Echoing flesh: The ‘voluminous body’ in heterosexual hard core

Introduction: Body/horror

In Pornified: How Pornography is Damaging Our Lives, Our Relationships, and Our Families, the journalist Pamela Paul sets out to frame adult entertainment (particularly in the form of internet pornographies) as a problem for contemporary America. Drawing upon interviews with a range of participants, including male porn consumers, she paints a picture of a virtual landscape littered with horrors; an interviewee called Thomas reports encountering ‘Bestiality, child porn, rape. Men shitting in women’s mouths. Things that approach snuff porn’ (Paul, 2005: 88). Even within the depraved (and presumably criminal) realm that Thomas describes here, a single offensive image stands out:

Once, Thomas saw an image – ‘a horrific picture’ – that seared itself into his brain. It showed an extremely obese woman wearing a bikini with a caption that said, ‘Find a fold and fuck it.’ ‘I think I started losing hair that day,’ Thomas says. He has no idea who looks for this kind of thing, but notes, ‘They say the scary people look just like everyone else, so it could be anyone. As The Shadow says, “Who knows what evil lurks in the heart of men?”’ (Paul, 2005: 88)

This example from Pornified provides a useful trigger for exploring what it is about the overt sexualization of fat female bodies that leads them to be perceived as so thoroughly abject. We might attribute something of the meme’s affective power (and Thomas’s horrified response before it) to the phrase with which it is captioned – the indexical signs that provide anchorage for the soft-core image and court a specific kind of visceral response. The caption – ‘Find a fold and fuck it’ – points to the instability of fat female flesh, ² referencing its non-normative potential and its ability to displace the seemingly fixed and unambiguous markers of biological sex, the genitalia. As Francis Ray White remarks, fat forms do not ‘conform to gendered or heterosexualized expectations. Bluntly, there is no pole and no hole, or at least, not where you’d expect to find them’ (White, this issue). In the case of Thomas’s nightmare porn image, the entire surface of the fat woman’s body is rendered genital, whilst the swimsuit-covered genitalia is itself de-emphasized. That is to say, as the skin enveloping the entirety of the woman’s body is framed as a potential site of sexual penetration, the sex organs are both shifted and superseded – displaced through dispersal.

This imagining of fat flesh most obviously recalls Jean François Lyotard’s critical dissection of the ‘voluminous body’ in Libidinal Economy, in which he suggests that the ‘volume implied in thinking the skin as the ego’s boundary between the interior and the exterior… spills into the folds and twists of the great ephemeral skin’ (Grant, 1993: xxi). Lyotard asks the reader to consider the libidinal body not as a frame with depth, but as ‘a band which has no back to it, a Moebius band which interests us not because it is closed, but because it is one-sided, a Moebian skin’ (Lyotard, 1993: 2). It is in ‘the act of folding the libidinal band onto itself’ that one succeeds in producing the effect of ‘a volume and a chamber of presence/absence’ (Lyotard, 1993:10). ³ Lyotard draws upon the idea of ‘diverse polymorphism’ (1993: 22) to reimagine the body as ‘a surface without holes. There are no holes, only invaginations of surfaces… slits are not entries, wounds, gashes, openings, but the same surface following its course after a detour in the form of a pocket, front folded back almost against itself’ (1993: 21–22).

Lyotard’s vision of the body here is one of a surface without depth across which libidinal intensities play. It is a body of pockets and invaginations variously available for erotic investment – a body that shares something with Pornified’s supposedly horrific example of online pornographic imagery. Certainly, this example displays the fat body as sexual according to a model of surfaces rather than depths – as an excessive (because distributed) sexuality of bodily tissue. Despite the dispersal of potential erogenous zones suggested by the phrase ‘Find a fold and fuck it’, however, we would do well to remain attentive to the divergences between this image of the fat sexual form and that of the libidinal band. For Lyotard, the ‘Moebian-labyrinthine skin, single-sided patchwork of all the organs (inorganic and disorganized) which the libido can traverse’ (1993: 4) should not be reduced to a rendering genital of bodily surfaces. He is in fact at pains to decentre the idea that folds might count as or stand in for the sexual organs, pleading: ‘The question of ‘counting as’, don’t urge us to ask it, far less to resolve it’ (1993: 2). The erotic body may be imagined as a site of multiple cavities or pouches, but these are not to be thoughtlessly mapped onto preconceived ideas about the genitalia; that is to say, surfaces can be conceived of as invaginated without being positioned as vaginal.

