Episode 74: Transcript

Episode: 74: Disobedient Bodies

Transcription by Keffy

Annalee: [00:00:00] Welcome to Our Opinions Are Correct, a podcast about science fiction and society. I'm Annalee Newitz. I'm the author of Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age, coming out in a couple months.

Charlie Jane: [00:00:14] I'm Charlie Jane Anders, author of Victories Greater Than Death, a young adult space opera novel coming out in April. 

Annalee: [00:00:22] Awesome. So now you know we're writers. 

Charlie Jane: [00:00:25] Yeah!

Annalee: [00:00:26] And today, what we're going to talk about is something that we're calling disobedient bodies in science fiction and fantasy. And the disobedient body is a relatively persistent trope in in these genres. And we're using it to talk about bodies that exceed their abilities somehow or that cannot contain the power of the person within their body. You see it a lot in overpowered characters or characters who just consume ravenously, like vampires and zombies. 

[00:00:57] So our question is, what are these stories really about? What are we really talking about when we when we use these kinds of disobedient bodies? And we're going to talk about that. And in the second half, we're super lucky to have guest, Meg Elison, who is a feminist cultural critic as well as the author of the amazing book of The Unnamed Midwife, as well as the series that follows. And she has a new novel that just came out called Find Layla. 

[00:01:22] So let's get going with the show. 

[00:01:25] Intro music plays: Drums with a bass drop and more science fictional bells and percussion. 

Annalee: [00:01:52] So we're talking about bodies that refuse to be ordinary. Bodies that are disobedient. And before we get started, I wanted to acknowledge that we're not going to be talking about disability in this episode. We're going to have a whole other episode about disability, there's a lot to unpack there. It does overlap a tiny bit with what we're talking about today, but it deserves its own episode. So stay tuned. 

[00:02:15] So to start out, I wanted to talk about the overpowered character, Charlie Jane. And this is a big trope in anime. A whole bunch of the Quirks in my Hero Academia have kind of an overpowered feeling. There's one Quirk called All For One, where basically the person who has that Quirk can like suck up everyone else's power, which is a super common trope you see in western stories as well. And sometimes this leads to bad things. Sometimes it can actually be used for good. One of the characters that sticks out for me the most that I wanted to ask you about Charlie Jane, is Dark Phoenix.

Charlie Jane: [00:02:57] Oh, yeah.

Annalee: [00:02:58] Because that's a really… I find that character super interesting for all kinds of reasons. But I wonder if before we dig into Dark Phoenix, if you could just give us a super quick thumbnail sketch of who she is and how she got to be dark.

Charlie Jane: [00:03:13] So Dark Phoenix is Jean Grey, a member of the X-Men who is sort of a super powerful telepath, who can do all the telepath things, read minds.

Annalee: [00:03:21] Telekinesis.

Charlie Jane: [00:03:22] Communicate with her mind. Yeah, she can do shit with her mind. And she's sort of the other telepath of the X-Men along with Professor X. And there's this thing called the Phoenix Force, which actually comes from outer space and is connected to these aliens called the Shi’ar, I think, which takes over her body and kind of gives her extra powers. But if she gets too powerful, then she basically turns evil, I guess. And then she has to die, basically. This is the big tragic arc of Jean Grey and Dark Phoenix is she gets more and more powerful until finally she can't handle it anymore and she's too dangerous. And she's also out of control. And she ends up just having to die for everybody else's safety. 

[00:04:07] They've done this now in two different X-Men movies, where they kind of turned it into a more of a kind of weirdly gendered thing of we have to control women who are too powerful. And Professor X, in particular, is trying to kind of put limits on her for her own good, and it becomes this weird very gendered thing around her power being specifically female power. 

Annalee: [00:04:31] One of the things I recall is that, I mean, in certain versions of the story, Xavier is aware that she's much more powerful than him. And he like implants, I think what he calls roadblocks, in her head, right? 

Charlie Jane: [00:04:46] Yeah, that's the movie version. I don't think that happens in the comics. If Baruch was here. He could tell us in great detail about Dark Phoenix. But I think in the comics, it's just that she gets more and more powerful and people are like, whoa, dude. Whereas in the in the movies I think usually they leave out the part where there's an alien force that kind of comes into her body. And it's just that from childhood, she shows signs of being too powerful. And so the men in her life are like this girl has to be contained, this girl has to be controlled. And so it's a very different kind of story when you don't include the thing about the Phoenix Force coming from outer space.

Annalee: [00:05:23] Well, I want to say two things about that. One is that I think it's interesting that it's never examined in any of the stories where Xavier implants roadblocks in her brain, it's never questioned about maybe it was the roadblocks that fucked her up. Maybe the problem wasn't her power, but all of the weird things they did to her head to prevent the power?

Charlie Jane: [00:05:44] Right.

Annalee: [00:05:46] That would be a super interesting story to investigate that. It’s just no one ever even brings that up. And then the other thing is that I feel like the power coming from outer space still winds up being kind of what you were saying about female bodies are uncontrollable because it's her body that's able to be the vessel for this power, or her power is able to host this power because she's already so incredibly agile with her mental strength or whatever, I don’t know. She's the perfect vessel for the Phoenix power. And that's also still kind of her fault somehow.

Charlie Jane: [00:06:21] Yeah, I mean, it's been a long time since I read the original Dark Phoenix saga. And I've read a bunch of the comics that have come out since then, like X-Men: Phoenix—Endsong, which was written by Greg Pak actually, and it was pretty—

Annalee: [00:06:35] It was awesome. I love him.

