Abstract
Reviewed by: Breanne Fahs, Arizona State University, USA
In first glancing at the cover of Helen Hester and Caroline Walters’ edited collection, Fat Sex: New Directions in Theory and Activism, I immediately thought of James Baldwin’s (1985) claim in Nobody Knows My Name that “The artistic image is not intended to represent the thing itself, but, rather, the reality of the force the thing contains” (p. 47). The cover of their book, a black and white image of a fat woman lying on her side, with three prominent (non-disguised) fat rolls and a coiled, shaded spine, was striking. I could not stop staring at it. For days I wondered why it seemed so utterly startling to me. This is a body with which I maintain intimate knowledge—it is the body of my mother and sister, my aunts, my grandmother, myself. It is a body for which I have immense fondness, and yet, it was made suddenly strange to me, striking, arresting even, by its appearance on this book cover. This thing—a simple image of an eroticized fat body—contains, as Baldwin (1985) would say, a “force.” Hester and Walters consider in intimate, artistic, personal, psychological, sociological, and critical ways the force of fat sex.
Fat and sex are rarely placed in any proximity, either within or outside academia, and the mere suggestion that they might be twinned, that fat bodies could be sexual, or (shudder to think) are already sexual often violates a core taboo about representations of sexuality. Like menstruating vaginas, fat people’s sexuality is driven underground, imagined rarely, represented with shame, embarrassment, and chastisement rather than with celebration or embrace. This collection operates in multiple ways to shatter the unspoken rule of silencing and erasing fat sexualities: first, it prioritizes visibility by simply existing, by imagining fat sex (and not, notably, fat sexualities—a far more cerebral and less fleshy word) as valid and important. Second, the collection finds what is hidden in plain sight, showcasing fat bodies and fat eroticisms as always/already there. Third, the book looks at fat sex not as an individual experience (though individual experiences of fat sex are also featured) but as part of a larger conversation within fat studies; in short, they argue that fat studies has neglected the material, concrete, embodied, corporeal experiences of fat sex by instead focusing on broader debates about fat identity, fat activism, and critiques of fat phobic institutions. Hester and Walters have signaled a challenge to the fat studies literature and related fields to imagine, theorize about, and represent the eroticized fat (female) body.
Organizationally, the book moves through four sections, first considering “Fat Histories, Fat Communities” by examining the history of fat as a feminist issue (and its attendant debates and critiques starting with grassroots organizing in the 1970s through to the “fatosphere” of the 2000s) (Zora Simic), followed by a consideration of why fat sex has been largely neglected in academic writing in fat studies, particularly as these studies emphasize women’s body shame (Cat Pausé). Part two, “Fat Gender Politics,” includes three essays that examine how gender, fat, and sex intersect, including a provocative qualitative study on fat sexual empowerment (Jeannine Gailey), an engaging essay on working-class fat femininities and the cultural shift away from seeing the working-class body as hardworking and respectable (Frances Hatherley), and an enjoyable piece on a campy fat beauty pageant called Hamburger Queen in early 2010s London (Vikki Chalklin). Part three, “The Pornography of Fat,” takes up in two chapters the incredibly complex question of how fat women are represented in a genre that is “openly hostile to their very existence” (p. 8), first through an edgy qualitative study of fat-identified queer porn performers (Natalie Ingraham) and then through a study of fat viewership of fat pornography and the immense ambiguities and contradictions inherent in representing accurately and adequately the fat body in pornography (Katrine Smiet and Goda Klumbyte). The book ends with part four, “Culturally (In)Visible Bodies,” which includes three chapters that focus on fat sex in literature, including a chapter on Amy Lowell’s poetry about fatness (Sarah Parker), a chapter on Margaret Atwood’s Lady Oracle (Michelle Green), and a piece on Blake Butler’s EVER (Laura Ellen Joyce). Interspersed throughout the book are “creative interludes” of first-hand accounts of fat sex, including an autobiographical essay by Jennifer Lee, a poem by Alison Winch, and a small-but-mighty memoir by Kimberly Dark.
The movement through the text works exceptionally well, as the book’s introduction and the first two chapters work collectively as a strong indictment of the existing literature that has too often erased and ignored fat sex. The subsequent chapters, in their increasing specificity, make new spaces for fat sex across a spectrum of fields. Methodologically, as chapters move from qualitative interviews to personal narratives to cultural studies essays to analyses of artistic and performance pieces, we get to hop through a variety of locations, time periods, and political moments. The only weak aspects of the collection are that the book rarely considers fat masculinities (described only briefly in Chapter 7), and does not always lay claim explicitly to its political identity as a collection. I wanted more strong and explicit statements about its feminist politics, for example, just as I wanted more specificity about the problems of fat phobia for fat people as they imagine their sexual possibilities. While I did not personally always find the arguments compelling for each part of each chapter—for example, the two chapters on fat sex in pornography could have more pointedly critiqued the appropriation of fat bodies as a “fetish” in online porn—these reactions only testify to the provocative qualities of the book as a whole.
Fat Sex has many strong points—too many to name, in fact—making it an excellent addition to any academic’s collection of embodiment and fat studies work. It fuses creative work with academic work in a thoughtful way (I was especially taken with Kimberly Dark’s “Coming out fat” at the end of the book.). The authors in this collection take on not only contemporary debates within fat studies but also insert themselves into territories previously imagined as off limits to fat studies scholars (e.g. porn studies, fat working-class sexualities). Also, the collection meaningfully considers the overlaps between activism and academia, seeing activism in broader and more multifaceted ways than it is typically imagined in academic discourse (and, of course, seeing academics as having responsibilities to behave as activists!). They write, for example, “This book seeks to demonstrate some of the ways in which academics are also activists and activists are also academics, since the boundaries between these two seemingly commonsensical categories are often less clear-cut than they might appear” (p. 4). Finally, the book also moves a subject—fat sex—from “outlaw” texts like zines, blogs, Tumblr accounts, underground documents, manifestos, music, and performance art to more formalized academic discourse. While this shift always comes with various hazards, the editors and contributors in this collection manage to do this without erasing the importance and impact of the outlaw texts that came before this book.
Because the essays are so accessible, well-written, and cutting edge in their grounding in issues that impact women right at this moment (e.g. social media issues, fusion between activism and academia, etc.), professors who teach undergraduate and graduate courses in women and gender studies, American studies, literary studies, sexuality studies, sociology, and psychology could well adopt this text to ensure that provocative and up-to-date conversations occur in the classroom about fat bodies and fat sexualities. Some questions this text will provoke: How can fat women be and feel sexual, especially in a sex-positive way, in a culture that strips them of affirming self-images? What do the silences and absences of fat sex do, not only to fat bodies but to all marginalized bodies and sexualities? Why must fatness be included in conversations about intersectionality, particularly when dealing with the material inequalities women face? Finally, what sorts of new insights and understandings can we generate about fat sex and its related concepts like fatness and orgasm, fatness and sexual health, fat sexual resistance, fat infertility/fertility discourse, fat sex and adolescence, and beyond? This book is about mapping the emerging subfield of fat sex and fat sexualities; Hester and Walters implicitly and explicitly make an argument for academics doing the same in their course syllabi and in their academic imagination—make room for fat sex.