This thinking of the idea of ‘Find a fold and fuck it’ alongside Lyotard’s theoretical take on diverse polymorphism leads us to another facet of debates about fat flesh as non-normative – a reading of this flesh that can be thought of as overtly queer. The notion of the fat woman’s body as being one of surfaces rather than depths sets it up as being both excessively permeable (with multiple pockets across the corporeal landscape) and as distinctly and emphatically resistant to penetration. It becomes one specific, particularly forceful and visible embodiment of Lyotard’s invaginated body. In establishing the libidinal skin as a surface of detours and not an object of holes, Libidinal Economy questions the idea that ‘there is a fissure, thus an inside if it is penetrated’ (1993: 21). For Lyotard, ‘there is no hole, no interior, no sanctuary to respect’ or disrespect (1993: 21–22). It is not simply the case that the body’s folds should not be conflated with the genitals; it is also a matter of questioning the distinction that is drawn between sexual and other parts of the body.

If the entire labyrinthine band is available to be traversed by erotic intensities, then the genitals are no longer privileged as the site of a more meaningful kind of bodily event, and ‘penis sheathed in vagina is will be was [sic] a particular case of an incessant, maniacal and totally unforeseeable assemblage of parts of the great monoface skin’ (Lyotard, 1993: 21).

This equalizing re-characterization of the erotic bodily terrain disrupts many of western culture’s (rigorously heterosexist) preconceptions about what constitutes sexual intercourse. These ideas are embodied in words such as ‘foreplay’ – defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as ‘stimulation or love-play preceding sexual intercourse’ (OED, 2014) – and in the notion of hard-core pornography, which is broadly understood to refer to pornographic images featuring sexual penetration. Such terms make obvious judgements about which kinds of corporeal activity count as sex, and which are conceived of as being outside of this sexual economy. In stripping the genitalia of their perceived primacy through a de-hierarchization of the body, Lyotard challenges heteronormative understandings of sex, declining to frame the vagina or the anus as sites of potential plunder and violation. If there are no holes, only pockets, then there are no penetrations, only envelopings. This is the key difference between Thomas’s image and Lyotard’s imagining, perhaps: in the case of the libidinal band, there are plenty of folds to be found, but they are never, in any straightforward way, merely to be fucked.

I begin my essay with this discussion because it sets up numerous issues that are crucial to any attempt to theorize fat sex. First, and most obviously, the use to which the example of ‘Find a fold and fuck it’ is put in Pamela Paul’s book raises questions about the affective power of the fat female form (and as we shall see, gender is crucial here). ⁴ As Thomas’s response – and Paul’s uncritical citation of that response – suggest, this image is charged with the ability to move contemporary subjects in an intense and visceral way. The flesh depicted is framed in such a manner as to intersect with Julia Kristeva’s notion of the abject as something that elicits a conflicted ‘start’ from the subject (1982: 2). The intensity of Thomas’s reaction – and the fact that the text has remained with him, ‘seared’ into his mind – suggests that he is both repulsed by and drawn to the image; after all, as Kriteva notes, ‘many victims of the abject are its fascinated victims’ (1982: 9). This linking of ‘pornographic’ imagery, affect, and the figure of the fat woman are central to the rest of this article and will be unpacked and explored in detail.

This introduction also serves to foreground another of my essay’s key thematic concerns: the disruptive potential of the representation of non-normative bodies within sexualized contexts. We have already touched upon the idea that larger bodies can be anxiety-inducing, binary-defying, and invested with the queer potential to disrupt genitally focused ideas of sexuality. I wish to extend this exploration of the variously invaginated fat cis female form by analyzing one prominent genre of pornography – BBW (Big Beautiful Women) – and by using a close reading of one scene in particular to foreground some of the tendencies within this group of texts more generally. Is there a unique aesthetics of BBW porn and, if so, how does this link to affect, to sexual difference, and to issues of media? In what ways might fat sex provide solutions to some of the (uniquely gendered) problems associated with heterosexual hard core’s attempts to visualize pleasure? I will seek to address these questions in relation to contemporary examples from the world of adult entertainment, and will then conclude by critically reflecting on BBW’s ability to queer hard core.

