12/01/01

Last summer on the Women Writers listserv, a lively discussion erupted about the politics of fat. True to our literary inclinations, we talked about the problem of language, how words such as "obese" and "overweight" imply an ideal cultural norm prescribed by the medical field. Some of us revealed our own personal experiences of shame and humiliation inculcated by ignorant doctors and well-meaning but misinformed family members and friends. We tried out fat pride to see how it fit and shared resources for getting more involved in the fat acceptance movement. In an effort to bring the discussion around to women writers, I asked for recommendations of books in which the protagonist is a confident, content, and well-adjusted fat woman. The responses were few. Basically, we were stumped.

Fortunately, a recent collection of scholarly essays, Bodies Out of Bounds: Fatness and Transgression, addresses the questions central to the listserv’s discussion, and any feminist discussion of the politics of the female body. In their introduction, editors Jana Evans Braziel and Kathleen LeBesco write, "Resisting the dominant discursive constructions of corpulence, the essays in this collection analyze the politics and power of corpulence and answer a variety of research questions related to the social representations of fatness: How do media representations of fat people erase and asexualize them? How do weight, body size, food consumption, and eating disorders constitute the normative discourses of fatness? How are these discourses deployed in order to contain the fat body?" Braziel and LeBesco have made an important intervention in a nascent field—fat studies—by providing an interdisciplinary range of academic voices. The collection is divided into various conceptual sections: Revaluing Corpulence, Redefining Fat Subjectivities; Representational Matrices of Power: Nationality, Gender, Sexuality, and Fatness; Fat Perversities? Reconstructing Corpulent Sexualities; Deconstructing the Carnivalesque, Grotesque, and Other Configurations of Corpulence; Bodies in Motion: Corpulence and Performativity. Within those sections, we encounter essays grounded in re-narrativizing fat history, analyzing the sexual politics of fat, examining the discursive strategies of performance, and reading films, exercise videos, and, yes, literature.

In the one essay devoted to literature by women, "Devouring Women: Corporeality and Autonomy in Fiction by Women Since the 1960s," Sarah Shieff uses Mary Russo’s The Female Grotesque: Risk, Excess, and Modernity (a favorite among the collection’s contributors) to read novels by Margaret Atwood, Fay Weldon, Jeannette Winterson, Claude Tardat, and Jenefer Shute. Shieff finds a connection between eating and writing, as well as a pattern of domineering mothers, in what turns out to be a predominance of first novels by these authors. However, none of the books under Shieff’s scrutiny here provide a satisfactory transgression of oppressive fat discourses. Shieff concludes, "While their methods of resistance differ, many of [the female protagonists] have in common an insatiable, unruly hunger. Although this hunger has multiple causes, it produces a common effect: grotesque bodies, which are a sign of at least subconscious resistance to the normal. But normalcy exerts its inevitable pressure, making these bodies obscene to their very owners. The resultant self-loathing perpetuates a vicious cycle." Shieff’s essay suggests that there is an unconscionable gap in literature by women—writers: heed the call! We are hungry for fiction featuring large women to be admired. (I can think of at least one fictional male character of size and note: the detective Nero Wolfe whose corpulence keeps him from leaving his New York brownstone with any frequency, but whose wit, intelligence, and unparalleled acuity attract his clients.)

It is in the other essays that we better understand why positive, literary representations of fat women are so scarce. Le’a Kent’s wonderfully written essay, "Fighting Abjection: Representing Fat Women," opens, "Fat is Beautiful. Or, as the name of one fat girl’s publication puts it, I Am So Fucking Beautiful. What are the effects when fat women begin to say such things? More important, how do they manage to say such things?" As many of the other essays do, Kent refers to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s description of a "fat abhorring world of images." In a culture that hates fat so vehemently, Kent argues that to create "images valuing the fat female body […] requires radical confrontation with the representational status quo." Kent examines how two publications, FaT GiRL: The Zine for Fat Dykes and the Women Who Want Them and the book Women En Large: Images of Fat Nudes, measure up to those radical requirements. Her analysis carefully delineates between representations that merely avoid "subjecting the fat body to abjection" and images that "destabilize the process of abjection through recipes for counterabjection." The latter strategy ultimately reverses the dynamic that reduces fat people to symptoms of their psychological abnormalcy, or lack of self-control, by targeting the cultural symbols of fat shame themselves with abjection. For example, FaT GiRL’s "Fat Girl Revenge Cocktail" offers a recipe with a vomiting agent and instructions to approach "desired target (diet centers are good places), swallow the Ipecac" and "heave."

While Shieff’s and Kent’s essays come the closest to addressing womenwriters.net’s literary focus, the other essays offer sumptuous fare as well, from Richard Klein’s history of fat aesthetics ("Fat Beauty") to Sharon Mazer’s close reading of Katy Dierlam’s (a.k.a. Helen Melon) performance as the "Fat Lady" at Coney Island. Jon Waters’s films and the diva Divine surface again and again as cultural heroes of fat studies, most notably in the conversation between Michael Moon and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick reprinted here from the journal Discourse as "Divinity: A Dossier, a Performance Piece, a Little-Understood Emotion."

My only nit-picky complaint is that given their frequently similar theoretical foundations, many of the essays repeat the same critical frameworks, relying frequently on the work of Russo, Sedgwick, Susan Bordo, Elizabeth Grosz (Volatile Bodies), Judith Butler, and Michel Foucault, however crucial these theorists are to our strategies of resistance to the power of cultural discourses. However, this is a minor problem, most likely reflecting the—until now—limited range of critical material in this field, and therefore the way in which Bodies Out of Bounds accomplishes much needed extensions of work in queer theory, feminist theory, and body theory. This collection is a must-read for anyone who claims affinity with those theories. As Petra Kuppers asks in "Fatties on Stage: Feminist Performances," "So how can we as women of size present ourselves, perform our specific and subjective identity in a world in which our bodies are read against our will?"

A disclaimer: One of the editors, Kathleen LeBesco, is a dear friend of mine, so of course my review has been distilled through a perspective of personal and professional affection.