There's a Botticelli Angel Inside, Snapping Beans:

Thinness as character trait

2008-05-14T04:36:03Z

Most characters in YA and middle grade literature are thin. Lean, willowy, slender, slim, slight. A character's thinness can mean a million different things. It can mean they're likeable, attractive, elegant, normal; it can mean they’re intelligent, mature, responsible, disciplined, moderate; it can mean they’re vulnerable, young, awkward, immature. It can mean myriad things.

Most of thinness's connotations are positive, whether it’s a role-model/admiration type of positive or an empathy/sympathy type of positive. When thinness connotes something negative or temporary (vulnerability, immaturity, some kinds of youthfulness, some kinds of awkwardness), fatness or plumpness are never the positive contrast. Fatness and plumpness are never symbols of the character growth, the emotional achievment, the victory. Even when thinness means something bad, its opposite isn’t any level of fatness. Sometimes the opposite of thinness is simply "acquires boobs and hips."

The plethora of thin characters helps construct our cultural associations with thinness, and at the same time, it draws on them. It uses them for literary art. It’s a pretty healthy dialectical relationship – unless you happen to question or resent those very associations. Unless you happen to notice that the cultural meanings ascribed to thinness are slamming fat characters and real fat people, and are creating a world of investors in The Fantasy of Being Thin.

In case anyone is poised to misunderstand, I'm not calling for all literary characters to be shades of fat. I'm calling for a weight-neutral world where thinness isn't automatic praise, and where a body of any size deserves default respect. It would include all sizes of fat and thin.

Often in YA lit, characters are thin for what seems no particular pinned-down reason. Their thinness may vaguely connote something positive, but the symbolism isn’t clear or necessary. Thinness is a shortcut to making a character likeable. An amorphous Mary Sue quality, a wish fulfillment, an aspiration, an achievment, a piece of candy to attract affection and loyalty from readers. That may be the saddest part of all.

diceytillerman @ 2008-05-13T23:33:00

2008-05-14T03:36:04Z

Harvard's new supposed Healthy Eating Pyramid has a scale on it.

A scale.

On the triangle's BASE -- the triangle's lowest level, that you're supposed to partake of most often.

Way to go, Harvard.

diceytillerman @ 2008-04-30T01:20:00

2008-04-30T05:36:51Z

A declaration I've been hearing a lot lately is "Fat is a feminist issue."* I've been thinking about it. And I don't feel comfortable with it.

To look at fatness through a feminist lens yields powerful revelations. It would be a crying shame not to do that -- not to have that be one way we look at fatness. But fat politics is not a subset of feminist politics, and fat oppression is not a subset of sexism.

I mean, it is. But it is also many other things. Fatphobia is an oppression in its own right, just like racism and sexism and homophobia and transphobia. I believe that there are bountiful riches to be found in studying how various oppressions intersect and influence each other. But I don't want fatpol, just because it's perceived as such a small movement, to locate a place underneath the umbrella of feminism. Or under any umbrella. Not unless all the other isms are under there too and each ism also has its own umbrella, underneath which are the oppressions that are not that umbrella.

Does that make sense? Each oppression has its own particular workings. Intersectional studies are wildly helpful, but there must not be ranking. Calling fat a feminist issue (without saying anything else) is a ranking.

So, sure, "fat is a feminist issue" -- as long as, too, feminism is a fat issue, sexism is a fat issue. As long as race is a class issue and class is a race issue. So nothing is subsumed. So they are each their own, and also each equally "of" the others. That could be interesting.

This reminds me of a earlier part of my life when I heard a lot of people saying that gender oppression of boys was a homophobia issue. Yes, of course, one reason people oppressively force boys into boy roles is the fear that they'll otherwise be queer; but that's not the only thing going on. Gender oppression of boys also occurs for its own sake: boys are forced into boy roles because we care that boys take boy roles. We fear they'll be queer, but we also fear that they won't be boys.

Insectionality is good and great and exciting. But one oppression getting labeled as solely part of another is neither truthful nor useful.

