#EffYourBeautyStandards

Rebecca sits down with three of her favorite colleagues & friends — Mara Pellittieri, Laura Durso, and Rebecca Cokley — to talk body shame, fashion, respectability politics and more — to take a break from the soul-crushing news cycle.

September marked the close of Fashion Month — that time of year when impossibly slim models with legs up to their ears sashay up and down the runways of New York, Paris, and Milan in outfits none of us with real-life bodies could even manage to zip up. But what if our bodies don’t fit the fashion industry’s idea of what that “perfect body” looks like or should look like?

This year’s Fashion Month was perhaps the most diverse ever in terms of the body types walking the runways — but realistic bodies and representation of marginalized communities were still an exception more than a norm. The severe and long-lasting consequences that fixation with thinness can have in women’s lives is well understood. But the concept of the “perfect body” — and the shame and stigma that can accompany having anything else — has real and profound implications not just for folks any larger than a size 2, but also for people with disabilities, LGBTQ folks, people living in poverty, and other marginalized groups too. That’s why, to take a break from a soul-crushing news cycle, Rebecca rounded up three of her favorite colleagues and friends — Mara Pellittieri, Laura Durso, and Rebecca Cokley — to open some wine and talk about their experiences with body shame, fashion, respectability politics, and more, for a special episode of Off-Kilter.

Guests:

Rebecca Cokley, director, Disability Justice Initiative, Center for American Progress (@rebeccacokley)

Laura Durso, vice president, LGBT Research and Progress, Center for American Progress (@thedursoisin)

Mara Pellittieri, editor-in-chief, TalkPoverty.org (@mpellittieri)

Must-reads for folks who care about this stuff:

• The Body Is Not An Apology
• My Body is Uncivil by Imani
• Everything You Know About Obesity Is Wrong by Michael Hobbes for Highline
• Check out this Vogue article by Somali-Eritrean-Canadian Muslim fashion designer Eman Idil Bare, on hijab and modest fashion — and learn more about her vision and how her brand came to be on the Kickstarter page she used to cover the costs of her debut at New York Fashion Week

This week’s transcript:

REBECCA VALLAS (HOST): Welcome to a special edition of Off Kilter, the show about poverty, inequality and everything they intersect with, powered by the Center for American Progress Action Fund. I’m Rebecca Vallas. September marked the close of Fashion Month — that time of year when impossibly slim models with legs up to their ears sashay up and down the runways of New York, and Paris, and Milan and many other places too in outfits none of us with real-life bodies could even manage to zip up. But what if our bodies don’t fit the fashion industry’s idea of what that “perfect body” looks like or should look like? This year’s Fashion Month was perhaps the most diverse ever in terms of the body types walking the runways — but realistic bodies and representation of marginalized communities were still an exception more than a norm. The severe and long-lasting consequences that fixation with thinness can have in women’s lives is well understood. But the concept of the “perfect body” — and the shame and stigma that can accompany having anything else — has real and profound implications not just for folks any larger than a size 2, but also for people with disabilities, LGBTQ folks, people living in poverty, and other marginalized populations as well.

That’s why I rounded up three of my favorite colleagues and friends, Mara Pellittieri, Laura Durso, and Rebecca Cokley — to open some wine, also beer, Cokley, I see you with the beer. And to talk about their experiences [LAUGHTER] she likes beer, with body shame, fashion, respectability politics and more. Ladies, thank you so much for taking the time to come hang out in the radio studio.

LAURA DURSO: This is great. Where do we start?

VALLAS: I mean if you just want to tell me it’s great, we can start there.

DURSO: Let’s start there.

VALLAS: So I feel like to help situated people a little bit in why each of you are here as opposed to just being three of my favorite humans you are also three people who have very specific ties to this conversation so I’d love to hear a little bit from each of you about how you come to this set of issues and the respectability politics in fashion itself. Laura, I’ll start with you.

DURSO: Great, I’ve always wanted to say this on the radio, I come at this as a queer fat femme and someone who in a former life studied weight stigma for my career. My graduate work is all about the internalization of weight stigma and obesity stereotypes. And so I come at this as somebody who thinks, tries to think deeply the in particular psychological impact that it has on people to shown and internalize the multitude of stereotypes about heavier people. And I’ve done my own grappling with language and the intersections with my own sexuality orientation and my community as an LGBTQ advocate. So I’m hoping to talk about those many things today.

VALLAS: And if anyone here is rustling papers, it’s you taking out your own –

DURSO: It’s me trying to find all the stats.

VALLAS: Your own work from your Ph.D and more. So Mara why are you here?

MARA PELLITTIERI: So I am here because I am the second of the queer fat femmes [LAUGHTER] there are two of us in the room.

VALLAS: It’s such a great album cover by the way, you can’t see it but I can.

[LAUGHTER]

DURSO: We’ll send that selfie, on twitter

PELLITTIERI: I had a very compelling pose, you’re welcome listeners, I’m sure it was really strong content for you.

[LAUGHTER]

VALLAS: I’ve had to tell Jeremy this before on the show but this is radio and so you have to say things for people to know what you’re doing but that’s ok usually when Jeremy does it it’s for less good reasons.

[LAUGHTER]

PELLITTIERI: Than straight up mugging for laughs? Because that’s my only goal here.

VALLAS: Correct.

PELLITTIERI: So I am the Editor-in-Chief of Talk Poverty so we come across all sorts of stigma related to clothing and low-income people. Most often in the realm of race related shaming, that super-super fun and exciting like how can they be poor if they have nice shoes, get their nails done, have their hair done, so on and so forth. I also as a fat person and a queer person and a person who spent their formative years really struggling financially and am also a very femme person married to a gender non-conforming person, clothes are pretty core to most of my life. I think most of us spend a lot of our adulthood trying to rectify the wrongs of our teen years. So I do a whole lot of that.