Charlie Jane: [00:06:35] Fun ride. Yeah. I think that part of what's going on with with Dark Phoenix and with other kind of overpowered superheroes, I feel like superheroes are often kind of monstrous to begin with, like the line between monster and superhero is a wavy one, like the Incredible Hulk is a superhero, for example, and a bunch of other superheroes who are basically kind of like Frankenstein-y or actual fantasy monsters, get to be superheroes and get to be seen as heroic. 

[00:07:07] Oftentimes, when you have characters who are kind of an analog of Superman, they kind of play up the kind of weirdness of this oversized, kind of overpowered body. And you had this trend, I guess, starting in the ‘90s, of really drawing super heroic bodies as so muscly that you can see every vein, and every sinew and—

Annalee: [00:07:27] Their bodies are like breaking out of their bodies in a weird way. 

Charlie Jane: [00:07:31] Yeah, they're like bodybuilders, but like, times 10. And that was kind of the Rob Liefeld, Image Comics style that became super mainstream in the ‘90s and 2000s and kind of defined how superheroes are drawn. So, I think that there is kind of this weird crossover in superheroes between how powerful they are and how we depict their bodies as being out of control in some way.

Annalee: [00:07:56] That's what I think is interesting about Dark Phoenix, and I'm glad that you, you brought up the stuff around gender, because depending on the movie or the comic book, she's usually depicted as having… this is all about mental power. But the mental power strains her body. It's almost as if it's her body, her female body, that can't deal with having so much power inside of it. I mean, sometimes she's sort of ripped apart, almost. And she's sort of lighting things on fire. And it's like, there's all this stuff that's kind of coming out of her body. But her body isn't strong enough. It’s interesting that Hulk can somehow handle growing super giant, and then shrinking back down again. But, Jean Grey just can't handle having this mental power that kind of stretches the bounds of her body. Her body just has to be destroyed, and her mind has to be destroyed, or contained in some way. 

[00:08:52] I don't know, her character, to me, is an interesting way to start this conversation because we never know, really, with her if her power is in her body, in her mind, limited by her body, limited by her mind. It's almost like, in Jean Grey's character, there's this breakdown of this division between mind and body because we don't ever know what the limit is that she's breaking through. What's causing her to be so disobedient as it were?

Charlie Jane: [00:09:26] It’s the Cartesian dualism problem.

Annalee: [00:09:27] Right. 

Charlie Jane: [00:09:29] And I do really think, having read a billion superhero comics. I think that in superhero comics, your power tearing your body apart is a very common thing for male superheroes and female superheroes, but I think it probably is a little bit more common for female superheroes. And this idea that you get so powerful that your eyes are glowing and your hands are glowing and you're starting to just turn into pure power.

Annalee: [00:09:56] And your flesh is ripping us off and things are coming, spikes are coming out of your body. I mean, it's interesting that Wolverine is another character that has the same problem. Because he's, unlike some of the other characters, anytime he gets his power, his body is violated, right? He’s constantly being penetrated from the inside by his own power and having to heal. Which is, depending, again, on the representation of Wolverine, it's more or less painful for him, right? Sometimes, he's in agony. Every time the knives come out of his hands, he's like, ouch. And sometimes it's just like, dude, I got the knife hands.

Charlie Jane: [00:10:40] I think it's actually canonical that like, it hurts horribly every time those knives come out. And Wolverine’s origin story always lingers on the thing where every bone in his body is coated with adamantium. And it's this whole, thing of they have to basically tear his body apart, fill his skeleton or cover his skeleton with this impenetrable metal and then, somehow, he's not just too heavy to move after that.

Annalee: [00:11:06] Well, because of his healing ability and strength and stuff. 

Charlie Jane: [00:11:09] Yeah. 

Annalee: [00:11:11] So I wanted to turn away from the X-Men or a bit now.

Charlie Jane: [00:11:14] Fine.

Annalee: [00:11:15] And I wanted to talk about a movie that you and I are both kind of obsessed with. It’s called Society. 

Charlie Jane: [00:11:22] Oh my God. Yes.

Annalee: [00:11:21] It’s an ‘80s. It's sort of a mid-‘80s movie directed by Brian Yuzna who did a bunch of really schlocky political thriller type movies, not political thriller, like political horror. And he also worked a lot with Screaming Mad George, who is a fantastic special effects artist who does a lot of the gloopy, gooey, drippy effects, and these are all practical effects. And so. Society is a simple tale of a youth growing up in Beverly Hills, and his parents are really weird. His sister's a little strange. He just feels kind of like he doesn't fit in, but he's not really sure why. And eventually, he discovers that his family and most of the other wealthy families in Beverly Hills are actually aliens who are kind of shapeshifters. They're kind of a collective but they've separated out into human bodies. They're always like having sex with each other and trading body parts so there's like, spoilers, a key scene where he finally puts two and two together when he accidentally walks in on his parents and sister having sex, but they're all in this gelatinous mass, kind of. In that all their body parts are switched around and his dad's face is inside his dad's butt. And his dad's face in his butt says, “What's wrong? Are you upset about something? I’m paraphrasing, that's not exactly what he says.

Charlie Jane: [00:12:45] Man, that movie.

Annalee: [00:12:46] It's super crazy. And it kind of culminates with this scene where all of the wealthy folks of Beverly Hills get together and they're having this nice dinner party, and they're arranging for their children to get fancy fellowships and internships and doing all the things that rich people do. And then for dessert, they eat someone. They take off their clothes, they all slime into one giant slime bucket of white rich people and then they just eat this guy, they absorb his body, a young person who's poor. So it's a bit of an allegory, I would say. It's quite heavy-handed. And in that way, it's very delightful because it doesn't pull any punches.

Charlie Jane: [00:13:32] Yeah.

Annalee: [00:13:32] It doesn't try to pretend that it's just about goopy aliens. It's like, and yes, they are the people who control the economy and politics and they're eating poor people for fun. And they're also this incestuous blob.

