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Article
Phantom/liminal fat
and feminist theories
of the body
Feminist Theory
2017, Vol. 18(2) 99–117
! The Author(s) 2017
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DOI: 10.1177/1464700117700035
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Katariina Kyrölä
University of Turku, Finland
Hannele Harjunen
University of Jyväskylä, Finland
Abstract
This article brings together two concepts, ‘phantom fat’ and ‘liminal fat’, which both aim
to grasp how fat in contemporary culture becomes a kind of material immateriality,
corporeality in suspension. Comparing the spheres of representation and experience,
we examine the challenges and usefulness of these concepts, and feminist fat studies
perspectives more broadly, to feminist scholarship on the body. We ask what connects
and disconnects fat corporeality and fat studies from ways of theorising other embodied
differences, like gender, ‘race’, disability, class and sexuality, especially when thinking
through their perceived mutability or removability, and assumptions about their relevance for subjectivity. While it is important to consider corporeality and selfhood as
malleable and open to change in order to mobilise oppressive normativities around
gendered bodies and selves, we argue that more attention should also be paid to the
persistence of corporeality and a feeling of a relatively stable self, and the potential for
empowerment in not engaging with or idealising continuous transformation and becoming. Furthermore, we suggest that the concepts of phantom fat and liminal fat can help
shed light on some problematic ways in which feminist studies have approached – or not
approached – questions of fat corporeality in relation to the politics of health and bodily
appearance. Questions of weight, when critically interrogated together with other axes
of difference, highlight how experiential and subjugated knowledges, as well as critical
inquiry of internal prejudices, must remain of continued key importance to feminist
projects.
Keywords
Body, body image, experience, fat, feminist fat studies, feminist theory, knowledge,
liminality, representation, self
Corresponding author:
Katariina Kyrölä, Media Studies, University of Turku, Kaivokatu 12, Turun yliopisto 20014, Finland.
Email: jokaky@utu.fi
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During the last two decades, a growing body of scholarship termed ‘feminist fat
studies’ has emerged from the broader field of feminist studies of the body.1
Feminist fat studies refers to a field which, in contrast to biomedical research on
‘obesity’, does not see fat first and foremost as a problem that needs solving or
curing. Instead, it focuses on fat as a gendered, culturally produced and variable
category and experience. Feminist fat studies draws on and contributes to gender,
‘race’/ethnicity, disability, class and queer studies in its commitment to unravelling
embodied normativities and imagining alternatives. It reclaims a traditionally
disparaging term, ‘fat’, in a manner similar to how ‘queer’ has been remobilised
(see, for example: Butler, 1993: 223–229; Farrell, 2011: 21–22) and shares also
queer studies’ interest in undoing the very notion of ‘normalcy’.2
In this article, we want to suggest some perspectives and contributions that
feminist fat studies can offer to the broader field of feminist thought on the body
and embodied differences (and vice versa), particularly through two concepts which
we used in our respective research projects: phantom fat (Kyrölä, 2014) and liminal
fat (Harjunen, 2009). We explore how these concepts address the specificity of fat
marginalisation but also connect it to questions about the boundaries of embodiment and subjectivity. Moreover, feminist fat studies perspectives highlight and
remind us of the importance of keeping experiential and subjugated knowledges in
the centre of feminist ethics and epistemology overall. Bypassing such knowledges
can result in deeply problematic body politics. Examining scholarship on fat subordination in relation to other forms of marginalisation, we interrogate how understandings of mutability and intentionality connect and separate questions of weight
from gender, ‘race’, disability, sexuality and class in terms of such body politics.
In our work here, the concept of ‘phantom fat’ derives from media analysis and
autoethnographical methodology, while the concept of ‘liminal fat’ draws on
empirical social research – both collate feminist theories of the body and feminist
fat studies. Katariina Kyrölä’s research project addresses ways in which contemporary media images of fat bodies aim to engage their viewers affectively and
corporeally. Hannele Harjunen’s research explores Finnish women’s experiences
of being fat and the social and gendered power relations that construct those
experiences. Kyrölä’s research material includes a wide variety of AngloAmerican and Finnish media images from the early 1990s to the late 2000s,
reaching from reality television to Hollywood movies, from sitcoms to documentaries, from print magazine and news media to online pornography, examining also
autoethnographical accounts of reacting to and analysing the material. Harjunen’s
research data includes thirty-five autobiographical writings and twelve thematic
interviews with Finnish women aged between twenty-one and sixty-five, collected
in 2000.
While using different methodologies and departing from somewhat different
disciplinary backgrounds, the findings of the projects intersect in interesting
ways. Harjunen’s female informants appear to have experienced fatness as a liminal
state that cannot be considered a permanent, valuable and identifiable part of or
a base for subjectivity. Instead, fat is experienced as temporary and unstable.
Kyrölä and Harjunen
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Even those informants who had considered themselves fat for much or all of their
lives insisted that their ‘real’ selves should occupy a normatively sized body.