VALLAS: And you always have on some kind of fabulous outfit that I remark upon today you happen to have on a fabulous blazer, I really like the lining with the sleeves pulled up like that.

PELLITTIERI: Why thank you!

VALLAS: Just thought I’d pass that on since it’s relevant actually to the thing that we’re doing. And Cokley, Rebecca Cokley who is a friend of the show on usually talking about research or advocacy related to disability, where do you come from in all of this?

REBECCA COKLEY: As the director of the Disability Justice Initiative and as somebody who was very thrilled to work with our dear colleague Maria Town back at the White House when we pulled together a fashion show focusing on disability and technology, this is an issue that has continually come up. I’m one of the 20% of people with disabilities that grew up in household with parents with the same disability that I had. and my mom was super crafty and made our own clothes and that was the solution that she had growing up as number 6 of 9 children in a big Irish family there was not exactly folks handing out money for new wardrobes every school year so my mom was the crafter. She sewed, she knit, she crocheted, I got none of that skillset at all but I like to pay a tailor. But as a person with a disability and as most folks with disabilities experience we typically have to spend twice as much on our wardrobe. First to initially buy our clothing, and then a second time to get it altered. And I think I often get asked, why don’t you shop in the kids section, because I’m not fucking nine of whatever the various conversation is. And thinking about all the ways that fashion and disability come into place and I think we’ve seen a lot coming off of fashion month in terms of folks with disabilities on the cover of Teen Vogue, shout out to Miss Brown for a phenomenal article on that. Sinead Burke’s piece in British Vogue and heightened awareness but at the same time how do we get beyond being the models and how do we actually ascertain the power behind the design.

VALLAS: And I want to get into all of that. So with that as some of how you guys come to this, I’ll put myself in that seat as well. I am somebody who at various points in my life has struggled with eating disorders of multiple different kinds, especially when I was in law school and I got down to, I think I weighed 80 pounds. My family has various politically incorrect phrases and terms for what that period of my life looked like but it wasn’t a healthy one. And so it’s something that while I don’t talk about it a ton, I’m at the table too with you guys. This is something I don’t just want to talk about but I want to be right there with you thinking about all of these issues and how they intersect and impact all of us. So weight is for a lot of folks the one that makes a lot of sense here. I think the concept of the leggy tall model who is impossibly thin walking the runways, that’s an image that we can all concoct in our brains and it’s probably the image that comes into our heads when we think of who models are. And who is front and center on the runway when we are seeing fashion week and fashion month as all of these weeks apparently add up together to become fashion month look like. And I want to get into a little bit of that before we get into the disability and the LGBTQ and the poverty pieces of this.

Mara when we started talking about even having this conversation and was this a conversation we wanted to have on Off Kilter, you quipped and you actually talked about a particular store you said the very names of stores actually tell you a lot about what’s going on when it comes to how larger women are viewed by many in the fashion industry and not just people in the fashion industry. And you mentioned Dress Barn and you had a particularly nice little quip there that I think you show say.

PELLITTIERI: Oh you mean the fact that we’ve built an entire industry that describes women as cattle? Because that’s what you put in a barn.

VALLAS: That’s exactly right and you actually, you made, you brought in the gender piece of it as well because larger men as seen as big and tall and that’s maybe a positive set of things but I think the way you put it was poor fat women are cattle, not executives, right?

PELLITTIERI: Yeah, there are these wild value judgments that are written into sizing. And I remember this coming up when I was growing up because I have three brothers. We all have grew up fat and poor and super nerdy, we were just big hits in middle school. And my older brother, the first time that he had to get a suit fitted, there was specific sizing, like all of the sizing has these cutesy little names that women are usually plus size or curvy, my older brother’s suit when his waist measurement was larger than his shoulders it was referred to as the executive cut. Like being someone who has fat and who carried weight in his stomach, the explicit messaging was that that made him powerful. And then at the time there were only a small handful of stores that actually carried plus size clothes. Our options were basically Lane Bryant and Dress Barn. And so to have the difference between my older brother putting on an executive cut suit and then me trying to scrounge up an easter dress that I could afford in the Dress Barn, it was pretty clear. It’s not even really coded messaging, it’s explicit about what people are worth at that point.

VALLAS: And there’s a couple of statistics I want to bring into this which I know Laura will hate, right? [LAUGHTER] She’s already like yes, statistics! It’s the impact I think that society’s obsession with thinness has on so many of us and in particular, women, which we shouldn’t lay the blame all at fashion’s feet, there’s a lot more going on than just fashion but that is a big part of it. Who are the models you see in magazines? Who are the people you see wearing the clothes that then you are supposedly supposed to wear. A couple of stats jumped out at me in thinking and planning for this segment. One is that 45% of adults say that they’re preoccupied with their weights, some or all of the time. The next one, my jaw hit the floor and it hasn’t quite come back up yet to it’s normal resting place which is that nearly half of girls age 3 to 6, 3 to 6 years old say that they worry about being fat. I’m letting you guys sit with that for a second but you’re nodding. Mara and also Laura, if you want to pick up there.

