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For standing up for your rights, such as access to appropriate care, you need to also recognize the physical side of fat, Mollow ( 2015: 207) claims.
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Mollow ( 2015), for instance, cautions that fat should not only be approached from a social model angle because that would result in a negation of fat’s physical side. This shift away from the social model towards a materialist-oriented approach could also be productive for understanding fat. Contemporary voices within disability studies, however, argue that we miss the full extent of the phenomenon of disability if we only embrace the social model (Shakespeare 2013), or if we do not account for the material relations between body and environment (Garland‐Thomson 2011). As is well-known, disability studies distinguish between the medical and the social model, whereas the former entails the view that impairments imply a physical or mental defect in an individual, the latter holds that it is the society that produces disability (Oliver 1996). Precisely because critical fat studies aim at achieving political and social goals such as countering discrimination and stigma, and adapting public spaces to larger bodies, it is fruitful to look at fat from a disability studies perspective (Mollow 2015). Because of this criticism, they tend to take discussions about fat out of the medical domain and turn them into a political discussion (e.g., LeBesco 2004). Fat scholars criticize this view for several reasons not in the least because it is not at all self-evident that a fat body can be turned into a thin body (Gaesser 2009 Harding and Kirby 2009 Kolata 2007). From a medical and public health perspective, fat is seen as a health problem localized in an individual body, which subsequently can be solved by adjusting that individual body to the norm (through dieting, more exercise, or surgery). Critical fat studies thus counter the dominant medical view on fat according to which fat bodies are considered as deviating from “normal” body weight. Fat acceptance and body positivity movements strive to show that fat embodiment, instead of being “deviant,” involves a type of embodiment that fits within the range of human body diversity. In contemporary discussions about the negative meaning of fat, spearheaded by critical fat studies, emphasis on politics of inclusion is therefore seminal. Needless to say, lipoliteracy almost always goes together with overt and unabashed discrimination and stigmatization of fat people. Yet, I believe that some of his ideas on the body and writing can be helpful to understand fat from an alternative perspective. Nancy’s philosophy involves an ontology of the body, which pertains to the body as such, and does not include analyses of different types of embodiment, such as fat embodiment.
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This paper aims to mobilize the way we think and write about fat bodies while interpreting Gay’s memoir through the conceptual lens of Jean-Luc Nancy’s philosophy of the body. Fat, indeed, has a very negative meaning. In today’s Western societies, fat is often only seen as a signifier for the following pejorative traits: being unhealthy, stupid, gluttonous, lazy, clumsy, and incompetent. This is a telling example of what Graham has termed “lipoliteracy,” i.e., reading fat for what we believe it tells us about a person ( 2005: 178). Most people, she writes, think very little of fat people, assuming that they are neither smart nor capable (2017: 241). In her memoir Hunger (2017), Roxane Gay, a feminist writer and academic, claims that people are often very surprised to see that a fat person could be so successful. The corpus of corpulence that Gay has created gives voice to the precariousness of a fat body's materialization. Moreover, I propose that Gay’s writing style-hesitating and circling – involves an example of corpus-writing. In my analysis, I identify how the materiality of fat engenders the meaning of embodiment, and how it shapes how a fat body can and cannot be a body. To apply Nancy’s conceptual frame to a concrete manifestation of fat embodiment, I provide a reading of Roxane Gay’s memoir Hunger (2017). Additionally, Nancy’s idea of the body in terms of a “corpus”-a collection of pieces without a unity-together with his idea of corpus-writing-fragmentary writing, without head and tail-can help us to mobilize fixed meanings of fat. As such, it can help us to understand the lived experiences of fat embodiment. His philosophy, so I argue, offers a form of materialism that allows for a phenomenological exploration of the body. I introduce Nancy’s approach to the body as an addition to contemporary new materialism. This paper aims to mobilize the way we think and write about fat bodies while drawing on Jean-Luc Nancy’s philosophy of the body.