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Queer Sexualities, Normative Bodies: The Fat Body in Queer-Centered Television

Charlotte Stout

Submitted in Partial Fulfillment

of the Prerequisite for Honors

in American Studies

Under the Advisement of Michael Jeffries

May 2020

© 2020 Charlotte Stout 2

Acknowledgments

Without support and help from many people, this project would not have been possible. Many thanks:

To my thesis and major advisor, Professor Michael Jeffries, for your support and guidance this year on my thesis and throughout all of my time at Wellesley. Your confidence in my research and your thoughtful comments on my work shaped this project into what it is.

To Professor Clutario, Professor Fisher, and Professor Creef for serving on my thesis committee and giving me your time, even remotely on Zoom, to discuss my work with you. Thank you to Professor Musto for giving me space to discuss my thesis with you even as the world was rapidly changing and you had only known me for one semester – your kindness meant a lot in continuing my work from home.

To my father, Dave Stout, for picking me up from Wellesley every year and helping me settle into a new lifestyle after we all left campus in March. Thank you for holding me accountable to my work and encouraging me to dive deeper into it while I was at home. Your surprise smoothies and creative meals fueled much of this work!

To my mother, Rebecca Coles, for believing in me and encouraging me to pursue my passions and the subject matter I’m interested in. Your steadfast support all the way from California has helped me to keep going even after I had to leave campus.

To my sisters, Emily and Claire, for always cheering me on and for persistently asking to read and learn from the work I was doing. Your sincere interest always made my day and I love discussing everything with you.

To Rachel, for always taking the time to discuss every small concern and idea I had to help me develop my thoughts. Thank you for always believing in me and in my thesis. Thank you for being silly with me. You make everything easier.

To Loogee, for spending countless hours in the Clapp library with me as we attempted to hold each other accountable.

To Auriel, Christiane, Audrey, Erin, Izzy, Alexis, Alex, Angel, and Dillon for giving me a great group of friends and a fun place to come home to at the end of every day.

To the Tupelos for giving me space to make music and have fun. You are an incredible group of people and I feel so lucky to have known you all.

Thank you to everyone involved with the production and creation of the television shows I chose to write about. These shows are important and beloved by many, including myself, and I feel lucky to be able to write about something I love as much as queer television.

As I finish this thesis, the world continues to respond to COVID-19. Thank you to frontline workers who have continued to work during this time. None of the work any of us do would be possible without access to essential services.

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Table of Contents

Introduction………………………………………………………………………………4

Chapter 1: Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City………………………………………20

Chapter 2: Pose………………………………………………………………………….42

Chapter 3: The L Word………………………………………………………………….71

Conclusion………………………………………………………………………………97

Works Cited……………………………………………………………………….102-108

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Introduction

In July of 2018, Netflix released the trailer for its newest venture into teen dramedy television, Insatiable. Starring Debby Ryan as Patty, the show is a revenge-story gone wrong, all predicated on Patty’s transformation from a bullied, desperate fat girl into the “hottest girl in school.” As recently as 2018, Netflix released a show in which Debby Ryan donned a prosthetic chin and, as author Roxane Gay put it, a “lumpy stomach pillow” as a fat suit and became an unconvincing caricature of a fat girl.1 Viewers of the show could delight in seeing the torment of a fat girl with the safety of the skinny, Hollywood-ready body underneath, all while laughing not only at the bullying of Patty but also at the cliched, harmful portrayal of her lesbian best friend,

Nonnie, depicted as deeply in love with her. Nonnie and Patty fulfill common stereotypes about fat and queer people, with little interrogation of these stereotypes by the show’s writers.

Insatiable is not the only current show to attempt to tell the stories of queer people and fat people, but it does a remarkably deplorable execution.

As media scholars Katie Milestone and Anneke Meyer observe, “representation is so important because it is an active process of creating meanings…the words we choose to describe a group of people…shape the meanings of these people.”2 Thus, television representations influence how people perceive groups: Patty from Insatiable is miserable with her body, therefore fat people in general are miserable. Inside of every fat person, there is a skinny person waiting to break free. Nonnie is a lesbian in love with her best friend, so all queer people must be infatuated with their friends. This study investigates the representation of fat people in shows that follow a predominantly LGBTQ+ cast. Though there is preexisting scholarship on the

1 Roxane Gay, “Insatiable is Lazy, Insulting from Start to Finish,” Refinery29, August 23, 2018, https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/roxane-gay-insatiable-review-fat-shaming-essay. 2 Katie Milestone and Anneke Meyer, Gender and Popular Culture, (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2012), 7. 5 implications of the television representations of fat people and of queer people, scholars have not yet studied this crucial intersection. To understand this intersection, there must be a full understanding of the fields surrounding this study: fat studies, television studies, and queer studies.

What is Fat Studies? Why Fat Studies?

Hatred of fat people is pervasive throughout the United States. With a $58.6 billion diet industry, it is obvious that Americans fear fat, and will try many different tactics to avoid being labelled as such: pills, incessant diets, intense exercise regimes, and even surgery.3 However, these radical personal lifestyle changes are not the only symptoms of a fatphobic society, as there is systemic discrimination and disparagement against fat people at work and beyond. Many scholars point out that, with the recognition that “language creates reality,” many disparaging jokes and comments against different groups of people have become frowned upon by the mainstream, save for those against fat people.4 Fat children are subject to “almost constant harassment,” fat adults face workplace discrimination, and social isolation is common within the fat population.5 Thus, the societal implications of fatphobia harm more than just the bodily expectations of the self and effectively isolate and condemn fat people. Fat studies, then, is an active refusal of this system, and takes a critical eye to societal expectations for the human body.

Leading fat studies scholars Sondra Solovay and Esther Rothblum write, “fat studies is an interdisciplinary field…marked by an aggressive, consistent, rigorous critique of the negative

3 Marilyn Wann, “Foreword: Fat Studies: An Invitation to Revolution,” in The Fat Studies Reader, eds. Esther Rothblum and Sandra Soloway, (New York: New York University Press, 2009), ix. 4 Jana Evans Braziel and Kathleen LeBesco, “Editors’ Introduction,” in Bodies Out of Bounds: Fatness and Transgression, eds. Jana Evans Braziel and Kathleen LeBesco, (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001), 2. 5 Marilyn Wann, “Foreword: Fat Studies: An Invitation to Revolution,” xx. 6 assumptions, stereotypes, and stigma placed on the fat body.”6 To better understand this philosophy, one must examine the mechanizations that have ostracized and continue to harm fat people.

Though fat studies is a relatively new field, only emerging fully in the 21st century after years of scattered essays and books, the stigma surrounding fatness and fat people has existed since at least the 1890s in the United States. Fat studies scholars have traced the roots of widespread fatphobia to rapid lifestyle changes in the late 19th and early 20th century, citing that increased access to food and industrialization led to a change in the symbolism of fat – if anyone could be fat due to technological advancement, the prestige was lost.7 Fat became a sign in the eyes of the wealthier classes of the inability of middle and lower-class people to enjoy in moderation without overindulging, reinforcing preconceived notions of fundamental biological differences between those with wealth and those without.8 Fatphobia is not just rooted in classism, but also racism, as writings from the late 19th century by white authors detail the inherent inferiority of nonwhite peoples due to, in part, characterizations of them as having corpulent bodies.9 From the 20th century onward, Americans have been inundated with messages that thinness is a moral obligation, and fatness a sign not only of illness but also of corruption.10

Given fatphobia’s insidious roots, and harmful effects on current peoples, fat studies necessitates a call to action to change the way society talks about fat.

6 Sondra Solovay and Esther Rothblum, “Introduction,” in The Fat Studies Reader, eds. Esther Rothblum and Sandra Soloway, (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 2. 7 Laura Fraser, “The Inner Corset: A Brief History of Fat in the United States,” in The Fat Studies Reader, ed. Esther Rothblum and Sondra Solovay. (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 12. 8 Amy Erdman Farrell, Fat Shame, (New York: New York University Press, 2011), 41. 9 Amy Erdman Farrell, Fat Shame, 64. 10 Laura Fraser, “The Inner Corset: A Brief History of Fat in the United States,” 13. 7

Fat studies scholars and activists choose the word “fat” as a descriptor rather than

“obese” or “overweight,” due to the negative connotations associated with the “O-Words.”11

There is no inherent positive or negative value to the word “fat,” despites society’s condemnation of the term as insulting, and thus reclaiming the term is a way to reclaim fatness as a neutral, or even positive, identity.12 The term “obesity,” as fat studies scholar Marilyn Wann writes, “medicalizes human diversity…[which] spires a misplaced search for a ‘cure’ for naturally occurring difference.”13 Such medicalization often opens the door for anti-fat discrimination, as it is an invitation to speculate on what is “wrong” with the fat person for not

“getting better.”14 This medicalization has shaped many of the arguments against fat acceptance:

Americans continue to complain of the “glorification of obesity,” hypothesizing that the active work against harmful stereotypes and misinformation will lead to an unhealthy society. The

Health at Every Size Movement (HAES), spearheaded by health professionals who deviate from the normative fear of fat, actively thwarts this misconception, citing that “unhealthy lifestyles” are not necessarily congruent with fatness.15 Regardless of the health of the person, the discrimination fat people face relies on the assumption that their fat is an immoral choice that is a threat to public health. While the HAES movement has the mission to promote the notion that

“fat and fit” is not an oxymoron, there remains pushback within the fat positivity movement for the organization’s possible contribution to a “moral imperative to be healthy.”16 The characterization of “some” people as healthy and fat can introduce a problematic idea that while

12 Marilyn Wann, “Foreword: Fat Studies: An Invitation to Revolution,” xii. 13 Marilyn Wann, “Foreword: Fat Studies: An Invitation to Revolution,” xiii. 14 Ibid. 15 Amy Erdman Farrell, Fat Shame, 11. 16 Natalie Boero, Killer Fat: Media, Medicine, and Morals in the American ‘Obseity Epidemic” (Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2012), 134. 8 some fat people may not be healthy, those who are fat and fit are healthy and therefore deserve different treatment from society, ultimately continuing an ableist superiority complex of

“healthy” bodies as better than “diseased” or “disgusting” bodies.17 While the medicalization of fatness has, then, been accepted by the fat acceptance and fat studies community as unequivocally harmful, the mode through which to combat this has been contested.

Beyond the medicalization of fat people, the assumption of a person’s control over their body size drives continued discrimination and misconceptions about the psychological meanings of a fat body. People view fat as something “over which we…have some degree of control,” separating body size from other identities that people have “no control” over, such as race, sex, or ability.18 Similar to the effects of the medicalization of fat, this assumed culpability over body shape and size drives society at large to question why any fat person remains at the size that they are. Scholar Margaret K. Bass writes, “this culture does not permit those of us with fat bodies to represent or characterize our fat. We may explain, apologize, or do whatever we can to rid ourselves of fat, but we must tolerate the representations and meanings of fat imposed on us by our society.”19 Therefore, fat people are forced into coalescence with denigrating popular representations of themselves, because the fat is “their fault.” This assumed control and its resulting stereotypes of fat people has a long history in the United States. As noted earlier, the early 20th century made the access to food much more widespread, making fatness no longer a symbol of status, but of excess. Amy Erdman Farrell points to political cartoons from this era to demonstrate that the newly fat, seen as the same group as the newly rich, were mocked as a group that “did not know how to understand these new privileges without overdoing it,” noting

17 Natalie Boero, Killer Fat: Media, Medicine, and Morals in the American ‘Obseity Epidemic,” 134. 18 Jana Evans Braziel and Kathleen LeBesco, “Editors’ Introduction,” 2. 19 Margaret K. Bass, “On Being a Fat Black Girl in a Fat-Hating Culture,” in Recovering the Black Female Body, eds. Michael Bennett and Vanessa D. Dickson (Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001), 224. 9 that, ultimately, these popular cartoons argued that the humor was in “this new class of people…even daring to think themselves capable of self-improvement and class mobility.”20

Fatness then became a sign of a loss of self-control, and of a farcical performance of class that the individual could never embody. Further, after the Great Depression in the 1930s, there emerged a fear of the loss of “rural values” of thriftiness, and the excess of fat became a moral failure.21 This fear of the excess converged with the “Anglo-Protestant ethic of deferred gratification, or containing one’s impulses and desires,” making the fat body a visible symbol of an individual’s laziness and lack of restraint.22 The idea of “choice” in one’s size, then, has been a long-engrained legacy in American culture that continues well into today, enabling for discrimination against and hatred of fat people.

Fat studies scholars work against the prejudice against fat people on multiple levels. The field in its existence removes some of the isolation of fatness by taking away the invisibility that has been forced onto the fat body. Margaret K. Bass observes, “Fat silences…you are ashamed to admit that you are fat – ashamed to be fat – so you do not tell.”23 Fat remains the unspoken definitive quality to an outsider, one that fat people are encouraged to lose at all costs, but one that is spoken about almost constantly by others. While fat people themselves remain invisible, discourses about fat remain at the fore of popular culture, whether it is the explosion of the diet industry in disguise known as the “wellness” industry or commentary on the weight of celebrities. Fatness has been a “spectacle” since the 19th century, when side shows would exhibit very large people as remarkably removed from the everyday life of the “regular people,” continuing into today with the success of such shows as My 600-Pound Life and The Biggest

20 Amy Erdman Farrell, Fat Shame, 42. 21 Amy Erdman Farrell, Fat Shame, 44. 22 Ibid. 23 Margaret K. Bass, “On Being a Fat Black Girl in a Fat-Hating Culture,” 222. 10

Loser.24 Everyday fat people continue to remain erased, for “Americans can talk about weight and fat people freely, without censorship or disapproval, because everyone knows that it is wrong and bad and undisciplined…to be fat.”25 The humanity is removed from fat people in the discussion of their very bodies.

Thus, fat studies is the intervention that “unmasks the fat body” from its simultaneous amplification and silencing, and “unravels the discourses that have most intransigently defined and fixed fat bodies.”26 Fat studies scholars span many disciplines, from historians, to cultural critics, doctors, authors, lawyers, and political scientists. Moreover, the fat studies movement continues to gain traction, despite the continuation of prejudice against fat people in society.

Teen Vogue has started a series of articles dedicated to celebrating and destigmatizing fatness.27

Lizzo, a fat Black woman, dominated the pop charts during the summer of 2019. As the tenets of fat studies continue to spread through the mainstream, American society could crawl slowly towards the end of discrimination against fat people.

On Television Studies

Television Studies scholars will themselves define the field in amorphous, differing ways. However, Jonathan Gray and Amanda Lotz’s definition of television studies will serve as the guiding definition for this project. They define television studies as an “approach to studying media,” for which the field “conceives of television as a repository for meanings and a site where cultural values are articulated…television is a key part of lived, everyday culture…and one which may allow use to understand…culture.”28 In summary, in order to do television studies,

24 Amy Erdman Farrell, Fat Shame, 32. 25 Margaret K. Bass, “On Being a Fat Black Girl in a Fat-Hating Culture,” 226. 26 Jana Evans Braziel and Kathleen LeBesco, “Editors’ Introduction,” 1. 27 Ashleigh Shackelford, “Fat is Not a Bad Word,” Teen Vogue, August 26, 2019, https://www.teenvogue.com/story/fat-is-not-a-bad-word. 28 Jonathan Gray and Amanda D. Lotz, Television Studies, (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2012), 22. 11 one must accept the cultural significance and meaning behind televisual media productions. The pair continues, “[television] is also an industrial entity produced under specific conditions that require analysis precisely because it is one of our society’s prime storytellers…and a site wherein power and ideology operate.”29 Thus, television is a medium through which society negotiates meanings for phenomena that occur off of the screen through their depictions on screen. Lotz and

Gray’s choice to emphasize the operation “power and ideology” summarizes the significance of representations on screen. Television studies, then, is founded in part on the analysis and challenging of on-screen depictions.

Notably, historians of the field of television studies emphasize the interdisciplinary nature of the subject. Scholar Robert C. Allen notes that, though the study of television in academic courses abounds across multiple disciplines, it would be rare to find any academic who “would identify him or herself as a ‘television studies’ scholar.”30 Television studies, much like television itself, exists within an ever-changing setting of multiple disciplines, theories, and scholars. This inherent diversity of interests within the field provides for more provocative, necessary work. Gray and Lotz touch on this in their Short Introduction to Television Studies, observing, “television studies will not always seek to understand television for the sake of understanding television alone…works…examine the operation of identity, power, authority, meaning, community, politics, education, play, and countless other issues.”31 Though this is not an exhaustive list of what the study of television can cover, by clarifying the scope of what television studies can be, Gray and Lotz define the field in terms of its diversity. Though one

29 Jonathan Gray and Amanda D. Lotz, Television Studies, 22. 30 Robert C. Allen, “Frequently Asked Questions: A General Introduction to the Reader,” in The Television Studies Reader, eds. Robert C. Allen and Annette Hill, (New York: Routledge, 2004), 2. 31 Jonathan Gray and Amanda D. Lotz, Television Studies, 22. 12 must agree on the societal significance of television in order to “do television studies,” the breadth of the field is enormous.

This project focuses on the on-screen depictions of fat people in queer-centered television shows, and, as such, the focus within the field of television studies on representations of groups of people is of primary interest. Television depictions of different groups matter because they can enhance or expose the power structures within society. Gray and Lotz write, “if identity and agency, ideology and power, worked through this realm of the popular, the close analysis of television would tell us how such entities worked…if we wanted to change society and culture, an understanding of the entire television system…could help us better understand the dominant ideology and how to change it.”32 In order to understand the power structures that underly discrimination against many people, we must understand how the popular medium of television contributes to and exposes these structures, and through that learn how to challenge them.

Television Studies scholars Robert C. Allen and Annette Hill note, “television not only represents social groups; it helps to construct and maintain the norms and values through which society is ordered.”33 Therefore, depictions of different groups on television can define how others see that group and how societal cultural values respond to them, underscoring the power of this specific medium. Allen and Hill continue, “in contrast to the limited number of individuals we interact with...television presents us with a multitude of individuals whom ‘we know,” underscoring that, for many viewers, the television characters that they meet can define and redefine what any group of people means to them as their only links to certain groups. 34

John Hartley notably observes that television serves a “teaching function,” and as such teaches

32 Jonathan Gray and Amanda D. Lotz, Television Studies, 42. 33 Robert C. Allen and Annette Hill, “Introduction to Part Five: Social Representation on Television,” in The Television Studies Reader, eds. Robert C. Allen and Annette Hill, (New York: Routledge, 2004), 368. 34 Robert C. Allen and Annette Hill, “Introduction to Part Five: Social Representation on Television,” 370. 13 the viewers about how other people “look, live, speak, behave, relate…television is a major source of ‘people-watching’ for comparison.”35 Whereas some may not have the opportunity to meet many different groups of people in person, television provides the opportunity to understand and observe a diverse cast. While this can be empowering when done responsibly,

Hartley highlights that irresponsible or negative depictions of different groups can become the defining mechanization through which someone learns about others.36 Moreover, the social groups that are depicted in television and those that are omitted can shape the viewers’ conception of the existence, size, or power of different people. Dina Giovanelli and Stephen

Ostertag refer to the concept of “numerical symbolic annihilation,” through which the media can effectively erase a social group from the imagination of the viewer by neglecting to feature them in a given program.37 When interrogating the depictions, or lack thereof, of fat people in queer- centered television shows, both numerical symbolic annihilation and the negative teaching function of the media must be considered.

Queer Studies

Akin to television studies and fat studies, queer studies is an interdisciplinary field, and one that critiques, interrogates, and analyzes humanity’s conceptions of sexuality and gender.38

Much like fat studies, the terminology of queer studies aims to take back the word queer, which has historically been used as a slur, for a term with a positive value judgment. While queer studies can refer to the greater LGBTQ+ community, queer theory pushes the boundaries of how

35 John Hartley, “Democratainment,” in The Television Studies Reader, eds. Robert C. Allen and Annette Hill, (New York: Routledge, 2004), quoted in Robert C. Allen and Annette Hill, “Social representation on Television,” 370. 36 Ibid. 37 Dina Giovanelli & Stephen Ostertag, “Controlling the Body,” in The Fat Studies Reader, eds. Esther Rothblum and Sandra Soloway, (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 290. 38 Reese Carey Kelly, “Queer Studies,” in Encyclopedia of Gender and Society, ed. Jodi O’Brien, (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, 2009), 691. 14 one considers and conceptualizes gender and sexuality as institutions. As Donald E. Hall and

AnnaMarie Jagose summarize, “queer studies attempts to clear a space for thinking differently about the relations presumed to pertain between sex/gender and sex/sexuality, between sexual identities and erotic behaviors.”39 Therefore, not only does the field center the experiences of sexual and gender identities that have been and continue to be oppressed, but it challenges people to consider the limitations and assumptions prescribed with all sexual behaviors, sexual identities, and genders. Some scholars purport that the conception of a sexual identity in and of itself as a static, defining category should be challenged, as any category one can ascribe to is inherently “disciplinary and regulatory,” no matter how liberating it may feel to declare oneself as a part of any group in the moment.40 Reese Carey Kelly phrases this well, describing that “it will be liberatory to simply desire, feel, and act, to just be sexual, rather than to attach those behaviors to larger cultural meanings,” as these have been deemed with a moral attachment since at least the Victorian era.41 This suggests that, though queer studies and the empowerment of people who identify as queer is important, true freedom will come when conceptions of what sexuality is are constantly redefined and amorphous.

