Embodied ambivalence in Taiwan: fat women and gender minorities’ negotiation and subversion of their hyper(in)visibility

Abstract

ABSTRACT Based upon Jeannine Gailey’s concept of ‘hyper(in)visibility’ of fat women (2014), this article has two goals: (a) to analyse Taiwanese self-identifying fat women and gender minorities’ management and negotiation of their (in)visibility; and (b) to examine the local appropriation of the important international feminist movement that is fat activism in a non-Euro-American context. Drawing upon in-depth conversations with Taiwanese women, fat activists, and gender minorities who self-identify as fat, the findings reveal that they embody a paradoxical hyper(in)visibility. Given their large body size, fat women and gender minorities are hypervisible and their bodies are dissected publicly and privately, while at the same time their corpulent bodies are marginalized and overlooked. Moreover, since the most important criterion determining whether a Taiwanese woman is considered beautiful is thinness, the beauty cult also means a fat-phobic culture within which participants suffer from a dehumanizing gaze. As a result, some fat women choose to enact docile and cute femininity by embodying the figure of a ‘marshmallow girl’, while activists subvert gender and body-size norms and fight for fat acceptance and body diversity. Some activists try to reverse and queer the fat-shaming and abject representational codes and embody fat euphoria momentums.