DURSO: Yeah, there’s really clear evidence and there has been for sometime that representation maybe instead of just fashion but representation in media, western in particular is significantly related to body shame, body image concerns and that disproportionately women and girls evidence that problem. There’s very clear evidence Western TV, if you go to societies that don’t have Western TV they don’t have body shaming and eating disorders in the way that we in the west do. And so that’s been pretty clear for sometime. And I think that it manifests in other ways. If you ask elementary school children to rate who they want to be friends with, the fat kids [are] last, they come up with, they have these pictures of kids of all different shapes and sizes and all different races and with different disabilities and the fat kids last, no one wants to be friends with the fat kid and you get that message real early. And so then that translates throughout every other aspect of your life. What do your employers think? What are your interpersonal relationships like? What does your doctor think? I’d love to get into at some point that we’ve decided that stigmatizing weight is the way to make people thinner and the evidence is exactly the opposite of what we should be doing. So it is very, very, clear that girls in particular show this time of body image concern, boys and men are also pigeonholed into a muscular physique and they’re supposed to be that V, so the opposite of what we were talking about.

There’s clear physique that men are supposed to be conforming to and in particular we see that manifestation in gay men. There’s actually a question that we grapple with in looking at research around how gender and sexual orientation interact when you think abut bodies and eating there’s a question of actually is sexual orientation protective for queer women? Does it matter that it’s your gender, does it matter that you’re queer and so there’s actually different body types of physiques and a different standard of beauty within the queer community. So there might actually be things about being in another out group that help you cope with stigma around your size. So there’s just so much out there and it makes pretty clear that all of us are susceptible to messages about weight and then those look different in different communities.

VALLAS: Now your own research, which we’re hearing shuffle around on the table actually looks directly into some of these connection, looking at how weight based discrimination actually can and I don’t want to get causal if it’s not causal but it’s certainly associated with negative health consequences that can actually include eating disorders. And then there are some tie ins, as you said, to sexual orientation as well. I think part of why I was so struck by the age 3 to 6 year old girls piece, right, about worrying about their weight at that age was as I was pulling thoughts together for this segment I was thinking back to when I was in first grade which is my earliest memory of weight and caring about what I weighed and so I guess that’s my kernel of what became disordered eating later in life. And I have this very explicit memory of being on the playground; you’re talking about who kids want to be friends with and I was a little on the chunkier side and I had, I was always picked last for kickball and other things also for good reasons, because I’m not very athletic but there were these two girls who were the popular girls and they had on their little soccer shorts that my mom didn’t buy for me because I didn’t play soccer. And they came over and sort of looked at me and they laughed and one of them pointed at herself and said “spaghetti” and pointed at the other girl and said “spaghetti” and pointed at me and said “meatball.” And I was just elft standing there hearing this, with all the other kids laughing and that’s a memory I have to this day, very firmly associated with who those two girls. I don’t know what they’re doing, I’m not going to name them, but I remember that moment and that was the first moment I remember worrying, was I fat?

DURSO: Yeah and it’s, I mean we all have to have a relationship to food. You can’t not eat and I think that’s another entry point to thinking about how do we regulate bodies and how do we police each others’ activities is then like you go to college and what’s on your dining tray and we internalize all those messages and we really play these kinds of playground experiences out for the rest of our lives.

VALLAS: Now I don’t want to leave weight there and not come back to it but I want to overlay some of these other pieces onto it because a lot of these things also have interplays and Cokley I want to bring you in next on the disability front. People might not have even thought until you started to talk just a few minutes ago about having to effective pay twice as much for your wardrobe because you’ve got to buy it and then you got to get it altered. That might be news to people. Talk a little bit about your experience with clothes not really being made for you.

COKLEY: I also want to add on to something that my dear friend the doctor said a moment ago. A lot of times, and we’ve been really deliberate in how we talk about disability within the work that we’re doing at the Disability Justice Initiative and being very specific in talking about the wide, the width of the disability community. And that the disability community does include people with eating disorders and I have to tell you the first time we did this at a public event I had about three or four women pull me aside afterwards, a couple of whom work here at this organization, at CAP, and a couple of whom were activists in the broader disability community who said I’ve never been at a place and actually let me reframe that and say it was not just women who pulled me aside and said I’ve never been at an event focused on the disability community where they explicitly include people with eating disorders as part of the disability community. And I’ve never been able to bring my whole self to this community because that part of me has always been checked to the side or been left at the door. So I think that’s really important, that as a community, we don’t talk about that. I think you talking about your experience on the playground, I’m the mom of a five year old, a very proud five year old. And –

VALLAS: I can confirm that is true. There is a lot of pride.

COKLEY: There is a lot of pride in that five year old. And for her she’s also a little person. And so her perception of norms as a biracial little person is she has a dad who’s African-American and a mom who is Irish and a little person. And so we often talk about their bodies looking healthy, their bodies looking strong. And I remember when she was in preschool and they did a bar graph in the classroom, every kid said what their favorite part of their body was and I go to pick her up and they pull me aside and they said your daughter, and I was like oh lord what did she do? [LAUGHTER] and they said we had to add a line on the end of the bar graph for your daughter. And I was like oh gosh, what did Kaya say? So we asked all the kids to lay out what their favorite parts of their body was and it was like my hair, my nose, my legs are strong, I like my arms, whatever. It gets down to the end and they’d written in Crayola marker on the end was ‘butt’. And there was a marker for Kaya. [LAUGHTER] And I was like yes, I’ve done something right!

DURSO: Never lose that, girl.

COKLEY: No! [LAUGHTER] And I said we talk about this all the time in our household. Yes you should be proud of what your body looks like and that shouldn’t be revolutionary but it is and for me it was an experience I had growing up was I remember visiting a friend of mines house and my friend was, my friend is a little person and the rest of her family were average height. And her mom was in the other room. And I heard her mom say to her, jeez so-and-so, why aren’t you as skinny as Becca? And I remember just being shocked. Because to me, my friend is stunning, she is still one of the most beautiful people I’ve ever known. And I remember having this awkward moment of she doesn’t know that I heard this. How do I respond to it in this space?

