stephanie alaniz | queer. fat. ACTIVIST.

Written by Miranda K. Metcalf | Published 1 jan 2020

Stephanie Alaniz loves emotions. The shows she watches, the podcasts she listens to, and movies she goes to see are the ones with big feels and big consequences. She likes to experience the depths of others’ emotional worlds, and her making is motivated by empathy. Her work aims to bring that which we keep hidden, that which we fear holds the most power to hurt us, into the light. This way we can all experience those big feelings and big fears together. Alaniz believes that through normalising and creating solidarity around our insecurities, not only do we feel less alone in our anxieties, but we can also begin to see patterns emerge, which enables us to start finding the root of these insecurities. Through her practice she discovers that all insecurities come from toxic social programming, and suggests that by dismantling this we can find a healthier self image and more energy for the work of activism.

Alaniz grew up swimming in the very cultural waters that she would go on to question through her printmaking. She was born to a young, low-income family in Rockport, Texas. Her parents were still into partying and drinking, and still to this day hold many of the ideologies she is deconstructing. Although the family wouldn’t call them by their names - racism, homophobia, and fatphobia - they were a part of the cultural fabric of her childhood. Alaniz is quick to say, however, that her parents were incredibly supportive of her throughout her growing up. They were always telling her how well she could draw, although she modestly says they were probably wrong. I think that one look at her draftsmanship indicates otherwise. All she ever remembers wanting to be is an artist. She still has the “what do you want to be when you grow up” forms from grade school, and on everyone she’s written “artist” or “art teacher.” Currently, Alaniz is an adjunct professor of art at Emporia State University.

Her on-going project “Insecurity Portraits” crowd sources insecurities from around the world that she translates into drawn portraiture. Harnessing the power of Instagram, she put out a call for people to share their fears and their faces with her. She asks participants for a photograph of themselves, unidealised (no holding the camera above one’s face or making duck lips) in a straight on or three quarter’s view. Along with the photograph, participants give her a list of the things about their face they don’t like and those that they do. Currently, she has 90 participants, of which she has drawn 36 portraits. Alaniz renders the features that the participants perceive as negative in darkness and those they perceive as positive in colour. Neutral features are left non-tonal. This maps the subjects’ thoughts and feelings about their appearance for the viewer to see and often empathise with.

It is important to Alaniz that these images are hand drawn, not photographs. She utilises her stunning draftsmanship to capture her participants’ likenesses, but it is a slow process. She builds up the colours layer by layer, like the lithographer she is, starting with lightest and gradually working darker. As she offers her undivided attention and energy to the participant, she attempts to feel what they feel when they are looking in the mirror, worrying over the quality of their skin or their second chin. Her interest in emotion and empathy play center stage in the process as she connects herself to those who have chosen to share their vulnerabilities with her. She describes it as a stressful experience because while people have openly chosen to share their insecurities with her, she doesn’t want to do anything to perpetuate them. Rather, it is Alaniz’s intention to show people just as they are. The neutrality of the rendering a foil to the judgements they bring upon themselves.

The people who choose to share their insecurities do so with incredible honestly. Some write her with bullet points, while others create small essays on how they feel about how they look. Many of these words are displayed in the installed exhibition, screen printed on massive sheets of paper that envelop the viewer. When experienced collectively, the images and the words illuminate patterns of insecurities held by us all: double chins, dark patches, large noses, wrinkles... Seeing the power of the patterns not only begins to normalise these insecurities but also invites participants and viewers alike to begin to question where the insecurities come from. Why are lines around one’s eyes considered a bad thing? If we are all lucky enough to live a long life, they are inevitable. Beyond that, there is a reason why they are often called “laugh lines”. They are evidence of a life lived and feelings felt. 

When the insecurities are pulled out of the fluorescent light behind closed bathroom doors and into the space of a gallery exhibition, they are removed from the looping context of the participants' minds. The patterns of self hatred that emerge can all be linked back to social sicknesses from which we all suffer to varying degrees: ageism, fatphobia, and Euro-centric ideologies. Alaniz is trying to give people the chance to make the choice about how they want to perceive themselves. When you accept that the thoughts you have about yourself you did not choose, rather they were instilled from birth it gives you the chance to reject them. Alaniz wants her participants to be able to ask whether or not these physical traits are something that is truly bad, or if it’s something that we all have just been conditioned to believe.

Alaniz’s interest in insecurities is a personal one. She is fat, she has facial hair, and she has acne. If  that list sounds harshly negative, I invite you to reanalyse that list. The words “fat”, “hair”, and “acne” are not inherently bad. They are facts. Observations about a body that exists in the world, and any negativity is baggage that is brought to them —a story that was told in an instant. Why is facial hair on a woman a bad thing? It doesn’t hurt or harm. It is not a sign of any kind of underlying illness or disorder. Most every woman I have ever known has at least a few dark hairs on her upper lip, which arrive once past her early twenties, and almost every woman I know rips them from her body with a pair of tweezers the second she notices them. What is the mechanism in place that makes this action so universal that to opt out of this minor self mutilation is considered a radical, even political, act? When speaking of her own insecurities, Alaniz says:

“It feels like someone else made that choice for me. I was told that I should feel bad that I have facial hair. That I should feel bad because I have acne or hairy legs, because I was born a woman. So I try to reclaim my body. These are things that I worry about, but I don’t want to.” 

