Bonus! Live with "Chairbreaker" Caleb Luna
Caleb demands fat liberation.
Virgie Tovar: Hey everyone, Virgie here. I hope you’re all hanging in there. I’ve been deep in quarantine-landia, and dealing with it the only way a type-A Taurus knows how - by filling my time with ritual and work. Here’s a short list: creating elaborate tea time rituals, making chocolate chip banana bread, painting my toenails gold, stretching, meditating, dancing really hard in my bikini to Kate Bush, and listening to self-help audiobooks.
Drumming on stuff -- like literally just me drumming on the wall with my hands -- has been weirdly helpful as an energy release. And then sometimes I have deep, heaving waves of tears when things begin to feel overwhelming.
I hope Rebel Eaters Club has been able to offer some solace, and in that spirit I wanted to play a live conversation I had in late February with someone I really respect: Caleb Luna, better known on Twitter as @chairbreaker.
Caleb is an intellectual powerhouse finishing up their Phd at UC Berkeley, and I have a very big friend crush on them. We first met years ago, when fat activism was still a small movement. Since then, I’ve read all of their writing on the intersection of race, gender, sex, and fatness and it’s amazing to witness how they hold it down for complexity and nuance, but with a lot of heart.
Caleb and I started off by talking about their favorite snack: Mothers’ Circus Animal Cookies. They were one of my favorite treats as a kid, too. Because not only were they animal shaped.. They were frosted and they were pink AND they had rainbow sprinkles.
And even to this day, they are delicious.
[2:04] Caleb Luna: So I feel like I was talking to some people here beforehand about how these are such like a childhood memory and I chose them specifically because I still love them and I still eat them, um, because they're delicious. Um, and also I'm really stubborn. I'm a Taurus moon. Um, so I'm really into the principle of the thing.
VT: Yes I’m a Taurus too!
CL: Oh my God. I was wondering. Yes, food and senses. All about it. Um, but I find that like, I mean, I grew up working class, right? And now I'm like, doing this PhD thing at this like institution that has all this prestige and blah, blah, blah. And like everyone around me is so thin and so like concerned with it and so obsessed with it in these like ways that they don't even recognize or think is normal and even good. Um, right. And so like eating, continuing to eat the foods that I ate as a child is actually really important to me. Um, as a way of like maintaining like my working class background and like honoring it and recognizing that that's like what brought me into my fat body in some ways.
And especially as like these kinds of foods get really, um, demonized in some ways as like unhealthy or sugary or processed and blah, blah, blah. And like everybody is like. I dunno. Where is like the fucking low cow vegan alternative to this, right. Or whatever. Um, it just feels important to me to continue to eat them because, um, yeah, like I said, I'm stubborn and it's the principle of the thing that these are delicious.
VT: I just remember, um, one of the first things, uh, I was examining when I started looking at the public health stuff around like, you know, the, the campaigns and, and whatnot, um, around, uh, the quote unquote obesity epidemic and specifically focused on children. And there really was this very, to me, overt line of reasoning around the idea that essentially working class people make poor decisions across the board. And eating is one of those things. And obviously, I grew up working class as well, and I kind of think about how that relationship to these very classed foods, right? Like they, they stay with us. Um, I kind of want to get into who you are?
CL: Sure. Um, I'm a Leo sun, a Pisces rising and a Taurus moon. Um, like I said, I'm a PhD candidate. I'm a scholar, I'm an activist. I'm a performer, a writer, um, artist. I obviously am a fat person. Um, and that has been like in many ways, the defining experience for me, um, especially as like a super fat person, um, gender nonconforming non-binary.
VT: Yeah. I mean, you're in a program for performance studies, correct?
CL: Correct.
VT: Yes. Can you tell for the people or people who have never heard of this, what is it?
CL: Um, so performance studies is an academic discipline that, um, considers all sort of behavior as performance that we're all performing roles at any given time. I'm actually starting my dissertation this semester and I'm writing about performances of eating and not eating.
VT: Okay, wait, I need to- We need to keep going. Um, can you talk about the performance of- can you talk more about that performance of eating and not eating.