Understanding BBW pornography

As Michael Goddard points out in his essay ‘BBW: Techno-archaism, excessive corporeality and network sexuality’, there is ‘no exact definition of a BBW’, although the term is typically ‘applied to women weighing anything from 80 kilograms upwards’ (2007: 194). This pornographic subgenre is, as its name suggests, characterized by the appearance of the female bodies with which it concerns itself and that it seeks to represent. As such, the label ‘BBW’ can be seen to cross the ‘boundaries between the amateur and the professional or commercial, between ethnicities and nationalities, as well as between different media including video/DVD, magazines and phone lines’ (Goddard, 2007: 188). As with pornography more broadly, BBW porn can be framed as ‘a particular area of signification [which] is separated out across a wide range of media’ (Ellis, 2006: 26). In the discussion that follows, however, I will be focusing upon one particular form of BBW porn – that is, contemporary photorealistic heterosexual hard core (much of which is available and disseminated online).

As Goda Klumbyte and Katrine Smiet argue, this species of visual adult entertainment has enjoyed considerable success in the digital age, and is gaining increasing recognition within the industry’s mainstream. Noting the recent attention paid to the subgenre by the leading adult trade publication AVN (or Adult Video News), they argue that ‘pornography featuring fat female bodies is no longer an anomaly, but has reached a mainstream position in the adult entertainment landscape’ (Klumbyte and Smiet, 2015: 133). ⁵ The commercial visibility of this subgenre is reflected by the inclusion of numerous BBW titles within what we might think of as general interest porn websites. The adult video-on-demand website Hot Movies, for example, lists ‘BBW’ as a distinct category of ‘Appearance,’ with a healthy total of 1363 dedicated entries (‘Porn Categories,’ 2013); ⁶ this does not include the related subcategories of ‘Big Butts’ (3848 entries) and ‘Chubby/Voluptuous’ (1739 entries). ⁷ The category also features prominently in the image-based menu bar at the top of the categories listing page, with an image of the BBW porn star April Flores occupying a central position. A number of extensive series are devoted to the BBW body, including BBW Dreams, Scale Bustin Babes, and BBB – Big Big Babes, which according to Hot Movies, promises ‘big, horny girls that want to get boned, giant asses that gobble up your man meat and humongous boobs that flow over your face!’ (BBB – Big Big Babes #10, n.d.)

Understandably perhaps, given the wilfully hyperbolic tone of some of the promotional discourse which accompanies BBW porn films, there has been some debate within activist and Fat Acceptance communities about the manner in which fat women are represented in these texts. Klumbyte and Smiet, for example, discuss the diverse range of responses to BBW porn within online feminist spaces, noting that the reactions expressed by commentators range from ‘empowerment’ to ‘humiliation and disbelief,’ prompting questions of whether this type of fat porn should be seen as a ‘stepping stone or road block on the journey’ to self-acceptance (2015: 144).

However, I want to sidestep some of these debates about whether BBW porn is experienced as a positive or negative thing by people of size. This article draws upon Porn Studies’ distinctive (and still developing) disciplinary approach, ⁸ in that it is less about making value judgements about certain types of media texts and more about the ‘re-examination of pornography, sexuality and the politics of representation’ (Attwood, 2002: 92). More specifically, I want to contextualize BBW porn in relation not to issues of Fat Acceptance, but in terms of photorealistic hard core as a wider genre. A key question that I wish to address here is what, if anything, the cis female fat form can do differently when it comes to operating within the generic conventions of (relatively mainstream) visual pornography.

