AFTERWORD, FEMINISM AND FITNESS - AMANDA MONTEI

AFTERWORD

Amanda Montei

When Elizabeth Hall first suggested we edit an anthology on feminism and fitness, I was reluctant. We had discussed the ways we had moved and worked our bodies over the years. This kind of embodiment has, for me, always been an effort to counter some of the disembodiment that is often normalized not just by the pace of late capitalism, but also by writing and scholarly work. Still, my feelings about movement (exercise feels like such a dirty word) had never appeared in my writing. I knew that, despite my own very gendered and classed experiences of the body, I still worked my body from a position of privilege (a fact that recent events makes all too clear). I wanted us to acknowledge the capitalist exploitation of bodies, thinness/fatness, (dis)ability, class, and gender.

Talk about women’s bodies is messy because women’s bodies are messy.

I returned to Audre Lorde’s sentiments on self-care not as self-indulgence, but as self-preservation, a necessary practice of preparing oneself for political warfare. We experience our bodies too often as weapons that have been turned against us by others. As vessels that yoke us to unpaid care and affective labor. As a set of moving and permeable borders that somehow also distinctly and clearly outline our own vulnerability. Our bodies are in desperate need of care themselves.

These are bodies that, as Jessica Smith writes in her piece “13 December 2006/ Charlottesville”, need to be protected, walked home. That battle dysmorphia, and eating disorders. That are haunted by the specter of Gwyneth Paltrow and what Cheryl Quimba calls her “lifestyle goop.” As Natalie Eilbert writes in “Throwing Up Huevos Rancheros in a Motel Napa, 1pm”, “Misogyny wants us special, to walk in bold stencil outside the blur of girly superficial norms, so that we might satisfy a package deal.”

And yet, we were also reminded by the work in this collection of the bodies of mothers, writers, lovers, thinkers. Bodies that care, sometimes painfully, but also bodies that experience all sorts of pleasure. We saw what Amina Cain calls “writing not about sex, necessarily, but towards it, towards the energy of it (whether it is an energy that gets expressed or simply exists on its own).” We found women imagining, as Marisa Crawford does, Sylvia Plath on the elliptical.

This work often moves us beyond language, through and around that space of Acker’s, that wordless, mystical space outside language, where the body speaks. But it also returns us to those ongoing negotiations with the weight of language. A woman’s body is, after all, not simply either: not beyond, and not articulated by, the master’s tools. It is something always traveling, dragging, romping.

Amanda Montei holds an MFA from California Institute of the Arts, and is currently a PhD student at SUNY at Buffalo, where she is a Presidential Fellow. She has taught, performed or presented work in Los Angeles, New York, Uganda, Rwanda and Germany. She is currently the co-editor of Bon Aire Projects, a press that publishes collaborative poetry and connects otherwise divergent aesthetic communities. She also edits the literary journal P-QUEUE. Her poetry and fiction has appeared in P-QUEUE, Gigantic, Pinwheel, Joyland, Explosion Proof Magazine, Delirious Hem, PANK, Night Train and others. Her critical writing has appeared in American Book Review, Performing Ethos, Harriet: The Blog, PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, and Ms. Magazine.Her short story “We Are All Animals” was a nominee for the 2010 Million Writers’ Award. Her poetry manuscript The Failure Age was a semi-finalist for the 11^th annual Slope Editions Book Prize, and was published as a chapbook by Bloof Books in 2014. She is the co-author, with Jon Rutzmoser, of Dinner Poems. She is also a contributor to the Ms. Magazine blog.

Work It: Feminism and Fitness Feature

My Favorite Failure: an Introduction

Elizabeth Hall

A year ago I was asked to write an essay about fitness for eohippus labs, a micropress based out of Los Angeles. The editors placed no limitations on length, form, or style. The timing was unfortunate: I worked seven days a week, at three different jobs, in three different cities around LA. I struggled to sit still long enough to read a wikipedia article much less write an essay.  It’s true: I had lied to the editors, assuring them that I already had a text in progress. Months passed. I emailed the editors: “soon” and “almost done.” I had not written a single sentence. I was busy. Out of necessity, daily exercise—performed before or after work—had replaced writing as the prime mover in the active labor of keeping me sane, a person in the first place, and not some other walking, talking thing.

I did try to write. Every morning before the sun rose I would walk to the gym, thoroughly exhaust myself, then walk back to my apartment, notebook in hand. I tried to channel the precise sensation of lifting weights, of dancing, of stretching deeper and deeper within myself. I wrote nothing.  My failure did not bother me. I simply did not know how to proceed. This not-caring, however, was new to me. It had been daily exercise itself—the ritual of breaking down muscles in order to build them up again—that had conditioned me to failure, to relish its pleasures, to seek it out whenever possible. I lingered in my not-knowing.  Soon I found it necessary to walk to the library for the first time in months, to sit very still and read and read and read. 