*I mean the expression, not any of the books by that title, which I partially read in college but don't remember nearly well enough to have any opinion on.

diceytillerman @ 2008-04-24T20:59:00

2008-04-25T01:16:39Z

I've reviewed a string of books lately that caused me to make the notation -- to myself, in my own notes, before writing the review -- undercurrent of misogyny. The journal I review for has a strict word limit (125-175), so most of the time, there's no room to say it in the review without making it loom overly large. It's an ongoing question of balance in this job. Which pros and which cons do I want the reader to take away with them? Is the misogyny truly strong enough that I don't want people to buy the book?

Probably almost all books would show some sexism under a glaring feminist lens. And some racism or white-centrism, and some fatphobia, and plenty of heterosexism if not homophobia. But many of them also include the opposite. Children's books often have so many layers of meaning that they contradict each other.

Many, many books have fatphobia that I don't mention in the review because it's not primary enough. Sometimes this feels sad to me, but I also know that it's correct. Children's books are from and of the real world, not some world I've idealized in my mind. And who would I be to draw the exact lines anyway? Fatphobia doesn't outrank other content, and content doesn't outrank art. Art (meaning text plus any visual art) ranks #1 on what to analyse in the review. Art is the place to start.

Props and love to Kirkus for letting me mention fatphobia when I do decide to. Sometimes it gets edited, but it's never gotten edited out. Yet another reason I hold my job dear.

diceytillerman @ 2008-04-02T23:52:00

2008-04-03T03:55:58Z

Queer children's lit blog Worth the Trip points to After Elton's recent book review of a picturebook called Uncle Bobby's Wedding. I mostly agree with the review, though I think Rudolph’s use of the word “rich” to describe the watercolors is a bit misguided given the densely saturated color default in current picturebooks. The saturation of these watercolors is medium, which matches the book’s gentle tone better than super-rich colors would.

The article's sentence that stopped me, oddly enough for this totally queer book (two men get married and no one protests nor even mentions gender!), is one about fatness. Note this bit of the article regarding an interview with author/artist Sarah Brannen:

Why guinea pigs? Brannen wanted a species whose coloring would indicate Bobby and Jamie were both male. Birds, however, “look silly in clothes,” she says. She finally chose guinea pigs, which she had raised as a child. “They have these fat little bodies like water balloons with little legs. I thought they would look funny and cute walking around on their hind legs.”

She departed from nature, though, and arbitrarily colored the females brown and males black and white. “I decided not to make them terribly realistic. I wanted just to create fat little furry people.”

I’m just not sure that these characters are fat.

The review link has pictures if you want to ponder it with me. The adults do have somewhat rounded tummies – they’re standing upright and their torsos are bigger in the middle than at the legs – and the children slightly so. But given that they’re guinea pigs, they certainly don’t READ as fat – they read as normative for guinea pigs. Does this mean that Brannen has taken fatness and made it normative? I'd like to think so, but I don't think I really do. I think that in order for these characters to read as fat, they’d have to be fatter.

Now, of course I’m not criticizing the book for not having characters that I consider fat! I love the book and have zero problems with it. It just makes me slightly sad that the author thinks they’re fat, because it points to a low cultural standard of how fat is fat. For guinea pigs, these characters are decidely medum; if they count as fat, where’s the room for the real fat characters?

diceytillerman @ 2008-04-01T01:48:00

2008-04-01T06:01:24Z

There are so very, very few children's books with transgender or genderqueer primary characters. I can think of Luna, Choir Boy, and Parrotfish. I'm saddened by this dearth, as a reader, and frustrated by it as a critic. I want to be able to analyze these books with my full critical lenses on, but there are SO few that I feel compelled to support them when someone asks for recommendations.

At least in these leading three books, unlike the early days of books featuring main characters who are gay or gayish, the dog doesn't die.* Now that I think about it, for firsts, they're awfully lacking in people getting punished -- either inside their book's own world by prejudice and hate, or by the narration. Why do we think this is? Is it a sign of positive shift in the world, that these first three YA transgender/genderqueer main characters go thankfully (and mostly but of course not totally) unpunished? Is it because the world has come so far in terms of gay characters, and trans characters reap the benefits of that?

Still: we need many, many more trans and genderqueer characters.

