In this blogpost from 2017, scholar Sara Ahmed offers a lecture on the concept of the snap. She begins by describing a scene from a novel by Andrea Levy, in which a Black British girl ‘snaps’ in the context of a conversation with her white companions who seem unable to hear the particularity of their violent obliviousness in relation to an event that affected her more than it affected them. So she shouts. Ahmed writes:
If you have to shout to be heard you are heard as shouting. If you have to shout to be heard you are not heard. Think of how all her efforts to be heard, to get through that wall of silence, that wall of indifference, that wall of whiteness, come to nothing. Think of how all the frustration, that rage, can become a tipping point. It is only when you seem to lose it, when you shout, swear, spill, that you have their attention. And then you become a spectacle. And what you brought out means you have to get out. When we think of such moments of snap, those moments when you can’t take it anymore, when you just can’t take it anymore, we are thinking about worlds; how worlds are organised to enable some to breathe, how they leave less room for others. You have to leave because there is nothing left; when there is nothing left.
A snap is a moment where what was once just-about-tolerable becomes intolerable; the pressure is too much, and there is a break. But, as Ahmed writes, the snap is not the direct starting point of anything: ‘a snap is only the start of something because of what you did not notice, the pressure on the twig.’ This sort of temporality is complicated, I think, by thinking about who notices the pressure when, and what tactics are used to diffuse the pressure over time. I am thinking here of how fatness and dance interact, or how my fat life and my dance life come to apply pressure on one another in a fatphobic society.
Last Wednesday I snapped. I snapped at some horrible, supremacist, body-policing fatphobic bullshit I was expected to sit and listen to in the context of a work event. It was not even the last instance of direct, violent fatphobia I have experienced in a professional dance context in the intervening nine days. When I say that the deliberate and accidental fatphobia in my dance life is constant, and has been since I started dancing in an organised way as a very very small child, I mean it is a pressure that is sustained on an hourly basis. Some of it, like abusive language about fat people offered as a comment by someone who calls themselves a professional dance artist, on a post about a project of mine, on a social media platform it doesn’t interest me to use, is direct and nasty. (Have a look for it if you want, but I won’t be linking to it. It’s not very interesting.) Some of it is practical, like there not being comfortable dancewear available for me and my companions available in a reasonable way. Some of it is atmospheric, like the glances at my fat body the moment I walk into a dance studio, and the energetic environment that that creates. Some of it, like hearing second-hand that some people couldn’t engage with my last blogpost because they’re offended by the word ‘fat’, reminds me that if a neutral descriptor a person is using about themselves is a barrier to others’ understanding, there is a lot of work to do, including fat people (me) there-there-ing non-fat people about their sore feelings about a word that doesn’t even refer to them.
It has taken me a long, long time to recognise this as the violence it is. I accepted dance for what it appeared to be: a thin people thing, something I should be grateful to be included in as a very rare exception, where I would always have to be specially marked and definitely always have to be extraordinary to even be OK, in all senses. Over the past few years, I have had something of a fat awakening, partially realised by a short period of time when I was not fat, and suddenly everything in dance became easier. Not the dancing – I have always liked and been good at dancing – but the social and professional relations, the sense of acceptance in any meeting room, studio, or theatre. Because of how bodies work; because being fat is less a temporary situation for most of us than a normal state of being; because nobody has figured out how to successfully, safely, and permanently unfat a fat person (and I have no particular interest if they do), I returned to my natural large size and to entering into dance spaces as an anomaly, an irritation, a special case. This unfolding knowing alongside lots of reading, listening, and being with other fat people has gradually, slowly, inchingly lined up my ideas of fat acceptance with my ideas about what dance is and is for, to which I myself was always previously an exclusion: dance is an everybody thing, and the violence undertaken by the (usually but not always non-fat) people who control it to reproduce themselves as special and important in dance is really fucked up.
