excess baggage.

i'm thinking more and more lately about the intersections of fatness and queerness, particularly now in my own day-to-day life, not just academically, and what that means for the spaces i'm comfortable in and those where i'm not. it's interesting how when i'm in public and looked at because of my size, it is absent also of a queer read. because i'm femme and thus usually invisible as queer, the spectacle that my body becomes is only because of the "excessiveness" of my size and not also a reaction to my gender or my sexuality. this, of course, becomes complicated when i am in the presence of people who are visibly queer and takes on another dimension entirely when that person is clearly romantically linked to me. these are moments that i both cherish and fear because the transgressions are actually palpable. my fatness and my queerness, when they're both noticeable, create opportunities for rethinking love, desire, and sex despite size and despite who i'm fucking. these opportunities for conceiving differently, progressively even, of fat queer bodies, though, is also of course, made possible by the fact that i'm white and that i'm seemingly within a normative economic class. so there's potential here for blowing people's minds a bit, but there's also this overwhelming sense of danger that goes beyond queer bashing and the already serious danger of that. because now what must be taken into consideration is not only hatred of queerness, but also of fatness and the feelings of repulsion that inspires in people, let alone when fat sexuality is being made so open.

this is all to say that yesterday, when i was at a may day festival, surrounded by thousands of people and my friend - a brown, non-American, butch, my former lover - attempted to hold my hand as we made our way through cheese curd stands and kids running haywire with pink and purple paper streamers, i froze for a reason. and not because i didn't want her to take my hand because i feared what holding hands would signify in a relationship that is already complicated by our past as people who once loved a little and fucked a lot. i hesitated because of just how queer - because of the "excess" present in my size, our gender, our intimacy, our difference in skins - we were in a space where things seemed safe enough, but how and when do you really know? it was only two seconds worth of deliberation before i folded my fingers up with hers, but it's another example of thinking about this junction between sexuality and size and how it's real world stuff, daily stuff, that constantly reinspires my academic work on all of this.