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The Untouched Fat Skin: A Nomadic Feminist Journey without
Boundaries
Lydia Roberts, 11441704
Sociology MSc: Gender, Sexuality and Society Supervisor: Sarah Bracke,
09/07/2018, Amsterdam Word count: 24,523
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Table of Content
Acknowledgement ………..……3
Summary………..………...……...4
Chapter 1: Introduction: Going Skin Deep………..………....…………7
Chapter 2: Literature Review: Skin-on-Skin……….……12
Women and the Fat Body ……….12
Women and the Skin ……….………18
The Nomadic Tense……….……….……….21
Chapter 3: Research Design: Speaking from the Skin of our Teeth…...……….………..25
Chapter 4: ‘Touching the Untouched Skin’……….……..………32
Chapter 5: Thin Skin………..…………..……….……….34
Chapter 6: Malleable Skin……….……….………42
Chapter 7: Wobbly Skin……….………..…………..……48
Chapter 8: Concluding Thoughts: Comfortable in our own Skin……….……….54
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Acknowledgements
To the wonderful fat women who graced me with knowledge during this project. I am ever indebt to your wisdom, endurance, and encouragement towards finding comfort in my own skin.
To my mother Joy and my sister born with Joy. Your energy continues to guide and journey with me. To Maria Creech for uniting the motion, fluidity and pure joy of the fat skin in the cover image. To all “I love you more than my own skin” (Frida Kahlo).
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Summary
Thinking “with and through the skin” (Ahmed and Stacey 2001: p.1), my thesis touches upon the materialisation of fat feminine subjectivities upon our bodily boundaries. I will argue that the fat women’s skin materialises with something I name Joy; a passionate, yearning, and unapologetic disobedience to the modern dictates of normative femininity. Armed with this affective force, together with the participation of fat feminine activists, this thesis attempts a feminist ‘joyful insurrection’ (Braidotti 2014b: n.p.) of the untouched fat skin. We will raise this surface from the depths, out of the realm of the invisible in both academic and cultural repertoires, and at the same time tantalise the readers’ sensory receptors by bringing this weightily layer to our immediate presence.
Modernity has propelled women into a vortex of mattering which unravels upon our bodily boundaries (Braidotti 2006; Prosser 2001). We persistently and unremittingly navigate a contested terrain of difference, boundaries and locations (Braidotti 2006b), coming to locate comfort and familiarity in the routine practices of plucking, tattooing and even surgically re-modifying our skin to retain its normative smooth, youthful and feminine qualities (Ahmed and Stacey 2001). Despite the modern woman’s fascination with her surface, a prevailing skin pedagogy remains untouched and unspoken of in the cultural repertoire: the fat woman’s skin. Being the most visually modified organ in weight gain, the skin holds a peculiar place for the contemporary fat woman. Confessing the imperfections and blemishes of her excessive weight, her bodily boundaries push the parameters’ of the idyllic baby-like and flawless feminine skin (Watson 2010). How has this weighty layer remained untouched, unspoken, and unseen?
Bringing this bodily surface to our immediate presence, I ask: How does the fat women’s skin materialise? This guiding research question will tempt further injury: Why has the fat women’s skin remained untouched in modern academia and culture? How does the fat skin figure as both a medium and manifestation of fat femininities? And importantly, how epistemologically and politically
effective is a feminist nomadic ethics for envisioning fat subjectivity? For the purpose of this thesis, and all the more relevant when speaking of bodily boundaries, materialisation shall be rethought outside of Butler’s (1991) infamous concept of ‘performativity’ often unwittingly used in gender studies. Instead, following a new materialistic definition it emerges as an ‘intra-active’ process of becoming, one in which matter is immediately present, albeit central to its own unfolding (Barad 2003). I think both “with and through the skin” (Ahmed and Stacey 2001: p.1); as a medium between different worlds and the location for material, symbolic, and physical meaning.
On this journey across bodily boundaries I am accompanied by two travel companions. On my left, are the subjects involved in this thesis, the feminine members of the fat acceptance movement and fat activists from across the western world. An example of the new wave of feminist movements which
5 take the body as the starting point for activism (Braidotti 2015: p.252), these women have taken the cyber-world by storm offering a space to negotiate the parameters of fat-phobic culture. On my right is Braidotti. Whilst not the sole contributing thinker, Braidotti’s feminist nomadic project (1994) guides much of this thesis’ surface thoughts, not only acting as a theoretical guise but a new approach to researching and an innovative political orientation. Together we search for a tense to bring the fat skin to consciousness, and in the same motion encourage a blossoming of the feminine imaginary. Alongside my travel companions, Braidotti and the glorious participants, this piece flows nomadically through multiple methodologies, theories, and tenses to grasp the fat skin. Retaining a poststructuralist feminist ethics, epistemologically I will place emphasis upon the incalculability and irregularities of knowledge production outside of the sterile phallogocentric groundings of academia (Shildrick 1997; Hill-Collins 1992). In order to deconstruct this falsehood, I tie together fat studies, queer theory, feminist geographies, new materialists, poststructuralist feminism, and those who refuse a label, opening up a discursive space for thinking through the fat skin. I venture beyond both fat and skin studies extending analysis of fat feminine subjectivities beyond the top layer of flab, that which is persistently considered the most noteworthy and sole symbol of fatness (Mobley 2014; Harjunen 2009).
Not only flowing between theoretical camps, this feminist nomadic project endorses multiple methodologies. My data gathering consists of five journals of the fat skin, ten semi-structured interviews with fat women, and auto-ethnography. This is embedded within a somatographic inquiry regarded as a playful, creative and exploratory form of analysis. Ensuring an attunement to the metaphorical, synonymous, and idiomatic descriptions of the fat skin, somatography permits an expression of nomadic and multilayered subjectivities (Clarke-Keefe 2014). Energised by this research design, in the chapters ‘Touching the Untouched Surface,’ ‘Thin Skin,’ ‘Malleable Skin, and ‘Wobbly Skin,’ I ‘think through’ (Ahmed and Stacey 2001: p.1) participants’ linguistic descriptions of their surfaces, attuning to our shared dreams, memories, feelings, and visions of the fat skin. Invoking imagines of the fat skin rolling, wobbling, stretching and rupturing through time-space, these
descriptions portray the fat women’s flouting of the parameters of normative femininity and projection of unimagined forms of subjectivity upon their abundant fat skin.
