By Amanda Marzolf
I’ve never not been aware of my body—the space it takes up, the narrative it implies, the ways I am read like a stolen diary ripped from a child’s hands in the cafeteria (I can still feel the burn of humiliation when my entire class found out about the boy I liked, so similar to the shame of a near-stranger from my high school stopping me in the hallway after we watched Super Size Me in health class to ask if I ate McDonald’s). When what should have been mine was so freely feasted upon by any passerby’s derision, I naturally grew up in this fat body knowing that I could not blend in or disappear.
In 2015, I began teaching first-year writing as a GTA in Virginia Tech’s MA program. I remember the wardrobe of Old Navy dresses I bought in preparation to be an instructor of record. To be a teacher was to be a woman, I thought strongly. Despite my butch haircut and fat body, or probably because of those parts of me, I wore the dresses and a face full of makeup each day. Such a costume helped me, I can recognize in hindsight, to perform the teacher-femininity I found myself trapped by. It was a literal impossibility to me at the time that I could or should be fat, boyish, bare-faced, and a new teacher all at once.
An Old Navy dress I frequently wore in graduate school
But I also had to make sure my students knew, that I knew, what they thought of me and my body. On the second day of class, for years, I would offer myself up as a sacrifice. To teach students what it meant to act in the world rhetorically, I described my choices when coming into that classroom each day while short, young, and fat; I confronted students with the probability that they might make assumptions about my gender, my sexuality, my politics, all because of the way they read my body rhetorically. And so, I explained, I purposefully chose to dress a certain way in class to gain myself a bit more ethos back; if any of them were to see me on a Saturday afternoon in Target, they were likely to catch me in a hat and a t-shirt.
Knowing that I was always-already fileted open, I sought to gain back any small amount of control such that, instead of focusing on the anxiety that came with the unknown of how students perceived me, I could at least run towards that mirage of choice. They’ll think about how I perform in this body of mine because I’ve told them to. I allowed it.
Perhaps I’ve allowed all that’s happened since.
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In 2016, a small group of students arrived to class early while I was snarfing down some carrots during the small ten-minute break I had in between teaching three, seventy-five minute classes back-to-back. I’m not sure which student initially told me that I looked as if I had lost weight, but I can recall a second student agreeing, saying they could definitely tell.
“Thank you,” I replied. “I’m trying. I’m back to eating vegan again. When I get stressed, I eat cheese, so it’s been hard for me to stick to it for longer than a few months.”
It wasn’t until years later that I processed just how odd this interaction was. I can’t personally imagine discussing a teacher’s weight. I’ve had professors pregnant during the semester in which I was enrolled in their course, and not only did they never acknowledge it, but neither did anyone in the class. Yet I had entertained a conversation about my weight and my diet, one that my students initiated.
Outside of classrooms, I am and always have been familiar with the ubiquitous rhetoric of weight loss and weight gain. I recoiled last October when I heard a family member who was seeing an aunt for the first time in years say that she looked “incredible,” familiar coding to mean that she had lost a significant amount of weight. This is normal in my family. When we get together, we talk about our bodies. My sister called me last week and told me that she asked this same aunt what her “secret” was. As it turns out, our aunt is on new medication for her type 1 diabetes, and it strips her of any appetite. At my niece’s birthday party, she was dizzy.
Courtesy of my siblings, my nickname growing up was “bubble butt.” I was used to being the biggest kid in class, the “big girl” (a name a kid in middle school called me when he paused before hugging me in the hallway because “big girls need love, too”) whose friends rarely ever looked like me. Even when one did, my mother and my friend’s mother frequently talked about us within earshot. My friend was “pretty in the face,” according to my mom, which I took to mean I was a double whammy of both fat and ugly; as we grew older, my friend gained weight more rapidly than I did, to our parents’ dismay. As adults, we’ve learned that she has PCOS, a condition which affects, amongst many other parts of a person’s body, the way one processes insulin, resulting often in weight gain.
As a result of this suffocating discourse around my body from all corners of my life, I hid the outlines of myself as best I could. On rare occasions, though, I’d wear my older sister’s clothes to school. A collared shirt fitted to my waist. A ribbon in my hair.
“You should dress like this more often,” my friend Vicky told me as we stood at the same lockers where I remember her showing me that she was reading Twilight for the first time.
But that was a costume. What someone with my sister’s stomach wore. For the rest of the week, I was back to the baggy t-shirts I bought in the boy’s section of the department store where my grandma graciously bought our back-to-school clothes.
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I was wearing a different kind of costume in 2016 when a group of students, who were tasked with choosing a location on our campus that represented a “home away from home,” stealthily took a picture of me in class to add to their powerpoint. I watched, weeks later, as they presented their project on my classroom: they argued that our four walls in the Architecture Annex were like a house, with me as the mom who wrote chores on the board, and the other students ranging from siblings you saw everyday to a kid in the corner who only shows up maybe once a month, like a distant cousin you talked to at the family reunion.