The prescription of sexuality and sex as social rather than biologically inherent phenomena is foundational to queer studies. Not only is sexuality socially learned and constructed through the performance of “cultural roles and scripts,” all sexual behaviors are deemed with “a larger social and moral significance.”42 The cultural meanings behind these sexual behaviors can result in real, tangible negative effects for those who participate in sexual

39 Donald E. Hall and Annamarie Jagose, “Introduction,” in The Routledge Queer Studies Reader, eds. Donald E. Hall and Annamarie Jagose, (New York: Routledge, 2013), xvi. 40 Reese Carey Kelly, “Queer Studies,” 691. 41 Reese Carey Kelly, “Queer Studies,” 694. 42 Reese Carey Kelly, “Queer Studies,” 691. 15 acts and have sexual identities that are deemed as negative, sick, or criminal.43 Thus, participation in acts or identification as someone who society deems as “sick” makes the world read one as such.

Scholars within queer studies emphasizing a “queering” that goes beyond the human self and in towards the field itself. As described above, the “category” of a queer identity in and of itself is an institution that should be interrogated and analyzed on the basis of its liberatory possibilities. Expanding on this idea, foundational queer theorist Eve Sedgwick writes, “queer can refer to…the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone’s gender, of anyone’s sexuality aren’t made to signify monolithically.”44 The queerness lays not just in a category that one could fit into, but rather in the loss of categorization and the impossibility of definition.

More than just in terms of personal identity, queerness applies to the scholarship within the field.

Donald Hall and Annamarie Jagose postulate, “telling a chronologically organized account of queer studies…risks obscuring its multiple origins and influences. Single, linearly organized narratives cannot easily capture the sometimes inchoate energies of the various orders of political and scholarly work that mark the rise of queer studies.”45 A single narrative about where the field arose and how it developed would betray the markedly chaotic and indefinable elements that aid to queer studies, and thus, readers should be wary of a narrow-minded, one-sided depiction of queer studies. This can be applied to television studies and the depiction of queer people: a single, linearly organized narrative cannot capture the complexity and internal machinations of queer identities.

43 Reese Carey Kelly, “Queer Studies,” 691. 44 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Queer and Now,” in The Routledge Queer Studies Reader, eds. Donald E. Hall and Annamarie Jagose, (New York: Routledge, 2013), 8. 45 Donald E. Hall and Annamarie Jagose, “Introduction,” xvi. 16

Queer studies and fat studies are, importantly, intellectually linked. The social readings of fat and of queerness reflect one another in their historical and current medicalization, pathologizing, and stigmatization.46 As fat studies scholar Kathleen LeBesco notes, both queer and fat bodies have been seen and continue to be seen as the physical manifestation of the unnatural or excessive, and both queer and fat bodies destabilize normative conceptions of embodiment.47 While some scholars would argue that there is an inherent queerness to the fat body in its thwarting of dominant heterosexual desires, some caution against removing the meaning of queer from its dominant context of sexuality; however, this intellectual link between the conceptions of the fat and of the queer is worth noting.48 More than just linked in their physicality, fatness and queerness have been linked since the beginning of fat studies through theoretical connections, as fat studies has been influenced by queer studies scholarship.49 Since, as Eve Sedgwick notes, queerness can refer to a confounding of definition and the troubling of socially defined categories, fat studies mirrors these values in the interrogation of not only the cultural meanings of the fat body but also the rigidity of categories of “fat,” “thin,” and

“obese.”50 In consideration of fat people in queer television and fat queer people on screen, these conceptual links connect the very premise of these shows and their valuation of queerness to fatness and constructions of the body.

Throughout this project, questions of queer people’s experiences in their bodies will be relevant, for conceptions of what is attractive, what is “normal,” and more arise in discussions of the television characters’ relationships with fat people, if there are any in a given series. Though

46 Jackie Wykes, “Introduction: Why Queering Fat Embodiment?” in Queering Fat Embodiment, eds. Cat Pausé, Jackie Wykes, and Samantha Murray, (Burlington: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2014), 3. 47 Jackie Wykes, “Introduction: Why Queering Fat Embodiment?” 4. 48 Jackie Wykes, “Introduction: Why Queering Fat Embodiment?” 1. 49 Jackie Wykes, “Introduction: Why Queering Fat Embodiment?” 5. 50 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Queer and Now,” in The Routledge Queer Studies Reader, 8. 17 this project does not focus on the experiences of bodily dysphoria that can occur for genderqueer and transgender people without the context of body weight, these important corporeal relationships have been the subject of many works within the field of queer studies. There have been psychological and sociological studies on the perceptions of beauty standards and body weights of gay men and lesbians, many of which were conducted in the 80s and 90s. Dawn

Atkins describes the findings of 1990’s Body Image Task Force as such:

“First, the cultural norm was (and still is) that women were valued for their beauty (appearance norms) and men for their power/money. Lesbian and bisexual women were brought up with these appearance norms, many even developing eating disorders as young women; it is noteworthy that some of us began recovery at or about the same time as when we ‘came out.’…Yet, people in my workshops showed me that many of us continue to struggle with body image…For men, this did not seem to be the pattern. In fact, many gay men’s body image seemed in worse shape after coming out than before. It seemed that gay men were pressured to look for and be looked at for both their appearance and their money.”51

Of course, these findings relate to the personal experiences of the gay, lesbian, and bisexual people who participated in Atkins’ body-positive workshops. However, her work on personal body image provides foundations for inquiries surrounding the relationship between queer people and fatness. She shows that the queer community has never been divorced from dominant beauty norms and cultural ascriptions of the meaning of fatness.

Developments regarding a broader reading of the queer community to include qenderqueer and transgender individuals need to be made to work towards a more comprehensive, inclusive vision of the community’s relationship to body image and fat. One essay in Atkins’ collection, “The Razor’s Edge,” describes one transgender woman’s relationship to her fatness. The author Julie Waters writes on her childhood pre-transition, “when I looked in

51 Dawn Atkins, “Introduction: Looking Queer,” in Looking Queer, ed. Dawn Atkins (Binghamton, NY: Harrington Park Press, 1998), xxxix. 18 the mirror, I could not see a girl, even though I knew she was inside there somewhere. That wasn’t because I wasn’t feminine. In fact, I was very much so. It was because I wasn’t thin.”52

Thus, a large obstacle in her gender identity and expression was accepting her size. She also describes how the lack of “women of real size” in the media contributed to this experience of fatness discounting her femininity.53 Waters’ experience is just one of many, but her story indicates there is a complex relationship with fatness within the transgender community that deserves exploration. Though there is no dominant corporeal experience for members of the queer community, this early work remains important for establishing a niche for the study of corporeal relationships within the field of queer studies.

Looking Ahead

In the following chapters, I explore the representations of fat people and of the body in three queer-centered television shows. Chapter 1 examines Netflix’s 2019 show, Armistead

Maupin’s Tales of the City. This analysis not only focuses on the fat characters on screen and their characterizations, but on the significance of placemaking and inclusivity to the foundations of the show. Chapter 2 looks at FX’s Pose and the intersections on screen between the fat body and the show’s explorations of Ballroom Culture, the HIV/AIDS epidemic, and multiplicity of transgender embodiments. Chapter 3 focuses on Showtime’s The L Word and the importance of glamorous lesbian embodiment in the show’s erasure and usage of the fat body as a border.

While none of the shows feature a fat character in the main cast, all programs feature fat people in smaller roles, allowing for analysis of fat character constructions along with analysis of the discussion and framing of fat bodies as they intersect with more dominant themes of the shows.

52 Julie Waters, “The Razor’s Edge,” in Looking Queer, ed. Dawn Atkins (Binghamton, NY: Harrington Park Press, 1998), 182. 53 Ibid. 19

We begin with Tales of the City because of the importance of sweeping inclusion to the show’s creators, who emphasize the importance of all-queer production and writing teams and of bringing “realistic” queer people and stories to the screen. While this seems promising in consideration of the fat body, the show’s depictions of fat people and exclusion of their bodies warrants investigation.

20

Chapter 1: Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City

When Tales of the City first premiered as a PBS miniseries in 1994, the show made waves with its bold and honest depictions of queer people in San Francisco during the 1970s.

Based on the nine-novel series of the same name by Armistead Maupin, the first run of Tales of the City was one of the first positive depictions of queer people on mainstream television, and therefore holds a degree of historic weight for LGBTQ+ representation.54 Since then, the show has seen three reincarnations, with More Tales in 1998, Further Tales in 2001, and the latest reboot, Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City, which premiered on Netflix in June of 2019. The newest limited series brings the cast into the present, following the heroine of reboots past, Mary

Ann Singleton, as she returns to San Francisco and to the vibrant community in the shared house at 28 Barbary Lane. Viewers follow not only Mary Ann’s dramatic reconciliation with her chosen family, but also a diverse group of stories regarding queerness and identity. The show’s

2019 reboot aimed to bring new life to a queer ensemble-cast television classic, with intentions to serve as an accurate depiction of an inclusive and modern LGBT San Francisco experience.

Tales of the City commits its program to a diverse range of stories that center around queerness today, positing itself in its production choices and release as a show that explores and appreciates all LGBT stories. Tales lends storylines to the history behind the transgender liberation movement, the negotiations of identity that come when a partner transitions, the cultural differences between older and younger generations of gay people, the effects of gentrification in San Francisco on its long history of radical LGBTQ advocacy, and more. While the quality of this reboot and the handling of its large number of storylines can be debated, its

54Richard Lawson, “Netflix’s Tales of the City is Messy, Well-Meaning Pride Month Programming,” Vanity Fair, June 6, 2019, https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2019/06/netflix-tales-of-the-city-reiew.

21 attempts to create a comprehensive look at the lives of queer people today are remarkable.

Netflix released Tales of the City on June 7th, during the beginning of Pride Month in 2019, effectively identifying the program as a documentation of the various experiences of those who would be celebrating that month. Beyond the storylines of the program, Tales ends each episode not with a fade-to-black, but with a flash of the Philadelphia Pride Flag, which features black and brown stripes to represent the inclusion and celebration of queer people of color within the broader LGBT community. This choice emphasizes how central the creators of the show view queerness and diversity to the existence of the show itself, and how consciously forward-thinking they aim to be. This use of the Philadelphia Pride Flag also marks the show as attempting to be socially conscious and inclusive of a racially diverse group of people, notably in contrast to many other significant queer television shows.55

Tales outwardly commits not only to following multiple generations of queer people, but also to exploring the nuances of identity and struggles of many groups often ignored in more traditional television storytelling. This notion of the show’s comprehensiveness makes its depiction of fat people all the more troubling, due to their notable absence in the show as a part of the San Francisco queer community. In the large ensemble cast of Tales, there are three fat characters: Wrenita Butler, played by Michelle Buteau, Carlin, played by Fortune Feimster, and

Layla, played by Claudia Logan. Notably, Carlin and Layla only appear in one episode of the ten, and Wrenita appears in five. Due to Wrenita’s much larger role in the show than Layla and

55 In Melanie E.S. Kohnen’s Queer Representation, Visibility, and Race in American Film and Television, she establishes the interdependence of whiteness and queer representations in movies and television through multiple case studies. In her introduction, she writes, “The significance of whiteness in all of [these shows] is downplayed in popular and often also in academic discussions – it appears as merely a backdrop to portrayals of queer lives and practices. My analysis of these texts unveils the discursive labor that upholds the perception of queer visibility and whiteness as existing as mere coincidences” (4) As such, Kohnen’s work and analyses demonstrate the complex racial politics and significance of whiteness as an institution in important queer-focused television shows from Ellen to The Fosters and Orange is the New Black. 22

Carlin, my analysis will explore her specific characterization more in depth. The trio receive very little character development or exploration outside of their relationships to other characters’ plots, and are othered and physically isolated from the queer community at the core of the show.

As such, though the show has moments that embody fat positive sexuality and agency, Tales reinforces the marginalization of fat people within the LGBT community, effectively communicating not only that they do not exist in vibrant communities akin to that in the show, but also that fat characters do not have stories worth following. Given Layla, Carlin, and

Wrenita’s small amount of time on-screen in Tales, no meaningful fat character is part of the television show’s main cast, placing fat queer people as on the margins in the nominally inclusive and expansive community that surrounds the ensemble cast. Through analyzing the character developments of Wrenita, Layla, and Carlin, I will explore how their depictions align with or break from traditional fatphobic renderings of fat people on television, and how their characterizations interact with theories within fat studies and queer studies. As I will describe in the exploration of the marketing of Tales, the intersection of queerness and race and notions of racial diversity within the show should also be interrogated more deeply. I will explore the intersection of race, fat, and gender in my analysis of the construction of Wrenita, as one cannot divorce her character’s development from her identity as a fat Black woman. However, my larger analysis of the program will focus on the construction and depiction of the fat body, though notions of race and racial diversity remain important within Tales of the City and deserve their own critical study. To understand the significance of the lack of meaningful fat characters on

Tales, one must first understand the role of inclusion and diversity in the marketing and premise of the show.

Marketing and Queer Placemaking in “Tales” 23

The creators of the 2019 Tales of the City reboot marketed the show as more than just a comprehensive look at queer life today, but as by the queer community, for the queer community, and as an attempt to depict the San Francisco LGBTQ community accurately. Laura

Linney, the actress who plays Mary Ann, remarks in a Guardian interview that “…these stories are being told from the LGBTQ community. All of our writers are queer. All of our directors are queer.”56 While a show that markets itself as queer-made is compelling for viewers who are a part of the community, when there is an oversight in the representation of people within the group, the dearth in representation becomes all the more powerful given the creators’ own involvement within the community. Showrunner Lauren Morelli tells Vanity Fair in an interview, “we know how starved the younger, queer community is for authentic representation.

You want to create a world that looks like our world.”57 Yet, the world in Tales is not representative of queer communities around the United States today. Beyond the lack of representations of fat queer people, the show has received some criticism for its dearth of racial diversity specifically in relation to Black queer people. Although this iteration of Tales is much more racially diverse than earlier versions of the show, as mixed-race cast member Murray

Bartlett remarked in an interview with Buzzfeed’s AM to DM, “There’s a lot further to go…you see a lot of mixed representation, you don’t see a lot of the dark brothers, you know what I’m saying?”58 Though a product of the queer community, the lack of racial diversity in Tales of The

City shows the program to be an exclusive vision of that community. If, as Robert Allen and

56 Rebecca Patton, “What Happened in the Original ‘Tales of the City’? Netflix’s Revival Picks Up 18 Years Later,” Bustle, June 6, 2019, https://www.bustle.com/p/what-happened-in-the-original-tales-of-the-city-netflixs-revival- picks-up-18-years-later-17948607. 57 Joanna Robinson, “Tales of the City Gets a Modern Twist in Netflix’s New Revival,” Vanity Fair, March 19, 2019, https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2019/03/tales-of-the-city-netflix-photos-first-look?verso=true. 58 Buzzfeed News AM to DM, “The Cast of ‘Tales of the City’ Talks Reboot and How the Story is Told Differently,” YouTube Video, 10:43, June 3, 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xrdo1UhCZAA.

24

Annette Hill establish, watching television can introduce viewers to and influence their conceptions of different groups of people, a cast of racially diverse characters that includes fat people in a queer-made television show would make for a more expansive vision of the community for viewers of any sexuality. By omitting complex and meaningful fat characters from Tales of the City, the team of writers has created an exclusive vision of what they consider a queer community, erasing fat queer people from the supposedly comprehensive look at queer life today.

Claiming to be more than just a full representation of the queer community, showrunner

Lauren Morelli conceived of the show as a “safe space” for viewers as well. In one promotional video produced by Netflix, she comments, “Just as Barbary Lane is a safe place for our characters, I wanted the show to be a safe space for viewers.”59 Merriam-Webster describes what a “safe space” typically engenders as “a place intended to be free of bias, conflict, criticism, or potentially threatening actions, ideas or conversations.”60 These places can serve as spots of refuge for individuals whose identities prove them to be subject to harm within larger society. If a safe space is meant to be free of bias and conflict, the creators of the show position Tales to be the same for its LGBT viewers who may face discrimination or hardship in the outside world through this comparison. That Morelli would insinuate for an official promotional video that

Tales of the City could be a place of refuge for all viewers wrongfully posits the program as inclusive and celebratory of all marginalized identities. This characterization of the show as “safe space” also inadvertently removes it from criticism – if Tales of the City declares itself as free of bias or conflict, what could be its issues? For fat people, and as explored above, some viewers of

59 Netflix, “Tales of the City | Tales of the Generations,” YouTube Video, 3:27, May 14, 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qoBlks9mCg8. 60 Merriam-Webster, “Safe Space.” https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/safe%20space

25 color, the show’s lack of representations dissolves it of any status as a place free from bias. That the creators deem the show as an accurate, all-encompassing rendering of the LGBTQ+ community in San Francisco and beyond demonstrates a disconnect between the show and the people it attempts to depict, further “starving” queer viewers of accurate representation. Further, the house on Barbary Lane in the program is not accessed by the three named fat characters on the show during its run, actively removing them from the “safe place” for the characters. By placing these characters as outside of the house, they are more than just removed from the central location of the community in the show, but are rather removed from the insinuated apex of queer celebration and safety. Who has access to the declared “safe space” in Tales of the City and who does not again marks fat queer people as marginal to the program and to its creators’ vision.

Suffering from more than just exclusion from the specific “safe space” of Barbary Lane in Tales of the City, fat characters in the show are denied the opportunity to contribute to the significant tradition of placemaking within the queer community. Though Carlin and Layla both work at Body Politic, a queer cooperative burlesque bar in the tradition of public queer placemaking, their denied access to Barbary Lane – a private, explicitly queer space for resistance and celebration in the show – in turn denies them access to the most significant queer place on the show. Wrenita’s relegation to solely Brian’s apartment in her appearances on the program, despite the insinuations of a meaningful relationship between the two, removes the most significant of the three fat characters from any notion of community. In Tales of the City, an elderly transgender woman, Anna Madrigal, bought Barbary Lane in the late 1960s with the expressed desire of creating a home for members of the LGBT community to find safety within, as she faced unsafety and fear in the face of violent transphobia.61 This desire to create a safe

61 Episode eight of the series, “Days of Small Surrenders,” details Anna’s arrival in San Francisco in the 1960s and her journey to purchasing the house on Barbary Lane. She begins a romantic relationship with a police officer, who 26 haven for queer people in the face of discrimination is a landmark aspect of queer placemaking, as described in Ingram, Bouthillette, and Retter’s collection on the subject, Queers in Space. The trio writes, “the mental maps of most gay men and some lesbians show secret hidden spaces.

These less public queer spaces formed a major part of [their] lives…before gay liberation – indeed, they were central to our communities, especially when gay bars and other gay-owned businesses were repressed.”62 As such, private queer spaces like the group home at Barbary Lane have a historical legacy as a space for community and organizing in the face of often violent homophobia and transphobia, allowing for, as Ingram, Bouthillette, and Retter write, “coping with social conflicts…and building strategies for self-expression and fulfillment.”63 Moreover, home, family, and the significance of place are the dominant themes of Tales, whether in Mary

Ann’s experience of returning to her former home, the discussion on the expensive cost of living in San Francisco, the significance of the Barbary Lane as a grounding community in the lives of the main cast, or Anna’s story and her legacy as a matriarch of this fictional San Francisco queer community. The house at Barbary Lane serves the legacy as a central part of the queer community in its function not only as a private home but as a space for celebration and protest.

While the first episode of the season takes place during a large birthday party for Anna at the house, the last two episodes focus on a multi-day protest at the house to save the physical space and Anna’s reputation. In both of these instances, characters with small roles and extras appear

supports her on the condition of her isolation from other transgender women in San Francisco, but she defies him in her eventual involvement in the Compton’s Cafeteria Riot in 1966. Since they cannot remain together because of her arrest and involuntary outing to the police force, he gives her the money he had saved up for her gender reassignment surgery – money he had stolen from trans sex workers who he arrested – and she buys the house. She attributes her opening of her home as a place where other queer people could find safety to guilt she felt for not giving the money back to the women it was stolen from and not risking as much as they did for trans liberation. 62 Gordon Brent Ingram, Anne Marie Bouthiellete, and Yolanda Retter, “Narratives of Space: Subjective and Collective,” in Queers in Space, eds. Gordon Brent Ingram, Anne Marie Bouthiellete, and Yolanda Retter (Seattle, WA: Bay Press, 1997), 56. 63 Gordon Brent Ingram, Anne Marie Bouthiellete, and Yolanda Retter, “Narratives of Space: Subjective and Collective,” 55. 27 to support the community, but Wrenita, Carlin, and Layla do not appear. While these two events are unifying moments for the queer community of Tales, these fat characters do not return on screen for them, further divorcing them not only from the “safe space” at Barbary Lane but also from its function as a LGBT-community epicenter. Given the significance of place in both queer history and the television show itself, the exclusion of fat characters further isolates them from conceptions of queer community-building.