And when she came in I said to her that was some really messed up stuff your mom said to you and she shouldn’t have said it. And she’s like my mom has talked to me about my body in a very negative way. And has always compared me to other little people that she’s seen. And my friend is the middle of a large number of girls in the family and she’s like I used to try to compare myself to my sisters and I obviously couldn’t because they’re all average height. And I remember taking that moment and that’s seared into my head and thinking about if I ever have a daughter I don’t want her to ever feel that way. And I don’t want her to ever be hung up on thinking that she is anything less than amazing and perfect and beautiful and strong and healthy however she is, however she’s built. I think for a lot of people with disabilities and especially women with disabilities, we come to the conversation around fashion and body image with literally a ton of baggage.

DURSO: And I think that’s so important, just to underscore something that Rebecca was saying about; oh no, I’m going to lose it. OK so weight stigma hurts everyone for all the, there’s concern trolling and all these things about body positivity is only for fat people or that it’s actually marginalizing thinner people and I want to say out loud that weight stigma hurts everybody of all sizes and so it’s an absolutely crucial thing that it’s much like the patriarchy hurts everyone. Talking about we want to be healthy, we want to be strong, looking for these other markers of being a whole healthy person is actually so important because we know that this is not just about making fat people be able to exist in the world is actually being able to make all of us exist in the world.

VALLAS: And Cokley, an essay by actually a first of yours that I want to read a little bit of here to continue on the disability front which everyone should read, it’s going to be our nerdy syllabus page, it’s called “My Body is Uncivil.”

“My body is uncooperative. It moves to a beat that at times I cannot hear. Next to the images of thin, pale models, I am an affront to their image. My dark skin insults those with a fancy for a-historical revisionism and half-truths. My uterus is in the hands of men who will never have one.”

Boy does that ring true this week.

“ My scars and crutches are conveniently inspiring for those who couldn’t be bothered vote to ensure my access to healthcare. My body is political because of, what people choose to call “differences” to avoid saying “disabled;” and clothed in black skin that the privileged decide when they want to see and use it. My body has no choice.

My body is uncivil.”

Cokley you have a number of stories and I’m going to ask you to tell one of them that helped to sort of encapsulate moments when you found that clothes just aren’t made for you and then it has forced you to jump through all kinds of hoops just to be a clothed person, let alone a clothed professional who isn’t shopping in the children’s department. And one of them has to do with a green flannel shirt.

COKLEY: Yes, my favorite green flannel shirt ever. I also want to take a moment and acknowledge that was Imani Barbarin’s piece who is a very dear friend, a phenomenal friend of the show and a friend in the disability community and the intersections of disability and race conversations and just a total badass. And for me I very clearly remember and y’all texted me on my way in this morning but I had already left my house. The first piece of clothing that I got altered and I remember I bought it at the Nordstrom anniversary sale and in the brass plum section in 1993 and it is a green and black flannel shirt and I still to this day own that shirt. It was one my favorite pieces of clothing. And I remember it’s the first piece of clothing I ever bought at Nordstrom’s and I remember being blown away that I could get alterations there for free. And it feeling like almost like teenage Disneyland. It’s like wait a minute, somebody’s going to come in and sew these sleeves and my mom’s not going to do it and so the thread’s going to match? That was a big thing, my mom would just grab whatever thread she had to sew sleeves or cuffs on pants and I remember being mortified that the hem stitching did not match the inseam stitching, which sounds like a really petty thing but when you’re a teenager the petty is personal.

PELLITTIERI: That’s such a classic mom move.

COKLEY: Oh, it’s totally a classic mom move.

VALLAS: But it also makes so much sense. If you’re the person who’s really fixated on and focused on not wanting to look anymore different than you already do, something like that could feel like neon lights around the thing that makes you different.

COKLEY: It felt so indulgent. I remember going back to the store a week later to pick it up and they had, the tailor’s name was Lee Spadoni and she worked at Nordstrom’s at Hillsdale mall. And I remember going to pick it up and she had wrapped it in a box and it was wrapped in tissue and she knew how much I loved this shirt. And it’s funny because I ended up going to work at that Nordstrom’s while I was in high school and then I went on to work at Victoria’s Secret, for a number of years as a little person working in one of the most visually conscious companies in the world. And I remember every time I would see Lee she would always talk about my green shirt. And it to me, and I’ve talked to so many people with disabilities who because the cost is so high to get things matched for you, to get things made for you, and it’s weird because it does feel like, I’m a 40 year old women, almost 40, almost 40, not there yet. And it feels so, I feel spoiled and then I feel guilty about it. When I spend that extra money and get something like just made the way I want it made. And I don’t know I feel, it feels weird that I feel guilt associated with that.

DURSO: I’m sitting here thing, I have this love hate relationship with the notion that I can walk into a store and buy something. You have to go a separate section but I think [INAUDIBLE] a new experience too. The internet has been so helpful both in defining a community btu also allowing for boutiques and retailers to set up shop that can give me clothes. But I can’t go and try them on in a store and be seen by other humans. I have to buy them online and try them on at home and then so it’s like Nordstrom allows me to go walk into a section of a store but it’s got some goofy sign over it that’s like you fat person, over here. And we’ll give you three options and they probably look like tents and they have some ugly floral on them and so that’s what I was thinking of when you were talking about going and the notion of being able to just walk into a public space and have to covertly get to that section or not or be seen or not it’s like, it’s a struggle.

COKLEY: Honestly that’s [INAUDIBLE] reasons why I worked for Victoria’s Secret. I jokingly went in and filled out a job application.

DURSO: I love you for that.

COKLEY: And was like there’s no way they’re going to hire this random ass little person to come and sell lingerie. And when I didn’t realize, I didn’t know at the time was that the store manager had grown up next door to a family of little people in Washington state, and this does feed into the stereotype yes I knew them because we all know each other.

