Embodiment for the Rest of Us – Season 3, Episode 9: Mikey Mercedes
Thursday, August 31, 2023
Chavonne (she/her) and Jenn (she/her) interviewed Mikey Mercedes (she/they) about their embodiment journey.
Marquisele (Mikey) Mercedes (she/they) is a fat liberationist writer, creator, educator, and doctoral student from the Bronx, New York. As a Presidential Fellow at the Brown University School of Public Health, she works at the intersection of critical public health studies, fat studies, and scholarship on race/ism, examining how racism, anti-Blackness, and fatphobia have shaped health care, research, and public health.
Mikey is also a co-host of the podcast Unsolicited: Fatties Talk Back, which explores the lived fat experience from diverse vantage points to examine fatphobia in our relationships and culture. Her socials are @marquisele on Twitter, @fatmarquisele on Instagram, and Patreon.com/marquisele on Patreon. Their website is also marquiselemercedes.com
Content Warning: discussion of privilege, discussion of diet culture, discussion of fatphobia, discussion of racism, discussion of mental health, discussion of chronic medical issues, discussion of medical fatphobia
Trigger Warnings: None for this episode
A few highlights:
3:43: Mikey shares their understanding of “the rest of us” and how they are a part of that, as well as their privileges
1:03:33: Mikey discusses how “Rest” right in the middle of the podcast name feels, occurs, and shows up for her
1:38:34: Mikey shares her work on her podcast and how she stays embodied while working with her co-hosts
1:59:58: Mikey discusses how listeners can make a difference based on this conversation
2:04:08: Mikey shares where to be found and what’s next for them
Links from this episode:
The Embodiment of Disobedience
Google Form for Mikey’s doctoral research
Unsolicited: Fatties Talk Back
Music: “Bees and Bumblebees (Abeilles et Bourdons), Op. 562” by Eugène Dédé through the Creative Commons License
Please follow us on social media:
Twitter: @embodimentus
Instagram: @embodimentfortherestofus
Captions
EFTROU Season 3 Episode 9 is 2 hours, 14 minutes, and 20 seconds long. (2:14:20)
Chavonne: Hello there! I’m Chavonne McClay (she/her).
Jenn: And I’m Jenn Jackson (she/her).
Chavonne: This is Season 3 of Embodiment for the Rest of Us. A podcast series exploring topics and intersections that exist in fat, queer, and disability liberation!
Jenn: In this show, 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.
Chavonne: 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.
Jenn: In addition, the conversations held here are not exhaustive in their scope or depth. 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.
Chavonne: We are always interested in any feedback on this process if something needs to be addressed. You can email us at Listener@EmbodimentForTheRestOfUs.com.
[1:36]
(C): Welcome to Season 3 Episode 9 of the Embodiment for the Rest of Us podcast, and the second of our two-parter with the incredible Mikey Mercedes. Let’s continue this journey and deep dive!
(J): Marquisele (Mikey) Mercedes (she/they) is a fat liberationist writer, creator, educator, and doctoral student from the Bronx, New York. As a Presidential Fellow at the Brown University School of Public Health, she works at the intersection of critical public health studies, fat studies, and scholarship on race/ism, examining how racism, anti-Blackness, and fatphobia have shaped health care, research, and public health.
(C): Mikey is also a co-host of the podcast Unsolicited: Fatties Talk Back, which explores the lived fat experience from diverse vantage points to examine fatphobia in our relationships and culture. Her socials are @marquisele on Twitter, @fatmarquisele on Instagram, and Patreon.com/marquisele on Patreon. Their website is also marquiselemercedes.com
(J): For folks who are interested in participating in Mikey’s doctoral research, there is a link to their Google Form in the Show Notes.
(C): Thank you so much for being here with us dear listeners! This season is so great and we are honored you are here. We can’t wait to be with you again in conversation!
[2:56]
Chavonne (she/her):
We have Mikey Mercedes, she/they joining us again from Rhode Island. Welcome back, we are so excited to keep sharing space and continue our conversation with you. How are you doing today, Mikey?
Mikey (she/they):
I’m so glad to be here with you guys again, like we were speaking about earlier, it’s been a busy week, but this is a great way to spend a two-hour slot, so I’m looking forward to it. I’m happy to talk with you guys.
Jenn (she/her):
Oh, we’re so glad you’re back.
Chavonne (she/her):
We’re so glad. We’re so honored. I’m just super excited.
[3:43]
Jenn (she/her):
Oh my gosh, I can’t wait. I can’t wait. Okay, so continuing with our questions, let’s dive into the second half of our podcast title. What does “The rest of us,” mean to you? How do you identify within the rest of us? And we’d also love for you to share your pronouns again and name your privileged identities and context here too.
Mikey (she/they):
I actually love talking about this because it’s actually part of the reason why I have started to do a positionality type introduction before each of my presentations, especially when I do speaking engagements with med students or orgs or whatever. I love talking about where I’m coming from, and that’s essential to this concept of the rest of us. The rest of us, meaning people who are… I don’t want to use the word the norm, but those of us who we know who we are, we know we’re not supposed to be in.
We know we’re the out group. It’s this kind of inherent knowledge that you have. You either develop it very, very young because it comes to you in a super obvious way over the course of many years, or you come to that consciousness later on, which is also a valid way of understanding identity. There are lots of things that get in the way of some folks understanding themselves as part of groups that are political, marginalized, et cetera. And so the rest of us is just everyone who understands that the things that exist in our society are not made with them in mind. We’re not in mind.
For me, I occupy, I think, a very privileged space among fat black, fat liberationists. My experiences growing up in the Bronx, growing up in the projects, going to schools I did, experiencing the things I did, being racialized, being adultified, just struggling feeling like the entire weight of the world is on my shoulders. That is super pivotal to how I see things now, both within fat politics and just in science and just generally. But I’ve managed, I think, to make the impact that I have in the time that I have in doing this work specifically because of the fact that now I’m not in that place. I’m in a completely different place. I know that PhDs do not pay as well as people think they do, these people who are on the outside. But for a lot of people, myself included, it is literally the most stability some people have ever had.
I got into Brown with a Presidential Fellowship, so I was part of a small group of entering PhDs, and you’re given three years of funding, no obligations, no strings attached. At Brown, you’re guaranteed five years, but you usually have to do a research assistantship or a teaching assistantship within that throughout your program. And meanwhile, I’m entering my fourth year now and I’m about to do my first TA because of that Fellowship. And that was also strongly due to the work of women of color who advocated for me, faculty of color who advocated for me when I was entering the program, who saw my worth, who saw what I was bringing to the table because of who I am, where I come from. Who were like, “We’re going to make sure that at the very least you have this form of protection for this amount of time.”
And that’s another part of being in the rest of us too. Even when we’re in these very privileged spaces, the academy is not… Even as a marginalized person within the academy, you are still incredibly privileged. And not because the academy is some kind of magical place where thinking and collaboration happens in its purest form, because that isn’t true. You’re privileged because of the way privilege works. It’s that people have access to the spaces they have access to by virtue of their identities. To be able to navigate your marginalization, to end up in a space where things like whiteness, thinness, class, those things are what’s valued, you have privilege. So my PhD program is the most security I’ve ever had because of what comes along with that. It’s the most social capital I’ve ever had access to.
I think I’ve had a lot of success in the ways I have with reaching people because they’re like, “Okay, she goes to Brown. She’s been vetted,” in some way that means something to people. I think this goes hand in hand with my relative proximity to whiteness and my phenotype. I’m very light-skinned a black person. I’m a black Latinx person, but I’m still a very light-skinned woman. I still benefit from things like colorism, from things things like texturism. Even within the incredibly… I’m a large fat. At this point I could be considered among the fattest people that we have in our community, which is often saturated by thin or small fat people who are talking on these issues. But I also benefit in a very real way, I believe from the way my fatness is distributed, from my whiteness, my proximity to whiteness, my, for some people assumed whiteness. I think in most places, I’ve never had an experience of not being seen as black until leaving New York.
And so now I’m in Rhode Island, and the racial politics feel very weird here. Someone the other day that I met on campus was surprised that I identified as black, and that has never happened to me. It was the weirdest thing. They assumed that I was some kind of Latin American mixed with something else. And it’s like, “I am, no. That is not the case.” And so when this person tried to sort of give me this label that definitely felt like it was a form of whiteness being conferred onto me, that is something I think really deeply about in terms of the things I’ve managed to do in this space and the amount of time I’ve been doing work publicly. People like my colleagues that I work with, like Deshaun Harrison, people like Sid, people that I learned so much from that are not able to navigate as successfully as I am in exclusionary spaces because of their complete unambiguous blackness.
If you are not thinking about that as someone who’s interested in whatever fat liberation means, you’re not thinking about the right things. You have to think about your place, not just as a marginalized person, but as a person among marginalized people. And also that should be a lot more integral to the concept of the rest of us. But unfortunately, I think that there’s a real lack of will to do that kind of interrogation because when people start to think about how they have privilege among people who don’t have privilege, and that’s a new kind of idea for them, it is super uncomfortable.
So that’s something that I’m always grappling with. And yes, I’m a large fat, super fat black person who is queer and disabled, both in terms of my autistic sensibilities and also mobile-y in terms of physically how much I can move. Those are all ways that I’m limited in society, but there is so much more… You can go a lot closer to the margins than me. And that to an extent, I think, and I said this before, I think this absolutely has altered the way people receive me in this space.
I think it’s really, really interesting to see how I’m received, even as a fat black person in comparison to some of my colleagues who have been doing this work publicly for a lot longer, who have… And public profiles for a longer time. And I don’t like that. I don’t like that. I don’t like seeing people disregard the crucial contributions of people who do this work against incredibly high odds because they find someone more palatable to listen to. Just like I am against that on principle as both a fat liberationist, but also just as a person in the world who knows what it’s like to not be validated unless somebody else who looks different from me validates it first. And so yeah, I see that happen a lot. I see it happen so fucking much. But yeah, that’s where I stand. It’s like I am myself and I am marginalized, but you can go a lot closer to the margins. That’s just what it is.
Jenn (she/her):
I so appreciate, Mikey, the nuance about that. It’s almost like as a visual, I can picture you here and I can picture what’s the left of you in the right and in front of you, and behind you and above you, just in all directions. Your acknowledgement of the space you exist in, in community is just very visceral for me. It’s like, “Ah, yes.” And oh my gosh, and also so many…. I was just in the frustrations of it all with you, just thinking about there’s examples that people talk about often as if there’re in the past, but you were really talking about it in the present, which it very much is. White women, their proximity to white men is how they got the right to vote.
They utilized that very intentionally, but people talk about that like, “Oh, that’s a thing we used to do. Oh, look, oh, white feminism has always been a problem,” but it’s always somehow in the past tense. Or less and less proximity to the margins is more and more problematic because there’s proximity to whiteness or gender identity or whatever the more privileged identity is. And also… But without acknowledging it. And when you said that waiting for a person that is further away from the margins to say, “Listen to Mikey,” is just such an ick space. And so I’m just highlighting some of the nuance. I think my brain needs to stew about it some more, but I was like, “Oh, there’s so much nuance in the rest of us.”