The fat characters in Tales of the City are extraneous, and as such the creators physically and symbolically place them on the margins of the program’s queer community. More than just numerically annihilating fat people, Tales of the City adds to the qualm of simultaneous hypervisibility and invisibility inherent to discourse surrounding fatness and fat people. As fat studies scholars Kathleen LeBesco and Jana Evans Braziel write, “the American preoccupation with weight...is ironically paralleled by…the erasure of fat bodies.”64 In this phenomenon, while discussions of fatness as a quality abound in popular culture, the representation of actual fat people and acknowledgement of their humanity is rare. Fat characters’ isolation in Tales draws on this erasure of fat people’s humanity. This physical and symbolic isolation in turn places fat queer people as a group on the margins of the queer community of reality in the eyes of the viewer, further alienating them rather than promoting the inclusion the program propagates in its marketing and other storylines.

Tales of Three Fat Characters: Wrenita, Carlin, & Layla

While Tales does not include any jokes or comments that disparage the fat characters’ bodies in a manner akin to other contemporary television shows, the program ultimately

64 Jana Evans Braziel and Kathleen LeBesco, “Editors’ Introduction,” 8.

28 emphasizes the “otherness” of fat people within the queer community in their physical and symbolic isolation as well as their lack of development. No fat men appear on the program, either, continuing the conception of fat as feminine and therefore falsely investing in a conception of body-types that adheres to a gender binary in a television show that aims to celebrate the thwarting of gender and sexual norms.65 Further, Wrenita, the most prolific of the three characters, is not a queer person, and serves as the love interest for the straight character

Brian Hawkins. Though she is depicted positively and often serves as the voice of reason or comic relief, Tales does not give Wrenita a life outside of her relationship with Brian. Wrenita’s poor character construction cannot be fully attributed to her fatness, as her status as a Black woman also influences the implications of her characterization. At times, Wrenita is an asexualized emotional support character, until Brian suddenly expresses sexual interest, at which point the depiction of her changes. She becomes a desirable and emotionally wise woman, chastising Brian for his poor treatment of her, but ultimately serves as a vehicle for a lesson on how Brian should treat women. This lesson functions in pursuit of the resolution of his relationship with Mary Ann, the straight skinny white woman at the center of the show and essential “opposite” to Wrenita. While Wrenita is ultimately an empowered character, if poorly constructed, she remains fully on the outside of the queer community in Tales. Thus, though she breaks societal expectations by showing the sexuality of fat women, she remains an outsider and does not bring fat queer people to the fore in her inclusion on the show. Similarly, Carlin, a fat white lesbian, is a positive addition to the show, and details an emotional coming out experience

65 Jana Evans Braziel elaborates on the feminization of fat in her piece in Bodies Out of Bounds: Fatness and Transgression entitled “Deterritorializing the Fat Female Body.” She writes, “fatness in men marks them as ‘effeminate,’ ‘emasculated,’ and ‘soft’.” (238) She grounds this in conceptions from classical philosophy of the female body as “porous” and more “vulnerable” to “fluctuation and imbalance.” (238) Male bodies, then, are meant to be less porous and soft, and stronger against an “imbalance” such as corpulence. 29 for her one appearance in the episode “A Touch O’ Butch.” But the treatment and development of her character is limited due to such a short amount of time in the show. As such, her scenes ultimately serve to advance the storylines of other characters. Layla’s arc on the show is even more truncated, as she is limited to a three-minute appearance in episode four. To best investigate the significance and meanings of these characters’ presence on the show, detailed inspection of their respective scenes is necessary.

Viewers first meet Wrenita during episode two of the reboot, “She Messy,” a title taken from her line. During this introduction, Wrenita is established as a funny and likeable character, though one with no personality outside of her relationship to Brian Hawkins. She and Brian, the aforementioned older straight man who is part of the original cast of Tales, watch baseball on his couch as she gives him life and dating advice in between her many jokes. Though her character is boisterous and memorable, Wrenita is not named when she is introduced, rendering her personhood invisible. Instead, she serves as nameless comic relief and emotional support that in turn advances the plot by advising Brian to go on a date with one of the women that he matches with on a dating app, driving the conflicted romantic storyline between Brian and Mary Ann forward. Before she begins with the advice, the only information the viewer learns about Wrenita is that she loves goat yoga and watches baseball with Brian regularly, giving her very little depth beyond her interactions with him. Further, she understands immediately why Brian is insecure about dating one of the women, which all resemble his ex-wife Mary Ann, as she comments,

“That’s why you’re slumped over like a rag doll with no insides,” knowing what has made him upset without Brian telling her. She continues to read his needs, as she comments, “What do you need right now, boo? You need a fair-weather bro with a beer and a cheer, or the wise, ‘been through all kinds of shit’ neighbor with sage advice?” She then hands him beer and proceeds to 30 give him her insight into why he is so hesitant to begin dating again, answering the question for herself. Through this interaction, viewers learn that Wrenita exists mostly in relation and service to Brian. Further, she is fully removed from any sexual innuendo, as her interest in baseball and frankness with Brian appears to place her as a platonic rather than sexual interest. She is able to anticipate his emotional needs without him saying anything, and spouts advice at the cost of her interest in simply watching the baseball game with him. Her ill-defined personhood outside of her advice to him render her not as a character helping a friend in need, but a woman who exists in Tales of the City solely to help Brian learn how to date again after Mary Ann’s reappearance in San Francisco. While the relationship between Brian and Wrenita evolves into a sexual one over her 5-episode arc, this establishment of Wrenita as solely at the emotional service of Brian contains echoes of the well-established trope of a fat Black woman as a mammy.

Though Wrenita is not a full embodiment of what Patricia Hill Collins defines as the mammy, one core aspect of the concept defines her arc on Tales of the City. The traditional mammy figure comes from the legacy of the Southern plantation, and is an echo of “the faithful, obedient domestic servant.”66More than just obedient, the mammy cares for the white family she works for better than she cares for herself and her family, symbolizing the accepted subordination of Black women.67 She is an asexualized figure, often in part because of her large matronly body, fully in the service of her white oppressors. Wrenita does not embody all of these aspects, and is not depicted as a mammy in the literal sense as a child’s caregiver, but she serves as the emotional subordinate to Brian Hawkins, accepting his problems as her own and existing in Tales of the City as someone only relevant to the viewer because of the emotional support she gives him. As referenced in Jennifer Fuller’s piece on the role of the mammy stereotype in

66 Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought (New York: Routledge, 2000), 80. 67 Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought (New York: Routledge, 2000), 80. 31 television of the 1980s, Collins argues that “the mammy stereotype creates the expectation that ideal Black women (no matter their profession) will be helpful and deferential to whites.”68 This legacy of helpfulness and subservience plays out in Wrenita’s character. Moreover, as Kimberly

Wallace-Sanders writes, the mammy is often not given a name or life outside of her role as caretaker, and Wrenita is not named in Tales until after her fourth appearance on the show.69 She does not exist outside of Brian’s apartment, either. During her five-episode arc, she is only depicted in his apartment, confining her physical existence to a space that belongs to Brian.

Confined to a space that is not her own, and denied access to the community space that serves as the focal point of the show, Wrenita is relegated to solely Brian’s world both physically and symbolically. In this way, she is not only denied a well-written backstory and character arc but is also subject to the continuation of the stereotype of the mammy as living solely to complement the life of a white person. As one of three Black characters on the show, and the one of the only

Black women, this rendering of Wrenita cannot be divorced from the legacy of poorly constructed Black female characters who fulfill the mammy trope that came before her. As scholar Jennifer Fuller writes, “stereotypes…that persist, like the mammy, are reconstructed to fit the needs and the limitations of the social context and of the particular text in which they appear,” and Wrenita’s one-sided emotional support and lack of developed personhood within

Tales could be a new iteration of mammyhood for the “woke” and inclusively-intended programming of the present day. The writers of Tales of the City reduce the one fat character with a multi-episode arc, then, to a poorly written stereotype of Black womanhood.

68 Jennifer Fuller, “Gimme a Break and Limits of the Modern Mammy,” in Watching While Black, ed. Beretta E. Smith-Shomade, (Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2012), 108. 69 Kimberly Wallace-Sanders, Mammy (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008), 6. 32

Tales of the City, then, “mammifies” Wrenita into becoming Brian’s crying shoulder and emotional support despite the pair being introduced as baseball companions and friendly neighbors at best. bell hooks defines this concept of mammification as pervasive to the experience of Black women, writing, “racist and sexist assumptions that Black women are somehow ‘innately’ more capable of caring for others continues to permeate cultural thinking about Black female roles,” and that Black women are often expected to take on “multi-purpose caretaker roles.”70 This “innate” caretaking ability is perpetuated through the sequence of

Wrenita’s comforting of Brian and his complaints about Mary Ann. Wrenita and Brian discuss

Mary Ann in almost all of the scenes they share, and in this first scene, her encouragement and caretaking come right after this discussion quoted above; her role in Brian’s life in Tales is in service to his relationship with another character. Wrenita is shown in direct opposition to cold, white, skinny Mary Ann, positioning the two as opposite poles. While the degree of friendship between Wrenita and Brian is unclear, as the writers of the show do not go into great detail on the pair’s background other than that they are neighbors, the point remains that Wrenita’s character is built around her service to Brian as a selfless comforter and anticipator of his feelings. Since caretaking is not Wrenita’s job, and the writers do not write any moments in which Brian reciprocates this aspect of their relationship and takes care of her in an emotional capacity, Tales of the City fails to depict a well-written fat Black woman.

By becoming Brian’s sexual partner, however, Wrenita thwarts one aspect of the mammy stereotype and stereotypical expectations for the fat female body. Mammies are in part so pervasive in American popular culture because of their asexualization and the way in which that

70 bell hooks and Cornel West, Breaking Bread, Insurgent Black Intellectual Life (Boston: South End Press, 1991), 154. 33 serves as “surrogate to contain all those fears of the physical female” and female sexuality.71

Further, as the fat body has continuously been marked as disgusting, out-of-control, and a public health risk, a positive sexual depiction of a fat woman goes against the grain of dominant conceptions of the fat body’s sexual ability. Dina Giovanelli and Stephen Ostertag, who completed a study on fat women in popular sitcoms, write that “fat female television representations reflect a hierarchy of patriarchy that suggests to viewers how females should look and act if they wish to be viewed positively,” and reinforce notions of fat as an indication of personal failure and disgust.72 Thus, the character of Wrenita challenges a history of the asexualized and demonized fat woman on television by beginning a sexual relationship with

Brian, in which both parties express mutual attraction, in opposition to earlier narratives of fat women’s desperation. Further, in a study of prime-time television shows conducted for the

American Journal of Public Health in 2003, researchers found that fat women were less likely to be depicted as attractive, involved in a romantic relationship, or showing physical affection.73

Therefore, the Tales of the City writers break the mold of scolding fat women through the construction of lonely, unhappy, and unattractive characters on television. However, that

Wrenita’s development as a character begins and ends with her relationship with Brian negatively reflects that same “hierarchy of patriarchy” by grounding her character in the desires of a man.

When the pair first gets together, Wrenita arrives at Brian’s apartment to debrief another strained incident of his with Mary Ann, continuing to serve as emotional support. He complains,

71 Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought, 81. 72 Dina Giovanelli & Stephen Ostertag, “Controlling the Body,” 295. 73 Bradley S. Greenberg, Matthew Eastin, Linda Hofschire, Ken Lachlan, & Kelly D. Brownell, “Portrayals of Overweight and Obese Individuals on Commercial Television,” The American Journal of Public Health 93, no. 8 (August 2003): 1342. 34

“I am sick and tired of the same dance over and over and over again with [Mary Ann],” to which she retorts, “Then stop showing up to the ball, Cinderella!” Brian mulls this over, replying,

“You’re right, and I’m done. Fuck Mary Ann and her sad…whatever.” They toast to his determination to stop speaking with Mary Ann. Brian thinks for a second, takes another look at her, then simply states, “We should fuck.” Wrenita asks, “Oh I’m sorry, but do you think you can handle this?” to which Brian replies, “I don’t know.” Notably, the viewer still does not know

Wrenita’s name or how she knows Brian at this point in the show, and this proposition comes after a barrage of complaints from Brian about Mary Ann, positioning Wrenita and Brian’s relationship as an antithesis to his previous relationship with Mary Ann. The viewer does not know who Wrenita is until a full episode later, when Brian refers to her as “Wren from down the hall.” While the program shows Wrenita to be desirable and confident during this interaction, she has no name or backstory to her: she is still just the emotional support for Brian, and now his sexual partner. In the 2003 study on television from the American Journal of Public Health mentioned above, researchers reported that it was rare for prime time shows to depict fat women in relationships.74 By giving Wrenita a simplistic relationship with Brian, as baseball buddy, crying shoulder and sexual partner only, and no character development outside of their relationship, the show’s creators play into this established trope of fat women as lonely or undeserving of romantic attention.75 Brian’s plotline also revolves around his relationship with

Mary Ann, and while he is intent on advancing his relationship with Wrenita, Brian’s near- constant complaints about Mary Ann show him to be still emotionally tethered to his ex-wife.

This places Wrenita and Brian’s somewhat subversive relationship within the context of a man whose storyline revolves around a different woman. Wrenita, then, is still a vessel through which

74 Greenberg et al., “Portrayals of Overweight and Obese Individuals on Commercial Television,” 1342. 75 Dina Giovanelli & Stephen Ostertag, “Controlling the Body,” 295. 35 the writers can advance the romantic storyline between Brian and Mary Ann. This correlates with an earlier study of fat women on television completed by Dina Giovanelli and Stephen

Ostertag, which found that “fat women on prime-time television are used as props against which thinner women are compared, judged, and valued.”76 Earlier programming has also used sex between fat and thin characters to emphasize the confusion, lack of self-esteem, or other personal problems of the thin character.77 Therefore, while Tales deviates from other programming in its refusal of fat-deprecating jokes and inclusion of fat sexuality, Wrenita’s poorly contrived characterization remains in step with earlier shows and in dialogue with established representations of the fat body on screen.

Though her character does serve as a means to Brian reconciling with Mary Ann,

Wrenita demonstrates empowerment and self-sufficiency as she breaks off her relationship with

Brian, remaining a positive character in the viewer’s eyes due to Brian’s multiple missteps and refusal to adapt to her desires that do not align with his own and anger with her. After Brian makes passive aggressive remarks about their unknown relationship status in Episode five of the series, “Not Today, Satan,” Wrenita comments, “What’s wrong? Please don’t give me the emotional labor of trying to figure out what’s in your mind. I can see it in your face.” Though a shallow callback to the concept of the emotional support Black women are often expected to offer in professional settings as explained by bell hooks, interactions between Brian and Wrenita such as these demonstrate that she differs from earlier television depictions of fat women in her confidence and willingness to refute a romantic partner’s desires.78 Brian and Wrenita’s relationship ends when he criticizes her for not appreciating him more, saying, “Most women

76 Dina Giovanelli & Stephen Ostertag, “Controlling the Body,” 294. 77 Jerry Mosher, “Setting Free the Bears,” in Bodies Out of Bounds: Fatness and Transgression, eds. Jana Evans Braziel and Kathleen LeBesco, (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001), 185. 78 Dina Giovanelli & Stephen Ostertag, “Controlling the Body,” 294. 36 would kill for this, you know that right?” to which she responds, “Excuse me? Kill for what? For some dude who gets all pissy when the woman he’s fucking doesn’t stop her whole world for him? Come on, honey.” She continues, “You’re not talking to me, you’re talking to her. This

Mary Ann nonsense has got you all fucked up…I like you too much to make this the disaster I know it’s going to be,” and leaves, ending their relationship and effectively her storyline on the show. Far from the fat women ignored by romantic and sexual partners in the television shows analyzed in studies past, Wrenita retains her independence and agency over her relationship, refuting the argument that she should feel “lucky” to see a man that cares for her at all. This ties into the notion within fat studies that it is radical for fat people to “take up space, perform as excessive, and become purposefully and shamelessly ‘too much’,” as Wrenita refuses to contort to the desires that Brian has for her and their relationship, taking up space and refusing to acquiesce.79 This demonstration of strong will and intentional taking-up of space remains a significant development in her character and in representation of fat people as strong-willed, in contrast to the dominant societal narrative that fat people lack discipline or will.

Yet for Wrenita’s last appearance in the show during episode seven, “Next Level Sh*t,” she returns to comfort Brian, who has had no contact with her since they broke up and he reunited with Mary Ann. As soon as she walks in his apartment and he tells her that his adult daughter has disappeared, she says, “come on” and the program cuts to a shot of her listening to

Brian’s worries and fears for his daughter’s safety. Wrenita’s willingness to offer emotional support to Brian after his poor treatment towards her demonstrates a return to the caretaker role, given that, based on the details provided by the writers on Wrenita and Brian’s relationship, the pair is nothing more than a pair of friendly neighbors, making forgiveness a more fraught

79 Breanne Fahs, “A Tale of Three Classrooms: Fat Studies and its intellectual Allies,” Counterpoints 467 (2016): 226. 37 decision than it would be for a more intimate pair. In this conversation Brian apologizes for his previous behavior and the pair reconciles, but Wrenita’s return to a caring role before any apology correlates with an evolution of the subservience and “innate” desire to care often expected of Black women. What follows his apology is Wrenita’s exaltation of her innate ability to “always be right,” followed soon by an exercise in which she has Brian “list all of the reasons why your baby girl gonna be alright,” bookending a celebration of herself with further work in comforting Brian. Thus, despite Wrenita’s demonstrated confidence, deliberate space-taking and humor, the core function of her character remains comfort for Brian.

Carlin is similar to Wrenita in her likability and positive presence in the show, as well as in her relegation to a short storyline resulting in an underdeveloped character. Her character’s story spans the sixth episode of the series, “Touch O’ Butch,” in which her interactions with the mysterious filmmaker on the show, Claire, foreshadows the reveal of her as the ultimate villain of the season. While not the focus of the episode, her appearances drive the storyline not only of

Claire’s negative intentions, but also of the love story between two other characters in the main cast of Tales. Carlin first appears on camera as the manager of the queer burlesque club in the show, Body Politic, arguing backstage with a performer over the name of the performance theme for the evening. She then steps into an interview for Claire’s documentary about the disappearance of LGBT community spaces in San Francisco, and describes her experiences with homophobia and dysphoria as a child in the south, exclaiming that her local gay bar as a teenager

“saved my fucking life.” Carlin’s coming out story is emotional, describing how “I was pretty sure I was the only lesbo in the whole world,” and “every Sunday, when my mom would make me put on a dress and curl my hair for church, I felt like I was forced in a girl Halloween costume or something.” Her storytelling emotionally connects with viewers whose experiences 38 as children may echo hers, rendering her sympathetic and relatable. When asked to refilm her personal story for the documentary to change her language from describing the LGBT community as “freaks and weirdos” to “marginalized outsiders” to better suit Claire’s tastes,

Carlin retorts, “How about I say….’Go fuck yourself?’” Not only does this refusal to bend in her sharing her own personal history demonstrate a radical taking up of space for a fat woman akin to that of Wrenita, but it also shows Claire’s character to be disingenuous.

Carlin reappears in the episode during main cast member May’s burlesque performance, for which she sings the backing track of “Shave ‘Em Dry” in a tuxedo. “Shave ‘Em Dry” is a dirty blues song first recorded by Ma Rainey in 1924, who sang openly about her queerness and love for masculine presentation, and also recorded by Lucille Bogan in 1935.80 Rainey’s song

“Prove it On Me Blues,” in particular, includes lyrics that detail “It’s true I wear a collar and tie,/makes the wind blow all the while” and “I don’t like no men.”81 While “Shave ‘Em Dry” is not the track that scholars often point to when discussing Rainey’s queerness and does not explicitly mention her attraction to women, the inclusion of a track by Ma Rainey demonstrates a degree of knowledge and appreciation among the creators of Tales of the City for not only historically significant queer women, but also a fat Black queer woman. Carlin’s rendition echoes that of Bogan’s, whose blues music also touched on queerness, such as her song “B.D.