As Linda Williams points out in her ground breaking and hugely influential study Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the ‘Frenzy of the Visible’, pornography can be thought of as a genre driven by a documentary impulse. It represents something of a ‘cinematic will-to-knowledge’ (1999: 101), and draws upon a photographic tradition that seeks out ‘visual evidence of the mechanical “truth” of bodily pleasure caught in an involuntary spasm’ (1999: 101). That is to say, much visual pornography wants to capture and represent authentic scenes of sexual arousal, stimulation, and climax. However, as Williams notes, this focus upon documenting corporeal sensation and rendering sex visually accessible can prove somewhat problematic for porn. In the case of heterosexual hard core in particular, this generic logic poses a distinct conundrum, for ‘while it is possible, in a certain limited and reductive way, to ‘represent’ the physical pleasure of the male by showing erection and ejaculation, this maximum visibility proves elusive in the parallel confession of female sexual pleasure’ (Williams, 1999: 49). The woman’s corporeal experience of sexual ecstasy – for Williams, a key object of fascination for the heterosexual male consumer-viewer – proves frustratingly difficult to demonstrate. As Gertrude Koch puts it, due to the ‘expressive poverty of its naturalistic style, pornographic film necessarily reaches its limit literally ante portas, before achieving its goal of seeing the secret place where woman’s pleasure resides’ (1993: 41).

Pornography has developed various (often ingenious) strategies for overcoming the kind of synesthesia that comes with attempting to represent physical sensation via a visual medium. For Williams, this is (at least partly) the rationale behind the emphasis upon screening external penile ejaculation – the ‘money shot’ or ‘cum shot’. The highly conventional deployment of the spectacle of seminal ejaculation can be seen as a ‘form of cinematic perversion’ and a ‘fetish substitute for less visible… instances of genital connection’ (1999: 95); in other words, one can frame the excessive emphasis upon the cum shot as an attempt to compensate for those instances of female orgasmic (and other) sexual pleasures which do not lend themselves so readily to cinematic visualization. This use of the supposedly authenticating properties of bodily fluids also occurs in other pornographic subgenres, in which the affective experiences of the sexualized cis female body are mapped onto the liquids that it visibly excretes. Tanya Krzywinska picks up on this in relation to both squirting (or ‘female ejaculation’) and lactation within pornographic films (2000: 36). Elsewhere, I have argued that this also applies to the emphasis on saliva in gagging pornography (2014b).

In these cases, certain varieties of porn films come to utilize different strategies for indicating that the body really has been ‘moved’ by some sexual force. In staging the emission of substances from within the body, they rely upon what Eugenie Brinkema has referred to as a ‘depth model movement, in/out, very different from movements that dance across surfaces, faces, pubic hair, and privileged precisely because this movement calls out to the interior space that carries traces of the real’ (2006: 166). In other words, a different form of gendered affect is seemingly authenticated via this referencing of cis female corporeal interiority, as signified by fluids. The problem with these strategies, however, is that they appear to operate according to the logic of ‘counting as’ which Lyotard so determinedly swerves away from. That is to say, the fluids represented can often seem simply to stand in for semen.

These screenings of ‘feminine’ affects can all too easily be recouped by a phallic visual logic in which pleasure equates to the sign of the spectacularly drawn out bodily fluid. Krzywinska makes this point very clearly in her discussion of the lactation porn film Erupting Volcanoes:

Within hardcore the male come-shot is an undeniable sign of authentic sexual pleasure and here lactation is subject to the same paradigm (this is of course a male genital paradigm). The imposition of this framework on the lactating woman tempers the radical and powerful otherness of the mother’s body and the mother’s desire again disappears off-scene. (Krzywinska, 2000: 36)

Displacing the ‘male genital paradigm’