Whilst initially difficult to find a shared dialect to speak of this unspoken surface, we come to collectively find a voice in the metaphor of Joy. Now let me introduce Joy. Deriving from religious scriptures, Joy shall be taken as lasting state of contentment- or potential affective force- built up through moments of great pleasure. It is about unapologetically striving towards those moments of satisfaction and desire. I will conclude that the fat skin matters with and through Joy: Embarking on an ever-lasting state of mattering upon her fat skin, the fat woman transcends that which can be imagined presently and dreamt of in the future. Speaking of the skin as Joy offers a dynamic and
6 creative pre-figurative tense invigorating for epistemological re-orientations, a vehicle for feminist political intervention (Braidotti 1994; Braidotti 2015; Zarranz 2016), and lastly for my personal quest to find comfort in my own skin. My hoping in this piece is to work towards a ‘joyful affirmation’ (Braidotti 2015: p.241) of the nomadic fat woman’s mattering. Together, we literally and
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Chapter 1: Introduction: Going Skin Deep
When the shrivelled skin of the ordinary is stuffed out with meaning, it satisfies the senses amazingly. (Woolf 1928: 283)
Shrivelled skin, skin deep, by the skin of your teeth, no skin off my back, banana skin, skinny, skin-tight, comfortable in my skin, skin-on-skin, tough skin, crawling skin, wobbling skin, tattooed skin, under the skin, skin colour, skin and bones, loose skin, surface, transparent, folding, rolling, splitting, jumping out of my skin. From metaphor to attribute, the ordinary and inescapable skin is “stuffed with meaning” (Woolf 1928: p.283). This comes as no surprise. The largest organ engulfing our bodily existence, we think, we feel, we touch, and extend ourselves outwards through the skin. We are “in kinship with our skin and it demands to be looked at” (Parkhouse 2015: p.1).
Narrating from the perspective of the ordinary, the skin holds a peculiar place in Woolf’s (1928) metaphor. For her, the realities of the skin are not intense but fleeting. The skin does not simply contain meaning, but itself “satisfies the senses” (Woolf 1928: p.283). It touches and is touched, it extends and contains, it surfaces and re-surfaces, it is both read and being read, and it is both a plain and imaginative landscape. More broadly than the enchanting perspective of Virginia Woolf, skin metaphors have come to saturate the modern cultural repertoire (Benthien 2002). In a host of literacy and artistic tropes it at the same time serves as a representation of the whole body, subject, or existence, and as that which restrains it. In this sense, the metaphor of the ‘shrivelled skin’ is
significantly more than a play on words. In Orlando (1928) Virginia Woolf is essentially articulating a “skin-tight politics” (Ahmed and Stacey 2001: p.1).
Recently a number of visionary social theorists have engaged in the skin as the surface for a reading, collision, and unfolding of subjectivities. Most notably and originally, Ahmed and Stacey (2001) have called for a “skin-tight politics,” one which “takes as its orientation not the body as such, but the fleshy interface between bodies of the world” (p.1). Following this vein, we will not only explore the surface of the skin, but also think “with and through the skin” (Ahmed and Stacey 2001: p.1), repositioning the skin as both the medium for our communication with the modern world and site for a crystallisation of symbolic, physical, and material significance. The skin matters as both a medium and manifestation of subjectivity. It is upon “the skin that issues such as beauty, appearance and colour are debated and are literally worked and suffered for; it is there where they are also felt, some or many of the times with shame, fear or disgust” (Moreno-Figueroa 2012: p.178).
The concept and feel of the modern woman’s skin lies at the heart of this piece. Advanced capitalism denotes rising anxieties about social identity, political longing, as well as the future which manifest upon the fabric of our skin (Prosser 2001). Women are increasingly encouraged to read the skin as requiring manipulation to protect from time and to retain feminine qualities in the softness and
8 smoothness of its touch (Ahmed and Stacey 2001; Hurst 2008). Waxing, tattooing, plucking, clothing, dying, remoulding and piercing it, all point towards the modern woman’s fascination with the skin. Whilst pioneering poststructuralist feminist thinkers like Butler (1991), Grosz (1994), and Haraway (1991) have touched upon the fragility and vulnerability of body boundaries, scant attention has been paid to the woman’s skin.
What initially struck me when thinking through the silenced feminine skin was the common motif ‘skinny.’ A particularly resounding signifier, denoting a thin individual, the piercing naked truth, and laying bare the skin. The multiple meanings behind the phase ‘skinny’ brings to the surface a
mystifying layer of the body that has remained untouched in scholarly knowledge: the fat1 woman’s skin. In the waxing and waning between weight gain and loss over a woman’s life course, no organ is more visually and corporeally modified than the skin (Watson 2010). The skin is that “inescapable garment” (Benthien 2002: p.23) which glides over her fat flesh, at once mirroring, projecting, and expanding upon her corporeal existence. Whilst it is not perceived to be the ‘original’ or most imminent marker of fatness, thinking through fat materiality should not end at the top layer of flab. Touching the fat skin we will bring its fleeting but meaningful mattering to our immediate perception. Moving beyond the rhetoric of confinement, veiling, and separation, the fat skin figures as a touching surface transversing subjectivities, rememorizing, and harbouring an affinity with the social world (Benthien 2002; Ahmed and Stacey 2001; Prosser 1998). I gaze upon the fat skin as the location for an unfolding or ‘materialisation’ of fat femininities.
Acknowledging the centrality of bodily matter, in this case skin, in its own unfolding we will journey beyond the common equation of gendered ‘materialisation’ with performativity (Butler 1991). For the purpose of this thesis, materialisation is taken as the process through which the body as “a piece of meat activated by electric waves of desire” (Braidotti 2000: p.159) comes to bear boundaries, exteriority, interiority, depth, connectivity, and surface. The starting point for my definition is a feminist post-human and new materialist stream of thought which stems from a notion of embodied and embedded corporeality (Braidotti 2006a). Here matter is not a passive surface eagerly awaiting symbolic significance to complete it. Matter, as Barad (2003) posits, is ‘intra-active,’ that is an “active agent participating in the very process of materialisation” (p.280). An injection of productive
capabilities into the fat skin is imperative when speaking of fat materialisation. The fat woman is no longer a monolithic, singular essence but a surface for infinite, complex and opposing experiences,
1 Before and commencing on our journey, I find it imperative to address our use of the term ‘fat.’ The least of
my hopes is to repeat the pathologisng derogative rhetoric of fat which persistently resurfaces in political, medical, social, and academic fields (Mobley 2014; Saguy 2013; Murray 2005). Throughout this piece, the word fat denotes a descriptor, a lived experience and a growing form of identity politics.
9 fragmented by intersecting axes of differentiation such as race, class, age, gender, weight, and
lifestyle among others. She is nomadic (Braidotti 1994).
