{"title":"变胖的同性恋:对脂肪体现的干预","authors":"Erin Ritchie","doi":"10.1111/gequ.12438","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<p>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.</p><p>In considering these similarities, the question arises: is fat queer? In a volume of essays by queer and fat studies scholars entitled <i>Queering Fat Embodiment</i> (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 <i>Queering Fat Embodiment</i> 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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>Currently, only two German-language academic volumes exist that treat the subject of fat embodiment: <i>Fat Studies in Deutschland: Hohes Körpergewicht zwischen Diskriminierung und Anerkennung</i> (2017) and <i>Fat Studies: Ein Glossar</i> (2022). While these works are instrumental in defining and outlining <i>Dickenaktivismus</i>, <i>Gewichtsdiskriminierung</i>, the <i>Fat-Acceptance-Bewegung</i>, and the social ramifications of <i>Dicksein</i>, 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 <i>representations</i> of fat bodies.</p><p>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 <i>Dies ist kein Liebeslied</i> (2000) or in films like Doris Dörrie's <i>Die Friseuse</i> (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 <i>Die Friseuse</i>. Despite being fully-fledged, well-developed characters, these figures are ultimately still defined by their embodiments of normative failure.</p><p>However, we can also find representations of fat bodies that fracture discourses of fat failure. The German film <i>Riot not Diet</i> (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, <i>human</i>. Indeed, fattening queer and queering fat in German imaginative works can help us locate the human within us all.</p>","PeriodicalId":54057,"journal":{"name":"GERMAN QUARTERLY","volume":"97 2","pages":"233-236"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2000,"publicationDate":"2024-05-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/gequ.12438","citationCount":"0","resultStr":"{\"title\":\"Fattening queer: Interventions in fat embodiment\",\"authors\":\"Erin Ritchie\",\"doi\":\"10.1111/gequ.12438\",\"DOIUrl\":null,\"url\":null,\"abstract\":\"<p>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.</p><p>In considering these similarities, the question arises: is fat queer? In a volume of essays by queer and fat studies scholars entitled <i>Queering Fat Embodiment</i> (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 <i>Queering Fat Embodiment</i> 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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>Currently, only two German-language academic volumes exist that treat the subject of fat embodiment: <i>Fat Studies in Deutschland: Hohes Körpergewicht zwischen Diskriminierung und Anerkennung</i> (2017) and <i>Fat Studies: Ein Glossar</i> (2022). While these works are instrumental in defining and outlining <i>Dickenaktivismus</i>, <i>Gewichtsdiskriminierung</i>, the <i>Fat-Acceptance-Bewegung</i>, and the social ramifications of <i>Dicksein</i>, 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 <i>representations</i> of fat bodies.</p><p>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 <i>Dies ist kein Liebeslied</i> (2000) or in films like Doris Dörrie's <i>Die Friseuse</i> (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 <i>Die Friseuse</i>. Despite being fully-fledged, well-developed characters, these figures are ultimately still defined by their embodiments of normative failure.</p><p>However, we can also find representations of fat bodies that fracture discourses of fat failure. The German film <i>Riot not Diet</i> (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, <i>human</i>. 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引用次数: 0
摘要
虽然这些著作在定义和概述 "狄更斯主义"、"侏儒症"、"脂肪接受运动 "和 "迪克森 "的社会影响方面发挥了重要作用,但它们仍然延续了丽莎-普法尔和贾斯汀-鲍威尔在德国残疾研究中发现的问题。普法尔和鲍威尔称之为该领域 "薄弱的制度化",这意味着尽管德国有着丰富的政治活动史,但残障研究的 "地域和语言 "仍然深深植根于英美语境。同样,大多数脂肪研究专著的撰稿人都来自社会学、法学和教育学等学科,因此,那些主要研究领域不属于更传统学科的撰稿人仍然具有 "颠覆性地位"(普法尔和鲍威尔)。即使是少数几个以德语为基础进行干预的章节,也忽略了分析肥胖身体的文化表征的必要性。"相对于规范而言,被认为是过度体现的艺术表征会影响文化,并有助于创建和再造维护有害规范性理想的机构。同时,与理论和医学研究相比,这些表征揭示这些理想的方式能更清楚地强调大局(伊顿,52-54)。当代批判性视角对凯伦-杜夫(Karen Duve)的《Dies ist kein Liebeslied》(2000 年)等通俗小说或多丽丝-多里(Doris Dörrie)的《Die Friseuse》(2010 年)等电影中对肥胖身体的表现进行了探讨,探讨了肥胖表现的颠覆性和积极层面(贝特曼;莱恩)。对肥胖角色的正面描写值得关注,但这些作品中的主人公仍然会回忆起过去并不成功的性关系,而且往往带有身体疾病的特征--《Die Friseuse》中卡蒂被诊断出患有多发性硬化症就是如此。尽管这些人物形象都是成熟、完善的角色,但他们最终还是被定义为规范性失败的化身。然而,我们也可以发现一些肥胖身体的表现形式打破了肥胖失败的论述。德国电影《暴动不减肥》(Riot not Diet,2018)是一部实验短片,歌颂了肥胖身体的过剩能力。在朱莉娅-福尔曼(Julia Fuhrmann)的影片中,身体不仅仅是一个容器,而是心灵及其所感知的美好的物理标记。影片中肥胖的女性身体被描绘成美好的、令人向往的、有能力的,最重要的是,是人类的。事实上,在德国的想象力作品中,肥胖的同性恋和同性恋的肥胖可以帮助我们找到人类的内在。
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.
期刊介绍:
The German Quarterly serves as a forum for all sorts of scholarly debates - topical, ideological, methodological, theoretical, of both the established and the experimental variety, as well as debates on recent developments in the profession. We particularly encourage essays employing new theoretical or methodological approaches, essays on recent developments in the field, and essays on subjects that have recently been underrepresented in The German Quarterly, such as studies on pre-modern subjects.