Alaniz told me that when she was getting her first reviews for teaching at West Virginia University during her MFA she was worried that students would comment on her appearance. That the feedback would be centred around how she needed to shave her legs or deal with her acne. Alaniz is an active participant in her “Insecurity Portraits,” drawing lithograph after lithograph with her own insecurities in bold. This impulse to put it all on display was the beginning of the whole series. Rather than worrying about whether or not people see something she feels insecure about, she puts it on display and invites everyone to look. That way she doesn’t have to worry about whether or not they have noticed it. She knows that they have. She knows they know it’s there, and they know that she knows it’s there. In this way, it takes some of the power away from insecurities. That particular kind of discomfort of wondering if people know what you know about yourself.

When it comes to insecurities, fatness may be the final frontier. While society has been making slow and steady progress towards acceptance of, and the need to celebrate and represent bodies that differ in gender, sexuality, and race from the status quo, larger bodies have remained on the outs. Looking at cultural signifiers such as the cartoons of Disney, we have seen princesses of colour take the leading role and even periferal characters in queer relationships, such as Judy Hopps neighbors in Zootopia. Yet think about how inconceivable it would be to see Disney make a movie where the lead was fat. A fat lead in a movie that had nothing to do with their fatness. (Although Maui from Moana’s body type is a matter of some debate.) A fat lead that was capable, respected, and romantically desirable. It seems like light years away. This is why fact activism exists and why fat activists like Alaniz have a long road ahead of them. 

Now, let me just ask you, dear readers, are you finding yourself reacting to the use of the word “fat”? Are you already forming a counter argument in your head about how fatness is a choice unlike sexuality or race? Are you listing in your head the health problems that come with fatness, and how it would be damaging to normalise it to our precious Disney-consuming children? The Pandora’s box of fatphobia is not the subject of this article, nor is it solely the subject of Alaniz’s printmaking, but luckily for all of us there are fantastic resources out there to educate ourselves. Read the works of Roxane Gay or Lindy West. Listen to the She’s All Fat Podcast. Follow instagram accounts like @thefatsextherapist or @yrfatfriend. Not only are these accurate and helpful resources, but they are also more than a little amusing as well. I promise it will be some of the most fun and liberating self-education you can do out there.

I also feel the need to say that I am not in anyway trying to create a hierarchy of suffering to say that fat people’s lived experiences are the same, better, or worse than a person of colour or a queer person or any of the varied marginalised identities out there. Rather, fatness needs to be looked at for what is: another complex, intersectional identity that deeply affects how we see ourselves, and how we are received in the world. 

Alaniz is committed to intersectionality, recognising privilege, and pulling each other up. “I may be fat and queer but am also white, and I need to use my privilege when and where I can to help those who more marginalised than myself. Fat people of color or super fats,” she says. 

When I ask her why printmaking is the medium for this work she says speaks to printmaking as the most marginalised medium that also has wonderfully interconnected roots in activism and the multiple as way to distribute dissident information. Yet beyond that, the community is vitally important to not only activism, but creating a chosen family that gives us strength to push back against the societal programming. Programming that keeps us staring in the mirror pinching and pulling at our beautiful bodies. As long as we are frowning at what we see, and looking for the next miracle diet or wrinkle cure, we aren’t spending that energy acting against the forces in place that directly and negatively affect our lives. To cast off the programming that keeps us hating ourselves is a radical act. To reject the values that we have not chosen for ourselves in favour of those we have consciously accepted is the beginning of any great revolution.

As your thoughts turn to 2020, what is on the forefront of your mind? With the new year we are offered our metaphorical clean slate. For those in the northern hemisphere this comes of course in almost the middle of a dark winter, yet with the New Year we tend to think of ourselves as blossoming again. Telling ourselves that this is the year when we take control and change things about ourselves we’ve spent the last year channeling energy into hating. Our size seems to often be chief among these. Weight loss programs and the gyms will be packed come January 2nd, it has become a cycle as enviable as buds forming on the cherry trees. This assumption that the smaller the body the better is so deeply woven into the fabric of our society that to question it seems tantamount to blasphemy. We can question colonialism, racism, gender bias, heteronormativity, and homophobia but something about digging into this deeply held belief seems to set people on edge. But if this idea makes you uncomfortable, I would ask that you sit with it for a moment and examine what it is about the idea that people shouldn’t be expected to hate themselves based on their size that seems offensive. What if you could take all the energy you’ve been spending on hating the flesh around your beautiful bones, and put it into your artwork? Or being there for someone who needs you? Or productively acting against the ways capitalism creates unfulfillable cycles of self hatred that you spend money on to try to fix the unfixable and the unbroken? Maybe a better use for your precious and finite time for 2020 would be to let go of that which does not serve you, to bring out into the light what would be easier to let stay hidden, and come together to realise that in our collective vulnerability is where we are the strongest, together.

“Insecurity Portraits” be installed at 528.0 Regional Juried Printmaking Exhibition 2020 in the Arvada Centre in Arvada, Colorado. January 16 through February 29." Insecurity Collective is the piece on display at the 528.0 Exhibition, it is the large sculpture piece made of paper and screenprinted words.

Alaniz on Instagram