Whilst not the sole contributing theory, a feminist nomadic ethics will guide this exploration of the fat skin. Standing at the centre of the journey, the ‘nomad’ refers to a non-unitary, non-linear and fluid figuration of modern subjectivity who has “relinquished all idea, desire, or nostalgia for fixity” (Braidotti 1994: p.222). Both coherent and fragmented, the nomadic woman is a contested space between networks of interconnections pulling her in contradictory temporal and spatial directions at once (Braidotti 1994). What will become significant throughout this piece is the ‘joyful discontinuity’ of the nomad escaping the suffering of the past, and offering an imaginative future (Braidotti 1994, 2006b). Joy here is defined as an enduring affective force we unapologetically motion towards in the hope of reaching our desires and pleasures. Equipped with the affective force, the nomadic figure offers us a dynamic and creative pre-figurative tense invigorating for new approaches of researching women, and a vehicle for feminist political intervention (Braidotti 1994; Braidotti 2015; Zarranz 2016).
Here we are reminded of the initial remark from Virginia Woolf. Chosen for much more than its metaphorical significance, Woolf is emblematic of the nomadic figure. In Orlando (1928) she harmoniously presents life and gender as at once rupturing, bountiful, yet concrete in the complexity of becoming. Fluidly zigzagging through times, sexes, characters and senses, Woolf reflects a dreamy nomadic crossing of boundaries, flowing between subject positions, and transcending of time-space (Braidotti 2014).
Such a nomadic elasticity has implications for feminist politics. Braidotti (2002) invests in the nomad as a site for both “reconfiguring political practice and redefining political subjectivity” (p.3). No longer bound to oppose the coherent, static, and superior modern subject, the nomad comes to possess the transformative power of those othered subjects, untangling the persistent classification of
materiality into Cartesian dualisms (Braidotti 2002; Grosz 1994; Kristeva 1980). She is the writer who refuses tenses, the witch who casts spells in cyberspace, the bride with no husband, or the fat woman who is comfortable in her own skin. As a nomad, I ponder how the very tendency of the fat skin to roll, wobble, and stretch across time-space conveys the image of fat women as a body continually travelling out of time-space; but through movement projects unimagined forms of feminine
subjectivity. As such, the aim of this piece is to empower a ‘joyful affirmation’ (Braidotti 2015: p.241) of the nomadic fat woman. An open affiliation with fat acceptance throughout this research is not taken to be a limitation in epistemological worth. But in hoping towards the triumph of feminist political projects (Braidotti 1994), the insurrection of Joy as an ethical affirmation is conscious, always exposed and situated (Haraway 1988).
10 Outside of imagining new feminine subjectivities, a feminist nomadic ethics opens up new paths of researching the fat woman. As Shildrick (1997) infers, the ‘leakiness’ of a post-human
poststructuralist feminist ethics, its emphasis on multiplicity, partiality, instability and incalculability, exposes the very boundaries which organises knowledge into definable categories (p.10). Beginning with a feminist ethics is more than a poetic choice; it is a dedication to expose the patriarchal, colonial, and symbolically violent grounding of academia (Shildrick 1997; Hill-Collins 1992). In order escape this trapping, I commit to three ethical tasks throughout this piece to facilitate validating and empowering qualitative research: a resistance of singular and sterile scholarly language; a flowing between multiple theorises, data gathering methods, and analyses; and an embodied epistemology. In the following chapter, ‘Skin on Skin,’ I invite nomadic readers to journey through a branching, flowing, and rupturing of theories to do justice to the ‘complex crystallisation’ of matter on the feminine skin (Bordo 2003: p.35). I connect the skins of two segments of literature which cover (1) ‘Women and the Fat Body’ and (2) ‘Women and the Skin.’ Fields of inquiry which have commonly been conceptualised as ‘developing’ along a neat trajectory, instead I will weave together fat studies, queer theory, feminist geographies, new materialists, poststructuralist feminism, and those who refuse a label to create a discursive space for thinking through the fat skin. In the third section, (3) ‘The nomadic Tense,’ attention turns towards Braidotti’s (1994) nomadic project. Whilst not the sole framework of this project I outline its roots, and it’s theoretical and ethical potential in exploring the materialisation of the fat skin.
Continuing this nomadic vein, the third chapter weaves together multiple methodologies to come to terms with the materialisation of the fat skin. The data gathering consists of a collection of five journals of the fat skin, ten semi-structured interviews with fat women, and auto-ethnography. This is embedded within a somatographic inquiry, regarded as a creative alternative in data collection enabling an expression of nomadic and multilayered subjectivities (Clarke-Keefe 2014). Together, this allows me to playfully connect my thoughts and feeling of the skin with others’ experiences, and subsequently maintains a dynamic and fluid vision of fat subjectivity (Shildrick 1997).
The fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh chapters are pieced together by ‘thinking through’ (Ahmed and Stacey 2001: p.1) the fat skin with the findings from the varied data gathered. In ‘Touching the Untouched Surface’ I unearth forgotten questions to the surface of the skin. In an attempt to find answers in ‘Thin Skin,’ ‘Malleable Skin’ and the ‘Wobbly Skin,’ I tease apart these fat skin tropes to illuminate the temporal and spatial nomadicity of this surface. The narrative drifting between the fat women involved, academic discourse, and myself, in these sections the skin works in the same way as language connecting feelings with thoughts as they pass through the bodies of myself and the women present (Parkhouse 2015).
11 “How does the fat women’s skin materialise?’’ This guiding research question will enable to me to probe: Why has the fat women’s skin remained untouched in modern academia and culture? How does the fat skin figure as both a medium and manifestation of fat femininities? And importantly, how epistemologically and politically effective is a feminist nomadic ethics for envisioning fat
subjectivity? In light of these reflections, my guiding research question encapsulates a certain dualism; opening pathways for new epistemic significance as well as new approaches to researching the fat woman’s body. I intend to challenge the incessant shaming of this mystical woman re-born of advanced capitalism. I promise fat monsters (Haraway 1992).
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Chapter 2: Literature Review: Skin on Skin
Women and the Fat Body
Advanced capitalism consists of a schizophrenic time-space. It persistently confuses the observer, throwing into radical doubt our understandings of difference, boundaries, and locations (Braidotti 2006b). A defining pillar of this current tense has been the convergence of bio-technologies and neoliberal market forces in navigating knowledge of bodily matter (Haraway 1997; Braidotti 2006b). Modern forms of capitalism involve new definitions and significations of matter exploiting the productive capacity of women, animals and cells alike (Braidotti 2012). Through a production of different, constantly shifting targets, and fragmenting accountability, advanced capital has been able to commodify and market these multiple others (Braidotti 2006b). This all-too-modern mattering is nowhere more evident than upon the fat woman’s body.
In an ever-looming ‘obesity epidemic,’ biomedical discourse has come to saturate the contemporary western diagnosis of fat subjecthood. Over the last decade, the epidemic monologue has peaked and intensified. In 1998, the BMI cut off point was decreased with millions of people becoming fat in a heartbeat (Wann 1998: p.52). By 2004, what is labelled ‘The year of Obesity’ by Times magazine the obesity crisis has been elevated to a ‘public health concern’ (Monaghan et al 2010: p.52) by
transnational institutions the World Health Organisation and the Centre for Diseases (Hancock 2015: p.2).
