Comfy fat queer love: affective digital resistance through kinship

Abstract

ABSTRACT This piece uses Sara Ahmed’s writing on the notion of public comfort as a jumping off point and incorporates fat studies scholarship to explore the private comfort offered by fat queer love. Working with digital posts from superfat non-binary writer J Aprileo (Comfy Fat) on Instagram, Patreon, and their website, and to a lesser extent the posts of Corissa Enneking (Fat Girl Flow), this paper examines the power of queer fat kinship to contravene the expectation for fat people to embody the “Good Fatty” archetype and to resist the dominant narratives surrounding acceptable trajectories of linear “progress.” Looking at fat queer kinship underlines how comfort is relationally experienced and generated. The internet is explored as a space for comfy intimate publics, and Aprileo’s work is situated in a lineage of fat queer activism and affective resistance.