Artwork: Haneen Odetallah
“The other whom I love shows me the particularity of my desire”(Trinh 47)
The other whom I love: Kat not Fat
“Above all, women must control themselves, must be careful, for to relax their vigilance might lead to the worst possible consequence: being fat” (Hartley 64)
Kat is the “fat” girl that never got laid; her character brings in themes of gender, sexuality, and body norms in today’s digital era. At some point in her preteens during a school vacation she relaxes and gains a noticeable amount of weight; Kat becomes fat. She returns to daily school life and loses her childhood love, the only thing she saw as “amazing” in her life, at the hand of a pretty blonde thin girl; she receives a break up letter from her boyfriend in that girl’s
handwriting. Kat then abstains from boys, and indulges in a virtual world where her body is hidden and what appears from her is only her fantasies, her creativity; she lives “from the neck up” (Hartley 69). Kat replaces her fantasy for real guys with fantasies for an idealized version of them: in romance films; “Those were real men, men who never leave her” ("Made You Look"
04:56). She starts an anonymous online blog where she writes Alternative Universe Crossover fanfiction and hordes fan attention and love under an alias “thunder-kit-kat”, and becomes extremely popular online. Yet all her fantasies, when she attempts to ground them in reality, are haunted by the fear of being discovered as fat. In reality Kat tries to hide her weight, she always pretends to be on “the grapefruit” diet during lunch break and sits out gym class pretending that she has asthma. All the while she fantasizes about gaining the same popularity—love and attention—in real life as she does online by telling her online fans who she really was, yet she fears that if they discover what actually looked like, they would also hate and leave her. In the first episode of the series, Kat is pressed by her friends to “catch a dick”, and at a party later on in the episode when she’s teased by a group of young men over being a “prude”, she insists on
her experienced sexuality and ends up having sex. The next day, the internet explodes with a sex video of a “fat girl” who they all “love”.
The particularity of *my* desire: Kat’s phenomenology
In the third episode"Made You Look" which highlights Kat’s backstory, when she is first
perceived as fat, she becomes something that is not appealing or adequate to be desired by males (something that lacks the conditions for a proper sexual function) and even calls for
ridicule—she receives harassment and stares while walking down the school halls. “Fat women are viewed as unfeminine, unattractive, masculine, out of the running. In a word, they are desexualized” (Hartley 69), in Letting Ourselves Go, Cecilia Hartley articulates the “fat” female body as that which challenges the masculine production of females as “docile bodies” by drifting away from the (normatively) ideal “small” female body. “By becoming large, whether with fat tissue or muscle mass, [the woman] implicitly violates the sexual roles that place her in physical subordination to the man” (Hartley 62). Hartley asserts that fat females are prone to “to remove themselves from their bodies, to live from the neck up”, she reckons that generally, “Women are prone to disembodiment not only because they are constantly exposed to intrusive judgments about their bodies but also because they are taught to regard their bodies as passive objects others should admire” (Hartley 69). Kat thus withdraws from her “fat” body to a virtual world and instead presents it in the real world as a work-in-progress (like the diet illusion she poses for example). Kat’s figure is articulated or highlighted by an effort to restore a normative sexual function; to restore her figure as acceptable as a “public property” to the male gaze (Hartley 65).
While her “figure” is revealed as not adequate or fat, she attempts to hint that there is still some sense or way that it may be (perceived) otherwise.