Fat studies has emerged as a space for academic inquiry in a response to this epidemic (Murray, Wykes and Pause 2014). With a heightened concern for weight, the fat subject has been propelled to the centre of a ‘moral panic’ or ‘fat panic’ (Saguy and Almeling 2008). Ensuring a neoliberal framing of social problems, these biomedical narratives propagate an individualisation of obesity, presenting fat individuals as among other negative values, immoral, undisciplined, unhealthy, gluttonous, and ignorant (Saguy 2013; Murray 2005). Bodily deregulation and freedom of movement are only rewarded to those neoliberal subjects at a ‘normal’ weight who materially function within a market driven society (Harjunen 2009). As a threat to social integrity, fat body has become the vital location for failed neoliberal citizenship, and more specifically failed femininity (Murray 2008; Gailey 2014). The biomedical management of the fat body has joined forced with the beauty industry in an effort to control the fat women’s body (Tischer 2012). Here, fat feminists stress an undeniably gendered dynamic within the prevailing ‘tyranny of slenderness’ (Chenin 1981); a culture which policies women’s bodies into acceptable ‘skinny,’ tight, and bounded parameters. Rehashing Wolf’s ‘Beauty Myth,’ Hartley (2010) argues “a cultural fixation on female thinness is not an obsession about female beauty but an obsession about female obedience” (Wolf 1991, cited in Hartley 2010: p.187). A woman is required to occupy and invest in as little space as possible (Hartley 2010; Mobley 2014).
13 Violating the spatial confinements imposed on her body and allowing herself to grow ‘excessively,’ the fat woman labelled ‘ugly’, ‘unfeminine’ and has “let themselves go” (Hartley 2010: p.63). This common phrase signals a loosing of ties from the normative skinny femininity constructed as “absolutely tight, contained, bolted down, firm; in other a words, a body that is protected against eruption from within, whose internal processes are under control” (Bordo 1993: p.189).
With a mainstreaming of fat-phobia in advanced capitalism, we are witnessing a convergence of scientific, political, medical, and discourses of beauty in an effort to control the fat woman (Harjunen 2009). Her body lays at the intersection of “normative feminine beauty and sexuality, health and pathology, morality, anxieties about excess, and the centrality of the individual in the project of self-governance” (Murray 2008: p.213). It is within the intersections of these multidimensional and directional forms of control a curriculum is established mediating the fat feminine bodies and the markets (Kenway and Bullen 2011). Fat consumers are encouraged to purchase dieting products, join weightless programs, and even undergo cosmetic surgery in the hope of obtaining the ‘normal’ body (Harjunen 2009). With transnational cosmetic companies’ increasingly sourcing biotech materials and pharmaceutical ingredients, the capitalist medical-beauty complex has become a major location for an articulation of ‘bio-power’ (Kenway and Bullen 2011; Harjunen 2009).
Biopower, a modern form of bodily management, comprises the politics of life itself (Rose 2001). Doubly expanding reach to multiple ‘othered’ bodies yet refining the target to the body, bio-power seeks to organise and control contemporary manifestations of subjectivity (Rose 2001: p.12). Fat feminists have argued these operations of bio-power are nowhere more evident that upon the fat woman’s body seeking to discipline her corporeality in the name of consumption and productivity (Bordo 1993; Malson 1997). Overstepping the boundaries of normative weight, the fat woman does not adhere to the requirements of a modern productive or moral lifestyle and as a result pollutes and threatens the capitalist order (Murray 2005; Gailey 2014). Inside this framework the fat woman has become a signifier for societal and moral “anxieties around the correct management of desires” (Bordo 1993: p.187). Bordo goes on to claim that, unable to contain the moral decay of society, the fat woman represents the “corporeal presencing of other” (Bordo 1993: p.189). Her unruly and excessive body confesses a “particular kind of fat gendered subjectivity” containing all that is undesirable in a contemporary woman (Harjunen 2009: p.15).
The Disordering of Fat Studies
In a move to counter rather than simply critique the bio-political control of fat women’s bodies, a new paradigm of fat scholarship has emerged which gazes into how 'queering' can be used to overcome the othering of fat subjectivities (Wykes 2014; Guerrieri and Cherrier 2008). Here, to 'queer' or to
14 ‘'Make strange, to frustrate, to counteract, to delegitimize, to camp up…[heteronormative]
knowledges and institutions, and the subjectivities and socialites that are (in)formed by them and that (in)form them'’ (Sullivan, 2003: p.vi).
Originating in the writings of Butler (1993) and Sedgwick (1993), but adding a fat twist, fat-queer scholars argue that the same performative dynamics used by the LGBT+ movement to queer heteronormativity also lends itself as a stage to body size and shape (Longhurst 2014). Through a queering, mocking, and transgression of the tyranny of slenderness, fat scholars argue it is possible to subvert normative fatness by exposing its non-essential character. Whilst body weight is often treated as constant throughout pregnancy, illness, puberty, daily habits and even career change our weight is more frequently fluid and contingent (Longhurst 2001). As such, fat subjectivity is “open to splitting, self-parody, self-criticism, and those hyperbolic exhibitions of the natural” (Butler 1990: p.146-7). In partaking in activities which are usually disassociated with fat, queer performances have the ability to expose the weightlessness of the fat body and reposition fatness in the cultural imaginary (Nault 2013).
Through the appropriation of the phase ‘coming out’ from the LGBT+ movement and a reclamation of the word ‘fat,’ fat activists attempt to create alternative visions of fat subjecthood (Saguy and Ward 2011; Afful and Ricciardelli 2015). Here fat bodies engage in visualisation strategies which ‘flaunt fat,’ that is a refusing to cover up or ‘pass’ in society by “drawing attention to a visible stigma'' (Saguy 2011: p.5). One contemporary manifestation of flaunting fat in the cultural repertoire is Beth Ditto’s performativity both on stage and off-stage (Nault 2013). A punk singer songwriter, in both her energetic stage performances and music videos Ditto unapologetically takes up excessive space. Combined with her tightly fitted style choices and public exposure of her naked fat body, Ditto undermines visions of normative femininity and fatness (Nault 2013: p.280). As Nault (2013) claims, “by flagrantly offering up her soft flesh and flabby stomach to the gaze of her admiring audience… Ditto troubles our orthodox views of fatness” (p.280-1). Since the publication of this article, Ditto no longer stands as a fat spectacle. From front women Tess Holliday to comedian Lena Dunham, fat feminine performances have evolved from an underground deviant act to saturate contemporary popular culture.
