how much space do i deserve?
TW: body image, body dysmorphia, etc.
TW: I will be discussing details about my relationship with my body image, and some parts may be triggering. Please do not read if you think this may be harmful to you.
I recently read Faith Zapata’s post (linked below), and I could not relate more.
When I’m with my family, we usually spend a day or two looking back on photos from when I was younger. Comments about how “thin” and “healthy” I looked in middle or high school are inevitable on those days. In those moments, I can’t help but feel transported back to that time when I was restricting my diet, tracking my meals in MyFitnessPal, and doing HIIT workouts1 twice a day. I hated my body then. But now, I envy how she looked. She didn’t know how good she had it.
I have always been uber-conscious of my size and weight. And I also want to acknowledge that every time I’ve heard someone who I perceive as skinnier and healthier than me say the same, I roll my eyes. I get it. Growing up, I wanted to blame a lot of my body image struggles on my family, but over time, I’ve learned that assigning this blame to a few individuals took away from the full picture.
In elementary school, I was always the tallest in the class. I had (and still have) a large round face. In middle school I learned it doesn’t take too much effort for me to build and grow muscle, adding to my frustration of wanting to look slimmer without physically growing. In high school, I learned more about the limited snapshot of health offered by a person’s weight and BMI and stopped tracking my weight every chance I got because the number on the scale was doing more harm than good2. But if you’ve struggled with body image, you know how ever-present the thoughts can become when supplemented by comments from other people.
Back in my first undergraduate research experience, I had the opportunity to observe some animal surgeries which required a bit of preparation in a very small room. One morning, my lab manager suggested I stand on the scale in the room to get a better vantage point on the surgery prep. As soon as I stepped on the scale, my male PI looked at the scale (which was in kilograms, thank God) and said how much I weighed aloud in a playful manner. I was startled and let out an uncomfortable laugh. A few minutes later, during a lull in the protocol, he saw a decrease in the scale and commented that I had lost weight.
Fortunately, I immediately forgot what numbers he blurted out, but this interaction left me feeling what I can only describe as an itch occupying my body for the rest of the day. Just to make sure that I wasn’t losing my mind, I told a few friends to confirm that it was, indeed, weird of him to make such comments at all.
My entire life, I have been taught to make myself smaller. Both in the sense of my physical body (body dysmorphia slay) and in the sense of my personality and who I am. Today, I nearly broke down because I thought someone I had a crush on didn’t like me back simply because I am physically too large and not “cutesy” enough. Do I realize this emotional meltdown was probably overdramatic and slightly uncalled for? Yes, but in the moment, I was overwhelmed by the insecurity I felt within my body and the idea that I was unlovable—and undateable at that.
I have worked so hard to avoid falling back into disordered eating and extreme surveillance of every food I place in my mouth. I have come too far to just let it all implode.
Above is an excerpt from one of my journal entries. I wish I could say that this was 5 years ago, but it was only last year.
When I’m around my friends who are mostly women, I feel as if I take up too much space. When I was younger, I likened myself to meat being forced within sausage casing, metaphorically bursting at the seams of the space I was allotted. (Who allots space anyway? East Asian beauty standards? Eurocentric beauty standards? No clue.) Although I am comfortable dressing how I want around my friends, I feel most at ease when certain areas of my body are minimized by proxy of looser clothing.
At my current male-dominated workplace, most of my colleagues are men who are at least 5’10” and likely shop in the Men’s Big and Tall section whenever possible. In this particular space, their relative size minimizes the space I occupy. In response, I tend to present myself in a specific way, dressing with larger, more angular silhouettes and pants that lengthen my legs. These subconscious choices allow me to perceptually increase the space I occupy to contend with that of my colleagues.3
The field of anthropology dismantles these damaging ideas about the body and space by “making the familiar strange and the strange familiar,” as frequently stated by my anthropology professors.
What is familiar to us is the idea of bodies as solely natural objects. What #SkinnyTok has you believe is that the space bodies occupy—and thus, our interpretations—are also natural. It is only natural to resent certain bodies, as well as our own, and to hold a physique to a higher standard than others.