Woman’s Blues” which covers the behavior of butch lesbians. Further, this inclusion of sexually explicit song with lyrics that exalt the singer’s own body such as “I got something between my legs/That’ll make a dead man come” provides the space for Carlin to tout her own sexual prowess in a body that is denied as such by dominant conceptions about fat people as asexual,

80Tyina Steptoe, “Big Mama Thornton, Little Richard, and The Queer Roots of Rock ‘n’ Roll,” American Quarterly 70 no. 1 (2018), 58. 81 Ibid. 39 unathletic, and ugly. However, this inclusion of the song raises more questions on the intentions of the show, as there is no allusion to the history of the song for those who are not attuned to the blues and its queer history, and Carlin’s position of whiteness in singing music originally performed by Black women. As such, this reference to culturally significant queer blues women fails to prove meaningful or advance their legacy. Further, the song ends with a heterosexual sex scene between Mary Ann and Brian, in effect using queer art and history to advance the love plot between the only significant heterosexual characters on Tales of the City. While Carlin’s ownership of her body as sexual in its corpulence brings acknowledgment of fat sexuality, the potential for her “Shave ‘Em Dry” performance to pay homage to significant fat lesbians before her is lost. Considering this is Carlin’s last appearance in Tales, her assertion of sexual freedom in “Shave ‘Em Dry” is cheapened, as this radical notion is followed by sex between the most socially privileged characters in the show. Given her preference for “freaks and weirdos” as she describes earlier in the show, this usage of her performance for the upholding of sexual normalcy removes an element of its radical potential.

This empty tribute is repeated in the show in its inclusion of a fat burlesque dancer in episode four of Tales of the City, “The Price of Oil.” For one minute, a dancer who is later identified as Layla performs a glamorous burlesque routine at the Body Politic. This performance is enthusiastically received by the audience, and as fat burlesque dancer Heather McAllister writes, “fat dance is rare enough; fat exotic/erotic dance is pretty much unheard of outside of

‘fetish’ acts that alienate rather than normalize fat bodies.”82 As such, Layla’s performance at a queer venue catering to performers of all sizes, while short, demonstrates an acceptance and celebration of fat sexuality and performance in the San Francisco community of Tales. In the

82 Heather McAllister, “Embodying Fat Liberation,” in The Fat Studies Reader, eds. Esther Rothblum and Sandra Soloway, (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 305. 40 scene directly following her dance, Layla describes to Mary Ann the empowerment she gains from her performance, citing that burlesque allows her to “take control.” She is confident, strong in her beliefs, and actively takes up a radical amount of space in her celebration of her body. Yet, she is included in Tales for three minutes total in the season, bringing forth the concept of numerical annihilation once again. Multiple members of the main cast work at Body Politic as a dancer or bartender, yet her character is relegated to very few lines in her place of work and a debate on feminism, necessitating the question of why her character’s development should differ from other staff members.

The quandary of Tales of the City is not one of a hatred of fat bodies or the conscious desire to fully erase them from the queer community, but of the constant failure to fully develop fat queer characters in a show predicated on full inclusion. Given the egregious history of jokes about and crude imitations of fat people in television, Tales of the City’s failure to include significant fat queer characters can appear small. However, the full separation of fat people, queer and straight, from the community at the core of the show, and the show’s refusal to devote storylines to develop the fat characters as well-rounded people, becomes troubling in the face of its creators’ conscious marketing and development of the show as accepting and celebratory of all. Moreover, the inclusion of such a diverse array of emotionally charged stories for the main cast inadvertently communicates that the stories of the fat characters featured on the show are not worth following in comparison. When taken into consideration with the American obsession with fat bodies that hinges on the dismissal and erasure of actual fat people and their humanity, this erasure and messaging compounds into a new version of this simultaneous erasure and caricature. Layla, Carlin, and Wrenita are all relatively positively presented characters, but they are denied the complex humanity that the main cast is afforded, with storylines on the 41 renegotiation of identity at the core of the show. Physically, three fat bodies appear on the screen, but are regarded in their presence alone, with very little investment made into the personalities and selves of the characters. Moreover, their bodies never enter the places most significant to the main characters featured in the show, central to the development of the queer community the viewer follows. When looking to culturally significant queer-centered shows beyond Tales of the City, many of which do not consciously attempt to include diverse communities, this numerical annihilation and othering of fat people continues. In the case of

Ryan Murphy’s Pose, this relationship to the fat body is more complex, with little time afforded to actual fat people on screen but the philosophy of embodiment in line with fat positive thought.

42

Chapter 2: Pose

Critics and viewers alike have praised television series Pose since it premiered on FX in

2018. Having completed its second season on August 20, 2019, the series continues to receive accolades for its sincere and emotional depictions of Black and Latinx trans and gay life in the late 1980s, its celebration of ballroom culture, and its diverse group of stars, writers, and producers. Notably, the show features the largest cast of transgender people in television history, and Janet Mock became the first transgender woman of color to write and direct an episode of television with the show’s sixth episode of season one, “Love is the Message.”83 Beyond its representational milestones, Pose is known for its emotionally sensitive treatment of the onset of the AIDS crisis’s effects on queer people of color in the 1980s, making a point to not only show the hardships and tragedies but also show the moments of joy and fellowship.84 Throughout the series, viewers follow multiple ballroom community members as they negotiate their places within and outside the community, bringing to the fore discussions of transphobia and racism within the LGBT community, conceptions of what womanhood engenders, and the importance of a chosen family in light of oppression. In celebratory and colorful ballroom scenes, the program celebrates the bodies, talents, and full selves of its queer and trans characters.

Examining Pose and its treatment of fat people provides a perspective on conceptions of the politics of fatness within and about the trans community through the lens of ballroom culture in the 1980s. As the show explores ideas of health during the beginnings of the AIDS crisis and notions of womanhood and its relation to curviness and body shape, the politics of who can be

83Allie Gemmill, “Janet Mock Wrote and Directed an Episode of ‘Pose’ and Made TV History,” Teen Vogue, July 9, 2018, https://www.teenvogue.com/story/janet-mock-wrote-directed-episode-of-pose-made-tv-history. It should be noted as well that Mock serves as a co-executive producer for Pose. 84Richard Lawson, “Pose is Necessary, Bold Melodrama,” Vanity Fair, May 30, 2018, https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2018/05/pose-fx-ryan-murphy-review. 43 fat, who has “good” or attractive amounts of fat, and how much fat is attractive arise. Through the recurring fat character of Veronica, multiple side characters, and discussions of how fat can bolster femininity, Pose contains varied perspectives on fatness and fat people’s place within the queer community. However, to best understand the body politics of Pose, one must analyze not only how the show posits itself as a site of inclusion within the mediascape of today, but also the gender and body standards within the ballroom community that the program is based on.

When actors, producers, and other involved parties speak about Pose, notions of revolution, the importance of representation, and inclusion in Hollywood arise, marking the show as a trailblazer and program for viewers interested in exploring often ignored or violently erased histories. Beyond its remarkable strides in increasing the number and the sincerity of the representations of Black and Latinx queer people and, specifically, transgender women, Pose also aims to pay homage to the AIDS crisis and the moments of queer oppression that many heterosexual people in power would rather be forgotten. The program is important in these regards, and especially in its unapologetic and celebratory centering of Black and Latinx queer and transgender people. Mj Rodriguez, the lead actress who plays Blanca on the show, emphasizes in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter that acting on the program “feels like a form of activism,” particularly in this cultural moment of a resurgence of transphobic government policies and an emboldening of white supremacists.85 She underscores that “Pose gives me hope that we can change people’s hearts and minds…at the end of the day, we’re all human.”86 Other actors in the show, including Dakota Johnson (Elektra) and Indya Moore

(Angel), repeatedly emphasize the importance of positive, accurate representations of Black and

85Evan Real, “’Pose’ Stars on Why the FX Show ‘Feels Like a Form of Activism’,” The Hollywood Reporter, November 26, 2018, https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/lists/pose-stars-why-fx-show-feels-like-a-form-activism- 1161486/item/pose-stars-why-fx-show-mj-rodriguez-1161488. 86 Ibid. 44

Latinx trans people in television, and praise Pose for its role in advancing the number of trans women featured in the medium.87 As such, positive representations of marginalized groups, and an emphasis on expanding the number of stories seen about these groups, remains central to the very premise and existence of Pose. Moreover, Ryan Murphy, one of the show’s creators and a significant figure in the expansion of queer television more broadly, is quoted by Janet Mock in saying “the reason I’m doing this show is the internal thing that I’ve been saying to myself – show running as advocacy.”88 While the article she quotes him in later notes that he has since expanded his reasons for producing and promoting Pose to include a love and care for the importance of the story and its core storyline of trying to make something of oneself, this positioning of Pose as advocacy by the show’s executive producer is important. If the show’s driving force and creator views it as a political and activist act above all else, the representations of the show’s characters carry with them a political weight and intentionality. In understanding the care taken with Pose’s main cast of Black and Latinx trans and queer people, one can better understand the program itself and the meanings of its treatment of people who live at the intersection of their Blackness, queerness, and fatness.

When considering the body politics of Pose, an understanding of ballroom culture and its relationship with normativity in gender, appearance, and sexuality is necessary, as is an understanding of the culture’s ultimate function as a community-building space for marginalized people. Ballroom culture is central to the entire premise of Pose, with the series accrediting the

1990 documentary Paris is Burning as partial inspiration.89 Ballroom culture, as lead actress Mj

87 Evan Real, “’Pose’ Stars on Why the FX Show ‘Feels Like a Form of Activism’,” The Hollywood Reporter. 88Jude Dry, “How Ryan Murphy’s ‘Showrunning as Advocacy’ Led to Janet Mock’s Historic Netflix Deal,” Indiewire, June 9, 2019, https://www.indiewire.com/2019/06/ryan-murphy-pose-interview-janet-mock-lgbt- 1202151338/. 89Caroline Framke, “The Revolutionary Happiness of ‘Pose’,” Variety, July 23, 2018, https://variety.com/2018/tv/columns/pose-fx-season-finale-mother-of-the-year-1202880972/. 45

Rodriguez states in conversation with Seth Meyers, “is where LGBT community members, they go to, they find refuge, they find comfort, they get to be who they truly want to be, and they just get to live their lives completely.”90 This comfort and openness in the community that Rodriguez describes serves in opposition to an outside world that is hostile to the predominantly Black and

Latinx queer people who participate in ballroom culture. Fellow Pose star Dominique Jackson elaborates on this in an interview with Studio 10, describing how “ballroom culture was about people who were ostracized from their families…where we could appreciate each other and uplift each other…these different categories [in competition] tapped into the many talents that so many people had that they could not express.”91 Jackson elaborates on the ballroom space as more than just a place in which Black and Latinx queer people can find community; rather, it also offers a rare venue for them to showcase their talents and celebrate themselves and their appearances. Ballroom culture also challenges white hegemonic beauty standards within the

LGBT community. While drag balls emerged in New York City in the 1930s, they were hosted by white gay men, only a few times a year, and Black queens were expected to imitate white features of beauty.92 Pepper LeBeija, a queen featured in Paris is Burning and known as “the last remaining queen of the Harlem Drag Balls,” relayed that “it was our goal then to look like white women.”93 However, in the 1960s, Black queens began holding their own balls in Harlem, not competing to minimize their Blackness but to push the boundaries and celebrate the beauty within their community.94 Thus, ballroom culture was created to and continues to aim to

90Late Night with Seth Meyers, “Mj Rodriguez Explains Underground Ballroom Culture,” YouTube Video, 4:38, August 16, 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvsi6vJtXtQ. 91Studio 10, “Dominique Jackson & Indya Moore Talk ‘Pose’ & Ballroom Culture | Studio 10,” YouTube Video, 9:12, September 26, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XggnjJyRkYw. 92Michael Cunningham, “The Slap of Love,” Open City no. 6 (1998), https://opencity.org/archive/issue-6/the-slap- of-love. 93 Ibid. 94 Ibid. 46 celebrate those who went ignored or unacknowledged in their beauty by the broader queer community.

Writing on the power and implications of this unique space, scholar Marlon M. Bailey writes, “The Black and Latina/o queer members of [Ballroom] community use performance to create an alternative discursive terrain and a kinship structure that critiques and revises dominant notions of gender, sexuality, family, and community.”95 Thus, the community and familial atmosphere of Ballroom as explored in Pose also serves as a venue for negotiations and renegotiations of relationships to outside expectations of gender and sexuality. Participation in ballroom, then, is subversive in its promotion of alternative family structures and constant reimagining of queerness and community. Further, the categories that participants can compete in often parallel societal norms and expectations, including categories for the performance of specific gender and sexual identities and the delivery of different fashions, styles, or physical attributes.96 Themes explored in Pose include categories such as “Dynasty Rich Bitch Fantasy,”

“Femme Queen in Pumps,” “Best Dressed High Class in a Fur Coat,” and, as will be later explored more in depth in this paper, “Luscious Femme Queen Body.” Considering these categories and those beyond them, and participants’ ability to compete in differing categories, ballroom exists with an understanding of presentation and gender as more fluid than as understood in heterosexual spaces outside of the ballroom scene. If these categories that symbolize exclusion in the outside world can be easily imitated and overtaken by those most hated by society, are they as rigid as those within them assume?

95 Marlon M. Bailey, “Gender/Racial Realness: Theorizing the Gender System in Ballroom Culture,” Feminist Studies Vol. 37 No. 2 (Summer 2011), 367. 96 Marlon M. Bailey, “Gender/Racial Realness: Theorizing the Gender System in Ballroom Culture,” 368. 47

Ballroom participants’ conceptions of gender and ideas of “realness” simultaneously thwart societal expectations for gender and sexuality through embodiment in the ballroom space and implement these same expectations for the sake of judgment in competition. The concept of

“realness” in ballroom, Bailey explains, “requires adherence to certain performances, self- presentations, and embodiments that are believed to capture the authenticity of particular gender and sexual identities.”97 As such, categories that value realness above all other aspects of presentation often judge the ability of a participant to embody and “pass” as a privileged identity that adheres to gender norms, dominant conceptions of class, or heterosexuality. While categories in ballroom that require realness include judging on how well the competitor embodies and presents as a normative identity, such as a rich woman or a man in the military, this embodiment remains somewhat subversive. Realness “ultimately signifies the possibility of deception…positioned at the crossroads between the ballroom world and the ‘real world’,” and as such the concept and its queer embodiments within the ballroom space expose the fallacy of gender norms and expectations in the heterosexual world.98 That there is a space in which those ostracized most by a white supremacist and heterosexual society can embody the pinnacle of the dominant culture’s ideals blasts open the ideas that they have within them something inherently

“wrong,” or that the values of whiteness and straightness are impenetrable. Moreover, Bailey identifies that “realness” within the ballroom can help provide safety in a violent and oppressive outside world, as through the judging of one’s realness, ballroom members can understand how their body is read by others through a lens that imitates the heterosexual and white supremacist lens of the dominant culture in the United States.99

97 Marlon M. Bailey, “Gender/Racial Realness: Theorizing the Gender System in Ballroom Culture,” 377. 98 Marlon M. Bailey, “Gender/Racial Realness: Theorizing the Gender System in Ballroom Culture,” 378. 99 Marlon M. Bailey, “Gender/Racial Realness: Theorizing the Gender System in Ballroom Culture,” 379. 48

However, these categories, as explored in Pose’s episode dedicated to the “Luscious

Femme Queen Body,” can reinforce bodily expectations and a monitoring of what bodies can be seen as “real” or not, often in the context of transgender identities and one’s ability to “pass.”

Bailey explores how accolades of a trans woman’s fulfillment of femininity often ties back to the biology of cisgender women, with cries of realness aligning with cries of “pussy” or “soft and cunt.”100 As Bailey ultimately concludes, this is not to insinuate that the Ballroom space functions as a body-policing space that upholds racist and transphobic gender norms – these comments are often welcomed by participants and can often relate to the quality of performance more than one’s biology.101 It is, however, worth noting that gender presentations, often in relation to bodily fulfillment of them, are judged and that individual bodies are subject to gendered criticism in the Ballroom space. This can be extended to corpulence and the “ideal” distributions of fat within a woman’s body: as such, the body politics within ballroom and conceptions of what bodies are celebrated are worth exploring. Specifically, within the context of

Pose, this judgment of the physical embodiment of gender is challenged through the painful storyline that follows one character’s public exclusion from a “body category.” “Body categories” celebrate specific “types” of bodies, from the slim and straight “runway model” figure to the “luscious” and curvy figure. This monitoring of bodies in expression of gender ties into the concept of bodily monitoring or policing within fat studies, as a way through which those with bodies that defy conventional conceptions of what is “attractive” or “healthy” are observed and relentlessly encouraged to change.102 Moreover, as legal scholars and trans and fat activists Dylan Vade and Sondra Solovay write, within the context of the law and broader

100 Marlon M. Bailey, “Gender/Racial Realness: Theorizing the Gender System in Ballroom Culture,” 381. 101 Marlon M. Bailey, “Gender/Racial Realness: Theorizing the Gender System in Ballroom Culture,” 383. 102 Marilyn Wann, “Foreword: Fat Studies: An Invitation to Revolution,” xxi. 49 society, gender norms and bodily norms are projected onto “deviant” bodies, and so long as those who are fat or trans or otherwise defying corporeal expectations show a “strong desire to conform to societal gender and body norms,” they may be seen as more acceptable.103 This connection between the monitoring of fat and the monitoring of gender remains important in the consideration of how fat people are portrayed and discussed on Pose.

Just as Pose cannot be separated from the larger body politics within ballroom culture, it cannot be removed from the body standards within the LGBT community specifically as a result of the HIV/AIDS crisis. As many members of the community continued to die from AIDS in the

80s & 90s at a rapid rate with little government intervention, conceptions of what the virus looked like as it progressed began to arise. The onset of AIDS leaves the body more vulnerable to severe illnesses as the number of T cells decreases and the immune system weakens.104 Tied to this vulnerability to disease is often severe weight loss, sores, and weakness, as exemplified in the scenes that feature people dying of AIDS in Pose.105 That the emergence of AIDS radically shrank and changed the body of those fighting it influenced in part the ideas of what acceptable and attractive bodies are within the broader gay community. Ideas surrounding gay body standards and AIDS should not seek to pathologize body standards within communities of gay men, but this traumatizing era of death and illness remains important when considering these standards, especially with the context of the physical toll on the body that AIDS takes.106 Writing

103 Dylan Vade and Sondra Solovay, “No Apology: Shared Struggles in Fat and Transgender Law,” in The Fat Studies Reader, ed. Esther Rothblum and Sondra Solovay. (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 174. 104 “About HIV/AIDS,” The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, last updated December 2, 2019, https://www.cdc.gov/hiv/basics/whatishiv.html. 105 Ibid. 106 It should be noted that in the book published in 2000 about male body image and muscular obsession, The Adonis Complex, authors Harrsion G. Pope, Katharine A. Phillips, and Roberto Olivardia found that straight and gay men both are “similarly vulnerable” to the bodily obsession they coin the “Adonis Complex.” (225) They note earlier in their chapter on “Straights and Gays” that “few good studies” look at body image in gay men, challenging preconceived notions of gay men as exceptionally obsessive over their physical appearance. (212) 50 on the pursuit of muscles for gay men, doctors Harrison Pope, Katharine Phillips, and Roberto

Olivardia observe that “the frightening image of the wasting syndrome of AIDS…has left an indelible mark on the gay consciousness. Now, gay men routinely tell us, thinness is ugly, because it speaks of sickness and death. Muscles equal health.”107 Notably, the focus remains on muscle, rather than just on bodily size: the composition of the body as muscular, rather than as fat, remains critical. As Kathleen LeBesco has articulated, fat has historically been associated with susceptibility to disease and a “porousness” of the body, which becomes all the more important in light of an all-encompassing virus and its ravaging of a community.108 The pursuit to appear “healthy,” and therefore muscular, not only positions those as thin as potentially sickly, but those as fat as potentially ill as well. While Pope, Phillips, and Olivardia penned the book this excerpt comes from, The Adonis Complex, in 2000, Pose’s time frame of the late 1980s in season one and 1990 in season two do provide time for standards within the gay community to have changed as a reaction to AIDS, which first appeared early in the 1980s. As characters in the show articulate the number of friends and lovers they have witnessed wasting away from this syndrome, it becomes clear that the visual effects of AIDS have a profound effect not just on the body standards of the LGBT community today, but of the community in crisis during the 80s and

90s.

