The Politics of Jiggling


Fady Shanouda, Carleton University

All bodies jiggle. Bodies have the capacity to shake, shudder, wobble, jerk, and bounce. However, the nuances of jiggling—such as which bodies jiggle, when they do, what parts of them jiggle, and in what spaces they jiggle—are all part of a set of inculcated colonial values that delimit the flow of the body in public space in what I have selected to call the politics of jiggling. Existing literature on jiggling has predominantly focused on women, particularly delving into the disciplinary practices that regulate women's bodies. These include the use of shaping garments like girdles and shapewear (Burns-Ardolino, 2007), the movement and sexualization of women's butts—often those of Black, Latinx, and women of color (Aubry, 2000; Beltrán, 2002; Barrera, 2002; Burns-Ardolino, 2009; Radke, 2022)—the co-optation and resistance of twerking (Radke, 2022; Johnson, 2023), the hypersexualization of fat women’s bodies in pornography (Hester, 2016), and the concept of “good fatties” ascribed to plus-size beauty queens whose bodies move less (Prohaska, 2022), among other topics. Scholars have developed numerous concepts to describe the containment and restraint of the body, including Marcel Mauss’s (1973) “techniques of the body,” Michel Foucault’s (1986) “technologies of the self,” and Iris Marion Young's (1990) exploration of feminine body comportment. Moreover, Judith Butler’s (1990) notion of gendered subjectivity as performative, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s (1997) concept of misfitting, and Robert McRuer’s (2006) idea of compulsory able-bodiedness have each made significant contributions to the field of body studies. These concepts collectively highlight a longstanding intellectual fascination with understanding how we learn, perceive, move, and mould our bodies. However, absent in much of this debate, including with Fat Studies, is the ways fat man experience fatmisia and aligned systems of oppression, including patriarchy and ableism, which contribute to the construction of their bodies’ natural movement as undesirable and unhealthy (see, Bell and McNaughton, 2007). In Gilman’s Fat Boys: A Slim Book (2004), she argues that portraying fat men as successful and beyond the reach of fatmisia is a misleading impression. Fat boys experience fatmisia and degradation of their bodies and gender. She argues fat boys “…change what the culture represents as male” (Gilman 2004, p. 9). Although Gilman (2004) does not address the issue, the capacity for fat men to jiggle raises questions about gender performativity, bodily capacitation, and issues around control, management, and restraint. By examining the limits surrounding the movement, sway, and jiggling of fat men’s bodies, we can gain insights into the intricate dynamics of power and resistance embedded in the body.

This paper will be presented at the following session: