The Anarcho-Feminist

size and representation in Shrek

feministdisney:

phoetiquette asked: What about Fiona from Shrek? I know she isn’t a Disney character, but does she partially fit the bill of a fat princess, or does she not count b/c she starts off thin, or because her fatness is part of being an “ugly” ogre, etc? ——————————————————

I’m not sure what the “what about” refers to- main, fat leads? To be clear, I don’t deny that it’s possible to scour the last 4-5 decades of children’s media and find a handful of fat leads, but their limited presence does not negate the fact that fat people are vastly under and misrepresented in media.   No matter how positive of a representation Fiona is, it doesn’t even matter because she is one character in a sea of characters that are otherwise generally a fairly uniform (small) size.

As far as Fiona goes, I’m of several minds. At least this franchise has sequels that were nearly as popular as the original so it’s less of a “no one sees it tack on”, but in the first movie, yeah, I don’t think it counts much because she spends 95% of the movie looking like a generic pretty princess.

My second “meh” feeling about her and characters like her is that I find the messages in those movies to often not go much beyond a surface-level feel-good.   The movie does not teach us that all sizes are beautiful; it teaches us that Shrek is considered ugly by everyone, and Fiona is considered ugly by everyone, yet in spite of their ugliness they love each other because love (and happiness) isn’t about appearance.

The message is never really, “You can be fat and beautiful” even though we end up sort of interpretting it that way, as do the characters at times, but I think there’s a difference.   I get really tired of fat characters always being props for the “beauty on the inside” messages because isn’t that what society is always telling fat people 99% of the time to begin with, that they’re only beautiful on the inside, that for someone to love them they need to show personality because their looks are never going to cut it, that only the magical transformative powers of love will make someone think their body is wonderful?

What I would really like is a character that is not treated, or feels, like they are ugly just because they are fat.   Someone who does not need some magic fairy or trickery in order for someone to fall in love with them “despite” their fatness. Fat and beautiful- on the outside.   If that makes sense

~originally a reply, reposted by request~

And let’s not forget that when Fiona turns “ugly” her facial features become more like the ones from a black womyn, wider nose, thicker lips…

Reblogged from POLITICS IS MY HOT HOT SEX

Tags: fat body acceptance body positive love beauty norms quote text

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Those who subvert social norms are, ostensibly, people who have forgotten that they can be seen, publicly, at any time. Therefore, when they transgress social norms—by expressing physical affection for a person not visibly coded as the opposite sex, for example, or by being fat and rejecting social and bodily invisibility—they need to be reminded of this omniscient social gaze, and in the absence of institutional discipline, must be punished so they do not transgress again. This is the mechanism by which a dude who sees me in a vividly-colored dress, walking alone as though I either don’t know or don’t care that I am defying bodily norms, feels compelled to scream “UGLY FAT BITCH” at me. He is applying social discipline and teaching me a lesson: Everyone can see you, and your body and/or behavior are unacceptable.

— So Michel Foucault and Jeremy Bentham walk into an elementary school cafeteria* via the Two Whole Cakes blog by Lesley Kinzel (via transformfeminism)

Reblogged from The Fist of Artemis

Tags: quote politics norms normativity society body

count-vulvula:

this is a great thing and i’m all for labia acceptance! and this art looks great! but keep in mind that trans* people may not be comfortable with their genitals, and they shouldn’t be shamed for that.

Reblogged from Recalled to Life

Tags: illustration labia body acceptance norms

What It Feels Like For A Girl

Tags: gender film scene Charlotte Gainsbourg feminism norms art

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When I’m on the train, I read my favorite gay magazine. I can’t remember having ever seen someone who looks like me on the cover. When I read it I see more ads - for underwear, cologne, cruises, hotels, and clothes - with people who don’t look like me. None of the writers look like me, nor are there any stories about anyone who looks like me. When I finally see an advertisement with someone who shares my skin color, the advertisement is for HIV medication.

While I’m waiting for my friend in the gayborhood hotspot I notice that none of the bartenders, DJs, or waiters look like me, nor do most of the clientele. Out of boredom, I fiddle around with the Grindr mobile dating app on my iPhone. My screen is filled with different faces, bodies, and torsos of men in the area. One particularly handsome man attracts my attention, until I read the “NO ASIANS” typed in angry capped letters on his profile. I wonder how I would feel if I were Asian.

After having a few drinks with my friend, I walk home through the garment district in midtown Manhattan. I see a gay male couple walking hand in hand down the street. They also do not look like me. In fact, they look like they could be in one of the gay cruise ads I see in my favorite magazine. Their relaxed and happy faces turn frightened when they see me, and they immediately cease holding hands and separate. On this late night in an unfamiliar area of the city, I am not seen as a member of the LGBT community. I am black. I am male. I am a threat.

— The Bearable Whiteness of Being Gay - CNN Opinion (via thenoobyorker)(via cuntymint)(via oppressionisyucky)(via titotito)

Reblogged from fuckyeahbisexuals

Tags: quote story text gay norms body diversity racism

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We have this entire culture that’s telling people that there’s One Right Thing To Want. Dudes, for instance, are supposed to have a high sex drive, to like porn, to enjoy casual sex, to be attracted to thin young feminine large-breasted women, to want anal sex and public sex and rough sex, to not want pegging and ageplay and vanilla missionary with the lights out. If you’re asexual you’re broken; if you like drag you’re a pervert and probably a pedophile; if you’re a male submissive you’re pathetic and unmasculine; if you’re queer you’re destroying America. I don’t understand why people do this: what possible gain could there be from reducing the vibrant rainbow of human sexuality to two colors (the dude color and the girl color)? Those two colors look much nicer as part of the whole spectrum.

— On Good Consent, Part One | No, Seriously, What About Teh Menz? (via sexisnottheenemy)

Reblogged from sex is not the enemy

Tags: quote gender culture norms queer anarcha-feminism

Reblogged from ♡ STRⒶNGE DAYS ♡

Tags: norms photo quote queer

youdontlooklikeafeminist:

All day, err’ day. Fuck.

The funny thing about this graph is that it says nowhere that the person speaking is a woman. And yet it is completly obvious to any reader that it is the case. That’s what one might call collectively internalized heteronormativity. Ethnomethodologists such as Harvey Sacks, Harold Garfinkel, or anthropologist Bruno Latour, have demonstrated how society is made through interactions and communication. If one obverses and analyses closely what people say and do, or more precisely what they do not say, but is implicitly understood, one will find the fondational structures of normativity which are intrinsic in the building of social stuctures. This graph, although it is meant to be feminist and in some regards possibly lgbt friendly, it technically reproducing a social structure that defines heterosexuality as the norm, homosexuality as a deviance. Furthermore it reproduces the notion that “feminist” is an attribute that is implicitly feminine, which is by my standards quite un-feministic actually.

You’re welcome. =P

Reblogged from sexstainability

Tags: anthropology ethnomethodology categories norms graph feminism heteronormativity gender

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How much we each want to have sex, what kinds of people we find attractive, what pleasures bring us to orgasm, how we feel about all of it, and any other variable can shift for a number of reasons. Sooner or later, almost everyone is going to find themselves outside the statistically defined norm, at least in some way. If someone never diverged from that middle portion of any of the distribution curves, they’d be so uncommon that they would, in fact, be abnormal. The only thing that’s normal about sex is that nobody is actually normal.

— You Don’t Get to Be Normal | Charlie Glickman (via sexisnottheenemy)

Reblogged from sex is not the enemy

Tags: sex positivity norms statistics quote sex love