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The Belly of the Beast

Non-Fiction

The Belly of the Beast by Da'Shaun L. Harrison

Please note capitalization in this section. Pretty will retain a different definition than pretty. For clarity, all capitilized words have been tagged with emphasis.

My notes on the book:

Desire/ability politics names social, political, & economic capital one gains/is given access to through their ability to be Desire. But who owns/embodies identites that grant the owner Access, Power, & Resources A.K.A Desire Capitol?

• Whereas Pretty is access to Desire Capitol, and Ugly is lack of access to Desire Capitol, "pretty, beauty, and ugly" are subjective. They are not identities, rather, they are detirmined by the individual as one does not have to feel beautiful or pretty to have access to Desire & Prettyness.

• Beauty, Prettyness, and Ugliness are all things to be traded & saved like money A.K.A. capitol, but Pretty, Beauty, and Ugly are determined by structures which marginalize people for their Blackness, Gender/lessness, and their bodies..
• This determination means that at epicenter of Black fat subjugation and objectification is unDesire. Therefore, to destroy anti-fatness and anti-blackness, we must destroy Desire, Beauty, Thinness, and whiteness.
• Thinness, as a politic, demands one consume & desire less, rather than demand we end a World where what one desires would leave others without. Concepts of "Greedy/ness" & "overconsumption" are cages which breed Thinness. They are concepts that suggest that, in politic, to be free, one must be thin.
• On the surface, the Black fat doesn't have to eat less. By underneath that appearance, the fat don't deserve less access to housing, employment, healthcare, clothing options, etc. Fat children don't deserve to be sent to fat camps. Fat women don't deserve to be believed less & assulted more. Consent is only for those who are Desired.

Fatness as Blackness: fatness exists w/ Blackness itself which leads to other determining fatness is unDesireable.¹ This unDesire creates the margins where the Black fat is forced to live.

• wanting to alter partners body because it's too fat is anti-fat. uninterested in relationships with fat people (romantic or otherwise) is anti-fat, because, statistically, thin people who hold these views are also people in positions of power to deny the Black fat materials and tools necessary to live.

• disinterest in desiring fat Black poeple is harmful - not only because they derseve access to love - but because at the epicenter of their subjugation & objectification is unDesire; therefore,to destroy anti-fatness & anti-blackness, we must destroy Desire, Beauty, Thinness, & whiteness.

• Ugly is structural violance just as anti-Black is. use insecurity to reject Beauty & war w/ thinness & the idea of health.

Fuckability as Desireablity - Desire/ablity is part of the human experiance because being seen as unDesireable helps maintain seperation between the Human and the nonHuman. However, fuckability does not equal an integrated politic because one does not need to see another as human to have sex.

Gender & Assult

• Black people assigned "masculine" are necessarily expendable; their bodies are useful only as punching bags & modes of punishment. Black men, boys, & bois are, historically & currently, fetishized and hypersexualized because of the animalistic characterization assigned to their existance as Black. This characterization is exacerbated when they are fat or otherwise large.


• Black women - "stong" & thought to not experiance pain, yet seen as "weak". They are weak because they are strong, strong because they are weak. They are assulted because they are strong. They are weak and therefore assulted.


• Anti-fatness teaches Black fat bodies are made to endure pain, not pleasure. Their existance defined by death, not life. Their value, if given any, is tied to their ability to perform. Your body is not your own. Hightened fear of hypersexualization while simultaneously never being desired.

insecurity is an inadvertent critique of society which seeks to punish/harm Ugly people who dare to name their percieved flaws are only seen as such because of anti-blackness.

• insecure - classifies one's, percieved negative, feelings about their body & societal standing.


• insecurity - names the response to having no protection, to being harmed.

people deemed Ugly should run to insecurity, not as a trauma, but as a political tool which aids understanding & relationship to opressive power structures.

• because
• Ugly is political. its the deciding factor for who does/not work, receive love, receive housing, eat, and die. Ugly as political creates the framework that demotes humans to beasts.
  Ugly → Monster → Slave → Other → unDesireable → Beast
• because
• insecurty is political. politicalization of Ugly leads to the political, economic, & physical death of a person which will make that person feel unprotected, uncared-for, & unconfident.
• insecurity lets you free of performing "perfection" & can allow the total confidence to advocate for collective liveration if we stopped apologizing for insecurities, stopped fearing them, stopped trying to remove them.

Why are Ugly people asked to apologize for their Ugliness & asked to conform to Beauty rather than divesting from Beauty as a political concept?

Why do we see insecurity as a personal failing rather than the result of systematic & social domination?

Additional sources on topic:

¹"In the trans-Atlantic slave trade, colonists and race scientists suggested that black people were sensuous and thus prone to sexual and oral excesses. Protestantism encouraged temperance in all pleasures, including those of the palate. By the early 19th century, particularly in the U.S., fatness was deemed evidence of immorality and racial inferiority (Strings 2019).