However, the field of fat studies has not yet fully encapsulated all the complexities of these emergent fat subjectivities in contemporary culture. There has been a continual desire to convert fatness into a political embodiment, overlooking any “rich descriptions of aesthetic experience” (Felski 2006: p.281). The preceding queer and feminist analysis infers a static framework within which the fat women is caught between two poles; either oppressively contained and traumatized by her fat flesh, or agentically dancing unapologetically outside her bodily boundaries. The fat subject demands a tense beyond a singular politicisation of her bodily existenc, to do justice to the complex crystallisation of
15 fat femininity, teasing ''apart the multifarious socio-political meanings of texts while also crafting richer and thicker descriptions of aesthetic experience'' (Felski 2006: p.281). Idyllically encapsulated by LeBesco (2004), Fat is a double-edged sword, both ‘revolting’ as a synonym for the monstrous and ‘revolting’ as the apex of a revolution. Whilst continuing to support a ‘positive resignification’ of fat LeBesco (2004) is weary of the “easy slide back into subjection” within fat activism and identity politics (p.124).
Yet, this is not a denial of the vitality of identity politics for the creation of alternative pathways towards fat feminine subjecthood. Braidotti (2011) captures this in her work on ethics and ‘becoming-minority’ (p.41). She argues that this claiming of a fixed location or adherence to a singular political identity can be critical for feminist political praxis. Assimilation into the minority position is “both inevitable and necessary because you cannot give up something you have never had” (Braidotti 2011: p.42). One must become a fat woman to then give it up. Murray (2008) argues that the experience of ambivalence is inevitable for the fat woman who lives a stigmatised existence, yet this “needs to be accommodated in ways where ambivalence does not have to be a kind of guilt secret, but is
productive in terms of opening out multiple ways of being” (p.144). Synthesising this with Braidotti (2013) we can infer that in order to recognise that the fat body cannot be experienced in singular, unambiguous ways, fat must first be experienced in the uniform such as in fat activism. This will facilitate a discursive rupture, revealing the unfathomable potentialities for new configurations of subjecthood. As such, the fat woman must first join the ranks of fat activist ‘majority’ for the opening of space to become her infinite ‘minority’ self.
Mattering the Fat Body
Fat subjectivity demands rethinking beyond the dichotomy of oppression and resistance in order to complicate and tease out its symbolic, resourceful, and material elements (Leith 2016, Forth 2013). Here, it is essential to see the “properties attributed to a substance rather than only on the visual appearance of bodies” (Mobley 2014: p.4). That is, viewing the materiality of fat not as an empty signifier, but how the properties of fat – its texture, movement, and consistency – play a central role in generating fat subjectivities. As Forth (2013) questions, “how did these qualities become extended to the physical, mental, and moral characteristics of ‘fat’ people?” (p.137). In order to rethink fat femininities we must move away from notions of social construction, venturing into the social production of fat’s weightiness.
Such a calling has been answered by feminist geographers. Starting from the feminist discourse of the fat woman as excessive and a “body-out-of-bounds” (LeBesco 2003: p.1), scholars such as Colls (2007) and Longhurst (2001) have argued that “fat can be materialised as a form of bodily matter that is not only impinged upon by outside forces but has its own capacities to act and be active” (Colls 2007: p.358). This draws attention to the ambiguity, fluidity, and dynamism of excessive and
16 weightily matter occupying a “borderline state that disturbs order by not respecting proper
boundaries” (Longhurst 2005: p.256). Fat is neither simply internal nor external to the body, but is always present and intelligible in mattering. Problematising solid boundaries, Colls and Longhurst have complicated the processes through which fat is seen to materialise. Fat is active in its own process of materialisation, shaking up an account of what it can do and how far it can extend.
Drawing upon Grosz’s (1989) unravelling of volatile bodily matter and Irigaray’s (1985) motif of the fluid body, Longhurst’s (2001) research puts the ‘fluid’ and ‘leaky’ qualities of the body such as ‘tears, saliva, faeces, urine, vomit, sweat and mucus’ and in recent work, fat at centre-stage (p.3). Positioned below the surface and consequently not seeping out in the same way of these bodily fluids, Colls (2007) argues that fat still occupies a ambiguous and fluid position, both “under the skin yet materialised as a substance in and of itself” (p.358). Paralleling Longhurst’s studies of both the pregnant woman and the fat body, we can infer that the fat feminine subject is the most dynamic and truly flexible. Whilst the solid masculine body enjoys unrestricted movement in social space, it is the leaky bodies of the abjected feminine which truly disrespect borders, rules, and positions.
For Longhurst (2001), a better way of conceptualising fat is ‘abjection.’ Borrowing from Kristeva’s foundational piece, Essay on Abjection (1982), Longhurst describes the abject body as that which is continually expelled for the unitary, complete, and dominant self image of the modern subject to persist. This exclusion enables the persistence of the foundational boundaries between subject/abject, and the corresponding dualistic oppositions self/other, surface/depth, inside/outside, personal/public, and human/nonhuman (Patterson and Schroeder 2010: p.256). Existing as gendered, sexualised, radicalised, differentiated, and naturalised bodies, the abjected are cast aside out of fear of the modern coherent subject “sliding back into the corporeal abyss out of which it was formed” (Wright 1992: p.198). All abjected bodies are monstrous, deviant, pathologised, and expelled from the normal (Kristeva 1982; Irigaray 1985; Grosz 1989); made up of the “counterparts of the subject: different from him, they are valued less than him” (Braidotti 2002: p.14). Placed at a distance, the abjected becomes a mere spectacle for the self to marvel and ponder at. Longhurst (2001) parallels this to Douglas’s (1966) insight into dirt and boundary formations. She argues that similar to dirt fat is that “matter out of place” (Douglas 1966: p.35) which is expelled for the perilous separation between bodies inside/out, surface/depth, and self/other.
As such, the fat woman is considered a threat to the solid boundaries of modern subjectivity and is placed at a distance (Grosz 1994). Through waxing, sucking, tucking, lifting, botox, plucking, and various other beauty “remedies” or “therapies” the fat woman is taught that the state of her body is monstrous, that which must be continually “’battled, controlled, and improved” (Chrisler 2011: p.202-3).The abjected fat woman’s “wide, soft hips, rounded buttock and ponderous breast suggest a kind of parody femininity, where all the feminine bodily characteristics are emphasised and exaggerated
17 and yet fat female bodies do not conform to aesthetic ideas relating to female sexuality’’ (Murray 2008: p.126).
In spite of paying due attention to the spatial dynamics of fatness, feminist geographers have barely grazed the flipside of space, time. Repeatedly, fat is affiliated with space, that which is considered static and nostalgic parallel to the dynamism and movement of time (Massey 1992). Challenging this stream of conscious, Tigdewell et al. (2017) have gazed upon the intersections of the fat body and time, arguing ‘fat-time,’ it’s resistance to containment, subversion of boundaries, and general abundance, provides alternative avenues towards fat subjectivity (p.115). Transcending the field of queer historiography (Levy-Navarro 2010), Tidgewell et al. offers a quintessential mattering of fat-time: “fat-time makes fatness more knowable. It satisfies and celebrates time, space, and who and what exists within it” (p.6). He argues that in opposition to the advanced capitalist production of phallogocentrically structured, linear, and shrunken time (Forman and Sowton, 1989), which relegates the abjected fat body to the past and death itself. Instead the amplification and rhythmic swiftness of fat-time moves towards infinite spaces at once reanimating the histories of fat existence and
collectivises (Tidgewell et al 2017).
The projection of fat matter into the past is central to diet discourse, particular in the ‘before’ and ‘after’ image which continues to saturate weight loss advertisement (Levy-Navarro 2012; Longhurst 2011). Here, life is divided into two stages; the inhabitable and wronged fat ‘before’ which is transformed into a newly glorious and happy skinny ‘after.’ As Longhurst (2012) illuminates, the process from one to another is conceptualised as a timeless ‘journey’ which focuses on an ‘absolute break with the past’ (p.341). The fat subject is burnt, destroyed, and killed off. One way to picture this cultural logic is in terms of Ahmed’s loaming Promise of Happiness (2010). As a technology of the modern being, Ahmed (2010) refigures happiness as a “bodily orientation” to which the individual directs their fleshy existence through “making the ‘right’ life decisions” (p.50). According to this dynamic the thin ‘after’ becomes associated with happiness, and all feelings of unhappiness, misery, and suffering ‘stick’ to the abjected fattened ‘before.’ In line with neoliberal modernist rhetoric, the promise of happiness ensures the presently ‘immoral’ fat woman’s “unwitting obedience to the [skinny] future” (Winnubst 2010: p.138).
Tidgewell edges towards a significant piece of the puzzle missing from the field of fat studies: An enmeshing of the spatial and temporal dynamics of fat matter. Following Massey (1992), central to theorising the potentialities of fat subjectivity is to understand a ‘time-space’ continuum: “the inseparability of time and space, on their joint constitution through the interrelations between phenomena” (p.65). Space is not a flat surface, nor temporality a singular flow. Just as space is integral to the production of politics and matter, temporality is central to the bodily geography.
18 Bringing together these elements of materiality, spatiality, and temporality in a dynamic and
productive way should be of central concern to feminist politics (Braidotti 2013), particularly in our epoch of advanced capitalism or as Bauman (1999) labels ‘liquid modernity.’ Constituting a schizophrenic time-space, modern capitalism throws the fat woman into a whirlwind of temporal instability, spiralling fragility, and ever-loaming vulnerability to change. To occupy the position of the fat woman is to be in a constant state of obsessively and rapidly mattering. One in which the possible subject locations are infinite and eternal, albeit often silenced. Eventually her body is relegated to the past with no hope of a fat feminine future. Recognising time-space as co-dependent offers hope for fat activism. As Walker (2014) optimistically maintains, it provides ‘hope’ in a different metaphysics and “a view of the future as an open-ended arena that holds possibilities for worlds, bodies and practices beyond what we can imagine in the present” (p.5).
Women and the Skin Skin that Matters
While many poststructuralist feminists have pointed to the importance of bodily boundaries (Butler 1993; Grosz 1994; Haraway 1991), little attention has been paid directly to the skin. This is
paradoxical considering the surface of the woman’s body has become ‘big business’ in the western world, and creeping globally through the transnational presence of skin pioneers Estee Lauder, Boots and L’Oreal (Kenway and Bullen 2011: p.7). Following similar dynamics to the advanced capitalist enfleshment of the fat woman’s body, the medical and beauty industry have deepened reach over the racialised, aged, gendered, and what are generally considered imperfect skins (Kenway and Bullen 2009, 2011; Benthien 2002). As such, skin is not a natural background but infected with colonial histories, technological interventions, gendered dynamics, classed significations, medical knowledge, and a nameless layering of skin pedagogies. This speaks to Connor’s (2004) claim that “the skin is more than ever visible as the visible object of many different forms of imaginary and assault” (p.50). The advanced capitalist skin ideal forgets histories (Connor 2001). As Connor (2001) claims, despite the skin’s surface function as a visual recorder of life, dominant discourse romanticizes the colourless, ageless, lifeless and blemish-free skin. This is no more evident than in the commercial skin industry promoting skin pedagogy without memories, life or history (Kenway and Bullen 2010). A discourse particularly pervasive for the modern woman, her skin is to be free from hair, lines, wrinkles or scars. Her skin is conceived as an object to be continually worked upon to shield against the markings of ageing, menstruation, childbirth, and significant life events (Ahmed and Stacey 2001). The idyllic surface has “amnesia—it has no memory, or as Avon promises, it can be born Anew™” (Kenway and Bullen 2010: p.34).
19 The cultural repugnance of dark, scarred, dry, wrinkled, damaged, spotted, and blotchy skin associates any skin imperfections or blemishes firmly with the abject (Benthien 2002). Here it strikes me that the skin metaphor figures deeply in Kristeva’s theory of abjection. She writes, “the eyes see or the lips touch that skin that a gagging sensation ensues” (Kristeva 1982: p.2). In this tense, gagging represents a physical enactment of the process of abjection. Repulsing, fascinating, and fearsome, for Kristeva the skin is the unstable border between the abjected other and modern self (Connor 1999; Tyler 2001). It is always present in the process of abjection marking the boundary in which the self/other
distinction is continually contested, breached or ensured. Of course, as Grosz (1989) points out, the abject “can never be fully obliterated but hovers at the borders of our existence, threatening the apparently settled unity of the subject with disruption and possible dissolution” (p.71).
Much recent work on the abjected surface has been contextualized in relation to race, discourses of colorism, and a privileging of whiteness (Kenway and Bullen 2011). Traced back to 17th century colonialism and the elevation of pigmentation as a marker of difference between the ‘civilized’ whites and ‘degenerate’ other (Benthien 2002), narratives of colorism persist today predominantly in the booming global beauty industry’s privileging of ‘bright’, ‘clear’ or ‘translucent’ skin and subsequent attempts to erase markers of race (Kenway and Bullen 2011; Hurst 2008). Mire (2014) offers one such example in the emerging trend of “do-it-yourself anti-ageing skin-whitening products” (p.119). Removing hyper-pigmentation signs of both aging and colour, these products inject colonial concerns with racial degeneracy and its gendered manifestations into the woman’s skin.
Not denying the central place of race upon the skin, much of this scholarship has been limited in theorising the ‘skin as container’ (Farber 2006: p.248). In this rhetoric, women are encouraged by the forces of advanced capitalism to read the skin as something which needs to be worked upon to protect from the severities of the external world, the passage of time, and to retain markers of femininity in the softness of its touch (Ahmed and Stacey 2001). The women’s body is culturally othered, the skin becoming a ‘concealing veil’ containing the fleshy taboo which lies beneath: “Undressing a woman of her skin would fundamentally destroy the myth of her being other and therefore she becomes defined by being both a container and surface with coding of femaleness” (Benthein 2002: p.86). Through commodification, objectification, and abjection, her skin becomes simply “a site of constriction, containment and control” (Farber 2006: p.248).