[LAUHGTER]

PELLITTIERI: You guys literally have meetings [INAUDIBLE] marginalized community.

[LAUGHTER]

COKLEY: We totally do an Off Kilter episode at the little people convention.

VALLAS: I’m in, don’t have to pitch me twice.

COKLEY: And I remember specifically the first, I remember working there and I remember I had a regional manager who was very deliberate, very Kavanaugh-esque if I can use that term about the type of salespeople that she liked to be on the sales floor. And so whenever she would come in for a visit I would get shipped to the back and I would be sent to do stock. And our regional vice president was a very strong very brilliant black women who was easily one of the biggest fashion icons I’ve ever had in my life and I remember Dee Dee coming in and saying why are you in the back? And I was like because Linda doesn’t like me. And she doesn’t want me on the sales floors. And she said how much have you sold today and I said $25,000 in merchandise and she was like you need to get your ass out on the salesfloor if I see you in the stock room I’m kicking your ass. And because my take on being working in that company was my job was to make everybody feel comfortable because I didn’t fit in there, I didn’t look like any of the women on the walls. And so literally I would approach people that would consider themselves unapproachable in that space. My goal was to make everyone that felt like they did not fit to coming into that store feel like they were being spoiled and pampered. And if I couldn’t help them, if we didn’t have the right sizes I would literally pick up the phone and call my old colleagues at Nordstrom, I would call somebody at Macy’s that I knew and be like I’m going to get you taken care of because everybody deserves to look beautiful and there should be no standards, no bars, no anything, how can I help spoil you today?

VALLAS: Which is so mind blowing because when you think about a store like Victoria’s Secret, it’s a place where so many people who feel body shamed don’t want to walk into because they’re told in every possible all caps way this is not for you, this does not look like you and we’re going to judge you and you handled totally the opposite of the playbook that everyone expects.

COKLEY: We also hired, when I became a store manager I literally hired people that looked the opposite of the women on the walls.

VALLAS: This is like the Victoria’s Secret equivalent, the lingerie equivalent of jury nullification.

COKLEY: Yes.

VALLAS: What you did at Victoria’s Secret.

[LAUGHTER]

COKLEY: Yes.

VALLAS: And I didn’t know the story before so I love every part of it. I want to bring poverty into this as well and Mara you mentioned when we were setting the table here a little bit that actually there’s something of a Catch-22 for low-income folks when it comes to the respectability politics of fashion. That you are told you need to look nice enough and I want to get into that. But on the flip side if you look too nice you’re doing it wrong because aren’t you supposed to be poor and why are you wearing this Nikes and are you committing food stamp fraud of some kind?

PELLITTIERI: Yeah, so I think of clothing as being, and this definitely cuts both ways is an extremely accessible of virtue signaling and value signaling and by accessible I mean easy to read on other people. I think most people at this point are familiar with the concept of code switching, which when we talk about we’re usually talking about the language that you use but you need to code switch in the way that you dress yourself as well and one of the things that low-income people face in particular is the struggle with needing to look a certain way so that you can be the right kind of poor person. So I remember when I personally was really having a hard time financially, didn’t have enough food, was having a hard time figuring out which bills we could by paying and which ones we could let go off, like it’s October so the heat’s not as important but I need internet this month so I can finish writing this paper. The one thing that I could never afford to sacrifice and the one thing that I would get consistent help on actually from family members who were otherwise pretty reluctant to step in was making sure that I was dressed in a way that other people would want to help me when I needed it.

So I learned pretty early that that meant a whole bunch of specific things. It means that you are first not to have visible brand names on your clothing, logo tees are not going to cut it. Everything needs to be fairly muted colors like fitted enough not to be sloppy but not so tight that it’s slutty and it needs to have an appropriate amount of threadbare-ness. If you show up wearing things that look super new, that look like you haven’t had to care for them yourself, then all of the sudden they’re an item of suspicion. The same thing goes with hair and with makeup. If you wear too much makeup then you’re trying too hard or you’re trashy if you didn’t wearing any and you didn’t bother to put yourself together. If your hair is dyed nicely then how did you afford it? Or if you’ve let grays show then how dare you let yourself go. So it’s this extremely, extremely tricky line that you have to walk and a lot of the shaming and stigma attached to it is super similar to the stigma that you face for weight, where there’s a lot of research that shows when you look at pictures of fat people, they’re immediately associated with ideas around laziness and around lack of self control. And those are ideas that low-income have to combat really aggressively and they’re ideas that you see showing up in current policies especially around work requirements. All of the language that we have around poor people is focused on how you get poor people to work. So you have to make sure that nothing about yourself falls into those stereotypes.

VALLAS: I have so many memories of when I was a legal aid lawyer representing clients who we were go into court or we were going to go into a hearing before a judge. And needing to have the most horrible conversation with them beforehand about how to dress. And I wish so much that I could’ve just said look nice, and I usually would start with wear what you would wear to church or synagogue or mosque or whatever. But that was not enough I had to say don’t look too nice and actually some of the specific memories I have coming up to the forefront of my brain right now had to do with cases where people were being chased for Ferguson style fines and fees. And so they were going in front of judges specifically to demonstrate that they were too poor to afford to pay fines and fees that were being levied on them as an alternative to taxing people who can afford it. And so if they looked too nice judges often and it depended heavily on who was the judge could actually sit up there on the dais and look down at them and say, “Are those Nikes? I think those are Nikes. If you can afford Nikes then you can afford to pay this fine or this fee.” And those things would really happen. You mentioned, Mara, your hair being done. That came up all the time, “Well it looks like you got your hair done so I’d say if you can get your hair done you can — “ The same was true with tattoos. “Well if you could afford that tattoo or those cigarettes in your back pocket but all of this has to come into play in people’s minds as they’re thinking about what is respectable in putting clothes on my body?

PELLITTIERI: And it’s such a tricky line to walk because two, a lot of those pieces were treasured investment. Like I remember thinking about my clothes to ask adults for things. They were these very specific outfits that I would put on when I knew that I needed someone to help me pay to take the SATs or to my AP exams or that I was going to have to be explaining to my dean why I was going to need them to cover the grant without asking questions about my parents’ taxes. Those, they were put aside for just those occasion which also means if you don’t have that many nice things you keep the things that you have that are nice absolutely treasured but the act of doing that in a lot of ways can count against you. You have played all of the rules right but because you have these things that for these super specific occasions then you haven’t worn them enough to look like the kind of person that someone wants to take charitable pity on.

VALLAS: Now Laura we’ve got to bring in LGBTQ folks here as well and then there’s some themes I also want to bring in before we close but take that where you want. I’ll say this which is that I think a lot of folks may be thinking oh yeah trans people, clothes that’s probably challenging if you’re trans but it’s a lot more than just trans folks.

DURSO: Absolutely. I think clothes defined our community. I know at some point we’re talking about resiliency and the in-group. We were a marginalized people and we still are and so clothing could signal where you belonged. And not just like the bandanas in the back of your pocket, the back pocket of your jeans and which color. but there were literal pieces of clothing were used to signal whether you belonged some place. Radical notion of women wearing pants, this helped define who we were and who you were associating with. So I think clothing has a really important role to play, certain in oppression but also in defining where your safe spaces are. So I think that that’s been really true for the LGBTQ community. I think as I mentioned earlier, I think there’s actually some things that we can teach people about bodies and about confidence and security in one’s shape and size and being and weight and everything. And I hope that there’s some good things that we can teach folks because I think what’s front and center for the general public around LGBTQ issues is the notion of what is gender and how do we perform it? And what role does clothing play in that? And so, and I’m glad we’re having that conversation, I think it will help everyone to have a discussion about gender expression. And I think vanguard of our issues around folks who are gender non-conforming and non-binary, agender. It isn’t just about being trans. For a lot of folks it’s not just about existing on one poll of masculinity or femininity. It’s actually the beauty of being in between and among all of those things. So I think that clothing and expression is really a way that we are defining what it means to be queer and trans. And I think that’s actually really, really powerful.

VALLAS: Clothing and fashion, it’s not just a tool for oppression, it can also be a means to resilience.

PELLITTIERI: Yeah, clothes are one of the only things about your identity that you get to choose on a daily basis. So many of the other things about the way people perceive you are more or less immutable. And clothes are choice that you get to make and I think a lot of us come from communities that spent their entire existence basically being literally aggressively policed for the way that they look. This idea that clothing is a unifying factor for queer folks, it also comes out of the fact that our clothes used to be illegal. There were a lot of municipalities where you could, you had to have a minimum number of items of clothing that matched what was considered your biological gender. So when you hear about the Stonewall riots and the original movements that took place it was because you would have these police raids that happened in gay clubs, in part because they were unlicensed and in part because police would come in and everyone knew that their responsibility was to line up against the wall so that you could get checked. And the police would literally check people’s genitals and then they would have to show that they were wearing a minimum of three items of clothing that the police felt matched your genitalia or you’d be arrested for it. And so to be able to move from a place where your clothing is policed that aggressively and in ways that we still see in a lot of communities, like so many people of color, I’m sorry I yawned a little bit in the middle of that but I’m so excited to be here, it’s a lie! [LAUGHTER] The yawn is a lie!

COKLEY: The yawn is a lie, yes. [LAUGHTER] The cake is a lie.

DURSO: The cake is absolutely a like.

COKLEY: The cake is a total lie.

VALLAS: I have to say that many people bore you visibly in meetings, this is a face I’m used to, I’m not used to it –

[CROSSTALK]

DURSO: The oxygen levels are really low in here, let’s be honest.

[LAUGHTER]

PELLITTIERI: You guys, I’m doing my best.

[LAUGHTER]

VALLAS: Jeremy’s going to feel a lot better though because you’ve done this to yourself too, it’s not just him.

PELLITIERI: Fair enough.

VALLAS: I should note he’s your officemate, that’s why I’ve brought him up three times.

PELLITIERI: Yeah.

VALLAS: You share an office with Jeremy Slevin.

PELLITIERI: Yeah. But yeah this level of policing, of literal policing is something that we see cut across a lot of marginalized communities. So communities of color you’ll see get hassled in much the same way, they just look a way that cops aren’t comfortable with.

DURSO: Or teachers or school resource officers.

COKLEY: Or you see the dress codes, there’s a sushi restaurant in Balitmore that I remember my husband and I were going to go eat and there was a dress code for lunch at this sushi restaurant, and it was like, it was like a touristy hotel sushi restaurant. And I remember being like you’re kidding me, seriously? And the dress code was like, no sneakers, no jerseys –

VALLAS: No track suits?

COKLEY: No track suits, no visible brand labels.

DURSO: Hmm, I wonder who they’re talking about.

COKLEY: Hmm, alright, sure.

PELLITIERI: But yeah, I think because of so many things like this where it’s such an aggressive form of policing, clothes and the community building around them can be an act of defiance, which I think is a lot of what we’re seeing in the body positivity and the fat acceptance movement right now. A lot of the clothes are extraordinarily loud because they are just a huge fuck you to any one that has anything to say about them. And that’s why I think the shirts that Laura’s talking about that have an enormous puffed sleeve but absolutely no midriff, they’re there partly because this is a thing that we’ve been denied and partly because we have finally gotten the amount of community that the internet affords us that we can give each other the strength to wear the things that we want to wear and reinforce each other when previously it would have been to pick us off.