The earlier chapters offered a phenomenological account of the female figure as that which denotes a situatedness in the background against which its perceived, where the projected or foregrounded self-image supposed-to constitute the positivity of the figure is determined via the male gaze within a fixed spatial configuration of a sexual position apropos male desire—the female figure as a dramatized performance of the sexual function. According to Merleau-Ponty, the background is that which reveals the figure as it is—as three dimensional—in that it offers an all exposing view from the objects that constitute the background and surround the figure (Kelly 96). The female figure’s desire for a whole ideal-I (Loos)—that which institutes subjectivity as a drive towards inhabiting new backgrounds which reveal the figure otherwise—is “contained”
within these fixed spatial relationships of the background assigned by maleness. Moreover the female figure as male’s object of desire is attributed a quasi-object position—her subject capacity is retained within the bounds of the assigned configuration of her normative (sexual) function, because a deviation from that function is problematic, to males’ social hierarchy. “A woman is taught early to contain herself, to keep arms and legs close to her body and take up as little space as possible” (Hartley 61), thus Kat’s “fat figure” is considered to be transgressing those female limits. In phenomenological terms, Kat’s figure, dubbed as transgressive, can be understood as taking up space that otherwise should be lent to the viewer who holds a perspective on
a—supposedly smaller—figure. Yet Kat’s performance insists that the figure’s “real” spatiality (or the “smaller” one) lies “within” those bounds of her excess figure. She implies that her figure is “contained” and the diet front she keeps for example negates that excess space—that was taken by her body’s extra fat or mass—through indicating digression from her current figure’s
outline. Such that through this digression, better views on her figure would be revealed and subsequently reveal the figure as adequately contained, female, and desirable. This figure however remains only “implied”, Kat only poses as trying to produce that normative figure but she never really commits to it, we see her bombarding her system with junk food at
home—where no one can see—as opposed to that single grapefruit she mostly stares at during lunch break at school, thus she only attempts to divert attention from her current transgressions.
Merleau-Ponty’s figure of perception is that which is revealed through the background objects’
perspectives “that reveal more of the object’s revealing features” (Kelly 93), by that we can understand Kat’s effort as that which directs her background (objects) to a view or to potential object standpoints to occupy where she is revealed as contained. Merleau-Ponty’s conception also is that the perception of these objects or objects’ standpoints as points to be potentially lodged in—to have a bodily readiness to deal with the features of the figure that these points overlook which come to be presented through the perception of these objects (Kelly 100). Kat attempts to reaffirm her femaleness (or her commitment to the ideal female figure) through offering viewers new standpoints that bring them closer to the version they accept of her, in other words, if her current figure is viewed as transgressing the limits of the assigned construct (the assigned background), Kat brings the viewers closer to her excessive figure’s spatial outline—to direct contact with the excess of her body, thus allowing them to reclaim that space that is supposed to be lent to the male viewer rather than occupied by the female (mass) through the digression offered by the diet for instance or hiding her body in online networks. When her sex video is out online, the frame zooms out on Kat walking across the hall, a slow motion camera zooms out on her as she walks in complete denial as the narration goes; “But we all knew it was her…Or I guess for Kat it felt like we all knew” (“Stuntin' Like My Daddy” 28:10), the frame
thus zooms out from a close portrait of Kat (alone) to a wide frame capturing her many
schoolmates’ heads trun and stare while Kat walked by with her excessive figure. The published albeit vague sex video of a “fat girl” referrenced to Kat destabilizes her attempts to negate her occupation of excess space (or digress from her current figure), like the camera movement that expands the distance between the viewholders and Kat—thus allowing her body-size to be fully revealed. Instead of shrinking the distance between Kat and the viewpoint where only the viewer’s perception of her persists without measure or scale; where she can be perceived “from the neck up” from standpoints that reflect a “closer” look at Kat; the many layers and details of her personality (like the flamboyant fanfiction she secretly writes, or her diet routines) without having to assess these through her body’s relationship against the background of the world. A view where her size ceases to be scalable. Where on the other hand, offering that scaling through a masculine environment, like her representation as a fat girl in the image or video, offers the viewers standpoints that are spatially further from the ideal figure she constantly implies and thus her excessiveness can be perceived—her figure is redeemed as transgressive. But Kat denies that it’s her, she accuses the principal of body shaming her for assuming it was her because the girl in the video is fat, and wary as he is, he apologizes and pledges to track and erase the video, in that sense she redirects the principal to a standpoint where his stance performs the negation of that excess space she occupies—negating her association with “fat” once she proclaimed it
inadequate for a sufficient representation of her.