*in John Donovan's 1969 book I'll Get There, It Better Be Worth the Trip, which is often considered the first children's book with gay content, a dog literally dies. In many gay books that followed, someone dies or gets beaten up or gets in a car accident. There's an important difference between a character being hurt by homophobia within their own world (the book's world) in cases where the narrative voice condemns that homophobia, and a character being hurt BY the narration, which feels like the narration is punishing the gayness. When the dog in I'll Get There gets hit by a car, it feels to me like narrative punishment. (Feel free to debate me on that!) Still, gay books without any punishment were awfully refreshing when they finally arrived.

diceytillerman @ 2008-03-27T15:51:00

2008-03-27T19:53:11Z

Several years ago, I wrote an article about fat characters in children’s lit. It was published in KLIATT and later in the sadly-now-defunct Ruminator Review. I’m okay with most of it, but one paragraph has been haunting me for years.

This is the paragraph that bugs me:

Sometimes there are fat characters who are more complex and fully realized than those mentioned so far. This is the case for Susan in Alt Ed and Virginia in Carolyn Mackler's The Earth, My Butt, and Other Big Round Things. Each girl is the main character of her book, each tells the story in first-person perspective, and each is likeable. Each follows a familiar story arc of learning strength and sense of self. But each also loses weight along the way. Virginia begins with timidity, pain, and no self-esteem; she ends as a Web site-founder and proud sporter of purple hair and an eyebrow ring. But near the end, as the result of a kickboxing class, she notes "I'm starting to feel stronger, to see my stomach and arms tightening up" (237). The kickboxing class is an excellent choice for her, but the tightening up of her stomach and arms--and the linking of it with her growing "strength," which is physical in this sentence but is true overall in a profound emotional way--means that once again, fatness is inherently linked with weakness and lack of self-knowledge. Lose weight, gain strength--all kinds of strength.

What bothers me is how I dealt with Mackler’s sentence (in the pov of the protagonist), "I'm starting to feel stronger, to see my stomach and arms tightening up." I focused my criticism on the word “tightening,” which was the wrong place to focus it. The truth is, a fat character could exercise and feel their stomach and arms "tightening up" without any weight loss occuring, and therefore without invoking the old formula that weight loss is a symbol of social/emotional growth. She could gain tons of physical strength and stay equally fat.

I dislike that my article implies that gaining muscle strength is symbolically the same as weight loss. But although the word “tightening” shouldn’t have been what I attacked, SOMETHING is still wrong with Mackler's arc, from a fatpol viewpoint. Maybe it’s the word “see” – if a fat character were to gain lots of new muscle strength without losing any fat, she’d be less likely to see the change than to feel it. Feeling new physical strength, or feeling muscles tighten, is not necessarily indicative of weight loss. Or maybe the phrase "tightening up" would always be ambiguous because it sounds visually discernable? I'm not sure.

It’s important to me that I don’t imply in my critical writing that fat characters can’t exercise or gain physical strenth without playing into an anti-fatness formula.

At the same time, It’s also important to me that exercise and physical strength not be moralized into a NECESSARY requirement in order for fat characters to achieve their YA social/emotional growth arc, even if they don’t lose weight at all. But that’s more a question of my seeking out such characters as a critic, not of criticizing fat characters who exercise and gain physical strength. We will need both kinds – fat characters who are physically fit, and fat chacters who aren’t – in order to begin portraying a true-to-life variety of fat people in YA lit.

diceytillerman @ 2008-03-10T00:37:00

2008-03-10T04:50:13Z

Fairly regularly, people ask me my opinion of the verb "to queer." I don't mind the verb when it's used in the context of queer theory -- disrupting binaries of sex, gender, and sexuality, and otherwise recognizing aspects of those three categories that don't fit into neat definitions.

But I don't like the word when it's applied to other topics of identity. I am certainly in favor of pondering what we can learn from messing with boundaries and binaries on other identities -- "child/adult," for example, is one that comes up often in the children's lit field. But in my opinion, the verb "queer" would be diluted if we used it beyond sex, gender, and sexuality.

Besides, I don't see the need: we already have the word "deconstruct," which can apply to... pretty much anything, happily! "Deconstruct" is what people mean when they want to use the verb "queer" for other aspects of children's literature. Let's give deconstruction its props -- queer theory basically IS deconstruction applied to sex, gender, and sexuality.