I read all afternoon. As I read I discovered I was not alone in my particular failing. In her essay Bodies of Work, Kathy Acker describes her own inability to write about bodybuilding. After failing time and time again to finish an essay on the topic, she experimented with keeping a workout diary. She described the journaling process as another failure: “After each workout I forgot to write. Repeatedly I...some part of me...the part of the “I” who body builds...was rejecting ordinary language, any verbal description...”  Ordinary language had been replaced by the language of the body.  A language created through the repetition of breath, of traveling further into one’s own body. The more I worked out—the more I failed to write about working out—the more I began to slow down, discover that language, like the body, is not always so controllable. The essayist, like the bodybuilder, is always working in and around this failure.  

Let me put it another way: I knew I needed a new language to describe the experience of exercise but I didn’t know what that language might look like. I read through blogs, exhausted my library’s offerings, emailed friends for book recommendations. It was in this spirit that I asked Amanda Montei, a writer and veteran yoga student, to co-edit a feature for Delirious Hem about fitness and feminism. The premise for the project was simple: we wanted to read more literary writing about working out.

In our open call for submissions, we expanded our definition of “working out” to include the various ways women work their bodies, including the work of motherhood, of writing, of maintaining one’s health and mental clarity, among other things. Although we initially conceived of our project as an anthology—a collection of published pieces—the submissions we received were mostly original texts. This delighted us. More writing—more for us to read—had been the whole point.

Throughout the month of December we will be posting essays, poems, short stories, and interviews every day on Delirious Hem by

Joanna Ruocco, Weather.com and Manufactured Obsolescence

Marisa Crawford, Flip Turn

Elizabeth Colen, What I Cannot Do

Amanda Ackerman, excerpt from I Fell in Love with a Monster Truck

Natalie Eilbert, ThrowingUp Huevos Rancheros in a Motel in Napa, 1pm
Elizabeth Hall, Interview with Amina Cain
Jessica Comola, The Smart of My Example Target Heartrate
Terri Witek, Sex Dream with Triceps
Suzanne Scanlon, Scary Mary
Cheryl Quimba, WORKIT: The Making of Gwyneth Paltrow in the Age of Healthism



 

Elizabeth Hall lives and loves in Long Beach, CA. Her chapbook, Two Essays, is forthcoming from eohippus labs. You can read more of her writing here.

 

Four Poems

by Amanda Montei




Four Poems

1.
Today they announced that the failure age is twenty-nine. That for women it comes three decades earlier than it does for men. “Why is it that people think they understand their bodies?” she says. “How can you know that your insides yearn for salad?” He is on the bearskin rug in the corner of the apartment, eating a violin bit by bit, and yearning for a salad. “Like the man that ate the airplane!” he says. “Like the man that ate the world!” Yesterday, she asked the old woman in the park what she loved. The woman said, “Queen Anne’s lace.” She didn’t know then that Queen Anne’s lace was a flower. (She thought it was a doily-type thing the woman might wear on her brittle bony shoulders, an old delicate shawl that would break apart in hands. She liked the idea of frail-on-frail.)

2.
Her favorite thing is cats that bat at your hand but really they’re just batting at the air. “It’s sweet the way it seems they’re always grabbing at something they can’t quite touch,” she says. He says his favorite thing is the bearksin rug, which he is dusting with a feather duster. He says his second favorite thing is unexpected eye contact. “It’s glorious when you realize you have sexual tension with everyone you meet,” he says. She hasn’t seen the moon in days. She can’t stay awake for it anymore. “My least favorite thing is gin,” she says. “My second least favorite is conversation. My third least favorite is wrinkles.” He falls asleep on the rug, and she goes looking for the moon.

3.
She will write a story about women who feel like objects even in the eyes of women. (They are incapable of seeing themselves as people, as friends, as anything other than sexual. They are constantly searching for satisfaction, attraction, even in those they have no real sexual interest in.) She will write a story about a woman who is looking for the moon, who travels the world trying to find it. (Such is the plight of so many young women. They define themselves in terms of others.) When she finally finds the moon in Biarritz she is blinded by it. The glow is too specular, too iridescent, too much like teenage glitter.

4.
(She has high, round cheeks and looks like she is sucking on the sides of her mouth, like those druggy models. She wears a thin sparkly wrap over her ears, like she is covering the fact that she doesn’t actually have ears. Like she is covering her coiled coiffure. She squeezes his hand whenever anything is funny or scary. Her fingers are muggy on the palm and her cold rings warm to nervous skin. When she doesn’t know what someone is talking about she always pretends she does and then googles it later.) The flower, there on the screen, reaches out, stems like lonely separate fingers stretching from a long night curled. She thinks that Queen Anne’s lace also looks as if it’s grabbing at something it can’t quite touch. They decide to walk through the night. The sky is painted pastel, a swollen peach with blue-gray mold-fuzz, tantalizing in its death. She catches the moon in her eye, but as they pass a high building, it winks out and she can’t get her eye on it again. “Isn’t it upsetting that the moon is always out there but you can’t always see it?” she says. “Doesn’t it feel like it’s running from us?”


Bio: Amanda lives in Los Angeles, where she is completing her MFA at California Institute of the Arts. Her creative and critical work has appeared or is forthcoming in Ms. Magazine, PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, PANK, Nanofiction, Nighttrain, and others. She blogs for Ms. Magazine semi-regularly.