“Women must continually produce bodies that are acceptable to that gaze. Thus a woman’s own gaze becomes a substitute for a man’s gaze, and she evaluates her own body as ruthlessly as she expects it to be evaluated by him” (Hartley 62), Hartley notes on women’s perception of
themselves. Unlike Jules’s character (discussed in the previous chapters) who attempts to
produce her figure as desirable through producing a background (standpoints) which reveals her as desirable or feminine, by prompting herself to occupy those standpoints (through her
commitment to the role like seeking out to seduce men, her fashion and sending out nudes for example)—the masquerade à la Doane. Kat doesn’t do it, she’s extremely embarrassed when a guy who’s interested in her offers to pay for her grapefruit during lunch break; she runs away thus admits that she’s undesirable). Rather, Kat offers a substitution for her transgression over these standpoints (occupying the extra space) by embedding the viewholders in that excess space, she turns her own body into that background which the viewers are invited to occupy to perceive her—implied—“real” figure through observing the details of this excess; to produce a relationship to (a view of) the excess which these points holds; the viewers online love Kat’s excessive thoughts like the fanfiction that takes the entire space of her subject while the perception of her “body” online is reduced to none. Yet “Excess body” denotes the feminine’s denounced “relapse into subjectivity” (Doane, Masquerade reconsidered 42), in the sense that
“culture still sees fat only in terms of self-indulgence” (Hartley 66). But instead of posing for the gaze or masquerading (committing to the diet for instance thus producing a new background like Jules), Kat occupies standpoints that only reveal her figure with proximity to the excess. The kind of proximity that would remove the judgment on its finiteness as an excessive figure by obscuring its limits. And her body’s limits (outline) in the viewers’ current perception turn into a narrative of potential standpoints which onlook the body’s limits, its finite points that are
obscured right now (because which the viewer’s current standpoints are proximate to the limits);
the narrative offers a relation of the viewers’ current standpoints to potential obscured standpoints which onlook the finite points of the figure. She substitutes the “desexualized”
position (Hartley 69) with a narrative of a properly (normative) sexual position that persists
beyond this or that standpoint. Each time her body size is brought up, it is indefinite or
indeterminate because the standpoints are revealing the figure’s clash with a negative distance (in gym class she pretends to have asthma thus her fat body’s struggle to exercise is negated by the proximity of the position a viewer has to her body, that instead of onlooking her whole body’s inability to exercise the standpoint offers a cellular level distance; onlooking her lung’s inability to breathe properly or the asthma). The narrative of standpoints that would reveal her figure as desirable or a female object of desire is disclosed by offering the viewers access only to views that are considered in Merleau-Ponty’s terms as not revealing of her figure’s “size” as a determinate feature or that are obscuring it.
Kat only directs to standpoints from which she seems desirable or make her hold that capacity, thus the (new) background she’s pointing to actually consists of hypothetical objects\standpoints onlooking a figure that is not quite there yet, whilst her “complete and excessive figure” is recessed into the background as “bad unrevealing angles”. Kat attempts to substitute current standpoints of the viewholders by signalling a direction towards other better revealing
standpoints, by that her “figure” is foregrounded into a Lacanian imaginary register—“situated around the notion of coherence rather than fragmentation” (Loos)—her figure gains its coherence and completeness only in the form of a narrative of a more desirable figure extending beyond points that we currently occupy, which we are too proximate to the figure to see. Kat’s
subjectivity is already exposed as that of substitution of desire, her desires are substituted by narratives of those desires: She reconfigures her subject in an imaginary register (the post-diet figure narrative for example) by reconfiguring the objects of her desire, the (background) objects which would reveal her figure, or the “men” in an imaginary register as well; by giving or
assigning the “other” a narrative of a female object of desire they will potentially acquire if the
limits of her figure come into view. While that narrative has shortcomings in real life i.e.
standpoints that fail to perceive her figure as desirable because they are not proximate enough to her figure or that these persist beyond the excess space she occupies: In gym class she is pointed out for sitting out the exercises by a classmate who disclaims “Ugh Kat doesn’t even have Asthma. She’s just fat and doesn’t wanna exercise” (“Made you look” 06:55) over an image of her other female classmates who differ in body sizes yet participate in the exercises, thus offering scalability. That narrative however, is better sustained with the online persona she created,
benefiting from the anonymity the internet can offer.