CL: Yeah. Um, like this performance of like, Oh, I can't eat that because I'm bad or that makes me bad. Right? Um, is a performance. It's performing this like sort of good citizen, which is like an individual who will produce a productive body towards the ends of a nation state. So I’m really interested in the ways fatphobia impacts thin people too, right. Because I feel like with these conversations, obviously fat people are impacted most directly, but I worry that sometimes the impacts on thin people gets lost as well. And so I wanna put pressure on the ways that thin people are self disciplining in ways to maintain a certain body size that comes with rewards but also comes with hardships. Also thin people take up in some ways like fat aesthetics of eating in ways that are culturally valorized and, and obscured. And it's like, actually you really want to be fat or you want to like perform the things that you think that fat people are doing all the time, but you're really scared to.
VT: Yeah, I mean, I'm thinking- what comes to mind is this image- I remember once there was this, I found a tee shirt and it called, it was called, it said I love fatties on it. And I was so excited. And then I was like, great, can I buy one? And then they sort of looked me up and down and they're like, well, I mean, you know, we've sort of- and I was like, Well what sizes do you have? And like the largest size that they had was an extra large. And it was like a tiny extra large, right. It was like a baby T. And it was like, okay, you guys your, you need to get your branding together. Um, but you know, it just reminds me so much of what you're talking about. Okay, so your Instagram handle is chair breaker. I'm wondering if you can give us the origin story of this handle.
CL: Yeah. So before I came to grad school, I had an office job. And there was one other fat person in my office. And she- and we like kind of bonded a lot over being the only fat people in the office.
VT: Yeah, as you do.
CL: Right. And she kept, I mean, she kept, there were two chairs that were broken that were in her office. Who knows how that happened. Um, but she was like really stressed about it. Like, understandably. But I was also like, girl, fucking good for you. Um, I’ve broken so many chairs before and it was just like this real like, yeah, that's a thing that happens because it's framed as like, um, something's wrong with our bodies because they break chairs rather than like these chairs are insufficient because they can't hold our bodies. Right. Um, and so I was like, there's my new Instagram handle. Um, people will frequently like DM me showing me like pictures of chairs they broke and I'm always like, congratulations. Another one down. We're going to break every chair until there's none left that can’t hold us. And that's really how we do this work.
VT: Yeah, so like, you know, a smaller bodied person sits in a chair that breaks and it's a broken, it's a broken chair. And a fat person sits in a chair and it breaks and they broke the chair. Right? And I always tell people, right? People are like, well, how, like how- How do you know fatphobia is bigotry and discrimination? I'm like, because two people can do the exact same thing and you can have very different experiences of how they do them, depending on their size. Right. And like, and what you think about them and what happens. Um when I was thinking about you and human rights and fat justice, right?
One of the things that has increasingly gone away from the conversation around body positivity, body justice, um, is the fact that we are fighting for human rights. This is not just a movement about the individual feeling good about themselves. Um, though those things though, that's important. Right? Um, but really, you know, when I think about the inception of, uh, fat activism and fat justice, I think about the ways that you know, rights were always a big part of it, and at the end of the day, right? Like positivity is very important, but it's not actually a political tool. Um, and in the sense that, right, like positivity is not a useful tool for people who are in survival mode. You cannot wield positivity and get anything from it really if you're like, if you're being denied human rights. So I'm kind of curious about, I mean, like, just like, right, like I'm curious about your thoughts on maybe the ways in which human rights have gotten away from this conversation, your interest in them, things like that.
CL: Yeah. Um, I think it, it actually is, um, for me about identifying as an anarchist and rejecting social hierarchies, right? And understanding that social hierarchies are hierarchies of race, their hierarchies of gender and class, but they're also hierarchies of body size. Um, and that I can make the choice to not perpetuate them in my actions. But I think you're right that like, it gets, the conversation gets so distilled into like how we feel about ourselves, and like body image and self love and all this shit, and like, actually the stakes are much higher. I get so frustrated by the conversation.
Partially because thin people don't love themselves. Right. But when thin people don't love themselves they are still granted opportunities like admission to college, like they get the job offer, right? Like those things, it isn't part of the conversation. And those are actually the stakes that we're talking about. Right. That like, fatphobia impacts our access to resources and our access to livelihood and survival and happiness through having resources and having the resources to be happy.