Several of the commentators who write on BBW pornography pick up on an idea suggested by that wilfully coarse phrase, ‘Find a fold and fuck it.’ They argue that the subgenre has a tendency to go beyond (and perhaps even to marginalize) the conventionally assumed privileging of genital penetration. Goddard, for example, stresses that ‘BBW scenes tend to focus on oral sex and breast play rather than conventional genitality, the practice of breast sex rather than vaginal penetration being the essential component of most BBW scenes’ (2007: 191), whilst Don Kulick argues that ‘fat pornography displaces erotic pleasure from the genitals and disperses it to other parts of the body, thereby reconfiguring what can count as a pleasurable body’ (2005: 91). That there is some focus upon ‘non-penetrative’ forms of intimacy within specialist BBW releases is certainly reflected in the promotional blurbs which accompany such films; the title 2 Tons of Fun promises that its stars’ ‘tits sway from side to side like giant sacks of fun. Their boobs are huge and their butts match in size’ (2 Tons of Fun, n.d.); BBBW (Big Black Beautiful Women) 12 claims that ‘butterball babes have hot luscious rolls of love’ and ‘Giant Jello booty’ (BBBW 12, n.d.).

Although many hard-core BBW releases do include some emphasis upon penile stimulation – the sucking and fucking typically stressed in other kinds of porn – it is clear that the sexual possibilities of body flesh (particularly at the breasts, buttocks, and belly) are foregrounded in quite distinctive ways. So, how does this relate to pornography’s generic attempts to screen non-phallic erotic experiences? I would argue that, in BBW, the proof that the cis female body has been moved by some sexual force comes not from the liquids emanating from within the body, but from the movements of the voluptuous exterior of the fat form. It is in the movements of surfaces that we can distinguish a subgeneric attempt to register the imprint of sexualized affects. This is the opposite of Brinkema’s ‘depth model movement, in/out’, and yet I would argue that it is equally capable of calling out ‘to the interior space that carries traces of the real’ (2006: 166).

The surface model that I am attempting to outline here is frequently described in the terminology of jiggling. Joey Silvera’s Evil BBW Gold #2 (n.d.), ⁹ for example, markets itself as featuring ‘curvaceous, jiggling sex-hungry sluts’, whilst BBB #23 claims to be ‘packed with loads of jiggly fun’ (n.d.). The sexual experiences of the fat body are framed in terms of the jostling of bodily tissue – a jostling that is both highly visible and also indicative of corporeal experience. This is at times stated quite explicitly within BBW promotional discourse, with an emphasis upon quivering flesh going beyond a loose or general terminology and appearing as a specific focus upon how sexual penetration marks the performer’s fat flesh. BBW blurbs often deliberately foreground the specific ways in which hard-core sexual contact manifests itself at the level of the fat bodily surface. The film BBW Dreams 11, for instance, refers to itself as a ‘hardcore fuckfest packed full of big butts shaking as their [sic] tapped from behind’ (n.d.). Vanilla Thick Shakes makes a similarly specific set of assertions, claiming to be a suitable choice for those BBW aficionados who ‘like looking at big ol’ juicy BOOTAY wigglin and jiggle all ova a bruthas long hard cum cock’ (Vanilla Thick Shakes, n.d.). ¹⁰

In practice, this emphasis upon the jiggling of surfaces makes a significant contribution to BBW porn’s unique aesthetic identity. Frequently, the movement of external bodily tissue becomes a scene’s central visual event, and is the recipient of careful documentation by the camera. Take the opening scene of Heavy Duty MILF Edition (Mr Niche, 2009), for example, featuring the white brunette BBW performer Desiree Divine. ¹¹ Divine begins the scene, which is shot in the domestic setting of a living room, in a magenta top, heels and black underwear. She begins by lifting her breasts out of her top, verbally describing them as she does so (‘Big ol’ silver dollar nipples’), before lifting them to her mouth and sucking each one in turn. Just before the three minute mark, and in a gesture which would seem to reinforce many of Goddard’s claims about the emphasis on ‘breast sex rather than vaginal penetration’ in the BBW subgenre (2007: 191), Divine takes hold of her breasts and repeatedly slaps them together, as she tells the camera (and the viewer), ‘You can put your dick right there.’