According to Kyrölä’s study, the vast majority of mainstream media images of
fat bodies make fat into a removable, threatening, continuously disappearing and
reappearing, almost haunting entity. As such, these images produce an ideal viewer
who is expected to fear and reject actual or potential ‘fat’ parts of their bodies,
whether ‘fat’ exists in the concrete now or in the imagined future. Thus, the ideal
viewer’s body image contains fat as a phantom limb of sorts, resembling the way in
which a lost body part can remain a part of a person’s affective body and body
image, feeling as-if-real, although not existing in the flesh (see, for example: Grosz,
1994: 70–79; Sobchack, 2004: 167–174). However, for those who experience their
bodies as fat, the material reality of fat is made to appear unlivable, enforcing a
phantomising of their lived flesh as if it was not fully material. For those who do
not currently live as fat, phantom fat still becomes a part of their body images as
potentiality: threatening abstract flesh which can grab onto them materially anytime without continuous rejection and management. Therefore Kyrölä argues that
images of fat are never only about fat. They play a key part in managing our
relation to corporeal boundaries, openness and vulnerability overall.
As both approaches try to grasp experiences as well as representations of corporeality that simultaneously exist and do not exist in a fully fleshed or lived sense,
they also point to questions about the relations between the body and the self,
materiality and imagination. As such, these analyses relate to ongoing efforts in
feminist theory to rethink corporeality beyond the visible or graspable (Salamon,
2010; Blackman, 2012; Solander, 2014) and as multiple, open potentialities (Weiss,
1999; Blackman, 2008). Our intention is not to summarise our respective research
projects with their multifaceted materials in this article, but we use ‘phantom fat’
and ‘liminal fat’ as routes to make suggestions and raise questions in relation to
wider feminist studies’ discussions. We ask: 1) what the two conceptualisations
might suggest for understanding the relationship between or mutual constitution
of experience and representation; 2) what connects and disconnects fat from other
embodied differences, like gender and trans questions, ‘race’, disability and sexuality, especially when thinking through what qualities are seen as mutable or removable; and 3) how feminist studies could benefit from incorporating fat studies
perspectives into its discussions concerning the body.
Conceptualising fat: Experience and representation
One of the most persistently discussed issues in feminist studies is the question of
how representation and experience enmesh, and how culturally constructed norms
relate to – or disconnect from – lived embodiment (Bray and Colebrook, 1998: 36–
37; Thornham, 2000: 164). However, in practice, empirical research on embodied
experiences and analyses of cultural representations of bodies are often conducted
apart from each other in feminist scholarship, even if the relationality between
images and experiences is in the centre of inquiry. Typical questions address the
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ways in which representations assume things about, position or engage readers or
viewers in embodied ways, or how subjects of empirical research make sense of and
feel about texts or images, but comparisons between experiences and representations are few and far between (for notable exceptions, see, for example: Sobchack,
2004; Coleman, 2009; Skeggs and Wood, 2012). In our view, more comparative or
multi-sited studies are needed. One possible and fruitful way to focus more intently
on the relationality of experience and representation is through collaborative
efforts across disciplinary lines, as is our aim. Our intention in bringing together
‘phantom fat’ as a structure of media representation which enables and limits
viewers’ body images, and ‘liminal fat’ as a structure of fat female experience as
it is produced through cultural norms, is to examine the intertwining of representations of bodies and embodied experiences. Instead of assuming a process of ‘internalisation’, or prioritising one dimension over the other (cf. Bray and Colebrook,
1998: 46–47), we want to juxtapose them and see what that process brings about.
‘Phantom fat’ and ‘liminal fat’ are not the first or only concepts in feminist fat
studies which grapple with the difficult cultural structuring of fat as simultaneously
disappearing and very much existing, both in terms of experience and cultural
discourses. Samantha Murray, for example, terms this a process of ‘unbecoming
(out)’: she notes that ‘the fat body [. . .], in order to be accorded personhood, is
expected to engage in a continuous process of transformation, of becoming and,
indeed, unbecoming’ (2005a: 155). Murray draws on Michael Moon and Eve
Kosofsky Sedgwick’s (2001) article about coming out as a fat woman: unlike the
gay body, the fat body is always already out, as in hypervisible. Thus coming out
cannot mean revealing oneself as fat but, rather, willfully rejecting the imperative
for transformation, and outing oneself as fat and proud. Murray, however, criticises such politics as entailing a simplistic understanding of subjectivity which
assumes a fully volitional self who can simply change their mind about their
body. Instead, she calls for politics of ambiguity that allow for contradicting
feelings and actions around embodiment, and non-unitary subjectivities (2005a:
161–162). On another note, Jeannine Gailey (2014) uses the concept of ‘hyper(in)visibility’ to tackle the paradox of how fat women become hypervisible as objects of
concern within the ‘obesity epidemic’ discourse, while their subjectivities, experiences and bodies remain largely hyperinvisible. Gailey finds that in order to maintain a sense of valuable subjectivity, fat women often focus on their mental abilities
and reject their bodies.
These conceptualisations offer support for our view of how the paradoxes of
embodied subjectivity (and its suspension) that characterise fat experience happen
across cultural divides and on many levels. Murray’s ‘unbecoming’ grasps the
continuous demand for transformation and persistence of fat experience, and
focuses on the volitional and inadvertent actions and processes that fat bodies
take or are pushed into. Gailey’s ‘hyper(in)visibility’ focuses on vision and seeing,
how fat female experiences are structured around ways of being and feeling seen or
not seen. Our conceptualisations of ‘liminal fat’ and ‘phantom fat’ are akin to
Murray’s and Gailey’s ideas regarding the enmeshment of experience and
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representation. However, they tap more directly into questions of temporality, thus
mapping a somewhat different terrain. Significantly, all of these conceptualisations
draw on theoretical and conceptual histories that attach them to scholarship about
other forms of marginalisation.