Charlie Jane: [00:13:45] Mm-hmm.

Annalee: [00:13:46] So it’s this very simple story of class struggle, in a sense. Why do you think that we imagine that as this kind of disobedient body that's absorbing poor people? Why do we tell the story using that visual metaphor?

Charlie Jane: [00:14:00] Especially during the era when that movie came out like late ‘80s, early ‘90s, body horror really was the vehicle for social commentary. And there's so much body horror from that era—

Annalee: [00:14:10] Super true.

Charlie Jane: [00:14:11] Where in one way or another, we are commenting on class or gender or socially constructed roles by kind of breaking down and melting and distorting and sliming up the body.

Annalee: [00:14:27] This is the era when the Alien movies were really popular. John Carpenter's The Thing. David Cronenberg movies like The Fly were really popular.

Charlie Jane: [00:14:37] When was Dead Alive? Dead Alive is another really horrific—

Annalee: [00:14:40] Yeah, Dead Alive is kind of Peter Jackson's big breakthrough film. I want to say it’s early ‘90s. I don't know. 

Charlie Jane: [00:14:48] I don't think that same era. Yeah. And often in the body horror movie, the person who is… it's the victims who are kind of having their bodies melted or destroyed. 

Annalee: [00:15:00] Consumed.

Charlie Jane: [00:15:00] Or turned into something grotesque and distorted. So it's actually, I think, a little bit more unusual for the powerful people to be the ones whose bodies kind of do this. But I think it actually comes back to what we were talking about with Dark Phoenix, a little bit. Which is that part of how we want to imagine power is that it transcends, and part of what power transcends is physical limitations. And part of what's so monstrous about these rich people in Society, and I think that there are other monsters who have this as well, is that they were able to kind of transcend the limitations of the human body and become something that doesn't have the same idea of selfhood, and embodiment that we have, that we can think of as being intrinsic to ourselves. It kind of highlights how powerful they are that they can actually leave that behind. And it's kind of an interesting inversion of the body horror trope, I think. 

Annalee: [00:15:57] Yeah, that's a super interesting point about power. And it also is combined with the fact that these people are setting themselves up above the law and above morality. They're totally incestuous. Their sexuality is like, I don't even know. It's beyond pansexual. If you're sticking your own face into your—

Charlie Jane: [00:16:18] It’s bucket-sexual.

Annalee: [00:16:18] –butt.

Charlie Jane: [00:16:19] It’s not even pansexual, it’s bucket-sexual.

Annalee: [00:16:24] It is bucket-sexual. And I have to say that one of the things about the body horror of this sort of late 20th century era, a lot of it is kind of sexualized. The movie Reanimator has like an incredibly gross—

Charlie Jane: [00:16:35] Oh, my God.

Annalee: [00:16:35] Sex scene, which when I saw it in high school, I thought was delightful. I was like, hey, he's giving head. Let me just say, just check it out. Watch Reanimator if you want to get the pun.

[00:16:48] All of these films, I should say, are very satirical. They're very heightened and cartoonish, they're not torture porn at all in the way that we think of it now. 

Charlie Jane: [00:16:59] They’re not like Saw. 

Annalee: [00:17:00] They’re not like Saw. They're not realistic. They're very cartoony, like when this kid is eaten by the evil rich people in Society. I mean, you might be like ew, but you won't feel like your own body is being violated because it's so incredibly surreal. It doesn't even feel like real… well, it doesn't feel like real bodies are involved. So I think that's very interesting, that part of it is that their bodies are transcending the rules, but also having their bodies do this makes them ripe for satire, or makes them the perfect satirical vehicles. Because, of course, we can, to go back again to the buttface thing. We can have that and there's a lot of other puns like that in the movie where we see different body parts used in satirical ways. So even though it is showing the power of the rich, it's also showing the absurdity of that power.

Charlie Jane: [00:17:56] Yeah. 

Annalee: [00:17:56] And of course, they are defeated in a sense. I mean, the bad guys don't entirely win.

Charlie Jane: [00:18:02] Spoiler alert.

Annalee: [00:18:03] Yes, spoiler alert for a movie that came out in the mid-‘80s. But we're not telling you exactly. And it's not a perfect win, really. We know that there's more of these aliens out there. 

[00:18:13] So to finish up, I wanted to talk about ravenousness, and insatiableness and how so many of these disobedient bodies are the bodies of vampires or zombies that just cannot stop eating, and especially eating other people. I want to talk about bodies that are ravenous and insatiable, and monsters like vampires and zombies that just cannot fucking stop eating brains, human brains, mostly, and blood. They want to eat humans, but they're also formerly human. 

[00:18:52] And this is one of the oldest tropes in the book. It goes back very, very far in mythology. And certainly in genre, it goes back to the 19th century, at least, with things like Dracula. There's a lot of questions about why the ravenous and hungry body is so disobedient. Why is that something that we find so challenging? Why does it come up again and again?

Charlie Jane: [00:19:20] So Annalee, what is it about these kinds of stories that makes us focus on this type of hunger? And is it specifically gendered? Is it female hunger? Or is it just hunger?

Annalee: [00:19:28] I think it's both and I wanted to pick on the movie Jennifer's Body a little bit. And when I say pick on, I love this movie, I want to just investigate it a little bit. Because it's definitely a movie that's dealing with the gendered part of this story. And, of course, Jennifer, the character, is a person who has been used over and over, consumed by the boys in their school as a sex object. And she's kind of willingly offering herself as a sex object for the band that turns her into this monster creature. I mean, they're trying to sacrifice her in order to become a successful band in some sort of reverse Julie and the Phantoms scenario. But they fuck up because they're idiots, which is probably why their band sucks so much. And so instead of sacrificing her and becoming this great band, they believe her when she says she's a virgin, and so they try to sacrifice her. Well turns out, of course, she's not a virgin. She's an adult woman, and she just fucking kills them. She becomes a demonic force. We don't actually know the nature of her, of what's quite happened to her. Maybe she's inhabited by a demon or something else. But she has to keep eating people, mostly boys at their school. And her best friend who has not become a monster is having to kind of clean up the mess and deal with it. 

