Claire Willett

So. You are frustrated that it feels like women of color are trying to diminish your achievement and how big a deal this role is for you, and you're shutting down their attempts to explain why, which is Not a Good Look for someone trying to build solidarity among plus-size women.

I think it's splitting hairs a bit to talk about the way the films are billed/categorized, because that's a very industry-insider standard that doesn't necessarily have any connection to the way AUDIENCES view or mentally categorize different types of movies, so let's skip it.

But we REALLY DO need to talk about the idea that Queen Latifah and Mo'Nique "don't count" as plus-sized - both because that's very plainly not accurate but also because it gets into some ugly racist stereotype territory. Hopefully this will help clarify people's frustrations!

There's a disturbingly common thing in fat white girl culture where fat women of color - Black women in particular - are shut out of the conversation about body positivity, media stereotyping, representation, etc., for a host of reasons you may think are well-intentioned.

Sometimes it's the idea that the concept of "plus-sized" itself is a moving target because white women perceive the Black community to have different cultural standards and beauty norms about bodies, so they don't see plus-sized Black women as experiencing any disadvantage.

Sometimes it's rooted in the deep divide on TV, in movies and in the media between the Fat White Woman and the Fat Black Woman, who are two completely different shitty one-dimensional stereotypes. The Fat White Woman is a pathetic cat lady. The Fat Black Woman is "sassy."

Where I have a lot of empathy for you, because I understand where I THINK you're coming from, is that it feels to you like a bigger and further and more revolutionary leap to subvert the Pathetic Cat Lady and turn her into a rom-com heroine than to subvert the Sassy Black Friend.

But the thing that women of color have been trying to tell you on Twitter is that that's not true, and that the iconic Black women like Queen Latifah who came before you and laid that groundwork were doing something that was just as revolutionary.

A big part of the disconnect here is the notion that many fat white women have, when they look at these tropes side by side, that the Fat White Woman Stereotype is OBJECTIVELY WORSE. "At least the fat black girl gets to be funny! I'm just crying into my ice cream about men!"

So if one is presented as inherently tragic and one as comic, then clearly the one who is comic is "happier," so it's a "better" stereotype, so she's not REALLY oppressed, right? everyone likes the fat black woman sidekick! so where's the problem? at least she's not a CAT LADY

So there's this ongoing erasure of plus-size black women as though they're somehow subject to LESS oppression, because the media stereotype of them seems preferable to our own, as opposed to MORE, with three vectors of structural systemic bias - size, gender, race - to our two.

This is an ongoing cultural minefield and you did not BEGIN it, and you are as much a prisoner of it as every other plus-sized woman in our entire body-shaming, thin-worshiping society, but it's also really important to examine the way race and privilege intersect w/size here.

Because while the Fat White Woman is crying into her ice cream over how the male protagonist will never love her back, the Fat Black Woman is frequently desexualized so completely that the narrative never even CONSIDERS her in the same realm as the male protagonist's love life.

Or, alternately, she's aggressively OVER-sexualized, her body presented as a thing instead of a human being, or her sexuality played for outlandish comedy, because ha ha what's funnier than a fat black lady having the audacity to think of herself as attractive LOL HOW DARE SHE

This takes nothing away from your accomplishments or how big a deal it is to present any plus-sized woman as an object of romantic desire or give hee a starring role in anything! It just means that a white woman asking "but is Mo'Nique REALLY plus-size" is stepping on a landmine.

This is similar to the well-intentioned but messy conversations around "Moana" and whether or not it's "revolutionary" to depict a Disney princess who doesn't need/want a love interest. You can't divorce race from these conversations.

Letting a woman of color be the most beautiful princess in all the land with princes swooning over her, and letting a white woman exist outside the rigid framework of white femininity as a prize given as a reward for white male chivalry, would be way more subversive.

The REALLY revolutionary princess movie is the remake of "Rodgers & Hammerstein's Cinderella" starring Brandy, because it gives the full-on sparkly gown, adoring Prince Charming, "most beautiful woman in all the land" princess treatment to a Black girl.

And while I would literally die for "Moana" I would argue that actually Merida is a more subversive movie archetype because we EXPECT the "independent woman who don't need no man" character to be a desexualized woman of color and it's more rare if she's European/white.

That doesn't mean Moana is not awesome!!! It just means that there are really important ways in which the stereotypes we raise girls with are different based on race and you can't take that out of the equation. It doesn't minimize any of those individual characters or stories.

In the same way, it doesn't detract at all from how awesome it is to watch your career as a plus-sized female comic continue to ascend, if you could open your eyes and ears a little bit to the ways in which Black women have been laying this groundwork for years.

I know that many other people have tweeted you links and entire threads and articles listing other plus-sized women - of many ethnicities! - who have headlined romantic comedies before the year 2018. That doesn't mean we don't all understand how big a deal this is for you.

But the two women specifically mentioned - Queen Latifah and Mo'Nique - have been at this for DECADES. It is not a stretch to say that anything anyone claims to be the "first plus-sized woman" to accomplish, was probably already done by Queen Latifah in the nineties.

And yet there is this perception that - because Queen Latifah does not appear to be SUFFERING for her size - that the label of "plus-size", worn as a badge of honor, "look what I've overcome to get here," doesn't apply to her. And that's super, super problematic.

I just want to encourage plus-size white women to be extra extra aware of the ways in which women of color get erased from the conversation when we talk about making space for bodies of different sizes, because it's FREQUENTLY rooted in white supremacy we aren't examining.

anyway @RebelWilson I hope you read this and sit with it a second and maybe take a step back from feeling like you're being attacked or your accomplishments diminished. We gotta lift each other up, and that means fairly crediting the women who got there first.

TO CONCLUDE: EVERYONE NEEDS TO STOP ERASING QUEEN LATIFAH, LOVE OF MY LIFE, FIRST PLUS-SIZED WOMAN TO DO PRETTY MUCH EVERYTHING IN THE WORLD /fin