POTBELLIED MANIFESTO
Anarkorporeal. Punk will never diet.
Authors: Missogina (Constanza Alvárez Castillo) & Samuel HidalgoTranslator: Sol Tovar
Our body, the first enemy
Is now, in the fat present
Because one isn't born fat, but rather becomes one...
We enunciate, "some girls are bigger than others"
We are the anarkorporeals
We proclaim;
That we will above all rebuild our lives from what we are,
what bothers,
the brimfulness of the hog that does want to live.
We are gourmands and tempted,
pure eros turnt pleasure by the good food and feasts.
We like the warmth that fat brings on those winter days.
And before a demure culture,
a smart appearance and being proper,
we are the trenches of the skin fascism/dictatorship.
We are life overflowing with oral pleasure
Because we like to eat and we don't wanna hold back such desires.
Just so the family can like me,
or the incidental sexual partner or the boss who didn't wanna hire me because of
poor appearance.
We are the walking denunciation of the inconsistencies of the democracy of
the bodies
Whatever the cost
Because our stomach pleasures are not traded.
We are the ones who are reluctant to disappear when faced with the slimming
of body differences.
Because being fat is not some anecdote,
it's political,
against the rules.
... "What does not fit, what exceeds, what bursts boundaries, seams and
zippers, bus seats, borders, fictions, desires".
Here are my flaps,
Here are my rolls,
Here's the body,
the one that doesn't belong,
the one that apparently nobody wants to fuck,
this sick body.
We talk as fatties, potbellies,
from the stretch marks, cellulite, greasy and oily rolls
that run through our overflowing bodies,
the eternal school nickname,
as health and beauty proletarians,
more desiring than desirable.
We are the transfeminist radical potbellies speaking
'cause destroying gender ain't enough
if we don't blow up body standards too.
Because deep down, we disgust your system of vigor, strength,
fertilization and (labour and military) force.
We are the fatties that don't eat meat speaking,
those who believe that racism, sexism, el heterosexism
and specism are fences that should be destroyed.
Those who don't want to work,
those who want to stop being, to abort.
Those who don't want to give birth, to be on strike.
We are also the hairy, reeking fatties speaking,
the ugly, hyper-feminine fags,
who don't appear in pornos if not as a fetish,
the butches, the sloppy slobs, those who burp at the table,
disgusting, disturbing, excessive,
never quiet nor flawless.
We were the cool chubby one,
the one no one would ask to dance,
the one who never managed to keep a diet,
the embarrassed one, the one who covered herself,
the "fucking fatso", the one they always wanted to shut up,
the sow, piglet, obese, greasy ball, lardo,
whale, the tubby, the wideload, the Perez Hilton,
the ball, the bucket of lard.
To the rest, our body is just a big, deformed, greasy balloon.
'Cause we are all potentially anorectic potbellies.
We don't want to change our ways
or to be accepted for "what we are on the inside."
nor torture ourselves with extreme dieting and exercise,
we want desires to be unlearnt
and that our body turns into potential desire by the mere
fact of being a body.
We talk for the fatties that are still in the land
of silence, of shame, of derision...
We invite you not to come out of the sizing closet, but to destroy it...
The mirror is not a reflection of reality,
what we see in it is no more than a social construct we need to
rebuild.
We pulled out our claws, howled like wolves and got out of the land of
silence.
FAT TODAY YESTERDAY BITCH TOMORROW WOLF
Author Notes:
This text was written alongside Samuel Hidalgo/Salmuera.
Phrases between inverted commas are taken from GordaZine!, a sister publication.
Translation Notes:
This text is part of La Cerda Punk, a book that compiles some writings on fat activism and other surrounding matters. The book is free to distribute and freely available online. I took some poetic licences, especially when listing insults since some equivalences were hard to find. Also some "alternative re-spellings" can be found here and there as in the Spanish version. In the original, there is no mention of Perez Hilton but of Gonzalo Cáceres, a Chilean celebrity who is famous, in part, for knowing all the gossip. He used to be fat but lost weight and is obsessed with diets and staying thin (pretty much like his American counterpart).