[00:20:57] And I think in that film, this is very much about sort of the limits of female power. And what happens when a woman doesn't conform to what men want her to be, whether that's a virgin, or a compliant sex companion. That there's this kind of switch in our culture when it comes to women's bodies, where it's like, either you're a compliant sex toy, or you're a monster who wants to eat everything. And I think that the consuming of people is really just kind of a literalization of what's been done to her. She's been consumed as an object and so she's like, fine, well everyone's an object, I guess. So I might as well eat you. 

Charlie Jane: [00:21:38] Yeah. 

Annalee: [00:21:39] And there's a lot of other stuff going on in the film, too, about sort of how women prey on each other and friendships. That's the other piece of the film that's super interesting. 

[00:21:49] But then there's also just regular zombies, right, like zombies, like in the Night of the Living Dead series or Walking Dead who are not particularly gendered I don't feel like. Especially in The Night of the Living Dead series, it's really more just the shambling masses. And of course, in Dawn of the Dead, it's made explicit that this has to do with consumer culture, because all the zombies are walking around the mall moaning for coffee, jeans. They all just want consumer items, and they've come back to the mall because the mall was a place that they remember from life, and they're hungry. And when they think of their hunger, they think of jeans, coffee. 

[00:22:34] I think that's the other piece of it, is that again, this is about having a desire to have the kind of power that those people in society have. To be rich. To be able to consume. But when you fail to do that, there's a kind of a rebellion in your body. You’re left in this undead state where you're constantly hungry, you're constantly craving life, but you don't ever get it. You can't ever be satisfied. And so I think that the ways that the zombies eat people, the way that Jennifer eats men, or young men, in Jennifer's Body is very different from the way that the rich people eat poor people in society.

Charlie Jane: [00:23:20] Yeah, so actually, I just last night finished reading a vampire novel by Silvia Moreno Garcia, called Certain Dark Things, which is one of her earlier novels, which is being reissued by Tor Nightfire and I was asked to a look at it. And it's super interesting and actually one of the refrains that is mentioned over and over again, in that book is, we are our hunger. Like, vampires specifically, like, we are defined by our hunger, it's who we are, it’s what we are. We can't be friends with humans. We can't be nice. We only can be predators and carnivores. 

[00:23:58] And this idea, I think, when you have a vampire, or zombie or monster story, where there's a creature that's just hungry all the time, there can be a tragic component to it. If it's like, basically you're condemned to constantly be preying on others. And I think that this does come back to the problem of capitalism and the problem of living in a society where basically, every time you order from your online retailer, you are preying on other people's bodies in order to get the things that you need to keep going. And I think that there is this sense in which power, the power to consume, the power to maintain your own existence, comes with a cost and the cost is often borne by other people. And often there's a tradeoff, I feel like, where, if I, the monster want to keep my body intact and keep my body looking attractive and young and pretty, and vivacious. I have to steal that from other people. So my body can look great as long as I make other people's bodies… I either kill them or ruin them in some way. 

Annalee: [00:25:06] Drain their essence.

Charlie Jane: [00:25:07] Drain their essence and indeed, in Sylvia's book where she has, I think, 10 different types of vampires. She has like a taxonomy of vampires in the back that includes revenants and hopping vampires and Aztec vampires.

Annalee: [00:25:19] Oh man, love that.

Charlie Jane: [00:25:21] Central European vampires.

Annalee: [00:25:22] I love the taxonomy of monsters.

Charlie Jane: [00:25:23] And they all have different feeding habits and they all have different relationships to their prey. And some of them are more exploitative than others. It's really interesting. The vampire taxonomy in the back is actually one of the things that really stuck with me about that book. I mean, it's a great book in general. She has one character in particular, who, every time he feeds, he gets younger and more handsome, and his body is in better shape. But he does this by sucking the life essence of other people. And I think that's super common. The idea that basically, for my body to be perfect, yours has to be ruined. And it does come back to the thing where rich people have yoga and personal trainers and $500 smoothies that contain, I don't know, the hair of small creatures from the rain forest or whatever. I don't even want to think about that. But yeah, I mean, basically, it's this idea that rich people have perfect bodies because they are taking from everybody else. And that is kind of what Society [crosstalk].

Annalee: [00:26:24] I love that. I think that you're totally right. I think, on one hand, these are stories that literalize what happens to your body in capitalism. Instead of showing us that yoga-toned body or the body of the person with the horrible smoothie, it shows us what they really look like. It's sort of a Portrait of Dorian Gray thing where it's like, yeah, actually, this is a horrible, disgusting monster that only survives by doing disgusting, awful things, and hurting people and killing people. 

[00:26:55] And then I think there's the zombie side of it, or the kind of Jennifer's Body side where it's someone who has not been in a position to take power over anyone or to consume someone else. And now, because they've been screwed over by someone, they are stuck in a constant hunger trying to do that. But they don’t, I think especially with the zombie, they never achieve that beautiful body or the yoga pose. They're just shambling around, rotting away. 

Charlie Jane: [00:27:28] Yeah. 

Annalee: [00:27:29] But they've been pitted against other people. And so they're kind of in that position of working class people fighting each other, when really they should be fighting whoever unleashed the zombie virus.

