We’re shifting registers. A reckoning with Rasputia, fatphobia, fetish, and fear. What happens when a joke isn’t funny, and the monster looks like you?
This one implicates. It discomforts. It doesn’t offer closure — only the mirror.
It moves through fatphobia, ridicule, pornography (non-explicit links), and sexual shame — not as spectacle, but as survival data.
Engage however honors your body. Or don’t. That’s sacred too.
I dozed off on the couch last weekend and was startled awake by the most horrific, terrible, fear-inducing, disgusting sight imaginable.
Myself.
Now, Rasputia and I have danced before. I’ve been compared to her a lot. A lot a lot. And that comparison has been… difficult. But I’m older and wiser (and bigger) now.
When Norbit was released in 2007, it wasn’t just a comedy — it was a cultural gut-punch. Eddie Murphy played three characters, but it was Rasputia — the loud, fat, domineering wife — who stole the spotlight. And not in a good way. Murphy was the frontrunner in the Best Supporting Oscar race for his work in Dreamgirls. Then Norbit hit theaters. Box office was good. Reviews were brutal, and many blamed the film — and especially the Rasputia role — for torpedoing his chances at his first Oscar. The industry laughed, but the damage was done. One headline read: “Will Norbit cost Eddie Murphy his Oscar?” Spoiler: it did.
Murphy also played Mr. Wong, a grotesque caricature of an elderly Asian man — in full yellowface. It was so racist, even 2007 critics winced, invoking Mickey Rooney’s Mr. Yunioshi in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. But it was Rasputia’s body — not Mr. Wong’s caricature — that bore the brunt of public revulsion.
And let’s be clear: Murphy didn’t conjure her alone. Rasputia was constructed through prosthetics, padding, and the use of a body double: a fat Black woman named Lauren Miller. Miller’s name appears in the credits, but not in memory. Her body anchored a punchline. The audience was never meant to know her. They just needed to believe Rasputia was real enough to recoil from.
Miller’s name appears in the credits, but not in memory. Her body anchored a punchline.
There’s something particularly cruel about realizing you’ve been cast in a horror film you didn’t audition for. Rasputia is supposed to be funny. Over the top. An exaggeration. But when I saw her — saw myself in her — I didn’t laugh. I flinched.
That’s the power of a cultural hex. You don’t need to believe in it for it to work. Rasputia wasn’t designed to satirize fatness. She was built to make it monstrous. To make fat Black femmes grotesque, laughable, pathetic, dangerous, and sexually delusional. She is Eddie Murphy in drag, in a fat suit, prosthetics — a thin, cis Black man becoming the punchline to the very idea that someone like her could exist, want, command, or be desired. And let’s not forget, there’s a much larger cultural and historical discourse about famous Black male comedians dressing up as unflattering caricatures of Black women — often fat, older, brash, or broken — which we’re supposed to receive as loving homage. The laugh lands harder when it’s layered with misogynoir and anti-trans sentiments.
But here’s the thing: she exists. We do. And somewhere in the back of your cousin’s VHS drawer or your co-worker’s private browser history, somebody wanted her.
Rasputia may be mocked in public, but she is quietly fetishized in private. Image boards, reddit threads, old Tumblr blogs, #hashtags, the Sims, weird corners of fanfiction, porn. Especially porn. Her likeness — or bodies like hers — circulate not (only) as satire, but as sex in those places. Ask me how I know. (Actually, don’t. Some doors don’t need opening.)
Rasputia may be mocked in public, but she is quietly fetishized in private.
It’s not that the people consuming Rasputia content don’t know it’s Eddie Murphy; it’s that they are pretending not to. Erasing the man-in-a-fat-suit and letting the fantasy of the body stand in. Letting her be consumable, fuckable, taboo — so long as she stays contextless, dehumanized, detached from the real.