Differing body standards between white American society and Black communities should also be noted when considering the body politics of Pose. Though white American society is entrenched with fatphobia, some racial and ethnic groups within the United States differ in their

107 Harrison G. Pope, Jr., M.D.; Katharine A. Phillips, M.D., and Roberto Olivardia, Ph.D, The Adonis Complex, (New York: The Free Press, 2000), 218. 108 Jana Evans Braziel, “Sex and Fat Chics: Deterritorializing the Fat Female Body,” in Bodies Out of Bounds: Fatness and Transgression, eds. Jana Evans Braziel and Kathleen LeBesco. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 238. 51 own constructions of what fat embodies; while the white imagination posits that one cannot be

“too rich or too thin,” others have thought differently.109 Writing on her experience as fat Black woman, Margaret K. Bass observes, “I have been overweight for most of my life, but its significance has waxed and waned depending on the environment in which I lived…I attribute my relapse [into hatred for her fat body] to my movement into the white middle-class world that forces me…to be conscious of myself.”110 She continues, however, that the white middle-class obsession with weight is not removed from the Black experiences. Bass writes:

“Just a few years ago, I could crawl into my racial cocoon when the subjects of weight, fat, health, and diet came up in conversations. Back then, African American adults seemed much more accepting of fat people…I guess my generation lived with fat parents, grandparents, siblings, and relatives of every sort…Fat was common, natural and often admired…now not even blackness provides that comfortable space that it once claimed for a fat black girl, and perhaps that space never existed beyond the kitchen of some mythical grandmotherly type who just ‘loves to cook and watch people enjoy my food’…I wonder, given our history in this nation, if many African Americans are not a century or more ‘behind’ white American culture in relation to weight – if corpulence remained in vogue well into the twentieth century for many of us, particularly those of us who are new to the middle class.”111

She questions how the changing class makeup of Black people during the twentieth century may have changed the influence of weight obsession on her community. Though Bass’s perspective is but one, her experience as a fat woman marks that the white cultural denigration of the fat body has found its way to other racial and ethnic groups. In the context of Pose, Bass’s perspective remains relevant in that many plotlines of the show focus on finding one’s beauty in the face of a white supremacist and transphobic world, as often seen through the trials of needing to cultivate one’s appearance enough to “pass” and living in fear of being “clocked” by those who do not

109 Wendy A. Burns-Ardoling, “Jiggle in My Walk: The Iconic Power of the ‘Big Butt’ in American Pop Culture,” in The Fat Studies Reader, eds. Esther Rothblum and Sondra Solovay. (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 272. 110 Margaret K. Bass, “On Being a Fat Black Girl in a Fat-Hating Culture,” 225. 111 Margaret K. Bass, “On Being a Fat Black Girl in a Fat-Hating Culture,” 227. 52 support trans people. The characters on Pose have an affirmative community in ballroom, but live under the tyranny of white standards of appearance and gender in the public world. As such, one should note the possibility that the characters in Pose live with the knowledge of and under the oppression of the white obsession with skinny bodies. There is a tension, for example, between women who can walk the “fashion model” body categories and those who can walk the

“luscious” body categories. Though both are celebrated for their beauty, the former category demonstrates a restriction of bodies based on the white standard of who can be a model.

Recognizing the roles of the AIDS Crisis and Ballroom Culture within Pose, and their own specific effects on the body politics of the show and the Black and Latinx queer communities in the program, the depictions and discussions of fat people in Pose are complex.

While fat jokes between close friends remain a way to cope with the distressing surroundings of death due to virus and discrimination in Pose, fat people take space both inside and outside of the ballroom. Conceptions of what and when fat can be attractive or feminine necessitates interrogation in Pose, most notably in its treatment of “body categories” and when fat participants in ballroom can compete. Similar to Tales of the City, however, Pose does not feature any fat people in the main recurring cast of the show. While there is one fat character,

Veronica (played by Bianca Castro, also known as Jiggly Caliente of Rupaul’s Drag Race fame), fat people remain notably absent from most ballroom categories, celebrations, and interactions with the main cast. Her characterization and function on the show warrants deeper examination, for though she belongs to one of the three main houses the show follows, the House of Ferocity, people inside and outside of the house characterize her as bumbling and less attractive than her sisters. Drawing on the concept of numerical annihilation, this vacuum of fat representation remains something to reckon with for Pose. Notably, however, the number of characters in the 53 margins of the show who are fat dramatically increases between seasons one and two. Though not always positive characters – and in some cases, these fat actors portray people who perpetuate violence against the transgender women of color the show follows, and the implications of this will be explored – this increase in numbers marks a greater visibility of fat people within Pose. Moreover, an exploration of the interactions between womanhood, diversity of transgender embodiment, and fatness in the show, as well as the HIV/AIDS crisis and fatness, require analysis given the show’s unique position as one of few programs to explore such themes.

Fat Characters on “Pose” & Fat Visibility

Though Veronica is not a member of the main cast on Pose, and only speaks few times in her two seasons on the show, her role as the only named fat character, and the only fat transgender woman, is significant in the analysis of the show’s depictions of fat and body politics. Though Veronica is aligned with a house begun by women regarded as beautiful within the ballroom community – Candy, a common winner of the “face” category, and Lulu, a woman often called “Jessica Rabbit” for her figure and makeup– her house mothers joke about

Veronica’s function within the house and she only actively walks in a ball once. Her few lines in the program show her to be not as cunning as her house mothers, and highly emotional to the point of excess and comedic relief. She is identified by her own house mothers as someone with little to offer the ballroom community and her house, marking her as the weakest link within the

House of Ferocity. In the few scenes of the show in which she is featured, Veronica diets, has a comical emotional outburst, and walks in a realness category as “mother-of-the-bride.” Pose’s treatment of its only recurring fat character, then, reinforces notions of fat people not only as outsiders, but also as physical manifestations of their psychological premonitions towards failure 54 and excess. As the only named fat character, then, Veronica and the treatment of her on the show embodies an othering and alignment of fat with personal flaws and failures, and thus is a continuation of traditional thinking about fatness and fat people. In a show that focuses on breaking barriers and representing people who are often vilified or distilled to their bodies, this tacit continuation of fat stereotypes is an anomaly.

Veronica first appears on the sixth episode of the first season, as a sales associate in a clothing store frequented by the women in Pose, but joins the newly formed House of Ferocity and walks her first ball in episode eight. Engaged in a “House vs. House” competition against the

House of Evangelista, each member of both houses walks the category they excel at, including voguing, realness, face, and body categories. Veronica walks for the realness category as

“Mother of the Bride,” which is a markedly desexualized role, especially in comparison with her competition – two young men from the opposing house, “serving” “sexy bad boy hanging down at the Port Authority.” As Veronica struts with a fan and poses, the two men work the crowd with their shirts up, offering spectators to touch their toned bodies. One of the young men, in particular, lays on top of someone on the ballroom floor, rendering the category to be very sexually charged, and yet, Veronica’s performance is relegated to that of an older woman. In a sequence that celebrates the unique talents of every member of both houses and their beauty, that

Pose would choose to depart from this tone so radically for its sole named fat character marks an inadvertent refusal to acknowledge fat sexuality.

Though Veronica is not portrayed as ugly or undeserving of her space on the ballroom floor, in comparison with the choreography of the other competitors, the choice to have her walk as “Mother-of-the-Bride,” a matronly figure, diverges strongly from the tone of her competitors in this category. As Jana Evans Braziel writes on the erasure of fat female sexuality, “what is 55 erased subtends what is visible; what is absent must be absent for what is present to have meaning.”112 Therefore, what is missing form Veronica’s performance – sexuality – injects further meaning into the men’s sexual performance, and likewise delineates that the meaning of

Veronica’s character comes, in part, from her asexuality on the show. Jana Evans Braziel observes that the fat woman’s body has “been…marked by a dearth of sexual signification…the purportedly benign asexuality of the fat body,” and in Veronica, the idea surrounding “benign asexuality” comes to life.113 Veronica’s “believable” performance is not of a figure that is sexually charged, but one that is removed from all sexual charge, and grounded in the caring modesty of a mother. This construction of Veronica as benign or matronly stands out in a program in which beloved characters consistently tread the line between enemies and friends, treating one another in ways that could be seen as cruel and consistently emphasizing the importance of cunning in survival. Veronica, then, stands out not only for her body size, but also for her removal from the intense attitudes of other characters in the show. In this competition of

“realness,” and of embodying a personhood or character, Veronica is relegated to an asexual, benign persona.

When Veronica next appears, in episode two of season two, she is accompanied by glasses of SlimFast and hot sauce that she ingests to speed up her metabolism. Though

Veronica’s role remains small throughout the second season, a conversation in episode two between her house mothers, Candy and Lulu, about Veronica frames her as a woman without many skills or positive traits to offer. As the viewer watches the pair discuss what each member of the house contributes to their ballroom competitiveness and homelife, Candy stutters,

“Veronica...Veronica…uh…,” with Lulu shortly replying, “She’s a seamstress, girl. That takes

112 Jana Evans Braziel, “Sex and Fat Chics: Deterritorializing the Fat Female Body,” 232. 113 Jana Evans Braziel, “Sex and Fat Chics: Deterritorializing the Fat Female Body,” 231. 56 skills.” Candy replies, “You know what, you right. I can’t be measuring everybody’s worth based off what they can do under the ballroom spotlight. A behind-the-scenes bitch is necessary to every house.” Though Veronica is not depicted as useless, her role in the house is relegated to

“behind-the-scenes,” in a community that celebrates performance and visibility among friends.

In the other houses featured on the show – Evangelista, Wintour, and Abundance – none of the characters are strictly “behind-the-scenes;” though not every member walks in every ball, they are all performers in their own right and are featured as such through the show. Therefore, not only do these comments make Veronica’s role in the house a joke among the mothers, they show the viewer that she has less to offer than other house members and that she is not a character meant to be taken seriously on a drama show. While characters on Pose often insult and joke with one another about their physical and personal shortcomings, there are moments of deep emotional introspection that provide empathy for each character. Pose invites viewers to laugh along at jokes made about every character, but still inspires respect for each character through this emotional treatment. Veronica’s treatment is an exception to this, and as such, she is laughed at, but with no emotional storyline to ground her in the show as a character for the viewer to connect with. As such, Veronica’s character in this instance and her other appearances, does not communicate a dynamic, multifaceted humanity to her. Further, Veronica’s association with being “behind-the-scenes” links her with invisibility. With a mediascape that consistently erases the fat body, and a show that celebrates performance and extravagance, characterizing the one fat character as not involved in any performance and solely “behind-the-scenes” implies an outsider quality to fat people in ballroom and the larger queer community.

More than just othered in her house and identified as a useless member, Veronica is implicated in the House of Ferocity’s weight-loss plan. When Elektra, a house mother for the 57

House of Wintour, eats dinner at their home, members of the House of Ferocity detail that their dinners comprise solely of SlimFast milkshakes and popcorn with hot sauce in order to lose weight. Although the conversation reveals that this choice to eat so little in reality comes from necessity as a result of financial insecurity, rather than solely from a dedication to weight loss, the messaging remains that the house mothers, Candy and Lulu, value proximity to thinness. As

Lulu remarks, “this is a menu fit for the runway.” All house members, including Veronica, are implicated in the statement “we’re dieting,” and this cover of weight loss for their financial struggles reveals that acceptance of an extreme desire to be thin is more commonplace than acceptance of a poor financial state. Even after they reveal to Elektra that this choice to diet does not stem exclusively from the desire for a body that is “fit for the runway,” Veronica hands her the hot sauce for their popcorn dinner, commenting, “it’s good for your metabolism,” emphasizing that dieting remains important to the house and, particularly, to Veronica. This alignment of Veronica’s values with weight loss distills her otherwise undeveloped character to her sewing skills, performance inadequacy, and desire for weight-loss.

This physical alignment of the sole named fat character with products that seek the eradication of her body through consumption brings to fruition the simultaneous erasure and constant surveillance of the fat body.114 Kathleen LeBesco and Jana Evans Braziel describe how weight-loss products like SlimFast simultaneously produce and destroy the fat body, for the product cannot exist without the fat body, but also seeks to eradicate the fat body’s existence.115

This cycle of destruction and creation translates onto the screen in Veronica’s alignment with diet products and insistence on Elektra’s inclusion in the House of Ferocity’s dieting practices.

Her corpulent body is pronounced in a room of smaller women, but faces the physical

114 Jana Evans Braziel and Kathleen LeBesco, “Editors’ Introduction,” 8. 115 Jana Evans Braziel and Kathleen LeBesco, “Editors’ Introduction,” 6. 58 embodiment of society’s desire for that body – and Veronica herself, then – to be erased. Not only is Veronica aligned with the dieting foods in this scene, but she is implicitly challenged on her place in the House through their presence.

Further, Veronica’s last and longest set of lines in season two is a comical emotional outburst at the final Mother’s Day ball, in which she defends her house mother, Lulu, and decries the ballroom community’s failure to name her as the winner in the category for Realness. As

Lulu receives her scores from the judges, Veronica bursts from the crowd, yelling, “You old bitter bitches know that my mother Lulu is the realest of them all,” and as someone drags her back into the crowd, she continues, “Uh-uh! They’re fucking bricks!” Her outburst is met with laughter from the room and a short comment from Pray Tell dismissing her. While ballroom scenes in Pose are venues for plot escalation and personal drama throughout the series, and these arguments and personal issues are often met with debate or respect, Veronica’s yelling changes nothing about the plot and ultimately serves to show her to be a passionate, though inappropriately so, daughter. In context of societal characterizations of fat people as unable to control themselves, this outburst aligns the only fat character with comical, uncontrollable emotion and an inability to contain herself. The fat female body, as Jana Evans Braziel finds in her discussion of the philosophical background for the cultural trouble the fat female body can bring, is representative of “the site of performative excess - the unbound carnality of hyper corporeity.”116 Veronica’s emotional outburst too is performative excess in comparison with her house sisters who do not protest their mother’s loss, linking her behavior to preconceptions of the fat female body as inappropriately excessive.

116 Jana Evans Braziel, “Sex and Fat Chics: Deterritorializing the Fat Female Body,” 235. 59

While Veronica is the only named fat character featured in Pose, the number of unnamed fat characters in the show grows in large number between seasons one and two. Of these small roles, the most memorable is also one of the most violent. In the second season, fat nurses, secretaries, and YMCA members appear with small numbers of lines, increasing the visibility of fat bodies within the show numerically. However, of these small roles that fat actors have, one of the most pronounced is that of a man who solicits a transgender sex worker and ultimately assaults her in the backseat of his car. The scene stands alone in Pose for its graphic depiction of violence, and importantly exposes the corruption of the criminal justice system and the lack of justice available to transgender women of color, especially women who perform sex work.

Though violence against transgender women is an important thematic focus of the show, with multiple characters witnessing discrimination and hatred, this assault scene is the only within the two seasons to depict an assault in such visual detail. The scene cannot be removed from the politics of the body, in a show that chooses to feature so few fat people in its cast. When Elektra accidentally witnesses the death of a white man while at work as a domanatrix and must decide whether to call the police or find a way to hide the situation on her own, Candy encourages her to speak with Euphoria, a sex worker who has experienced violence at the hands of the criminal justice system. Euphoria then describes how, when she was unable to get a man to finish sexually, and she suggested that the problem may have been with him rather than with her technique, he violently beat her. He was able to convince the officers who arrived on the scene that she had attempted to rob him, resulting in her arrest and sentencing to time on Riker’s

Island. She then describes the violence she faced in jail, describing multiple assaults. The sequence is highly emotional and sobering, in an episode that frankly discusses the corruptions within the criminal justice system and the threat of violence that transgender women face every 60 day. The casting of a fat actor in the role of the assaulter should not be overlooked in recognition of the scene’s importance.

Fat men are often depicted as emasculated and unable to sexually perform, while also often stigmatized as ignorant or stupid. Fat men on television, in particular, draw from a number of contradictions; as scholar Jerry Mosher writes, fat men “are rendered ordinary but deviant, average but grotesque, male but not masculine.”117 Mosher details in his research on depictions of fat men in television shows that the fat male body has become the new visual site of a “crisis of masculinity,” with the fat body representing an unruly and emasculated man.118 This phenomenon is particularly salient in relation to sexual performance, communicating a disconnect between the masculine self and the soft, fat body that he inhabits, and a disproportion between the large, protruding stomach and the phallus that shrinks in comparison.119 The sexual failure projected onto the fat male body manifests itself on television with men who are often emasculated, exhausted, or slackers.

In Pose, the fat man fails sexually and is so insecure in his masculinity that he chooses to assault Euphoria, asserting his masculine dominance through violence, rather than recognizing the possibility of a sexual failure. The viewer watches the man struggle to get erect, with the camera angle highlighting the skin oozing over his button-down shirt, reinforcing his failure with the excesses of his physical body. The cruelty he shows is bound in the monstrosity of his body, aligning the fear and panic in the scene with his physical shortcomings. The fragility of masculinity and its resulting infliction of violence against women and vulnerable people necessitates exploration and exposing in mainstream media, but cannot be divorced in this case

117 Jerry Mosher, “Setting Free the Bears,” in Bodies Out of Bounds: Fatness and Transgression, eds. Jana Evans Braziel and Kathleen LeBesco, (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001), 187. 118 Jerry Mosher, “Setting Free the Bears,” 170. 119 Ibid. 61 from the instance here that the character’s emasculation is tied to his body size. Further, the bigotry and ignorance explored in this scene must be exposed, and also cannot be removed from the historical legacies and present-day manifestations of the association of fatness with people deemed stupid and unable to control their impulses.120 While multiple instances in the show have depicted bigoted white men taking advantage of or blackmailing the transgender women of color at the center of the show, the one who gives into his most basic urge to physically harm someone is the only fat man featured in a sexual scene with one of the characters on Pose. Linking the fat body to such transphobic violence in a show that only features one named fat character should not go unnoticed.

HIV/AIDS, Health, & Fat

In Pose’s more direct conversations about treatment for HIV/AIDS, fatness and weight gain are depicted as necessary concessions to live through the virus. In the conversations between characters surrounding home remedies and appearance while fighting the virus, the question of weight and muscle definition appears often. As noted above, HIV/AIDS can radically change a person’s body while they fight the disease, and cause dramatic weight loss. This remains underlying knowledge in the conversations between characters on Pose, who indicate that a higher weight may indicate better health – though it may be undesirable for personal image. As such, though Pose shows fat to be a medically positive trait and thus works against dominant conceptions of fatness as a sign of personal and medical failure, the social value of fat on-screen remains negative.

In the first season, the humor of fatness and jokes about fat people appear in the show only after characters receive devastating news regarding HIV/AIDS diagnoses. This pattern of

120 Amy Erdman Farrell, Fat Shame, 18. 62 fatness used as a tool for levity is remarkable because these jokes only appear in relation to the disease. When Blanca, the protagonist of Pose, is diagnosed with HIV in the first episode of the series, she calls upon her friend and emcee of the balls, Pray Tell, for comfort. When the show cuts from the scene of her diagnosis to that of Pray Tell’s home, he begins his talk with Blanca with advice from his mother, remarking, “That woman was a saint. A Saint Bernard! That woman must’ve weighed 400 pounds,” attempting to bring some levity to an otherwise despairing Blanca. This marks in the very first episode of the series that Pose is not a space removed from bodily standards. This is mirrored in episode three of the first season, after Pray

Tell’s boyfriend is suffering from pneumonia complicated with HIV. He plans to spend

Christmas alone, going to the theatres, but Blanca refuses. She attempts to cheer him up and have him come celebrate the holidays with her house, admonishing, “There’s no way you’re getting fat off of popcorn alone in a movie theatre on Christmas!” The fat body in these instances is an impossible other, an extreme or particularly visually salient image to distract the despairing party from focusing on the larger issues at hand of mortality and pain. In her historical analysis of fat bodies’ presence as a visual oddities in freak shows of the 19th century, Amy Erdman Farrell writes, “the spectacle of the fat person engages its viewers precisely because it is perceived to be so different, so far removed from the bodily experience of the ‘average’ person.”121 The image of the fat body in Pose, then, represents a striking image of an altered reality so removed from the dire conditions of the community featured in the show that it contains potential to alleviate emotional pain through this humor. Embedded in these jokes are the notions of the fat body as distant to the point of comedy.

121 Amy Erdman Farrell, Fat Shame, 34. 63

Beyond humorous mentions of the fat body as emotional consolation, fatness in Pose as it relates to HIV/AIDS medical care is a necessary, though dreaded, aspect of remaining healthy, as exemplified through the arc of Pray Tell’s HIV treatment preferences. In episode four of the second season, Pray Tell insists upon using homeopathic remedies for treating his HIV, rather than beginning treatment with AZT pills, which Blanca has done and hopes to have him do as well. In one scene at Blanca’s home, Pray Tell melts a pound of butter with mineral oils in pursuit of maintaining a healthy T Cell count, saying to his two friends with him, “You skinny queens are going to experience some fat bitch food tonight!” This willingness to become a “fat bitch” in light of HIV/AIDS demonstrates the severity of the fear aligned with the disease, with the “skinny queens” preparing to lose their physique in the name of staving off the onset of

AIDS. Offsetting the most severe components of the disease is an excuse in this sequence, then, to “allow” oneself to eat like a “fat bitch,” indulging in foods one would not have eaten in the past, all in the name of homeopathy. Though this is a homeopathic remedy for illness, Pray Tell refers to the mixture as fat bitch “food,” insinuating that fatness comes from the practice of consistently eating only fatty foods, such as copious amounts of butter. By this logic, what Pray

Tell and his friends do in the name of health, fat people do for lack of self-control and pleasure.