Charlie Jane: [00:27:40] Yeah. And I think that that's the most important point, which is that we depict bodies as monstrous when they feed on other people. But oftentimes the people that we stigmatize and kind of like to pick as the most monstrous, are the people who are actually fucked over, but are—

Annalee: [00:27:55] Sucked into the system.

Charlie Jane: [00:27:57] They're sucked into the system. Either they're gaining a tiny amount of power, but that power comes at the cost of having to exploit other people, and they're not far away enough from it, that they can just not have to see that. Or, it’s like, oh, well, you're trying to be like the rich and powerful, but that's not for you. You are trying to have something that's not… that shouldn’t be yours. You're trying to lay claim to power that belongs only to the genuinely powerful. And so it's actually oftentimes there's, even as these narratives can be very subversive and like Society, very subversive and kind of tearing down the rich and powerful often there's a very repressive conservative side to it. Where it's like, well, we're really going to stigmatize the people who are trying to climb up. Those are the people that we're going to really turn into slimy rotting monsters.

Annalee: [00:28:46] It reminds me of the first season of True Detective which, sorry, I'm gonna spoil it because if you haven't seen it, it's been a while. The whole arc of True Detective is that there's these rich people who are, engaging in these terrible murder rituals, and possibly with some kind of cosmic element, or possibly they just like to murder people because they're rich and creepy. And then at the very end, the actual bad guy, the true monster, is the super oppressed product of this incestuous rape, who is barely getting by. He's barely surviving. He's living in a hovel. He works as like a groundskeeper. And he's the one that's truly the most evil who's been committing the super evil crimes. 

[00:29:31] And it's like, what? Come on, this guy is just a horrible zombie victim, you know, it's all these other people in the government and in the higher echelons of corporate power that are really perpetrating all the crimes. But in the end, it’s just this horrible white trash guy who lives in a trailer or some abandoned house or something and it's just… I'm sorry if you love this show, listeners. I also loved the show, actually. I thought it was fantastic until the last episode. So I have a little bit of anger management to do about that. 

[00:30:06] Alright, so while we're still on the topic of consumption, let's talk to Meg Elison about fat phobia and fat fetishism. 

[00:30:16] Segment change music plays. Drums with a bass line including bass drops. 

Annalee: [00:30:28] All right, so we have Meg Elison here. Meg, welcome to the show.

Meg: [00:30:32] It's an honor to be here. Thank you.

Annalee: [00:30:34] So Charlie Jane was just saying that you had a great interview in Locus where you talked a lot about bodies. And of course, this is a big theme in your work. And we've just been talking about bodies that are ravenous. And so I think this is a good segue to start talking about the overwhelming themes that we see of fatphobia in science fiction and fantasy. I mean, these are obviously… we see fat phobia everywhere in our culture, but I feel like genre has its own set of issues around it. And I wonder if you could just start by telling us a little bit about how you see fatphobia working in genre stories and a few of your favorite or hate-iest examples.

Charlie Jane: [00:31:16] Oh God.

Meg: [00:31:17] I love a lot of Golden Age science fiction depiction of fatness in ways that you might not expect, because it's not a particularly welcoming place for fat bodies. But it also does treat them as a unique part of the future, where they haven't flexed that muscle that is obviously a representation of eugenics where you say all bodies in the future will be ideal, perfect bodies. But I have a collection of stories that was edited in the early ‘80s by Isaac Asimov and George R.R. Martin called the Science Fiction Weight Loss Book. 

Charlie Jane: [00:31:48] Oh.

Annalee: [00:31:49] Oh, okay. 

Meg: [00:31:51] It's a really weird piece of ephemera that nobody seems to know about. And I showed it to George. 

Charlie Jane: [00:31:55] I’ve never heard of this.

Meg: [00:31:56] Oh, it's so weird. I showed it to George when we were at Norwescon together, and he kind of laughed because he hadn't seen it in so long. And then he told me, you know, I think this book is cursed because before I edited it, I was thin.

Charlie Jane: [00:32:09] What a weird thing to say. 

Meg: [00:32:14] It was a very strange thing to say, especially to me, but you know, I kind of expect that even among self-loathing fats, like George. So there are stories in it about the action of zero-G or weightless environments on fat bodies. There are stories in it about a fourth dimensional girdle that when you tighten it just right, it stores your fat in another dimension, so that you appear thinner in this one.

Charlie Jane: [00:32:39] Oh my god, there's a lot of complexes going on here.

Annalee: [00:32:40] Wow.

Meg: [00:32:41] It’s so complex. There's a lot of stories about sort of the politics of desire and where that places people who are fat under different paradigms and I find it just endlessly fascinating. 

[00:32:51] There is, of course, the classic recycled body story like what if you could get as fat and shitty as you want and then just get a new body because it's the future. Of course, it's required to have one of those. And also it contains the Stephen King short story Quitters, Inc, which is only sort of tangentially about weight loss and weight gain. 

[00:33:12] So I've been trying to track stories about fatness or concerning fatness back to the beginning of genre, and specifically how we project the ideal body. And there are so many good examples of fatness being incidental, but only where it stands in as a measure of character. It implies gluttony, it implies carelessness, it implies greed, most of all. And what arcs are applied to characters who start off fat and then lose weight, which is, I know I always beat this drum, but it's a huge problem in Stephen King stories because he has such a loathing for fat people. So he awards valor to characters that managed to lose weight and then with withholds approval or audience affection from characters who don't.

Annalee: [00:33:58] Yeah, like, in IT, one of the characters who's fat when he's a kid, we know he's a good guy because he's lost that weight when he becomes a grownup, right?

Meg: [00:34:08] Right. That’s how you know he's good.

Annalee: [00:34:10] Yeah.

Charlie Jane: [00:34:09] Oh, wow.

Meg: [00:34:10] And conversely, another character, Eddie Kaspbrak has a very fat mother and then a very fat wife and they are bad and they are timid and they are poor-spirited because they stay fat.