In Harjunen’s research on Finnish women’s experiences of fatness, the majority
of informants saw the fat body as undesirable, and only a handful of women
directly named themselves or otherwise appeared to identify as ‘fat’. With a few
exceptions, nearly all of the women seemed to consider their ‘real’ body size to be
thin, or saw it as a self-evident goal, whereas fatness was experienced as a nonpermanent and transitional condition. This applied even to those women who said
they had been fat ‘all their lives’ or ‘since early childhood’ (twenty-nine out of
forty-seven). The informants understood fatness as an undesirable and temporally
limited state, or a state in-between. Hence, Harjunen began to consider how fat
experience could be conceptualised through the notion of liminality.
As a concept, liminality originates from the work of social anthropologist
Arnold van Gennep ([1909] 1960) who used it to analyse rites of passage.
Liminality refers specifically to the transitional phase of the rite of passage that
marks a move from one social status or identity to another. The concept has since
also been used for investigations of marginalised experiences, social statuses and
subjectivities that fall between classifications or are otherwise difficult to grasp or
explain. Furthermore, it has been posited that the experience of liminality is not
necessarily transient or temporally limited, and that it can continue even after its
initial cause is no longer present, as in the case of chronic illness (Little et al., 1998).
Understanding experiences of fat as liminal facilitated asking what factors construct and support the idea of fatness as a temporary state even when it is not, and
restrain people from thinking of fatness as a recognised part of their core selves and
embodied subjectivities (cf. LeBesco, 2004: 25–28). Liminality, in this context, is
used to capture the experience of bodily temporariness and the expectation of
controlled bodily transformation, but also how this temporariness paradoxically
becomes a long-term and fixed position, and can continue even if the body changes.
On a similar note as with ‘liminal fat’, the concept of ‘phantom fat’ is used to
address the simultaneous rejection and persistence of fat corporeality. However,
while ‘liminal fat’ conceptualises experiential structures articulated by informants
and shaped by their social surroundings, ‘phantom fat’ derives from thinking
through how the expectation of particular bodily responses is construed through
media images. For example, ‘anti-obesity’ campaigners habitually claim that fat
has not been condemned strongly enough in the media, since statistically people are
not getting any slimmer (Saguy and Riley, 2005; Kyrölä, 2014: 32–33). Such an
argument seems ridiculous, however, in the light of our research projects, as
Harjunen’s informants had understood the ‘message’ overwhelmingly well, and
Kyrölä’s extensive research material from various media and genres shows widespread and increasing repetition and force. It is indeed rather obvious that the bulk
of mainstream media imagery of fat bodies renders fatness visible just to demand
its removal, as in the popular reality TV dieting shows and the news stories on the
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‘obesity epidemic’, or to facilitate its status as ‘not-real’, as in Hollywood’s fat suit
comedies (cf. Wykes, 2012).
‘Phantom fat’ thus offers a way of conceptualising how media images have very
concrete and corporeal effects, even though those effects might not be immediately
visible or measurable in weight lost or gained: they can shape viewers’ body images,
as in their possibilities of living, feeling and seeing their bodies in relation to others.
However, to say that body images are shaped around ‘phantom fat’ is not to say
that body images are ‘distorted’. Indeed, as philosopher Gail Weiss (1999: 87–102)
claims, body images cannot be distorted, since everyone needs a multiplicity of
body images to function, to imagine themselves as multiple and not simply to lose
themselves when their bodies change through life (see also: Gatens, 1994: 39–41).
In Kyrölä’s view, this necessary and fundamental multiplicity is greatly reduced
when fat is culturally ‘amputated’ and personally experienced as an entity
resembling a phantom limb. When bodily mutability and vulnerability are seen
as repudiated qualities, belonging to and demanded of only some bodies instead
of seeing them as potentially productive capacities of all corporeality, body images
become homogenised: too singular, instead of ‘distorted’.
Although resemblance between representational and experiential structures is
rather easy to show, it is more difficult to study actually how – or whether –
phantom fat becomes experienced as liminal fat, or for whom, what is needed
for something else to happen or how to ‘isolate’ the impact of the media from
other contexts. The women in Harjunen’s research who talked about their experiences of fatness did comment on what they saw as an absence of relatable images of
fat people in the media, and they compared their own bodies unfavourably to
media images of thin women which they felt invariably dominate visual culture.
However, the informants discussed other contexts in much more detail than media
images, especially the spaces in everyday life where one’s body feels to be particularly on display, for example at school, in clothing shops, at the doctor’s office, at
the gym, while eating in public and in looking for romantic and sexual partners.
In empirical research, there is never any way of telling where experiences
‘actually’ originate, or what the ‘innermost’ experiences of informants are – or
whether they are simply using the most easily available language to talk about
their experiences which, in this case, culminates in the rejection of fat. Thus, it is
hard to say whether the lesser role given to media in the informants’ accounts
means that media images do not play a very central part in their experience
world, or whether the mechanics of media images’ impact are just so hard to
grasp, notice or put into words, especially when not specifically inquired about.