Judy, a friend and nurse who works with HIV positive patients, remarks on observance of Pray’s habits, “If you’re eating a pound of butter a day, you care about your [T Cell] numbers. Why don’t you take AZT?” Though Pray Tell eventually takes AZT, he falls ill from the pill’s side effects, and returns to his butter remedy, with Blanca assuring him, “Butter’s what’s going to flush that gut out, and it’s gonna make you gain some weight back.”

Beyond Pray Tell’s butter intake, this monitoring of weight as a sign of a lower T-cell count or the onset of AIDS pervades throughout the show. Before Pray Tell begins to take AZT, 64

Blanca expresses multiple times that his noticeable drops in weight indicate that his HIV is worsening. Further, Pray Tell uses weight as a prerequisite for remaining healthy when he explains to Ricky, a young man newly diagnosed with HIV, what he must do to prevent the onset of AIDS. While Ricky explains to Pray Tell that his diet of “beef jerky and Sprite” has allowed him to maintain his physique, Pray responds, “It is better for you to be thick and healthy than cute and withering away.” To this, Ricky asks, “So you like them thick?” Pray Tell answers, “I like them alive.” Through this interaction, Pray Tell insists that thick and cute are mutually exclusive. Though a “cute” man would be lean and have defined muscles, the man that is alive and healthy, and thus a man that Pray Tell could be with, is thicker but nonetheless more available than a man that is ill. In this moment, the viewer understands the body standards that

HIV/AIDS altered: health, above all, is most important. As explored earlier, that can come in the form of a fixation on muscle, but in this interaction, a valuing of leanness or muscle mass is downplayed in favor of a valuing of body size for indication of health. In this way, fat’s association with health as depicted on screen in Pose goes against popular conceptions of fat as a sign of poor health. While neither character in this interaction is or becomes fat, this desire not to obliterate fat, but obtain it, in part challenges dominant conceptions of the physical significations fat brings. However, the social value for the characters remains the same, with fat remaining an unattractive, though necessary, presence for a body fighting HIV. As such, while Pose does not consistently challenge normative views of the fat body and conceptions of fatness as manifestations of personal failure, these scenes explore how the HIV/AIDS epidemic altered conceptions of the body.

Fatness & Bodily Pressures 65

Ballroom provided a space for the queer people of color deemed unattractive or unworthy by white heteronormative patriarchal society to celebrate their bodies, talents, and selves. Body politics still operate in this space, with some bodies celebrated and others critiqued. In relation to fatness and gender presentation, the ballroom space as presented in Pose monitors and celebrates different aspects of everyone’s body – Candy or Angel for their faces, Lulu for her hourglass figure – but often with the stipulation of a division between appropriate categories for different bodies. Episode four of season one is entirely dedicated to body categories in the ballroom and the body image issues experienced by the main characters in relation to curves and bodily shape.

The body categories shown in this episode are the only categories fat people walk for on Pose, with the exception of Veronica’s Mother-of-the-Bride performance in the finale of season one: thus, though fat is not fully erased in the show, and in this episode is celebrated, fat ballroom performers are pigeonholed into a single category that is dedicated to the body, in opposition to categories that emphasize dance, fashion, or posing that viewers see other characters compete in.

Moreover, mobilized by the categories of ballroom featured in episode four, two of the transgender women in the cast, Angel and Candy, express a desire for more curves in order to appear more feminine and pass more easily as a woman in public. Through the pain of the characters seeking to find avenues to become curvier on Pose, the show challenges the existence of body standards and a specifically gendered association of fatness and femininity. Through the stories of Candy and Angel, two transgender women who diverge on their paths to facing their dissatisfaction with their slim and straight bodies, Pose explores the damage that body standards can inflict on the broader queer community, and advances the notion that a feminine body or beautiful body can look many different ways. This celebration extends to alignment with fat 66 studies interrogations of dominant ideas of a desirability of a single type of body and the refusion of societally accepted constructions of embodiment.

Episode four of the first season, “The Fever,” opens with three fat women walking the category for “Luscious Femme Queen Body,” to calls of “titaciousness,” “lusciousness,” and

“juiciness.” As the women receive praise for their bodies and curves, Elektra chastises Candy, a much slimmer woman who wants to walk for the category, that “body categories are about tits and asses out to here,” delineating that body categories are only for women with curves: notably, the category brings accolades to the curviest, though not necessarily fat, women. Defiant, Candy walks for the category, with emcee Pray Tell decrying, “Where’s the lusciousness? Where’s the juice?” Thus, the body category’s judgment ties suppleness and femininity to curves. In the second body category sequence of the episode, the women who walk have much smaller frames, and are praised specifically for their breasts and hourglass figures, further demonstrating that while the body category is a venue for celebration of the fat body, it is also a venue for bodies more dominantly desired in mainstream society. While the fat women featured in the first scene of the episode call attention to bodies not seen in Pose more regularly throughout the season, the latter iteration reveals the category to be about more commonly desired curves. Though this category is fat-affirming, Pose does not feature fat people in other categories, removing fat bodies from the ballroom floor in the bulk of its episodes. As such, Pose does not offer opportunity for fat people and their bodies to be celebrated beyond these scenes, and further, reinforces that different bodies belong in different places.

Throughout the rest of the episode “The Fever,” Candy pursues silicone injections to give herself these desired curves, only to suffer health problems from injections that are performed by an amateur. Mirroring Candy’s journey to silicone injections is Angel’s 67 reconciliation with her body and her boyfriend’s wife’s body, as she comments on how “men like curves nowadays” and how his wife must have been beautifully curvy after she birthed his children. Angel and Candy attribute the desire for curves to the desire to pass, though Candy admonishes that Angel always passes, whereas she struggles. The episode follows the pair as they research a purveyor of silicone injections, who performs the procedure cheaply for women who cannot afford to pay a medical professional to do it. Angel decides not to go through with the injections, but Candy does, and soon falls ill from them. However, the viewer watches a healed and confident Candy in the next episode, and her ballroom performance in the finale of the season brings Pray Tell to call out, “that body is giving you new life!” Similarly, Angel becomes a model in the next season, affirming widespread acceptance of her feminine appearance and acknowledgement of her beauty from society at large. As such, Pose does not use Candy or Angel’s stories as cautionary tales for the harms of silicone injections, but rather questions the pressures and structures underlying such procedures.

Through the stories of Candy and Angel, the viewer sees multiple paths to acceptance and celebration of one’s body, diversifying the dominant cultural narrative about transgender people’s relationships to their bodies and allowing for celebration of multiple corporeal identifications. When famous transgender people come out, much of the discourse surrounding their stories by the media revolves around the conception of the “wrong body” and explores the steps they have taken to have their bodies reflect their inner selves.122 Michael Lovelock, writing on this concept of corporeal mismatch and its place in pop culture, postulates that society’s acceptance of transgender women often relies on this conception and transgender women’s adherence to “corporeal normativity,” or the performance of their bodies in a gendered manner

122 Michael Lovelock, “Call Me Caitlyn: Making and Making Over the ‘Authentic’ Transgender Body in Anglo- American Popular Culture,” Journal of Gender Studies Vol. 26 No. 6, (2017), 676. 68 that confers with dominant ideas about what femininity looks like.123 He explains through the example of two transgender women in popular culture – Caitlyn Jenner and Nadia Almada - that when transgender women appear to pursue or fulfill a more normative femininity, they are more readily accepted by the “Anglo-American imagination” than transgender women who do not appear to engage in that pursuit.124 However, as media like Pose demonstrates, the pursuit of liberation and of presenting as oneself does not look the same for every transgender person. All transgender people do not experience transitions on the same “linear” timeline towards a single end, and not all fat people experience the desire to pursue a linear journey towards weight-loss.

In writing on what fat activist discourse can learn from gender theory, Kathleen LeBesco observes, “In both [readings of fat and transgender bodies by the public], observers busy themselves with the ascription of meaning, unconcerned with the self-determination of those whose embodiment they’re reading.”125 The self-determination of transgender people is consistently undermined in a heteropatriarchal world, and in a different way, society removes self-determination from fat people as they are read as out-of-control or lost on their assumed journey towards a thinner body. As such, in analyzing the functions of fat and fat studies discourse within Pose, the celebration of the self-determination of transgender characters to decide what procedures they desire to create the body that best reflects who they are cannot go unnoticed. Bodily autonomy and framing of procedures to align one’s body with their truest self as an option, rather than a necessity for transgender people, inherently refutes dominant conceptions of what gendered bodies should look like and how people should aspire to look. In

123 Michael Lovelock, “Call Me Caitlyn: Making and Making Over the ‘Authentic’ Transgender Body in Anglo- American Popular Culture,” 680. 124 Ibid. 125 Kathleen LeBesco, “On Fatness and Fluidity: A Meditation,” in Queering Fat Embodiment, eds. Cat Pausé, Jackie Wykes, and Samantha Murray, (Burlington: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2014), 52. 69 fat studies, scholars attempt to remove the cultural ascriptions of negative emotion from the fat body, and aim to expose the denigration of fat bodies as a type of social control. That Pose exposes that no one transgender body is more valid than another is an alignment with fat studies scholarship.

The concern for the viewer should not be whether Candy or Angel should or should not get the risky silicone injections, for either one may feel closer to their gender or ideal self- presentation with or without them, but should be to bear witness to the pressure to make body modifications that not everyone may desire as a result of societal expectations of gendered bodies. Though Candy eventually comes to love her injections, despite her illness, not every person would – and no one should have to endure the illness as a result of a gender-affirming procedure – and this is the question Pose interrogates. The viewer may remember Candy’s experience for the pain she endures, but the joy she experiences after she gets the injections, and the joy Angel experiences in the series without them, demonstrates that gender-affirming procedures are not the same for every person. As Pose pokes holes in the notion that all transgender people seek the same procedures and experience the same forms of dysphoria, it demonstrates that the gendered readings ascribed to bodily appearances such as fat distribution should be interrogated. As the woman who performs the injections on Candy says, “the good

Lord made all the girls that want to be skinny…fat, and all the girls that want to be fat…skinny.”

Though an oversimplification of body image and body politics, this acknowledgment of the pressure that can drive people to change their bodies further reinforces that the desire to change one’s appearance in the manner that Candy does should come from inner desires rather than outside influences. 70

Pose stands apart in the queer-centered mediascape for its commitment to telling the stories of the Black and Latinx queer and transgender people that often go ignored or erased.

Moreover, Pose aligns itself with fat studies discourse that disputes the societal conceptions that some excesses are acceptable, while others are not. In fat studies, this can appear in consideration of ideas of fat bodies that are acceptable to society and those that are not: most often bodies that are fat and “healthy” or practice self-care and fat bodies that are “diseased.”126 Pose centers its first season on an exploration of socially accepted extravagance in the rise of Trumpism and the socially denigrated extravagance in the ballroom community, directly aligning excesses that society may view as opposites. The show consistently demonstrates that society-sanctioned cultural practices are not always ethical, whether it be through the faux-feminist predatory landlord featured in season two or society’s quick condemnation of survival sex work. Thus,

Pose holds within its very premise and aim the potential to disrupt dominant notions of fatness and its reflections of the self. More than just this overarching premise, Pose also gives the opportunity for celebration of a diversity of gendered and sized bodies. The show concerns itself with corporeal embodiment of the self, through body categories, explorations of HIV/AIDS healthcare, and descriptions of gender-affirming surgeries and injections. However, the show depicts a dearth of fat characters, and depicts its sole named fat character as incompetent and emotionally out-of-control. While fat is depicted in the show as a medically necessary for the characters living with HIV, the social value of fatness in Pose remains negative and generally uncontested as such. With the exponential increase in fat characters featured in ensemble roles in the show, Pose has the potential to feature more fat people in centering roles and bring more fat transgender people into the public eye.

126 Natalie Boero, Killer Fat: Media, Medicine, and Morals in the American ‘Obesity Epidemic,” 135. 71

Chapter 3: The L Word

In January of 2004, following the success of Queer as Folk, Showtime premiered The L

Word, a show that would, for the first time on television, center the experiences of queer women.

The show’s intimate portrait of the lives of a group of lesbians in Los Angeles presented viewers with “something audiences had never seen,” and remained popular on the network for its run of six seasons.127 The L Word follows the drama between a large group of women, most of whom are queer, as they navigate romantic and platonic relationships in an interconnected community in Los Angeles. While television critics debated the quality of The L Word, the program explored various topics as they intersected with queer identity over its six seasons, from parenting to sex to navigating the workplace. The L Word was and remains unique for focusing its premise on the relationships of queer women, but for all of its trailblazing, the show has always had fraught relationships with different queer communities. While the show focused a large portion of its airtime on depicting and celebrating queer sex, many viewers felt as if the sex scenes catered more to the male gaze than to community members the show supposedly aimed to depict.128

Moreover, many queer people opposed the glamorous, highly-feminine and skinny appearances of the women on the show, with multiple reviewers and audience members decrying the lack of butch, working-class, and “real-looking” lesbians featured on the show.129 The critiques of the show abound as time has gone on since the finale premiered in 2009, but the show remains a mainstay and a cultural touchstone for many queer viewers. Thus, despite the problems of the show and its many concerning plot points, The L Word’s lasting longevity – the program saw a

127 “The L Word,” Entertainment Weekly Cast Reunions, PeopleTV Video, 36:52, 2017, https://peopletv.com/video/the-l-word/. 128 Alessandra Stanley, “Women Having Sex, Hoping Men Tune In,” New York Times, January 16, 2004. 129 Joy Press, “The L Word,” The Village Voice (New York, NY), January 18, 2006. 72 reboot in 2019, rebranded as Generation Q – necessitates an analysis of its relationship to the body.

Beyond its erasure of lesbians that are not quite as glamorous or thin as the main cast,

The L Word’s deep investment in corporeality and the physical, especially in relation to appearance and sexuality, notates an importance to considerations of fat and body politics within the program. This emphasis on corporeality and the physical manifestation of queerness marks the bodies that are shown as acceptable, thus bringing an emphasis to the unacceptable nature of the bodies left off of the screen. On The L Word, there are no fat queer characters in the main cast, and while some of the characters gain and lose weight, these bodily changes never go unnoticed by other characters. Throughout the series are multiple admonitions from characters themselves or their concerned friends of feeling fat or becoming fat as a sign of emotional distress. While no characters are fat, the arc of Kit, the straight sister of main character Bette who is the curviest member of the main cast, reinforces notions of fatness as feminine and fatness as the mark of excess. While mostly absent from the screen, when fat bodies appear as extras in The

L Word, these bodies are used in the landscape of scenes as physical demarcation of the characters’ entrance into queer spaces beyond their insular bubble. This usage of the fat body as a border between the glamorous lifestyles of the women featured in the show and the lives of the lesbians they encounter in more widely reaching events, such as the Dinah Shore Weekend or an

Olivia Cruise, not only others the fat body and the lives of fat lesbians, but mark these people as unworthy of dramatic exploration. Moreover, in the single sex scene in the six seasons that features a fat body, the sexual treatment of the fat body is used as another demarcation of the characters arriving in an unfamiliar space, marking fat sexuality on the show as a fetishization to exist on the fringes of the queer community, far from the lives of the characters the viewer has 73 grown to know. As such, while the fat body remains remarkably absent from the six seasons of

The L Word, the instances in which fat people are on screen serve only to further distance the main cast, and the viewer, from these bodies and their accompanying inferred lifestyles.

Though in many ways The L Word showcases a very specific, upper-class lesbian experience, the show’s creators and actors still consider it an important milestone in lesbian representation on television. In a 2017 retrospective, executive producer and co-creator of the show, Ilene Chaiken, stated that “Nobody was [writing stories about lesbians] at the time....the legacy of the show…is in part about representation and making our stories known.”130 Thus, to the creators of the show, The L Word was not only premised on giving general American audiences “something new,” but also premised on bringing stories of lesbians and queer women to the forefront of television. Before The L Word, most storylines about queer women on television were relegated to short multi-episode arcs or one-time jokes, and even in Showtime’s earlier LGBT-centered Queer as Folk, the lesbian characters remained under-explored. Thus,

Chaiken’s assertion is correct in that a show that specifically centered the lesbian experience was unforeseen before her program in 2004. As scholar Candace Moore notes in her consideration of

The L Word and its subtext of sexual tourism, “lesbians have historically been a latent, ghostly figure in visual culture – the uninvited, the invisible, haunting the moving image within the subtext.”131 The L Word brought the invisible bodies to the fore, yet, in doing so, erased the bodies left unseen. Moreover, Chaiken commented in 2004 that, though the first season may only have offered a focus on a small group of queer women, “if the show is around long enough, most

130 “The L Word,” Entertainment Weekly Cast Reunions, PeopleTV Video, 36:52, 2017, https://peopletv.com/video/the-l-word/. 131 Candace Moore, “Having It All Ways: The Tourist, the Traveler, and the Local in ‘The L Word’,” Cinema Journal 46 no. 4 (Summer 2007), 5. 74 lesbians will eventually see themselves.”132 This acknowledgment of the restrictive image of lesbians offered on the show’s earlier seasons, with a vague promise for increasing representation, annotates some experiences and bodies as more palatable to the general public – the bodies that will pull in the “non-lesbian” viewer – and more worthy of visibility in the early journey the show takes. In some ways, Chaiken acted on these words, by featuring characters in later seasons that were more racially diverse, differently abled, and from different class backgrounds than the mostly white, upper-class, and able-bodied original cast of the show. Critic

Joy Press noted in her review of the third season that through the success of earlier seasons, the show became “confident enough to feature more characters who actually look like contemporary lesbian archetypes,” specifically in relation to the addition of a more traditionally butch character. The careful selection of which lesbian bodies were allowed to leave the subtext and enter the fore via The L Word stringently limited who was allowed to be seen in line with the show’s atmosphere of glamour and sexuality. This notion that The L Word had to hit a stride and cultivate a stronger following before showing bodies that are less acceptable to the broader public was not expressed by Press alone.

While the selection of whose stories were shown on The L Word has always been a debate for critics and fans, some viewers and journalists notably opined that television was not the space for an “accurate” rendering of the LGBT community. These conversations mark The L

Word as a vehicle for the broader audience to consider the politics of representation and who from a community “deserves” to be seen. Some viewers felt that television was a space for the glamorous to appear rather than the ordinary, with one writer for lesbian magazine Curve joking,

“I for one am glad these lesbians are on television. If I want to see an overweight dyke with no

132 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “’The L Word’: Novelty in Normalcy,” The Chronicle of Higher Education 50, no. 9 (January 16, 2004): B10. 75 fashion sense, I’ll look in the mirror.”133 Television critic Penny Patterson curtly wrote in 2009 after the show’s conclusion, “It’s a television show, of course everyone’s hot.”134 More serious considerations of the ubiquitous conventionally attractive look of the show’s original main cast led television critic Alessandra Stanley to observe that the women’s beauty “on one hand works to dismiss stereotypes of lesbians as squat, plaid-shirted and mannish. On the other, they are all so exquisite…that it plays into…[a] male fantasy.”135 What these considerations of The L Word from its 2004 premiere establish is that the bodies deserving of screen time are not those of the fat lesbians, or the “mannish” ones, but those who “break stereotypes” through their conventional beauty. This notion of broadening the conventional picture of what a lesbian looks like through only casting conventionally feminine and beautiful women marks the bodies not shown as only manifestations of stereotypes or lesbians to be avoided. This ascribes onto the bodies not shown in The L Word a sense of shame, in that broad stereotypes about queer women as a group are attributed to their existence, placing blame on how they choose to present rather than the power structures that bring about stereotypes and slim conceptions of what a lesbian can look like.

Moreover, the teaching function of television representations was not lost on the creators or actors involved with The L Word, who often speak of the show as a venue for “making

[lesbian] stories known” and expanding the worldview of people who live in places who may not have visible queer communities.136 Thus, there is intent in the choice of casting conventionally attractive women, imbuing bodies that deviate from this as detracting from broader acceptance of

133 Rodger Streitmatter, From Perverts to Fab Five: The Media’s Changing Depiction of Gay Men and Lesbians, (New York: Routledge, 2008), 157. 134 Penny Patterson, “The L Word is Dead,” Santa Barbara Independent (Santa Barbara, CA), March 19, 2009. 135 Alessandra Stanley, “Women Having Sex, Hoping Men Tune In,” New York Times, January 16, 2004. 136 “The L Word,” Entertainment Weekly Cast Reunions, PeopleTV Video, 36:52, 2017, https://peopletv.com/video/the-l-word/. 76 queer women. Further, queer television scholar Rodger Streitmatter boils down The L Word’s messaging about lesbians communities as a program to two sentiments, “that lesbians can be stunningly beautiful and that they also can be obsessively sexual.”137 A show that claims to bring queerness to the fore while ascribing to dominant notions of beauty and of gender is oxymoronic.

