Cruel Optimism - talking about fat again

I want to talk about fat again.  This wasn't what I meant to talk about in this blog but as I fought the urge to write this post I see that perhaps fat and questions of identity and otherness go together.  I even see the analogy in the out of control appetites, the steriotype of the drunk indian and the fat person who won't stop eating.  Both know the path is not a good one.  Both make small choices day after day that build up over time.
I having been reading "The Tapping Solution for Weight Loss & Body Confidence - A Woman's Guide to Stressing Less, Weighing Less, and Loving More" by Jessica Ortner and it reminds me of a book I read a few years ago by Lauren Berlant called "Cruel Optimism"   where she explores "... the question of how people  maintain their binding to modes of life that threaten their well-being, and to do this it recasts the object of desire not as a thing (or even a relation) but as  a cluster of promises magnetized by a thing that appears as an object but is really a scene in the psychoanalytic sense."

Both these books are really exploring why we hurt ourselves and stay in broken relationships (with people, things, ideas or systems).  Or why do you stay with the abusive partner?  I see this reflected in my relationship to my weight and in the larger indigenous questions about the systems we stay close to even when they hurt us.  By staying attached, staying in relationship we maintain an optimism that we cannot keep once that link is broken.

"I realised that I was not broken.  I just had layers of belief that made it feel unbearable if I could not turn to food for comfort." Ortner speaks to the cycle of optimism and disappointment that we enter into when we have an unhealthy relationship with food "When the world does not live up to our expectations we rebel against its unfairness by turning to food. It is like we are giving the middle finger back to a society that is pressuring us to live up to its expectations and those in our lives that make us feel like we will not be loved until we are a certain weight."

While Berlant is examining these themes on a more global level she also recognizes that these stuggles are often played out on our bodies, through a wearing down of our own physical capitol in order to maintain our relationship to the larger capitolist question. "People are worn out by the activity of life-building, especially the poor and the  nonnormative."   She sees this playing out as injury, addiction or even fat.  The body is the one place of power where there can be "mini-vacation" from self will and we can take small pleasures while navitgating life's dangers.

That control is the same that Ortner raises as through unhealthy eating "we are giving ourselves the love other denied us and we are taking back our power."  Both too speak to the fractures that burden, for Ortner, the stress of current life or unresolved past issues and for Berlant widened to include the social fabric and economy.  We signed on to the "good life" and this is what we work towards and sacrifice our bodies too.  She notes that "under capitalism sickness is defined as the inability to work" if you are not working in this system you are outside it, but being inside it and maintaining that relationship is in it's self breaking us down and leading to our eventual rejection from the system.

Berlant takes this  into the space of race and the fears around morbid obesity in the US which are often raised as a spectre of colour "African Americans as a population already saturated by death and available for mourning, compelled by appetites rather than by strategies of sovereign agency toward class mobility."  Where the narrative of failure is widened to include personal failure in not overcoming your race, class, education advantages.  While she does not explicity address natives in this text, the ongoing government concerns about diabetes fits neatly into this narrative.  The indian litterally eating its own.  We are left with personal failing with no narrative connecting the larger societal stories and histories to the personal realities.  "Fat, the congealed form of history that hurts".  These groups are wearing their histories and the ongoing losses those histories imply.
I also find Berlant's discussion of the retreat to family interesting.  This is a personal choice I made in my life, not to focus on moving forward at work but to turn that energy into the home.  But as I read more I realize that I am not making this choice in a vacumn.  Are those others reading the same signs I am and making the same decisions or are we being sold a story and I have just signed on without reading the small print?  I wanted to ask the Elder that last week.  I think the capitolist system is turning us towards home as a new place of consumption and as a means to distract us from other bad stuff that is happening (economically, socially, globally) but from an indigenous world view family is a core concern.  How do we balance those two pushes?  How do we pass something healthy on to our children our of this whole mess?

With our current relationships to work, there is little time for normal family life.  Establishing a faimily life takes over much of the remaining time and the children see this according to Berlant.  They see this stress and "kids learn to try to take up as little space as possible. They grow up feeling guilty about taking up space, seeing their parents as doing their best, but being powerless as well."  I worry about this in our home where so much of normal life is hard.  Just leaving the house can take two hours some days.  Just getting food into someone can be a major effort.  How do I provide a healthy picture to my children that life is not just about a tenuous existance?   How do I manage my desire to retreat into the mini vacations of the will when those are what gets me through some days?

Both these books raise some interesting questions about our relationships to those things that sustain us be they food, ideas, relationships or the lies that we tell ourselves.  I like that both these books are woman focused and raise those challenges of womanhood and family relationships together.  Berlant was not an easy read for me but it was worth the effort and she connects back into a lot of other interesting writers like Judith Butler, Georgio Agamben and Phillip Adams.  She is a literary critic but her writing crosses so many acedmic disciplines that it is please to watch it all come together.

So where does that leave us? (as I eat a bag of strawberry marshmellows asserting my control).  We can go straight to the worst case senario, which for me is struggle.  You keep going and examining those relationships and interactions and through living the questions we may become a little wiser. 

Or more optimistically, I think these kinds of larger conversations and the living out of the questions on a wide scale can bring hope by reminding us that we are not alone.  Also by further combining the wisdom of our communities, and reaching accross boundaries, personal or acedemic or racial we can work together to find more coherent solutions.