In examining media images, it is also clear that they cannot solely determine
anyone’s views of their own or others’ bodies, and viewers’ dispositions, bodily
histories and reading practices co-constitute their reactions to images. Therefore,
the juxtaposition between empirical research and media research points to the
limits and possibilities of knowledge produced through them.
However, the juxtaposition also underlines the importance of keeping
experiential and subjugated knowledges (Foucault, 1975) at the forefront of
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feminist scholarship and cultural critique. The potential of experiential and alternative knowledges to contest and redefine how subjugated groups define themselves
and are perceived – and what scientific knowledge means overall – have for some
time been of key importance in feminist thought (Collins, 1991; Haraway, 1991;
Harding, 1993). Accounts and analyses of fat experiences from a feminist perspective have been produced and available for some time (Schoenfelder and Wieser,
1983), even if they have begun to emerge on a larger and more systemic academic
scale more recently (Harjunen, 2009; Owen, 2012; Gailey, 2014). Next, we want to
argue that much of the public (and private) condemnation and inhumanisation of
‘obesity’ is only enabled through bypassing and devaluing the experiential knowledge of those who live in – or in fear of – this so-called ‘obesity’, and through a lack
of understanding for how embodied subjects do not just internalise or reject cultural discourses but live, feel and process them in complex ways.
Feminist ethics and fat aversion
It should come as no surprise that some feminists have also adopted the
‘anti-obesity’ stance which dominates public discourse, taking for granted the
status of fat as a health threat. Next, we want to suggest that controversies in
feminist scholarship on body norms and fat can usefully – and rather brutally –
shed light on what happens when feminist scholars do not pay careful attention
to experiential knowledge and to the living corporeality of subordinated subjects.
Within the relatively recent upsurge of interest in issues of gender, fat and ‘obesity’, feminist scholars can be roughly divided into two broad groups. The first
group is located in the field of fat studies and emphasises the cultural meanings of
fatness as well as its materiality (Braziel and LeBesco, 2001; Rothblum and
Solovay, 2009; Cooper, 2010), and explores fat gendered experiences (as mentioned above), political aspects of ‘obesity’ discourses (LeBesco, 2004; Herndon,
2005; Murray, 2008) and morality and moralism around weight issues (Skeggs,
2005; Throsby, 2007). Representatives of this group challenge the medical calls to
cure and protect from ‘obesity’ as often serving capitalist, sexist, classist and
racist politics, and for many, a part of the solution is to detach health
promotion from weight management through advocating Health at Every Size
(HAES) policies (Bacon et al., 2005). This direction is evident, for instance, in the
journal Fat Studies which was launched in 2012, and in several special issues on
fat studies and feminism, for example in the journals Social Semiotics (Murray,
2005b), Somatechnics (Murray, 2012a) and Feminism & Psychology (Murray,
2012b).
The second group of feminist scholars, however, seems oblivious to the field of
feminist fat studies and feminist critiques of medical knowledge production – when it
comes to weight and health. For example, some representatives of this group often
criticise bodily normativities but advocate weight-loss dieting at the same time without seeing the paradox in that (Bovey, 2002; Orbach, 1987; for more critical
discussion of this approach, see: Cooper, 1998: 2; Cooper, 2010: 1027–1028).
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Other arguments in this group can be critical of and sensitive to forms of gendered, racialised and/or class oppression, but they also maintain an implicit or
explicit rejection of fat which they see as a structurally induced health problem
(Berlant, 2007; Yancey et al., 2006; Probyn, 2008) – an environmental issue, as
Anna Kirkland (2011) has termed it.
The feminist academic bypassing of the cultural construction of ‘fat’ and feminist fat studies can at times be interpreted as a result of the relative marginality of
the field. General discussions and introductions to feminist and cultural theorising
on the body (Bordo, 2003; Blackman, 2008; Moore and Kosut, 2010; Featherstone,
2010) may pay careful attention to gendered, racialised and sexualised body management culture through the slender, grooming, dieting, eating disordered or surgically modified body, but include little or no attention to questions of fat, despite
fat’s status as a key site of anxieties over bodily excess and fluidity today. In this
light, it is indeed interesting to ponder what are currently considered so-called
‘must’ areas of feminist thought on the body and ‘subtopics’ that can or cannot
be ignored. How, why and how long can fields such as feminist fat studies remain in
the inclusion-optional category? While we do not wish to make any simplistic
demands of ‘adding fat’, we propose that feminist thought on corporeality could
benefit from engaging even more thoroughly with questions of fat. Such engagement could lead, for example, to considerations of the enmeshment of body size
and gender legibility (White, 2014), or address the challenges that fat poses for
overall ideals of individuality in its appearance as ‘too undifferentiated and undifferentiating’ (Solander, 2014).
The feminist scholars who engage with questions of fat out of concern for fat
people’s health tend to adopt or accept a medical, problem-focused view on fatness.