This distills lesbians to only the women who are readily “consumable” to the heterosexual viewer by not inspiring thought about American heterosexualism and fetishization of the lesbian sex life, which is a viewer that Showtime officials readily acknowledged and discussed the desire to appeal to.138 This notion of what a lesbian “can” look like while on television inherently obscures the multiplicity of appearances across queer communities and uplifts a more traditionally appealing appearance as the only possibility for acceptance. The historical treatments of fat and lesbian bodies mirror one another in many ways, yet The L Word lifts the veil on only one. Thus, the hyper-awareness of the queer body in The L Word not only restricts what bodies can be seen on-screen, but also reminds the viewer of the bodies unseen.

The L Word’s investment in physicality and the body as a landscape for queerness demonstrates the important consideration the body is given on the show as well as the show’s usage of the body as an avenue to draw viewers in with. A dimension of The L Word’s fixation on sex and the physical manifestation of queerness is its investment in recruiting the straight male viewer. While many critics of the show from the journalistic world and queer communities alike observed that, at times, the sex scenes of the show and their settings verged on the soft-core pornographic in their believability, executives from Showtime have been quoted to say that the

137 Rodger Streitmatter, From Perverts to Fab Five: The Media’s Changing Depiction of Gay Men and Lesbians, 149. 138 Daniel Farr & Nathalie Degroult, “Understand the Queer World of the L-esbian Body: Using Queer as Folk and The L Word to Address the Construction of the Lesbian Body,” Journal of Lesbian Studies, 12 no. 4 (2008): 424.

77 show used sex scenes in part to attract more than just the “built-in” audience of lesbians raring for representation on television.139 This promise of sex manifested in the show’s tagline before its premiere, “Same Sex. Different City.” By not only appealing to queer viewers, but to those who may have missed the sexual content they received from HBO’s Sex and the City, which ended the year The L Word premiered, the program aimed to speak the unspoken in attracting those who found lesbian sex attractive beyond lesbians themselves.140 In Eve Sedgwick’s 2004 essay on The L Word, she relays a quote in The New York Daily News from Gary Levine, the

Vice President for Original Programming at Showtime, in which he stated that the showrunners knew that the appeal of the show for non-queer viewers rested on the knowledge that “lesbian sex…is a whole cottage industry for heterosexual men.”141 While Sedgwick then relayed that a representative from GLAAD noted that this enticement of the heterosexual man through the promise of lesbian sex is a smart strategy, for the viewer will still learn to know and understand the queer characters even if their fixation remains on the sexual, this investment in learning acceptance through sex emphasizes the importance of physicality in the show even further.142

The simultaneous goals of attracting a wide swath of viewers beyond queer women and of finally providing queer women with the representation not afforded to them in years past make for the bodies selected to embody acceptable queerness very carefully chosen and entrenched with meaning. In the case of The L Word, all of the main cast members are incredibly slim, conventionally attractive, and most are white. If the producers believed that the best way to teach tolerance and acceptance is through the dissemination of queer women’s sex lives for sexual

139 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “’The L Word’: Novelty in Normalcy,” The Chronicle of Higher Education 50, no. 9 (January 16, 2004): B10. 140 Candace Moore, “Having It All Ways: The Tourist, the Traveler, and the Local in ‘The L Word’,” Cinema Journal 46 no. 4 (Summer 2007), 5. 141 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “’The L Word’: Novelty in Normalcy,” B10. 142 Ibid. 78 pleasure, The L Word must then invest in the physical and the queer body as a site for teaching acceptance. This choice of what bodies are featured on screen becomes fraught in consideration of the culturally coded as “unspeakable” nature of the lesbian body and of the fat body.

Moreover, much of The L Word’s exploration of queerness and women’s sexuality relies on corporeality and the physical manifestation of queerness. Scholar Candace Moore asserts that the show’s main cast, who differ dramatically in appearance from the stereotype of an unkempt butch lesbian, have their bodies which may not be read as queer immediately “proven queer” through physical sex acts on screen.143 If a body is read as straight until “proven queer” – multiple instances on the show feature main characters getting mistaken for straight women – the sex scenes within the show hold a significance beyond what is attractive to viewers. Who is allowed to “prove” themselves queer on-screen and who is not is significant in that, in the 70 episodes, only one fat person has been featured in a sex scene. As Jana Evans Braziel noted, what is unseen must be erased for what is seen to have meaning: the bodies on The L Word and their actions show the viewer what they should envision when they think of lesbians or queer people, and the bodies not shown define the boundaries of the program’s definition of who is and who is not worth seeing within queer communities.144 Further, the sexual tone of the show and the refusal to show fat sexualities further projects culturally ascribed asexuality onto the fat bodies not shown. In relation to the stereotype of the “squat, plaid-shirted and mannish” lesbian that the show seeks to move beyond, lesbians who do not look like the feminine and glamourous cast are further desexualized and othered. This bodily fulfillment of queerness is not only a common thread throughout the show in that The L Word features many sex scenes, but in that

143 Candace Moore, “Having It All Ways: The Tourist, the Traveler, and the Local in ‘The L Word’,” Cinema Journal 46 no. 4 (Summer 2007), 5. 144Jana Evans Braziel, “Sex and Fat Chics: Deterritorializing the Fat Female Body,” 232. 79 when characters explore their identity and stray from the social group at the core of the show, their return to lesbianism or to the fold of this specific group is always manifested through physical sex acts. In season 4, for example, when Tina returns to her group of friends after being mostly abandoned for dating a man, her return to her friends and to queerness is only accepted after she has sex with a woman again. In the time Tina is with a man, her queerness in the eyes of her friends and community members is null and erased until she makes a decision to “return” to it. Thus, as queerness on The L Word is manifested through the body, the body becomes a site of importance in the show and one that is carefully considered.

Fat as Feminine and the Construction of the Straight Body

While The L Word faced many complaints of constructing one socially-acceptable lesbian body in the show’s choice of casting, there is some deviance in appearance in the straight characters featured. In constructing the lesbian community on-screen, The L Word also features one straight woman, who embodies a larger-bodied womanhood that differs from that of the queer women, reinforcing the fat-as-feminine construction and refusing to expand conceptions of what lesbians may look like. Kit Porter, the only straight woman in the main cast, differs from the other characters not just in her sexuality, but also in her appearance as an older and a larger woman, and as a Black woman in a cast of dominantly white people. Described in other articles about the show as “voluptuous” rather than overweight or obese, Kit is curvy and more traditionally feminine, played by 70s Blaxploitation film star Pam Grier.145 The L Word’s featuring of Kit realigns fatness on the show with a more traditional femininity, and her body stands in opposition to the only coded as androgynous body on the show, that of rail-thin and curveless Shane. The L Word, then, invests in the gendering of fat embodiment and the

145 Daniel Farr & Nathalie Degroult, “Understand the Queer World of the L-esbian Body,” 433.

80 reservation of androgyny for slim bodies. Kit’s character development on the show also aligns fat with a loss of control of the body and of the self. While all of the characters experience dramatic storylines, Kit’s problems on the show are given more formal treatment than those of the others. Kit is introduced to the show as disastrous and out-of-control because of her alcoholism. Her character serves as a foil to that of Bette, who is controlling and remarkably put- together to eyes of the outside world, whereas Kit is depicted as much more easy-going and fully out-of-control when it comes to her desires. Kit is at the mercy not only of her addiction but of her sexual interests, beginning affairs with married and younger men throughout the show as outsiders look on with distaste.

Throughout the series, Kit’s form of more mainstream acceptable femininity serves as a foil to Bette’s more controlling “masculine” personality, positioning their bodies as reflections of their different selves. As Daniel Farr and Nathalie Degrout remark in their study of the lesbian body as constructed in The L Word, Bette serves as the “man” in her relationship with Tina, allowing for more comfort for the heterosexual viewer in understanding a lesbian relationship as still defined by more traditional gender roles.146 This “quasi-butch” status Bette embodies allows her to present in a more traditionally feminine way, while still embodying the more “masculine” traits of the family breadwinner and protector of the family, proving more readily readable to the straight viewer as the “man” in the relationship or the one who “wears the pants.”147 While Tina serves in their relationship as the “social woman” and more traditionally feminine counterpart to

Bette romantically, Kit serves as the familial opposite to Bette, as manifested in her feminized appearance as represented in her body. Kit and Bette not only oppose one another in their personalities, but in their stylings and presentation. Farr and Degrout note that Bette is often

146 Daniel Farr & Nathalie Degroult, “Understand the Queer World of the L-esbian Body,” 428. 147 Ibid. 81 depicted on-screen in suits and less feminized professional clothing, emphasizing not only her professionalism but her more masculine social role in her relationship with Tina.148 Kit’s appearance contrasts Bette’s in her much more feminine dress, wearing patterns, dresses, and jewelry. Throughout the series, Kit also wears much more pronounced makeup than Bette. These choices in dress also related to Kit’s career as a musician and as a café-owner, but this emphasis on her femininity in her dressing style serves to accentuate the curves that render her “more feminine” than Bette.

In familial scenes with the pair’s father, Kit’s embodiment of straight womanhood and reliance on her partners remains more readily acceptable to their father than Bette’s more masculine traits and lesbianism. While Kit’s life decisions and past mistakes strain her relationship with her father, her embodiment of femininity helps to bring the pair close together in season two, when she reveals to him that she has a boyfriend she would like him to meet. A family dinner which she brings this boyfriend to exemplifies Bette and Kit’s bodily opposition to one another, as Bette wears neutral tones and minimal makeup, and Kit wears a fit red blazer with a large fur collar, silver eyeshadow, and large earrings. Kit’s body is emphasized as a manifestation of the more traditional femininity her father responds to in his regard of her, reinforcing the gendered reading of a curvy body. This alignment of Kit’s curves with heterosexual femininity places fat in opposition to Bette’s queerness, reinforcing a binary reading of fat as feminine and further othering it in relation to lesbianism.

Kit is also framed as an opposite to Shane, the most androgynous character on the screen, with her curves and more classic femininity in contrast to Shane’s more masculine construction, reserving both bodies as the only possible manifestation of each’s traits, imbuing a reading of

148 Daniel Farr & Nathalie Degroult, “Understand the Queer World of the L-esbian Body,” 429. 82 gender in body size and shape. The body on the The L Word is not only the medium though which sexuality and queerness is embodied and performed, as it also manifests through gender and femininity. Shane is constructed as androgynous not only in how she is styled with her shorter hair and wardrobe of loose button downs and t-shirts, but also in her behavior and personal history. In the first two seasons of the show, Shane is mistaken for a young man on multiple occasions and tells stories of when she used to engage in survival sex work posing as a man, establishing that her appearance and body allows her to pass as a man or as genderless when she so chooses. Her body, featured naked throughout the show, has much smaller curves than the other women on the show, placing her as different from the other women not only in how she dresses but in how her body is shaped. She and Kit, then, stand at opposite ends of a spectrum in their bodily shape on-screen, as both differ in size from the bodies at the core of the group and present different gender presentations from one another. By allowing for one larger woman and one much flatter woman in the cast, The L Word associates traditional femininity with a larger body and androgyny with a smaller body. This reinforces a binary in bodily size that is linked with Shane also behaves differently from the other women, serving as the resident lothario of the group and a woman with elaborated commitment issues. Kit stands in opposition to this as a woman who goes through multiple relationships in the show in which she is cheated on, removing the romantic power from Kit and emphasizing Shane’s sexual power in comparison. This is a normative presentation of not only what an androgynous body can look like, but of what femininity and androgyny entail in power dynamics.

Kit’s storylines also link the excessive feminine in body size and presentation to excessive and out-of-control behavior. While all characters engage in melodrama in the show,

Kit’s problems and emotional breakdowns occur mostly in public. Her very first appearance on 83 the show shows her apprehended by a police officer for drunk driving, pleading with the officer,

“I was on my way to my first paying gig in over a year!” Immediately, then, Kit is painted as a figure of excess, for her consumption of alcohol, and as a woman with no control, for her driving in this state and lackluster career aspirations. Throughout the series, Kit confronts her problems in very public ways, whether she apprehends an unknowingly polyamorous boyfriend in a club, reconnects with her estranged son in a public bar, or confronts a cheating boyfriend, Angus, during the middle of a performance. Her storyline with Angus embodies the “excessive feminine,” which “confounds definitions of the self” in its threatening of corporeal containment.149 She explodes when she confronts boyfriend Angus about his infidelity, interrupting their premiere performance of a song the pair had written together, exceeding and containment of the self and beginning a period of her time on the show as emotionally unstable and out-of-control, in which she relapses into her alcoholism and cuts ties with her sister and many of her friends. This very public undoing of Kit’s character and her emotional state differs from the often-insular interactions of the other characters, signaling a woman less in control than the other characters.

Fatness as A Reflection of Turmoil

While there are no fat characters featured in the main cast of The L Word, characters worry over their own and their friends’ body sizes throughout the series, with concerns about weight gain masquerading as concerns for the person’s state of mind. This imbuing of personal crisis with the appearance of fat is notable in Tina’s early days of pregnancy. In season two,

Tina, Bette’s on-and-off partner, hides her pregnancy at the beginning of the season, causing her friends to worry over her weight gain as a sign that her breakup with Bette has caused distress

149 Jana Evans Braziel, “Sex and Fat Chics: Deterritorializing the Fat Female Body,” 245. 84 beyond what they had estimated. Her weight gain indicates to friends that something is deeply wrong with her. Her friends view fat as a manifestation of personal distress, which is a common depiction of fatness in popular culture.150 The L Word exemplifies this concept of the “corpulent body as…encoded surface that signifies the subtext of the psyche,” in which the characters’ bodies are slates that their struggles are projected onto.151 Not only do these concerns reflect the notion that the fat body is the manifestation of personal issues, but these concerns as specifically reflected onto Tina’s body further emphasize the unacceptability of fatness in this group of friends. Tina as a character has always stood closer to the viewer in her appearance, as Eve

Sedgwick comments, she is “the only one without glamour among these women, she turns red and sweats during sex, worries about looking fat…her very discomfort in her skin seems to offer space for identification to any viewer who would appreciate a sightline among the lesbians.”152

While her worries about fatness may be relatable to an average viewer, her friends’ and partner’s concerns over her weight inflect onto her body a surveillance from bodies far slimmer and more traditionally acceptable. Tina’s body, out-of-control in the eyes of her friends, serves as a foil to her friends’ effortlessly slim bodies. As such, these scenes in season two reinforce that fatter bodies are abnormal in this lesbian community and should warrant questioning.

When Tina Kennard becomes pregnant in season two after a dramatic breakup with her partner Bette, she decides to keep the pregnancy a secret, leading her friends to speculate on the state of her mental health through the changes they observe in her body. In the third episode of the season, her friend Alice laments the toll the breakup has taken on Bette and Tina, saying,

“You know, I’m starting to get scared, it’s like Bette’s smoking and drinking herself to death,

150 Jana Evans Braziel and Kathleen LeBesco, “Editors’ Introduction,” 4. 151 Ibid. 152 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “’The L Word’: Novelty in Normalcy,” The Chronicle of Higher Education 50, no. 9 (January 16, 2004): B10. 85 and you’re…I’m gonna [sic] say it Tina, you’re eating your pain, and I don’t know how much weight you’ve gained, but if you don’t stop you’re going to have to go to some ashram, or hire some really majorly important physical trainer, and you don’t have the money!” When Tina retorts that she is not fat, Alice remains incredulous until Tina shows her stomach. This interaction, veiled underneath the concern of a friend, not only compares Bette’s reliance on substances to Tina’s weight gain and paints Tina’s body as the physical evidence of her emotional pain, but also regards weight gain and fatness as a permanent state that will require immense work to rid her body of. The fear she associates with substance abuse carries over to

Tina’s weight gain, aligning both new behaviors as life-threatening and cause for concern, further medicalizing fat as a sickness that must be fought. Moreover, this weight gain is depicted as nearly irreversible and life changing. This reinforces notions of fat as out-of-control; a

“parasite” that will infect Tina’s body and will be reluctant to leave.153 Thus, The L Word reifies the notion that fat bodies and thin bodies are binarily opposed to one another, with one representing health, and the other a permanent decline in health. As fat studies scholars Kathleen

LeBesco and Jana Evans Braziel write, “the fat or adipose tissue is regarded as a voracious parasite…that suffocates and even consumes the ‘ideal’…body.”154 Tina’s body, once beautiful in the eyes of Alice, has been consumed by her emotional pain and by her weight gain, with the illness of fat attacking both her physical appearance and her inner self. Alice’s insistence on

Tina’s need not only for a physical trainer, but for an ashram who would provide spiritual healing as a necessary remedy to her weight gain also emphasizes that Tina’s body requires not

153 Jackie Wykes, “Introduction: Why Queering Fat Embodiment?” in Queering Fat Embodiment, eds. Cat Pausé, Jackie Wykes, and Samantha Murray, (Burlington: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2014), 7. 154 Ibid. 86 only intense physical regimens but inner engagement to change, further linking the psyche and mental health to the shape of her body.

While Alice finds Tina’s pain manifested in her larger body as a cause for concern, Bette views this symbol of Tina’s emotional undoing as a cue that she would welcome reuniting romantically. Though the characters largely avoid each other for the first few episodes of the second season, Tina moves back in with Bette after turning down the romantic interests of the woman she had been staying with in the interim, and Bette interprets this as a sign that the pair should explore getting back together. In this time back at their shared home, Tina tells Bette that she is pregnant, and Bette later complains to her friends, “You know, ironically, I was actually pleased to see that Tina had put on weight, because number one, it means that if she’s eating to cover her pain, that means she’s really actually really still in love with me, and two, maybe if she’s overweight she might have trouble finding someone else…” Here, Tina’s body serves again not only as the slate on which her emotional pain is transcribed, but as a shield against any other romantic advances. Taking as truth that Tina’s fat body – now shown to be pregnant – would stave off any other romantic advances, Bette assumes that this weight gain would lead

Tina back to her not only out of love but also out of desperation for romantic attention, as Tina’s new fat would render her once-beautiful body invisible. It is not just that her fat body would be read as unattractive by others, but that it would render her other points of beauty in Bette’s eyes as invisible, the fat again overtaking the body and the self and consuming it. Moreover, Bette uses these characterizations to remove agency from Tina over her own body. Significantly, through all of these criticisms, Tina’s body is removed from the implications that fat would bring because she is pregnant, not fat from what her friends worry is overeating. The viewer need not panic at the sight of Tina’s emotional demise via her larger body, for the show assures that there 87 is a skinny version of Tina waiting to emerge after she has her baby. Unlike the irreversible change in body Alice feared Tina would undergo, Tina’s size remains a state to which she can presumably return after she gives birth.

Notably, Tina frames her own weight gain as a personal failure before and after she gives birth. Before she tells Bette that she is pregnant, and arrives at their shared home, she preemptively comments that she has gained some weight since Bette last saw her. When Bette responds that she does not care if Tina’s gained weight in an attempt to meet her with kindness,

Tina replies, “You don’t even care? Oh, that’s nice.” She posits Bette’s attempt at ignoring her change in appearance as a sign that Bette does not care for the reasons she could have gained weight, signifying her increase in size as a visual cue to others for a cry for help. Tina accepts that her changing body appears to those who do not know that she is pregnant as a sign of emotional duress, using this knowledge as a way to gauge to what degree Bette still cares about her after their breakup. Through Tina herself accepting and embodying this concept of the appearance of fat on the body as the appearance of distress, The L Word legitimizes the concerns of her friends and ex-partner over Tina’s weight. This personal admission of fat’s inner meanings does not allow for a viewer’s questioning of Alice’s validity of concerns, for Tina admits herself that her body weight is a change that loved one should care about.

The Fat Body as a Border

In a show that focuses on a small group of friends in very limited locations, demarcations of the other are as common as explorations of the characters the viewer has come to know. One such avenue of marking a space as new or unenjoyable to the main characters in The L Word is the introduction of fat bodies into a scene. Just as remarkable to the average viewer of The L

Word, beyond the beauty of the main group of friends explored on screen, is the group’s insular 88 nature – very rarely do characters make friends outside of this main group, and if someone attempts to join, the process is arduous and there is severe distrust. The characters also center their experiences on their shared social spaces and private homes, with very little expansion in their collective world explored on the show beyond these well-tread spaces and friends. As television critic Joy Press writes for The Village Voice, the group of friends at the core of the show “travel in packs, and everywhere they go resembles a hermetically sealed world of lesbian loveliness.”155 This “sealed” nature of the world of the characters does not go unacknowledged by the show, with characters questioning why they always encounter the same women on their nights out or why everyone knows the gossip of others, thus emphasizing the importance of this sealed experience to the core of the program. Even the larger scenes of house parties or concerts held at the group’s favorite venue, The Planet, show few if any fat people despite drawing large crowds from across the city. As such, when fat bodies are included in the background as extras, it is only when the characters are far from their familiar social spots. Moreover, when the “lovely” lesbian world in The L Word expands to include less glamorous swaths of Los Angeles or of queer life, the characters often express discontent.

