Embodiment for the Rest of Us – Season 4, Episode 9: Rachel Fox
Thursday, December 5, 2024
Jenn (she/they) and Chavonne (she/her) interviewed Rachel Fox (she/her) about her embodiment journey
Content Warning: Discussion of ableism, discussion of medical fatphobia, discussion of the multiple genocides occurring globally, discussion of intentional weight loss (including GLP-1 drugs)
Trigger Warnings:
This episode will use the word obesity throughout without being bleeped.
A few highlights:
14:00: Rachel shares her understanding of embodiment and her own embodiment journey
20:44: Rachel names her privileges and marginalizations
42:11: Rachel discusses how the pandemic has affected her embodiment practices
1:26:24: Rachel shares where to be found and what’s next for her
Links from this episode:
Persistent Drive for Autonomy (PDA)
Music: “Bees and Bumblebees (Abeilles et Bourdons), Op. 562” by Eugène Dédé through the Creative Commons License
Please follow us on social media:
Instagram: @embodimentfortherestofus
CAPTIONS
Season 4 Episode 9 is 1 hours, 32 minutes and 52 seconds (1:32:52) long.
Jenn: Welcome to our 4th season of the Embodiment for the Rest of Us podcast, a series exploring topics and intersections that exist in fat, queer, and disability liberation (and beyond!!)! You can consider this an anti-oppressive and generative space full of repair and intention.
Chavonne: In this podcast, we interview those with lived experience and professionals alike to learn how they are affecting radical change and how we can all make this world a safer and more welcoming place for all humans who are historically and currently marginalized and should be centered, listened to, and supported.
Jenn: Captions and content warnings are provided in the show notes for each episode, including specific time stamps, so that you can skip triggering content any time that feels supportive to you! This podcast is a representation of our co-host and guest experiences and may not be reflective of yours. These conversations are not medical advice, and are not a substitute for mental health or nutrition support.
Chavonne: In addition, the conversations held here are not exhaustive in their scope or levels of inquiry. These topics, these perspectives are not complete and are always in process. These are just highlights! Just like posts on social media, individual articles, or any other podcast – this is just a snapshot of the full picture.
Jenn: We are always interested in any feedback on this process, especially if you feel something needs to be addressed. We invite you to email us at Listener@EmbodimentForTheRestOfUs.com with any comments, requests, or concerns.
[1:44]
(C): Hello from Season 4 Episode 9 of the Embodiment for the Rest of Us podcast. In today’s episode, we have the first part of our embodiment journey conversation with Rachel Fox (she/her). Disclaimer for the intro and episode itself: the O word is intentionally and topically used in full.
(J): Rachel Fox is an Assistant Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at Grand Valley State University. She is also a PhD candidate, Kroner Family Fellow, Judith and Neil Morgan Fellow, and UC President’s Dissertation Year Fellow in the Communication Department, Science Studies Program, and Critical Gender Studies Graduate Specialization at UC San Diego. She holds a BA in Biology from Wesleyan University, an MS in Narrative Medicine from Columbia University, and an MA in Communication from UC San Diego.
(C): Her research has been published in the Fat Studies Journal, Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, and the Journal of Applied Social Psychology. In 2021, she joined the Centre for Fat Liberation and Scholarship as an Inaugural Junior Fellow. Her research critically examines how anti-obesity efforts drive anti-fatness in the US and how the field of weight stigma research perpetuates anti-fatness through its refusal to divest from an anti-obesity agenda.
(J): Wherever and however you are listening to this today, you are in for another incredible conversation and a part 2 coming in a couple weeks. We are so glad you’re here!
[3:08]
Jenn (she/they):
We are so ready to have a wonderful resource and human, Rachel Fox, she/her here, who is joining us from San Diego, California. Welcome.
Chavonne (she/her):
Yay.
Jenn (she/they):
We’re thrilled to be in the same space together, chatting about embodiment as we know it among fat oppression and the like. How are you doing at and in this moment, Rachel?
Rachel (she/her):
Thank you so much for having me. I’m really excited to be here.
Chavonne (she/her):
Yay.
Rachel (she/her):
Boy oh boy, as I was trying to prep my little notes for this answer was I like, “Things are pretty wild,” personally for me, but also then in the world and trying to be a person in it. I was dealing with some just really heavy feelings over the weekend with Mother’s Day and consuming media about Palestine and really thinking about what it means to be able to call my mother here and know that there are so many people, so many parents there who don’t have children anymore. So many children there who don’t have parents anymore, because of this US funded genocide.
Usually on Mother’s Day I try to do donations for incarcerated mothers and bail funds and stuff like that and this year I was just like, “Oh my God, there are so many problems in the world and I am just a little baby trying to make my way.” That has been top of mind for me, not least of which, because I am currently at the tail end of my PhD and next year I will be moving on to a professorship, which is really exciting.
Jenn (she/they):
That’s exciting. Yeah.
Chavonne (she/her):
Yeah, congratulations.
Rachel (she/her):
Thank you, would be happy to talk more about that, but I think being in higher education in the US right now is also a really difficult thing. I’m at UC San Diego, and a week ago from yesterday, UCSD called in riot cops to violently break up UCSD’s pro-Palestine encampment.
Every year that I’ve been here, I’ve been like, “I hate this school. I don’t want to be here anymore.” They’re doing all these things that are really not serving students. Then it was like, “Oh no, they’re just actually calling cops, huge numbers of cops to come and beat up students.” That was also just really hard, really hard.
I feel pretty fortunate to be in a department that is vocally pro-Palestine. If everyone isn’t, like their voices are not being amplified and pretty liberatory messages are being put out and that’s great, but man, it’s rough. UCSD is a public school. It’s part of the University of California system. Yet we got emails at 5:00AM that they were shutting down all the entrances to campus. People could not enter this public campus. Instead, they were busing in cops and California Highway Patrol. The University of California system has its own police department, UCPD, which has way too much power, way too many resources, basically authorized to act just like another police force.
I was on the one hand, very torn that I couldn’t be there for a lot of reasons and was trying to do my own work here. At the same time, just so horrified for my students and for my colleagues. I got to watch all these videos of cops up on top of the student health center, which was closed for the whole day without warning.
Chavonne (she/her):
Oh, my.
Jenn (she/they):
Oh.
Rachel (she/her):
So people couldn’t see their doctors, couldn’t get their medications. UCSD hat is such a huge school. I think we’re at 40,000 students maybe.
Jenn (she/they):
Oh, my gosh. It’s a city.
Rachel (she/her):
And we already only have one tiny health center for all the students.
Chavonne (she/her):
It really is, yeah. Uh-huh.
Rachel (she/her):
Then it was closed with no warning. It’s been a mess. Being in higher ed is like… As all of this is going on, as every single day, I am seeing things that melt my brain and cause my heart to clench, I am simultaneously trying to finish my PhD and also plan a cross-country move and also decide what to cook for dinner. It feels very surreal in that way also.
Chavonne (she/her):
Right.
Jenn (she/they):
Yeah.
Chavonne (she/her):
Yeah.
Rachel (she/her):
Yeah, just the intersection of, or not even the intersection, but what does it mean to keep living and keep living my kind of regular privileged life, where I am pretty much safe, while the rest… Well, so much of the rest of the world is not. Yeah, it’s a lot.
Jenn (she/they):
It’s a mind fuck.
Chavonne (she/her):
It’s such a mind fuck.
Rachel (she/her):
It’s been difficult.
Chavonne (she/her):
Surreal is the best word that you could… What you said is the best way to describe it. Being aware of everything that’s going on and trying to live your regular, regular life and remain aware and impassioned and also not fall apart because of the despair. Right?
Rachel (she/her):
Yeah. Yeah. One of the strangest juxtapositions, as I was writing my little list and everything was terrible.
Chavonne (she/her):
That’s the worst. Yeah.
Rachel (she/her):
At the same time, I was like, “And some of the best stuff in my whole life is also happening now.” I know that Mikey Mercedes talked about me while on her episode.
Chavonne (she/her):
Mm-hmm.
Rachel (she/her):
I feel unbelievably blessed to have the best collaborators that I’ve ever had in my whole life in Mikey Mercedes, and Monica Kriete, and Blakeley H. Payne. Also in my fiance, Rowan Hildebrand-Chupp, who is just the best person in the entire world, the love of my life, and also my intellectual collaborator.
Chavonne (she/her):
Cool.
Rachel (she/her):
Just looking around at this embarrassment of riches in my own life and knowing that’s part of how I’m getting through. Trying to hold that and hold the good things in my life close, while also trying to do the educational and political work that I feel I have to do.
Jenn (she/they):
Yeah. You know, as you were talking, and even in your response, Chavonne, I was thinking about all of these Onion headlines that the Onion just keeps reposting of what it has predicted in this incredibly… In that farcical interpretation about what’s ridiculous in our world and just reposting them, because they’re just accurate and relevant and current, and it’s just so very strange. I was just really sitting with the grief of what you were talking about. Right? The positives along with the loss. The appreciation for what you have while there’s such difficult things happening. It just sounds very human.
Also, that’s a lot of stuff to contain. We’re only one container, and so all the things that we might contain, I was just sort of imagining them bubbling up and maybe overflowing. It’s really tough. Really, really tough. It’s tough when you’re a person who cares.