Following a similar discourse as the field of fat studies, an alternative vision has progressed with the advent of queer theorising upon the skin. Davies (1997) in particular has problematised the notion of the feminine subject as a spectacle bounded by cosmetic intervention upon the skin. She argues that skin interventions may empower women or enable them to negotiate their feminine subject position. The skin represents a continually contested terrain in which metaphors of identity – personal, historical, political and environmental – are fleshed out. Through regeneration, modification,
20 sculpting, and healing the skin can communicate and express subjective forms (Farber 2006;
Parkhouse 2015). This resonates with Jain’s insightful auto-ethnography of Cancer Butch (2007). She argues butch survivors resist the ‘cancer complex’ through a visual display or ‘coming out’ of cancer scars upon the skin (Jain 2007: p.504). These individuals are pushing cancer “out of the closet by bringing its marks, its scars out of the realm of private natural death into the sphere of public, violent and technological death” (2007: p.522). Rehashing the ‘coming-out’ narratives of the queer
movement, butch survivors reclaim their body through a literal display of corporeality upon the skin. Mattering the Skin
Not simply about separation, it is vital to see beyond the skin as matter, conceptualizing instead materialisation with or ‘Through the Skin’ (Ahmed and Stacey 2001: p.1). Developing from Anzieu’s Skin Ego (1989), the skin has been re-imagined in recent scholarship as an embodied entity,
simultaneously containing and connecting our self with the exterior world. A boundary, surface, and border, the skin is that with “which we encounter the world and our experience of skin serves as the foundation and metaphor for the relationship between our interior and exterior lives” (Hurst 2008: p.234). As Ahmed and Stacey (2001) argue, the skin is not purely read, but is reading, it touches and is touched, it extends and contains, shields and exposes, and it is both a plain and imaginative landscape. It is effectively and affectively, “a surface upon which differences collide” (Ahmed 1998: p.47) and a “site of social crisis and instability” (p.52).
Within the same stream of thought, it is imperative to rethink how readings of the skin figure in our embodied lives. Through sweating the skin exposes our fear, through wrinkles it marks our memoires, and through scars it can bear trauma. The skin can bear consciousness that we may not have even revealed to ourselves (Prosser 1998). Developing from the same foetal tissues as the human brain the skin is “a living record and can become proof of an identity: fingerprints, tattoos, lightening,
darkening, tanning of the skin and stigmata” (Parkhouse 2015: p.1). As such, the skin is the location for a folding and unfolding of corporeal materiality, and as subsequently a space for imagining and revealing of subjectivity.
Attending to the corporeal materiality of the skin, a reading of the surface as timeless is ironic. In actuality it is the very phenomenological function of skin’ to record; “Skin is the body’s memory of our lives. Skin’s memory is burdened with the unconscious” (Prosser 2001: p.52). Following this thought stream, it would be erroneous to chase the dominant discourse of the skin as unmemorable, simply revitalising the anxiety over the defiance of boundaries (Prosser 2001; Grosz 1994). As Prosser (2001) continues, it is through touching, seeing and visualising the skin we are reminded of age, weight, gender and multiple life histories. In his notion of skin as “the body’s memory of our lives” (Prosser 2001: p.52), our surface is bound up with the passing of time, or rather “it materialises that passing in the accumulation of marks, of wrinkles, lines and creases, as well as in the literal
21 disintegration of skin” (Ahmed and Stacey 2001: p.2). Skin is both materialised time and re-memories with time. It is not only existent in its present state, but is remembered and imagined in past and future tenses, possessing multiple histories which are worked towards in the future.
Despite the abundance of matter upon the surface, the fat woman’s skin has yet to emerge as a space of inquiry in fat studies. This is notable considering that fat women draw upon the unique idioms of ‘soft’, ‘loose’, ‘stretched,’ and ‘wobbly’ to refer to the ‘texture and shape’ of the skin (Roberts 2015). Whilst by no means the singular marker of fatness, fat mattering should not be understood as that which ends at the top layer of ‘flab.’ As Mobley (2014) observes, fat is that ‘matter out of place’ that does not only settle within the body. Being externally consumed and internally produced, fat flows from inside to outside the corporeal body, and as I suggest, can settle on the bodily boundaries (Mobley 2014: p.143). The skin is fat: as an ‘inescapable garment’ (Benthien 2002) dressing the fat body, the skin glides over the fat flesh, transpiring, projecting, and expanding upon its corporeal existence.
In this sense, the fat skin has a rupturing existence for the modern woman. Whilst the bones and flesh can remain aesthetically unaltered by weight gain, the skin is most modified and can excessively expand her being in the world. As the flesh beneath grows and remoulds, the skin’s margins stretch outwards into the social world. Stretched and marked, her skin confronts the loaming cultural desire for smooth, flawless, and tight skin (Watson 2010). As Naomi Wolf (1991) envisions it, for the contemporary western woman “skin is the equivalent of the 1950s girdle – a girdle which is ‘made of their own flesh. They can’t take it off at night” (p.177). However, this inescapable garment is at the same time a code for fat femininities. The very tendency of the fat skin to wobble and roll not only conveys the image of fat women as a body unruly, out of control, and continually treading out of time and place; but through literal movement has the ability to actively projects alternative forms of womanhood. This is an energizing thought. Whilst the fat woman may not feel affinity, at home, nor of matter in a restricting social space, on her ever-abundant skin, she will always come to matter. What matters now is the tense chosen to think through unruly fat skin. Transcending both queer theory and the preceding fat feminist analysis, the fat feminine skin demands a celebration of embodiment, a refusal to split internal and external existence, and an open-ended commitment to the messiness of matter. It demands a tense which gravitates towards an “ethical affirmation of the feminine that is an acceptance of the leakiness of bodies and boundaries speaks to the necessity of an open response” (Shildrick 1997: p.217). How shall we respond to its demand?
A Nomadic Tense
What the fat skin demands is a theorising which embodies ‘Joy.’ Joy holds the future abundant with passionate and unruly subjectivities, far beyond that which can be imagined in our present state, or,
22 for that matter, that which can ever be imagined or settled in the future (Zarranz 2016). One such ethics of joyful affirmation is a feminist nomadic project (Braidotti 2013). In the words of Braidotti: “Feminism is the joyful affirmation of powerful alternatives. […] Feminism is joyful insurrection” (2014b: n.p.). Both dynamic and creative, this thought stream is particularly inviting for the fat skin. However, to fully comprehend the purposeful complexities and irregularities of the joyful nomadic tense, we have to take it back to its roots in new materialism.
