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Abstract
In this article I consider the lived fat body and its relation to clothing by thinking fat experience as analogous to the situation of women as laid out in The Second Sex ([1949, 1951] 2010).

To be fat hasn't always occasioned the level of hysteria that this condition receives today and indeed was once considered an admirable trait. Fat Shame: Stigma and the Fat Body in American Culture explores this arc, from veneration to shame, examining the historic roots of our contemporary anxiety about fatness. Tracing the cultural denigration of fatness to the mid 19th century, Amy Farrell argues that the stigma associated with a fat body preceded any health concerns about a large body size. Firmly in place by the time the diet industry began to flourish in the 1920s, the development of fat

This article brings together two concepts, 'phantom fat' and 'liminal fat', which both aim to grasp how fat in contemporary culture becomes a kind of material immateriality, corporeality in suspension. Comparing the spheres of representation and experience, we examine the challenges and usefulness of these concepts, and feminist fat studies perspectives more broadly, to feminist scholarship on the body. We ask what connects and disconnects fat corporeality and fat studies from ways of theorising other embodied differences, like gender, 'race', disability, class and sexuality, especially when thinking through their perceived mutability or removability, and assumptions about their relevance for subjectivity. While it is important to consider corporeality and selfhood as malleable and open to change in order to mobilise oppressive normativities around gendered bodies and selves, we argue that more attention should also be paid to the persistence of corporeality and a feeling of a relatively stable self, and the potential for empowerment in not engaging with or idealising continuous transformation and becoming. Furthermore, we suggest that the concepts of phantom fat and liminal fat can help shed light on some problematic ways in which feminist studies have approached – or not approached – questions of fat corporeality in relation to the politics of health and bodily appearance. Questions of weight, when critically interrogated together with other axes of difference, highlight how experiential and subjugated knowledges, as well as critical inquiry of internal prejudices, must remain of continued key importance to feminist projects. ; peerReviewed

This article interrogates how body positive and fat activist blogs offer alternative ways of feeling one's body, using the Finnish More to Love ( MTL, 2009–2013) and its successor PlusMimmi ( PM, 2013–) and the American Queer Fat Femme Guide to Life ( QFF, 2008–) as its examples. We investigate how these blogs, despite their differences, invite their publics not only to feel positive about their own and others' norm-exceeding bodies, but to feel in their bodies. While previous studies have criticized body positive discourses for employing a simplistic language of choice and relying on heteronormative logics of feminine attractiveness, they have not paid specific attention to how exactly body positive media attract and engage people affectively. In this article, MTL, PM, and QFF's strategies of inviting their followers to feel in their bodies are analyzed in the context of three key themes: exercise, fashion, and sex. We argue that when explored through the framework of affect, fat activist blogs do not present body positivity simply as a matter of choice but offer a space to feel through the affective contradictions of inhabiting a fat feminine body in a sizeist society. At their best, body positive blogs open up spaces of comfort which can be radical for bodies accustomed to discomfort.

2021 Summer. ; Includes bibliographical references. ; This dissertation uses a queer rhetorical approach augmented by a critical/cultural sensibility and autoethnographic performance to examine how body positive activists, influencers, and public figures carve out moments for fat-positive (queer) worldmaking within the online body positive movement. In particular, this project explores how body positivity shifts contextually from a set of depoliticized philosophies around self-love and positive body image to moments of worldmaking via radical body politics. The primary goal of this project is to examine how the body positive movement carves out possibilities for positive representation, humanization, and liberation for fat and otherwise non-normative bodies. To pursue this goal, I engage three distinct case studies of fat-positive queer worldmaking within body positivity after situating this project as joining and contributing to broader scholarly conversations around embodied social movement rhetoric as well as disciplinary perspectives on queer worldmaking. The first case study explores how two body positive social media influencers, @Sassy_latte and Melissa Gibson, use Instagram posts and the digital radio show format to develop radical, fat activist body politics around the notion of "body justice." The second case study focuses on hip-hop artist Lizzo and her role in the changing nature of body positivity in the current moment, analyzing how her social media, lyrics, and music videos engage in fat-positive queer worldmaking that recenters fat, Black femme bodies. The final case study takes on the character of autoethnographic performance in which I center my own body, my own journey with body positivity and fat activism, as well as grapple with the relationship between my role as a critic and my role as part of the rhetoric I analyze. In and through these case studies, I ultimately argue that it is through particular kinds of rhetorical labor—namely decolonial, intersectional, and queer forms—that body positive rhetors make possible moments of fat-positive queer worldmaking.

This article brings together two concepts, 'phantom fat' and 'liminal fat', which both aim to grasp how fat in contemporary culture becomes a kind of material immateriality, corporeality in suspension. Comparing the spheres of representation and experience, we examine the challenges and usefulness of these concepts, and feminist fat studies perspectives more broadly, to feminist scholarship on the body. We ask what connects and disconnects fat corporeality and fat studies from ways of theorising other embodied differences, like gender, 'race', disability, class and sexuality, especially when thinking through their perceived mutability or removability, and assumptions about their relevance for subjectivity. While it is important to consider corporeality and selfhood as malleable and open to change in order to mobilise oppressive normativities around gendered bodies and selves, we argue that more attention should also be paid to the persistence of corporeality and a feeling of a relatively stable self, and the potential for empowerment in not engaging with or idealising continuous transformation and becoming. Furthermore, we suggest that the concepts of phantom fat and liminal fat can help shed light on some problematic ways in which feminist studies have approached – or not approached – questions of fat corporeality in relation to the politics of health and bodily appearance. Questions of weight, when critically interrogated together with other axes of difference, highlight how experiential and subjugated knowledges, as well as critical inquiry of internal prejudices, must remain of continued key importance to feminist projects.

This article engages with recent critical research on the obesity epidemic to think through the bioethics of current obesity prevention and consider alternative responses to fat bodies. To develop such an approach, it offers a feminist "body becoming" theory of fat that interweaves constructivist and new materialist theories with embodied and aesthetic perspectives to imagine other possibilities for fat embodiment. Thinking beyond conventional biopedagogical interventions that send moralizing messages about what bodies should be, I theorize a "becoming" pedagogy that moves away from enforcing norms toward more creative ways of expanding possibilities for what bodies could become. Because in our boundary-setting world this kind of imagining is considered the work of the artist and not within the purview of the social scientist, I turn to the arts and to aesthetic theory for insight and inspiration in this project. I discuss representations that focus on embodying and materializing change among individuals and groups so as to transform social scripts about body, ability, and normality.