Self-love cannot and will not save us.

plus bookclub link! An introduction to Da'Shaun L. Harrison's instrumental text, "Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness." audio coming separately.

an essay I dreamt was entitled “I love, therefore I am.”

Photo by Kira auf der Heide on Unsplash

Introduction

Da’Shaun L. Harrison has penned one of my favorite texts in the past five years. I have read it three times in nine months and become more and more delighted with the person that I become. In Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness, Harrison presents theoretical frameworks that compel us to meaningful action. I will tell you now and I will tell you for free: belief that compels me to meaningful action is exactly my shit. Dr. Bettina Love, in her book We Want to do More than Survive, describes theory as her guiding light— as her way of making sense of why her body and personhood are routinely marked as undeserving while moving throughout the world. Blessed are the workers who make the way clearer with their weighty words. I relish texts like this.

Harrison, theorist and scholar in fat, Black, genderqueer studies, provides a pithy and effective analysis of the Black, fat, masculine body and the ways it is marked “undeserving.” I began a whole bookclub to dissect this text among peers (the link for which is at the bottom of this email, and will only be available via email if you are listening via a podcast listening app). I will be producing four essays reading through this text, and for the first I would like to examine the radical framework for love presented in the first chapter of their book.

Beyond Self Love

The chapter “Beyond Self Love” begins by interrogating the body positivity movement. Remember that the thesis of the book argues that anti-fatness and anti-Blackness are synonymous, twin-acting forces of violence on the world, a critique of the current politics of fatness is incredibly useful in seeing where we might need to go. Harrison asks:

“What is the utility of ‘body positivity’ if it only seeks to provide one with a false sense of confidence rather than to liberate all from that which cages the body?” (page 2)

I like this inquiry because it forces us to contend with the four quintessential questions of a close read:

1. Who wrote it?

2. For what purpose?

3. For what audience?

4. What is it missing?

The body positivity movement at first was a thought campaign headed by and for Black fat folks that wanted space, even if it was just internal space, to think of themselves as lovely. Harrison expands in the first chapter of the kind of fat person that is allowed to garner sympathy and support, and it’s one that is constantly trying to lose the weight on them or one that outwardly performs “health.” That makes external (or internal) a conditional kind of love. As the movement gained notoriety and was hijacked by white profit motive (as most good things are), the body positivity movement shrouded itself in a cloak of radicalism that it did nothing to earn.

Love is a Politic

Harrison then describes ‘body positivity’ as “benevolent anti-fatness in that it is masqueraded as some sort of semblance of acceptance for fat people when it is, instead, an opportunity for thinness to reroute, but not give up, its hold on fat people’s collective liberation.” (page 4)

The use of the word benevolent here is brilliant— I use the phrase “benevolent racism” all the time to indicate the same thing. As we consider the purposes, the audience, and the missing parts of body positivity, we can see the ways in which the current body positive movement mimics the goals of thinness. Again from the text, Harrison states the politic of thinness plainly:

“As a politic, thinness is a system that seeks to subjugate and ultimately eradicate fatness and fat people.” (page 4)

I want us all to take note how powerful it is to consider objects or states of being you might have conceived of as naturally occurring or inevitable happenstance as a politic that was uniquely and purposefully designed. What are the motives of thinness?

Any love that the state shows you is (always) conditional on your deservingness.

The frameworks presented in the first chapter of Belly of the Beast are not just useful to fat studies and scholarship, but to all systems of oppression that benefit from hijacking one’s own self perception. White supremacist capitalistic patriarchy is so effective because it relies so much on good, old-fashioned brainwashing. I would even argue that the vast majority (if not the entirety) of these hierarchal systems where the bottom is exploited to continue the ruling privilege of the top are based upon deservingness— the idea that one has done or can do something to deserve their place in life. Deservingness automatically adds conditionary measures to all of our love, including our self love.

This is a reality I see as a therapist. I constantly have to remind my clients not to be so hard or critical on themselves because all of them, in some way or another, were wading through a system designed to hurt them. This is also the reason my least favorite modality is Cognitive Behavioral Therapy— not even because it doesn’t work! CBT is helpful for circumstances within your control. It’s just that my clients were Black single mothers, folks on medicaid, laborers enduring union strikes, and in whole people that were tasked with the endless plight of survival. Most of the stressors in their lives were firmly outside of their control and did indeed make their lives significantly worse than the lives of the “more deserved” classes sitting above them. No matter how much I compelled them to love themselves and be kinder to themselves, that will never do anything to sincerely change their circumstances.

Our. I should say “our.” I am, by many intersections, amongst the class of the undeserved. I love myself sincerely and without ceasing. I am still depressed and viciously angered at the circumstances of my most beloved every single day.

Self Love in Community

From the text:

Radial self love (as in self love with no conditionality) is “necessary cultural work,” as Taylor states. It challenges our relationship to our own bodies and to other people’s bodies, and that will always be a work that can make our realities after the destruction of the world better than they were before, but it does not demand more than that because it cannot demand more. (page 6, bolding mine)

The only thing that self-love is accountable to is the self. Self-love can only make demands of the self it belongs to? So what is your own self? What are you made of? What parts of the whole are you accountable to? What does that whole make up and what does it want from you?

I have two maxims that I often use about my selfhood:

1. I am an amalgamation of the people that build me.

2. My Politic is alive and she will kill me.

Because of the way that I conceive of and receive myself, I consider my personhood a walking paper-mache art piece made up of bits of my community. I am little strips of the people that love me all stuck together around something full at my core. Full like a jar of dirt. Full and soft and something you can sink into, like fertile earth.

I recognize that the only thing that my self-perception shifts is my own internal world. This word that we wade through benefits greatly from us individually weighing ourselves by our “deservingness,” predicated, of course, by what this maniacal and genocidal state told us what we should reward ourselves for being. I do not have to yield to that thinking. Those of us that survive despite of the state will continue to be destabilized by it.

That is the sum of the demand that I can make of my own self love. Self love does not shift the love that this world withholds from you, and you are right to want to be loved by the world. Our original Mother Earth showed so much endless love for us, and she and her children were pillaged by a select and detrimental few. You are not wrong or “crazy” to mourn not being loved by the world in full.

Self love is only good for liberating the self of the shackles that are self-inflicted. Communal love and effort are needed to make lasting change to any sort of caretaking for the mind. Why love? Why do we need communal love, and not just communal space or communal affinity or community trust? What is love?

You might have your definitions. Here, in my Garden Space, Love is the feeling that compels you to action and love is also the action itself.

love is the testament, the very commitment to action as much as it is the action itself. I love myself so I will act in my self interest, which leads me to love my community. I love my community and wish to act in our best interests, which leads me to care for myself and for others intimately and without condition. Finding, building, and maintaining community where I can be vulnerable enough to be steadfast and humble and accountable is the work of my lifetime. It makes the commitment to action as natural as inhaling.

self love will not save us. can we save ourselves?

ismatu gwendolyn

book club is happening literally right now!!

Bookclub

https://uchicago.zoom.us/j/93123534631?pwd=SEtMazhLVTRRMitxRHRhZlNxUzVWUT09

Meeting ID: 931 2353 4631

Passcode: 082399