potbelly

Essay  Canada  2024  English  0:06:15    

potbelly is a performance-based video essay that deconstructs the motel scene in Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino, 1994) in which the coquettish baby talking Fabienne (Maria de Medeiros) describes to her boyfriend Butch (Bruce Willis) how she wishes she had a potbelly. 
In this video essay, I place my body in relation to this scene to speak back to Tarantino’s representations of cisheteronormative desire that depends on Western beauty standards of thinness, youth, non-disability, and whiteness. I wear an American size 16, the average dress size in the United States and Canada, and am what Aubrey Gordon calls “small fat,” a term I take up here as an acknowledgement of size privilege that marks a “relative proximity to thinness” regardless of how I am seen through the thin lens of cisheteronormativity. 

I position myself in the frame of this video essay without a head to focus on and amplify my torso and enact the “Headless Fatty,” a phenomenon fat activist Charlotte Cooper describes as “a never-ending parade” of fat people whose photographs are featured in internet journalism that “reek of a surveillance culture” full of judgement, fatphobia, and criticism. 

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