“So Much Meat”: Gloria Anzaldúa, the Mind/Body Split, and Exerting Control over My Fat Body

Abstract

Imagine you are at a dinner party, as I was last week, and your host, the dean of your college, directs you all to the intimate space around a small round table. In looking at that space, you immediately fix on those captain’s chairs with the knowledge that they will not fit your hips or thighs. As you look for other chairs, you think, “I can’t cause a disruption, can I?,” and so you squeeze your hips and thighs one more time into a chair too small, a prison with bars that crush in on your thighs. Rather than getting angry at the chair’s manufacturers, the club, your host, the guest, or, in fact, yourself for being so stupid as to force yourself into this tight spot, you reproach yourself, as I did, by saying, “why are you so fat?,” perhaps even adding one of those epithets you know so well. It becomes visible evidence for you of your own laxness, a moral as well as physical laxness. The next morning, whether you say it to yourself or not, you will feel that you deserve the long sharp bruises on your thighs, just as the night before you believed that you deserved the pain that you felt as the bars began to press close and cut into your leg. You have become your own best jailer.

I don’t know of anyone who writes through the body. I want to write from the body; that’s why we’re in a body.

Gloria Anzaldúa, Interviews/Entrevistas

And those that don’t survive? The waste of ourselves: so much meat thrown at the feet of madness or fate or the state.

Gloria Anzaldúa, “Speaking in Tongues”