DURSO: Yeah, free dissertation idea, stigma reduction by looking at Instagram and following fat bloggers who are just all of, just incredible fashionistas. So there’s a free dissertation idea. But the thing I’m not worried about just to throw in here, what I find fascinating is one of the arguments for fashion being more inclusive of different sizes was a purely economic argument. Why would you leave money on the table was the argument. And now I worry about what happens the more success that we have and the most commercialized things get. So today Eloquii, which is one of a pretty well known plus sized brand announced their partnership with Wal-Mart. And like OK, on the one hand that’s maybe great. That’s getting fashion to people who can’t otherwise afford it but also what’s Wal-Mart going to do to a boutique brand? What’s going to happen to our opportunities to say fuck you if it is now going to become part of some bigger corporate conglomerate. What do we do then?

COKLEY: And they took ModCloth before that and I’m wearing a ModCloth dress and it was one of the only places for women in the disability community, especially women who were either short statured or used wheelchairs, you could buy dresses without having to alter them. And so welcome! They’re taking all of our people.

VALLAS: One might say there’s a lot that’s really positive about this because in particular a lot of folks who’ve been left behind by fashion right, and who don’t have the same access points, who are still stuck with only Dress Barn. To some extent the internet also has revolutionized a lot of this but if Wal-Mart is an access point for fashion for you that is more than the three ugly mu-mus that have the flowers on them that you mentioned then that ends up being maybe a real opportunity but obviously like a lot of questions that also go along with it. But notable in some of what you guys are saying is there’s an opportunity here for the creation of community.

And I want to also give something of a shout-out to a piece that folks interested in this topic should also read which is called “Everything You Know About Obesity is Wrong”, which was getting a little bit of attention over at Highline in recent weeks and looks at how the medical community has, as it puts, “ignored mountains of evidence to wage a cruel and futile war on fat people, poisoning public perception and ruining millions of lives. I want to acknowledge here fashion is not the only place where this kind of stigma comes from, also the medical profession has a lot to do with the shame and Ok-ing of shame, as actual a tool for helping make people healthier. That’s how it gets painted. But part of what was really interesting in this piece by Michael Hobbes that ran in Highline is really just the telling of a story that had a lot to do with isolation, that had a lot to do with people feeling that they were pushed out of what would’ve been an in-group with no other in-group to be part of and it seems like fashion and the opportunity to use fashion as an act of resilience or defiance or both and maybe other things too is actually a way to develop community and Cokley bringing threads together with some of what you were saying before, your first conversation with these two ladies had to do with clothes sucking for you and how clothes suck for them too. And that actually itself was an opportunity to build bridges across otherwise marginalized communities. So not even just within specific in-groups that you guys have been talking about but actually across those various groups.

COKLEY: I think one of the most entertaining things, regardless of community and I’m sure y’all have experienced it as well is when somebody’s wearing a dress with pockets.

VALLAS: All dresses should have pockets.

COKLEY: Yeah I agree, but the minute you’re like does that dress have pockets? And the person’s who’s wearing the dress immediately sticks their hands in the pockets and twirls around and it’s like a universal, like yes, there are pockets! Regardless of what community that person represents it’s like celebration of pockets!

VALLAS: Democrat, Republican, pockets.

COKLEY: The pockets bring the revolution. The other thing that I think is really interesting in the context of fashion which actually we have never talked about among, well some of what we’ve talked about amongst ourselves here at work, but has been the ‘eff you’ protest t-shirt moment across all of our communities. I was walking down the street the other day and I saw somebody wearing an Alice Wong ‘ableism is trash’ shirt. And I literally, I’m sure I freaked them out, I stopped and was like aaahhhh!!! [LAUGHTER] You know, pointed at them and was like you’re wearing an Alice Wong ‘ableism is trash’ shirt, I know her, that’s my friend. But actively in this time of resistance across communities, really literally wearing your resistance and what that looks like and how that’s a different, it’s a way to politicize the fashion in a way that previously, I used to hate shirts with words on them. I used to hate conference shirts. And I have literally a drawer of crappy, uncomfortable conference shirts and now I’ve actually started a rating system on Facebook on Fridays where I’ll pull out a protest shirt and rate it. But I think that there really is this taking back and redesigning it for our communities and pushing it out there, pushing out the messaging the way we want to see it. And in a much more body positive and whole self way than we’ve seen previously.

VALLAS: Now Alice Wong of course is the founder of the Disability Visibility Project and if you too want an ‘ableism is trash’ shirt or one of the other many awesome protest shirts she has to do with disability on her website you can go to disabilityvisibilityproject.com, which we will also have a link to on our nerdy syllabus page. But ladies, we’re running out of time unbelievably because I feel like we just got started also I think there’s more wine in case, no there’s not, no, is there anymore? No there is still some more wine, so get that wine down to Laura.

[LAUGHTER]

DURSO: I totally just got called out on the radio.

[LAUGHTER]

VALLAS: I still have some in my glass and you don’t and that’s a problem so I’d like to make sure that you have wine for the closing of this segment, thank you David. Didn’t you know that this is what production of this show would entail when you signed up? Yep.

COKLEY: Wait ’til we take him to Netroots.

VALLAS: That’s true we do take him to Netroots, yeah I’ll take some more too thanks, thank you! You’re a saint.

[SOUND OF WINE POURING]

[LAUGHTER]

DURSO: I wish I’d recorded that.

VALLAS: This is a great radio moment, it is, you can hear the pouring, you can hear me being like yeah, I’ll take more, yeah, OK.