The wholeness of Kat’s subject, her narrative of the lacanian ideal-I (Loos), depends on the wholeness of her imaginary worlds, the “alternative universes” which hold object standpoints (for males to occupy) that are capable of revealing her figure as desirable or that are obscuring her “fat” figure, thus an optimal view from “all possible perspectives” (Kelly 91), and the
internet provided a convenient canvas for such an attempt. Since she has more control over these standpoints online, where she is capable of assigning standpoints that are so proximate that they only reveal certain thoughts or convenient parts of that narrative she established, her online persona for example becomes really popular through the desirability of the aspects she portrays there like the creative and appealing (sexual) fanfiction instead of photographs of herself. She almost achieves that optimal view in that online realm. Yet this optimal view remains disturbed by the symptom of fear of being discovered as who she really is; as fat, she receives fan mail like: “ILY slay kween! I picture you look just like kaleesi”, to which she responds “I wish”. After this message, we see Kat in the cafeteria fantasizing about having such a perception\reception in real life, one that is quickly killed by the nightmare of being discovered by her fans as fat (She imagines them furiously calling her an imposter and attacking her). Until this narrative is
dismantled by the sex video they published, and a view on her complete figure as fat is exposed online. However, when it did, “not only did they love her, they wanted to fuck her” (“Made you look” 08:48), Kat discovers the “fat” fetish as grounds for a new narrative of her desirability; as a new background.
Excessively female: Made you look
Kat skims through the comments on the porn site where the sex video of her is published, she’s surprised to find an overwhelming amount of comments directed at her sex appeal—some even requested pictures of her feet. Kat then decides to make more videos herself: she dances in sexy lingerie and posts the video online, which mounts up to a fan message by a man requesting a private paid Skype session. She finds the guy to be extremely “disgusting”, imploring Kat to mock him and his “tiny dick”, to take “complete control over him”, and to fine him when he disobeys because she’s “so big and powerful” (“Made you look” 36:44). When Kat starts receiving money from the man, she hits up the mall and the second day, she walks down the school hall, dressed in a black leather corset, fishnet leggings and a red mini skirt, dark eye make-up, leather choker, and bright red lipstick while heads turn and the jaws of her admiring school mates drop.
“The fat body also exists in a state of simultaneous asexuality and hypersexuality. Increased stores of fat exaggerate the outward sexuality of the female body; breasts and hips become fuller
and more prominent. A fat woman’s body is unmistakably, maturely female” (Hartley 68).
Hartley discusses the duality of the “fat” female body as that figure that is described in excess.
An excessive female body means excess (or an abundance of) femininity in the sense that a female is taking more space that is proclaimed as rightfully masculine. But it also means an excess of “mature femininity” thus an increased sexuality disclosed in the exaggeration of the matter of sexual desirability in the figure. Henrik Høgh-Olesen offers a biocultural account of the perceptual experience of objects of desire, he articulates “key stimuli” as markers associated with an increased quality of life, better functionality, fitness, fertility...etc. with which the perceptual system associates certain objects, situations, and body parts. Høgh-Olesen also notes that “The perceptual system reacts more strongly to an exaggeration of the original characteristics than to the original stimuli themselves (Høgh-Olesen 27). These objects he describes are aesthetic objects, whose function is the arousal of desire through presenting an exaggerated key stimuli.