The performer then proceeds to remove her knickers, briefly sitting on the sofa to masturbate before flipping on to her knees to better display her big beautiful bottom. Divine shakes her hips and jiggles her buttocks, as the action is depicted in alternating shots of either her entire body or close-ups which emphasize the reverberating tissue and which allow bouncing fat to fill the screen. Divine soon comes to address the camera, asking ‘Are you ready to see me get fucked?’ She then removes her vest top and – in close-up – begins to masturbate, the rolls of her lower belly and her labia forming the focus of the shot. The next time the camera zooms out, the viewer gets a first look at Divine’s co-star – a white man of medium build, whose face (and often body) remains largely obscured or out of shot throughout the course of the scene. ¹² It is at this point that Divine removes her bra, her bosom receiving detailed attention from camera and co-star alike. There is a period of breast play in which the BBW performer masturbates her partner, engulfing his penis within her cleavage. As the consumer’s view of the man’s erection becomes obscured by the generous handfuls of breast tissue being pressed around and against it, the breasts themselves come to bear some of the burden of representing sexual sensation. We witness the flesh shift, bounce, and jiggle in response to each displacing thrust.

As per Goddard’s observation, breast sex plays a central role here. It is not controversial, I think, to declare that this BBW release is strongly interested in capturing the movement of surfaces; even when Divine is performing fellatio, the camera has a tendency to drift away from the genital action to pan down her body. The viewer’s gaze is led away from the penetration of Divine’s mouth and down towards the rolls and folds of her fat body as she sits on the edge of the sofa. What we witness is often not the ‘hard core’ of direct genital stimulation, but a panorama of flesh depicted in shots so closely cropped that all contextualizing features and other bodily landmarks are diminished. We become lost in a visual field of fat.

Heavy Duty MILF Edition is a hard-core release, however, and genitality is not entirely displaced by breast and fat play. Divine is soon on her hands and knees, with her face low to the sofa so that the camera can capture her expansive buttocks and the low-hanging folds of her stomach. The vaginal sex between the two performers is framed so as to allow the viewer maximum access to the wobble, tremor and swing of the fat female body as it absorbs the penetrative thrusts of the male participant (whose head is typically cut out in order to facilitate this view). This emphasis upon the BBW jiggle is further enhanced by acts of spanking, both at this point in the action and later on in the scene (24.26), in which we watch Divine’s body fat ripple in response to open-handed slaps. This is a pornographic aesthetics founded upon the visible echoing and reverberation of female flesh in response to affective male touch, the effect of which is extended when the couple adopt a new sexual position for vaginal sex approximately 16 minutes into the scene.

Divine and her co-star take up a spooning position on the sofa; she is in front, with her upper leg cocked and lifted, whilst the male performer tucks in behind her so that he is almost completely obscured by her large frame. As he penetrates her, the camera studies her labia, thighs, and stomach – all of which jiggle in response to the bodily stimulation – before panning up to capture the movements of the whole mass of female flesh. The camera alternates between these two viewpoints, repeatedly switching from close-up ‘meat shots’ of vaginal penetration, to medium shots which provide visual access to Divine’s body and face (often at the expense of the sight of the vulva). This vacillation between viewpoints is common to much audio-visual adult entertainment, and Klumbyte and Smiet are amongst those who have particularly noted the prevalence of these ‘dynamics of distance/closeness’ in online fat porn (2015: 133). Certainly this oscillation between closeness and distance appears to be privileged in terms of the placement of the performers in the opening scene of Heavy Duty MILF Edition. The spooning position – which affords the consumer both an overview of Divine’s soft, responsive body, as well as tighter shots of the fold of her vulva framed by thigh flesh – is the longest held in the scene, with the performers fucking in this fashion for four solid minutes without change.

After relatively brief stints of fellatio and cowgirl-style woman on top vaginal penetration, Divine mounts her partner in the reverse cowgirl position, once again largely hiding the body of her co-star. The camera at this point (nearly 27 minutes into the scene) is positioned very low, with the viewer looking up at the BBW performer’s body in a manner that generates an impression of increased size whilst also providing a clear view of the folds of the belly. This is enhanced also by the positioning of Divine’s body as she leans forward with her spread legs largely out of shot. This means that the primary visual focus is the jiggling rolls of Divine’s flesh, which bounce in response to the movements of the thrusting penis positioned in the lower half of the frame. We look up at her body, made enormous through perspective, and at her face and the underside of her breasts as she moves. At 28.10, the viewer is presented with a shot which particularly foregrounds the smothering of the almost totally obscured male performer; Divine sits atop her partner, her thigh fat over-spilling his legs, her jiggling abdomen and breasts dominating the image, her arms positioned slightly behind her so that we cannot see them. The fat female body – towering and reverberating, with its limbs either misshapen or invisible – is rendered alien and interesting, its folds appear and fade as the surface of the body experiences and absorbs the shocks of sexual contact. The action draws to a close with the representation of external ejaculation onto Divine’s face and mouth as the scene approaches its 28th minute.