PELLITTIERI: Just to be clear there’s a small tumblr full of wine in front of Vallas right now.

VALLAS: Yeah, yeah, you’re not drinking today because you were sick and you came in for this segment anyway which makes you a hero but yeah, anyway. So I’m just deflecting a little bit because you would also probably have had the last of this wine in your glass.

PELLITIERI: That’s true. It also gave me time, I was working up some kind of joke about heroes wearing capes but I would wear a f***ing cape, y’all.

[LAUGHTER]

VALLAS: Well I will have you know I have two, I have two capes that have been made for me because of times I have said that, so be careful what you wish for you might end up with them and I do wear them sometimes. So I honestly don’t even know how to bring this conversation to a close because there’s so much here and I also don’t want to do the annoying thing that hosts do and be like so, would you like to sum up your thoughts in a couple of sentences? So what I’m going to ask as a closing question here is where do you guys want the conversation to go? What is the conversation that you wish we were having as a nation not just when it comes to fashion month but around body shame, body positivity and the community and the resilience on the flip side of that coin that you guys have been unearthing in a very personal way. And I’m going to start with Cokley.

COKLEY: I’m actually going to say that I think we should, this is the beginning of a conversation, we’ve been having this conversation among ourselves for the last year and I only see it expanding from there. I also think that it’s important that acknowledge that this year in fashion week for the first time there was a Canadian Muslim designer who had her first major show. And us not having that voice at the table is a voice that’s notably absent in these conversation about forcing and policing of identity and what not. I think it’s one of those things that I think is universally identifiable regardless of what community you come from.

VALLAS: Mara I’ll go over to you next.

PELLITIERI: Oof.

VALLAS: That can also just be [INAUDIBLE] [LAUGHTER] That’s perfectly acceptable.

PELLITIERI: I guess my question around this is the same as much question anytime I talk about any thorny topic, which is the whole time we’ve been having this conversation I’ve been acutely aware of the fact that there are four relatively affluent white women sitting at this table.

VALLAS: Yep.

PELLITIERI: And what I’m trying to figure out is basically ways for people to be brought into this conversation before they’ve made it now. What would it have taken for 19 year old Mara to have been able to be a participant in this conversation.

VALLAS: That’s a great question and one that I think none of necessarily have an answer to expect I’m looking around just in case anyone does want to weigh in on that.

DURSO: That was one of the things I thought I’d end on is something that I think Cokley said earlier which is how do we get beyond being the models. I think another risk of this commercialization and commodification of fat bodies as beautiful is actually what you end up with and no shame on Ashley Graham but you end up with somebody who is still an unattainable for most people kind of shape. It’s still about policing a body and so that is, I think the next conversation is how do we get being the models, being the privileged folks, being the people who only have access by virtue of our class really I think is one thing. And I think the second conversation we need to continue to have and I’m not saying, I’m the first to say I only made it through the revised version introduction before I was like I’m totally glazing over and I’m having a really hard time with this but can we just explode gender already because I think that fashion is gendered! The whole industry is entirely gendered and if we could actually just explode what gender is and get people to engage with the notion of performativity of gender in a different way I think you’d see the fashion landscape and I think psychologically we would all be in a much better place. So that’s what I hope. So on the next episode [CROSSTALK] That’s right, exploding gender with two fat queers and a little person

VALLAS: The all title for this episode but I know you’re exacty right because it’s all based on a binary. Everything is fundamentally are you in the men’s section, are you in the women’s section? And that’s just something that’s been –

DURSO: If Target can go to just kids can have toys, not girls toys and boys toys, when are we just going to all shop in the same place?

VALLAS: And I’m going to take moderators privilege to close with my thought which is less a closing wrap this all up moment thing which I don’t think is necessarily possible to do because we’re going to have that second episode of two fat queers and a little person. But is just a public service announcement for anyone listening who’s thinking wow I didn’t think about a lot of this and maybe this impacts people that are in my lfie that deal with this and this is part of their exsistence and I hadn’t even thought about it. Here’s a thing not to do, complimenting someone by telling them you look really thin. And I’ll put myself out there, have lose some weight in recent months for health reasons and it’s nto weight I wanted to lose. And I live with a chronic stomach illness and I have trouble processing food and I can’t tell you how many people have come up to me and totally well intentioned been like you look so great! You’ve lost weight, wow you look amazing! And I think it was probably six or seven times in that I finally started to answer honestly and to say I don’t look great, I look unhealthy I’ve lost weight I didn’t mean to lose and it’s because I’m sick. And I don’t know that people ever really knew how to deal with that response and a couple of those people sort of turned around and were like huh, OK. And that was the end of the conversation but just a thought for anyone out there who’s looking to give compliments you can probably find something else like maybe what the person is wearing that’s awesome. So we’ll leave it there but Dr. Laura Durso who sometimes know as doctor doctor Laura Durso

[LAUGHTER]

DURSO: Not for a real reason.

VALLAS: And Mara Pellittieri and Rebecca Cokley, thank you for taking the time to come and hang out with me in the studio and bare some souls and do some real talk on something that I know matters to all of you guys a ton and thank you guys for being awesome, smart friends of mine.

DURSO: Thanks for doing the episode.

COKLEY: Thank you.

PELLITTIERI: Thank you.

VALLAS: And that does it for this week’s episode of Off Kilter, powered by the Center for American Progress Action Fund. I’m your host, Rebecca Vallas, the show is produced each week by Will Urquhart. Find us on Facebook and Twitter @offkiltershow and you can find us on the airwaves on the Progressive Voices Network and the WeAct Radio Network or anytime as a podcast on iTunes. See you next week.