This came to Chavonne in a dream, which I think is so cool that it’s the rest of us. And it’s like, yes, it’s like where… It calls to mind things like intersectionality, and also sometimes I think we’re a bit beyond that because people literally view it as an intersection. I’m like, “It’s actually more complicated than that.” And which context are you in is also so… You’re talking about being in the Bronx and then being in Rhode Island like it’s such a contrast.
We can be seen as different identities if we happen to be if it’s less… What was the word you used? Oh, if it’s more ambiguous. It was just… What am I trying to say here? I think this level of nuance is really important. It’s also a lot to wrap your head around, which I think if you’re listening to me right now, you can tell. I’m like, “I see it. I’m wrapping my head around it.” But it’s not as simple as being like, “Look at this intersection of these two things.” That has so much value. The intersectionality is originally about who is the most left out, how do we get closer and closer to the margins?
And depending on the situation, there are going to be different people each time. We could say in the United States, that’s definitely black, femme, trans folks. That is for sure. But when we get to different cities and areas and different countries and different academia, and I just like anything, it changes. Or more people are added or something like that. So I’m just really appreciating that depth. It’s like my brain is having trouble with words explaining or expressing how much I appreciate that depth. Instead, I’m just summarizing you. I find that really powerful.
Mikey (she/they):
If you want, actually, I think intersectionality as a concept has become really overextended. As something that… Kimberly Crenshaw did not come up with the idea that people have multiple identities and that they overlap and they create these particular vulnerabilities or advantages. If someone wants to read something that really goes into this super hard that isn’t drawing from legal studies, which is an incredibly specific and vantage point-
Jenn (she/her):
Good point.
Mikey (she/they):
… You should engage with Patricia Hill Collins’ work, Black Feminist Thought. That whole book is something that I would really recommend to someone who wants to understand the matrix of domination, which is the phrasing that she uses. And then there is other people like Jennifer Nash who wrote the book, it’s a little book, highly recommend reading, called Beyond Intersectionality. Which I’m not going to spoil it for anybody. I love that book. I think I was just talking about this yesterday.
Jenn (she/her):
I get the best reading from you.
Mikey (she/they):
Well, I was just thinking about this yesterday. There are very… You guys will probably have seen this. There are very set ways that we talk about fatness or talk about racism or talk about the concept of multiple marginalized identities. There are set narratives we use to make sense of these things. And they’re shaped by both what we perceive to be people’s limitations and understanding, but also they’re shaped by lots of other stuff. What seems relevant, what seems appropriate to counter this other specific kind of thought or narrative that is harmful.
So when I think about something that I see happen a lot in spaces that are supposed to be challenging fat phobia, this idea that fatness was valued in the past, but then this thing happened and then fatness became bad. That is a retroactive rhetorical framing. Also not accurate because I think people read Fearing the Black Body, and then were like, “Oh, Peter Paul Rubens’s was a thing, Rubenesque was a thing. Fat bodies were portrayed in art, that means that fat was valued in the past.” A little more complicated than that because when Peter Paul Rubens was alive, people did not like his artwork. They complained about the fact that he was not emulating more idealistic bodies.
So no, it’s not as simple as these fat bodies were in a painting that means that fatness was valued or food was more scarce. So that means that people who were fat had more access to food, and so fatness was valued. No, those are not true. Those are rhetorical devices that people use to make specific points in specific contexts. So the idea that food was scarce before, and that means fatness was valuable before, that calls on this idea that one, that there is a drastic difference in what people are eating in the modern day, and thus that is the reason that there are more fat bodies now, which is not true because fat people have literally always existed. So that’s one thing. And then the other thing is that you could also use that argument to basically erase fatness as a historically relevant form of marginalization.
You sort of just erased that completely when you say, “Oh, well, fatness was valued before, and then it became bad.” Because frankly, the idea that the body is formed by what you intake is something that goes far back, to the 1600. These are not-
Jenn (she/her):
Even further. It goes back even further to the origin of the term.
Mikey (she/they):
And so like-
Jenn (she/her):
Terms.
Mikey (she/they):
These ideas have always been around. It is totally fine for us to say that the history of fatness is really complex, but eventually it becomes a coherent system of racialization and oppression to the levels unseen before, because of the lack of coalescing of those things. We can say it was scattered and then it became together, and then system started to form. We can say that, that is true. It’s when we start to use all these other things that already exist that sort of reflect the superficial way people understand things. And I see that happen a lot with intersectionality where it’s like, “These identities are intersectional, intersectionality is blah, blah, blah.”
Intersectionality can be a valuable framework. It is not even close to the only best or most foundational way to understand multiple marginalized identities. It’s not. It’s literally not. And so yeah, you should always reach deeper. Kimberly Crenshaw’s a neo-liberal. She’s not… She’s drawing on a very particular form of training and thought and analysis. It’s kind of the same way how you can understand fatness as a thing that has social meaning, but ultimately the perspective in which you’re analyzing that completely changes the actual message of that. So you could be a fat studies person and say, “Fatness has meaning and becomes oppression through these things.” Or you could say, “Fatness has meaning because of the way it’s been medicalized, and if we medicalize it in a different way, then we can make people lose weight better.” Completely different.
Completely different vantage points. And so the thing I’m always asking for people to do is to complicate the narrative, complicate the way that they understand things. And if you’re going to draw on a set of rhetorical ideas like the BMI is racist, for example. You have to understand what that means, you have to. Yeah, and I think perhaps people don’t actually know that much about intersectionality as much as they think they do.
Jenn (she/her):
I would agree. Thank you. I didn’t know how to express any of that. I definitely didn’t have the… Thank you for additions to my reading list again. No, I love it. I love forever expanding my reading list. This isn’t my… Oh, actually I have a box block it, but this is just my tiny little office bookshelf. They’re in every room. Complicate the narrative, complicate the way you understand things. Exactly, thank you for that. It just kind of drove home what you had said earlier, that there are ways that we have chosen to express things so that we try…
I kind of heard that as so we reach a larger audience so we influence more people, so it’s more palatable. And I was like, yes, that’s what I’m trying to say that that surface level vanity level, look what I can do kind of level, it’s always felt very strange to me. It’s not sexy what you’re talking about. It’s very sexy to be like, “Hello, everyone.” I’m thinking about the book White Fragility, for example, where it’s like, “What if a white woman who’s been studying this for 20 years had a book about this?” And I’m like, “Why is everyone talking about it? It’s very obvious why everyone is talking about it, why she got the money to research it.” Everything about it is very obvious. It is her whiteness and it’s boring.
I think sometimes the way my brain works is like, “Why does everyone think this is sexy?” To learn something on such a basic level that now they can all be like, “I know about that too. I know about that too.” And we can all just stop there. That just is never really appealed to me, but what you’re talking about really interests me, where it’s like, “What about one level deeper? Chavonne and I, actually before this, were just talking about that. I was talking about changing some of my supervision. I was talking about how I want to change the way my days are.
I kind of have this reawakening to this. I’m like, “I have my own business. I could run it however I want. I don’t have to do it in the surface ways that are presented to me. I can go deeper than that.” And so this just… It’s echoing in me like, “Oh, yes.” I didn’t have these particular words for it until you shared them. And now I’m like, “Ooh.” The way that it echoes, complicate the narrative, complicate the way you understand things. It’s not sexy, I think, to most people, but to me that’s the sexy stuff. I’m like, “Ooh, that’s so exciting. Ooh, a reading list.”
Like, “Ooh, I…”
Chavonne (she/her):
Reading list.
Jenn (she/her):
I want to understand more, I appreciate that. Part of considering things in the margins, I have quite a proximity to all sorts of things that are very privileged. I can’t even get a level, I don’t think, of understanding unless I push myself deeper into the understanding of things that I know nothing about at this moment. I’ve said before, I like to be humbled, I guess is my way of phrasing this, where I’m like, “Oh, shit.” That’s the kind of realizations, with all that proximity I have and all the privilege I have, to take those away and to see things I’ve never seen because of that proximity, because of that privilege.
It feels like actual human connection with each other, actual human understanding, or at least closer and closer to that. It feels like I’m getting more of a taste of that over time, and that’s not to toot my own horn, that’s to be like, “That’s why it’s sexier to me.” I actually genuinely want to understand about more things. I want to know what I did wrong. I actually really like learning that. That’s not an uncomfortable space for me. I’m like, “Well, fuck. We’re all doing that. Why isn’t anyone else paying attention?” It’s not easy to learn those things, but it’s so important. What you’re saying has so much value. Oh, I’m so sorry.
Chavonne (she/her):
No, no, no. I’m sorry. Go.
Jenn (she/her):
I’m just getting that what you’re saying has so much value and at this moment I can already tell it’s in a way that I don’t yet understand. That’s why I’m like, “Ooh, this is sexy.” I definitely don’t… I’m talking about it in a way that I’m not trying to give you an interpretation like I already understand. No, I very much get that I don’t understand it quite like that yet or to that depth yet, and I think that’s so interesting. That’s the kind of stuff that lights up my life because the rest of us, that lights up my life. The most interesting people, the most beautiful nuanced look at things, the most in-depth conversations. They’re all over there. They’re all over there. We don’t need to bio-hack and all of that other boring shit in the other direction just to give the counterpart.
Chavonne (she/her):
That’s so good. No, I was just basically agreeing. Something that’s really sitting with me in my head, I just kept saying, “Margins within the margins.” That’s what intersectionality sometimes feels like. Well, you’re this, and then you get [inaudible] just trying all this nitpicky stuff, but it’s important, in some ways. I’m thinking about you as a black person versus me as a black person versus Deshaun Harrison as a black person. And like you said, the more we dig into that stuff, sometimes the more uncomfortable it gets acknowledging that I am this black person who has a good amount of privilege in other ways. I don’t even know where I was going with that, but that’s just in my head. The margins within the margins. And then one thing that just sent chills through my body is that we’re not… People who are marginalized, are made more valid by someone who’s further away from the margins is really sitting heavily with me. For sure.
Mikey (she/they):
I think it’s part of the reason, I think… And you know what? I’ve actually been surprised at how averse sometimes people are to the idea of acknowledging the margins within the margins, because what is activism if not thinking about those who are most marginalized by society? That feels like the obvious point to me, and then I realized that part of the reason why some people were averse in ways that I was not is because there is this really difficult position that especially black people, especially us as black people have to occupy in a way that we’re kind of forced to contend with the social professional economic value of where we stand, of what we represent.
So I’m really aware of the fact that for my PhD department, for example, me being a fat black person who did not go to a prestigious undergrad institution, who has the background I have, I know that in the DEI economy I am valuable in very specific ways. And that’s always been obvious to me because part of how I’ve managed, I think, to succeed and navigate exclusionary spaces is to just understand that the things that institutions do specifically and that professionals often do in the name of diversity or inclusion or equity, that these things have value beyond what we’re getting as individuals.