When the purview is expanded in The L Word, characters express discomfort with their surroundings, often in regard to the new people they are surrounded by, such as when Alice tours a military base or explores a lower-income neighborhood, or Jenny returns home to her homophobic family in the Midwest. While this occurs in spaces where characters have little experience or little in common with their surroundings, this also occurs in queer-dominated spaces that attract a wider range of people than are normally seen on the show. This discontent is often expressed in the disconnectedness of the main characters in comparison to the excitement

155 Joy Press, “The L Word,” The Village Voice (New York, NY), January 7, 2004. 89 of the other less interesting or less put-together people they come into these new spaces with, framing them as spaces the viewer should hold at a distance. The surroundings that mark these queer spaces on the show as uncomfortable or foreign spaces to the main characters are defined in part by the people around the characters, specifically people with fat bodies and people that fit the stereotype of the “squat, mannish lesbian.” The reactions of the characters to their surroundings indicate more than just discomfort, with humor communicated to the viewer at the sight of “uglier” lesbians. The use of the fat body as a visual sign of an unfamiliar space for the main cast not only objectifies the fat body and further others it in a show that does not explore the stories of fat people, but also labels the spaces that fat people come in contact with as not worthy of following more closely on the show due to the presence of those fat bodies. Fatness serves as an indicator of less glamorous and attractive queer spaces, filled with people who differ fundamentally from the main characters of the cast in their lifestyles. This usage of the fat body as a visual cue for uncomfortable spaces further objectifies and intensifies the symbolism of a fat body, without accentuating the personhood within. This aligns with the conception within fat studies of the fat body in popular culture as both invisible and a spectacle: though the body remains extremely visible and remarked upon by others, the personhood is erased and left unspoken.156 The most remarkable usages of the fat body as a border occur in the group’s season one trip to the Dinah Shore Weekend in Palm Springs, their season two experience on an Olivia

Cruise, and Jenny’s season three road trip across the United States in which she explores a number of small-town gay bars.

The Dinah Shore Weekend, which takes place annually in Palm Springs, is “the largest lesbian/queer women event in the world” and thus became a significant place to explore for the

156Jana Evans Braziel and Kathleen LeBesco, “Editors’ Introduction,” 8. 90 characters on The L Word.157 Compared to the insular world of the characters on the show, the

Dinah Shore weekend offered viewers the chance to see lesbians from other walks of life than the main characters’ upper-class sphere, as an event that attracts queer women from around the world. As one Dinah Shore attendee told Vice Asia, “I come to Dinah because of the women, diversity, culture…just sex!”158 Yet, this excitement is not shared by the characters on the show, separating them from the people they encounter in Palm Springs. As the group drives from Los

Angeles to Palm Springs, Alice, who is a journalist, remarks that she is glad to be at Dinah Shore on a writing assignment, because she has “gotta make something out of this lame-ass weekend, right?” While the other characters who go along with Alice – Dana, Shane, Tina, and Jenny – remain in higher spirits, this construction of the party as “lame” or somewhere the group does not care to be continues throughout the episode. While Jenny meets a woman at a party who she continues to date in a multi-episode arc, the other characters remain skeptical and unenthused about the parties and their fellow attendees. When they walk into their hotel lobby for the first time, they are overwhelmed by the excitement of the women there who look much different from them, including more masculine lesbians and fatter lesbians. The camera zooms in on the group as they walk in, interspersing shots of their confused or overwhelmed faces with shots of the bustling lobby, with two women in cargo shorts, hiking boots, and very short hair in the middle of the shot. With these women centered in the sweeping view of the hotel, this scene signals that this party is unlike the others that the characters attend and is filled with people very different from the main cast, evidently to their chagrin. As the episode continues, Alice describes the number of “hundred-footers,” or people who she can tell are gay from one-hundred feet away, as

157 “The Dinah History,” The Dinah, Accessed April 20, 2020, https://thedinah.com/the-dinah-history. 158 Vice Asia, “A Weekend at the Biggest Lesbian Party in the World,” YouTube Video, 11:05, June 26, 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lzxI0JyzPbI.

91 the group laughs on at the appearances of the more masculine women that surround them, explicitly marking their appearances as unsophisticated and laughable. Fat women are the most visible in this episode when a few listen to Jenny as she tells a room full of partygoers her coming-out story, but remain interspersed in larger scenes centered around the pool or the hotel’s hallways. While not spoken about explicitly by the characters, these bodies help to shape the parties as places that are “below” the characters that the viewer has come to know. Towards the end of the weekend, as Dana, a famous tennis player, has been hounded by desperate fans, and

Tina, Shane, and Alice skip the biggest party to stay in their hotel room, the show makes clear to viewers that the “debauchery” of these parties is not desirable for the characters that they care about, in part because of the behavior and appearances of these other women. As such, the Dinah

Shore Weekend as depicted in the show serves as a venue for characters to laugh at queer women who conduct themselves and style their appearances in a radically different way from the main cast. In this rare opportunity for other body types and styles to appear on the show, they are condemned rather than celebrated as a worthy part of the queer community. As Tina tells her partner Bette when she returns home, “God, that party was so crazy. It just made me want to go home.”

Olivia Cruises, similar to the Dinah Shore Weekend, are unique party spaces for queer women as a travel venture catering to lesbians. In season two of The L Word, the main cast, with the exception of Bette and Tina, embarks on an Olivia Cruise. The episode opens with the only sex scene that features a fat woman in the show, marking the space as different from the ones the characters normally inhabit – moreover, the scene shows friends of the lovers looking onwards and laughing, removing any sensual aspect to the scene that these opening sex-themed sequences often have. While the skinny woman who has sex with the fat woman, sex therapist Phoebe 92

Sparkle, pursues and enjoys the company of the nameless fat woman, this joking atmosphere isolates this scene as different from the other, more serious, opening sex scenes featured in the show’s six seasons. This opening sex sequence also ends with a comedic moment of the fat woman “singing” as she orgasms, winking at the cultural image of “the fat lady singing” and boiling down her personhood to this image. She is also only shown as the sexual submissive, removing any power from this demonstration of fat sexuality. In a show that places queer sex at the fore, this comedic rendering of a nameless fat woman engaging in sex removes any fat positive nature of showing a fat woman having sex. While the main characters later meet Phoebe

Sparkle, the fat woman disappears for the rest of the episode and remains unnamed.

Though the opening sex scene characterizes the Olivia cruise as a sexual space, if not sexually deviant from the expectations of the main cast, the characters’ first interactions on the boat with the self-named OWLs (Old Wise Lesbians) characterizes the boat as a place for queer women who lead very different lives than the main cast. The OWLs look very different from the main group in The L Word, as their gathered members on the boat dress and style themselves in a much more masculine way and most are fat. However, these differences are not celebrated by the main cast – when Shane walks by the OWLs as they advertise their group’s philosophy on spirituality, she lowers her sunglasses and takes a long look at them, giggling with her friends

Jenny and Carmen as they walk by the group together. Similar to the Dinah Shore sequences, the enthusiasm and beliefs of these queer women that the main cast shares the space with are depicted as less sophisticated than those of the characters the viewer knows. There are similarly excited fans of Dana, as there are in the Dinah Shore episode, and for an event with hundreds of queer women, the characters spend little, if any, time meeting new people or interacting with other passengers. The one character who does, Jenny, is said by her friends to be “acting weird” 93 throughout the cruise, thus attributing her interest in these other passengers to a personal problem. Her “weird” behavior includes swimming and flirting with passengers who look much different from her counterparts – for example, she raises her glass to a butch woman at dinner and dives into the cruise’s pool with a large group of people. Her breach of her insular group makes her a pariah, and as such the show emphasizes that while these cruises may be significant to other women – Phoebe the sex therapist comments at dinner that the Olivia Cruise “is the only place where they’re completely free to express themselves” – they remain beneath the interests of friends at the center of The L Word. As such, the people seen on the cruise who otherwise go unseen on the show are marked as living lives beneath those of the main characters, ones defined by these large events that offer very little to the women on-screen.

When Jenny road trips from her childhood home in Illinois to Los Angeles, she and her partner, Max, stop at two small-town gay bars, laughing at the patrons and, at one bar, experiencing a “bears night” for the first time. At the first bar the pair stops at, the venue is very different from the lesbian bars and cafes Jenny had frequented in Los Angeles, with a different clientele. Within their first few minutes at the bar, Jenny and Max order tequila shots, and immediately afterwards laugh at a drunk fat man in the corner exclaiming, “I want to rock! I want to rock! Rock me!” He is never shown again during their time in the bar, and this moment serves only to emphasize that the people who frequent this bar are very different from the more reserved, upper-class lesbians Jenny has spent her time with. This jarring moment only allows for Jenny and Max to differentiate themselves from the other patrons, as no one else in the bar turns to look at what they conceive as very obviously inappropriate behavior. At the next gay bar that they stop at on their trip, the pair is joyful as they dance in a crowd of fat men at a “bears night,” which attracts men who are interested in and who are fat men. As they approach the bar, 94

Jenny questions what a bear night is, but Max reassures her that it will be fun. As soon as they walk in and the camera pans to show the room of fat men dancing with one another, Jenny giggles, exclaiming how great the bar is, and the pair dances joyfully for the rest of the night.

Though a remarkably more positive experience than other characters have had at queer spaces that are new to them, the men in the club remain silly to Jenny, allowing her to relax in a new way through dancing with Max. This space is completely removed from Jenny’s life in Los

Angeles and from Max’s life in Illinois, and is indicated as such by the sea of fat men.

The sparing usages of fat bodies as borders not only mark fat lesbians as inherently different and less appealing than the feminine women featured in The L Word, but also reinforce the viewer’s conception of the main characters’ bodies as appropriately sized and appropriately feminine. In consideration of the lack of butch lesbians on The L Word and Queer as Folk, scholars Daniel Farr and Nathalie Degrout posit that the tertiary butch women featured on the programs serve to reaffirm the otherwise tenuous femininities of lesbians with more “masculine” traits in their personalities.159 They posit that this helps to maintain an “acceptable” lesbian cast on screen that can continue to appeal to the heterosexual viewer without threating normative constructions of gender and sex.160 The pair writes specifically on the example of celebration scenes in Queer as Folk as opportunities to feature butch bodies as means of comparison, but this construction applies to these scenes in The L Word as well. Thus, The L Word does not just denigrate the fat body in these scenes in which it is featured, but uses this sparing representation to accentuate the acceptability of the characters the show has chosen to feature. This is most obvious in Alice’s jokes about the “hundred-footers” at the Dinah Shore weekend, in which she draws a more concrete division between the butch women at the event and the women the show

159 Daniel Farr & Nathalie Degroult, “Understand the Queer World of the L-esbian Body,” 428. 160 Ibid. 95 follows. This extends to all of the attendees at the party, who Alice and the other main characters continuously separate themselves from, who challenge dominant expectations of femininity in their gender presentation and their bodily size. Thus, using butch and fat bodies as a signifier for different and unworthy spaces reinforces the notion that the lesbianism the women of the main cast embody is the only acceptable lesbianism. When brought into comparison with these often- erased bodies, the femininity and visual appeal of these women is only accentuated, underscoring the importance of their broadly accepted beauty

In all of these instances, the cast members of The L Word posit themselves as above the more diverse queer spaces they enter, specifically through their reaction towards the different looking bodies that surround them in these situations, often through humor. As such, the fat body represents a lifestyle that stands in opposition to the lives explored on screen, and outside the realm of sex and personal intrigue that define the lives of these characters. This not only alienates fat people but also imbues in their bodies a manifestation of personal misgivings: their appearance, taken to be ugly and out-of-control, represents the shortcomings of their selves. This notion of fat as a reflection of failure is common in popular conceptions of the fat body, whether it be the failure to “practice self-restraint” or to “invest time, energy, or money in oneself.”161

Some of The L Word’s appeal to a broad audience relies on upholding heterosexual desires, and in this way, the show upholds the heterosexist construction of the fat body as illegitimate and the necessity of maintenance on the female body.162 Moreover, this usage of the fat body as a visual cue for uncomfortable or unenjoyable places further objectifies the body itself, morphing it into a symbol of lesbian stereotypes or lesbian failures. With no storytelling to accompany these

161 Samantha Kwan and Jennifer Graves, Framing Fat (Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2013), 28. 162 Jackie Wykes, “Introduction: Why Queering Fat Embodiment?” in Queering Fat Embodiment, 1. 96 partygoers and their actions, their presented selves are devoid of meaning. The body remains as a symbol of failure, but the person is erased.

While The L Word remains culturally significant in 2020 through its reboot and mainstay status as a drama that focused solely on the lives of queer women, the show invested in binaries of gender and body size, and the upholding of heterosexist desires in the appearance of its characters. While the show emphasizes the importance of bodily manifestation of queerness and providing space for physically queer acts, The L Word features bodies that uphold dominant conceptions of appropriate appearances. The L Word does not just erase fat bodies by not casting any significant fat characters, but uses the short appearances of fat bodies to emphasize the importance of the beautiful women in the show. The show draws a divide between the stereotyped “butch and overweight” lesbian and a much more slim, glamorous, and traditionally feminine image, denigrating the former and emphasizing the latter as the image of lesbians worth showing and the only image of lesbians that will attract a heterosexual viewer. This desire for a heterosexual viewer has constrained the work that The L Word aimed to do for representation of queer women, for the pursuit of the straight man viewer emphasized the importance of the attractiveness of the characters. Even as newer queer media brings more diverse representations of what queer people look like, in race, class, ability, and, at times, bodily size, The L Word remains significant in the queer mediascape as the most popular rendering of a television show focused entirely on the experience of queer women. As such, the show and its constructions of the othered body continue to circulate and influence conceptions of fat bodies.

97

Conclusion

Television depictions of fat people have been fraught in the open use of the fat body as a comedic device. From fat suits to significations of fat people’s lost masculinity or desperation, fatness has been a long-running joke on-screen and off-screen. In the shows analyzed in this project, this trend of the levity the fat body signifies continues in some ways, but diverges in others. These three shows, as stated above, each focus on and emphasize different groups within the overarching queer community, allowing for a diversity of interpretations of the queer body.

While the creators of Tales of the City emphasize the importance of accurate representations that mirror the diversity of queer people, The L Word’s hyper focus on glamorous and upper/middle class lesbians necessarily erases many queer bodies in the effort to present a “new” look at the lesbian community. Pose’s important focus on queer and transgender people of color centers people’s stories that are often erased or presented as a monolith. Exploring shows that feature different perspectives of the queer community allows for a more comprehensive look at the mediascape of queer television and the status of fat bodies within it. Moreover, the creators and producers of these shows frame them as milestones of the representation of the LGBTQ+ community on television, emphasizing the broader view they bring to popular conceptions of it.

As television theorists have written, representation matters as a teaching mechanism to imagine communities people may not come in contact with throughout day-to-day life. It matters for members of a community to be able to see themselves on-screen, as well: as many of the cast members of The L Word invoke in interviews about the significance of the show, for young queer people, television shows that feature queer communities can offer a way to imagine their futures even if they live in unaccepting or lonely places.163 Yet, these futures can be difficult to

163 The L Word,” Entertainment Weekly Cast Reunions, PeopleTV Video, 36:52, 2017, https://peopletv.com/video/the-l-word/. 98 envision if this imagined young queer viewer only sees bodies unlike their own in these imagined futures, whether this be in race, ability, or size.

While the themes and characters within these shows differ dramatically, the conspicuous absence of fat bodies exists across all three shows. While Tales of the City features the most named fat characters at three roles, this program along with the other two exclude their fat characters from the most prominent places and communities on their shows. While in Pose the named fat character, Veronica, still participates in ballroom, she is othered for her lack of performance ability and not taken seriously by her community. In Tales, all fat characters are absent from the central queer space at Barbary Lane. In The L Word, fat people are only present in unfamiliar spaces. As such, in all of these shows, the fat body is removed from the central queer community. This becomes particularly concerning when considered with the common theme throughout multiple queer-centered television shows of the importance of chosen family and one’s social community. In all three programs, multiple characters have strained relations with their families and instead lean on their “chosen families” of the people they choose to surround themselves with. The familial atmosphere of these communities on-screen and the support they can offer one another remains a key point of hope for the characters on the show and for the viewer. As such, this removal of the fat body from community spaces, both physical and emotional, communicates a distance between fatness and the queer community. This consistent visual othering of the fat body and its notable absence within these shows reveals a pattern in the consideration of the fat body as unworthy of exploration and inclusion, further stigmatizing it in LGBTQ+ communities and more broadly.

In some ways, then, the invisibility of the fat body on television remains something that can be addressed in a somewhat simple way. The inclusion of more fat people on television, in a 99 variety of roles and characters, can increase the visibility of fat people and assist viewers in imagining a more size-inclusive queer community. Notably, this does not engender the depiction of all fat people as positive or likeable characters, as that can also present a singular image of the fat body, and as scholar Jerry Mosher notes, can serve as a vehicle for thinly veiled paternalism.164 At the same time, however, many of the problems within the depictions of fat people are linked to larger societal conceptions of the fat body that are engrained and rooted in long histories of racism and classism. The ascription of personal problems onto the fat body as a sign of personal failure, as seen in Tina and Kit in The L Word and Veronica in Pose, is dominant in present-day discourses of body size, as diet programs claiming to work through assessment of one’s “psychology” continue to grow. But as queer shows have always aimed to challenge misconceptions of what queer people do and say through careful renderings on screen, they have the potential to do the same with the fat body.

As Pose demonstrates in the show’s discussion of the pressure to pursue a singly envisioned embodiment of womanhood, there remain avenues and natural alignments between queer television shows and fat studies. The intellectual linkages between fat studies and queer studies, of questioning hegemonic systems that prescribe normative relationships between the body and the self and the body and others, are still present in these more concrete manifestations of queerness on screen. The societal ascription of disgust and disease onto fat and queer bodies alike ties together the work involved in challenging the stigma attached to them. The producers and actors involved in the shows investigated in this project all detail the importance of inclusion and representation, and the importance of exploring queerness on television. Exploring queerness allows for an avenue to question the dominant prescriptions onto all bodies, in gender and in

164 Jerry Mosher, “Setting Free the Bears,” 171. 100 size. Thus, the future of the inclusion of fat bodies in queer-centered television remains viable and a natural transition in that they share similar stigmatization.

Fat people appear on new television shows that challenge popular notions of the fat body, embodying new ways the fat body can be featured on screen. In Shrill, lead actress Aidy Bryant depicts a fat woman, Annie, who is “looking to change her life, but not her body.” While the show explores the fatphobia Annie faces, it also explores a deeper character development and a woman coming into her own after years of criticism from the people around her. Though the show has received mixed reviews and, as fat cultural critic Robyn Bahr writes, does little sharp critique of fatphobia and more “mournful” introspection, there are moments of fat joy.165 One season one episode, “Pool,” features a fat-positive pool party in which Annie is surrounded by many fat women, dressed in brightly colored and patterned bathing suits, all taking up space and refusing to apologize for it. Notably, however, one of the characters that critiques Annie the most is her fatphobic gay boss, who quips lines like “lazy bodies, lazy minds,” and repeatedly affirms his distaste for the fat body. While there are other queer characters on the show that are more fat- positive, and Annie’s best friend is an affirming lesbian, this cultural image of the body-obsessed gay man even finds its way into a show about centering the fat experience. Not only does this reinforce fatphobia as a mainstay of gay men, it suggests a binary between the bodily experiences of gay men and lesbians as explored in the introduction to this project – that for men who have sex with men, body consciousness is amplified, and for women who have sex with women, body consciousness is lessened. There needs to be room on television for the muddy in- between that is reality, and for interrogation of where these fatphobic constructs come from.

Shrill does this in the treatment of Annie’s mom, who goads her to go on a diet for “health”

165Robyn Bahr, “’Shrill’ TV Review | SXSW 2019,” The Hollywood Reporter, March 11 2019, https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/review/shrill-review-1193654 101 reasons, through Annie realizing that all women are inundated with the notion that fat must be obliterated in a woman’s body, and future media could powerfully do this as well.

Television can teach and reflect our societal realities, but it is also a space for imagining another reality. Whether this be in dramatic constructions of the fantastical or in the centering of experiences often erased, television can help viewers explore new ideas and envision new futures. This can be a space where dominant conceptions of the fat body are challenged, where fat queer people are centered and well-developed as characters, and where communities are fat- affirming or take on the project of confronting their own fatphobia.

102

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