The problem with the medical view is that it is often narrow in scope: the aim is to
‘cure’ the fat body by medical means, and the social, cultural, political and
economic factors constructing and affecting the body are left unexplored. By labeling fat bodies as categorically risky, unhealthy or deadly, and narrowly defining
normal and healthy bodies as only thin – but not too thin – bodies, the medical
discourse has most significantly, even if partly inadvertently, contributed to fat
marginalisation and the production of fat as ‘liminal’ and ‘phantom’. This view
characteristically makes scientific truth claims about what fat is, without asking
how it is experienced or felt, defining and representing fat people from the outside.
A fitting example of the latter stance is an article called ‘Obesity at the
Crossroads: Feminist and Public Health Perspectives’ by Antronette K. Yancey,
Joanne Leslie and Emily Abel (2006) published in the feminist journal Signs:
Journal of Women in Culture and Society. The writers claim that feminists have
been silent about the ‘obesity epidemic’ – incorrectly, since there were already
several articles and book chapters of feminist critiques of the ‘obesity’ discourse
circulating well before the article’s publication (Cooper, 1998; Braziel and LeBesco,
2001; LeBesco, 2004; Herndon, 2005; see also: Kirkland, 2011: 469). According to
Yancey, Leslie and Abel, feminists are therefore failing especially lower class
women of colour who are disproportionately affected by the said epidemic. The
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authors suggest that feminists should explore ways to eradicate ‘obesity’ and offer
solutions to control it, rather than study the harmful effects of the thin ideal
(Yancey et al., 2006: 436–437). The suggested goal for feminists is then to fight
fat stigma and ‘obesity’, as in the existence of fat, at the same time (Yancey et al.,
2006: 437). As pointed out by Kirkland (2011: 468), the starting point for Yancey,
Leslie and Abel is the assumption that the dominant public health account of the
dangers of ‘obesity’ is the unquestionable truth.
This theoretical fat acceptance through concern for fat people’s well-being contradicts the concern for the enduring existence of fat bodies. The authors disregard
the experiences of fat, poor women of colour while rendering them ‘others’ among
women and objectifying them as targets of medical and/or psychological practices
and feminist ‘help’, rather than equal participants in feminist struggles (cf. Haggis
and Schech, 2000). Kirkland (2011: 465) stresses further that regardless of good
intentions, the solutions proposed in this kind of account end up being moralising,
patronising and punitive. Fat people are only acceptable subjects as potentially
size-normative bodies of the future, just as in the structure of liminal fat. Yancey,
Leslie and Abel’s discussion also follows the representational structure of phantom
fat: fat is only brought up so its removal can be demanded, and this demand
separates ‘fat’ as an abstract, unliving substance from the people actually living
it. Fat bodies as bases for complex and valuable embodied subjectivities and collectivities, and indeed for feminist agency and activism, remain unthinkable for the
authors.
The combination of societal criticism and adoption of the medical equation
between fat and ill-health or death has also been incorporated into the writings
of some well-known feminist and cultural theorists. One such case is Lauren
Berlant’s essay ‘Slow Death (Sovereignty, Obesity, Lateral Agency)’ which uses
‘obesity’ as an example of how contemporary capitalist culture pulls people into
patterns, practices and bodily states that simultaneously sustain them and shatter
them (2007: 759). This notion of self-medication through self-interruption (Berlant,
2007: 777) is an essential argument also in Berlant’s (2011) broader, rich analysis of
‘cruel optimism’ as a condition of life under capitalism. She thus reads ‘objectively
obese’ bodies from the outside as self-evident signs of those bodies’ desperate inner
states and relations to the world (see also: Kirkland, 2011: 469). She mentions but
dismisses critical fat studies, instead presenting as a fact the medical scientific view
of ‘obesity’ as disease, although this so-called fact is also a product of the capitalist
culture she critiques (see, for example: Campos, 2004; Harjunen, 2017).
Although Berlant does not demand the eradication of fat in the future, she does
see fat (or ‘globesity’ in her terms) as a condition that signals ‘deterioration’ (2007:
754), life turning against itself. But in our view, this is not what fat is or ontologically does to bodies. Rather, Berlant’s text repeats the representational structure
of phantom fat when she implicitly but clearly distinguishes between fat as inanimate flesh that slows down but just barely does not kill embodied agency, and the
more animate, non-fat ‘normal’ body which does not lend itself as readily to
deterioration. Experiential knowledge and the possibility of not experiencing fat
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as reduced embodied agency or a self-disruptive condition never enter the picture.
Berlant’s arguments, as Kirkland (2011: 480–481) maintains, would be much more
powerful without connecting human misery under capitalism so deterministically
to specific kinds of bodies. As it is, these kinds of statements have very grave ethical
implications: what does it mean to state as a fact that some bodies are dead weight,
literally slow death, when people are in fact living those bodies permanently?
Splitting selves, malleable bodies
Berlant’s unfortunate use of fat as a metaphor for deterioration brings us to a
question that can be seen to concern feminist studies much more broadly: what
body parts or qualities are seen as inseparable from the whole (or coherent) ‘self’,
the embodied subject, before that self becomes unlivable – or unrecognisable to
themselves and to others? What bodily qualities and identity categories are seen as
fixed or transformable, and to what degrees?