Rachel (she/her):
Yes. Oh.
Jenn (she/they):
I was also, as you were thinking, I was like, “Yeah, I’ve been thinking about a lot recently how I don’t know how to get people who don’t care to care.”
Rachel (she/her):
Yeah.
Jenn (she/they):
And that that’s also another loss. It almost feels like a betrayal that I don’t know how to get around. I was just thinking about that as you were talking, because it just feels obvious or necessary to care about these things. It’s just really relating to you and also all of the stuff that surrounds that, that makes it complex and challenging.
Chavonne (she/her):
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Rachel (she/her):
Yeah. I think a lot about the memes of we experience more information in one hour, than someone living in 1300 would get in their entire lives. The consolidation of information and the speeding up of time, and just how as humans, I don’t think we were meant for this much stimulation all at once.
Chavonne (she/her):
Agreed.
Rachel (she/her):
I’m so good at reminding other people about that, and I am so terrible at following it myself.
Jenn (she/they):
Same.
Chavonne (she/her):
Yeah. So hard. Yeah.
Jenn (she/they):
Immediately admit the same. Yes.
Chavonne (she/her):
I’m like, “Yes.”
Jenn (she/they):
Yes. It is. It’s so hard. Thinking about people in places like Palestine and Congo and Sudan and Haiti, and there’s 12 or 13, at least right now, Genocide’s happening at one time, the onslaught that they must have to go to and just trying to survive.
Chavonne (she/her):
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Jenn (she/they):
Brain fuck, mind fuck, body fuck. I don’t know what to call all of that.
Chavonne (she/her):
All the fucks.
Jenn (she/they):
But just like an overwhelming, I imagine, totally impossible to be a person, to really actually be a person.
Chavonne (she/her):
Yeah. To feel embodied.
Rachel (she/her):
Absolutely.
Jenn (she/they):
Mm-hmm.
Rachel (she/her):
Yeah. Yeah.
Jenn (she/they):
We know this is a privileged conversation.
Chavonne (she/her):
Yes.
Jenn (she/they):
And I really appreciate that context, because it feels like in embodiment, things that we end up tapping into are also how much we hurt for those people, how much we don’t understand because we’re not actually living it, how much there is to think about as you were just pointing out. Right? That’s challenging to embodiment and sometimes helpful. It just feels like it’s in the mix. This is a privileged conversation. This is also part of that.
[14:00]
Chavonne (she/her):
Yeah, absolutely. I guess we’ll start talking with that. I guess we’ll start talking about embodiment. As we start this conversation about being present and in our bodies, we’d love to start with the centering question about the themes of our podcast and how they occur to you. Can you share with us what embodiment means to you and what your embodiment journey has been like if you would like to share?
Rachel (she/her):
Yeah, absolutely. Man, this question, this prompted so many things for me. I guess all the questions did, I will try not to repeat myself there too many times.
Chavonne (she/her):
Jen’s really good at those questions.
Jenn (she/they):
Thank you.
Chavonne (she/her):
Questions big/little house.
Jenn (she/they):
To me, repetition is a really important part of embodiment, so please feel free to repeat yourself.
Chavonne (she/her):
Yes, please do.
Rachel (she/her):
That’s such a good point.
Chavonne (she/her):
Oh, I like that. Yeah.
Jenn (she/they):
It’s one of my favorite parts of it. I’m like, oh, here we go again.
Rachel (she/her):
Part of why this challenged me so much is because in my scholarship, which is also my whole life, I have really moved away from thinking about embodiment and have really moved towards thinking about the forces that act on bodies and thinking about the systems that we are embodied within. But then at the same time, I was like, “Well,” you can see me on camera. I know listeners won’t be able to see me, but I’m dancing around a little bit, and it’s because I’m standing, because I have a standing desk with an ergonomic mat that has all these ridges on it that is meant to make you kind move around so you don’t stand too much in one place. It’s because I have been absolutely destroying my body trying to finish this PhD, which is a super common experience for grad students.
A year ago, I developed debilitating back pain. Part of how I manage that is by not sitting as much, which is a whole other thing that brings up a lot of feelings in terms of being a fat person. I was thinking about, I guess, before I go back to the thing about the forces that we live within, I was thinking about how embodiment is by definition of relation of care, because it is something that we have to do to maintain ourselves. Or I guess self-care, body care, basically… You know what, I’m just going to read you this meme that I sent to Mikey and Monica and Blakeley the other day, because it just really perfectly captures how I’ve been feeling.
It’s like a series of Tumblr posts, but the first one starts like, “Hey, did you know that if you stop stretching and maintaining mobility in your body, then it goes away. Things get tight and you can’t move the weight that you used to. When you decide to try to get a stretch routine going that the first week fucking sucks because you keep going, ‘Damn, I used to be able to do this. No problem.’ Then you have to switch gears and be kind to yourself and just focus on getting better from here instead of berating yourself for dropping the good habits in the first place? Your body never stops aging, so you got to keep taking care of it, because sometimes you got to take care of it in extra in certain areas because of things that happened to you when you were younger, and it’s boring and sometimes hurts, but it’s so necessary.”
I was like, “Wow, okay, call me out.” Then there was a response that’s just like, “#what’s the name of that guy who has to perpetually push that rock up that hill?” Someone just added a picture of Sisyphus.
Chavonne (she/her):
I love it.
Rachel (she/her):
It’s like low resolution, grainy, and it’s just like, “Ah,” all kinds of ways. The rock is labeled, “The fucking body maintenance.”
Chavonne (she/her):
Oh, God. Yes.
Rachel (she/her):
[inaudible] wow. Wow. Oh, wow. If this isn’t my experience right now, where I love to be an academic and pretend like I am just a floating head in a robot vessel, and how every day my body is like, “No. No.”
Chavonne (she/her):
No, no.
Rachel (she/her):
Also, my wonderful fiance is like, “No.” To be fair, if I was a robot vessel, I wouldn’t be able to hold my cats, and that would be awful.
Chavonne (she/her):
Okay. Yes. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Rachel (she/her):
Anyway, so I was thinking about that and how now that I’ve entered my thirties, I do have to do a morning stretch routine every day, or otherwise all of my joints pop all the time and my back really hurts.
Jenn (she/they):
Oh, just wait until you’re forties. You’ll do all that and it still happens.
Chavonne (she/her):
Oh, yeah. I’m just like, “What?”
Rachel (she/her):
I’ve been thinking about it. I’ve been… Okay, I’m going to do something that is… I’m going to call it mildly mean, but a little bit pesky, which is that I keep telling my friends, “Do you know that our bones are going to be the same bones that we have for the rest of our lives?”
Jenn (she/they):
I think about that a lot.
Rachel (she/her):
They’re like, “Why did you do this to me?”
Chavonne (she/her):
Why? Why?
Rachel (she/her):
Why?
Chavonne (she/her):
My hip just went, “No.”
Rachel (she/her):
It’s like, “No, these are the ones that we got.” I mean, maybe not all of them fully, but for the most part.
Jenn (she/they):
Yeah. They’ll get porous. They’ll get more porous.
Chavonne (she/her):
Yeah. They will. My husband and I call it rice crispy time in the morning. We get up and we’re just snap, crackle and popping all over the [inaudible]. We’re the in our forties.
Jenn (she/they):
Yeah.
Chavonne (she/her):
So funny.
Jenn (she/they):
I remember my thirties fondly, that sometimes I skipped stretching and things, and it was all right.
Chavonne (she/her):
It was fine.
Rachel (she/her):
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Jenn (she/they):
Yeah.
Chavonne (she/her):
In the before times. Yeah. Uh-huh.
[20:44]
Rachel (she/her):
Yeah. I think embodiment is ever present, obviously. Obviously it is, because we’re living and we live through being embodied. But it is something that I’ve moved away from a little bit because I, in my scholarship, really wanted to be focusing on how in particular fat people’s embodiments are limited, how our lives are constrained by systemic, structural, anti-fatness. That’s kind of where my mind has been for a few years now. So coming back to think about embodiment, I was like, “Wow, okay. Yeah, I haven’t been doing that for a little bit.”
But I think about… Well, okay, let me first do a little bit of positionality work, because what I do want to talk about is fat embodiment in particular, but that does come out of my own position within the world and within the academy. I am white. I have done as much anti racist work in political education on racism that I can. At the same time, I know that that does not overcome my whiteness, but it is something that I have done a lot to account for and will continue to do a lot to account for the rest of my life.
I’m white, I was raised upper middle class and still have a decent amount of financial privilege even for a grad student, and I’m about to start a job with a real salary for the first time in my life.
Chavonne (she/her):
Yay.
Rachel (she/her):
Thinking about what that means. I was also raised Jewish. This has been a very interesting moment to be someone who was raised Jewish, isn’t especially committed to Judaism, and is now like, “Oh, man, I got to do so much more in order to make really clear that doing a genocide in the name of Judaism is not acceptable.” I’m also someone who lives with numerous chronic illnesses, which again makes it really interesting that I was like, “Oh, I don’t think about embodiment that much.” My body is like, “No, no, no, you do. It’s just part of your routine.”
