Abstract
Jeannine Gailey’s book The Hyper(in)Visible Fat Woman makes several distinct and useful contributions to a wide range of literatures, including sociology, fat studies, and feminism. Though there is even more to be donewith the data that Gailey has, her initial foray into its richness and depth is welcome for its deployment of an “ocular ethic” to turn scholarly attention to the lives of very fat women. Gailey argues that “magnifying” the “marginalized bodies” of fat women allows us to see that which has been hidden,and that magnifying their experiences through close attention will help us develop an understanding of these women’s lives.
The book’s primary contribution is to point out the multiple sites of paradox in the lives of fat women and, in pointing them out, to coin the term “hyper(in)visibility.” Gailey persuasively demonstrates the multiple ways that women are both (hyper) visible—their bodies are closely regarded, objects of shame and humiliation—and (hyper) invisible—their lived experiences are not tended to because of assumptions made about them, their bodies are not accommodated for in most public spaces, and they are ignored and spoken about as if they were, indeed, invisible. Shewrites, “To be hyper(in)visible means that a person is sometimes paid exceptional attention and is sometimes exceptionally overlooked, and it can happen simultaneously” (p. 7). Her interviews with fat women show that they experience these types of (in)visibility in their daily life, and that (in)visibility plays a role in shaping their lived experience. Indeed, Gailey shows that this paradoxical embodiment of invisibility and hyper-visibility gives rise to a unique set of challenges for women of size, as well as a unique set ofpotentially subversive and resistant actions.
One of the strengths of this book is the utter respect with which Gailey treats her subjects and the extent to which she gets out of the way of their voices. Utilizing long quotes from her extensive open-ended interviews, Gailey allows the reader to hear/read the subjects’ words and experiences in a nicely unmediated way. Of course, Gailey has done the scholarly work of coding and analyzing—but the interview subjects’ words feel less like “data” and more like conversation. In her introduction, Gailey writes, “the women’s voices guide us through the daily trials and tribulations they encounter being fat” (p. 27), and it is to her credit that she allows them to do exactly that. The result is that readers are given a respectfully rendered intimate portrait of what it feels like to be very fat in America through five substantive chapters exploring various moments of embodiment and relationship. In those chapters, Gailey reveals how her subjects are encouraged to “fight” their fat bodies and advised on how to “fix” their fat bodies; she shows how they do and do not articulate and experience loving relationships with selfand others, through fitness and health, through sexual intimacy, and through community-building.
Gailey’s subjects recount extremely painful stories of being bullied, marginalized, ignored, and dismissed in a distressingly wide range of social environments. Her prose reminds readers to check our own assumptions; she writes, “we as a society believe that we know a fat person’s habits just from looking at the person” (p. 60), while giving us the voices of women who might want to challenge just what it is we “know” about them. Gailey also, though, highlights stories of acceptance and love—found sometimes in seemingly unlikely places—and potentially powerful moments of activism and action. In this way, the book challenges other stereotypical assumptions about fat women—that they are lazy, unlovable, and isolated.
Chapters Four and Five in particular stand out for their strength, even as they are also the chapters I most want Gailey to expand upon in future work. Chapter Four, “Fit and Fat,” engages the neoliberal discourse of “health” (and how health is conflated with thinness) to discuss the medicalization of obesity and fatness, the assumptions made about fat women’s culpability for their size, and the risks (often wrongly) associated with being fat. Gailey’s review of the literature and use of her informants’ words clearly show that being fat is treated, by medical professionals and regular people, like being “ill”: she tells of a blogger who writes that she “has been prescribed weight loss for a broken toe, a separated shoulder, and strep throat” (p. 86). Under neoliberalism, illnesses that are constructed as avoidable (like fatness) are understood to constitute moral bankruptcy.
Gailey argues that fat people are hypervisible in large part because their deviance—their seeming refusal to “be” healthy—renders them open to increased surveillance by the state, by health care professionals, and by the general public. She is clear: the abject fat body is a site of deviance that challenges both patriarchy and heteronormativity. It also is a site of neoliberal governance. The book begins to open a window onto the multiple ways that patriarchy, heteronormativity, and neoliberalism intersect.
Chapter Five, “Ample Sex,” is a spectacular chapter. In it, the women that Gailey interviews talk about their sexual experiences, their dating histories, and their own attitudes toward and about their desirability. The chapter is strong for many reasons: it disabuses readers of their potential biases (fat women don’t have, or enjoy, sex, do they?) and challenges us to envision sexualities that don’t sync with popular culture imaginings. It also exposes reprehensible and repulsive actions and juxtaposes them with true care and commitment. The chapter is strong, as well, simply because it is rare for interview subjects to be so vulnerable—over the phone, no less—with an interviewer. Their vulnerability and honesty is a tribute to the women’s bravery, certainly. It is also a tribute to the strength of the methodologies used by Gailey in her interviews.
In fact, the methodological appendix is perhaps the most fascinating and important part of the book, and Gailey could have made much more of it. Aside from her primary (intended) contributions to the literatures on embodiment, Gailey does some really nice auto-ethnographic work in this text, work that I would like to see her expand upon in self-contained and stand-alone pieces. Her early discussions of her own weight, how enmeshed she is (as a woman in the United States) in body normativity, how she found and approached her research subjects, and her assumptions about how her interview subjects might respond to her own body, give the reader wonderful examples of vulnerability and directness in the research project and will be interesting for graduate student readers in particular.
Gailey’s work is well grounded in a distinct set of literatures, and she makes particularly good use of Goffman and Butler. I wished many times in the introductory section of the text and in the concluding portions of each chapter for more of Gailey’s voice—for an appropriation, perhaps, or rearticulation of the theories that she is engaging. The book is doing more work than her prose imagines or allows. Gailey is not only applying theory and extending an ocular ethic—she is making important interventions into theories of embodiment, performance, and gender. Frankly, I wouldn’t mind a bit less humility in the telling of that scholarly story!