One key strategy in ‘phantomising’ fat is its separation from lived bodies as
threatening matter, at once abstract and very material: fat thus becomes a fetish
object. This happens particularly forcefully in news and documentary media that
claim to be purely informative, neutral in terms of affective charge. In Sara
Ahmed’s (2004: 92–94) discussion on the politics of fear, an object, body or concept
becomes a fetish object when it is distanced from the material contexts and histories
which give it depth and complexity, and recycled as a simplified, condensed sign of
threat. When fat is portrayed as a fetish object, it is separated from actual, living fat
people and becomes a life-threatening quality that renders gender, ‘race’, class,
ability and personal history as factors that have little to no impact on what fatness
feels like or means. When fatness is attached to a person, it suddenly flattens their
multifaceted corporeal existence into one denominator, deemed dangerous for not
only the person but for others whose economic resources and aesthetic sensibilities
are supposedly invaded by fat bodies. Fat also becomes flattened in itself into a
substance that means the same regardless of where, for whom, how, when, to what
degree and against what historical background it exists.
In a way that resonates with the fetishising and ‘phantomising’ of fat in the
media, the respondents in Harjunen’s study also often saw fat as separate from
their experience of the self. Lesleigh Owen, in her study of the spatial experience of
fatness, identifies the same tendency and terms it a coping strategy of ‘disembodiment’ (2012: 300–302): a failure or refusal to recognise one’s fat body as one’s own
to avoid being fully implicated in the negative connotations of fatness. Harjunen’s
respondents frequently used phrases such as ‘inside the fat body there is a thin
person trying to get out’ and its many variations to describe themselves, splitting
themselves into inner ‘normal’ or ‘true’ selves, tied to the potential of slimness, and
the ‘outer’ body characterised above all by fatness. Most of the informants wanted
to be slimmer and had dieted repeatedly in the past or were actively trying to lose
weight at the time of research. The splitting of bodies and selves appears to give
reassurance (to oneself and others) that one’s body can never fully capture or even
Kyrölä and Harjunen
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begin to reflect the inner world of the person. In effect, however, the constant
challenging of the legitimacy of the fat body still ends up challenging the validity
of the whole self.
This tendency in representing, discussing and experiencing fat can be compared
to a form of humanism, where all people regardless of their differences are understood as being the ‘same’ underneath. This also forms a possible basis for demanding equality. One of the problems with such an approach is that the ‘same
underneath’ tends still to be predicated on the norm of a male, white, western,
affluent, heterosexual and able-bodied subject, and those outside that subject position must fight for their validity and inclusion. In the case of fat experience, a
similar mechanism becomes strikingly visible, but with a twist. The authentic self
living ‘underneath’ is visualised as slender, but perhaps because the idea that fat
can and must be removed is so culturally normalised and pressing, fat rights,
protection and equality have not (yet) become widely recognised issues. It is as if
only when people are believed to be utterly unable to change their ‘difference’ that
their existence in that difference becomes something of value.
We do not wish to make simple additive or alignment arguments here, that fat
must be included more, or that fat should be seen in relation to slim as female in
relation to male, or the like (cf. White, 2014: 86–87). Fat as well as slim people’s
experiences and cultural representations are thoroughly shaped by their various
gendered, sexual, ethnic and class positions, and no body’s complexity can or
should be reduced to one quality. In an article that also inspires our approach,
Francis Ray White (2014: 89–91) explores the ways in which fat and gender legibility are enmeshed in complex ways through experiences of trans people whose
bodies’ recognisability as specifically gendered can be limited or enabled by fat, or
others’ perception of them as fat or not fat can depend on whether they are seen as
male or female. White’s study further points out how both trans and fat politics
depend on the malleability of the body, but in somewhat different ways. Trans
politics have embraced the possibilities opened up by myriad body moulding technologies in today’s surgical, medical, cosmetic and workout culture to move bodies
along the gender spectrum – while also recognising that bodily materiality is always
unpredictable. For fat politics, however, these moulding possibilities are imperatives which not only possibly, but most likely, result in experiences of failure, as
permanent weight loss happens only very rarely (Kassirer and Angell, 1998; SarlioLähteenkorva, 1999: 58, 63; Green et al., 2009). When the option to transform
becomes a demand, fatness as a valid and valuable corporeal position to exist in
fades from view both culturally and personally. As Rebecca Coleman (2012) has
suggested in relation to contemporary visual culture more broadly, the ‘imperative
of transformation’ draws in bodies through aspirational temporality where a better
future is the focus of attention. However, the bodies for which this investment in
the future becomes an imperative are also those whose present is perceived to be
difficult or unlivable as it is.
White, following Murray (2008), makes a call for fat politics which would not
need to insist on the non-malleability of the body but could take the ambiguity and
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malleability of all bodies and selves as its starting point. In her study, Kyrölä came
to a somewhat similar argument: that if instability was seen as a fundamental and
valuable part of all corporeality, then some bodies, such as fat bodies, would not
have to carry the weight of the fear that has to do with bodily vulnerability and
uncontrollable change. However, changeability is currently connected to different
bodily qualities in varying ways, with varying degrees of assumed self-control, and
varying politics.
