Resisting Sizeism/Shapeism as Body-without-Organs: An Intersectional Praxis of Fat-Becomings


Ramanpreet A. Bahra, York University

Within the interdisciplinary field of fat studies intersectionality theory as praxis has been taken up to critique the regulatory functions of ant-fat narratives that come to be practiced, lived and felt within society. Alongside such discussions arise an interest in the nexus of affect, fatness and racialization to speak of the biopolitical practices which thrive through both the medical, wellness, and diet industrial complex and the larger cultural forums within society, perpetuating the image of the thin or adequately curvy, white, nondisabled, elite cisgender person as an artifact of complete personhood. Fatness subsequently is seen as not a mere public health issue, but a socially, historically, politically, medically constructed category tied up with cultural understandings of gender, sex, and fatness. This paper deploys an intersectional praxis to explore how fat racialized people are framed as failed em(body)ments under the oppressive cycles of sizeism and shapeism. It concludes fat racialized bodies tend to face the authoritative medical and cultural gaze that conflates ‘health,’ notions of gender and desirability with thinness. Anti-fat, ableist and racist narratives push for fat flesh and bodies across the intersections to become smaller and smaller, aligning with the thin, ‘healthy’ progressive body ready to enter the lifeworlds. To examine the liminal space of lifeworlds and deathworlds, the paper lastly approaches the impersonal registry’s Body-without-Organs (BwO) following an intersectional praxis to reconceptualizes the materiality of fatness as expressions of life that are generative and interrelated with others, spaces, and world-making structures. In this refiguring of fatness as BwO, fat life is indeterminate, non-reactive and non-prescriptive; no longer succumbing to the cycle of performing the undertones of sizeism, shapeism and whiteness. Overall, the BwO enables the fat-becomings to unfold without referring to compulsory thinness, heterosexuality, and whiteness, and instead flourishing through its relational affective capacity.

This paper will be presented at the following session: