I admire adrienne maree brown.
Emergent Strategy and brown’s organizing principles of small is all, fractals, joy and liberation, and pleasure activism resonate with me. So it is that I came to find myself in a Radical Self-Permission course coordinated by ms. brown and Sonya Renée Taylor. (Sonya Renée Taylor’s work on “getting off the ladder” of kyriarchy is genius, as well.)
Each section of the course began with a video recording of the gentlefriends Taylor and brown speaking on subjects related to practices like grace, curiosity, surrender, and satisfaction.
I loved the idea. I loved everything about it. I mean, one of the sections is on “self-worship,” an idea I still find powerful and threatening. Like, what would happen if I allowed myself to fully inhabit a practice of self-worship? I loved the whole promise of the course.
And then.
And then, in the very first recording about permission, our gentlefriends discuss the things they need to give themselves permission for. Permission to be more “woo,” more magical. Permission to acknowledge what their bodies were asking for, what pleased and satisfied them in their bodies. It was beautiful.
And then.
And then adrienne maree brown said, “I need to give myself permission to lose weight.”
Anger and Disbelief
I nearly fell off my chair, hearing it. I was momentarily overcome by shock. Shock turned to disbelief. Disbelief to anger. Anger to betrayal. She went on from that first statement to say that it is so difficult to talk about losing weight. That brought a belly laugh from me.
I thought to myself, and said later to the friends with whom I was taking the course, diet talk is everywhere, the slings and arrows of outrageous weight loss-weight gain-weight loss, the weight-gain industry, all of it is everywhere. How could she say that she felt as though she had no place to talk about it? Support for weight loss is everywhere, just everywhere!
And it is…well, not quite everywhere, but in vast swaths of the culure, for sure.
I could not believe that adrienne maree—I did feel as though we were invited into a kind of intimacy with the gentlefriends that invited first names—would say such a thing. It’s hard to talk about losing weight. Was she for real?!
Betrayal and Intersections
I really did feel betrayed. And betrayed by someone I’d expected to be an ally. I hadn’t even thought it could be otherwise. I mean, Sonya Renée’s The Body is not an Apology— Even the title made me feel so much more at home in my body than I had been before I saw that glorious cover. And I thought adrienne, too, was someone I could rely on to support the liberation of fat people, not claim that she needed to lose weight for her health or some shit. For goddess’s sake, she looks like a small fat person, at least in the “Zoom box.” What the hell?
So I listened to the talk again. And I heard some more. I heard more nuances, more that unsettled me. adrienne talked about the pain she felt in her body (does she have rheumatoid arthritis? I forget now.) and how she was seeking relief from that pain. I also thought, okay, wait a minute, let’s look at the intersection of things here.
adrienne maree brown is a black woman and I am a white one. She appeared to my eyes to be a small/medium fat person and I am of a size that some call “superfat” or “infinifat.” She has disabilities, I have disabilities. Both of us struggle with moving around in our bodies.
In the world of intentional weight loss, size discrimination and oppression, racism, hatred of the body, and justice, joy, and liberation, there is a lot going on in here.
I am really big. The biggest person in my circle of friends and acquaintances. On that axis, I’m bearing the burden of oppression every time I leave the house and sometimes when I’m in my brain alone. Hanging onto a commitment to fat liberation—not just for others, but for me too—is something I could only do by my eye teeth sometimes. But I’ve been hanging on as best I could, and here comes adrienne maree brown, saying that giving herself permission to lose weight was part of her liberation, and involved fostering and attending to grace, curiosity, surrender, and satisfaction.
So what was she saying? Why was I reacting the way I was, and so strongly…?
Part 2 next…