Keeping this in mind, even a very rough comparison between the ways in which
malleability and intentionality relate to fat, gender, ethnicity/‘race’, ability and
class can highlight how these categories intertwine in complex ways. As feminist
and trans scholarship has shown, gender is indeed a malleable category, although
gender appearance and recognition is not simply something one can choose at will,
and trans people regularly have to struggle with the idea that ‘true’ biological
gender leaves a trace even through surgical modifications. To be seen as female
or male or somewhere else on the gender spectrum depends both on the physicality
and materiality of the body, including its movements, clothing and adornment, and
on cultural ideas and representations of what gender means and looks like (see, for
example: Salamon, 2010). Moulding one’s body so that its gendered appearance
thoroughly changes often requires time and effort, and the degree of success for
reaching the desired results varies, but it is certainly possible and increasingly
legally and medically supported in many parts of the world. Gender is, however,
a category generally seen as essential for a sense of self, as it is for legal personhood, most identification documents requiring gender specification.
‘Race’, on the other hand, is seen as much more permanent, even though the
very idea is also a floating signifier (Hall, 1997) and its definitions relational and
context-bound. Changing one’s skin tone, or other bodily characteristics marked as
racialising, is perceived as a politically suspect act, if not an outright condemnable
sign of racism imposed on and internalised by subjects – while it is simultaneously
physically possible and very popular in different parts of the world (see, for
example: Davis, 2003). When it comes to ability, some forms of mental disability
are considered changeable but most often not (solely) through one’s own efforts,
while physical disability is usually not seen as one’s ‘own fault’: rather, it appears to
compromise ideals of the autonomous subject, and malleability becomes more a
question of one’s environment and orientations in space than personal volition
(see, for example: Shildrick, 2009). But disability is also heavy with the expectation
of wanting to be able-bodied and of wanting to aspire towards able-bodied lives as
fully as possible (simulate walking or sitting), even if the expectation of actually
becoming able-bodied is not really there. In other words, the biomedical discourse
on disability can be seen to perform ‘compulsory able-bodiedness’ (McRuer, 2006;
see also: Vaahtera, 2012).
In terms of perceived changeability and personal autonomy, fat comes perhaps
closest to class. Upward class mobility is seen as possible in the neoliberal imagination, and indeed almost necessarily achievable if enough effort is put into the task,
much as with moving from fat to ‘normal’ size. Inability to change is regularly
Kyrölä and Harjunen
111
interpreted as lack of effort and a personal failure, with little regard for how
material conditions, structures of inequality or a sense of belonging and identity
might hinder class mobility (Harjunen, 2017). Also, if another status is achieved,
the danger of ‘falling back’ is continuously present, much like with fat and the
constant ‘danger’ and likelihood of regaining weight after weight-loss dieting.
However, fat and class legibility are also intimately connected in a partly similar
vein as fat and gender legibility. Fatness may be statistically more common in lower
socioeconomic groups, but it is not limited to any demographic. Still, in contemporary western popular culture, the fat body and particularly the fat female body
have begun to signify low class or working class status (LeBesco, 2007; Skeggs,
2005).
Fat stigma is tightly connected to one bodily quality that has been culturally
marked as hypervisible, but that does not make fatness stand apart from other
differences. Fat’s contemporary particularity lies in the most commonly presented
‘solution’ to improve fat people’s lives in an oppressive environment: to remove the
visible quality seen as the cause of the ‘problem’. This solution is presented as being
in the best interest not only of fat people but of all people who, according to the
logic of the ‘phantom fat’, are also threatened by fat. If such a suggestion was made
today about gender or ‘race’ – that the solution to racism was to bleach non-white
people’s skins, or the solution to sexism was gender reassignment surgery – that
suggestion would be considered unfathomable, outrageous or simply a joke.
In the case of homosexuality, something similar has of course been attempted
through the infamous sexual conversion therapy practices (Erzen, 2006), with no
success and dire consequences to the mental health of participants. Still, these are
not necessarily any more or less radical changes to the body, or to one’s self, than
those proposed by the fully normalised and widely accepted demands to eradicate
fat.
The question of bodily transformations necessarily involves questions of body
image also due to their temporal dimension, when body image is understood as the
ability to endure various bodily changes without losing the capacity to function in
one’s body, and as the ability to imagine oneself in the past and future (Gatens,
1994: 31–37). Even when the body has not lost weight or changed shape yet, the
promise of future full selfhood already moves the fat self towards the slim image
that lingers ahead, instead of living and feeling with the body in the now. The fat
body suspended in the ‘before’ of undoing itself, even if that ‘before’ is ‘now’, is
denied as an image with a potential future, limiting the body image by limiting the
potential to endure not changing. In this sense, not changing can feel as radical for
one’s body image and sense of self as changing.
