I stripped myself of clothes and shame. Then – on stage – I started to dance
Ican’t change in the toilet cubicle. It just won’t work. I will need a large flat surface to sit on in order to get my stockings and garter belt on and to pull up my fancy shoes. My body is fat. My fatness means I need extra space and props to perform tasks that others take for granted.
People often assume things about my fat body that are untrue. They take one look at me and assume I will have heart trouble, diabetes, a host of apparently weight-related health issues. I do not have any of these problems, but I do have a corporeal awkwardness that means I need a raised surface to rest my leg up so I can snap the garters in place, and a bit of assistance pulling on these very tight boots.
I have spent many months assembling this outfit: a bra and a harness in size 22 from a plus-size online lingerie shop; a corset that, when ordered, had to be returned and then reordered in a larger size. The pasties to cover my nipples were homemade using feathers and sequins because the ones you can buy in sex shops are way too small for my gigantic areolae.
I have written a book about living in a fat body and because of this I am appearing at writers’ festivals to promote that book. For this particular session I am putting my body on the line. I am performing a burlesque striptease, literally revealing my body on stage as I read about being uncomfortable revealing my body.
In the greenroom I pull the curtain across. There is an older male writer preparing for his session just across from me and for a moment I feel for him. I am about to take my clothes off to change into my fancy underwear, and the sight might make him uncomfortable. But after a pause, I shrug. The sight of my body creates discomfort exactly because we are not used to seeing fat bodies naked or wearing underwear or bikinis, or even just walking around in summer clothes. Fat people are culturally compelled to cover up and that is why it is important for me to embody the very premise of my book.
This book was the hardest thing I have ever written because there is so much stigma and shame surrounding a person who is living in a fat body. We only ever see ourselves as the “before” picture in an ad for diet products. Somewhere, if we are good citizens, there will be a thin person just waiting to spring out of our ugly fat suits. I am 55 and I have dieted through many waves of shame in my life and yet here I am, a very fat person about to take to the stage.
I decided it was important for me to write this book when my grandmother, aged 98, looked down at her own body and began to weep, asking me: “Why did I have to get so fat?” After a lifetime spent controlling every morsel of food she ate, her medication cocktail had made her plump and, at nearly 100 years old, she was traumatised not because of her newly broken hip but because she felt like she was fat.
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I know that no matter how much I diet, I will die fat. Shame has clouded my enjoyment of life for many years. Shame has stopped me going for regular swims and wearing sleeveless clothes at the height of Brisbane’s heat. Shame has meant that for most of my life I have not allowed myself to dance.
When I decided to write about fatness, I took up burlesque. For research, I took to the stage with all my copious flesh. Now I am dancing again. I am dancing with this book in one hand and a microphone in the other. I am dancing because dancing makes me confront my own insecurities but also because when I dance, you get to see me dance, a fat person shimmying their voluminous flesh.
It isn’t something you see often and it is good for you to see it because you, like me, might be carrying too much shame to shed those layers of bullying, discrimination, fat jokes and self-hate and to shake your gorgeous bodies to a rhythm that is powerful and joyous. Inside the “before” fat person is another fat person, a happier fat person, someone who might, for a moment under the spotlight, do a body-roll that sends the reflections of a thousand sequins bouncing off the ceiling, illuminating the elated crowd.
The audience might gasp at first. They have never before seen a fat person stripping off their self-hatred and exposing their rolls of gorgeous flesh. But after a moment their feet begin to tap, their hips twitch. There is nothing as contagiously ecstatic or transgressive as a fat girl who starts to dance.