I’ve been living here in San Diego, California, which is unceded Kumeyaay territory for eight years. I’m trying to think about any other relevant positionality stuff. I’m a cisgender woman and I am partnered, which let me tell you, haven’t been not partnered for a really long time, I wish more people talked about the privilege of being in a dyadic relationship in particular.
It’s like Caleb Luna has some really good work on this, on how romantic love is itself, maintains the nuclear heteropatriarchal family, and constraints are mutual relationships and hierarchies of affection and stuff like that. Yeah. Anyway, having been in it for a bit, I’m like, “Wow, this is a real privilege.”
Chavonne (she/her):
Yes. Mm-hmm.
Jenn (she/they):
Mm-hmm.
Rachel (she/her):
So much. From all of that, recognizing that when I talk about fat embodiment, it’s not going to be everyone, it’s not going to be perfect, but because I am trying to get at structural ant-fatness, I feel like I can talk about those forces and recognize that they impact other people differently and that they intersect with other forms of oppression, like racism, like ableism, like sexism and transphobia.
When I think about fat embodiment and what it means to be a fat person in the US, I’ll say, at this moment, I think so much about how we are targets and we are targets of quantification. Things that are measuring our bodies and turning them into numbers that can travel through systems, that can be used to deny us access to things, and that also can really shape how we feel about ourselves. I think the obvious example of quantification is of course, being weighed or having your weight and your height measured, and then your BMI calculated. We all know the myriad problems with the BMI, but I was also thinking about the quantification of needing to buy clothes and having to have a clothing size. Or if you buy women’s clothes, a half a dozen sizes, a dozen sizes, whatever. Just how that’s something that’s unavoidable and that there are some numbers that are good and some numbers that are bad, and that if you’re given a bad number that that can be something really just really, really hard to live with.
Or you can be chill with it and a system like a medical system could be like, “We’re not chill with it. You don’t get to be chill with it.”
Chavonne (she/her):
Yeah. Right.
Rachel (she/her):
I was thinking about how fat embodiment is a target of surveillance, how we are being watched, we are being monitored. Again, that is something that exists outside of how we feel about ourselves. I’m like, “I don’t want people to look at me. I don’t want people tracking me.”
Chavonne (she/her):
Right.
Rachel (she/her):
And yet I don’t actually get to control that. That’s after 10 years of fat activism.
Chavonne (she/her):
Right.
Rachel (she/her):
I would say the vast, vast majority of my life, it was something that I was also doing to myself. I was self surveilling. I was thinking about all of those things. I guess I’ve already talked a little bit about my embodiment journey. But to all of that, I will add, I’ve been fat my whole life, which has been really difficult. It’s been really, really difficult.
Growing up, was very acutely aware that my body was not what my parents wanted. My dad is a doctor, so that added a whole other layer to things. I was put on my first weight loss diet. The earliest one that I remember pretty well was fourth grade. I was maybe like nine or 10, although it could have easily started earlier than that. My parents are very health conscious people and remain so through to this day.
I was fat my whole life, I grew up until I was about 22, which is when I found fat activism. The main message that I felt like I got from the world was, “You don’t deserve good things. You don’t deserve to be happy. You are a burden. You are a threat. You are a drain. You are wrong and you don’t get to have anything good until you achieve thinness.” I think that that is a message that most fat people get. I think especially fat kids get.
Of course, I grew up in the nineties and the aughts, which had their own kind of anti-fat politics. I was thinking about just how prominent before and after photos were when I was growing up, and I felt like they went away a little bit, but maybe I just chose to consume different media. But now they have really reared their head full force in the past few years as people go on their weight loss journeys with Ozempic and Wegovy and whatnot.
That was really the foundation of my embodiment journey. I talk about finding fat activism between my junior and senior year of college as the first time that I ever got the message that I didn’t need to hate myself as a prerequisite of being alive.
Chavonne (she/her):
Oof. Oof. Mm-hmm.
Rachel (she/her):
I’ve practiced that one.
Chavonne (she/her):
That was really good.
Rachel (she/her):
Thank you for the noises.
Jenn (she/they):
That landed.
Chavonne (she/her):
I hope that it was the response you wanted, because boy did I have that. Oof. Oof. Okay.
Rachel (she/her):
Just to say that I’m sometimes more eloquent and sometimes less eloquent. When I’m more eloquent, it’s usually because I’ve practiced.
Jenn (she/they):
Same, same.
Chavonne (she/her):
Hard same.
Jenn (she/they):
Wow.
Rachel (she/her):
That was a real turning point for me in a lot of ways. Of course, I started to be able to articulate a lot of the things that I’m saying now. But one of the things that I noticed when I first found fat activism, I was deep in grief, really angry, also was the first time that any mental health care had actually started to work for me, because before that, what is therapy going to do when you think that you don’t have a right to exist as you do?
Maybe therapy can be maintenance, but I think it’s really difficult to heal. I was healing for the first time.
Jenn (she/they):
The trauma is still ongoing. Yeah.
Chavonne (she/her):
Yeah, absolutely.
Rachel (she/her):
I was, at the time, pre-med. I was a biology major. I have a degree in biology. I found fat activism in maybe June or July. Then in August or September before my senior year, the American Medical Association, the AMA, did this huge press release about officially classifying obesity as a disease. Sorry, I should have given a heads up there with the…
Chavonne (she/her):
It’s okay.
Jenn (she/they):
It’s okay.
Rachel (she/her):
We can edit it.
Jenn (she/they):
Yeah, we can con…
Chavonne (she/her):
We’re just going to put it at the beginning of it.
Jenn (she/they):
Yeah. We can content organ the whole video.
Chavonne (she/her):
We’re going to put it at the beginning of it, and we’re just going to… Exactly. Exactly. Perfect. Mm-hmm.
Rachel (she/her):
Yeah. For the folks who are listening, you missed my many very exaggerated quotation marks. Of course, that was a lie. I wish that people didn’t talk about it the way that they talk about that 2013 decision, because the AMA was up to a lot of shenanigans before then, but the timing of it was very potent for me because I was about to do my applications to medical school. I was about to do my applications to biomedical research, gap year type programs.
I just found fat activism. I was like, “Oh, no, I don’t think I can put myself through this. I’ve just learned that I can just maybe chill, not even heal, not even have a good life, but just exist, like I just have an ability to just exist.” I was like, Ooh, okay. Probably can’t go to medical school, probably don’t want to do that to myself. I think it would probably immediately undo all of the positive effects of finding bad activism and starting to build out my own life.
Of course, like a good pre-med biology major, I threw myself into critical weight studies health at every size area. The folks who are doing the real deconstruction of the science and the epidemiology and stuff, which I have since moved away from. But at the time, I was like, “Oh, these anti-fat folks, they’re lying. They’re just straight up lying. The data is real bad. It is very blatant.” So between that and doing really intensive therapy, spending all my time on fat positive Tumblr that I could outside of classes and stuff, I realized that it was going to be a full-time job to just resist the amount of anti-fatness that I felt at all times.
Chavonne (she/her):
Wow.
Rachel (she/her):
That I had to do it every minute of every day, which was in and of itself a real imposition, because if I didn’t, I would just slip right back into self-hatred and all the things I was being taught in my classes, for example. That is kind of when I was like, “Well, if I have to do this all the time every day anyway, maybe I should just try to do this all the time, every day on purpose.
Chavonne (she/her):
Mm-hmm. Wow. Yeah.
Rachel (she/her):
I know, right? I have been really immensely privileged to be able to basically do that. I’m at the tail end of a dissertation that is all about anti-fatness, and I got hired to teach a lot of different courses, but one of them will be about fat studies.
Chavonne (she/her):
Yes.
Rachel (she/her):
And the program that I’m going to, they were like, “Yeah, we want that,” which there are so few fat study scholars, and there are even fewer who get jobs where they can continue to teach fat studies and make it a center part of what they do instead of a peripheral part, because again, academia does not like fat people and does not like people who study fatness or anti-fatness, except in very oppressive ways. Yeah, that was about 10 years ago, and it has been that way ever since. Anytime I’m like, “Maybe I can study something else,” the world is like, “No, you can’t.”
Chavonne (she/her):
No.
Rachel (she/her):
I mean, it’s truly amazing that it is a practice, and if I slack, much like if I skip a few days of stretching, things come right back. The pain comes right back. That is also, that’s a very big part of my life that I take for granted a little bit, because I just have to do it every day. But on the other hand, I get to do it every day.
Chavonne (she/her):
Wow.
Jenn (she/they):
Wow.
Chavonne (she/her):
I have so many thoughts. I don’t know if you want to go first, Jen? Or do you want me to?
Jenn (she/they):
No, go ahead. Please.
Chavonne (she/her):
Okay. Okay. I wrote a list. The first one is good.
Jenn (she/they):
Oh, good for you. I haven’t. I’ll write a list now.
Chavonne (she/her):
This is how my neuro divergent brain, if I don’t write it down, it’s not real. The first thing I wanted to say was thank you so much for offering your positionality. We ask it later on in the episode, but I find it so interesting that you offered it up before even speaking about your embodiment. I’m going to sit with that a little bit.
Jenn (she/they):
Me too.