There is a long Western tradition of this. The grotesque as erotic or at least as spectacle, so long as it stays in the dark. Think of “trans” porn — one of the most searched terms in the U.S., even as trans people are demonized by the same culture. We needn’t get into the whole “who’s actually watching that porn?” convo, do we? Or the fact that BBW porn remains wildly popular, even as fat women are treated like public nuisances and private secrets.
Think of the legacy of the “Mammy” — desexualized in theory, but deeply entangled in fantasies of servitude, submission, and control.
Think of the tabloid bodies that go viral in ridicule but find after-hours life in fetish sites and search engines. This is not contradiction. It is design.
What does it mean to live in a body that is a joke in public and a fetish in private?
To be laughed at, then lusted after — but rarely loved in the light?
Rasputia is more than a grotesque caricature. She’s an archetype. A descendant in the lineage of fat Black femme monstering. The Sapphire and her cultural daughter, the angry Black woman. The Mammy. A sprinkling of Jezebel in her “delulu” self-perception. The “strong Black woman” who wants too much. She’s Madea without the gun. Ursula without the magic. Precious without the pity.
In another era, she’d be a figure in a Bosch painting — chaotic, carnal, swollen with symbolism. A contemporary grotesque. Mikhail Bakhtin called it the grotesque body — exaggerated, unruly, porous, always in motion. The grotesque body resists containment. It is too much, too fluid, too unfinished. Rasputia isn’t just laughed at because she’s big. She’s laughed at because she leaks out of the frame. She embarrasses the clean lines of the screen.
And what contains her? Norbit. Or more precisely, Eddie Murphy — in every role, every prosthetic, every exaggeration. (And no, there’s no cultural montage, collection, or archive — in video or text — of all his prosthetic-heavy roles, even though a good 60% of his films involve him playing multiple characters, often with racial/ethnic, fatphobic, or gendered exaggeration. Somebody get on that.) The film is a carnival: a temporary inversion of social norms, where men wear fat suits and yellowface, where women dominate, where chaos rules — until, of course, order is restored. The carnivalesque invites disorder, but only to reinforce what’s proper. Rasputia gets to reign, but only long enough to be punished.
She is a force — loud, angry, commanding — and that force is met with disgust precisely because it refuses to be small.
She is a threat. Not because she’s cruel — plenty of thin villains are lionized for far worse — but because she’s unrepentant. She doesn’t apologize for her body, her voice, her sexual appetite, or her abusive rage. She storms into every room like she owns it (I mean, her family does basically own that town, so…). She punishes the man who is unfaithful, but cheats herself. She commands the household. She demands pleasure. She asserts her beauty constantly. She is wrong, and the whole movie is built around the assumption that we agree.
But what if she’s not wrong?
What if Rasputia — in all her brashness and bigness — was never the monster, but the mirror? A reflection of our complicity.
And then, of course, there’s Kate. Played by Thandiwe Newton — thin, light-skinned, soft-spoken — she exists in the film not just as the “nice girl,” but as the reward for Norbit’s suffering. Her beauty is effortless, her body manageable, her presence non-threatening. Rasputia even body shames Kate for being skinny. This isn’t just a good wife/bad wife binary. It’s colorism, texturized. It’s desirability mapped onto skin tone and size. One is built for mockery. The other for redemption. And the audience is meant to cheer when Norbit escapes the dark, fat woman and is rewarded with thinness white-proximity the light.
I am not here to redeem Rasputia. I don’t need to.
She already won. She strutted. She fucked. She screamed. Spoiler: She ends the movie as an adored sex symbol. She was hated not because she failed at being a woman, but because she refused to be the kind of woman the culture could handle. She is not delicate. She is not deferential. She is not designed to soothe.
And yes, she was created by a man — by Eddie Murphy, whose talent could’ve done anything and chose this. By a team of writers (specifically Eddie and his brother Charlie) and producers and costumers who built her body (again, based on a real person who is also in the film) to be laughable. By a studio that knew exactly what it was doing. But she also slipped through their fingers.