This cold, rational conception of space – refined through subsequent centuries to the present day and resulting in a ‘spatialization of consciousness’ (Fabian 1983, emphasis removed) that shapes rhetoric, conceptions of the world, and their presentation (Fabian 1983; cf. Havelock 1982: 9, 311–12) – has had a pervasive influence on academic and other engagement with the world. Not only do memory and rhetoric and pedagogy bear the stamp of this spatialized approach to knowledge (W. Ong 1958), with spatio-cultural forms such as taxonomies, grids, kinship diagrams, and so forth shaping encounters with social data (Fabian 1983), but a complex of space-focused biases and stances and predispositions has created pervasive distortions in how social scientists, and others, interpret surroundings and the societies they study. Amid these conditions of persistent intellectual disengagement from lived experience, people continue to ‘see’ the world through the filter of space.
“Lost in ‘Space’: An Anthropological Approach to Movement” by Peter Wynn Kirby4
We are familiar with seeing our bodies through the lens of space, as fixed objects. At the same time, we can mostly agree that everyone’s bodies fluctuate and prove to be dynamic though there’s a great deal of shame attached to this dynamicism.5 Thus, the current state of Western body image and acceptance is no surprise. In viewing our bodies through such a lens and heavy bias toward the naturalization of space, it is no wonder that society attacks any anomalies of a fixed, natural understanding of the body.
Naturally, lived sensory experience of body and surroundings is part and parcel of existence in any society... But the extensive diffusion of this form of space-thinking, a social logic otherwise known as the Cartesian perspective – from whose viewpoint the world is surveyed as an eerily disembodied zone, cross-cut with x,y,z axes designating human or material positions as co-ordinates on a conceptual grid – has had massive political ramifications that contributions to this volume address directly. Not only did spatialized thought shape Enlightenment philosophy and the development of modern science (Ong 1958; Yates 1966; Fabian 1983; Jay 1993; Casey 1997), but it has fuelled colonial, imperialist, and capitalist appropriation of territory framed in the peculiar social rhetoric of spatiality…
Through Kirby’s lens of space as a sociopolitical phenomenon, we can more easily and effectively scrutinize the power dynamics at play in national borders, the climate crisis, the classroom, the doctor’s office, and even the Israeli occupation of Gaza. The anthropological understanding of physical space adds nuance to the #SkinnyTok discourse, making the political ramifications of glorifying emaciation and toxic infighting plain to see.
…movement as an essential component of the effervescence and improvisation of social life, movement in defiance of political strictures, indeed, the inevitability of movement across or along spatio-political structures or boundaries intended to restrict movement, control dissent or difference, and pacify populations.
Do these anthropological perspectives “fix” my way of thinking so that I don’t resent my body? I wish, but no. I’m still a human navigating online discourse and spending enough time with audiovisual media to feel the societal pressure of looking a certain way. But these perspectives add significant nuance to the way I navigate such discourse and act as a mental stop sign that causes me to pause and reflect before moving forward. The way that my body exists and takes up space is not absolute and should never be treated as such.
The human tendency is to naturalize social phenomena, to assign clear-cut categories and diagnoses, and to subjugate any anomalies to the “closest” label. The world we live in consists of far more than the three dimensions of x, y, and z. There is a dimension of time and numerous dimensions of social power that keep physical space constantly in flux. Let that inform what you see in the mirror.
I was on that MadFit, Blogilates, Natacha Océane, and Chloe Ting grind way before quarantine, and I definitely thought those HIIT workouts would give me visible abs…
There’s a lot of Substack discourse over the harms that the body positivity movement did due to its mere capitalization on cultural acceptance of larger bodies, but I would argue that this awareness over BMI and its limitations was one of the most significant benefits from that time. Ideally, body positivity should have trended towards a wider understanding of body neutrality, but alas, trends have a tendency to swing from one extreme to another.
Side note: This summer I wanted to order a ribeye steak at a company dinner, and my boss replied, “Are you sure? You’re so tiny.” At that moment, it dawned on me that I’d never perceived myself the same way he perceived me. Oops.
I remember seeing tabloid covers of Selena Gomez in a hot pink bikini in 2015 alongside claims that she had gained an excessive amount of weight. I felt like I couldn’t escape the backlash she was receiving for how she looked. Even in my mind, her public perception seeped in, fighting my core belief that there was nothing wrong with how she looked.