The analysis was surprising and funny and, in many ways, flattering. But I can’t forget the picture they included. I was wearing a black and white striped dress which clung to my stomach. From the angle where students sat in their chairs as I stood at the front of the class, my chin looked huge. My cheeks round and red.
The content of their presentation described me as a maternal figure whom they respected and liked, but what I saw was the artifice of my disguise. I wasn’t convincingly feminine at all.
I had a similar feeling at the beginning of this fall 2023 semester. Over the summer, I painstakingly searched for a first-day outfit which would make me feel comfortable in the non-binary body I was coming to accept as part of me, not in spite of me. At Kohl’s this time, I bought a short-sleeved button-down, which I hoped would help me to survive the ninety degree heat expected in Blacksburg on the following Monday. I planned to wear it over a white tank top, a 3X, paired with loose-fitting pants that I did in fact purchase from reliably size-inclusive Old Navy.
In my first class of the day, a student told me she liked my shirt. Nailed it, I thought. I introduced my pronouns as she/they, I’m barefaced, I bought this button down in the men’s section, and a student said they liked it.
My final class of the day was and is in Whittemore. The ceilings are high. The projector’s askew. The desks are the antiquated kind where the table top is connected to the seat; the sound made from moving the desks to work collaboratively makes me want to rip off my skin. The rows are close together to fit us all into the room, and I find myself often walking up and down the only stretch of clear floor space, an aisle from the door to the board. I can’t fit anywhere else.
Pictures of Whittemore 257, courtesy of Virginia Tech’s Classroom A/V Services
On that first day, as I described the contents of the introductory survey students were taking, I caught sight of myself in the pane of glass next to the door.
The 3X tank top which I was so confident would look casual, even oversized, clung to every lump of my stomach. I could see—and I then knew every student I’d taught that day had seen—where my pants cinched in my fat, where my belly bulged out and over my waistband.
I felt no closer to the ethos I yearned for then. My therapist told me in the session after I came out to her about my gender that I needed to work on untangling my gender expression from my body image. It wasn’t just femininity I felt was out of reach. Looking and feeling more masc, too, which I’ve always gravitated toward even as a kid, felt impossible as a fat person. To teach was to be a feminine woman. To be androgynous was to be thin. A double bind.
My therapist made it sound simple, and I find it difficult to describe how complex of a task this is to my cishet, conventionally attractive counselor who describes eating certain foods as “clean” and “natural.” I am trying, though, to rewire these associations I’ve made over a lifetime; it’s just that most days it feels impossible when no one even has to say a word for me to hear it all loud and clear.
In Whittemore, no student has said “A teacher who isn’t fat would be able to teach us much better in this room,” but damn does it feel like that, each day that I’m there.
“Excuse me,” I say as I stretch my legs over someone’s backpack, which takes up all of the approximate two feet of space in between the desks.
“I’m sorry,” I apologize to the student whose arm I’ve bumped with my hips.
“God, I hate this classroom,” I complain for what feels like the hundredth time since August.
One day, once the first person asked a question, I stopped on my way to their desk to address the entire class: “This is a blanket apology for all the times I’m going to be heading down this row and might hit you with my big butt.”
I don’t draw attention to my body during my introduction to rhetoric lesson anymore, and no one in this class has commented on my weight this semester, and I now actively avoid catching my reflection in the glass beside the door, but I’m not sure any of that matters anyway when it’s the contours of my thighs and back which are grazing students as we all try to learn from each other.
Last week, I chatted with one student and then made the humiliating trek back to the front of the room only to turn around and see someone in the back row had their hand up. It was my fault for not checking all around me before removing myself from the trenches of the desks, but I did end up asking the student to bring himself to the podium rather than having me come to the back of the room. I felt such searing shame for asking him to do that.
But I’m also convinced this classroom isn’t just disservicing me.
When someone comes up to me at the end of class, there’s no room for the people trying to get out of that row to scoot around them.
When a student in the class after mine tries to get to their seat in the back-middle of the room, they knock over a desk, sending it clattering so loudly to the ground that I edge close to an anxiety attack.
One student takes notes in their lap because there’s no room for both their laptop and their notebook on their desk.
I can’t ask the group at the back of the room how they’re doing because I can’t get to them without disturbing everyone else in the class.
Though less frequent than when students research the dangers of “obesity” while taking a class from who they would undoubtedly consider an “obese” teacher, it is common for my students to explore questions of classroom layout for their research projects in my class. They want to know what fosters collaboration, productivity, an academic spirit.
Perhaps what I want to know is this: what would allow me to teach my students in my fat body without having to apologize?
Because I am sorry to teach students in this classroom which I haven’t chosen and I have no control over. For all of us, I wish we were somewhere else. Somewhere I can sit sideways in a desk to talk to a student and not have a bar digging into my side. Somewhere students can hear each other without yelling over the echo of the group next to them.
Somewhere I can feel myself once I understand what that means.
Somewhere, somewhere made for my body and me.
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