Chavonne (she/her):
What that translates to in my head, is that you said you… First, I want to repair if you felt like you were like, “Well wait till you’re 40, ha ha ha, young lady.” I didn’t mean to make you feel bad about whatever your body experiences.
Jenn (she/they):
Oh, that’s a good point.
Rachel (she/her):
Not at all. Not at all.
Chavonne (she/her):
I just wanted to say that out loud.
Jenn (she/they):
Oh, I’m so glad you spotted that.
Chavonne (she/her):
Yeah. Then you said later on that you had some chronic illnesses. It made me think of, well, you said your chronic illnesses and how that you don’t really have a journey or you hadn’t really thought about it, but your body is like, “Oh, no, we’ve been doing this forever and ever.” It made me think about all the ways that people are marginalized in this society. I’ll speak for myself. I don’t want to apply it to you or anyone else, but I’m black, I’m fat, I have chronic depression, et cetera, et cetera. Those things that we are marginalized according to are the things that we have to have constant embodiment about.
Jenn (she/they):
Yes.
Chavonne (she/her):
Because like you said, the world would be like, you’ll be like, “My life’s awesome.” For me, “I have two kids. I have a great husband. Da da da. I love my career. Da da. Oh, but did you forget that you’re black?” I’m so having to have this constant embodiment of our unprivileged identities. Yeah. There’s always a journal topic. This one’s coming up for me, is that I think about my embodiment in the ways that I’m not, “acceptable,” and how to integrate that with embodiment I don’t even think about like my education. All those kind of things that play into it, and how much work it is to embody those things that we are supposed to be not happy with.
Jenn (she/they):
Yes.
Rachel (she/her):
Mm-hmm.
Chavonne (she/her):
I just wanted to say thank you for that, and thank you for speaking to that. There was something else. I wrote one word, I don’t know what it means, so we’re going to come back to it. That’s how that works. It’s just one word, but I just wanted to say thank you, and thinking about the constant embodiment process of certain aspects of your identity is really sitting pretty heavily with me, so thank you.
Jenn (she/they):
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Chavonne (she/her):
Yeah.
Jenn (she/they):
Yeah. It’s interesting. The first word that I wrote down is demands, because what I really heard in what you were saying is that fat embodiments context is the demands that are constantly put on our body on anybody. Tiana Dodson, someone we’ve had on here a couple of times talks about relative fat and absolute fat. The difference between walking around in the world where you can be somewhat hidden or not, and just thinking about… I’m trying to think of what the word would be.
When I hear demands, first of all, I have a PDA profile. I actively fight against demands at any moment, but I thought about being dehumanized when you were talking about your positionality and the context of fat embodiment. I’m trying to remember how you phrased it. It was, oh, the targets. Right?
Rachel (she/her):
Mm-hmm.
Jenn (she/they):
The visual of a target was really visceral for me. That when you were describing how you hadn’t realized that you’re just allowed to exist and that you don’t have to have any prerequisites for just existing, that one’s still twisting and turning inside of me. I’m not quite sure I even have words for that yet, but it’s a really visceral feeling. The other word that was coming to mind was betrayal. You talked about the grief of trying to be embodied in a world that says, “No, not like that.”
I was thinking about how, and you were talking about in a mental health journey, which is part of an embodiment journey, what if the trauma’s ongoing? How are we supposed to heal from that? There’s an incredible loss in just that. That was making me think of betrayal really specifically. I’ve been saying lots of ums because I’m thinking through it as I’m talking about it, but betrayal, when I just thought the word betrayal, that feels particularly heavy, constant. It’s not just people doing that. I mean, it’s agents of systems. Those are people, but it’s also organizations that are agents of a system. The system itself, it’s a lot. It’s a lot, a lot, a lot. I can’t remember the author of the book Heavy. It’s such a beautiful book.
Chavonne (she/her):
Kiese Laymon. I’m not sure if I said the word, the name. Isn’t it Kiese Lehman?
Jenn (she/they):
I think so.
Chavonne (she/her):
Yeah, I believe so. I’m not sure if I pronounced the name correctly.
Jenn (she/they):
No I think that’s right.
Chavonne (she/her):
But I believe so. Okay.
Jenn (she/they):
I think about words from that book very often. None of them are coming to mind in this moment. That would’ve been helpful, but the heaviness of the things that betray fat bodies, and I just as Chavonne was talking, I wrote down, “Ah, embodiment is in a constant context of demands.” It’s always complex. It’s always challenging. It’s always intersectional. It’s always very, very real. I don’t know. It brought a concreteness to embodiment that I think I’ve been searching for.
It’s only showing up as really challenging words right now, but I still think that’s a really important space, is how concrete it can be. Just the last thing I was thinking about that is you were talking about it’s something you take for granted there all the time. I also was just imagining how stark a contrast it must be, the times that it doesn’t feel like something you can take for granted, when there’s a new moment of being hyper-visibilized perceived in ways that you weren’t asking for or looking for, no choice of your own. How that just keeps rolling. It’s the grief betrayal is just sitting heavy in that.
It’s very real too. I was just sort of thinking about that. It’s a very based in reality experience, because that’s what we’re up against. And oof, that’s my last word on that.
Chavonne (she/her):
Oof. That’s a good one.
[42:11]
Jenn (she/they):
It was just like, oof. Speaking of complexities, I have a question that adds another element. As human beings, just for this existing, even though people are trying to, and systems try to dehumanize us, how has the ongoing pandemic affected your embodiment practice in ways that challenge the process, especially with the inherent ableism, which you had already mentioned, virtue signaling and sort of back to normal energy of the current and continuing moments?
Chavonne (she/her):
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Rachel (she/her):
Such a great question. I want to return to, I guess two things before I answer this. One is the oof, because yes, yes, with the oof. Also, I try to do this also in my classes because I teach about social justice, which means teaching about social injustice, which means telling a bunch of 19 year olds like, “Hey, your lives are basically dictated for you by capitalism, and what do we do about that?” Students are like, “I’m going to go cry now.” I don’t always want that to be happening.
I will say, I talked about how I moved from studying embodiment to studying the systems that target fat bodies. That, for me, came out of the oof. I got to spend a number of years really digging, being able to articulate all of these horrible things. It was like, “Okay, then what? Is there anything I can do about this?” Because I’m waking up and I’m saying, oof every single day.
Jenn (she/they):
Oh, I bet you were.
Rachel (she/her):
Yes, and still am.
Chavonne (she/her):
Right.
Rachel (she/her):
It hasn’t gone away. But kind of moving to how can I visualize the machinery that is creating this in a way that makes it visible, tangible, and undoable, hopefully. That’s been a lot of my recent theorizing has been like, “How do I figure out how I can do something about this?”
The other thing that I wanted to return to is Chavonne, what you were talking about, how you are not able to forget your blackness. You’re not able to forget your fatness. You’re not able to forget all these things. I will say coming to terms with what it means to be a fat person and what it means to be targeted, this is something I like to point out, which I think is a benefit of being a politicized fat person. It made it so easy for me to take other oppressions seriously.
I have never once doubted when I have had a friend come to me and be like, “They said this thing. Was I micro aggressed? Was that okay that they said that to me?” Every time I’m like, “No, it wasn’t.” I get the harm. I get it immediately, because of course, I only know what that feels like from my own context, but it makes it much, much, much easier, I think, to just straight up believe other people. To validate other people when they’re like, “Oh, is this happening along this axis?” Was that an anti Asian microaggression? Was that a little bit transphobic? Every time I’m like, “Yes, it was,” because you have your own internal barometer. Something is setting it off and I know what that feels like, and I can see it happening in you.
Jenn (she/they):
It’s relational.
Chavonne (she/her):
Yes. [inaudible].
Rachel (she/her):
It is relational.
Chavonne (she/her):
You said that sort of at the top, that it’s relational.
Yeah, it’s in relation to care. Yeah.
Rachel (she/her):
It is.
Chavonne (she/her):
Oh, yeah. I hadn’t thought of it that way. Mm-hmm.
Jenn (she/they):
Okay. That’s a balm. That’s a balm right there.
Chavonne (she/her):
Yes. Yes.
Rachel (she/her):
I try to be very careful when I say this, because I don’t want it to sound like I am just foisting my perception of things onto other people. But I think that reckoning with anti-fatness has really made me more empathetic, and it has made me much, much better at social justice work.
Chavonne (she/her):
Mm-hmm. Agreed.
Rachel (she/her):
Anytime it brings up stuff in other people, I’m like, “Yes.”
Chavonne (she/her):
Yes.
Rachel (she/her):
I’m glad. Even though it’s hard.
Chavonne (she/her):
Oh, totally. Yeah. Absolutely.
Rachel (she/her):
Even though it’s terribly hard. Yeah.
Jenn (she/they):
It’s hard, and.
Rachel (she/her):
It’s hard and.
Chavonne (she/her):
Hard and. Mm-hmm.
Rachel (she/her):
Yeah.
Jenn (she/they):
I appreciate that very much.
Chavonne (she/her):
I do too. Absolutely. I hadn’t thought of it that way. Absolutely. Yeah.
Rachel (she/her):
Yeah.
Jenn (she/they):
I still have the oof, now I have an and.
