Maeve: Hi, I’m Maeve Marsden, and you’re listening to Queerstories. This week, Krissy Kneen is the author of the bestselling memoir Affection; the novels Steeplechase, Triptych, The Adventures of Holly White and the Incredible Sex Machine; and the Thomas Shapcott Award–winning poetry collection Eating My Grandmother. Her novel An Uncertain Grace was shortlisted for the Stella Prize, the Norma K Hemming Award, the – look. Her bio is a litany of awards she’s been nominated for, shortlisted for and won. She’s an incredibly accomplished writer. She’s the current Copyright Agency Ltd Non-Fiction Fellow, she’s developing two TV series and a feature film, and when she performed this story at Sydney Writers Festival, she intercut the storytelling with an incredible burlesque strip routine to screams of applause. For weeks afterwards, people told me how much they enjoyed the performance. Sadly we didn’t film it, but if you live in Brisbane you might catch Krissy performing locally as her love of burlesque grows. Enjoy.
Krissy: The shop assistant is a busty blonde with perfect skin. She looks too small to work in a plus sized shop but it reminds me that even a size 14 women are often sidelined by mainstream fashion. When she sees me looking at lingerie she asks if I’m shopping for a special occasion.
“I’ve stupidly joined a Burlesque class,” I snap and I realise I sound quite defensive.
Undeterred, the woman brightens.
“I went to a burlesque show last weekend! I gasped when the first dancer came on and my girlfriend said, that’s nothing! And it just got better and better.“
I take a deep breath. This all feels so hard. It seems that burlesque involves me doing the things I hate, trying on underwear, wearing high heels, thinking about how I look.
The last time I was game to try on underwear in a shop I was still small enough to fit into a size 18. Back then my breasts still looked full and firm. My waist still dipped inwards, flaring out again at the hips. These days my torso is a spill of flesh with very little to differentiate the top from the middle and the bottom. A menopausal silhouette.
I quickly struggle into the first of the bras. I pull the matching undies up over my knee-length bloomers. Ridiculous. I stare in horror at the hot mess in the mirror.
“Can I just…?” And she’s there at my back, adjusting the straps before I can shout, No! Don’t!
She looks at the cups, frowns and hurries off to find a different size. She’s seen me. She’s seen my sweat and my rash and the messy sticky mark from yesterday’s HRT patch. When she returns I find myself apologising for my body. Sorry for the sweat, sorry for the HRT, sorry for existing in this flesh which is so obviously disgusting. “Well,” she tells me, that’s all part of burlesque isn’t it. Bodies come in all types.” It’s true. There are people who would tell me to cover up these tits, these rolls of fat, this expanse of belly, this cellulite.
But there are other bodies that wave a red flag for the trolls far more acutely than my own. Black bodies, disabled bodies, bodies that don’t conform to cis gender roles. I have it relatively easy in my body, despite the fact that it coaxes threatening creaks from chairs when they are large enough for me to sit in them.
I was once at a friends house for dinner and they had the most delicate lovely handmade furniture. I hovered by the lounge chair, finally admitting that I was a bit scared to sit in it in case I broke it. They assured me that the furniture maker said the couch was solid. It just looked fragile, a beautiful illusion. I sat down. The chair creaked, and then something popped and I thudded down onto the floor.
My body is not the biggest provocation in the world, but it is still problematic. Sometimes I can’t fit into chairs in restaurants. Sometimes I can’t fit into toilet cubicles. My body defies airline seat belts and university tray tables and, yes, regular sized clothes. I handed the woman the bra I would buy. A bra to dance in. My god. What am I doing to myself?
The harness arrives in an unmarked package. It is a complicated bundle of straps and gold buckles, shoulder straps, neck halter, under-breast wires. I spend ten minutes trying to figure out what goes where and when the thing is too tight, loosening a dozen straps to their widest setting. Eventually I snap it closed and it nestles around my push-up bra, spider-like, beautiful but slightly dangerous looking.
Thus the transformation begins. The knickers are next, high waisted but with a flirty split affording the viewer a glimpse of the top of my arse.
I stand in front of the mirror and I’m surprised to find myself staring back. Not the Krissy who sinks into despair every evening. Not the Krissy who struggles to get up in the morning, not the slumped gnomic figure hunched over her laptop in the day, but the huntress of my youth, proud, confident, busty, self-possessed and very, very sexy.
She startles me. I turn to my side and sure, there is the huge swell of my belly, the thunderous thighs, but I’m more like Angela Carter’s magnificent winged woman, Fevvers than Dune’s Harkonen or Star War’s Jabba the Hut.
My eyes narrow. I am suspicious. Surely it is not as simple as finding the right clothes. Wearing a plus-sized corset is not going to help me fit into a particularly tight toilet cubicle or prevent me from breaking a fragile chair, and of course finding a plus-sized corset that is affordable for my size is another barrier to negotiate, but at the end of the day finding myself again is at least a start, a tentative sweet start and I just hope that on the night of the performance I will be able to look in the mirror and find myself again.
Fancy Feast, Bubble Bordeaux, The Yorkshire Puddings, Rebel Cupcakes.
The fat burlesque dancers shimmy and shake and when they shimmy there’s a weight to it, the sequins fly, breasts bounce and rotate like glowing yo-yos. Pasties are huge as side-plates, tassels sway like little hula-skirts for barbie dolls. When the fat burlesque women strut their stuff there is flesh, there is sweat, there are juices. When she shakes her booty you know there is a booty there to shake. Her breasts are thunder, her g-string is lightning, her thighs are the seat of the world, her arms shudder and her back is a body roll when she walks.
When I dance I will mushroom up from the ferment. I will be damp, dewy, full of knowing, I will swell along with the applause, I will puff up with whistles. I can feel it in my bones. I can feel it shimmy in my copious flesh.
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