‘The Trash Heap Has Spoken’
— Joyce Chong
Unapologetic fat women embrace the philosophy of displacement. They manifest the audacity of space-taking. They cleave the very air. This is not just fatness of the body, it is fatness of the mind. If you have a fat body, you take up room by default. If you have a fat mind, you choose to take up room.
If you’re in the mood to read something transformational today, then I have the perfect essay for you. Carmen Maria Machado tackles the notion of villainy, fatness, and gender in ‘The Trash Heap Has Spoken’. The body as a representation of power, of confidence; the body as a glimpse into the vastness of the mind, the body as something that is proportional to greatness. There’s no better way to look back at ourselves and our notions of weight and how they align with ideas of good and bad than by looking at the media and the stories we create. Machado makes quick work of the sidelining of fat characters in film and television, the cheap shots and tired, overdone cliches that paint fat characters as bumbling, nameless, story-less side characters. What does the role of fatness as the trait of a villain say about what we fear? A woman’s comfort in her own body, the ability to be vain and beautiful, to be powerful in your body, to wield it like you own it, and not as a burden.
Where do you go to find yourself if not in our stories, if not on the screen? What does the role that weight plays in fiction tell us about the way we live, what we expect from one another, from ourselves? Shaming and trimming and cutting down and shrinking ourselves into someone else's body. Where do we shelve our defiance? Do we sweep it under the rug, or slip it under the bed? Will it fit? Do we pick an option offered, or do we make our own?