Obstinate fatties: Fat activism, queer negativity, and the celebration of ‘obesity’ (original) (raw)
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No Fat Future? The Uses of Anti-Social Queer Theory for Fat Activism
chapter in: Queer Futures: Reconsidering Normativity, Activism and the Political (eds E. Haschemi Yekani et al. p21-36), 2013
This chapter examines the possible connections between anti-social queer theory and fat politics, and the consequences for activism. Intersections between fat and queer identities, particularly in terms of their potential to be reclaimed politically, have previously been explored within fat studies (LeBesco, 2001, 2004). However, as an emerging locus of activism, fat politics, like queer, may be able to move beyond both liberal individualist and resignificatory politics via a turn to the anti-social as suggested by Edelman (2004) and Halberstam (2008). Fat politics fit this turn in queer theory because contemporary discourses of the obesity ‘epidemic’ in the West are engaged in the construction of fat not only as an individual moral failure, but as profoundly anti-social. The fat subject is being made knowable through its proximity to death, disease and sterility and the strain it places on collective resources. Anti-obesity discourse envisions not only a fat free future, but attempts to restore subjects to a position inside the heteronormatively gendered, fully reproductive social order. It is not just fat, but the fat subject’s queerness that is under threat of erasure. This chapter reads the discourse of the obesity epidemic in terms of its production of the fat subject as a figure with ‘no future’, and argues that, like Edelman’s queer subject, the fat subject is conjured to embody the death drive and to stand as the other of a foundational logic of reproductive futurity. It explores Edelman’s embrace of negativity in terms of the possibilities it opens for fat activism using The Chubsters, a UK-based fat/queer activist project, as a case study. The Chubsters’ style of political engagement precisely revels in the abjection fat/queer subjects are cast in. They appear to embody the ‘turn away from the comfort zone of polite exchange’ Halberstam (2008:154) proposes for a successful anti-social politics. However, can The Chubsters ‘fuck the future’, or are they implicitly invested in creating liveable lives for future fat/queer subjects? In a cultural climate that calls for the erasure of a fat future, is celebrating anti-futurity a productive option for fat activism?
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Fat Studies, 3 (2) 86-100, 2014
This article argues for a new approach to the intersection of fat/trans identities that moves beyond “additive” accounts or those that simply highlight parallel struggles. The analysis addresses the divergent accounts of the “malleability” of the body in fat and trans political discourses and how these might shape the lived experience of the fat/trans individual. However, rather than thinking of trans and fat as distinct phenomena, the article asks what it would mean to recognize their inextricability and suggests that this could be a productive way of imagining a queer fat politics that seeks not to reproduce exclusionary norms.
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That contemporary discourses of the ‘obesity epidemic’ are engaged in the construction of fatness as pathological, immoral and socially undesirable has been the subject much recent critical inquiry within Fat Studies. This paper contributes to that literature with a re-reading of obesity discourse via what queer theorist Lee Edelman (2004) has called ‘reproductive futurism’. Edelman contends that queerness figures the social order's death drive, and is thus abjected in order to assure the reproduction of that social order. This paper argues that, like the queer, fatness is increasingly being figured as anti-social and as that which must be eliminated in the name of a viable future. Framing obesity in this way makes possible an analysis of the presumed ‘threat’ of obesity, frequently referred to, but seldom unpacked, in the existing literature. A comparative analysis of the UK government's Change 4 Life (2009) public health campaign and nineteenth century theories of degeneracy is used to illustrate the cultural anxieties about immorality, disease, civilization and death that undergird both discourses. This analysis suggests the centrality of rationality and self-control, understood as moral, to the reproduction of the social order. Furthermore, reading the ‘obesity epidemic’ as couched in the logic of reproductive futurism opens up potential alternative approaches to fat politics. In the light of Samantha Murray's (2008) critique of the liberal humanist underpinnings of fat activist discourse, this paper considers whether Edelman's advocacy of ‘future-negating’ for queers, offers a productive trajectory for fat politics.
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