In the first pages of Fat Girl Dancing, Kris Kneen’s newest memoir about their shifting relationship with their body, they write: “When you are told to draw a woman’s body your mind sketches what it has been taught, the hourglass of femininity, your true sight complicated by years of seeing one thing repeated: the memory of bodies, the imagined flesh.”
I love this idea – “your true sight complicated” – because it immediately invites us to consider what our perceptions of our bodies might be if they were untroubled by the dominant ideologies and beauty standards, and the tsunami of fitspo and wellness ideals presented by advertising and most mainstream media. While the task of uncomplicating things enough to find a kind of “true sight” is undoubtedly too large for any one writer to achieve in a single book, Kneen makes a significant contribution with Fat Girl Dancing.
This is a memoir of the body – Kneen’s own body, but also all bodies that have been othered by thin, cis, white ideals. “I start with me,” they write early on, their vulnerable tone creating a deep narrative intimacy. There are so many lives in this body – an adult, a child, a diver, a lover, a painter, a dancer, a writer – and yet Kneen writes about the anticipation of “sloughing” off their body and emerging from it, better, smaller. It’s an image that so many readers will relate to, our culture caught up as it is in the myth of the thin goddess hidden within the flesh of every fat woman.
Kneen, whose motto “has always been to run quickly and blindingly towards the subjects that scare you”, does so here, rejecting the simplicity of body positivity and opting instead to explore feelings of confidence and desirability alongside shame and their occasional yearnings to be thin. This commitment to truth is compelling, sometimes heartbreaking. Why do we make it so difficult for people to live in their bodies, in the world? Why are we so cruel?
Kneen recalls themself as a young girl who gave up the “exotic” sports – shot put, discus, javelin – she loved and excelled in, who threw her medals in the bin because older kids mockingly told her those sports were for fat kids. As an adult, Kneen reflects on the ways that shame is rewarded, even expected from people in fat bodies, because it indicates they recognise their aberrance: fatness is a choice, a health issue, a drain on public funding; fatness is up for debate.
Kneen chases the truth through shame and into discomfort, baring the intimacies and indignities of living in a fat body in the world. Their critique of the ways in which anti-fat messaging manifests (from a lack of clothing options to medical stereotyping and misdiagnoses) is balanced in how they write about finding pleasure in their body. Kneen, who is no stranger to writing sensual, erotic fiction, is the perfect narrator as they describe the fluid, tantalising freedom of the ocean, or how they capture fleeting glimpses of their own naked body in words, photographs and paint.
Like Kneen’s earlier work, including their last memoir The Three Burials of Lotty Kneen, Fat Girl Dancing experiments with form, using life writing as a broad frame to capture surreal imaginings, thought experiments, dreams and theory. Kneen is playful and displays an openness, even as the subject of the memoir, that leads them down such interesting roads. Who else would allow themselves to be swept out to sea by an amorous dugong who has identified them as “something like itself”? Who else would commit themselves so fully to this project of radical self-reflection?
Their commitment to run blindingly towards the subjects that scare them is evident in writing as in life, as they run blindingly towards exposing the body (literally) that they’re simultaneously afraid of having exposed. Given all this, it is unsurprising really that Kneen finally finds their way to reconnect with their body through burlesque, which blends sex, play and truth in the same way that Kneen does. Fat Girl Dancing is a fresh, vital call to arms for all those who have had a gutful of being told their body isn’t good enough, when, as Kneen makes so evident here, it absolutely, spectacularly, is.
Fat Girl Dancing by Kris Kneen is published in Australia by Text Publishing ($34.99)