[00:34:22] Yeah.

[00:34:23] It’s a fascinating dimension of horror. As long as we're talking about genre work. I mean, fat is often a stand in for the worst kinds of body horror like when a when a body is revealed for shocking effect. Fat is almost always one of the largest markers of that. If it's not fat, it's disability. If it's not that it's age.

Annalee: [00:34:43] Mm-hmm. Well, and you know, you can do all three for—

Meg: [00:34:48] Max effect. I'm thinking of the witch from just a couple years ago, where the witch is revealed to be haggard, very old, nude and on the fat side.

Charlie Jane: [00:34:59] Oh, wow. 

Meg: [00:35:00] Yeah.

Annalee: [00:35:01] eah, the same thing in Hereditary which drove me nuts, because that's the same thing where it's like old fat naked ladies. And at least at the end, they're kind of cool.

Meg: [00:35:11] At least they get some power.

Annalee: [00:35:13] They get some power. I was like, there's two ways to read this scene.

Meg: [00:35:15] Right? It's very telling that the soundtrack tells you that the most horrifying thing that you've ever seen is perhaps a woman's body that is not appealing to you. It doesn't make me think much of a filmmaker.

Annalee: [00:35:27] Yeah, no, same. So you've been talking a little bit about what fat bodies sort of represent symbolically and why we kind of come back to them. Is this like a gendered phenomenon? Is this something that see kind of across the board? Is it different for men? Like in Dune, we have the floating fat man, and we have Jabba the Hutt in Star Wars. So there's kind of a male paradigm and then we were just talking about the kind of naked fat old lady paradigm.

Charlie Jane: [00:35:57] I feel like when you have a man who has fat, often he's feminized or he's effete, or he's a little bit fey, he's a little bit like like that, like in Baron Harkonnen. who's like, “Oh, my boy. Oh, my sweet boy.”

Meg: [00:36:09] Harkonnen is the original creepy gay villain. He's definitely painted with a brush of pederasty and his fatness is a physical clue to that. 

[00:36:20] Yes, I think fatness is extremely gendered. And it is used to as Charlie Jane said, render a man's body feminized and to always render it incapable of being the object of desire, Jabba the Hutt being the best possible example of having to have your lovers on a literal chain or your slaves, as the case may be. 

[00:36:39] It's funny because it renders men ridiculous and it renders women pitiful. It either way robs them of power, because you are neither the object of desire nor the motivator of desire. And there's also a short, I think there's a narrow paradigm where the fat body is rendered sexless because it is set outside of the matrix of desire, which you could almost read a non-binary identity into. And as awful as it is, as an example, I'm thinking of SNL’s Pat sketch.

[00:37:12] The fatness of the body is used to degender it, which I know that a lot of fat people have expressed the experience of having been put outside the spectrum of gender, treated as neither boy or girl, but as some kind of go between and as an impartial observer and as the kind of friend who can give advice. 

Charlie Jane: [00:37:31] Oh wow.

Meg: [00:37:31] I think there’s—

Annalee: [00:37:32] Yeah, it's a neutering kind of thing. 

Meg: [00:37:34] It is. It’s exactly that.

Annalee: [00:37:35] I mean, it's the same thing with in Game of Thrones the character who is like—

Charlie Jane: [00:37:39] Oh, Varys.

Annalee: [00:37:40] Varys, right. And, he's a kind of non-binary figure. 

Meg: [00:37:45] Definitely.

Annalee: [00:37:45] We know he’s a eunuch and he's also fat and that's kind of part of his presentation.

Meg: [00:37:51] Effete and mysterious and fastidious and grooming in presentation and yeah, it does sort of render him a non-binary figure. It does, in any event, put him outside of the all-important breeding complex that is the entire animus of Game of Thrones.

Annalee: [00:38:07] Yeah, exactly. 

Charlie Jane: [00:38:08] Well, and also in Game of Thrones, you have King Robert, who, much is made of how he's too fat for his armor in the first season. 

Meg: [00:38:14] Yes. 

Charlie Jane: [00:38:15] And he also… he became fat when he became kind of a not a good king anymore. And he also didn't father his own children.

Meg: [00:38:23] Right, because fat men couldn't. Of course not.

Annalee: [00:38:26] Well, he does have children but they're not royalty. 

Meg: [00:38:28] They're not. Yeah, that she made sure of that.

Charlie Jane: [00:38:30] He has a bunch of bastards it's true. He has many bastards.

Annalee: [00:38:33] Also, I was thinking as I was sort of thinking about this show, I kept thinking about how many bad guys eating scenes there are in movies and books about fatness where it's just like he's just eating, he's always eating. He’s just always got a chicken leg in his mouth or he’s eating something horrible. 

Meg: [00:38:53] It's always something messy or something very bloody. I'm thinking of the scene in Lord of the Rings, where the steward of Gondor, I’ve forgotten his name, is shown to be devouring great feast as they prepare the funeral fire for one of his children. And I can read it, I can read it one of two ways, like the body that is always hungering is a danger. It poses a danger because you may yourself be consumed and it poses a danger because you may depend on the same stores that keep that body alive and it's taking more than its share. And it's applied very specifically with fat characters, as with King Robert, there's always some great excess of consumption. It's four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie, it's not. And there are plenty of characters who are constantly indulging, like Cersei puts away barrels of wine for God's sake. There is no implication of discipline. There is no statement that if these people are bodied correctly, because they consume correctly. It's just that if you consume really wrong, you have the really wrong kind of body. It's a very interesting statement of dissert[?] of the body.

Annalee: [00:40:01] Yeah. Although Cersei’s body is punished in plenty of ways. 

Meg: [00:40:05] Yeah, but she's punished for being a slut. 

