Blog 6--Female Trouble

I love when words that were previously used to offend a person or group are reclaimed and their negative connotations fall away. Before reading Lebosco, I was unaware that the word fat had been reclaimed. The acceptance of overweight individuals in media has both grown and shrunk dramatically in recent years, especially since the reality tv age, but it's good to know that the word has changed as well. Divine's character in Female Trouble pushes all sorts of boundaries: cross dressing, exposing her body, practicing violence, and simply the satisfaction she feels with herself that the typical hegemonic viewer would find shocking and possibly offensive. The idea of a fat person being alright with being fat? This idea seems radical to many regular cinema goers and I'm glad that even in the 1980s audiences were pushed to think more freely.
Re-appropriating words like queer and fat takes power from the bigot and forces people to step out from their own prejudices and use real words to express their feelings. It became to tiring in high school listening to people use the words "gay" and "retarded" as negative terms. I found myself constantly sounding like that annoying Hilary Duff commerical; scolding my fellow classmates. Thankfully many young people have realized how unacceptable it really is to use those words for the purpose of degrading something, but unfortunately it has not completely disappeared. As "queer" has been changed, please let the negative use "gay" be erased as well.