Chavonne (she/her):
[inaudible]. Yeah.
Jenn (she/they):
Oof and, yeah.
Chavonne (she/her):
Oof and.
Rachel (she/her):
I think that’s actually my sweet spot, is oof and.
Chavonne (she/her):
Off and. I love that. I love that. I love that. Yeah.
Jenn (she/they):
It’s humbling. I love to be humbled. Oof and is very humbling.
Rachel (she/her):
Yeah. Yeah.
Jenn (she/they):
Wow.
Rachel (she/her):
Okay, so coming back to this question and the pandemic and embodiment practices, I mean, what oof.
Chavonne (she/her):
Yeah.
Rachel (she/her):
Off and. What can I say about the pandemic that hasn’t already been said by people who are much smarter than me? I think it’s… What can I say about it? It’s awful. It’s ongoing. I still mask. Everyone should mask in public. Masking is a care practice. Masking disability justice. Let’s fight for air filtration systems, et cetera. Start with that.
Jenn (she/they):
Single point, UV that doesn’t hurt anyone in the room and kills everything like that in the room. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Rachel (she/her):
In terms of, but yeah, thinking about fat embodiment and thinking about the pandemic, obviously there has been a lot of violence done to fat people in the name of this pandemic and in the name of not fighting it, in the name of letting it continue, that real neoliberal will like, “If you die, it’s your fault. We shouldn’t have to do air filters. We shouldn’t have to do masking in healthcare spaces because fat life is not that valuable anyway.”
But I think there’s been a couple of things that have been very salient for me as it’s been ongoing. One has been, I grew up in the height of the obesity epidemic rhetoric, the war on obesity rhetoric. I don’t mean to say that that has ever gone away, but I do think that headlines wise, let’s say there’s been a slight decrease since maybe 2005. Living through that and then living through an actual pandemic that literally spreads in the air and just being like, “How do people continue to say that there is an obesity epidemic, but it’s like you’re literally living through a thing that spreads.” Why? I really hoped that that metaphor would decrease. I really hoped that people would use it less and start to see the absurdity of it.
Jenn (she/they):
Me too.
Rachel (she/her):
It’s been very interesting to me intellectually to be like, “Oh, no, they aren’t.” They’re just, they’re just all in on the metaphor still. It’s like, “Do you also notice that labeling something as an epidemic or a pandemic doesn’t actually mean that we’re going to fight it?” Interesting that we spent all this time on these epidemics. Of course, you can see in those public health’s complicity and just doing harm. That’s unsurprisingly what the public health apparatus is doing now.
But that was very interesting to me, especially in the beginning, to just be like… Epidemic and pandemic feels like an easy kind of catch all phrase for hurting people, which is really… Oh, I didn’t put that together until just now, which is really shitty. You would think that we would label these things in order to try do some… And by we, I mean here, the ascendant we of the public health apparatus to try to do good.
Of course, I don’t think that anything good can come out of targeting fat people for elimination. That’s my whole thing. But just the way the term is a way to stoke fear, to turn people into threats and to simultaneously just abandon them also. Target and abandon. Target in a harmful way, abandon at the personal level.
Chavonne (she/her):
Target and abandon. Wow, okay.
Jenn (she/they):
Oh yeah, it’s eugenics. That’s what I’m hearing in target and abandon.
Chavonne (she/her):
Mm-hmm.
Rachel (she/her):
Yeah. Yeah. It is. I mean, it is.
Jenn (she/they):
Wow.
Rachel (she/her):
The pandemic response has been deeply, deeply eugenic. That’s something that disability activists clocked immediately and clocked, “This is going to be a mass disabling event immediately.” And it has been.
That was something that was really sitting with me early on of like, “Wow, this is so different. Maybe that difference will be illuminating for folks.” Then it wasn’t. They just tripled and quadrupled down on anti-fatness and anti blackness and ableism along with this moment.
Okay, I’ll say a personal thing and then I’ll zoom back out. Simultaneously, I have been very lucky to be able to basically work from home since the pandemic began. In particular, this past year, I have been on fellowship. I won a dissertation year fellowship. Really when UCSD was ramping up everyone back on campus, I still got to not do that.
Chavonne (she/her):
Great.
Rachel (she/her):
That has been hard in its own way, because I am a very social person and I am missing the energy that I get from in-person socializing. This is a side note, I went from being introverted to being extroverted at the beginning of graduate school, because I finally found a therapy and medication regime that was really working for me. What a nightmare. I miss being an introvert so much. So much. I used to be able to get in bed, read a book, watch a show, and wake up the next day and feel reenergized. Now I’m like, “Oh, if I don’t go talk to people, I’m just going to feel bad.” Okay. Who let that happen?
Chavonne (she/her):
Amazing.
Rachel (she/her):
It’s helpful for some things, but…
Chavonne (she/her):
Amazing. I love it.
Rachel (she/her):
And do I miss being able to recharge my battery in non-social ways.
Chavonne (she/her):
Right.
Rachel (she/her):
But oh man, where was I?
Jenn (she/they):
That was your zoom in, I think.
Chavonne (she/her):
I loved it. Whatever, wherever you were.
Rachel (she/her):
I have been able to be home in my tiny apartment. Again, my fiance and I found out just how much we love each other, because we spend all day every day together and it’s bliss, like horrifying, sickly, totally infatuated with one another. Other people don’t want to hear about it, bliss.
Chavonne (she/her):
Nice.
Rachel (she/her):
But also I think it’s important. People should like their spouses.
Chavonne (she/her):
Yeah. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Jenn (she/they):
Horrifying and wonderful.
Rachel (she/her):
I love myself very deeply. Horrifying and wonderful.
Chavonne (she/her):
Yeah. Yeah.
Rachel (she/her):
But it has been very interesting in terms of how my body interfaces with the rest of the world that is, in most cases, not designed to fit me. Things that I used to be able to tolerate a little more are now kind of harder. There’s a shuttle that goes from where I live to campus, and the seats are way too small for me. When I’m packed in there and I take up two seats, that feels worse than it used to feel, because I’m not in the practice of taking up that space like I had to be every day before the pandemic. Also, I’m just don’t like being crammed in next to other people anymore because of the germ thing.
Chavonne (she/her):
Sure. Yeah.
Jenn (she/they):
Yeah.
Rachel (she/her):
But at the same time, avoiding those kinds of spaces, not sitting in chairs that left bruises on my hips and thighs, not seeing other people’s facial expressions when they looked at my body like, man, do I not miss that.
Chavonne (she/her):
Absolutely.
Rachel (she/her):
That has been really healing. To just feel a little bit removed from that surveillance for the first time, to have a good reason to do telehealth and not have to go to the doctor’s office as often has been A plus.
Chavonne (she/her):
Yes.
Rachel (she/her):
Love that. Doctors definitely treat me better, although of course it doesn’t stop them from making notes about how fat I am just based on my double chin, I assume. But yeah, at the same time, that has been really nice and it has allowed me to collaborate with Mikey, Monica and Blakeley who live all in different parts of the country. Because I get to work from home, we spend a lot of time on Zoom together.
Chavonne (she/her):
Nice.
Rachel (she/her):
And as I’ve said that collaboration has been so extremely generative and life-changing and transforming. We have even gotten to do a lot of health profession student education together. It’s because we can do it online that people are like, “Oh yeah, we’ll Zoom you in to do this session.”
Chavonne (she/her):
Nice.
Rachel (she/her):
That is also very cool. I am really happy that remote access to some things has become more commonplace. That’s the zoom in and zooming back out, one thing that I started studying back in 2013 when I found fat activism, and I was going through that whole transformation, is I started to study how fat people are pressured to experience time.
I was in this class on post-colonial studies and ecology, and it was a wonky class, but it was great. We were reading about settler colonialism and how it was in the particular context of Australia. These white people who were colonizing Australia were destroying the environment, absolutely destroying the environment, committing genocide, committing ecocide, all in the name of building a better civilization, building a utopian like white supremacist civilization.
One of the things that this author said in the book that I was reading was they were destroying the future that they were trying to create, via the means that they were using to create it. This very kind of ironic effect of the ends justify the means. Sometimes the means destroy the end that you can’t get to it.
Chavonne (she/her):
Mm-hmm.
Rachel (she/her):
I read this and I want to be really clear that I am not drawing a parallel between colonialism and dieting, but the manipulation of time really struck me as like, “Oh, that’s how I live. I think of myself in my thin future.” That justifies literally any weight loss practice that I try to engage in.
Chavonne (she/her):
Dang.
Rachel (she/her):
The thing that extra struck me was maybe those practices are destroying that future before I can get there.
Jenn (she/they):
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Chavonne (she/her):
Oh. Okay. Okay.
Rachel (she/her):
Yes, and I thought-
Jenn (she/they):
Oh, that’s so nuanced. I love that.
Rachel (she/her):
That became my master thesis.
Jenn (she/they):
Wow.
Chavonne (she/her):
Yeah.
Rachel (she/her):
Was just the study of time and the distortion of time and how fat people are very often pushed into thinking about ourselves as who we will become once we have lost weight. This was deeply inspired by Kate Harding’s essay, the Fantasy of Being Thin, which came out of, I think the golden age of early fat online posting.