VT: Yeah. I mean, I use like body positivity as like business lingo for me at this point cause I want to monetize my work. And when I'm talking about it in reality from my own life, with my friends or, you know, privately or academically or any other thing, it's always fat activism. It's always fat liberation to me. Um, because liberation is an actual political demand. I mean, it's complicated cause there's different paths to it. But, um, but there have been many movements throughout history that have fought for liberation, and there are like mechanisms that you can do to like that are tried and true to get rights to get those kinds of things, like access to medical care.
CL: And also like highlights that like in some ways that fat people are not the only people impacted right that like, thin people need to like- don't feel good about themselves either. And that like, sometimes people are just naturally thin and like, that's fine. Um, and like you can also feel okay about yourself. Um, but yeah, it's very much like, use that as a link- as like, um, the sort of Trojan horse to then be like, and actually this is what body positive is- body positivity is to me, which is like the liberation of all people.
VT: Yeah absolutely. Um, okay. So I have tons more questions for you, I've got all my little, all my little notes here. Okay. One of the first pieces of yours I ever read was an article titled On Being Fat, Brown, Femme, Ugly and Unlovable. And I really loved how you went there in discussing ugliness. I remember thinking, there's, there's power here, right? There's power in this, in this idea, right? And for me, as someone who grew up feeling super ugly, right? And being taught that I was ugly because I was fat and those things were the same thing. And so for me, one of the most powerful things that ever happened was when I started to actually have sex.
And I was like, wait, this is actually not hard. I don't understand. And I was like, you know, I was being told I was never going to get that. I was never going to have sex. I was never going to have love. I was not gonna have a relationship. Um, and then I found that, you know, at least casual sex was actually quite easy to acquire. And I kept sort of going through the math. I was like, okay, wait. So like we've got this person, I've had sex with them. That happened, I'm sure. And then that person definitely real also. But like what it meant to occupy the space of being sexually desirable, and also ugly. And I'm kind of talking and I'm, I'm curious, you know, do you still identify with that piece? Do you still identify with all of those words?
CL: I have such a complicated relationship to it because I wrote it when I was really sad at like three in the morning and like unrequitedly in love with somebody and never expected anyone to read it. And then like, I remember waking up at like two in the afternoon the day it was published and like it had like- all my friends were sharing it and like it went everywhere and I was like, Oh fuck. And as part of its like viralityI got a lot of like messages like affirming that I wasn't ugly. Which also I don't actually remember if I like talk about in that essay that like I don't actually think I'm ugly.
I think I'm very attractive, but the world responds to me as if I'm ugly just because I'm fat. So I got all these affirmations that I wasn't ugly and that I just needed to love myself. And I was like, once again, I see thin people who hate themselves all the time and they still get asked out on dates. Um, so like this is not the issue. However, I think one thing that I’ve learned since that essay is that yes, sex is easy. And that just because somebody’s- gonna have sex with me, it doesn't mean they're going to respect me. And that is like the thing that I feel like more fat people need to like, I dunno hear, or like understand or like a process that we all go through. Is that like, Oh, this is easy. It doesn't necessarily feel good. They're not, not necessarily like treating me um, well. And like I had this one experience with this boy who was like very attracted to me. And then like told me when we were cuddling that he could never be with me because he didn't know what his family would say.
Um, and I was like, I'm literally just here for the sex. Um, you don't need to like overshare with me, but, you know people are- so many more people are attracted to us than they want to admit. Um, but it doesn't mean that they're gonna like, be nice to us. It doesn't mean that they're gonna like love us and especially not the way that we need to be loved.
VT: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I relate to what you're talking about where it's like we're clearly in the midst of this really intimate thing, and there's clearly this desire and it's reciprocal, but then there's this public facing component. The public component is a significant part of how we understand relationships, how we understand love and intimacy and all that. That's a big part of relating. That's a big part of dating. That's a big part of relationships, right. Romance. Um, one of the pieces, um, that you wrote was about Grindr. Um, and you said that it took you until the age of 29 to realize that you could be genuinely desirable and not just someone that someone settled for. And I kind of want to hear that story of that realization.
