On Writing the Body: Or Welcome to the Body of Fat and Disability Politics, a guest post by Jen Ferguson

As a child, I didn’t know I was fat. People called me thick. Or people commented on how big I was getting. In the particular childhood photograph I’m thinking of, the sun has given the image a brownish-orange tint. I’m wearing a one-piece bathing suit. It’s bright, I think. Or it’s neon. My family and I, we’re at Myrtle Beach on vacation. Both my younger sisters are in the photo. Or, if I’m misremembering, they’re just out of the frame.

As a child, I didn’t know that my bathing suit was too tight.

All I knew was that my body could do miraculous things. That I could run into the ocean, be playfully crushed by the waves, and then I could stand up, and do it all over again. I could be buried in sand, my whole body incased in that wet stuff, and then, if I tried hard enough I could break free.

Soon after that trip, I realized that when adults commented on my body, when they said “big” they did not mean tall or broad-shouldered, but wide. When they said “thick” it was a comment on my hips, my waist, my chubby arms.

I stopped thinking of my body as miraculous.           

I could only think of it as too large and for a long time, I used the word fat against myself, like if I called myself that three letter word enough, I would learn to hate myself and then, then because I hated myself, I would change. 

Change only ever meant becoming skinny.

When I wrote A Constellation of Minor Bears, I knew that Molly Norris-Norquay would be fat, and she would also be an adventurer. She would be fat, and she would be capable. Her fatness would not stop her from doing, from being, from experiencing.

Molly’s parents don’t food shame her or try to make her diet.

Mine didn’t either. Not really.

Molly’s friends love her, don’t care about her size.

Mine loved me the way I was too.

And still, Molly knows her fat body limits her in the world. Maybe the thing she’s most aware of is how hard it is to find athletic clothing made for her size 16/18 body.

I hid in baggy pajama bottoms and hooded sweatshirts for a long time. But I also learned from fat activists that the word itself isn’t inherently negative, that it’s descriptive, and that I could use it that way.

I didn’t have to hurt myself with the word fat.

It was powerful to take it and remove the word from the harm it caused me.

I could be fat and also be a hiker, be fat and someone who took two-week long canoe trips into the interior of Algonquin Provincial Park. I fell in love with the wilderness as a fat girl. I learned that my body has stamina, and that it’s okay to be slow. That fat hikers, and fat adventurers belong in the wild—and everywhere else too.

Fellow hiker Brynn is not a small fat like Molly but a mid-fat. She’s also not afraid of knotting her t-shirt and showing off her midriff because hiking the Pacific Crest Trail (PCT) is sweaty business.

Hank, Molly’s half-brother is skinny, tall, and ever since his indoor climbing accident, and recovering from the subsequent coma, he’s struggling with his memory, with balance and other lingering effects of a traumatic brain injury.

Molly, Brynn and Hank have something in common.

At the most fundamental level they exist in bodies that do not “fit”.

At the most fundamental level, this is fat and disability politics: two distinct movements that seeks to reshape the world, not bodies, reshape the world so that all bodies fit. So that fit is a problem with infrastructure and not with people. So that fit becomes a thing we no longer have to fight against, to hold ourselves up to and discover over and over again how our bodies (and our minds) are not made for the world.

The world, the land around us, this place is meant for all bodies, all living and non-living things.

People have built inequal structures, have assumed an ideal body, have assumed that the body we start with is the body we will have forever. This is categorically untrue. The changing status and health of our bodies, the changing abilities and shapes of our bodies, is a constant in this experience of life: some of us are born disabled, some of us become sick or have an accident causing disability, some of us just get old. This is life.

I would like to introduce you to some of the fat and disability thinkers and activists who I have I learned from. This list is varied. It’s writers, thinkers, activists, business people, models, librarians. This list is not the end or even much more than a small beginning, a starting point, a collection of smart humans.

A. H.  Reaume

Adam Pottle

Alice Wong

Alicia Elliott

Angie Manfredi

Brooke Eby

Claire Forrest

Disability In Kidlit (Resource)

Fiercefatfemme

Gabi Fresh

Keah Brown

Lillie Lainoff

Rivers Solomon

I would like to encourage you to do more learning.