Yes, this became my whole first project. One of the things that I was really upset about was all the ways that I felt like fat people were not allowed or had a really hard time opting out of that forced futurity. One of the ways that I kind of figured out… And some folks have talked about this, Kristin Rodier in particular, who’s a Canadian philosopher, talks about this apocalyptic time where fat people are hit with the message, “You’re not going to live until, you’re going to die at X age, you’re going to die at 40, you’re going to die at 50. You’re not going to see your children do this. You’re not going to see your grandchildren do this.” Right? All those kinds of messages.
Jenn (she/they):
Yeah.
Rachel (she/her):
She talked about that as apocalyptic time, where fat people are basically threatened with a terrible future or the end of a future if we don’t engage in weight loss practices. I was feeling like, “Oh, I get pushed into this particular futurity where it’s like, I’m going to get there via dieting, because I don’t get to have any other future.” Again, this is where I’ll recognize my positionality. I think that those messages were very, very intense for me because I, as a wealthier white woman, was especially targeted for them. Because weight Watchers wants white women to spend their money there.
Chavonne (she/her):
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Jenn (she/they):
The affluence of wellness culture
Rachel (she/her):
Yeah. Very much. Also, again, being raised by a doctor, who kept those messages very front and center for me. All of this, I wrote about it for my master’s thesis. It is the content of my first ever publication, which came out I think in 2017 or 2018 in the Fat Studies Journal. It was on a special issue on Time.
All of that came roaring back for me in the Pandemic, because of the way that the pandemic has manipulated time and because of all the like… I think there were a lot of apocalyptic messages early in the pandemic. There were the straight-up eugenics messages of like, we’re going to call the week. There were people getting sick and not knowing what that meant. That is kind of its own form of very intense time. Then there was also the question of what is the future going to look like? Then when you were talking about the ableism and back to normal energy, the back to normal energy really reminds me of the, “We have to get to this end, no matter the means.”
It’s like, “Oh, you’re trying to get back to normal. You’re forcing people back to work. They’re getting sick, they’re becoming disabled, they’re dying. You are destroying the future that you want through these eugenical means.” One thing that I wrote about in the article was that this particular, I’ll call it hegemonic futurity, and hegemonic just being a fancy word for unopt-outable, just a powerful futurity. That is something that shows up again and again, because I think because it is a part of white supremacy.
It shows up in colonialism, and we’re seeing that in real time again with these genocides and ecocides all over the world. It shows up in heterosexism and heteropatriarchy. There are a bunch of queer scholars who have talked about reproductive futurity, where if you are on the linear heterosexual life path, it’s like your life becomes structured by having kids and achieving these life milestones.
It shows up, I think, in dieting. I think we’re also seeing it show up in the pandemic response. One of the things that I talked about in that article was the danger, the danger of elevating the future over the present. You know where else we’re seeing this? In AI rhetoric, which is another interesting connection.
Chavonne (she/her):
Yes. Yeah. Mm-hmm.
Jenn (she/they):
Oh boy.
Rachel (she/her):
It’s so dangerous. It’s so dangerous. I felt like in addition to listening to incredible disability justice scholars and activists, it really showed up for me with the pandemic of being like, “I recognize this. I recognize this move, this temporal manipulation, this trying to get people to collectively imagine this potential future and use that potential future as justification to do terrible things in the present, regardless of what the actual consequences of those present choices are going to be.”
That has been very salient for me and very upsetting for me because of course, I can go yell about it to as many people who will listen to me, but I can’t control the federal government. But yeah, honestly, I felt a little bit helpless about it. But I do feel like it has been helpful to be able to recognize it and name it as part of this ongoing legacy of white supremacy.
Jenn (she/they):
Yeah.
Chavonne (she/her):
Wow. The time thing.
Jenn (she/they):
You know and right now.
Chavonne (she/her):
Sorry.
Jenn (she/they):
Oh, sorry.
Chavonne (she/her):
No, that was all I was going to say. That’s good. The time thing. Wow. Go.
Jenn (she/they):
The time thing?
Chavonne (she/her):
Yeah.
Jenn (she/they):
Yeah. Well, I thought money is time, so I’m just really getting the… Or time is money in this sort of context, trying to save money now, but costing money later. Mass disabling events, I mean, there isn’t a workforce anymore, and all of our lovely billionaires can’t make any of their money without a workforce. A heavily depleted and disabled and oppressed workforce is not going to be able to do any of the things that are needed to be done. I’m putting air quotes inside of capitalism. Capitalism says need. I say, “Okay, that’s not really a need.”
Unmet needs in contrast our safety, our security. This week in Ohio, protesters from Xavier University are being charged with disguising their faces because they were wearing masks at a pro-Palestine encampment. That really gave me creepy chills.
I saw that. I was like, “What?” It was like conspiracy as well or something, right? It’s becoming weaponized further and further. It’s not happening less. It’s happening more. It feels like the apocalypse is now in many ways. It’s in spite of what we might want for the future because it takes away from it, because it’s just getting criminalized. Anything that’s enforceable really, which would be oppressive arms of things and eugenicist arms of things, etc.
Something that I often fear will be used primarily for people in black and brown bodies, people in fat bodies, people in otherwise oppressed bodies that are visibly, absolutely something. Right? That it will create excuses and openings for more harm. When you said harm, target and abandoned as what you were describing, harm, that’s just showing up. Target, punish, hide away, and abandon. Just oof.
Chavonne (she/her):
Oof.
Jenn (she/they):
I have a feeling there’s going to be a lot of oof. You’ve actually helped me see, Rachel… First of all, I’m enjoying listening to the podcast, while the podcast is ongoing. I’ve had a really fabulous real time experience, because the way you’re phrasing things, the way that you’re relating things to each other, I think maybe especially because of that intention of positionality in sharing things, is really showing me a lot about different ways of perceiving time.
I have ADHD at the very least in my neurodivergence. Time is challenging. Next week is challenging, and yet this fear mongering of using time is really effective on me. I’m just sort of sitting with that and realizing how easily it is weaponized, and it just makes me want to journal topic, ponder about that, talk in therapy about that. Just really think about the pressures of that. Because in this capitalistic, white supremacist society that we live in, it’s kyriarchical, overarching oppression from every angle. In that kind of space, it’s hard to notice, I think, in real time all the things that are coming at you intentionally. That’s on purpose. We’re not supposed to be able to perceive it all. We’re supposed to be busy. We’re supposed to be busy doing.
It was just making me think about pausing, taking time back. I never thought about that. Taking time back as a form of embodiment or losing our concept or relationship with time as disembodiment. Oh, that’s a nice little nugget. I love that. I can’t wait to read your writing. I think that’s on your website.
Chavonne (she/her):
I know.
Jenn (she/they):
I think you linked to that article.
Rachel (she/her):
It is. Yeah.
Chavonne (she/her):
I’m about to look that up.
Jenn (she/they):
Okay. Because I’m like, oh, I think I remember seeing that on your website.
Rachel (she/her):
Yeah.
Jenn (she/they):
Okay.
Chavonne (she/her):
I can’t wait to. Absolutely.
Rachel (she/her):
Yes. The title of that article is Against Progress.
Jenn (she/they):
Thank you.
Chavonne (she/her):
Appreciate that.
Rachel (she/her):
Led it to be targeted by a Twitter mob at one point, because they were like…
Jenn (she/they):
Oh, gosh, I’m sure.
Rachel (she/her):
“Look at this fat girl who thinks progress is bad.” I was like, “Well, you know what I stand by it.” Anyway, I’m sorry I cut you off.
Chavonne (she/her):
No, no. go for it.
Jenn (she/they):
Yeah, progress at the expense of what?
Rachel (she/her):
Yeah.
Jenn (she/they):
It is so important. Oh, we can’t wait to read it.
Chavonne (she/her):
Absolutely. Absolutely. In terms of embodiment and the pandemic, I think you’ve spoken to, but I just want to see if there’s anything more. Is there anything about the pandemic that feels like it has connected you further to your embodiment? What lights you up about your work and when are you feeling most embodied?
Rachel (she/her):
Again? Great question.
Chavonne (she/her):
Yay, Jen.
Rachel (she/her):
When am I feeling most embodied? Okay, I’m going to go back to the time thing, and I promise that I will get to the feeling most embodied thing.
Chavonne (she/her):
However you want to do it. We love it. We love it, we love it.
Jenn (she/they):
I’m enjoying the flow.
Chavonne (she/her):
Me too.
Rachel (she/her):
When I was talking about this temporal warping or manipulation, I wrote about it as something that affected the past, the present, and the future. We’ve talked about the future and that kind of coercion into futurity. One thing that is really weird about this, and this is I think maybe the hardest part to understand. If you don’t get it, that is okay. Or if I’m saying things that are very confusing, that’s on me.
But when you and you, a general you, or when one. When you imagine yourself in a permanent state of future achievement, which I think for a lot of fat people is imagining that after photo, that future thin self. Weirdly, you can be in the present, but imagining yourself in the future so intensely that you kind of look backwards at where you are now, and see it in retrospect.
I could say, “I’m Rachel, I’m here. I’m at this computer, but I’m going to be thin in six months.” Right? Six months from now, my diet, it’s going to work. Who I am right now, it’s like that’s old me, right? What I’m living through right now is old me.