CL: I would love to tell it to tell that story. So it was actually right after I moved to the Bay. Um, I moved here on a Tuesday and like within an hour this dude was like hitting me up and was like, when can we meet? And I was like, Oh my God. My friend's here so we're going to have to wait a couple of days. So my friend who drove across the country with me, I feel like they left on Thursday morning and Thursday afternoon we hooked up. And I was very attracted to him and I w- and he was like very attracted to me. And that was the moment when I was like- I didn't understand that like I was sexy and that people could think I was sexy because up until that moment I was only having sex with people that weren't really engaging with my body. And so when I met this person that I was really attracted to, that was really into my body, that we had good sex, I was like, Oh, like,I'm not a constellation prize. Which I think until that moment, I had always felt like. Partially because that's kind of how people treated me.
VT: Yeah I mean, I can relate to that also. I mean, just thinking there's only two kinds of people. Right? Um, for me it was people who don't like me and some kind of man saint who will just out of the magnanimity and wonderfulness of his spirit would tolerate my body. And I just remember thinking, right? Like I have to be on point. I have to be smart. I have to be funny I have to be fashionable.
I have to have great glasses. And right like, and then maybe he'll be able to overlook this, this like glaring problem with my body. And then kind of finding that I could actually experience and then demand something much better. Right. And just kind of like the first time somebody was like, can I watch you shower please? And I was like, Oh my God. Right? What a special day today is. You know? And I don't know, like they're just something so powerful about that.
[19:31] VT: Before we wrapped up our conversation, we took a question from a super cute fat babe in the audience. She runs an instagram account called “curvystreets” documenting fat fashion in the Bay Area. She brought up how it's “on trend” for brands to make plus size clothes, and you can order them online... but when you go into the stores, the plus sizes aren’t on the rack.
I was really struck by one thing she said - that she feels like these companies are treating her and other fat people like their secret girlfriend - they want our money, but they’re not sure about committing.
VT: I think like the duality of fashion, how it's both for me, it's both self care and it's also armor. Which I see as not as antithetical to self care in a lot of ways. Um, and so it's, it's difficult, you know. And I think for me, I have a different persona when I don't look cute and I'm not like showered. I like, I turn into this like very inwardly facing, very sort of like defensive person. And I, and I really, I literally see the shower as like part of the arming to go out into a world that hates my body.
CL: I had this experience like a couple of weeks ago where I went to fucking Torrid, the fat girl store, and they did not have my size in store. And I was like, what does it mean to be too fat for the fat store? Um, and so I'm just especially like bitter about that right now.
But yeah, it's absolutely this thing where they want us to wear their clothes, but they don't want us in the store because we are somehow tainting their brand and changing their image. They don't want us to be associated and then, you know, I feel fucking trapped because I like looking cute. Um, and like we have. Thank you. Again, who knows if this is because I'm a Leo sun, but like, my self esteem is so tied to like how cute I feel and how cute I look. And like I can't do that without access to the clothes. And so it's just, and so then we're like forced to, um- I mean, I still had to fucking buy Torrid pants because that was like the only place I know that's can like carry my size. Um, so yeah, it's garbage. Um. And I hate them.
Check out Caleb Luna on Instagram @chairbreaker - that’s one word - c-h-a-i-r-b-r-e-a-k-e-r
VT: Caleb, thank you so much for being here and being amazing and wonderful.
[22:28] VT: Next week, I’ll be back to answer a few of YOUR questions.
Voicemail: How do you get to the point of loving yourself at any size? That sounds wonderful, but how do you get there?
VT: If you’d like to send one along, leave a voicemail at 862-231-5386. That number is 862-231-5386. You can also email us at Rebel Eaters Club at gmail dot com.
Rebel Eaters Club is an original podcast from Transmitter Media… the podcast company that's like adding fresh herbs from your window garden to your pasta primavera.
I’m Virgie Tovar. The show is produced by Lacy Roberts and Jordan Bailey. Our editor is Sara Nics. Gretta Cohn is our executive producer.
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