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Ushshi

"There’s a lot here [in America] that’s similar to Bangladesh. 'Fat' is reviled across the board. Part of that is the post-colonial legacy, and the other part is that the modern ideal is the Western ideal, so a lot of the attitudes around weight have shifted [around the world]. In my mother’s generation, everyone told her she needed to gain weight. When I was growing up, it was quite the opposite. In Bangladesh, part of the hostility that you get if you're fat is that you have a famine-ridden country where the first generation after the war had very little wealth and people were literally starving. So being larger — even though there are lots of large women in the village who aren’t necessarily rich — was very Marie Antoinette. Like, 'how dare you.' It’s this representation of gluttony. Here, it’s sort of the opposite; there’s this assumption that you don’t eat well, or you can’t eat well, and that you couldn’t possibly be educated enough to know your body and still be fat. The classism perspective is interesting, but it’s still people regulating and trying to control fat women.



"I really thought I would come to the United States and all of a sudden things would be cool, but it was interesting to see how the microaggressions shifted. Being a brown, fat woman is also very different, whereas over there, I’m just a fat woman. I had fat women in my family that were ashamed and would never show their bodies, and had such intense hate towards themselves. The idea of having positive or even neutral images [of plus bodies] was a bit mind-blowing. I remember when Instagram first launched, and I started following a bunch of fat babes, I thought, 'If I only had this when I was 10, or 12, I wouldn’t have dealt with years of eating disorders, or years of feeling like I was unlovable or less-than because I had never felt represented anywhere except for in a negative context.' I think it does a lot to reinforce your own self-image via other people who look like you.



"Fashion was one of the many constructs through which I navigated both my identity and transgressions against the values of a world I was at odds with. I have vivid sensory memories of bruised fingers from studding and patching vests, the weight of that metal on my shoulders, feeling rooted by the heaviness of it in a mosh pit. I remember the first time I dyed my hair at thirteen, and tasted what it was like to push what could and could not be 'natural,' and the years I spent fighting with my school principal to keep it. I remember the joyous liberation of the warm sun on my belly the first time I wore a bikini and swam in the ocean. I spent a lot of years trying on outfits and styles I was told I could not wear just to prove folks wrong, and often the pendulum swung back to overcorrect. These days, I think less about my personal fashion on a day-to-day basis, because after years of experimenting, my choices are on autopilot. The older I get, the deeper I feel connected to myself. Instinctively, I know what I want and how I want to feel on a particular day, so there's a lot less internal negotiation. For a long time, style is how I pieced together my confidence as a fat, brown weirdo — back then, expressing my creativity and thrifting on no budget gave me a sense of mastery and skill that I could literally wear on me to present to the world. Fashion feels much more like a seamless integration and extension of myself, rather than the armor I used to wear to face and conquer the day."