I am a media and performance artist who uses autoethnographic methods to examine representation, experience, and embodiment from my perspective as a white, cisgender, nondisabled, middle class-passing, middle-aging, queer woman in performance-based works. My embodied approach informs how I evolve, shape, change, and otherwise distinguish my figuration of middle-aging queer femininity while capitalizing on mainstream misogynistic mores that figure this body as abject or grotesque.1 I use performance-based methods to engage with and stage the social and material conditions of my body while also engaging with liveness for in-person and screen-based audiences. I often use humor to make my audience feel at ease and to communicate my intent and queer way of relating to the world, what Jack Halberstam calls queer failure under the terms and conditions of cisheteronormativity.2
Potbelly is a performance-based video essay that capitalizes on these methods and deconstructs the motel scene in Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino, 1994) in which the coquettish baby talking Fabienne (Maria de Medeiros) describes to her boyfriend Butch (Bruce Willis) how she wishes she had a potbelly. In this video essay, I place my body in relation to this scene to speak back to Tarantino’s representations of cisheteronormative desire that depends on Western beauty standards of thinness, youth, non-disability, and whiteness. I wear an American size 16, the average dress size in the United States and Canada, and am what Aubrey Gordon calls “small fat,” a term I take up here as an acknowledgement of size privilege that marks a “relative proximity to thinness” regardless of how I am seen through the thin lens of cisheteronormativity.3 I position myself in the frame of this video essay without a head to focus on and amplify my torso and enact the “Headless Fatty,” a phenomenon fat activist Charlotte Cooper describes as “a never-ending parade” of fat people whose photographs are featured in internet journalism that “reek of a surveillance culture” full of judgment, fatphobia, and criticism. Cooper argues that for headless fatties, “the body becomes symbolic: we are there but we have no voice” and “are reduced and dehumanised as symbols of cultural fear: the body, the belly, the arse, food.”
Similarly, Gordon examines how thin women see fat women as a reflection of mainstream normative anti-fat bias: “we reflect their bodies back to them, their imperfect thinness made beautiful by its proximity to the abject failure of our fatness. We are reminders of what could be. Thinner people embrace fatter people as a way of finding their relative virtue.”4 Because female subjectivity is always-already dependent on the body, the performativity of gender also has an impact on how we conceive of embodiment. It influences the ways representation performs, signifies, and is signified. Potbelly harnesses gendered representation and anti-fat bias through bodily gestures that demonstrate an engagement with (my) queer aging fatness.
I linger on, indulge, and otherwise celebrate my fatness in the opening scene of Potbelly. In a close-up of my stomach, I dance and shake to Dick Dale & His Del-Tones’ “Misirlou,” the song used at the beginning of Pulp Fiction. Throughout the video essay, I use performance-based methods as a means of knowing by staging my body in proximity to my audience (here via the close-up camera lens) to collapse the space between us. I keep my gyrating stomach onscreen for as long as possible and engage in what Halberstam calls queer failure “as a way of refusing to acquiesce to dominant logics of power and discipline and as a form of critique.” The viewer cannot look away in this long take and must contend with my fat body until I decide to exit the frame, jiggling with queer joy and celebrating my body on my terms.
Throughout Potbelly, I’m dressed in a sequined crop top and pants that reflect light that seemingly shoots into the Pulp Fiction scene from my body, queerly marking my place in the scene. My intention is to reveal the absurdity of the scene through its distortion on my body and offer critique of its presentation of normative values that ultimately focuses our attention on how women (should) dress, weigh, and look through Tarantino’s pseudo-feminist dialogue. I queer the film’s projection by reveling in the light of the projector as an intervention. I use long takes to stay with this headless fat body and reframe it for myself and my viewers as a body worthy of celebration, joy, and desire. I end the video essay by having my belly lip-synch Urge Overkill’s “Girl, You’ll be a Woman Soon” (which is performed by Uma Thurman earlier in the film) with a punk rock red gash across my stomach for a mouth and giant googly eyes over my breasts and nipples, to self-censor my body again, on my terms. After the credits roll, I literally turn off the screen with a remote from within the frame, in charge of my own ending.
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Endnotes
- Dayna McLeod, “Spotting the Cougar: Performing Queer Middle-Aging in Cougar for a Year,” Theatre Research in Canada 45, no. 1 (2021): 96-115.
- Jack Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011).
- Aubrey Gordon, What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Fat (Boston: Beacon Press, 2020), 29.
- Ibid., 158.
Dayna McLeod