Because my feelings and thoughts about fat people and dance have taken time to transform – my own internalised fatphobia, especially in relation to dance, has been hard to unpeel – my snap last week acted as a kind of time travel. Ahmed writes of this delay: ‘a snap can be experienced as a delayed snap, once it happens, you can wonder with frustration what took you so long.’ Through this delayed snap, I was transported through my snap to both a past, where I still shared the worldview of the others present and especially those who wrote, spoke and published a script advocating for the stealing of bodily autonomy of minors through dance because they don’t like fat people. This is a world of norms, understood not as things that are usual or common, but carrying the fear of the socially-policed ‘should’. I was also transported to that dance world’s future, a future I am trying to conjure, where dance’s powers are never mobilised for the sake of abuse (towards anyone, for anything). This is the world of speculation, understood not as vague maybes but carrying the multiplicity and potentiality of the ‘could’. This time travel complicated the pressure between the two sides of the snap (the foot and the ground, the stick snapping between), producing in terms of affect not just anger but confusion and sadness, probably for lots of people in that room. In Ahmed’s terms, the world assumed as accommodating became a wall, ‘a wall that comes up because of the body you have; because of what comes with you when you enter a room’.
One of Ahmed’s ‘travelling companions’ is the figure of angry woman of colour. Ahmed writes in this other text:
The figure of the angry black woman is a fantasy figure that produces its own effects. Reasonable, thoughtful arguments are dismissed as anger (which of course empties anger of its own reason), which makes you angry, such that your response becomes read as the confirmation of evidence that you are not only angry but also unreasonable! To make this point in another way, the anger of feminists of color is attributed. You might be angry about how racism and sexism diminish life choices for women of color. Your anger is a judgment that something is wrong. But then in being heard as angry, your speech is read as motivated by anger. Your anger is read as unattributed, as if you are against x because you are angry rather than being angry because you are against x. You become angry at the injustice of being heard as motivated by anger, which makes it harder to separate yourself from the object of your anger. You become entangled with what you are angry about because you are angry about how they have entangled you in your anger. In becoming angry about that entanglement, you confirm their commitment to your anger as the truth “behind” your speech, which is what blocks your anger, stops it from getting through. You are blocked by not getting through.
I am always nervous of finding analogues or even parallels between the exclusion of fat people and the horrendous marginalisation experienced by other people, in other ways, but here I find a sort of sideways connection that is helping me to think. Standing next to the figure of the angry woman of colour is the sad fat lass. This fantasy figure shares the structure of appearance with the angry woman of colour, in that her presence makes actual fat people entangled in sadness. The sadness appears as the motivating factor for speaking out, rather than a consequence of exclusion and disregard once some speaking-out has begun. For instance, most dance people might structure their relation to what I say as ‘Gillie is saying these things about the field of professional dance because she’s sad, and she’s sad because she’s fat’, rather than ‘Gillie is excluded from her professional environment because of fatphobia, and that makes her sad’. The ‘lass’ of ‘sad fat lass’ is crucial here, because of dance often being seen as a feminised practice; because of complexities thrown up by thinking about fatness and gender; and because of relationships between fatness and class in the public imagination, with ‘lass’ usually being a term used only in Scottish and northern English dialects like mine, deeply linked to working class places. It’s also important because lass really means girl, but is used affectionately to refer to adult women, usually to soften an interaction. Lasses should be gentle and fat lasses should be gentle and jolly. Sad fat lasses are lowly and simple, emotions base, politics absent.
This was apparent in some but not all reactions to my snap. In the room, I said that I no longer wanted to show my presentation slides because they contained images of very fat people dancing. One person – who truly seemed kind and good from what I could tell – said that it was OK, they’d support me. In a draft missive – which was changed before it was sent – the organisation that had invited me wrote that they wanted to reassure the audience that I was OK. I had a couple of calls and messages from dear friends who thought I might need support. I did need support, and I got it from my amazing friends and am grateful and am fine. It puzzled me, though, that I was receiving this communication that suggested I was having some kind of out-there mental health episode rather than a totally reasonable reaction to a vicious workplace. What Ahmed is helping me understand is that these pretty nice people were having a reaction to the figure of the sad fat lass conjured by my snap, rather than to the structural and systemic problem the snap exposed.
Ahmed writes that the snap is a moment. She says: ‘[m]oments become movements; moments can accumulate; worn threads of connection…Snap is about making what is necessary possible’. Let’s.
Thanks to Ruth Raynor for so helpfully offering the connection to Ahmed’s ‘snap’, when I told her about what had happened.