I knew that there were certain awards in undergrad that I was going to be pushed towards or go up for because they wanted somebody like me to be represented among nominees, among winners, whatever. We’re in a moment where it’s increasingly obvious to marginalized people and to black people in particular, that we need to use what our marginalization means in these spaces in order to survive and thrive in them. We’re kind of forced to…. I kind of think of it as writing the college admissions essay. “Here is all of the bad shit that has ever happened to me. I’m an interesting person, please take me.”
There is a version of that, that especially black people have to do when they’re trying to get into grad school, when they are going up for awards, especially awards or grants or Fellowships or just programs that are supposedly to help us thrive. They’re really about collecting the most interesting little jewels.
Jenn (she/her):
Tokens.
Mikey (she/they):
Among a very… Tokens.
Jenn (she/her):
[inaudible] my chest.
Mikey (she/they):
Yeah, and so I think it can be really uncomfortable for people to grapple with that.
Speaker 1:
… comfortable for people to grapple with that. In a way, because if you actually believe in meritocracy, if you believe that the things you get are 1000% because of how hard you work and because of your effort and that is the main thing, and you really hate having that idea disrupted by the understanding that there is a whole other system that is over-determining where you fall in terms of your success or failure, that is really fucking uncomfortable. The people that I have found be most resistant to acknowledging their privilege within marginalized spaces, in particular and specifically other black people who struggle with that realization, it is specifically because they’re trying to hold onto the idea that they have earned something. They have earned something, that they do deserve X, Y, Z.
And the thing is, what I always try to say is that there are two ways to understand tokenization. One side is the side that we usually hear. It’s like it’s derogatory. It is, “You only got in because you’re Black. You only got this because you’re Black. You only got this because you’re a Black woman,” blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. That’s one side. The other side, and the side that I think people are struggling to grapple with because of the discomfort around it is the side that says, “Black people are tokens.” But the reason why we are tokenized is not in this weird, conservative rationale for, “Oh, no. They’re giving everything to the Blacks.”
It’s not that. It is quite literally because the economic value of engaging in the DEI economy is powerful and alluring enough that the concept of racial diversity or racial equity is something that is absolutely about checking those boxes. It is absolutely about collecting the right tokens, and it’s because none of this DEI economy is done with what people think is in mind. People think that diversity is this step to justice, to liberation, to freedom, and we are in a cultural moment where I’m sad to say that is very much not the case. And the reason for that is because of something called elite capture, which Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò wrote the book Elite Capture about identity politics and how they were co-opted by the rich and powerful.
Elite capture comes from global development studies. It used to be a way, well, it still is, but originally it was a way to talk about how people who are powerful get access to resources that are supposed to be for everyone, through things like bribing, for example. And it was really from global development studies, but then it sort of took on this new life where it’s kind of a way to describe how things like identity politics become hijacked by people who are looking. Well, not necessarily people who are looking, but they become hijacked because our systems are made and grounded in hierarchy. We live in an inherently unequal society. Some people have power, most people don’t. And the further you get to the margins, obviously the less power people have.
And so when you have a society that is built that way, it is the natural consequence of that society. That something like diversity, that something like intersectionality, that something like fat liberation becomes co-opted and hijacked by powerful people to meet their own ends. There’s so many things at play here in how people get to understand themselves as political beings. I am working on an article right now about health equity capture specifically, and how health equity as a concept and its values and framings and language is being co-opted by the weight loss industry in order to sell people weight loss medications. And they’re specifically doing that through health equity capture and by using Black women’s health as a cause, specifically attached to health equity and also individual Black women as ambassadors in this space.
And so that is what happens in a society where people with power have their own goals in mind. In this case, it’s profit. It’s the consolidation of political corporate power. That is what happens in a society where some people have power and they exert it over others. It’s that these concepts that originally mean very specific things, they just explode. They rupture and they’re co-opted. They’re appropriated. They’re hijacked. So yeah, lots of things that get in the way or that alter or that make it difficult for people to understand margins within margins, that make it difficult and painful for people to think about themselves as participants in a DEI economy. So yeah, it’s rough. It is rough out here. It is rough.
Speaker 2:
Out in the streets, right?
Speaker 1:
It’s rough.
Speaker 3:
It’s so fucked up. And you were talking about hijacked, and I was also thinking in that moment, some of it’s hijacking and some of it is this system is working in the exact fucked up way it was designed to work.
Speaker 1:
Yes.
Speaker 3:
I could see two levels, where the rhetoric is about hijacked, but I’m like, are we sure? That is definitely stuff that is designed to happen. Then there’s another layer where people with a lot of power and money and time on their hands and ridiculous numbers of people working for them get weird ideas in their head like, “What if we make this whole thing work for us more, even though we have everything we need?” It’s like a multi-layered almost hijacking.
Speaker 1:
Well, they’re usually forced to that place because they can’t… Well, okay. The rich and powerful do control culture, but they can’t control the fine specifics of culture. So, the weight loss industry has no choice but to adapt to a moment where we’re in this post-racial reckoning society. We had the summer of 2020. People thought [inaudible]-
Speaker 3:
Black squares, we’re done now.
Speaker 1:
Yes. People thought it was going to be some neck shit. It was not. It was the racial reckoning that was not. It did not happen. And then we’re also specifically in a post-body positivity mainstream moment.
Speaker 3:
Yes.
Speaker 1:
So they don’t really have a choice but to change aesthetics, to change their maneuvers in order to keep up in this moment. And so that’s part of the reason why things get hijacked. It’s because it’s like, “Oh, this is the way people are understanding things now. This is the narrative. This is how people are talking about bodies. This is how people are talking about body positivity. This is how people are talking about race, racism, equality, blah, blah, blah. We need to use those things.” And so, yeah.
And the thing is, it’s like one of the things that I think has been hard for me to accept, even though I know it’s true, even though I know it’s true, is that people’s intentions, even among the powerful, intentions don’t mean much. It’s not like some white guy wakes up someday and is like, “I’m going to appropriate health equity language.” It’s definitely it doesn’t work that way. The things that powerful people do are dangerous and harmful and absolutely can be loaded with malice and contempt, and they have access to creating forms of destruction that we could only dream of.
But it’s really important to also realize that when, like I said, the foundations of society, when the foundations of something like an economy around making people feel bad and forcing them to change their bodies, when that economy already exists and is at its core a monument to anti-Blackness, to anti-fatness, it’s going to go in that direction regardless.
Speaker 3:
It’s true.
Speaker 1:
The white guy doesn’t have to wake up and decide to do it. It’s going to go in that direction.
Speaker 3:
It’s a great point.
Speaker 1:
Yeah. And I hate that, because I’m just like, “Y’all are fucked up, and I know you’re fucked up and I hate you.” But also, it also helps me make sense of how I see certain marginalized people give in to these systems, and I’m like, that is the way things are built to go.
Speaker 3:
Such a good point.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, absolutely. Wow, that’s pretty heavy, thinking about it.
Speaker 3:
I also don’t want to believe it, but I also know it’s true.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1:
I know.
Speaker 2:
I’m like, “I don’t like that, but yeah, you’re right.”
Speaker 1:
I know, I know. It feels like, “Okay, bitch. Damn.” But also, it really is the truth. Yeah.
Speaker 2:
Well, damn.
Speaker 3:
Yeah, it was like a gut punch. I feel it physically.
Speaker 1:
Yes.
Speaker 2:
All right then. Well, let me go take a nap now.
Speaker 3:
Well, fuck.
Speaker 2:
That’s my only response. I’m wondering since you said this, you’ve been placing yourself, I don’t think that’s the word you use, but positioning, that’s it, positioning yourself when you’re introducing yourself. What kind of reactions are you getting? Are people feeling really grateful? Are they pushing back against it?
Speaker 1:
Oh, good question. The people who receive it well, it’s like an “if you know, you know” kind of thing. If you know, you know. People who see, for example, me and Monica talk about our positionalities before giving a lecture, and they’re like, “Okay, okay. Love to see it. Love to see it,” they are people who already understand the relevance and importance of positionality. But there are so many more people, and they tend to not… Let me not OD, but they tend to be people who really don’t have smoke like that in public, so they’re not going to act up. You know what I mean?
Speaker 2:
Oh, gotcha.
Speaker 3:
Yeah. Yes, I do.
Speaker 1:
I see academics in particular first, from lots of different domains, really, really balk at the idea that, for example, when someone suggests that journals should ask for positionality statements from journal authors. That is a thing that I’ve seen pop up in discussion more recently, and I have seen people from philosophy to physics to psychology. It’s always the people you expect to be like, “Why is this relevant? This isn’t relevant. Science is an objective practice.” And it’s like, “To who?”
Speaker 2:
Right, right, right.
Speaker 1:
To when?
Speaker 3:
Exactly.
Speaker 1:
This is news to me.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3:
Since when?
Speaker 1:
Let me know when the meeting about what science was happened, because the last time I checked-
Speaker 2:
Oh my God.
Speaker 1:
– it is literally impossible to do science on any level without that knowledge being formed by the person doing the science. And you see them and it’s like that, I’ve never watched The Simpsons, but it’s like that meme that’s angry man yells at cloud. It’s very like, “I hate change!” And I think that the idea that people are going to start talking about their positionalities more and more as a regular part of academic practice, that also definitely has already happened and had the potential of being part of this elite capture DEI economy process. But also, I think it scares the shit out of so many people who are just used to not having their identities part of the conversation, because they are the unspoken implicit and explicit default.
Speaker 3:
Yes. It shouldn’t have any bias in it at all! That’s not subjective at all!
Speaker 2:
[inaudible] you talking about?
Speaker 1:
Come on. Yeah. But…
Speaker 3:
Wow, you’re reminding me of Rachel Fox’s presentation again at the Weight Stigma Conference. I’ve watched that. I’ve watched it twice already since watching it the first time, because there’s just so much to play with. But she first highlights the researcher who came up with the quote [inaudible] epidemic, and then highlighted his own tweets and conference comments and shared his positionality. Which, “Here’s his research and here’s his positionality,” it floored me. Because he was like, “This is what we have to do,” and then he’s like, “Wow, [inaudible] epidemic. How do we even get here?” And I’m like, “You did it! You started it! You did!” It actually reminds me of earlier in the pandemic when politicians were like, “Someone should do something!” And I’m like-
Speaker 1:
It’s like, “You!”
Speaker 2:
“Uh, uh.”
Speaker 1:
We don’t have any money.
Speaker 2:
[inaudible] before.
Speaker 3:
Yeah. “We don’t have any money or any power. That’s supposed to be what you do over there.” It just reminds me very much of how when positionality comes into it, the chance to be humble seems to just be lost on people. They’re afraid to be canceled or whatever their little argument is, and I mean specifically little argument. Tiny little arguments where they’re like, “Oh!” They get so small all of a sudden. And I’m like, “Okay, it’s okay to be wrong.” “Yes, I came up with it. I’m wrong now,” is very different than being like, “Wow, how did we get here?” It’s not the lack of humbleness. Sometimes I’ve done this in therapy, where I’m like, “I would like to acknowledge my own whiteness more,” and I actually see it as a scale of humbleness.
