Thickening Theory: Memoir, Affect, and Fat Feminist Futures

Abstract

This dissertation is about the epistemological potential of fat life writing at the intersection of affect and embodiment. While the field of Fat Studies has its roots in liberation movements of the 1960s and 1970s (Wykes, 2014), contemporary 'body positivity' has commodified feminist ideologies to promote a sanitized fat politic that seeks participation in normative structures or what Da'Shaun L. Harrison (2021) calls "Desire/ability" (p. 12). Moreover, feminist studies has, at times, been epistemically ignorant around issues of 'fat', despite a feminist interest in the body and its meanings. As healthism and neoliberal ideals of individual responsibility have taken root, particularly through 'body positivity' and Health at Every Size (BP/HAES), a singular, "problematic model of fat subjectivity" (Murray, 2005, p. 155) has emerged.

This project endeavours to contribute to ideas of messiness, ambiguity, and an acknowledgement of the contradictions of fat life, thereby challenging the assimilationism and achievement feminism (Farrell, 2021) at the centre of contemporary fat politics and thickening existing approaches to fat. Following the history of personal narrative in feminist theory, works by authors Roxane Gay, Lindy West, and Samantha Irby are analyzed in this thesis, highlighting the everyday affective encounters they archive with an emphasis on the role of race, queerness, and disability. Through their own stylistic and tonal choices, each author generates important contributions to fat studies' interest in cultural depictions of fatness, particularly the ways in which fat bodies are shaped by and shape the world. By mobilizing the work of Hil Malatino on "side affects" (2022), Sianne Ngai's "ugly feelings" (2005), Rosemarie Garland-Thomson's "misfitting" (2011), and Sara Ahmed's (2006; 2010) work on orientations and affect, this project aims to strengthen fat epistemology and contribute to a fattening of feminist studies which takes seriously the uncomfortable, the ugly, and the irreverent.