Thus we arrive back at ‘phantom fat’ and ‘liminal fat’. Both concepts, arriving
from different directions, try to capture the oppressiveness of an orientation
towards the future that obscures the vast varieties of fully livable corporeality
and the potential pleasure of the now. It seems to us, then, that a sense of
some core self can be much more sustainable in everyday experiences than a
perception of the self as a forever ongoing project of transmuting into something
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else entirely – transformation which easily becomes lived as an imperative
(see: Coleman, 2012). In queer and feminist criticism of identity politics, drawing
for example on Judith Butler’s (1990) work on gender performativity, it has become
common to argue against core selves and stable identities as naturalised maintenance of gendered and sexed hierarchies. In so-called new materialist feminist
writings, corporeality is seen as always multiple, porous, proliferating and
becoming, and its malleability is usually welcomed rather than critically interrogated (Blackman, 2008). In line with the latter direction, Tove Solander (2014) has
convincingly argued for using fat as a key concept for ‘gut feminism’: fat can be
understood as a substance that productively dismantles the integrity of the subject,
simultaneously impersonal and densely sensual and visceral, connected to the
feminine through the fear of incorporation. Indeed, perceiving the body as a perpetually continuing process, and fat as an integrity-dismantling substance, could be
empowering in terms of mobilising bodies from fixation into limiting norms and
categorisations – in theory. In practice, however, the problem is that the failure or
refusal to engage in continuous and clearly visualisable bodily transformation
comes at a high price, especially for fat persons. Fat subjectivity and corporeality
as valid, valuable and possibly permanent conditions are not recognised in the
logics of endless malleability. We do not want to reinstate any idea of a stable
core identity or ‘self’ that has to somehow visibly coincide with the body, as
that would only repeat the structure of a ‘thin person living inside’ and waiting
for the body to coincide with that self. Nonetheless, we do wish to account for the
temporal and material persistence of corporeality, the persistence and necessity of a
feeling of a self that inhabits and lives the body in the present, in all its messiness
and ambiguity.
Beyond fat specificity
As we have highlighted, notions both of liminal fat and phantom fat are designed to
try to grasp the mechanisms which make possible the separation of fat from livable,
‘normal’ selves both in personal experiences and in cultural representations – even
when the current body is felt and lived as fat. Both concepts, as we have used and
developed them, thus focus primarily on conditions of marginalisation and subordination. However, it is worth noting that liminal states and corporeal phantom
experiences are also mundane parts of our lives as embodied beings and not
unavoidably negative or limiting: many of us dwell, flourish, as well as get stuck
in between categories; some parts of our bodies or our bodily potential may feel
permanently or fleetingly strange and ‘phantom’ to us. These aspects of liminal and
phantom corporeality would indeed be worthy of more investigation, even though
they fall outside the scope of this article. The problem is not that corporeality is a
mixture of persistence and malleability, of material and immaterial forces, but that
the boundary between ‘essential’ and ‘removable’ corporeality becomes too fixed
and unrelentingly managed.
Kyrölä and Harjunen
113
The expectation of removability, along with the understanding of fat as a question
of personal choice and volition, connect fat to, as well as distinguish it from, other
axes of difference. Population management and pathologisation of groups based on
ethnicity, ‘race’, sexuality, ability and gender are practices very much happening
around us in everyday life and are targets of keen inquiry and critique in feminist,
queer and anti-racist studies and politics. These practices are also happening in the
name of fat, intersecting with other axes of difference, and weight plays a notable role
in estimations of whose lives are worthy of respect, sustenance and acknowledgement. Feminist studies has an ethical imperative not to accept or condone the practice of connecting groups of people, or forms of embodiment, to death and danger as
if these groups stood as their signifiers. We feel that a key in answering the call of this
ethical project is that feminist studies and theorising on embodiment must remain
based on a critical understanding of the limits of medical knowledge production in
terms of health and body weight, just as in questions of gender, sexuality and ‘race’.
Feminist thought has a rich history of challenging hegemonic ‘truths’ about marginalised bodies, of ‘disobedience to social norms about health and appearance’
(Kirkland, 2011: 480) and of interrogating prejudices and uncomfortable hierarchies
within feminisms. That history should not be forgotten but utilised extensively also in
considering matters of weight. We aim at mindful inspection of fat as an experience
as well as a cultural concept with material consequences, not merely as an abstraction or inanimate weight, in order to call for the relevance of feminist fat studies not
only for those currently identifiable as fat but as a key issue in today’s management
of corporeality much more broadly.
We have also briefly suggested and highlighted some ways in which the perspective of fat, and the contributions of feminist fat studies, can open up theoretical and
analytical vistas for feminist scholarship on corporeality. Since what is categorically considered a normative body size is always subject to change, and the borders
of the acceptable body are always shifting alongside other shifting power relations,
discussions about fat have consequences and meanings that reach far beyond questions of fat specificity, as we have demonstrated. By phantomising the fat body or
condemning it to the margins by positioning it as liminal, ‘proper’ boundaries of
the body are being effectively pushed into shape in material, although not always
measurable or visible, ways. This concerns all bodies, not just the ones that are
currently perceived as non-normative.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their insightful and helpful comments,
as well as Greg Seigworth, Susanna Paasonen, Mari Pajala and Emmi Vähäpassi for encouragement and careful feedback on an earlier draft of this article.
Notes
1. For example: Cooper (1998); Braziel and LeBesco (2001); LeBesco (2004); Murray (2008);
Rothblum and Solovay (2009); Farrell (2011); Gailey (2014); Pausé et al. (2014) etc.
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2. For further reading on how the term ‘fat’ rejects the pathology implied in the terms
‘overweight’ and ‘obese’, see for example: Campos (2004); Saguy and Riley (2005);
Murray (2008: 2–5).
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