The more white you are, the closer you are to that proximity, the less you’re allowed to be humbled or the less you say you’re humble or less you act like that, but being marginalized is very humbling. You don’t have a choice about that. It’s just a way that I see this, and so when I saw that in Rachel Fox’s presentation, I did not know that he had said those things. But I’m like, of course he did. Of course he created it, and then denied that he created it while he has been benefiting from it for an incredibly long time. 30-plus years at this point, he’s been benefiting from this. I don’t know. It’s just very fucked up. That’s the phrase in my head a lot so far in this conversation. These things are very real.
I don’t mind going deeper, but that’s something that we get present to as we go deeper is like, wow, this is really fucked up. It’s fucked up on every level. It’s intentional on every level. People are forced on every level. It affects all of us, but not all of us equally. This is really important. I so appreciate what you’re sharing. I always like, “Ooh, that’s a journal topic for me,” but I feel like this is on a different level. This is like an invitation to do some unlearning about area… I’m actually making notes to myself about areas I’d like to do more unlearning about. I really see what you said earlier, “Complicate the narrative. Complicate the way you understand things as an invitation.” I’m like, “Ooh.”
I will be inviting myself to do that, because that blew my mind when Rachel Fox brought that up, but I feel like I should have known that. I just hadn’t gone deep enough about that. And not shitting all over myself, but just like, ooh, that’s an opportunity. I didn’t mean that in a shameful way towards myself.
Speaker 1:
Of course. Yeah.
Speaker 3:
But just like, ooh, I would like to learn more about that. I want to read these books. You put on your Twitter at some point in the past… What is it, health communism?
Speaker 1:
Yeah.
Speaker 3:
And you wrote a little, you just were talking about your experience with it, and I was like, “Oh my gosh, I need these kinds of book recommendations.” That’s been one of the most interesting books I’ve read recently. I haven’t heard of 90% of what’s in that book. It was-
Speaker 1:
Yeah, it could be dense. It could be dense. I’m not going to front. It could be dense.
Speaker 3:
But it was fabulous. I don’t see it over there. I was going to say I should show you. I have it tabbed with endless colored… It’s all like, “I need to go learn about this. I’ve never heard of this before. This one made me mad. I don’t know what to do with it. This is really complicated. Oh, I see what narratives people create about things and say it’s about communism, but it’s actually about capitalism.” It’s a really fascinating book, but I like that. See, that’s the deepening, where I’m like, “Ooh, I don’t know any of this stuff, so I guess I’ll take them one at a time.” I think that’s important, because people act like, “Wow, how did we get here?” And I’m like, “You just need to unlearn a little at a time. You don’t have to undo 30 years in one conversation. Please just get started. Just start somewhere.
Speaker 1:
[inaudible] Oh my God.
Speaker 3:
And I think you’re highlighting how simple that can be and how important that can be. But even that hesitation like, “Let’s keep it complicated so we don’t have to do anything about it,” I think is this knee-jerk reaction like, “Oh, my stuff is coming up.” But I think it’s so important, so I appreciate that invitation. I don’t hear it as speed up or accelerate.
Speaker 1:
No!
Speaker 3:
I hear it as go slow, take your time. It’s complex. It’s not like things you can snap into place like some sort of Lego set. You actually have to, “Which piece goes?”, or Tetris. They’re not clear that if you rotate them, they suddenly fit. Although, I hate Tetris. I’m terrible at that game. My brain makes it far too complicated. It goes too fast for me. That’s not my learning speed. I’m not good at that game, but I can Mortal Combat my way through anything because it’s slow. It’s actually slow. You have pauses in-between battles. You can learn a character over time and learn what their moves are, but Tetris is like, “Oh, no! Oh, no! Oh, no!” I can’t do that.
Speaker 1:
[inaudible]
Speaker 3:
I don’t actually think that anyone anywhere is saying, “Please do whatever feels like your Tetris. Do it in the hardest way possible. Do it with your stress hormones guiding the way.” Like, why? We can do it in simpler ways. That’s something that I’m really getting from this conversation. I think your perspective is so powerful on this, because our whole society says, “Hurry up. Hurry up and get in line. Hurry up and then wait.” And I’m like, “Why? I just do it slowly and I’ll get there at the same time as you, but at least I did at my pace.”
Speaker 1:
Yes, yes, yes.
Speaker 3:
That’s all coming forward. I’m enjoying the energy of that and the permission in that and the reminders in that.
Speaker 1:
Well, what I like to always tell people is… And this is a part of the reason why I think I’ve had a longstanding policy about not doing the whole debate thing, especially on Twitter and especially with strangers, because of this. For lots of reasons, but specifically because of this fact. It took me 20 years to openly challenge the concept of [inaudible], and then it took me a couple more years on top of that to feel confident in saying that I had a fat politic that I could use to analyze situations outside of myself. That’s like 22 years. How the fuck am I going to expect someone to rush to the point that I’m at when it took me 22 years to get there? That is not a reasonable expectation to put on people.
And so there’s lots of reasons to not entertain people who are trying to goad you into giving them a simplified deduction of decades of evolving research. It is a standard that nobody can meet and it’s often meant to derail. And to engage in those things and also to expect someone to get it, there’s a reason why I spend all of my time doing this. It is something that deeply enriches me on an intrinsic level, that has connected me to a really incredible community that I like doing real and intellectual work with. Not everybody is Rachel Fox. Not everyone is doing a PhD in these specific things, and so the goal should never be to become me or become Da’Shaun Harrison or become Rachel Fox.
The goal just has to be, and I want people who do this kind of education for these goals to also internalize this, the goal is just the light bulb moment. That’s all. That is all your [inaudible]. It’s the light bulb moment. If you can organically spark somebody else’s curiosity, that is it. That is all you are there for, and then they look to them to pursue deeper lines of inquiry. And yeah, they might get stuck in a place where they’re reiterating these specific rhetorical narratives that are simplistic ways of understanding things. It’s part of the learning process.
And so yeah, all you have to do, especially if you’re someone who has started to learn about anti-fatness or anti-Blackness or how those things are the same thing and you’re like, “I want to tell all of my friends. I want to tell all my family. I want everybody to get it. I want everybody to understand where I’m at in terms of my politics,” it’s not something you have to do. It’s something that you can invite people to do. It’s something that you can respond positively when people engage in. But there’s so many different people with so many different concerns, that to try and have everyone on board at the same exact place without regard for all the different things that impact why people understand things the way they do, it’s not a burden worth carrying, because it’s literally impossible to meet.
And it’s also just like, you can’t flatten people in that way. For me, I know that I really couldn’t see myself in some of the earlier fat work that I engaged with, because it was just too white. It was not of relevance to me. It felt very much like a reiteration of Dove commercials that I have always hated, because I hate it when people are trying to sell me something when they’re the problem. And so it just didn’t ring for me, but when I found other people like Andrea Elizabeth Shaw writing about Black women’s bodies specifically as understood to be these unruly things, that drew me in. For someone else, it might be something else.
I know that especially if you’re someone who has always been disabled, for example, your relationship to developing a fat politic is going to be so different than someone who’s not disabled, and also different from the other disabled person who was born disabled, who has different values and different perspectives on things. But the good thing is that there’s people from all walks of life doing fat work, doing shit that other people can engage with in the ways that make sense to them, and that’s all you really need. It’s just an invitation is the point. It’s an invitation, like you said. It’s an invitation. You just need to spark genuine curiosity, because once you have that, you’re golden.
Speaker 2:
Wow, I love that. You just need to be the light bulb or the light switch. My light bulb is an ancient piece of-
Speaker 1:
You just need the light bulb moment. You just need the light bulb.
Speaker 2:
Yeah. It’s a lot less pressure, because I’m always like, “I don’t know what the fuck I’m talking about.” I feel like I can’t light somebody up and then they ask questions, I’m like, “I actually don’t know.” [inaudible] that. So I really like, like I said, a lot less pressure. I can just be like, “This is what I’m learning. This is what I whatever, and we can learn together. We could talk about it again.” But I don’t know everything. That’s such a gift. It’s such a gift, really is.
Speaker 3:
Yeah, beautiful permission.
Speaker 2:
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Yeah.
Speaker 3:
Yeah, it would just be more of this-
Speaker 2:
[inaudible]-
Speaker 3:
Sure. It would just be more of the same. It would just be more of the same if we took it all on. That’s sitting there.
[1:03:33]
Speaker 2:
I’m going to go ahead and pivot to our next question. As part of a new realization for we co-host this season, how does the word “rest” being right in the middle of the podcast name feel, occur, or show up for you?
Speaker 3:
Yeah, we didn’t know the word “rest” was in here. Someone pointed that out to us. We were like, “Oh.”
Speaker 2:
Yeah, “Oh.”
Speaker 3:
It is.
Speaker 2:
So, how does “rest” feel for you as the center of our podcast name?
Speaker 1:
Oh, yeah. Well, first, I think rest as part of the phrase “rest of us” is it feels like an opening to think about things more broadly. But if we’re talking about just the word rest, my brain always goes to something that I got language for more recently from a really brilliant grad student named Ebony Oldham. Black people, fat Black people, we are not able to access leisure in the same way that other people are. There is something about fatness, specifically fat Blackness in the cultural consciousness that cannot be at rest, because to be fat and Black is to labor. It is to struggle. It is either to be burdened by your own body or to have to burden yourself on behalf of labor that you are performing for another person or for a wider societal context.
Fat Blackness, Black fatness is almost antithetical to rest, antithetical to rest. I’ve been trying to hold that, while also not giving in to something that I see as… We just talked about elite capture, and I’m not trying to rehash that again, but there is something, I think, very seductive about the idea that the way we pursue… And this is, I think, thoughts that I have developed while talking particularly with Da’Shaun and listening to Da’Shaun on Unsolicited in particular, because they just managed to put language to things that I feel so deeply. There is something about the idea that rest is radical or rest is resistance that rubs me the wrong way.
Speaker 2:
Oh, I need to hear all of this.
Speaker 3:
Yeah.
Speaker 1:
Yes. And the thing is, we actually recently spoke about this with regard to kink, to fat kink and sex. And it translates really well to this, because we’re getting into the conversations about whether an activity that gives marginalized people good feelings, pleasure, makes us feel liberated, whether that is actually equivalent to a larger political practice. I don’t want to be shady and specifically call out specific people or programming that I see as perpetuating this, but the idea that a nap, for example, is activism, it exists on this really slippery slope. It’s the same kind of slope that the idea that kink, for example, because marginalized people participate in it and it gives marginalized people pleasure is also activism. It’s a slippery slope.
We were critiquing this when we were talking about fat kink and about how… Da’Shaun was articulating that just because kink brings the implicit social process of what is fetishized to the forefront… So, fatness is fetishized. Black fatness in particular is fetishized. It is fetishized within a historical, sexual, political thing that gives it specific meaning in those domains. Oppression is sexual. Sexuality can be oppressive. Desire is sexual. Desire is often violent. So, all of these things are tied together.