The opening scene of this particular BBW release is, to my mind, exemplary of several tendencies within the subgenre as a whole. I am particularly interested in the manner in which an aesthetics of surfaces is demonstrated here, with the fleshy, rippling bodily exterior bearing some of the weight of demonstrating affect and erotic sensation. If, as I argued earlier, heterosexual porn’s central generic concern is to screen cis female bodily experiences and to show that the woman has been ‘moved’ by some sexual force, then the BBW body offers a valuable tool for advancing alternative representational strategies. The jiggling of tissue – foregrounded in paratextual promotional discourse as well as within the content of the films themselves – makes visible (at least in some sense) what is happening within the obscure bodily interior. Each thrust into the vagina marks itself, fleetingly, upon the fat form.

We cannot see much of the penis itself once it has been enveloped by the anus or vagina, but we can see the effects of its movements upon the BBW’s rolls and folds. This is the shifting, moving softness of a body being affected from the inside out. The visible reverberations that pass through and flicker across the surface of the body in films such as Heavy Duty MILF Edition generate a visual language for a kind of penetrative sexual stimulation that is not thought to lend itself easily to cinematic visualization, suggesting that physical intimacy really does impact upon the BBW bodies on screen without relying upon a paradigm of fluids. In this sense, the cis female fat body can be said to function as a tool for screening (supposedly) allusive non-phallic affects within a photorealistic genre that insists upon its need to see.

Conclusion: How voluminous is the fat female body?

From the foregoing discussion, it would appear that the female bodies in BBW porn disrupt the model of the ‘voluminous body’ outlined by Lyotard. As we have seen, Libidinal Economy posits that the voluminous body is the human form as it is often conventionally conceived – as ‘closed upon itself, filtering impulses’ (Lyotard, 1993: 3). This is the body of Freud, Lyotard claims, in which the first encroachments of self-awareness and a concomitant sense of separation from the mother give rise to the concepts of interiority and exteriority. According to this model, it is ‘absence, rupture or breakage or loss or the disconnection of an ex-part of the libidinal skin which will give rise to a voluminous place’ (1993: 22). This voluminous corporeality stands in opposition to Lyotard’s radical reimagining of the body as a libidinal ribbon, which is conceived of as having ‘no density, intensities running here and there, setting up, escaping, without ever being imprisoned in the volume of the stage/auditorium’ (Lyotard, 1993: 3). This, of course, aligns with much of our discussion about the aesthetics of BBW porn – an aesthetics which, I have claimed, finds interesting ways to disrupt porn’s conventional (and often fluids-focused) ‘depth model movement, in/out’ via the depiction of ‘movements that dance across surfaces’ (Brinkema, 2006: 166).

In this species of fat porn, a movement that is visually obscured within the folds of the body is not seen as an atomized thrust into a distinct and separate realm of the bodily interior. Instead, it exhibits itself as a movement across variously invaginated corporeal surfaces which manifests itself upon a plurality of sites, all charged with libidinal intensity. The BBW body can be conceived of as a fundamentally connected body – an ‘interminable band with variable geometry’ (Lyotard, 1993: 3) – in which ‘the anatomy of ‘polymorphous perversion’ undoes the libidinal investments and somatic folds that maintain the proper body’ (Grant, 1993: xxi). The critical manoeuvre I am performing here is itself an invagination, returning us once again to the idea that opened this essay – the idea that the fat body has an intense power to disturb boundaries. The visual language of BBW porn could be framed as undermining the notion that there is a distinction between the body’s interior and its surfaces. That is to say, the concept of an absolute ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ is compromised when insertion is represented through the echoing of the flesh, as what is supposedly happening within the body comes to be ‘vouched for’ by the movements of fat on its surface.

