This week I finished my PhD preliminary exams...and can finally see the light at the end of this academic tunnel!  I will be back in the blogging world now that I have time to be creative and reflective.  One of my questions was to discuss what queer theory meant to me personally.  I wrote this as a response.

Proclaiming queerness is a dangerous game

Removing me from my academic bubble where I write with some measure of anonymity

I am not a white, middle-class, male voice, yet as a writer and academic I am able to pass as such

until I proclaim my queerness

Queerness, or oddity, has been something I wrestled with throughout my academic journey

A Mexican-American female who spoke no Spanish, refusing to wrestle with ethnicity…accepting the label of a “bad” Mexican with shame and resignment

A female labeled a heartless bitch…fighting for equal ground with men…crying at night because being...

Flesh is tricky

never staying in the same shape or place

our bodies are solid

yet fluid in their ability to be interpreted in a myriad of ways.

We wrestle with our flesh,

forcing it into spandex contraptions designed to morph unruly flesh into the image of hourglass perfection,

it eludes captivity. 

Flesh spills gleefully

over the elastic confines of the corset, the shaper, the bra.

  Flesh reminds us

we can’t be anything we want to be. 

Our attempts to perform thinness

model-esque physical perfection as defined by an airbrush fail as our bodies wiggle and jiggle in merry display.

  We wound our bodies

angry and swollen red lines attest to our attempts to confine the flesh. 

Even the devices we inflict upon our body revolt at its captivity-

Runs in panty hose reveal pale flesh not suntan brown, toe reinforcement be damned

for context visit www.mickeefaust.com

My dissertation is concerned with performance and space.  How do people perform their identity and how does the presence of a stage signify a body is acceptable?  How does the performance of identities not welcome on traditional stages challenge our ideas of beauty and who gets to be looked upon?  How is physicality and knowledge of what constitutes a theatrical body challenged not only by those who can’t physically perform in standard theater, but deliberate decisions to use non-normative bodies- the fifty year old woman who plays a sorority sister, the fat graduate student who plays a lesbian hottie, the elderly man in a wheelchair who plays an army general.

in this  self professed weird theater for the weird community I feel at home…a freak among freaks.  a young rat among the old rat divas I love to sit and listen to stories about the company…tales that attest to the weirdness of this space.  The time deaf performer Terry Galloway missed her cues as the cast raced around the back of the stage trying to find her…calling her name in a panic…forgetting she couldn’t hear them.  Discovering her blissfully unaware, slowly putting on her Mickee Faust rat persona.  The story of a well respected professor in a Madonna sketch, dressed in leather crawling across stage to lap from a bowl of milk.  The days when the company operated out of a...

She laughs as she tells me she almost died five years ago.  She put her affairs in order and had a custom coffin made, after all they don’t make coffins big enough for her fat body.  She grins as she tells me her beautiful coffin is now sitting in a garage, gathering dust.  She wanted to use it as a trunk in her nursing home, but it wouldn’t fit.  I want to talk about sexuality, how the fat power movement she started has changed over the years.  She wants to talk about the medical industry.  Today I yield to her wishes and think seriously about health, what it means and how I struggle to locate myself within its discourse.

Health in not about healthy bodies.  It is an industry turning a five billion dollar profit a year- producing pills and shakes in an effort to create superhuman bodies.  Bodies without defect.  Bodies that might glow in the dark they are so artificial- articficially healthy and vitamined out.  Bodies that are so morphed they might survive nuclear fallout.

Health is a store full of color coordinated jogging suites- tight on the body and made for people who are already in shape…who would wear all that spandex on their saggy baggy body?  Health is narrow running shoes designed by Nike…cute but not made to support over 150 pounds of woman.  Health is a gym full of mirrors because who wouldn’t want to watch themselves push their bodies. ...

Shitting.  We all do it.  Not shitting out words onto paper or lies into the atmosphere…but asses on toilets crapping out a reproduction of our dietary intake.  Yet I meet so many people with hangups about their shit.  The girl next to me laughs as she read her friend’s away message…”on the fourth floor”.  She informs me her friend refuses to poop in her office so she heads to the fourth floor.  I had a professor who refused to poop in public bathrooms.  If forced to do so, he would have to leave his office, drive home, and shower.  After a few missed appointments, I told him to lay off the fiber .

Shitting.  I have shat in a stall next to some of the biggest names in my field…and smelled the ripeness of shit from these academic monsters.  In the shared stench of a crowded conference bathroom I am reminded we are all human…we all shit.

It is a revelation any child could share with me.  When my nephew was little he was afraid to poop.  We would find him in a corner, red faced, trying to pretend he didn’t just take a giant shit in his pants.  But we knew.  We bought him a book called Everybody Poops.  The premise was simple…mommy poops, daddy poops….we taught him to be proud of his poop. 

Later, my poop-phobic nephew had a little brother.  At his christening my family looked wonderful- sober and...

I am thinking about fucking.

how fucking has become a political word…how I, who have never been fucked, use this word.Every day when I leave my house with my breasts out and my clothes tight…I say fuck you to this fat phobic culture.  When I demand to be heard I say fuck you to those who silence me because I am fat, female, poor.

Fuck is political like Obama…divorced from an actual body, so much larger than an individual….a movement.

Lilly allen wrote a song about it…fuck you….not about fucking at all….about giving the finger to politicians against gay marriage.

I talk about how fucked up the world is daily…but I rarely talk about fucking people.Perhaps these words are incompatible in my fat existence.  In my work as a fat activist I constantly hear about size discrimination, hatred…I experience hatred on a daily basis because of my body.  Putting on my fuck you armor is work.  It is a daily process of hardening myself…reminding myself my body is fabulous and the world around me is miserable and, most likely, starving after a breakfast of jogging and Starbucks.  In fighting to be treated as human I often lose sight of my sexuality.  My life becomes me against the world.  Us fatties against the skinny bitches.  A fat phobic world against fat me. 

I love my body.  I won’t stand for...

I spent a year of my life dieting, telling my students I loved my body, telling my housemates it was for my health- gleefully watching my body disappear in a mirror, celebrating each night I went to bed with stomach pains, knowing I would wake up and be rewarded for my denial by another pound lost on the scale.  The scale- my own personal numeric demon as I obsessively weighed myself after a night of indulging on a slice of pizza…no weight gain!  As I excitedly weighed after a day of eating nothing but salad…I gained a pound?!  Weighing became a ritual…take clothes off…use the restroom so there is nothing left in your body…

3,000 dollars…30 pounds.

It has been four months and I finally gathered the courage to throw the diet food, and the evil scale, out!

It is a typical story.  One I hear repeated constantly by women I meet everyday.  I know the statistics on weight and dieting.  Almost 90 percent of women are effectively on a permanent diet.  My size 2 students who spend every day running nowhere on a treadmill and counting calories attest to this.  The women I work with in community theater who share experiences of thirty to forty years of dieting…one who cheerfully admits she would have snorted cheetos if she could have gotten them into her body fast enough are reminders of a diet and body obsessed culture.  I spent five years secure in my decision to...