portmanteau

This is a really awesome video.

Transcript (thanks a million grrrltalks!):

“It’s taken me awhile to love my body the way it is, the size it is.
If you look at the typical advertisements, or women that American
women are supposed to look to for their images and ideals of beauty…
you don’t see people my size there. The average American woman wears
a size 12 or 14, but you don’t see the women modeling the clothing
wearing those sizes.

Look at the idols, look at the advertisements… no one there is wearing
the sizes that I do. I have never been those proportions, and while I
might have in the past, I now don’t hope to be. I like how I look, I
like how I feel, and I know how to defend myself and people my size to
those who call us ugly and use the word fat with a negative
connotation.

Honestly, it’s only recently that this came to be. A few years ago, I
found the photographic work of Substantia Jones. Her mission
statement for The Adipositivity Project reads:
“The Adipositivity Project aims to promote size acceptance, not by
listing the merits of big people, or detailing examples of excellence
(these things are easily seen all around us), but rather, through a
visual display of fat physicality. The sort that’s normally unseen.
The hope is to widen definitions of physical beauty. Literally.   The
photographs here are close details of the fat female form, without the
inclusion of faces. One reason for this is to coax observers into
imagining they’re looking at the fat women in their own lives, ideally
then accepting them as having aesthetic appeal which, for better or
worse, often translates into more complete forms of acceptance.

I had never seen images of fat women like this. I had never seen them
photographed with so much love. I started thinking about viewing
myself and other women in another light. Though I have always been a
feminist, I had never heard of terms like body positive, fat positive,
or even fat acceptance, and I have been a fat girl all my life. I can
say that now, that I’m fat, because of the work that I’ve done
understanding the politics of being fat in this country, and
understanding that this is a descriptor I definitely can reclaim.

When I say in conversation that I’m fat, all too often I either get
the response “oh, no, you’re not fat, you’re just curvy” or “but
you’re so beautiful.” Yes, I am fat, yes, I am curvy, and yes, I am
beautiful. I am all of those things. Saying things like, no you’re
not fat, when someone self identifies that way reinforces the thought
that fat is a negative thing. It’s reinforcing that fat is unwanted,
unsexy, un-beautiful. Look at these images. These women call
themselves fat. They’re all beautiful, and they’re not beautiful in
spite of the fact that they are fat. They are beautiful and they are
fat. I see myself now in a positive light because of Substantia
Jones’s work and because of the body positive work many feminists and
fat studies scholars are doing.”