Fattening queer: Interventions in fat embodiment

Fat bodies are deviant bodies. Just like queer bodies, fat bodies and our judgment of them are tightly interwoven with prescriptive, compulsory norms that impose standards of health, body shape and function, gender, and sexuality. Fatness is judged according to unspoken norms against which certain bodies are deemed to possess too much flesh. Regardless of how these norms have been determined over time, fat bodies are always legible as different in that they do not fit into environments oriented around ostensibly normal bodies. Fatness itself is a slippery term. Just like the word queer, fat carries with it social, cultural, institutional, structural, and personal meanings, both derogatory and affirmative, that influence the ways that fat bodies interact with and in the world.

In considering these similarities, the question arises: is fat queer? In a volume of essays by queer and fat studies scholars entitled Queering Fat Embodiment (2015), Cat Pausé, Jackie White, and Samantha Murray examine how compulsory heterosexuality, a term popularized by Adrienne Rich, works to create and uphold compulsory thinness and to regulate fat bodies and subjects. Essays in Queering Fat Embodiment rely on queer theories and methodologies like Judith Butler's notion of gender performance and Sara Ahmed's queer phenomenology to demonstrate how fat bodies are othered via heterosexual, hegemonic physical spaces and their respective orientations. Queerness, as Zoe Meleo-Erwin argues, can help us to examine and dismantle dominant conceptions of health, illness, normalcy, and pathology (108-09). Queering fat makes room for difference, interdependence, and vulnerability.

Standard medical discourse assesses fat according to hierarchical binary notions of success and failure. The obsession with fat has become a phenomenon in the medical world, with the World Health Organization naming “Globesity” the most threatening growing pandemic, even in the era of Covid-19 (Branca et al. xiii; Schorb 40). In 2020, the Robert Koch Institut identified 46% of German women and 60% of German men as “übergewichtig” and 14% of Germans in total as “adipostas” (“Übergewicht und Adipostas”). Yet the dominant socio-cultural urge to pathologize fat reinforces normative able-bodiedness, scorns bodily difference, and even directly undercuts fat sexuality, as study after study attempts to correlate genital dysfunction with excess adipose tissue (White). Not only are fat individuals unable to have “successful” heteronormative sex within a medical model, but medical studies utilize normative bodily expectations in attempts to prove the failure of fat individuals’ lives, evoking false correlations between their life span and overall health (White). A shortened lifespan is that of a less than ideal citizen, one who cannot continue to be a productive member of society in ways that align with neoliberal ideologies (Pausé et al. 6). In the medical paradigm, a fat life is a miserably failed one if not a fast track toward death itself.

Fat's inescapably visible, corporeal disruption of predicted normative futures and heteronormative paths lends itself to exaggerated queer temporalities. A transient sense of failure and decay projects itself onto a pathway of time that defies notions of progression from past to present and future. The so-called social failures vis-à-vis linear temporal progression embody queer temporalities that, as J. Halberstam writes, focus on the “transient, the fleeting, the contingent” in the here and now instead of the longevity of normative futures (2). In her exploration of queer time and its relation to fatness, Elena Levy-Navarro argues for a “fat history” that would highlight the term obesity and its relevance in cultural discourse (Rebentisch 236). As she traces the historicity of the term “fat,” Levy-Navarro contends that fat time is queer time because fat time does not privilege future, past, or present. Instead, it fractures these temporal hierarchies and exists as a guarantee of imperfection.

Despite a widespread embrace of queer theory, the academic dismantling of dominant fatphobic discourses via the burgeoning field of fat studies lags in the German-speaking world. Yet it is imperative to explore fat embodiment within this context, not least because German intellectual, political, and social histories were built upon fraught national ideals and a cult of health that began in the Enlightenment (Mosse 6–12). These ideals of health and body were advanced via the scientific movements of the late nineteenth century and taken up by the Nazis in the twentieth century. Remnants of the Nazi ideology of bodily health are still present today.

Currently, only two German-language academic volumes exist that treat the subject of fat embodiment: Fat Studies in Deutschland: Hohes Körpergewicht zwischen Diskriminierung und Anerkennung (2017) and Fat Studies: Ein Glossar (2022). While these works are instrumental in defining and outlining Dickenaktivismus, Gewichtsdiskriminierung, the Fat-Acceptance-Bewegung, and the social ramifications of Dicksein, they still perpetuate problems that Lisa Pfahl and Justin Powell identify within disability studies in Germany. More traditionally discipline-bound German universities and academic settings create what Pfahl and Powell call a “weak institutionalization” of the field, meaning that the “locale and language” of disability studies remain strongly rooted in an Anglo-American context despite a rich history of German political activism. Similarly, most contributors to the volumes on fat studies stem from disciplines like sociology, law, and education, so that those whose primary area of study is not anchored in more traditional disciplines retain a “subversive status” (Pfahl and Powell). Even the few chapters that offer interventions grounded in the German-language context miss the necessity of analyzing cultural representations of fat bodies.

Artistic representations of what is perceived as excessive embodiment vis-à-vis the norm influence culture and help to create and recreate institutions that uphold harmful ideals of normativity. At the same time, such representations unveil these ideals in ways that more clearly underscore the bigger picture than theories and medical studies are able to do (Eaton 52–54). Contemporary critical perspectives on representations of fat bodies in popular novels like Karen Duve's Dies ist kein Liebeslied (2000) or in films like Doris Dörrie's Die Friseuse (2010) explore the subversive, positive dimensions of fat representation (Bethman; Layne). Positive depictions of fat characters are worth noting, yet the main protagonists in these works still find themselves reminiscing about past sexual relationships that didn't quite work out and are often marked by physical illness—as is the case with Kathi's diagnosis of Multiple Sclerosis in Die Friseuse. Despite being fully-fledged, well-developed characters, these figures are ultimately still defined by their embodiments of normative failure.

However, we can also find representations of fat bodies that fracture discourses of fat failure. The German film Riot not Diet (2018), an experimental short, celebrates fat bodies for what their excess can do. In Julia Fuhrmann's film, the body becomes not just a vessel but the physical marker for the mind and its perceived goodness. The fat female bodies in this film are depicted as good, desirable, capable, and above all, human. Indeed, fattening queer and queering fat in German imaginative works can help us locate the human within us all.