Mikey (she/they):
All of these things are tied together. And so you have some people who say there’s nothing wrong with feeding, for example, or gaining. Like the kink around having somebody else gain weight through the act of eating. Some people say we should not shame that form of kink because it gives some fat people pleasure. It allows some fat people to engage in the fetishism around their bodies that is always already happening in non-sexual scenarios. And so that is equivalent to me, in my eyes, to how we’re starting to look at things like self-care and rest. Where it is extremely true that to be oppressed is to often not have access to the means to sustain yourself. That is 1000% true. There’s absolutely no way to ignore that in conversations about oppression.
It’s one of the reasons why Black people and why Black fat people in particular struggle with plenty of health outcomes that are on worse levels than our counterparts. Because of the fact that we are constantly performing social, cultural, emotional, physical labor. And we are also deprived of the means to recover from that labor.
Jenn (she/her):
Yes.
Mikey (she/they):
And so the conversation about self-care is political. It is political, but that has taken on this new life where people are starting to say having a skincare routine as a Black person, as a disabled person, as a person of color is radical. It’s not.
Jenn (she/her):
No.
Mikey (she/they):
It’s not. And I also hold that while saying, I still want fat Black people to take care of themselves. I still want them to pursue things that give them pleasure. I just have a problem with making those pleasure seeking activities equivalent to political practice.
And so when I think about rest and how important it is for marginalized people, I always have to evaluate who I’m talking to and how far they’re going to take that concept. Because I’m just like, “How far are you going to run with this?” I can see something like creating a space for Black people specifically, to have rest. I see how opening up that kind of space is important to the wellbeing of Black people. I see that completely.
It is when we try to make it more than that, that I start to sort of feel weird about it. Just because something gives us pleasure, just because it makes us feel good, even if it’s nourishing or sustaining in a way. Just because we perform these tasks in a context of oppression, does not necessarily make them radical. And that I think is fine.
It’s the kind of thing that we don’t have to make the case for that. We need rest as a bodily demand. You cannot… We already need that. We don’t have to justify it through this lens that dilutes it or not dilutes it. That actually does the opposite. That magnifies and amplifies it to a degree that makes it something bigger than it is.
Jenn (she/her):
It’s an additional demand.
Mikey (she/they):
It’s an additional demand. It’s not necessary to perform that kind of political consciousness at every moment. Take your rest.
Jenn (she/her):
Yeah. Is that restful? Sorry, stop [inaudible].
Mikey (she/they):
No, no, just take your rest and then do the actual work. That’s all I was going to say. It’s just like it doesn’t have to be more than it is. And so the only reason why now when I see the word rest, I’m like [inaudible] is because I keep seeing that kind of rhetoric. I keep seeing that kind of rhetoric and it is concerning. It is concerning. And also, I mean it’s the kind of thing that as we talked about before, has absolutely been hijacked for the purposes of recreating a self-centered wellness industry in the cultural moment that we live in.
And so yeah, I’m always worried when things are so primed and ready to be commodified. It’s-
Jenn (she/her):
Interesting.
Mikey (she/they):
That whole your existence is resistance, pleasure, activism. Sleeping is activism. These are things that Da’Shaun mentions on the podcast. And we should resist, I think the impulse, and this is hard for me too. Specifically as an autistic person because I am the epitome of that. I also have not seen it sunny and it’s always sunny in Philadelphia, but I am the epitome of that meme where the guy’s like, “It’s all connected.” There’s all these strings and stuff in the back. I’m literally the epitome [inaudible]. I guess so I don’t don’t know. I’ve just seen the picture.
Chavonne (she/her):
So here they talk about it how it’s funny all the time.
Jenn (she/her):
We do.
Chavonne (she/her):
All the time. We send each other memes from the show all the time.
Mikey (she/they):
I feel like that, like that is literally me. And so I also have to restrain myself from roping everything into my political practice because-
Jenn (she/her):
That’s so interesting because that character is painted as the least intelligent person on the show.
Chavonne (she/her):
Really?
Jenn (she/her):
But he actually get things that other people, the characters don’t get. He gets them before anyone else does. And he’s a beautiful lounge singer and all talented and creative. But he’s painted as the village idiot essentially. But I mean that episode is particularly good, but it’s like a conspiracy theory. But actually he is very… The way that he goes about that I find so interesting. He’s not at all what he seems on the surface kind of character. So I think that’s very interesting in this moment because I’ve taken these phrases at their face value. And I’m really curious to hear what you have to say Chavonne. Because we talk about this all the time and I’m like, this is so interesting. Because this whole conversation is an invitation to go deeper.
And this is actually only one level deeper than just the phrase itself. We aren’t even going that deep here, but it’s just deeper. And I just think it’s so interesting because there is a level… This reminds me also Mikey, of when that American Medical Association statement came out where they’re like, “We won’t be fat phobic anymore.” But the actual words are like, “But this is specifically how we’re going to be fat phobic though. We’re not going to do it this one way anymore. We’re going to do it all these other ways. Here are the seven things or however many.” So it’s just very interesting. So Chavonne, so interested in how-
Chavonne (she/her):
I got thoughts, so.
Jenn (she/her):
You can see it, but one of the decks is right here. Look, it’s right here. It’s right here. There it is. It’s right there. So I think this is so interesting because they can have a lot of-
Chavonne (she/her):
Is that the resistance deck?
Jenn (she/her):
Yeah, it’s the deck. Yeah, which I think is so interesting because sometimes rest can be resistance in your own life. I’m like, I work for myself, but I seem to not be able to let myself rest. So it’s me versus me. And so that’s how I’ve interpret it. But I also have a proximity to being allowed to rest. The person who created this does not, and people who are far more marginal. I’m barely marginalized. That’s how I try to think about it in my head. Like, “Oh, okay, fine. I’m not a white male, but otherwise I’m fine.” I don’t know. Okay, I’m going to stop because I’m so interested. I want to know what you think.
Chavonne (she/her):
I’m going to go. So the first thought I had is I’ve been Black. Nope, I’m, start that again. I’ve been fat almost as long as I’ve been Black. And I’ve never thought of rest being antithetical to both of them. If I would’ve had to say it was antithetical to one thing, I definitely would’ve said my blackness, my fatness has never played into it into my head. I know it does. I just don’t know how from what you said. And I’m like, “I’m going to go.” That’s one of my first general topics is how does my fatness play into being against rest? Secondly, so I’m thinking… Sorry, I’m going to collect my thoughts. I have so many thoughts.
Jenn (she/her):
I knew it.
Chavonne (she/her):
I try not to cough because I’m very allergic to New Mexico. Sorry.
Jenn (she/her):
Go away, New Mexico allergies, okay.
Chavonne (she/her):
So bad.
Jenn (she/her):
I’m sending them away while you talk. I’m just sending them away.
Chavonne (she/her):
Oh, so I’m going to go have a coughing fit after this. So we talk about rest. I’ll say the writer. It’s fine. So we talk about Rest Is Resistance by Tricia Hersey a lot, or at least I did. I brought it up probably almost every episode of this season, almost. I guess not the last one with you. Otherwise, you would’ve talked about it sooner. But I took a year of rest last year in that I had to. I really felt like I was going to not… I don’t know what was going to happen, but I had to. I just could not work. And one thing Jen just said is that having the ability to do that is huge. And I definitely I have some disadvantages. I have some advantages. I’m definitely financially advantaged. I’m not going to pretend that I’m not privileged in that way. So obviously I could take that.
But I guess so now I’m thinking the idea of rest and pleasure activism shouldn’t be activism. I think they’re expressed that way because we’re not encouraged to have that depending on what society, what identities we’re a part of, what upbringing we have. So it does feel like activism for me to say, “I’m not going to work for a year.” Or it’s activism to say, “I am going to seek whatever because it feels good. And I’m going to rest without the goal of getting up and going to work.” To me, that feels like, maybe it’s more personal activism rather than this… I guess my question is, if you don’t see it as activism, what would you see it as? I recognize that you said that it’s a right and we should all have that, but I don’t know how many people would take that on if they weren’t told, “This is how you save your life.” You know what I mean? I guess that’s where I’m coming from.
Mikey (she/they):
I love that.
Jenn (she/her):
Me too.
Mikey (she/they):
And thank you for sharing that because I also recently… I don’t know if I mentioned this last time, but after my second year of grad school, I had to take a year off.
Chavonne (she/her):
Yeah, I would’ve died. I really know that I would’ve died if I hadn’t taken a year off.
Mikey (she/they):
Exactly. It really is that serious. And so I don’t think that all things that are necessary and serious and valuable to do, need to be activism.
Jenn (she/her):
Dang, that’s powerful sentence.
Mikey (she/they):
And maybe this is just something that we can just hold as different ways that we understand these tasks. I also hear, like you said, personal activism on a personal level, maybe that is personal activism. And I think that’s fine for you to hold for yourself and also as a way for you to understand what other people do. Because as fat Black people, we’re not encouraged to rest. You are the workhorse. You’re also the lazy slob.
Chavonne (she/her):
Correct.
Mikey (she/they):
Trying to navigate the duality of that and all that it comes with in terms of your wellbeing, it is a lot. But I think that there is a consequence for how we speak about things when we are setting priorities for an activist agenda. When we are understanding things about our political practice. So I always try to think about where this fits within the larger context of how people understand activism. What stops people from doing activism, what activism even is. And the thing is, I take a really broad… I want to emphasize that too.
I look at things in particular fat activism as this incredibly broad range of things. Like Charlotte Cooper talks about in her book on fat activism. Some things that maybe some of us would not consider activism, are activism for other people. And we should hold space for that kind of broad range of approaches to this. So for some people, the whole I’m going to show up in public and be fat in public and gather with other fat people in public, and we’re going to do a demonstration or something. That might not necessarily jive with some other people’s interpretation of activism. Which let’s say is mainly a restricted to the legal sphere or working and advocating for legislation and things. So I just want to say I do take a very broad approach to how I understand activism.
I think that there is unfortunately an economy around self-care type activism that is negating in a way that unfortunately does stifle the potential for these things. When we’re thinking about breaking down historically rooted in larger scale systems of oppression. I think it’s limited not because of the task specifically, not because self-care itself is totally incapable of being activism. But because the way it’s located in the individual makes it incredibly vulnerable to being co-opted. And so look how easily it is, again, I’m not going to mention any names here. But for other people to be like, “Oh, I’m an activist because I do influencing and I do brand deals with brands. And I’m a fat person who appears in clothes. And I deserve clothes because I am a person and I deserve to be able to exist and look nice and stuff. And that is my activism.”
That is a form of presence that is very vulnerable to being co-opted. And in fact, in that scenario already has been once you’re getting to the point where you’re doing-
Chavonne (she/her):
Absolutely.
Mikey (she/they):
… doing deals with brands. And that is the extent to which you talk about your size. I’m sorry, you never had the plot. You didn’t lose it, because you never had the plot. So I do think that the potential for something to be co-opted is part of the calculus of determining whether or not it makes for good activism. Whether or not it’s something that we should be naming as a goal for people overall.