Now that I think about it, though, "to queer" may have a limiting implication. It may imply that critics are MAKING a certain children's book (or character, or aspect of the book) queer, rather than finding some queerness that's already abiding within. Does the queerness reside in the book, or in the critic's lens, or somewhere between the two?

diceytillerman @ 2008-03-08T12:36:00

2008-03-08T17:44:57Z

There's a certain type of fat character in YA fiction that I think about a lot. It's the type of character who is well-rounded and appealing, with foibles and strengths and weakness, and who happens to be fat, but whose fatness is not the single defining trait.

Here's the problem. These characters unfailingly either lose weight or show signs that they're about to lose weight by the end of the book. Losing weight is written as integral to the YA growth arc. Sometimes the weight loss is barely mentioned -- perhaps only one sentence -- but that's a world of difference from not being mentioned at all.

Two examples of this are Alt Ed and The Earth, My Butt, and Other Big Round Things. Both books show a complex character who needs to learn to grow into herself, become centered, etc -- classic YA growth. But both also lose weight as part of that arc.

Fatness is not immaturity. It's not a lack of centeredness, and it's neither a mental or physical fault nor the symbol of some such fault. We need some fat YA protagonists whose YA growth arc doesn't include weight loss. There are two ways for this to happen: weight loss attempts could be addressed and rejected, or weight loss could go unmentioned.

a bit of rambling

2008-03-08T04:48:13Z

I was in graduate school when I formally found out about deconstruction. This is odd, because I was an English major in college and we USED deconstruction, but somehow I fell through the crack of knowing its name.

When I found queer theory, at the end of a Criticism class in grad school, I could see that it was a descendent of not just Feminism and Gay & Lesbian Theory but also of deconstruction. (Side note: clearly I have doubts about when to capitalize schools of theory. Please advise.) Those grandparents of queer theory, so to speak, are obvious. But what’s been slowly dawning on me over a number of years, so slowly I barely noticed, is that archetypal theory, too, is queer theory’s ancestor.

Ah, archetypal theory. How I love it. It’s what creates those delicious layers of depth in books that refer to other books – older books – and old stories. All the fairy tale retellings, and all the bible story retellings, lend a reader archetypal lenses whether she knows it or not. And once you have those archetypal lenses (again, whether you know it or not), you can see archetypal meanings all over the place. It’s awesome.

But archetypal theory is not just about seeing links with the bible and Grimm’s tales and Greek/Roman myths and Shakespeare. It’s not just about connecting a modern book with old books; it’s also a structure of thinking, and the structure is based on the idea of archetypes. Archetypes - or icons. And thinking about humanity in terms of icons – if the icon is “girl” or “boy,” for example – leads right to queer theory. Judith Butler and others have done all kinds of queerness work arguing that the ICONIC boy or girl can not really exist – that it’s only an idea in our head, and that no living human person can map neatly onto that icon. The identity of “boy” and of “girl” are messy BOTH THEORETICALLY AND IN REAL LIFE – and that’s the stuff queer theory is made of.

It’s true that traditional archetypal theory leans upon the notion of icons, while queer theory messes with any icon in its path. But the schools are thus related, and I think they need each other. Or maybe what I mean is, I need both of them. *grin*

So, archetypal theory, I thank you. I knew I loved you all along, but I didn’t realize until recently that you were another key to the birth of queer theory. Props to you.

diceytillerman @ 2008-03-07T02:46:00

2008-03-07T07:57:12Z

Hi!

I'm starting this journal under my real name, because the topics I'm going to write about here are my real work in the real world. If you happen to know my other online alias, please do not mention it here or link back to it in any way.

I study children's books. My favorite critical schools are deconstruction and archetypal theory. I've always known that my pet school, Queer Theory (capitalized here for introduction but probably never again), came from deconstruction. Lately I've been realizing that it comes from archetypal theory too. This is really exciting. Tomorrow I hope to explain why it's so exciting.

I'm a big theory geek and I will happily talk children's lit until the cows come home. Drop in and chat with me about children's books, queer theory, fat politics, and whatever else pops up. You have time -- the cows aren't home yet.

But they'll be home when they want to be milked.