Shame-Soaked Selves: Self-Policing the Hyper(in)visible Fat Female Body

Abstract

Broadly situated in feminist theory and fat studies, this thesis puts forth a cultural analysis of autobiographical writings on fat female embodiment by making use of mixed theoretical frameworks around the regime of visibility, body- and self-policing, and a phenomenological understanding of fat embodiment, to examine the ways in which hierarchically structured ideas about femininity, desirability and size are constructed and policed on the fat female body. In order to understand in what way shame functions in fat women’s embodiment and their internalization of normative ideas about gender, size, and desirability, I have analyzed fat activist Virgie Tovar’s book You Have the Right to Remain Fat: A Manifesto (2018) as well as selected chapters from the nonfiction anthology Scoot Over, Skinny: The Fat Nonfiction Anthology (2005), edited by Donna Jarrell and Ira Sukrungruang. The key themes that emerge from my analysis of these works include self- and body policing, hyper(in)visibility, and the material-semiotic relation between the sign fat and the corporeality of fatness. Fat women’s bodies exist in a dual state of hypervisibility and hyperinvisibility. In response to this hyper(in)visibility, fat women may increasingly police themselves and experience a split between their bodies and their selves. Through my analysis of the interconnectedness of self- and body policing, hyper(in)visibility, the affect of shame, and the corporeal experience of fat female embodiment, identifying the body as the site on which normative constructions of femininity are reproduced and policed, I locate shame as a key component in the policing of fat bodies. By laying bare the structural dimensions of the disciplinary norms around fat female embodiment, I show that the shame that is so central to their (self-)policing is neither individual nor random. As such, in this thesis I make salient how the negative body knowingness around fatness comes to dominate the corporeality of fat women’s embodiment.