Jenn (she/her):
Gotcha.
Mikey (she/they):
Because the fact is that some people are just not going to be interested in these tasks, too. I am the kind of person, I’m autistic and I have ADHD, and I’m also disabled in other ways. The act of putting cream or lotion on has always been a sensory nightmare for me, which is a very particular burden to bear in a Black household.
Chavonne (she/her):
I was thinking it’s like my mom would’ve just been chasing me with it all day long.
Mikey (she/they):
I literally-
Chavonne (she/her):
[inaudible]
Mikey (she/they):
I used to get so much shit from my mom and from my sister and also from my best friend, for just not wearing lotion. Because I just couldn’t, I just couldn’t. I couldn’t do it. It’s slimy. I hated the smells and the time to dry. The time to dry was the worst.
Chavonne (she/her):
Sorry, this is amazing.
Mikey (she/they):
And I’m just mentioning that I’m just like, I want to give a goofy example of how someone might not be attuned to these tasks. But not everybody has to do everything. But just to say-
Jenn (she/her):
Definitely.
Mikey (she/they):
… not everybody has to do everything. And just because some people are not into self-care as a routine thing or as ceremony, as anointing. Just because some people are not into that, doesn’t mean it’s less valid for that reason. But I do think that there is something to be said about economic and political vulnerability to elite capture. That does unfortunately impact something’s importance at the very least in terms of what we see as activism.
So if I’m going to decide whether I’m going to encourage people to rest or if I’m going to encourage them to do something else, probably going to choose something else. But also I don’t want that to take away from your understanding of it as something that genuinely saved your life. You know what I mean? And ultimately, the way I understand that should not determine how much it’s worth to you, especially in a way that’s limiting. And this is part of one of the reasons I think what ends up getting lost a little bit when we talk about activism in general. We can have different approaches to things, variety of approaches is necessary and welcome, as long as we have the same values, I think is what actually matters. So I think of for example, organized… This is such a left turn, oh my God. But I think of organized armed struggle, for example. Organized violence, organized whatever.
I think that has a place in certain struggles, especially against police brutality, against violence from the state. Other people have different perspectives on that. And honestly, they might also be people that I’m ideologically aligned with. Depending on how they oppose, on what grounds they oppose, that sort of tactic. But ultimately, we can come at this from different ways and that’s totally valid too.
Chavonne (she/her):
That’s really helpful. Can I…
Jenn (she/her):
Yeah.
Chavonne (she/her):
Sorry, I thought Jenn was going to say, so I was like, “Can I?”
Jenn (she/her):
Sorry.
Chavonne (she/her):
No, that’s really helpful. And as you were speaking, I was like, there’s got to be something between self-care. Because self-care has been so co-opted. It’s like this… I think I said it in our meeting when we talked with Alicia McCullough, this idea of here’s this pretty plant to put on your desk while you work 80 hours a week. That’s what self-care [inaudible]-
Jenn (she/her):
Yes. Yes, I forgot that. Yes.
Chavonne (she/her):
That’s that bullshit co-opting. And then activism, which is not the same as taking it out. I do recognize that. What is that? And then when you said self-care activism, my whole body would absolutely fucking not. So I don’t know.
No way. Absolutely not. Because that’s like this versus the twain shall not, they should not meet, in my opinion. So I’m like, what is that balance of… What do you call it? I guess that’s where I’m coming from because it isn’t, I agree that… And I don’t know if personal activism is the right word. So even when I said that, I was like, I don’t think that’s what I mean. I don’t know what the term is. I don’t know what it is, but I definitely don’t think it’s the same thing as just-
Jenn (she/her):
Living your life. You’re just living your life.
Chavonne (she/her):
Correct, correct.
Jenn (she/her):
You’re just living your life.
Chavonne (she/her):
Yeah. It’s not self-care for me. I don’t remember to do it if I’m being honest. I have to make a concerted effort to… I have to remind myself to lotion and I actually like lotion. It just takes too long. So I have to find this balance between what is self-care for me, what is activism for me, and that’s where rest is normally. But I don’t know what that term is, I guess.
Jenn (she/her):
Ooh, that’s really interesting. I loved what you said, Mikey, about prioritizing activism and then you were talking about sharing values. It’s reminding me in general about conversations about boundaries and limits. There’s a lot of lack of boundaries and lack of limits and a lot of what you’re highlighting about in this conversation, for me. It’s like why are these blended? Why are these confused? Why are these co-opted? Why do we have to be left so vulnerable to the system that is absolutely going to come for us and try to make us part of it? But a lot of that was flowing through what you were saying and it’s making me think of a couple of things. You were talking about activism. If we all did the same thing, that would be really weird. And I don’t mean in Europe how they’re like, we will all protest not getting a raise all together at once.
Let’s go out entire country. I’m sure it’s not literally everyone, but the streets are filled. We have very few moments like that. I don’t mean like that. I mean there’s nothing wrong with writing letters. There’s nothing wrong with having your voice recorded. There’s nothing wrong with tweeting. There’s nothing wrong with being yourself. There is a level of activism that I can see there. And when you were talking that combined with the priorities of activism, that does have a level of invitation to be aligned. This is what we are doing. This is where we are going. That level of community, which we talked about the first time we had a conversation together. Just about the importance of community. Who gets you on the levels you need to be gotten? Is that a word, gotten? Well, it is right now. So the level…
Mikey (she/they):
Keep going.
Jenn (she/her):
Okay, but people who see you. You were talking about people who actually see you and sometimes in ways that you have not yet seen yourself, which I thought was so interesting. So activism is also like, are we seeing each other while we’re doing this activism? Are we counterproductive in our activism? I could see all of that coming into play in prioritizing activism.
You were talking about violence. There’s also what if we have to go completely outside of the capitalist system in order to even do this particular activism? There’s just a lot more to talk about. As a concept, rest is resistance. I also think rest is inside the word resistance, which I’ve always found fascinating. Rest is inside, rest is short for restorative. These things are really interesting. But resistance and restorative, I’m not sure resistance is wholly restorative. Maybe that’s part of the priority, but I’m not sure that’s always how that goes. So even in the language play of that, it’s just really interesting. I definitely need to go deeper about this, but it’s very intriguing to me.
Mikey (she/they):
Yeah, something that you actually are making me think of that Chavonne made me think of earlier, and I was trying to figure out a way to phrase it. One of the things that is also coming up here, is self-care in particular is so tied up in self-actualization. It’s really for a lot of people, even people who I think in their minds align themselves with the idea of resistance.
Just because someone is pro self-preservation, pro self-actualization, pro self-growth does not necessarily automatically mean that that same person is anti-oppression. And this is the consequence of commodifying something like self-care, especially when it’s specifically targeted towards groups of people who have been denied that opportunity to preserve themselves.
When you make self-preservation into a product that in a larger economy that is about discovering the self, that is an individual journey, discovering the self. Growing as a person, becoming healing. This whole idea of we’re going to become better people, we’re going to break down our trauma, all of those things are so fucking valid. They’re valid. Does it make you anti-oppression?
Jenn (she/her):
No.
Mikey (she/they):
Not necessarily.
Jenn (she/her):
Not automatically. I think that’s so important. We’ve been talking about neurodivergence in the disability realm today. We’ve kind of gotten in and out of that. Something that you just highlighted for me is in its creativity and seeing the world differently. Sometimes we get to a place of realizing how some things are automatically created or are assumed in our culture. But I love neurodivergence. Almost every kind of neurodivergence is some aspect of us, it’s now on manual mode. We don’t have an automatic about that. So as we’re learning and understanding and growing, we’re doing it on manual mode. We’re like, “But why is that step seven? What does that have to do with anything else that we’re doing here?” We get to this moment where we’re like, “This doesn’t match.” My whole body is like, “Absolutely not. That is not what we’re doing here.”
But it’s just so automatic that we’re like, “Oh, because that’s what we do here.’ And I’m like, “What do you mean that’s what we do here? I just got here and I don’t want to do that. That doesn’t feel like the next thing to do.” That’s one of my favorite… It’s not like neurodivergence is a superpower or something like that. I just mean the perspective on that sits amongst the challenges of it. Where it’s like I really like being able to see things clearly and clearer and clearer over time. I really like to be able to notice what feels like a mismatched step and to interrogate it. That’s actually how I found my way to this particular space about embodiment. That’s how I found my way to Chavonne.
It’s that things don’t have to be… We have steps one through 10 and step seven starts to go in some weird direction, but we just do that here. And I’m like, “I don’t want to do that. I’m going to stop where I stop and then I’m going to do a whole new set of steps there.” So you’re really highlighting how fluid it is and how when we do that automatic assumption, we just kind of sit in some place.
All I can think of is an assumption makes an ass out of you and me, which is not what I mean exactly in this moment, but it’s like we just get stuck there. But we’re like, “How did I get here?” The automatic acceptance of this is how we do things here is not the space that we’re in today. So I can feel how different those spaces are from each other. And I just think it’s amazing.
[1:35:38]
So here we are on a podcast and we want to ask about your podcast, which I love. You already referred to it a couple of times. Unsolicited: Fatties Talk Back with some of the people that you’ve already mentioned too. I’m curious how you and your co-hosts find balance and boundaries while deconstructing all the bullshit that you see, notice and feel in your bodies together. Because you do not have conversations that are at the surface. You have very deep conversations, which I love listening to so much. So it makes me really curious, how does it feel to have those conversations? How do you take care of each other? How do you stay embodied?
Mikey (she/they):
It is the greatest privilege, I think, currently in my life to be able to do that podcast with my co-host because it is… Okay. So the origin story for this podcast, I think, which I don’t think I’ve talked about this. But it started out of the current writer for the Dear Prudence column, putting out a call on Twitter, asking for feedback from people who are fat, who think about anti-fatness. I don’t know if it was that exact phrasing, but it naturally called to a certain subset of us on the internet. And I gave my two cents and then I saw the response. And I was just like, “This is not good.”
And I wasn’t really expecting much, but I thought that this was one of those rare examples of somebody trying to tap into a network of people and knowledge that they were not attuned to. In order to come up with something that was a bit more nuanced, complex, critical. And it did turn out to be that way. And so then another fat activist artist Ally Online, was like, “I would really like to see fat people do an advice column podcast.”
And at that point, I was getting stuck in this place where I was doing work on fatness publicly. But the main people that I was able to talk about that work with were professionals who followed me because of the nature of my work. And I think because of the things that we talked about earlier. Me being a more palatable, pre-vetted person to get certain kinds of information from. And so I was really tired of that and I wanted to be in conversation with other fat people. And so then from that, me, Da’Shaun Harrison, Bryan Guffey, Caleb Luna, Jo Underwood, we came together and we were like, “We’re going to do this podcast.” And I think I wanted to mention that because we’re-
Chavonne (she/her):
… think I wanted to mention that because, we’re all from pretty different areas. I’m a fat black woman. I’m doing my PhD at Brown. De’Shaun is a fat, black, trans theorist has their real, they have a background in community organizing in particular with regard to education protests, and they’re currently doing really incredible work as part of the Stop Cop City movement. Joe has been thinking about fatness critically since they were 12, their first. And they had a blog, actually, when they were in middle school that was basically about anti-fatness in education. That was their first sort… And that was 10 years ago. So they’ve spent a long time being a very fat person, on the internet, analyzing their experience, and they’re white and they’re trans and they’re trans mass specifically.