In some ways, then, we might view both Lyotard’s notion of ‘the immense membrane of the libidinal “body”’ (1993: 2), and the cis female bodies featured within BBW porn, as charged with a similar set of queer political possibilities. In standing against the proper, voluminous body, they can be seen to refuse heteronormative corporeal hierarchies in favour of exploring new ways of organizing and understanding the human form. The sexualized image of the fat body finds some common ground or productive points of confluence when brought into conversation with this part of Libidinal Economy’s eccentric project. However, it would be wrong to see BBW bodies as some sort of embodied approximation of Lyotard’s ideas, and any reading that attempts to pit the fat performer against the voluminous body (or which makes spurious claims about the political possibilities of either) will not hold up to scrutiny. Not only does the libidinal band function as an entirely abstract reimagining or re-envisioning of the erotic body, but BBW porn can also be seen as to some extent shoring up the idea of the proper voluminous body precisely through its use of an aesthetic of surfaces.

Fat flesh, I have argued, lends itself particularly well to pornography’s generic project of screening ‘visual evidence of the mechanical ‘truth’ of bodily pleasure’ (Williams, 1999: 101), including the mystified paroxysms of non-penile sexual sensation. This flesh proves an appropriate vehicle for communicating particular kinds of erotic affect because its rolls and folds visibly suggest the effects of penetration upon the body – the idea that something is really happening to the BBW performer, and at least an impression of this can be documented via the camera’s lens. The first point to be made about this, however, is that the very notions of proof and demonstration – so crucial to the generic history of hard core – must be framed as problematic as regards any radical reimagining of the sexual body. As the epigraph to Libidinal Economy puts it, ‘Who knows not how to hide, knows not how to love’ (Lyotard, 1993: v). ¹³

Whilst the emphasis upon jiggling in BBW porn might be positioned as an imaginative way of extending pornography’s visual vocabulary of gendered sexual affects, it does not go very far at all in terms of disrupting audiovisual adult entertainment’s long-standing generic conventions. It still adheres to the notion that tactile pleasure can be demonstrated synesthetically – proved by visual means – and that erotic affects can and should submit to a documentary paradigm in order to generate an authenticity effect. Indeed, this adherence to generic conventions extends to that hyperbolic and fetishistic substitute for obscure cis female pleasure, the external penile ejaculation. Many examples of BBW hard core, ¹⁴ including the Divine scene discussed earlier, end with a highly conventional facial cum shot, suggesting that any displacement of genitality within the subgenre is problematic, contingent, and temporary. This is not to suggest that any and all pornographic depictions of the fat body are divested of queer potential, of course; it is important that we consider the specificities of different visual treatments, and assess them on their own merits. What is clear, however, is that any effort to frame the female bodies of BBW porn as necessarily charged with radical political possibilities is in need of careful and critical qualification.

I would like to finish with one more note on ideas about the radical possibilities of BBW pornography – particularly, the notion that it somehow manages to avoid mapping a ‘male genital paradigm’ onto female pleasure, or that its visual language offers a solution to the problem of representing ‘feminine’ sexual experience. Undoubtedly a focus upon fleshy surfaces can be viewed as a compelling device in porn’s aesthetic toolbox; however, the jiggling of the fat porn star’s body is not a movement that can properly be said to belong to a sphere of non-phallic pleasure. Instead, as we saw in the case of Heavy Duty MILF Edition, the woman’s flesh reverberates in direct response to the impact of intercourse. As such, one could argue that the movement of surfaces is not privileged in and of itself, but as a mode of visualizing Brinkema’s depth model of insertion. Through their fat, BBW bodies are invested with an evidentiary power, demonstrating that the body really is being penetrated, even though our direct view of this penetration is obscured. It is through this that the idea of the voluminous body is once again called into being. If the fat female form speaks in this context, it does not do so in its own voice; instead, it echoes.