Revolting Bodies?: The Struggle to Redefine Fat Identity

by Kathleen LeBesco

A provocative analysis of fatness as a cultural construct Viewed as both unhealthy and unattractive, fat people are widely represented in popular culture and in interpersonal interactions as revolting--as agents of abhorrence and disgust. Yet if we think about "revolting" in a different way, Kathleen LeBesco argues, we can recognize fatness as not simply an aesthetic state or a medical condition, but a political one. If we think of revolting in terms of overthrowing authority, rebelling, protesting, and rejecting, then corpulence carries a whole new weight as a subversive cultural practice that calls into question received notions about health, beauty, and nature. Revolting Bodies examines a number of sites of struggle over the cultural meaning of fatness. The book is grounded in scholarship on identity politics, the social construction of beauty, and the subversion of hegemonic medical ideas about the dangers of fatness. It explains how the redefinition of fat identities has been undertaken by people who challenge conventional understandings of nature, health, and beauty and, in so doing, alter their individual and collective relationships to power. LeBesco explores how the bearer of a fat body is marked as a failed citizen, inasmuch as her powers as a worker, shopper, and sexually "desirable" subject are called into question. At the same time, she highlights fat fashion, relations among fat, queer, and disability politics and activism, and online communities as opportunities for transforming these pejorative stereotypes of fatness. Her discussion of the long-term ramifications of denying bodily agency--in effect, letting biological determinism run rampant--has implications not onlyfor our understanding of fatness but also for future political practice.

Genres: Fat Studies, Feminism, Nonfiction, Bodies, Fat, Politics, Academic

192 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2003

Reviews

[Aggrey Odera · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lebesco attempts to theorize what fatness, at our contemporary cultural moment, means. She argues that we should conceive of fatness as a political category. Fat people, she says, are often seen as physically and aesthetically repulsive- we constantly associate being fat with being unhealthy, being dirty, being sweaty etc. Fat people, Lebesco argues, are constantly denied citizenship rights in subtle ways that do not seem pernicious to us: they are thought to be poor workers (so we are less likely to hire them); thought to be poor shoppers (so we feel comfortable telling them at the line in the supermarket to "pick something healthier); we charge them more for flights (but not muscular people, who sometimes may weigh even more), we tease the fat kids at school, and we deem fat people sexually "undesirable", so we refuse to fuck them (though of course it is a whole other argument whether anyone has a right to sex).

Lebesco explores several issues that she thinks have led to this maltreatment of fat people: the social constructivism of beauty - which is from where our aesthetic distaste of fatness arises; hegemonic medical conceptions of fat as unhealthy - which have given us justifications for mistreating fat people, to say that their deserve their underclass status because their fatness is construed by us as a personal failing.

Lebesco explores several ways through which fat people attempt to subvert these cultural conceptions of fatness; to reclaim a sense of bodily agency. These fat people seek to alter the way fatness is viewed in relation to beauty (fat can be beautiful, since beauty is socially constructed anyway); to health (to be fat is not necessarily to be unhealthy, and likewise being skinny is not synonymous with being healthy); to nature (we are biologically different - some people are more likely to get fat than others, and this should not determine how we are treated in society). Lebesco shows how "fat fashion", as well as intersectional relationships of activism between fat people, disabled people and queer people are attempting to redefine cultural conceptions of fatness, or at the very least to carve out spaces for such people to comfortably exist.

On finishing the book, I was convinced by Lebesco's argument: fat is indeed political. But I wonder if, in an attempt to resist extreme medicalisation, we may end up undermedicalising. While not every fat person is unhealthy, it is my belief that at certain levels, there are very good arguments to be made as to why fat is unhealthy, and consequently why people should not be fat to that extent. Obesity leads to a whole host of health problems - and has significant economic implications, and making this simply a civil rights issue, without accounting for these other aspects, strikes me not just as disingenuous, but as patently dangerous. Fatness is a political issue, right, but it is also a health one and an economic one, and we do not need to deny one to assert the other.

[Sanjiv kumar · Rating 3 out of 5]

I would like to read As soon as i finish my current ones, Which are already in my hand.

[Mills College Library]

362.19639 L443 2004

[Tarmia]

A really interesting meditation on language and Fatness.