Abstract
The focus for this Special Issue grew out of conversations begun at the Fat Studies: A Critical Dialogue conference, held at Macquarie University in 2010. This international conference was convened in order to bring Australasian Fat Studies into meaningful conversation with critical fat scholars from around the world. The conference was committed to expanding Fat Studies beyond the walls of the Academy, and as such, writers, artists, activists, health professionals, and filmmakers gathered with scholars from a broad cross-section of disciplinary backgrounds to critically discuss the possibilities Fat Studies offers for rethinking dominant ideas about fat bodies as they are constructed in relation to health and pathology, gender and bodily aesthetics, intersectional identities, and beyond. The conversations initiated at the conference were continued online, enabling those unable to attend the event to be brought into conversation with others working in Fat Studies and fat activism. The articles collected herein are evidence of the generative potential of these conversations, in their interdisciplinarity, their critical rigour, and their diversity.
Opening this special issue, Lesleigh Owen’s article looks at a crucial aspect of fat being, often elided in dominant debates about fatness and medicalised accounts of ‘obesity’: the lived experience(s) of fatness, and the daily negotiations of spatialities that (re)produce the fat body as one that cannot (and disciplined as a body that should not) ‘fit’. Similarly, in moving beyond the cultural and medicalised meanings we have come to attach to fat flesh, Meredith Nash turns her attention to the lived experience of women in early pregnancy (‘in-betweenness’), and their responses to weight they gain during this time. Nash critically foregrounds the complexities attendant on this gendered fear of ‘fat’, and its associated bodily markers, in early pregnancy.
Where mothers are always already publicly and privately scrutinised through a cultural lens of hyper-morality around childrearing, Elisabeth Harrison investigates the panicked focus on ‘childhood obesity’ in obesity epidemic discourses. Where an ‘obese’ child has long been assumed to be the result of a particular moral failing on the part of parents (particularly mothers), Harrison highlights moves by anti-obesity campaigns and programs to directly target individual fat children. In light of this, Harrison’s analysis goes on to demonstrate the ways in which fat children’s bodies are not just understood as ‘ticking timebombs’ or representative of poor health and moral failure, but also as economic ‘problems’ in our Western neoliberal capitalist context.
The Western commitment to rational individualism is often emblematised by a particular understanding of bodily mastery, demonstrated by the moral imperative of an unceasing maintenance that (re)produces an embodiment that appears to uphold gendered bodily aesthetics. In light of this, Brenda R. Weber critically engages with the intense public interest in, and scrutiny of, US pop singer Britney Spears in recent years, and the equation of slender female embodiment with ‘good’ physical and mental health. In the context of Spears’ closely documented breakdowns, Weber suggests that a politics of rational individualism always already reads bodies that exceed the narrow bounds of bodily propriety as suspect and pathological.
Spears has been variously (and often simultaneously) criticised as being ‘fat’, ‘mad’, ‘white trash’, and, particularly during her public custody battles, as an unfit mother. Warin et al. explore the discourse of maternal blame, with the authors interrogating the links that have been constructed between childhood obesity and poor parental monitoring of dietary intake. This moral imperative to rear a slender (and therefore, healthy) child now extends to the management of the foetus: Warin et al. demonstrate the lived implications of scientific studies that target mothers as responsible for the (re)production of childhood obesity because of poor personal dietary management during pregnancy, which, such studies argue, effects an ‘overnutrition’ of a foetus still in utero.
Continuing a discussion about monitoring and dietary surveillance, Meghan Griffin examines electronic food journaling technologies, which function in service of the medicalisation of fatness and, as Griffith argues, as part of a ‘feedback loop’ between the mind, body and technology. However, Griffin posits that food journaling serves as a mode of externalising/visualising one’s internal physiology that may also present a means of conceptual ‘rupture’ to theories of extended embodiment and feminist psychology that rely on a distinction between body image and body schema.
The final article in this collection also points to the possibility of a kind of ‘rupturing’, in and through a critical engagement with the productive potential of disrupting ‘normal’ in critical fat scholarship. Zoë Meleo-Erwin argues that Fat Studies, as an emergent field of scholarship, needs to pay attention to its engagement with, and mobilisation of, ‘normal’ as a category, given its conceptual instability and exclusionary effects. In closing this special issue, Meleo-Erwin’s article constitutes a timely and crucial intervention into Fat Studies scholarship, calling for scholars and activists to avoid assimilationist strategies around body normativity by developing ‘a more critical politics of embodiment and more effective challenge to healthism.’
While feminism has paid considerable critical attention to embodiment, fatness has historically been discussed as part of an overarching rubric of patriarchal demands on feminine bodily aesthetics, and Western cultural expectations of slenderness in women. However, an explicit focus on fat embodiment has, until now, been somewhat limited. This special issue showcases the critical interdisciplinary potential of the fast-growing academic field of Fat Studies, founded in feminist thought, which foregrounds ethico-political examinations of fatness as a mode of embodiment, as a lived experience, as a medicalised category, and as a discursive construction. Further, the articles collected herein demonstrate the generative political and critical potential, not simply of interdisciplinary diversity, but also dialogue, in expanding the scholarly, political and embodied considerations of fatness. Given this, what emerges from the critical dialogues presented here are the ways in which valuable connections/conversations are enabled between Fat Studies and feminist psychology and, indeed, feminist theories of embodiment more generally.