That’s one of the other things I’ve learned is a constant in this life we are living. Learning doesn’t end when you graduate high school, or even college or university, or even when you turn thirty, forty, fifty, etc. … Learning is lifelong.

Too many of us have stopped.

Too many of us have become brittle, complacent, inflexible.

If you feel this is true in your own life, it’s an easy thing to change. You can start here, with this list. You can grow.

For a long time, wilderness places didn’t seem welcoming to those of us who weren’t living in white, middle-class or upper-class, cis, het, non-disabled bodies.

I say seem because the wilderness, the land itself doesn’t judge, doesn’t think one body is better, or stronger or more welcomed than any other.

But the people who build the idea of the wilderness—the same people who recognized it as needing protection—and those who recognized that in order to go into the wilderness, people would require clothing, gear, guides, all sorts of things and services, and those who went into the wilderness and wrote books, and those who learned about the wilderness in organizations like Girl Guides or Scouts, and those whose parents took them to the wilderness, and those who stumbled on the PCT and the Appalachian Trail and went home and told their buddies about their experiences, all of these people built the wilderness.

Many built the wilderness in their own image.

The wilderness is an idea.

But it is more than an idea too.

And the more-than, the land itself, it welcomes everyone. It always has. The land is not politics. The land is not a barrier*.

The land does not even ask for respect.

But I will.

I invite you, whoever you are, whatever your body looks like or can do, I invite you into wild places, and I invite you to respect and even further, I invite you to love the living and non-living entities you find there. Yes, love the things that are easy to love. For many of us, other mammals are easiest. But love the things that don’t get enough love—like spiders, like mosquitos, and other insects, like mud, like fallen trees. Love the rocks, the pretty ones and the weird ones, and the broken ones too.

The wilderness, more than anything in my life, has taught me that my body, my fat body is miraculous. And your body, it is miraculous too.

There are so many fat and disabled hikers and adventurers waiting.

Join us.

*Absolute respect to those of you whose disabilities make accessing wilderness spaces difficult to impossible. If you don’t know about Disabled Hikers, please get to know them. They are doing good work. But also, since the wilderness is an idea, there’s no reason you can’t take that idea and shape it for your life, your body. It’s yours too.

Meet the author

Jen Ferguson (she/her) is Métis with ancestral ties to the Red River and white, an activist, a feminist, an auntie, and an accomplice armed with a PhD. She believes writing, teaching and beading are political acts. Her debut YA novel, The Summer of Bitter and Sweet (Heartdrum/HarperCollins) won a 2022 Governor General’s Literary Award and is a 2023 Stonewall Honor Book. Jen’s second YA novel Those Pink Mountain Nights has four starred reviews and is a Junior Library Guild Gold Selection. A Constellation of Minor Bears, about three teens grappling with balancing resentment against enduring friendship—and how to move forward with a life that’s not what they’d imagined, will be published September 24th, 2024.

www.jenfergusonwrites.com

https://swampfoxbookstore.com/preorders/jen-ferguson

A Constellation of Minor Bears

About A Constellation of Minor Bears

Award-winning author Jen Ferguson has written a powerful story about teens grappling with balancing resentment with enduring friendship—and how to move forward with a life that’s not what they’d imagined.          

Before that awful Saturday, Molly used to be inseparable from her brother, Hank, and his best friend, Tray. The indoor climbing accident that left Hank with a traumatic brain injury filled Molly with anger.

While she knows the accident wasn’t Tray’s fault, she will never forgive him for being there and failing to stop the damage. But she can’t forgive herself for not being there either.

Determined to go on the trio’s postgraduation hike of the Pacific Crest Trail, even without Hank, Molly packs her bag. But when her parents put Tray in charge of looking out for her, she is stuck backpacking with the person who incites her easy anger.

Despite all her planning, the trail she’ll walk has a few more twists and turns ahead. . . .

Discover the evocative storytelling and emotion from the author of The Summer of Bitter and Sweet, which was the winner of the Governor General’s Award, a Stonewall Award honor book, and a Morris Award finalist, as well as Those Pink Mountain Nights, a Kirkus Best Book of the Year!

ISBN-13: 9780063334229
Publisher: HarperCollins
Publication date: 09/24/2024
Age Range: 13-18 Years

Filed under: Guest Post