Jenn (she/they):
Oh.
Rachel (she/her):
Yes.
Jenn (she/they):
Okay.
Rachel (she/her):
So in this weird, warped-
Chavonne (she/her):
Talk about disembodied. Yeah, sorry.
Jenn (she/they):
Mm-hmm. What?
Chavonne (she/her):
Exactly. Right?
Jenn (she/they):
Mm-hmm. What? What?
Chavonne (she/her):
Okay. [inaudible]. Okay, I’m back.
Jenn (she/they):
More creepy chills.
Rachel (she/her):
In this futurity, the past isn’t really the past. It is instead just a container for things that you don’t want anymore or you don’t like anymore, including it can be your fat body. It’s like, “Well, that’s not really me. That has to be something that I have transcended or will transcend.” I think we’re also seeing that right now with people talking about when the pandemic was happening, as if it is not ongoing. They’re just putting it into the container of the past so they don’t have to think about it anymore.
Chavonne (she/her):
Right.
Rachel (she/her):
Which is I think how we… Again, we, the ascendant we, like justify a lot of these policies where it’s like, “Okay, well we did that and now we’re in the post-pandemic future.” Which, how can you say, “Now we’re in the future,” but this is the weird temporal warping.
Jenn (she/they):
Yeah. Check. Now that’s in the past. Check.
Chavonne (she/her):
Yeah.
Rachel (she/her):
You both hit the nail exactly on the head because what do you do if you’re in the future and what you’re living through is actually the past? It means that there’s no real present. The present is evacuated because you either have who you’re going to be or who you were.
Chavonne (she/her):
The present is evacuated. Wow.
Rachel (she/her):
Yeah. The present is just empty. It can’t exist anymore because you’re one or the other. Right? You’re either like your future achieved thin self or your old fat self who’s not really you. In terms of what that does for embodiment, is it makes it really gosh darn hard.
Jenn (she/they):
Yeah.
Rachel (she/her):
Right? Because it’s like, well I’m-
Jenn (she/they):
Just a present moment experience.
Rachel (she/her):
Embodiment is a present moment experience, and it’s like, “Well, I’m not really here.”
Chavonne (she/her):
Thinner me. Thinner me.
Jenn (she/they):
Wow, what a tension you’re describing with these multiple things that can… Right? Because you can do this about so many areas of your life at one time.
Rachel (she/her):
Yeah.
Jenn (she/they):
The tension of… It’s actually very fused. It’s like all these things holding you in place.
Rachel (she/her):
Mm-hmm. Yeah. I will say one… Little baby. My cat just tried to jump and her paw slipped out from under her and she just kind of belly flopped.
Chavonne (she/her):
She’s like, “I’m not…” I love it. I love it. That was very silly.
Rachel (she/her):
I have the two goofiest cats in the world and I love them so much.
Chavonne (she/her):
Cats are very grounding and embodying. I love that.
Jenn (she/they):
Yes.
Rachel (she/her):
Yeah, it really is. They’re so sweet and they have nothing going on in their brains, and it’s the best.
Jenn (she/they):
It is.
Rachel (she/her):
I talk about them. They’re not really afraid of other people, because they have never had anyone be mean to them. They have only ever known people as a source of love and enjoyment, and it honestly is very healing for me to know that that’s their lives.
Chavonne (she/her):
Yes. Absolutely.
Rachel (she/her):
But yeah, you’re right. This is a form of temporality that works through many different realms of our lives, and I will give a very simple example here, which is my writing practice. When I sit down to write an article, it’s always like I have to get to the product. The article’s going to exist, and therefore the ends of the article justify the means by which I am writing the article, which is how I’ve ended up with so much back pain. It’s like, “No, actually I have to be present and treat my writing like a practice,” that is something that I actively do every day. I have to try to do things that make it a little bit more enjoyable for me because it is literally how I spend so many of my hours, that I can’t just be miserable the whole time I’m writing. Because then, by the time I get to the finished article, I’m just going to have been miserable for however long it took to get there.
Chavonne (she/her):
Wow. Yeah. Yeah.
Jenn (she/they):
Embodied during a dissertation.
Rachel (she/her):
Embodied during a dissertation, just not actually a good way to do things.
Jenn (she/they):
Wow. That sounds revolutionary almost. I’ve never heard anyone have that experience.
Chavonne (she/her):
No, no.
Rachel (she/her):
I would say the intense investment in the future, very beneficial to employers, very beneficial to educational institutions. Like you said, it is a form of power and it’s a form of control. It’s also very profitable for weight loss companies. What it does is it makes it very, very hard to be in the present. It makes it very, very hard to be in the present, especially because just recognizing that this is happening doesn’t mean that it goes away. It just means that now you see it for what it is and it’s still crappy.
Chavonne (she/her):
Right.
Rachel (she/her):
One really interesting thing that I think this does, is it opens up the question of what are good ways to try to stay in the present? What are good ways to resist this split between the future and the past, and rebuild this space that for a lot of people is kind of empty? If not literally empty, it can be kind of metaphorically or psychologically empty, because it’s just not something you’ve spent a lot of time thinking about or paying attention to because it’s very painful. Again, I figured this all out. Did the TV stop telling me that I was going to die? No. All of a sudden I just had to live with that. And that was really rough.
Chavonne (she/her):
Right. Yeah.
Rachel (she/her):
And there’s a lot of different ways that fat activism approaches this question. I would say kind of implicitly, but really any kind of fat activism is doing it because it’s kind of saying fat people are here and that’s okay, but especially in the nineties and the aughts, I think the rhetoric of fat is beautiful, was really prominent within fat activist spaces. As far as I know, this is based on a lot of reading, but obviously not being there.
Fat is good. Fat is beautiful. Fat people are healthy, or fat people are desirable, or whatever, especially because so much of fat activism is undergirded by men who like fat women.
Chavonne (she/her):
Right.
Jenn (she/they):
Mm-hmm.
Rachel (she/her):
Fat is beautiful. Fat is sexy kind of message. Really there for reasons. When I was starting to dig into the fat studies literature to write this article and think about the present, there is a small but very intense group of articles that are just really angry about the idea of fat activists saying fat is beautiful or you should love yourself. The way that I interpreted that anger as I was trying to work through this was, “Well, why are you telling me to love myself? This still kind of sucks.”
On the one hand I get it, because it does still kind of suck. On the other hand, I think that anger is misplaced. I do not think it should be against the people who are also trying to scramble for the present, but I feel like I keep seeing it over and over and over again, where it’s like, “You don’t have to be body positive. You can be body neutral.” Or, “You don’t have to love yourself. Your body can just be for you.” Or all of that kind of, not quite backlash, but resistance to body positivity and these messages that seem a little bit facile.
I am currently sitting with how frustrating that is to me. I’m like, “You know what? The people who are saying you should love yourself, they have no power.” Maybe it’s an influencer and maybe that influencer has 500,000 followers and that’s some kind of power, but that’s not the power of the public health establishment.
Chavonne (she/her):
Right. Right.
Rachel (she/her):
Why are you targeting your anger there? Why don’t you target the anger at the people who are making this influencer feel like she has to say love yourself?
Chavonne (she/her):
Yeah.
Rachel (she/her):
But I feel like I keep seeing this frustration or this anger, this ambivalence over and over and over again, and I really wish that we could treat it a little bit differently that just because you’ve taken, the first few steps of understanding anti-fatness and recognizing that you live within it doesn’t mean that it’s going to feel good and doesn’t mean that the journey is done. But then at the same time, I’m very sympathetic because I’m like, “Yeah, I started to rebuild my present and it still sucks,” and doctors are still terrible to me.
Chavonne (she/her):
Right. Right.
Rachel (she/her):
And the world still wants me to be thin, and I still feel a lot of pressure to be thin even though I’ve been doing this for 10 years.
Chavonne (she/her):
Right. Exactly.
Rachel (she/her):
The new weight loss drugs are not helping.
Chavonne (she/her):
No.
Jenn (she/they):
No, they’re not.
Rachel (she/her):
But so all of this to come back around to what lights me up about my work and when am I feeling most embodied? I know I came all the way back around.
Chavonne (she/her):
I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to make that face. I was like, “Oh, yeah, that’s what we were on.”
Jenn (she/they):
How you talk is how my brain works, so I’m just like, “And here we are.”
Chavonne (she/her):
I love it. Same. Hard same.
Jenn (she/they):
Like, here we are.
Rachel (she/her):
It is when I am grappling with that, it’s like when I am trying to build out my present in a way that is still engaged in the political work of resisting anti-fatness. I really wish it would go away. I don’t think that it’s going to, and I’m angry about that, but that’s a big part of my work, and it is sometimes very selfishly trying to find pleasure in the present. I don’t know. It’s probably actually not that selfish. I just feel guilty all the time because of who I am as a person.
Chavonne (she/her):
That doesn’t sound very selfish at all. Yeah. Yeah.
Jenn (she/they):
We’re also conditioned to feel shame and guilt when we seek pleasure.
Chavonne (she/her):
Yes.
Jenn (she/they):
Even though that’s a basic human need.
