Fat people are so rarely included in visual culture that fat is perceived as a blot on the landscape of sleek and slim.
Interpretation
This quote highlights the lack of representation of different body types in visual culture, suggesting that being fat is marginalized in society's aesthetic standards.
Susie Orbach's quote emphasizes the significant underrepresentation of individuals with larger body sizes in visual culture, creating a narrative where fatness is seen negatively, as an unwelcome disruption to the ideals of slimness and sleekness. This not only reflects societal biases but also perpetuates harmful stereotypes and feelings of exclusion among those who do not conform to mainstream beauty standards.
In practice
In a discussion on body positivity, you might use this quote to highlight the need for greater diversity in media representation.
Say anything you want against The Seventh Seal. My fear of death - this infantile fixation of mine - was, at that moment, overwhelming. I felt myself in contact with death day and night, and my fear was tremendous. When I finished the picture, my fear went away. I have the feeling simply of having painted a canvas in an enormous hurry - with enormous pretension but without any arrogance. I said, 'Here is a painting; take it, please.'
The secret is not to write about what you love best, but about what you, alone, love at all.
Artists and writers have to deal with the element that makes the real real and the dream real while you are dreaming it. That's where stories and poems get their power.
I do not know which to prefer, The beauty of inflections, Or the beauty of innuendoes, The blackbird whistling, Or just after.
Literature was not born the day when a boy crying "wolf, wolf" came running out of the Neanderthal valley with a big gray wolf at his heels; literature was born on the day when a boy came crying "wolf, wolf" and there was no wolf behind him.
Drag queens have always taken on that role of spilling the tea - and the tea is the emperor has no clothes!
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.