Annalee: [00:40:06] Yeah, and that's a whole other set of ways that—

Meg: [00:40:10] [crosstalk]

Annalee: [00:40:09] bodies are contained and… Framed, contained, and marginalized, as we say. 

Meg: [00:40:14] Absolutely. 

Annalee: [00:40:15] So, I wanted to get to fat fetishization. Because I think that this is something that gets talked about a lot less, and it's still very much a part of the genre. So I wonder if you could just tell us a little bit about fat fetishization and where that fits into fatphobia? Or is it a corrective to fatphobia?

Meg: [00:40:38] I don't find it to be a corrective to fatphobia. And I know that that can be a controversial statement, because for some fat people, discovering fetishism is sort of freeing because it places you back on the matrix of desire. It places you at an extreme point on that matrix, but still in a desirable body. So when it is depicted as, in genre, film and books, but especially in all books, in all media, it is posited as… it is presented as though it is one of the most extreme forms of perversion. It will be paired with things that are deeply unacceptable, like age play, or coprophilia. It is represented as a very… what’s the word I’m looking for. It’s an extreme perversion.

Charlie Jane: [00:41:23] Taboo.

Meg: [00:41:23] It’s extremely taboo. Thank you. 

Annalee: [00:41:24] Yeah, it's like bestiality, or like incest, or yeah.

Meg: [00:41:28] And when I see it, it's almost never centered. It's almost always peripheral to a buffet of perversions and taboos. Like you’re going through the strange space bordello. And in one room, there's a tentacle thing happening. And then another room, somebody's having sex with a cloud of vapor. And in one room, it's just a really oiled up very fat humanoid body. And it is as strange and non-normative as those other ones.

Annalee: [00:41:56] That's making me rethink this one of my favorite scenes in the movie Nightbreed, which is a deep cut from the 1990s. And there's a scene… it's just like that. There's a scene where we go down into the realm of the Nightbreed, who are the the kind of leftover creatures from before history. They're all having sex, it's like a BDSM dungeon. And it's just like that. There's a room with vapor and a room with a devil, and then a room with a fat person, then a room with a dragon and it's just like, these are our fetishes or whatever.

Meg: [00:42:23] It has the opposite effect, sometimes of rendering the fat body extremely powerful. Like if fucking the devil, if fucking a tentacle monster is the same as fucking a fat body, then all I have to do is walk around naked to stop traffic, right? If we are that non-normative, if we are that taboo, then there's no limit to what we can do with it. 

[00:42:45] I'm thinking of William Kunstler’s series, World Made by Hand, which is a slightly more literary post-apocalyptic novel. And there's a character who emerges later in it who is described very much like a queen bee. Like she is a largely immobile, extremely fat woman who receives tribute of various kind from drones and may or may not be in her right mind or capable of consent. And it is presented as extreme weirdness. And that that's the level that he expects a highly religious society to operate on.

Annalee: [00:43:18] So that's like the ultimate fallen state is to have that kind of setup. 

Meg: [00:43:22] That's it.

Charlie Jane: [00:43:23] So I wanted to bring up the greatest movie of 2019, which is of course, Cats, and Rebel Wilson's character in that movie, who, you know, Rebel Wilson, I think is almost always a sexy, she almost always plays kind of sexy characters, I feel like. But in Cats, she's this weird… Everything in Cats feels incredibly sexualized, to me.

Meg: [00:43:44] It is.

Charlie Jane: [00:43:46] That movie feels like basically porn—

Annalee: [00:43:49] It is. When we first see her character, she's masturbating. 

Meg: [00:43:51] Yes. 

Annalee: [00:43:52] And she's like walking around rubbing her crotch. [Laughing] I’m sorry.

Charlie Jane: [00:43:55] But she also eats little people. 

Meg: [00:43:59] Yes.

Charlie Jane: [00:44:00] In that movie and it’s—

Meg: [00:44:00] She introduces them like her children and then bites their heads off.

Charlie Jane: [00:44:04] She's like, the sexy, chubby, cat person. But because she's chubby, we have to watch her eat people.

Meg: [00:44:11] Yes.

Charlie Jane: [00:44:13] I just wanted to kind of process about that for a moment.

Annalee: [00:44:14] She eats the cockroaches, right?

Charlie Jane: [00:44:16] Yeah.

Meg: [00:44:16] [Crosstalk] They have human faces, and—[crosstalk]

Annalee: [00:44:17] Oh, no, they're people. Yeah. I totally. I was just trying to remember if it was mice or cockroaches.

Meg: [00:44:23] So, there are dancing mice also, but she eats the cockroaches.

Annalee: [00:44:25] Right.

Charlie Jane: [00:44:27] Mm-hmm.

Meg: [00:44:27] I have trouble with Rebel Wilson's presentation because as you said, she does play a sexy character who puts herself on the matrix of desire. But also it is played as a joke that she views herself that way. It is always the object of comedy that she should imagine that she is that desirable. So there's a lot of layers of operation to it that I'm not entirely happy with. And then, yeah, when she has a chance to turn that taboo to her advantage, she wholeheartedly takes it. And the characterization in Cats, although a deeply mushroom-addicted nightmare that that movie is, is a pretty good example of—I mean, there are literal murders in that movie. And there is a hard allusion to cat sex work and cat pandering, but more non-normative than all of that more strange and more viewed with disgust from all of that is the fat cat. And everybody knows everybody loves fat house cats, how many subreddits are there for chonky animals? And how many people love chonky animals and won't be decent to fat people in real life? I feel like there should be some kind of law.

Annalee: [00:45:38] I do, too. And I want to… like, following that thread, I want to hear about how you deal with this in your own work. And how do you try to flip some of this stuff on its head and like give us like the hot chonk instead of all the other crap that we've been talking about?

