Lovely writing as usual! I love this line ("“dabbing a silvery serum on my skin to play up the reduced distance between my bones and my body’s surface"), especially in connection with the Susan Sontag quote about photography and (self-)knowledge that you mentioned. It'd be interesting to play that out more?
I like this idea of skinniness (skin-ness?) as supposedly a form of transparency. If one is thin, one "shows" oneself, one's inner structure. One does not "hide." Fatness, on the other hand, is then a means of hiding oneself, hiding the body, hiding one's insides.
It’s thus not just that we demand fat people hide themselves, hide their bodies, but that—strangely—we view fatness itself as a form of hiding? Of refusing to appear in the form that one should?
This gets at the way––paradoxically––that fat bodies (like disabled bodies) are both *too* present, *too* visible, *too* physical, but also not physical enough, not present enough, not visible enough, not preoccupied with their appearance enough, and not available enough as objects of desire that are sexually available to our gaze/touch/etc.––(along the lines of your first book).
In that sense, the internet troll feels the need to tell you what you look like **as if you did not obviously already know**——as if fatness were not just a sign of a lack of self-mastery (as we generally tend to talk about it), but somehow itself also a sign of a lack of self-knowledge, a lack of self-awareness. The internet troll bizarrely insists, ‘You somehow forgot––or you seem not to know––what you look like. Your presence in the public sphere indicates to me that you lack this self-knowledge. Let me tell you.’ (As if this were some kind of favor?)
For the natural endpoint of this line of thinking about bones and bodies, your piece made me think about Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain. Mann’s protagonist Hans Castorp fantasizes about the way that his love interest Madame Chauchat, like all the other tubercular patients in the sanatorium, wears an X-ray of her lungs folded up in an envelope around her neck: It's an image, he imagines, of her ribcage surrounded by ghostly wisps of flesh.
For Castorp, this X-ray becomes a kind of fetish object. It is as if the photographic apparatus (and science) permit a profound knowledge of her insides, along the lines of the Sontag quote you mentioned, that would allow Castorp to possess her more fully than he ever could in any other way.
But the X-ray serves for him as a means of fetishizing her tubercular-induced, “consumptive” wasting-away over the course of her illness and her impending death. (As it happens, Mann describes Madame Chauchat, perhaps not coincidentally,––the one Castorp wants to see X-rayed––as "schlaff" ("flabby").)
I really admire the honesty and reflection you are doing here. I know that the praise of "honesty" can sound a little anemic, but I really do appreciate it as someone who recently tried and was less successful at reflecting on the same topic. I wrote a blog post on the softer subject of taking pictures of my cat (one might call it a "fluff piece") and transitioned from there to the observation of how I don't like taking pictures of myself or having my picture taken. I tried in this post to deflect any sense of insecurity by insisting that "I think I'm pretty," but as you describe here, my relationship to my own image is of course really much more complicated--not wholly negative! but definitely ambivalent.
I'm also reminds me of a recent "You're Wrong About" episode on Karen Carpenter (part 2, about ten mins in) wherein Sarah Marshall comments on her own reflex to deny having body-image issues, joking that she essentially pretending to be "the lone woman" to not have experienced that. It's interesting to me that ambivalence, about this topic but also others, seems so difficult to express even as we constantly discover that it is quite widespread.
Kate, I have never been aware of any of your supposed imperfections - you are wonderfully human - open, genuine, candid & just right.
Thank you for sharing yourself, once again, with the result that you touch and enlighten me.
Lovely writing as usual! I love this line ("“dabbing a silvery serum on my skin to play up the reduced distance between my bones and my body’s surface"), especially in connection with the Susan Sontag quote about photography and (self-)knowledge that you mentioned. It'd be interesting to play that out more?
I like this idea of skinniness (skin-ness?) as supposedly a form of transparency. If one is thin, one "shows" oneself, one's inner structure. One does not "hide." Fatness, on the other hand, is then a means of hiding oneself, hiding the body, hiding one's insides.
It’s thus not just that we demand fat people hide themselves, hide their bodies, but that—strangely—we view fatness itself as a form of hiding? Of refusing to appear in the form that one should?
This gets at the way––paradoxically––that fat bodies (like disabled bodies) are both *too* present, *too* visible, *too* physical, but also not physical enough, not present enough, not visible enough, not preoccupied with their appearance enough, and not available enough as objects of desire that are sexually available to our gaze/touch/etc.––(along the lines of your first book).
In that sense, the internet troll feels the need to tell you what you look like **as if you did not obviously already know**——as if fatness were not just a sign of a lack of self-mastery (as we generally tend to talk about it), but somehow itself also a sign of a lack of self-knowledge, a lack of self-awareness. The internet troll bizarrely insists, ‘You somehow forgot––or you seem not to know––what you look like. Your presence in the public sphere indicates to me that you lack this self-knowledge. Let me tell you.’ (As if this were some kind of favor?)
For the natural endpoint of this line of thinking about bones and bodies, your piece made me think about Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain. Mann’s protagonist Hans Castorp fantasizes about the way that his love interest Madame Chauchat, like all the other tubercular patients in the sanatorium, wears an X-ray of her lungs folded up in an envelope around her neck: It's an image, he imagines, of her ribcage surrounded by ghostly wisps of flesh.
For Castorp, this X-ray becomes a kind of fetish object. It is as if the photographic apparatus (and science) permit a profound knowledge of her insides, along the lines of the Sontag quote you mentioned, that would allow Castorp to possess her more fully than he ever could in any other way.
But the X-ray serves for him as a means of fetishizing her tubercular-induced, “consumptive” wasting-away over the course of her illness and her impending death. (As it happens, Mann describes Madame Chauchat, perhaps not coincidentally,––the one Castorp wants to see X-rayed––as "schlaff" ("flabby").)
Really fascinating post! Thank you!
I pretty much have an anxiety attack if it looks like someone is going to take a picture of me, and don't submit willingly if asked.
I like this picture of you alot. I would smile at this person if I saw her--she looks real :)
very interesting. i hate being photographed myself. i can never smile for the camera.
also, we're twinsies on chicken pox scars! lol
I really admire the honesty and reflection you are doing here. I know that the praise of "honesty" can sound a little anemic, but I really do appreciate it as someone who recently tried and was less successful at reflecting on the same topic. I wrote a blog post on the softer subject of taking pictures of my cat (one might call it a "fluff piece") and transitioned from there to the observation of how I don't like taking pictures of myself or having my picture taken. I tried in this post to deflect any sense of insecurity by insisting that "I think I'm pretty," but as you describe here, my relationship to my own image is of course really much more complicated--not wholly negative! but definitely ambivalent.
I'm also reminds me of a recent "You're Wrong About" episode on Karen Carpenter (part 2, about ten mins in) wherein Sarah Marshall comments on her own reflex to deny having body-image issues, joking that she essentially pretending to be "the lone woman" to not have experienced that. It's interesting to me that ambivalence, about this topic but also others, seems so difficult to express even as we constantly discover that it is quite widespread.
I've never met or seen you but read you a lot.
My impression has always been you are very beautiful. This belief is not changeable.
Not that your worth depends on appearance in any way, but you look beautiful in that picture.
THIS absolutely worthless dreck is what passes for thinking in America today? LMAO.
Uggos keep posting their Ls online 😂