And there’s Brian who is the oldest of our group, and I really enjoy that too, that there’s this very specific range in life experiences and I also enjoy the fact that Brian is older but also newer to the space of fat politics. And so we can navigate those complicated dynamics while also layering on their experiences as a trans, fat, black person.
And then we have Caleb who has been doing fat activism work forever. Tumblr day… There was a Tumblr heyday in the 2000s that I was not a part of, that I am pissed off that I missed all the time, because that was… Caleb, the ways that people talk about fat phobia now, you can find a line back to Caleb because of how long they’ve been doing this work. They were one of the few non-white people doing this work on Tumblr. And now they are about to start a tenure track position at UC Santa Barbara. These are people that I have learned from, that I’ve learned with. We’re all so incredibly different and we also understand that the strength of the podcast is that, is the fact that we are so different as people. We have all of these different perspectives, all of these different forms of expertise, lived and studied, and that is something that seems like it’ll be a lot harder to navigate, but I think that we all have so much fun just comparing what our perspectives are, that it is easier than you would think.
There are obviously moments where we don’t agree. Like during the Fat Kink episode that I talked about, we do not agree on the role and perspectives that we should be having on Fat Kink. And that is an asset because, one of the things that I think is really important to remember, and this is part of the reason why I’m so against these set narrative rhetorical tools that people use, is that fat people are not a monolith. To understand that logically, but then to understand it in practice is two different things. And we don’t all go through fat phobia in the same way. We don’t all understand fat phobia in the same way and even when we are aligned in values, because our core value at Unsolicited is that fat people deserve to exist and we want fat people to live. That is where we stand.
Even when you have the same values, you can still come away having differences on perspectives. I think that’s really present in the Fat Kink episode, but also in other episodes that we’ve had where we just don’t necessarily have the same analysis or we just flat out disagree. All of it is valuable in part because we’ve structured our podcast around our differences. It’s something to embrace and just always, always trying to complicate the narrative. And I think that that’s just essential to the understanding that we can disagree, we can look at things differently, we can also be at different points in understanding certain issues. We all have something to bring that might be different at certain points.
When it comes to theorizing on anti-blackness and anti-fatness, De’Shaun is the person that I look to for that. When it comes to creating or analyzing the political economy of science and public health with regard to anti-fatness, I think people would look to me for that kind of thing. When it comes to the very specific context of dieting, having the almond mom, doing fat activism from a very specific vantage point, experiences in theater, experiences as a model, Joe comes in with that. Caleb understands racial formation and how that’s related to fatness, also does a lot of work specifically focusing on fat, gay people. And so we all bring something and there’s a spectrum from expert to learner that goes this way, but also goes back this way, because even when we’re acting as experts, we’re all still trying to learn from each other.
I think just understanding very early on, from the onset really, that our differences were our strength, that’s what really allows for us to have balance and boundaries on Unsolicited. Because we might not see things the same way, but there’s always an exchange. There’s always respect. There’s always a basic level of care for each other that cannot be superseded by the desire to be correct or to make a point. And that is the way that I would like for everyone to act with each other. It’s something that I hope that we’re encouraging by doing things on the podcast as we do.
Jenn (she/her):
Oh, you definitely do. And you put words to something that I’ve been trying to put words to myself about your podcast. It is very much embodied differences. You all are allowed to exist the way that you are, in the place that you are, and the direction you want to go and in your place of learning, while being yourselves, on a very connected level, with each other, with yourselves. It’s actually something that I think, I don’t know what you think about this, Mikey, but it’s something that I think I hear growing as you progress-
Chavonne (she/her):
Agree.
Jenn (she/her):
… in the podcast that… Embodied difference is the phrase I’m going with right now, but it’s like, Hey, we’re all here. Let’s do this. You have fun while doing it. It’s something that Chavonne and I love about this podcast. Let’s talk about some hard shit, but I’m going to laugh. At some point throughout this, I’m going to have a wild laughing moment, and that’s just how I deal with this stuff.
Chavonne (she/her):
Absolutely.
Jenn (she/her):
There’s just, I don’t know. There’s a humanity. And I think the differences part is key to me in that, because if we talk about… I mean even the theory of embodiment is called positive embodiment, and I’m like, uh-oh going in toxic body positive space. The way it’s always phrased is how do we all come together and find the same place within ourselves, which I find to be a total crock of shit. So calling out that whole thing, I’m like, okay, or the person who came up with body image as a phrase who also acknowledges that it’s body imaging. It’s a process that’s unique to the individual. It’s about communication with our bodies, it’s not about appearance. That’s not what’s happening in these conversations. Although our bodies interact with the world around us and how we’re perceived. There is a level of I get to be me, You get to be you, you get to be you that is often missed. It’s washed over. There’s this sense of sameness or let’s all arrive.
Something else that I really get from your podcast is that the journey itself is the destination, which I think is a really hard thing to maintain over time. You were just saying, “And we’re still doing it.” I’m like, yeah, I think that’s so incredible because we are conditioned for our ego to pop in at some point and go, “Oh yeah, well I’m right now. I’ve done this enough with you. I’m right now. I’m no longer going to play nice with you.” This is a major conditioning, at least in American culture, for sure. But I can hear your values are centered. Your values are agreed upon. Your priorities are allowed to be up to each of you. And so you can all exist in your space, of you as a human, while existing in space with other humans.
Maybe I’m defining community right now. It’s really interesting. I’m like, this is a really nice definition of community. I haven’t thought about it quite like this, but it’s really beautiful. So I loved you… And we’re like, what are the boundaries and the limits? And you’re like, “Well, it’s because of each of our differences.” And then you highlighted such beautiful things about each of you, it was making me emotional. It’s just really lovely. It’s exactly like it is on the podcast. Where it’s like, you know what De’Shaun, do you remember what you said to me? I’m trying to remember what episode this was, but one of you was like, “Do you remember what you said to me?” And you were helping them remember what they had said, and then you were having this conversation where I was like, you really hear each other. You really see each other.
To me, I guess that’s embodiment. So when I say embodied differences, I’m like, everything’s different. Nothing has to match. We’re not cookie cutters. Earlier you said flattened and I pictured a cookie cutter. I was like, yeah, roll out the cookie dough and pick out your cookie cutter. You all are not doing anything like that together. Someone can be a biscochito, someone can be a gingerbread, someone can be just like your regular old sugar cookie, someone can be chocolate with chocolate chips. Whatever you all are. Sorry, I went way too far into the cookie analogy, but-
Chavonne (she/her):
You can never go too far with cookies. It’s fine.
Jenn (she/her):
But there isn’t-
Chavonne (she/her):
Keep it going. I was like, what else?
Jenn (she/her):
Right. Whenever I say sugar cookie, I immediately go, ooh, vanilla. Sometimes I’m listening to a podcast and I was like, oh, dang it. I’m not in the mood for just plain old sugar cookie today. I need something else. And so I love that there’s nothing wrong with being on the surface. There’s a lot of important stuff there, but there’s just, I don’t know, varying depths. It’s not just differences. It’s actually depths, I think is a better word for what I’m trying to describe.
Chavonne (she/her):
Yeah, depth. I like that.
Jenn (she/her):
Which I think is so beautiful. There’s not a lot of permission to be found around us generally in society for that. It’s something we have to create together, so it’s just really powerful.
Chavonne (she/her):
It makes me think of, I know, when your podcast first started, I remember this post on Instagram that was like, don’t compare us to meat in its face. How dare you? And what it made me think of-
Jenn (she/her):
I remember that.
Chavonne (she/her):
[inaudible] everybody tells me about is-
Jenn (she/her):
I Remember that.
Chavonne (she/her):
Yeah. I’ll be honest, I listen to that one too. But it makes me think of, on their podcast, it’s like embodied cookie cutters. There’s no dissenting opinion in anything. It’s just like a circle jerk half the time. And I enjoy it sometimes, but it’s really a circle jerk. But yours is like, okay, how about this? And then there’s this, and then there’s this, and [inaudible]. And I really… That’s the difference. That’s why this one feels so… I can’t believe I just said circle jerk, but it just feels-
Mikey (she/they):
Accurate. It was accurate. That’s all I have to say about that.
Chavonne (she/her):
It just feels like a discourse. It almost feels like a salon. And I’m always, every time I’m listening, I’m cracking up and thinking about foods. And also I told Jenn that it lives in my head rent free that De’Shaun didn’t know what huevos rancheros was and was like, “Is it British?” Because it was a bean meal. And I was screaming, screaming in my car. Literally screaming out loud. I was like, “What is happening? What is happening?”
Jenn (she/her):
Oh, I forgot about that.
Chavonne (she/her):
Apparently [inaudible] thought it was okay, but it was [inaudible] the podcast. I was like, fuck you huevos ranchero. I was like, “What?” Still.
Anyway, I just love that it feels like a salon. It feels like a discourse.
Jenn (she/her):
It does.
Chavonne (she/her):
It feels like a let’s-
Jenn (she/her):
Well said.
Chavonne (she/her):
Let’s talk to learn. Let’s talk to grow instead of let’s just keep saying the same thing back and forth to one another.
Mikey (she/they):
It honestly, something that people don’t know, how we usually get these episodes edited is that I list… And I do not listen to podcasts. Let me make that very clear. I can’t because-
Chavonne (she/her):
Really?
Mikey (she/they):
Yeah, it’s just difficult for me.
Chavonne (she/her):
Yeah.
Jenn (she/her):
Me too.
Mikey (she/they):
But I listen through the episodes, at the very least, fully twice, but most times it’s three whole times. And our episodes can be an hour and a half, and so at the end of the day, that’s four and a half hours, you know what I mean, of listening to us talk. I have to listen and then write notes for our editor about how I want things structured, very detailed notes. Then Justin, our editor, does the edits, gives it back to me. I listen to it again. I write notes again. I send it back to him. He does the edits again. Usually we do a third round of edits.
And the reason why is I am so, so, so particular about trying to maintain the feel that you’re just listening in on a conversation with five friends.
Jenn (she/her):
Yeah, that’s exactly what it feels like.
Mikey (she/they):
I don’t like the idea that we’re encouraging para social relationships with our listeners because that is something that I think I’ve struggled with and because para social relationships often go hand in hand with tokenization, and I’ve had experiences in the past where once people start to… You can’t hinge your politics on a person. You got to hinge it on the actual politics. But we sort of live… I keep saying cultural moment. That’s the phrase of the week today. But we live in a cultural moment that is really about the personality and the personality behind the work, behind the thoughts.
If it was up to me, I would’ve pulled Your Fat Friend from the beginning. If it was up to me, I would be anonymous because that is how much I prefer to not be perceived in specific ways by people. And I also, it’s the autism. I really hate when I feel like people are trying to force intimacy with me also.
