“We’re all a fat black girl”

I can fully get on board with this quote from Gabourey Sidibe, the until-recently unknown actress who plays, and thus embodies, the titular Precious. In America’s schizoid socio-cultural makeup, no site is more contentious in our bubbling culture wars than the woman’s body. Pop culture is essentially a puritanical fuckfest (see Miley Cyrus and virginity) that episodically promotes self-disdain by dressing up cruel impossibilities as beauty standards. Meanwhile, society continues to function in complicity with the steep shadow of systemic, widespread racism (see hiring demographics). To put it crudely: teenage girls are directed to the poles of naïve purity and sexual potency, black women are rendered largely invisible, and women of size are openly pathologized.

So what does it mean to occupy all of these places, as our heroine (Precious/Gabourey), and her doppelgänger (Gabourey/Precious) do? It is too simple, and mildly dehumanizing, to make either of these young women into basic metaphors - placeholders for societal ills, or anti-establishment provocations. But I, who would rather weep for Precious than deconstruct the shallow depth of field she is surrounded by, freely admit that it will be impossible to separate either Precious or Gabourey from the socio-cultural injustices they are products of, and therefore embody. Perhaps it is a matter of allowing these dualities to cross-pollinate, to create a dialectic, even. Gabourey Sidibe is a soulful actress, an intriguing interviewee, and a charismatic celebrity. She is also a cannon aimed at several glass ceilings, a cog in the pasty petite Hollywood machine that, by its wholesale erasure of true diversity, has made her visibility so remarkable, and so fraught.

Actress Gabourey Sidibe at t the Governor's Awards November 14, 2009 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images North America); Mo'Nique accepting the Oscar for Best Actress in a Supporting Role, 2010.

It is true that in our visual culture the effect of one-of-these-things-is-not-like-the-others speaks volumes, and not just through some superficial identification (ie: that boy looks like me, therefore he is me). Rather, the downtrodden and invisible (the true masses, lets remember!), are so adept at mining for subject positions in cinema, that feeling for Precious will be natural to many: she’s one of us!

This identification, for me, is with her story and her physiognomy, that likeness which Sidibe claimed first and carries with her beyond the frame of the film. Thus, Sidibe’s success, her integrity, her glamour are, for the time-being, shrouded with an aura of victory and celebration. The master narrative of American culture has typecast the role of the young black woman as antithetical to success, self-love and beauty. Gabourey Sidibe graciously accepting a statuette, sexy as hell in her haute couture, and radiating the kind of confidence that can only be borne of self-love is not just a shock to the system; it is radical magic: deeply meaningful to many young women like her, and many others, including me. Through my celebration of her, I also celebrate my own against-all-odds possibilities, or, as she so succinctly puts it, “we’re all a fat black girl.”