“The main forms of fetishism can be understood as aesthetic power objects as they combine, enlarge, and exaggerate critical key stimuli from a species’ register” (Høgh-Olesen 29). In that sense we can understand the “fat” fetish or the fetish for Kat’s excessive body as a desire for excessiveness of her femininity, her excess body is an aesthetic power object to the masculine gaze. But the sexual desire for Kat, is not locked within her excessive femininity as such, her excess is also articulated in a transgressive mode, as in taking up more space than ascribed to a female body as seen in Hartley; “those women who claim more than their share of territory are regarded with suspicion… women are forbidden to take up space (by being large of body) or resources” (Hartley 61). Yet that space is indeed taken by Kat with the power of her mass—her
“large” figure is constituted through nothing other than her figure itself, the background objects, those that overlook her figure from a distance reveal the size of her mass or figure as the “large”
figure it is. A fetish operates as an “erotic solution to a real world anxiety” (“The School of Life”
01:00) in the sense that Kat’s anxiety inducing transgressiveness which is perceived as illegitimate power by her male counter parts, comes to be resolved on their part through the standpoint that also offers the possibility of deriving pleasure from her figure’s spatiality as an exaggerated sexual object of desire. “Domination is natural to a social-hierarchic animal, but it is also natural to obey and submit to legitimate authority” (Høgh-Olesen 27), Kat’s figure brings forth the viewholder’s submission to its desirable finiteness, as a sexual figure that occupies this amount of space. The Skype customer’s desire for Kat (and the commentators’) is a desire for a
“big and powerful beautiful creature” (“Made you look” 34:38); a desire to be
male-subordinates, conventionally a (heteronormative) female type of desire. When Kat
discovers that her body type can actually constitute a fetish, she finds standpoints from which her figure is perceived as desirable, as female, standpoints that constitute a background from which her figure is revealed. But these standpoints must remain in such a view that her “powerfulness”
as key stimuli is always perceived, she must remain as a fetish or an aesthetic power object; the perception of her figure’s exaggeration or excess is conditioned by constant scalability to her surroundings as holding an excessive amount of feminine sexuality. Thus in phenomenological terms her background objects must remain onlooking the figure at a distance, recognizing its finiteness as a “large” figure which stimulates pleasure through sexual arousal, and to refrain from standpoints which come to obscure this powerfulness\finiteness by being too proximate to the figure.
To sustain this narrative of the “big and beautiful”, Kat comes to embody a dominatrix all the time to constitute her subject; she starts dressing up such that she is always revealed as an
aesthetic power object that exaggerated key stimuli: shiny leather for skin, corsets for an hourglass figure, red colors for excitement..etc. (Høgh-Olesen 25-26). But unlike BDSM roles that are conceived through role-playing, in which the male (gaze) permits the female’s
domination or transgression only as an act towards male’s pleasure, Kat’s performance exceeds the “act” of role-playing such that it lends Kat a power position from which her subjectivity benefits from males’ subordination—she starts taking initiative with any guy that she fancies to have sex with no matter how hot and intimidating they seemed before (as opposed to hiding and shying away from them), she even hordes money mindlessly from these men. Kat’s new female subject position emerges as a paradoxical power position; what seems as two contradictory directions of desire, one instituted by a heteronormative gaze which installs a negation of an excessive female subject—the excessive female subject must be “contained” within a normative framework thus it can only appear as an excessive object of desire. The second instituted by her excessive figure’s legitimate power of taking up space and resources (which include men’s finances and obedience) for her own pleasure or the satisfaction of her (excessive) subjectivity.
These seemingly contradictory directions function like Trinh Minh-ha’s “empty signs” (Trinh 42)—Trinh’s commentary on the figure of Asia in Roland Barthes’ work. Whereby the Japanese envelope for example, signifies both the envelope (the work invested in the envelope-the
exterior) and that void which it’s supposed to enclose. Trinh writes, “The package’s existence depends on the interdependence of the two elements and it is in order to designate this reality more effectively that the work investment seems to be in the envelope” (Trinh 43). Like the envelope, the new female subject position Kat is exposed to, is that which depends on both Kat’s excessive female subjectivity and devoidness of (normative) female subjectivity as a small subordinate female. The empty sign, Trinh continues, diminishes “asymptomatically the distance
between the subject and the act, the agent is here not posited as pre-existing but as immediately contemporary to the process of the act” (Trinh 42). Hence Kat’s female figure is constituted as an agent of an excessive subject rather than a subject holding excessive capacities—Kat manages her excessiveness by orienting it to the right directions, to pleasure males through which she profits and enhances her subjectivity (she orders the Skype man to listen to stories of her sexual adventures and to purchase the corset she has on her Amazon wish-list if he wishes to be be allowed to masturbate). Hence she directs her background objects (the men) to standpoints which reveal her as “big and beautiful” through the narrative of pleasure being derived from those standpoints articulated in her dominatrix appearance. In contrast to the female spectator’s masquerade (Doane, Film and the Masquerade 82) which requires expansive distance between the subject and the act, Kat’s self-sameness is asserted through that diminished distance from a familiar standpoint; her (fat or relaxed) figure.