Chavonne (she/her):
Oo, well said.
Mikey (she/they):
I share things, and that’s a dicey area to get into when you’re an activist. I feel weird calling myself that, but when you’re somebody-
Chavonne (she/her):
You are.
Mikey (she/they):
Sure. But when you’re somebody who analyzes your own experiences in a broader social context, you share a lot. I share a lot, and part of it is because I need people to understand how these big, lofty ideas actually apply to people’s lives. And the best way I can do that is by drawing on my own experiences because I have lived the repercussions of public health, for example, pathologizing fatness. I have lived that. I do live that. But I still want it to feel like you’re listening in on our conversations. You’re listening in on us just being ourselves while having these conversations.
Also to show that, I don’t know, it doesn’t… When we make jokes and when we’re laughing amongst ourselves, in those specific moments, the fact that people are going to hear it is secondary. We’re not trying to be funny. We just sort of get goofy, especially if the recording has been going on for long enough and we’re all running on fumes. We just get goofy. I never want it to feel like we’re trying to do things because we need to maintain or satisfy an audience. I told you that last time, but I’m about not giving people what they want. I’m not going to give you what you want. I don’t care about giving you what you want. It’s secondary.
And it’s a really rare space where I get to fully be myself, and that is really precious, especially because most of my time I am really not able to do that.
Jenn (she/her):
I’m so glad you have that. I’m so glad you all have that in each other.
[1:59:58]
Chavonne (she/her):
Yeah, thank you so much for being here with us. What do you think we all can do to make a difference with what we’ve learned today?
Mikey (she/they):
I’ve taken to really encouraging people to organize themselves, align themselves with other people. And I know it’s like, oh, find your team and do your work like very Parks and Rec. But also there is a tendency to think of learning about politics, especially anti-fatness, as again, this thing that’s located in the individual that’s about self-actualization. And it’s not about that. And the more people think about, I need to learn the right lingo, I need to learn the right way to think about things, versus I have questions. How does my life fit into this? That stifles the work. You need to be able to see yourself in what you’re learning. And the ways that I’ve really deepened my understanding of anti-fatness, from an academic perspective, from a personal perspective, has been being in community with other fat people who are doing that rigorous interpretation.
Also, when you’re keeping your learning to yourself and you’re trying to accumulate this knowledge that you can whip out for some hypothetical scenario in the future where somebody’s being a total dick and you want to be able to counteract that, that is motivated by the wrong desire. It’s rooted in ego. It’s really rooted in wanting to… It’s rooted in ego and it’s also rooted in wanting to protect yourself from unpleasant interactions. That’s a worthy goal. Nobody wants to be around an asshole. Nobody wants to let injustice happen in front of them and not be able to counteract it, but that’s also not the point. That’s not the main point.
And when you talk to other people and when you share what you’re learning and you share maybe the things that you’re stuck on, that does bring it into real life. That brings these concepts into real life. I’ve seen really incredible work happen from groups of people who just found each other online, or are students in the same program, or they read the same book together at this thing and just those organic senses of curiosity. It can’t be forced. You can’t force yourself into believing something matters until you understand why it matters. It’s just that’s what it is.
We all can strive to have better politics. We can all challenge… We should challenge ourselves when we start to think things that are like, whoa, that is rooted in bigotry. I should not be saying that. But that lonely mission of trying to be a correct person or a right person is so draining and it keeps things out of the world. It keeps the concepts that should be in the world out of the world.
So find other people. Facebook is a great place to find groups that are specifically about fatness. I’m in a couple. I’m in a couple of fat studies groups. I’m also in a group called Fatties in Public Health. I’m also just like the more you also participate in community, the bigger your community gets. So now I just have random people message me like, “Hey, I saw your presentation on this thing. Do you want to work on this thing together?”And I’m just like, “Yes, I do.” Because we should. Because we should be working on these things together.
Jenn (she/her):
I love it.
Mikey (she/they):
Community is everything.
[2:04:08]
Jenn (she/her):
It is everything. I love that. So on that note, last question of the day, what would you like everyone listening to know about what you’re up to and how they can find you?
Mikey (she/they):
Okay. I recently opened my Patreon, so all of the posts are public and it’s payment optional. I was feeling really weird about keeping it behind a paywall, and I want things that are helpful to people to be helpful and available to everyone. So you can follow me on Patreon at patreon.com/marquisele. This is my name.
That’s where most things will happen. I’ve been doing lots of work recently connecting with student groups, connecting with organizations, doing presentations on anti-fatness and stuff. But I’m also currently pivoting to doing work on my dissertation, which is exciting and I’m looking for people to help me with that, either as folks who are comfortable with sharing their expertise, whether that’s lived experience or studied expertise or both, which is even better. If you are a fat, black woman, and that could be anyone who identifies as a fat, black woman. So specifically, even if you are a non-binary person who still identifies as a fat, black woman, because many of us do still retain this political label of black woman, I want to hear from you.
I’m going to send a link that hopefully y’all can put in your show notes-
Jenn (she/her):
Yes, please.
Mikey (she/they):
… that is basically a contact form, so if anybody wants to contribute to my dissertation either by providing their thoughts and feedback or by actually participating and taking a survey and potentially being interviewed by me, that would also be really great. I will make sure to provide that link so that anybody who’s interested can potentially offer their time. And I’m really excited about that.
Chavonne (she/her):
That’s awesome.
Mikey (she/they):
I’m hoping to really change the way that, not just people understand anti-blackness anti-fatness, but also, this is a little context actually. I love giving research context because unless you dive so… All the way up, its ascent around the corner of certain little niches of research. You don’t understand fully the context that it’s being created in.
In public health and in weight stigma research generally, the way that we understand stand the healthcare that fat people get is really limited to things like attitudes and beliefs. So most of what we know about medical anti-fatness in particular is limited by this idea that fat people and the stereotypes they face, being in the minds of doctors is the most important thing. So we’ll ask doctors, do you think fat people are lazy? Do you think fat people are not smart? Do you think they should have to lose weight? We’ll ask them things like that, we’ll meaning these researchers, instead of asking about things that actually matter.
So we won’t ask doctors, for example, how often do you refer fat patients to commercial weight loss products? How often do you withhold care from someone, either just flat out or in anticipation for some future moment when they have lost weight? These are the dynamics I really want to know about. And I’m not going to ask doctors about it because, why would I? I’m going to ask fat, black people who are subjected to this treatment and in a way that hasn’t been done in the literature before at all.
I’m really looking forward to that. And it will be-
Jenn (she/her):
Directness.
Mikey (she/they):
Yeah, I mean, the thing is-
Jenn (she/her):
They’ll love it.
Mikey (she/they):
… weight stigma research basically functions as an extension of [inaudible] prevention in the sciences. Rebecca Puhl one of the most, she’s basically the most notable weight stigma researcher. Has citations out the wazoo. She recently-
Jenn (she/her):
P-U-H-L, right? P-U-H-L?
Mikey (she/they):
P-U-H-L. Yes, Puhl.
Chavonne (she/her):
Thank you.
Jenn (she/her):
Yeah, I know that name. I see it everywhere.
Mikey (she/they):
The UConn Rudd Center. The UConn Rudd Center. They actually recently changed their name, I think a year or two ago to take [inaudible] out of it, which I think is very funny. Because they are also adjusting to this moment that we’ve been talking about where it’s kind of passe. She actually just finished a while ago with a huge project that was funded by Weight Watchers.
Chavonne (she/her):
Oh my.
Mikey (she/they):
That’s an example of-
Jenn (she/her):
I didn’t know that.
Mikey (she/they):
… what we’re dealing with here. This whole stronghold of researchers that dominate the weight stigma space, what they want to do is make the process of forcing people to do weight loss less stigmatizing. They want it to be nicer, they want it to be kinder. They want it to be that way because of the research that we have that says that exposing people to weight stigma makes them more likely to avoid behaviors that are associated with weight loss. It’s counterproductive, and they’re starting to catch onto that, but they’re not actually shifting gears to advocate for fat people to be able to exist without losing weight. They’re shifting gears to make weight loss less frightening, less scary, less mean. And so that is what the field of weight stigma is.
And so then you have people like me and Rachel, Rachel’s doing her whole dissertation on a critical analysis of the anti [inaudible] assemblage, basically looking at how weight stigma, part of her research is about how weight stigma functions as a [inaudible] prevention in these spaces. For me, I’m really interested in challenging set norms about how to measure and research anti-fatness. And I’m also really interested in breaking down the idea that has really, really penetrated weight stigma research that says that fat, black women experience less weight stigma, which is not true.
There is… Yes.
Chavonne (she/her):
I’m Sorry.
Mikey (she/they):
I’m like, you have to what? Excuses.
Jenn (she/her):
We’re pulling some faces over here.
Chavonne (she/her):
Both of us are like, the what?
Mikey (she/they):
Yes, there is a persistent nonsensical idea, and this is the consequence of how you measure something. And what priorities determine how you measure something. Because, when you measure something, if you are using a scale that basically does not reflect how fat, black people face anti-fatness as an extension and reiteration of anti-blackness, then how are they supposed to respond in a way that reflects their experiences with weight stigma?
At least in my household, my mom did not put me on Weight Watchers. That was not the MO. And as far as I’m concerned, I’ve really seen certain forms of engagement in body shaming. I hate that term, but I’m going to use it here. Certain forms of body shaming that are very white specific and others that are not. And those that are not are not present in the literature. And so then when they ask black people, black women in particular, what are your experiences with weight stigma? It comes out looking like black women face less weight stigma than white women because these measures are more accurately depict and reflect what white women are experiencing. And so then the result of that is that researchers explain it away by saying, “Oh, well, black people have different body ideals. They like thicker women. They like people who look thicker.” And it is so much more complicated than that. It is so much more complicated than that.
Jenn (she/her):
But Mikey, research is not biased. It’s very objective.
Chavonne (she/her):
It’s very objective.
Mikey (she/they):
Oh god.
Chavonne (she/her):
This has been so, so, so, so good.
Jenn (she/her):
Oh my gosh. We could talk to you all day, all day.
Chavonne (she/her):
This has been incredible.
Mikey (she/they):
Well, thanks just for having me.
Jenn (she/her):
Oh, a pleasure.
Chavonne (she/her):
Thank you so much for coming on. This has been amazing. Truly, truly amazing. We’re obviously going to ask you back next season.
Mikey (she/they):
Obviously. Obviously. I’m down.
Jenn (she/her):
Yeah, I have some unlearning to do. I want to talk about more of that. There’s a lot more to discover there I can tell. I
Chavonne (she/her):
I need to go think of what rest is for me.
Jenn (she/her):
Yeah. Oh my gosh.
Chavonne (she/her):
[inaudible] nap on it. Thank you, though. This has been just magical.
Jenn (she/her):
Thank you.
Chavonne (she/her):
Sincerely. Thank you.
Jenn (she/her):
Thank you, Mikey. Thank you so much.
Chavonne (she/her):
Love, love, love.