Meg: [00:45:55] I just recently worked with the author Marianne Kirby, on a class for Writing the Other, which is a great organization. And we did a course on Writing the Fat Body as the Other. And one of the things that we talked about at length because people were so interested in it and so on unaccustomed to hearing about it is fat sensuality. What is sensual and differently pleasurable about being a fat person or being with a fat person or even better being a fat person with a fat person? And because of that taboo, because of those markers of disgust and the expectation of horror in the body, it's very rarely explored.

[00:46:35] So one of the things I always try to do in my own work is express a unique sensuality and connection. The coziness and the hyggeness and the absolute luxury of having a surfeit of calories in the body and what that means for experiences like heat, and depth and expansive skin and how different things feel on stretch marked skin. And I feel like that there is an authoritative quality to fat writers admitting to their own pleasure within the framework of that taboo. Just both middle fingers up, bellies out, talking about how great it is. And I can't wait to see more of that work in the world.

Annalee: [00:47:12] Same here. I wanted to finish up with just asking, well, all of us, I guess, to talk a little bit about what makes the kinds of bodies that we're discussing disobedient? What are they disobeying? What are we resisting with fat bodies or bodies that exceed expectations or exceed social boundaries? Meg, what do you think? I bet you've thought about this.

Meg: [00:47:36] I don't think that the fat body in itself is an act of rebellion. It is simply a fact of nature. Some people are just fatter than others and it's the way it is, and nobody gets fat on purpose to make a statement. That's not how this works. I think the statement comes in where you refuse to hide yourself, to shrink yourself or to perform the endless mea culpa of hating the body that people expect of you in public. It's what we get accused of promoting obesity by doing, is just by joyfully existing, and using the body as it was meant to be used and taking pleasure in all that it can do. 

[00:48:12] That's incredible resistance. And we are resisting everything. We're resisting the expectation of health, we're resisting the valorization of fitting the norm. We're resisting an expectation of heteronormativity and of female obedience, and especially of female thinness and smallness, and the expectation that women are always smaller than men. Honestly, every, every, moment of my existence in public feels like a goddamn revolution.

Annalee: [00:48:41] Yeah, that's awesome. I really like that. I think, for me, what I see with some of the disobedient bodies that we were talking about earlier, like, we were talking about vampires, and the infinitely hungry, the body that Dark Phoenix has, that can't really be—her power can't be contained by her body. And I think it goes back to a little bit of what Charlie Jane and I were talking about with rebelling against capitalism and sort of refusing to play into the relationships that we’re asked to play into. A lot of the time, in capitalism, it's eat or be eaten. And when we have characters who are infinitely hungry, or whose powers extend beyond their bodies, they're playing some role in that. But they're also, in some ways, refusing. 

[00:49:36] And so that's one of the areas that I think is most interesting in these movies, is to see where bodies refuse to play into those power relationships. And so—

Meg: [00:49:45] I love that. I love that.

Annalee: [00:49:46] Yeah, this is much more about in the realm of symbolism as opposed to people walking down the street and refusing to be.

Meg: [00:49:54] Sure.

Annalee: [00:49:54] But I think that that's a big part of what's being played with, yeah.

Charlie Jane: [00:49:58] Yeah. I just wanted to bring it back to what we talked about at the start of this conversation about eugenics and this idea that's really buried deep in science fiction of certain bodies being heroic or valorized, or kind of more worthy of living in the future. And the idea that the futuristic is often depicted as a certain look that's kind of shiny clothing and everything looking like an Apple store, and everybody kind of wearing jumpsuits or whatever. And this idea that the future is for all of us, and that we all get to have desire and power and agency and control over our own bodies. And that we all get to kind of feel embodied as part of this future world that that science fiction invites us to imagine. I think that's incredibly powerful and important.

Annalee: [00:50:57] Yeah, I love that, because I think getting to feel embodied really kind of fixes the wound in Jean Grey's identity, because she's a powerful woman, and she's constantly having her body ripped apart, because she's so powerful, and she's having her mind contained. And what about if she could just be super powerful and be in a body? What about that?

[00:51:19] That’s the future I look forward to, is where Jean Grey gets to be powerful and keep her body. And we all get to have whatever fucking body we're born with, or that we want to have. 

[00:51:33] So, thank you so much for joining us, Meg and for talking to us all about your work and what you're thinking about. And tell us where we can find you online and what people might want to pick up by you.

Meg: [00:51:46] It's definitely a pleasure to join you. Thank you again for having me. You can find more of my work at MegElison.com, which is my website. I'm @MegElison on Twitter, and I'm @MeganElison on Instagram where I am very fat.

Annalee: [00:52:00] Excellent. I think yeah, I feel like you pioneered at least in my life, the hashtag #fatvanity, which is like my favorite series of photos. So yeah.

Meg: [00:52:10] I’m so glad you appreciate.

Annalee: [00:52:12] Hashtag #fatvanity.

Charlie Jane: [00:52:13] Yay.

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Annalee: [00:52:26] You've been listening to Our Opinions are Correct. You can find us wherever podcasts are available for download, streaming, whatever you're doing. Glarblaling? Zlabeling? 

[00:52:39] You can leave us a review on Apple podcasts that will help people zarble us with more efficiency. You can support us on Patreon, we give you lots of extras like excerpts from our works in progress and essays and writing prompts every week, and audio extras. So sign up on Patreon. We're patreon.com/ouropinionsarecorrect. You can also follow us on Twitter at @OOACpod. And thanks so much to our amazing producer Veronica Simonetti, and music from Chris Palmer. And thanks to you for listening and we'll be back in two weeks.

[00:53:16] Bye!

Charlie Jane: [00:53:16] Bye!

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