In the seventh episode, Kat agrees to another cam invitation from a new man who persuades her by buying all her online wishlists. The man refuses to turn on his cam in return, instead he starts making requests from a black screen, ones that she’s not happy with, like asking her to undress beyond her desire and calling him “special”. Kat obeys for a second, starts taking off her lingerie, the man calls her “beautiful” while breathing heavily, Kat immediately shuts the laptop screen ending the session. Here Kat abandons her new subject because she experiences herself as no longer “in control”. Her figure, finitely identified as “large” fails to be scalable anymore, because the man’s figure is not finitely identified (he refuses to show himself). Here the man who’s supposed to marvel at her excessive figure because it designates “powerful feminine sexuality”
instead marvels at her feminine sexuality denying her the subjectivity she attains through her powerfulness\excessiveness—she no longers directs her background object rather they direct her
(like when he asks her to undress). She finds herself masquerading; she is represented only through what could be excessively sexual. Kat no longer holds the narrative (of the ideal-I) through which she can assert her subjectivity because she is forced to take masquerade distance once again, to abandon her familiar standpoint which denotes self-sameness. When she loses familiarity, she becomes rather an object in another’s narrative, so she immediately abandons online camming.
In the previous chapters, the third female subject position that emerges between two female subjects as “essentially form and emptiness” (Trinh 42), as both the ability to be lodged in one background onlooking a “contained” female figure whilst holding new subject capacities retained in that position as an overlap of potential backgrounds (an overlap of directions of desire), thus hinting a subject to be (Kat’s desires and Male desire overlap in the dominatrix).
This subject position as a sign is generated by the distance between its object capacities (proximity or situatedness in the background—its normative sexual function) and subject capacities (onlooking the new figure) which emerge when the female subject is prompted by the inevitable work of fantasy (desire or the imaginary) to be situated otherwise whilst still retaining self-sameness or familiarity with her original background as point of departure. In other words, this position comes as a point that steps away from the proximity of the female as an object (the image itself) by offering an open ended narrative of her extension through that point, open because the female, who appropriates her background lodgings to fit a male viewholder’s
perspective, cannot see the finiteness of the new subject from his position. And it's an empty sign in Trinh’s sense because (like the japanese envelope), the female must unfold from there to get a grip (or view) the entire new figure\message. The normative narrative of female finiteness as a sexual object denies the female the ability to substitute backgrounds, because male viewholder is
demanded to shift his view or abandon his standpoint. That is, the finiteness of the female figure has to be determined from a male viewer’s standpoint all the time. But Kat’s substitution process comes to highlight an important aspect of that *third* female subject position, it comes to reveal its determining order: That a female subject position is that which manifests a spatial hierarchy of desires through which, the female can assert the relationships of distance and proximity she can have from her familiar position\point to certain viewpoints. For instance when the first Skype man offers a female type of desire (wanting to be dominated by Kat), Kat’s desire for subjectivity (the new background of a desiring female subject) seems proximate to her current standpoint (apropos males), and she needn’t lose sight of her position to see the new capacity. If the new point was further or distanced, thus losing sight on the finiteness of her figure (the second Skype man’s distant or “invisible” view point on Kat), the female cannot unfold to an unfamiliar position (Kat loses sight of her dominatrix persona). This allows a female figure to hypothesize extension within backgrounds and standpoints that are not strictly revealing of a subordinate position or that don’t have the phallus as their central compass, but by substituting the object of desire itself (the male or his gaze) that constitutes revealing points on a female’s ideal-I. In the end Kat eliminates the Skype man’s viewpoint from her background by turning off the camera, yet she still dresses in leather and fishnets that grant her excessive\powerful figure legitimacy, and she’s not hesitant to cry like a dominatrix while admitting her desire for the guy she had feelings for all along without reducing him to a sex object (an object of her background).
The fat female body as excess, is that figure which surpasses female dispossession, dispossession of that ability to surpass the spatiality offered by the heteronormative narrative of the female’s position, by imposing its finiteness as delineating from that narrative’s imperatives. The fetish as excess sexual pleasurability for the male comes to highlight that hetenormative narrative’s