She became something else. Not a symbol of pity or morality, but a glimpse of unruly possibility— of what it might look like to live without shame. Of what it might sound like to shout your name in every room, without waiting for permission. Of what it might mean to say yes to your desire, even when the world says no.
She haunts me. Because I know her. Because I saw her before I saw myself. Because I carry pieces of her in my walk, in my hunger, in my fury. And because no one taught me how to love her.
Sometimes I think about the girls who laughed at Rasputia. The boys who muttered “gross” under their breaths. The mothers who said, “Don’t ever let yourself go like that.” The pastors who joked about gluttony. The non-partners who insisted they “just aren’t into big girls” before sending that “U up?” text. The friends who said, “At least you’re not like that.” The me, 100 lbs ago, who thought, “There but for the grace of God, go I.”
And I think: we were all watching the same movie. But some of us saw a monster. And some of us saw a map.
A map of how we’d be treated. A map of what we could never become. A map of what we already were.
I still flinch when I see Rasputia. That hasn’t changed. But the flinch isn’t because I’m ashamed of her. It’s because I remember being ashamed of me. Because I know what it is to be a walking punchline. Because I know what it’s like to be both too much and not enough — to be everything they fear and still nothing they want.
But I also know this: I am not a joke. And neither was she.
We may never be redeemed in the culture. But we were never broken.
We may never be redeemed in the culture. But we were never broken.
So I’m not asking for Rasputia’s redemption. I’m asking for her inclusion in the archive. Her place in the unruly, unpolished, unforgettable lineage of women who scared the world and survived it anyway.
I want every fat girl who screamed and strutted and scared the shit out of people to take her place in the lineage.
I want us loud. I want us loved. I want us fucking in the light.
By the way: if you Google images of Rasputia, about a third of them are not actually Rasputia. They’re pictures of regular degular women — just living their fat, Black lives. Or Halloween costumes. Often worn by men. Sometimes white men. Le sigh.
Under This Moon
New Moon in Gemini — May 26, 2025
Candle: Pale yellow or soft silver
Support Item: A sprig of mint or a bowl of cool water
Tarot Pull: The Magician reminds us: your words are spells. Your focus is a tool of manifestation.
The New Moon in Gemini arrives with questions on its breath and clarity coiled just beneath the surface. A trine between Mercury and Pluto deepens the moment, making this an opening for communication, truth-telling, and rewriting old narratives. Set intentions with flexibility. Let curiosity be your compass.
Spell / Reflection
I welcome the unfinished. I bless the tangled questions. I plant a thought and let it bloom in its own time.
Sit outside (if you can). Speak a question aloud. Then stay silent for one full minute. Notice what arises.
Dispatches from the Stars
Saturn enters Aries — May 24, 2025
There’s a lot of talk about Saturn moving into Aries: karmic retribution, long-overdue reckonings, and the return of the taskmaster, etc.
But I want to offer two small reframes:
First, karma here might look less like punishment, and more like balance. Saturn offers the structure we need to meet and begin to repair what’s been broken. New foundations to rebuild from the flood, and structures to withstand the coming fires.
Second — and this won’t land for everyone — imagine Saturn as the archetypal Dom, and Aries (with a jolt from unruly, chaotic, mischievous, disruptive Uranus) as full Brat (not brat) energy. Some of us know exactly what kind of magic ignites when those two connect. But it only works when both are willing to slow down, find their rhythm, and trust the structure being built.
What happens when discipline meets defiance — and neither flinches?
What about when the natural consequences come knocking? When the chickens come home to roost?
What’s the line between punishment and funishment punishment?
Further Reflection
Who taught you to be afraid of your bigness? And what might you do with that fear now?
And if you're still feeling it — or want to keep unfolding these questions — come find me over at The Body Trust Podcast. Our latest episode is technically about Overeaters Anonymous — but really, it’s about cults! control, shame, desire, and the long work of coming home to your body.
I reeeeeally hope you consider writing a book some day.
Powerful. Lots to think about. 🙏