Queering Fat Embodiment (Queer Interventions)

Cultural anxieties about fatness and the attendant stigmatisation of fat bodies, have lent a medical authority and cultural legitimacy to what can be described as ‘fat-phobia’. Against the backdrop of the ever-growing medicalisation, pathologisation, and commodification of fatness, coupled with the moral panic over an alleged ‘obesity epidemic’, this volume brings together the latest scholarship from various critical disciplines to challenge existing ideas of fat and fat embodiment. Shedding light on the ways in which fat embodiment is lived, experienced, regulated and (re)produced across a range of cultural sites and contexts, Queering Fat Embodiment destabilises established ideas about fat bodies, making explicit the intersectionality of fat identities and thereby countering the assertion that fat studies has in recent years reproduced a white, ableist, heteronormative subjectivity in its analyses. A critical queer examination on fatness, Queering Fat Embodiment will be of interest to scholars of cultural and queer theory, sociology and media studies, working on questions of embodiment, stigmatisation and gender and sexuality. List of Figures vii About the Editors ix Notes on Contributors xi Acknowledgements xv 1 Introduction: Why Queering Fat Embodiment? 1 Jackie Wykes 2 Queering Body Size and Shape: Performativity, the Closet, Shame and Orientation 13 Robyn Longhurst 3 Becoming Travolta 27 Kimberly Dark 4 The Performance of Fat: The Spectre Outside the House of Desire 31 Stefanie A. Jones 5 On Fatness and Fluidity: A Meditation 49 Kathleen LeBesco 6 Chubby Boys with Strap-Ons: Queering Fat Transmasculine Embodiment 61 James Burford and Sam Orchard 7 Causing a Commotion: Queering Fat in Cyberspace 75 Cat Pausé 8 Flaunting Fat: Sex with the Lights On 89 Jenny Lee 9 Queering the Linkages and Divergences: The Relationship between Fatness and Disability and the Hope for a Livable World 97 Zoë Meleo-Erwin 10 Bear Arts Naked: Queer Activism and the Fat Male Body 115 Scott Beattie 11 Fashion’s ‘Forgotten Woman’: How Fat Bodies Queer Fashion and Consumption 131 Margitte Kristjansson Index 147 Cover 1 Title 4 Copyright 5 Contents 6 List of Figures 8 About the Editors 10 Notes on Contributors 12 Acknowledgements 16 1 Introduction: Why Queering Fat Embodiment? 18 2 Queering Body Size and Shape: Performativity, the Closet, Shame and Orientation 30 3 Becoming Travolta 44 4 The Performance of Fat: The Spectre Outside the House of Desire 48 5 On Fatness and Fluidity: A Meditation 66 6 Chubby Boys with Strap-Ons: Queering Fat Transmasculine Embodiment 78 7 Causing a Commotion: Queering Fat in Cyberspace 92 8 Flaunting Fat: Sex with the Lights On 106 9 Queering the Linkages and Divergences: The Relationship between Fatness and Disability and the Hope for a Livable World 114 10 Bear Arts Naked: Queer Activism and the Fat Male Body 132 11 Fashion’s ‘Forgotten Woman’: How Fat Bodies Queer Fashion and Consumption 148 Index 164

Cultural anxieties about fatness and the attendant stigmatisation of fat bodies, have lent a medical authority and cultural legitimacy to what can be described as