Chavonne (she/her):
We seek pleasure absolutely. Absolutely.
Jenn (she/they):
It’s not a want. That’ a need.
Chavonne (she/her):
For sure. Mm-hmm. It is.
Rachel (she/her):
Yeah.
Chavonne (she/her):
Yeah. It is. You’re absolutely right.
Rachel (she/her):
I think there’s a real balance between trying to seek pleasure, trying to build out a semblance of a present that is what every person is actually entitled to and is just ripped away from a lot, a lot of people.
Chavonne (she/her):
Yes.
Rachel (she/her):
And also still recognizing that the enemy is there and the times that I feel bad is because of the enemy and not because I’m being told to love myself.
Chavonne (she/her):
Yeah. Mm-hmm.
Jenn (she/they):
Wow.
Chavonne (she/her):
Mm-hmm.
Jenn (she/they):
That was like a thesis right there.
Rachel (she/her):
It was actually a thesis, though.
Jenn (she/they):
That was amazing. I could feel it. Right? You’re talking about the pressure to not be in the present, and then you’re talking about the release valves. I usually need a visual or an analogy. You’re talking about the release valve of pleasure that helps you be in the present moment and it doesn’t release all the pressure. It certainly releases some of the pressure. Right. It’s an oof, and. The oof is always going to be there.
I actually, I used to avoid the oof, pretend it wasn’t there, but it’s everywhere. It’s just there and. Right? And what else? Oh, my gosh, Rachel, we are enjoying the shit out of this conversation. Do you think that you’d be willing to come back? Because what I’m kind of thinking is I would like to have a whole episode about the anti obesity assemblage.
Chavonne (she/her):
Yes.
Jenn (she/they):
What do you think about that? Because I love the way it’s flowing.
Chavonne (she/her):
We were texting about it.
Jenn (she/they):
But I was like, “Ask back?” Yes. What would you think about that?
Rachel (she/her):
A dream come true.
Chavonne (she/her):
Okay.
Jenn (she/they):
Oh, thank you.
Rachel (she/her):
Yeah, absolutely.
Chavonne (she/her):
Yay.
Rachel (she/her):
I love talking about the anti obesity assemblage, even though it’s the most horrible thing that I’ve ever theorized. I do love talking about it.
Chavonne (she/her):
That’s funny.
Jenn (she/they):
I think everyone should have access to it. That’s another reason that I would love to… And if it’s not getting published, let’s talk about it. Let’s talk about it. Okay.
Chavonne (she/her):
Let’s do it.
Jenn (she/they):
We’re going to have Rachel back for a second conversation to talk about Rachel’s passion project, if that feels okay to call it that.
Chavonne (she/her):
Yay. Mm-hmm.
[1:26:24]
Jenn (she/they):
So for today, we just want to finish up and ask what would you like everyone listening to know about what you’re up to and how they can find you? What direction do you see your career and/or work taking in the future? Which you’ve talked about a little bit, we’d love to hear more.
Rachel (she/her):
I have, and wow. I’m feeling the joy of having my dissertation described as a passion project because it is, but also I know that that is not what the dissertation is for most people, I think. It’s like it has to be, but also it becomes so unpleasant, I think, for a lot of folks.
What I’m up to right now in May of 2024, is I am finishing up my dissertation, and then in August I will be moving to Michigan to start as an assistant professor in the School of Interdisciplinary studies at Grand Valley State University, which is a real dream come true.
Chavonne (she/her):
Congratulations.
Rachel (she/her):
I got hired my first time on the academic job market.
Jenn (she/they):
Amazing.
Rachel (she/her):
Which is a rarity.
Chavonne (she/her):
Yeah. Huge.
Rachel (she/her):
And also is incredible. I feel very lucky. I’ll be dragging my fiance with me and my cats.
Chavonne (she/her):
Uh-huh.
Rachel (she/her):
Don’t ask how long my to-do list is because the Google Doc is terrifying.
Chavonne (she/her):
Horrifying. Yeah. Yeah. Love it.
Rachel (she/her):
But I won’t actually be defending my dissertation until sometime in the fall, I believe, just because of academic calendars and whatnot. I’m trying to push for a remote or a hybrid defense, which means that it will be open to the public. If anyone wants to keep an eye out.
Chavonne (she/her):
Me. Me. Me. Yes, please.
Rachel (she/her):
Come be in my corner because defenses are not that fun and I want as many people there who like me as I can get.
Jenn (she/they):
Oh, send it our way. We’ll share it.
Chavonne (she/her):
Can we do ours? We’ll have signs.
Jenn (she/they):
Yes.
Rachel (she/her):
Okay. I will send-
Chavonne (she/her):
I absolutely will do that.
Rachel (she/her):
I will send it to you when it’s scheduled.
Chavonne (she/her):
Yes, absolutely. I’d be honored.
Rachel (she/her):
You can find me at my website, which is rachelefox.com and also Twitter. What is left of Twitter, where I’m rachel_e_fox. Those are my more public platforms. Even though I don’t tweet very much. I just retweet. I like to lurk. I’m a lurker.
Jenn (she/they):
I’m a lurker.
Chavonne (she/her):
Think?
Rachel (she/her):
I’m also one of the moderators of the Fat Studies Facebook group, so if there are fat studies scholars who are listening, or people who are interested in following the field of fat studies, I think it’s a really good Facebook group.
Jenn (she/they):
It is.
Rachel (she/her):
It’s medium active. But it’s like helps me feel very connected, which I like.
Chavonne (she/her):
Nice.
Rachel (she/her):
Then where’s my career and my work taking me? My fiance and I right now have a six publication trajectory that we’re working on.
Chavonne (she/her):
Nice.
Rachel (she/her):
The goal would be as soon as I’m done with my dissertation to crank out some publications, especially because my dissertation, which I haven’t talked about all that much, is about what’s going on in weight stigma research and advocacy right now, and how incredibly anti-fat they are. I’m hoping to get those publications out as quickly as I can because they’re so relevant to the present.
Chavonne (she/her):
Yes, please.
Rachel (she/her):
My work is really meant to help us draw boundaries between what is actually going to be beneficial for fat people and what is not. I would say minimum 90% of what is going on in weight stigma, research and advocacy is what I would consider not beneficial.
Chavonne (she/her):
Okay.
Rachel (she/her):
That’s where things are going. I would also love to rest at some point.
Jenn (she/they):
Yeah.
Rachel (she/her):
I know that was one of the questions that we didn’t get to.
Chavonne (she/her):
What is this? Yeah. We’ll get there.
Rachel (she/her):
But boy, oh boy, am I tired. Boy, oh boy, will I not get to rest before starting my job as a professor. I am a little nervous about it, but also very excited and fortunately surrounded by people who help me prioritize rest when I don’t. I guess that’s message is like keep your eyes peeled. Academic publishing timelines are horrible and very confusing to anyone who’s not in academia, where it’s like, you wrote something. What do you mean? It’s not going to be published until two years from now.
Jenn (she/they):
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Chavonne (she/her):
Love that.
Rachel (she/her):
But I also do my best for events that Mikey and Monica and I do. Whenever we can get access to those recordings, we try to put them on our websites. Mikey sends stuff out through her Patreon. That is also where some of my work will appear with any luck.
Chavonne (she/her):
Nice.
Jenn (she/they):
Awesome. Okay.
Chavonne (she/her):
Amazing. Amazing.
Jenn (she/they):
We’ll share anything that you have that’s upcoming that we see. We’ll make sure we do that.
Rachel (she/her):
Well, thank you.
Chavonne (she/her):
Thank you.
Jenn (she/they):
I want everyone to have access.
Chavonne (she/her):
Thank you. It’s wonderful.
Jenn (she/they):
Yeah.
Chavonne (she/her):
Thank you so, so, so much.
Jenn (she/they):
Thank you for being here for part one of our conversations.
Chavonne (she/her):
Absolutely. Yes.
Jenn (she/they):
Not that there’s going to be a part two and we can’t wait to talk with you again in the fall when you’re in Michigan.
Rachel (she/her):
Me too. Me too. Thank you for having me.
Jenn (she/they):
Thank you.
Chavonne (she/her):
This was such a dream. Such a dream. Thank you.
Rachel (she/her):
Oh, a really generative conversation. So, thank you.
Chavonne (she/her):
Yay.
Jenn (she/they):
Yes.
Chavonne (she/her):
Thank you so much.
Jenn (she/they):
Oh, some of my favorite words. Yes, yes, yes.
Chavonne (she/her):
Yes it is.
Jenn (she/they):
You also subject to position earlier, which is another one of my favorite words. Yes.
Chavonne (she/her):
It’s a good one.
Jenn (she/they):
Thank you. See you next time.
Chavonne (she/her):
Bye.
Rachel (she/her):
Sounds good. Bye.
Chavonne: Thank you for listening to Season 4 of the Embodiment for the Rest of Us podcast. Episodes will be published the first Thursday of every month-ish (in case we need some wiggle room) wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also find all podcast content (including the transcript and show notes) at our website, EmbodimentForTheRestOfUs.com.
Jenn: And follow us on social media on Instagram @EmbodimentForTheRestOfUs. We look forward to continuing this evolving and expanding conversation in our next episode.