Fat Feminism
Reading Shelley Jackson's ‘Fat’ through Elizabeth Wilson's Gut Feminism
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 13008023 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Tove Solander (0000-0002-1015-7664, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2014 |
| Volume | 4 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 168-184 |
| Publication date | 2014-02-26 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Somatechnics (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 2044-0138 • E-ISSN: 2044-0146 |
| Publisher | Edinburgh University Press (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.3366/soma.2014.0118 |
| OpenAlex | W1970108023 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 16 |
In this article, I treat a literary text as a form of somatechnics making an intervention in fat embodiment. I read contemporary American author Shelley Jackson's short story ‘Fat’ from The Melancholy of Anatomy through what Elizabeth Wilson terms ‘gut feminism’, a feminism accounting for the dynamism of the biological body and acknowledging ‘organic thought’ as an alternative to the mind/body split. Wilson's ‘gut feminism’ is related to theories drawing on Deleuze's concept the ‘Body without Organs’ such as hypertheorist N. Katherine Hayles’ argument for the ‘Text as Assemblage’. I show how the seemingly surreal narrative of ‘Fat’ provides crucial insights about fat, understood as an assemblage of images, affects and matter and as a liminal substance questioning the integrity of the subject. Fat is associated with the feminine in a reclamation of the early modern rhetorical term ‘dilation’, which figures the swelling text as a fat, fertile woman with voracious orifices. I describe how Jackson's ‘aesthetics of fat’ works through dilation, disgust and ‘bad taste’ to draw the reader into an experience of fat embodiment. I characterise fat as a ‘sticky sign’ in Sara Ahmed's sense, one that will not stay confined to the page but sticks to the reader and elicit gut reactions. In conclusion, I argue for a non-derogatory model of reading as incorporation
Aesthetics · Art · Feminism · Liminality · Linguistics · Literature · Narrative · Psychoanalysis · Reading (process · Rhetorical question · Sociology · Diversity and Impact of Dance · Gender Studies · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Philosophy · Posthumanist Ethics and Activism · Psychology
My Mother Was a Computer
The Cultural Politics of Emotion
The 'Fat' Female Body
(Anamnesis) Revolting Bodies
Jenny Saville and a Feminist Aesthetics of Disgust
The Cultural Politics of Emotion
An Intimate Distance
The Haunted Flesh
From Communion to Cannibalism
Parables for the Virtual
Gut Feminism
The Anatomy of Disgust
| Citations per year | 0.11 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2017 - 2017 (1) |
| Highly cited | No |