Initiating a move away from diagnoses of social construction towards an emphasis upon the social production of materiality (Coole and Frost 2010), new materialist thinkers have placed desires and feeling at the heart of the materialisation of modern subjects. Coupled with a focus on the micro-level assemblages of human/non-human affect which form the social whole (Fox 2015), new materialism provides fertile ground for an ethics of multiple transformative possibilities rather than adherence to a fixed mode of subjectivity. The works of Deleuze and Guattari (1992) have been invigorating in this sense. Rethinking materialisation beyond classification and categorisation into Cartesian dualisms, Deleuze and Guattari regard that which is considered out of place, unruly, othered, and generally failing to satisfy the demands of society as productive forces of becoming. Three aspects of Deleuzian and Guatarrian ontology are vital in a commitment to a fluid and rupturing fat skin (Fox 2015). Firstly and crucially, the emphasis on the body as an assemblage made up of “chaotic network of habitual and non-habitual connections, always in flux, always reassembling in different ways” (Potts 2004: p.19). This prioritises the complexity and unpredictability of the body, and its affinity to other ideas, beings, objects, and social institutions (Fox 2015). Focus shifts from a singular geography of the skin, to a co-habitation of matter with other bodies, ideas, and forms (Fox 2015). Secondly, the notion of human agency is replaced with Spinoza’s concept of affect (Deleuze 1988). The assemblage unearthed above consists of affective flows in an ever-changing, reforming, and fluid condition. Vital here is the fact that affects can be social, physical, or psychological, thus cutting across traditional divides of knowledge/feeling, social/biological, and the cultural/physical worlds. When applied to the skin, its materialisation can be rethought as a non-linear process, invoking both a mystifying and rupturing flow of affects and desires. Lastly, assemblages come to ‘territorize,’ produce, and reproduce. Bringing together the first and second elements, Deleuze (1988) reveals what affect does with assemblages. A contested terrain between all objects, subjects, and ideas, flows can at once guide the materialisation of subjects into coherent and static forms, or de-terrotize bodies into alternative directions enlarging ground for the future (Deleuze and Guattari 1984; Fox 2015). This micro-politics is played out on the skin, as waves of desire and affect come to territorize and de-territorize fat subjectivities.
Rethinking otherness as a mobilizer of affirmative flows and forces, Deleuze and Guattari have invigorated new materialist authors which academia has historically rejected (Braidotti 1994; Deleuze
23 and Guattari 1992). It has been particularly fruitful for feminist philosophy (Braidotti 2001; Grosz 1994), inspiring a celebration of fragmented and unbounded materiality, and consequently a commitment to anti-dualistic knowledge production. Most significantly, it has guided Braidotti’s (2001) ‘Nomadic Project’, which she labels a “more radical sense of materialism” (p.158). Privileging motion and transformation over constancy, she repositions not only bodies of matter but bodies of knowledge, leaving creative space for what the fat feminine body can do.
At the centre of this project is the ‘nomadic’ subject which Braidottii (2011) refers to as her “own figuration of a situated, postmodern, culturally differentiated understanding of the subject in general and of the feminist subject in particular” (p.25). It is a non-unitary and non-linear figuration of modern subjectivity who has “relinquished all idea, desire, or nostalgia for fixity” (Braidotti 1994: p.222). Placed at the communicative space between contradictory axes of differentiation such as race, class, weight, gender, and sexuality, the nomad is pulled in many directions at once. This arouses a passion for the destabilisation of identities and the dualistic oppositions which maintain them. Not only a traveller of subject locations, the nomad occupies different time zones simultaneously (Briadotti 2002). Much like Massey’s (1992) time-space continue, the nomad focuses us to think in terms of a spatial-temporal force. Influenced by Deleuze’s (1994) notion of ‘endurance’ as both temporality lasting through time, and spatially as a field of embodied actualisation, for Braidotti (2011) location is “not a self-appointed and self-designed subject position, but rather a collectively shared and constructed, jointly occupied spatiotemporal territory” (p.16). Braidotti (2006b) goes on to argue that advanced capitalism has colonised time from the modern woman. It has arrested becoming, through impinging cross-cutting connections and mocking nomadic intensities through the marketing of difference. Here she shares Ahmed’s (2010) ‘promise of happiness,’ within which the modern future is measured in terms of commodified pleasure, no desire in the present. Time becomes uniform, rationalised, and limited, instead of the cyclical becoming to which women have a privileged
relationship (Felski 2000).
The nomad comes to embody a ‘discontinuous sense of time:’ “this is the time of cyclical transformation, of counter-genealogies, of becoming and resistance” (Braidotti 1997: p.46). She represents a ‘joyfully discontinuous’ (Braidotti 2015: p.241) zig-zagging through time-space, both mystifying the past and illuminating futures. As such, in her creative reading of time-space, the nomad activates a set of ‘counter-memories’ in order to de-territorialise the unitary and dominant modern subject Braidotti (2006b). Akin to Foucault’s (1977) writings, the counter-memory does not retrieve in a linear order but consists of a “process of refusing to forget, or forgetting to forget” in which nomadic “memory is activated against the stream; they enact a rebellion of subjugated
knowledges” (Braidotti 1994: p.25). Braidotti (2006b) goes on to argue that the modern subject stores data banks of knowledge which reduce the ‘other’s’ counter claims to subjugated dreams and
24 memories. Working against this, counter-memories infuse alternative visions, remembrance, and time into the collective consciousness: “It endows the subject with the power to recall what has been learned and utilise this cognizan for future” (Braidotti 2011: p.25). This gesture is aimed at transcending the merely modern, at empowering alternative worlds in the future (Fanon 1961; Braidotti 2013).
Indulging in Braidotti’s works, what grew on me was her refusal to take the materiality of the skin for granted. Ahmed and Stacey (2001) have praised Braidotti, amongst other poststructuralist thinkers such as Grosz (1994) and Butler (1993), for exploring the bodily surface. Whilst it is not always the direct gaze of inquiry, the instant challenging of the dualisms of self/society, inside/outside, personal/public relationships, and market cultures (Patterson and Schroeder 2010: p.256)
automates a rethinking of so-called bodily borders. In Braidottian terms, the skin can be thought of as “a folding-in of external influences and a simultaneous unfolding outwards of affects” (2000: p.159). This is vital for theorising the fat skin, exposing its fluidity across boundaries and by extension maintaining hope in alternative and imaginative feminine subjectivities.
As readers have allowed me to guide them through this concise synopsis of the nomadic tense, one might ask, what is with all this Joy rhetoric? I began with Joy and continue on this path. This is no mistake. Here Joy shall be taken as a lasting state of contentment built up through moments of great pleasure. With and through Joy we unapologetically strive to meet those instances of contentment once again. A counter-conductive affect, it transcends past, present, and future moments, when we feel it propelling us into the future. This is what Braidotti refers to as ‘joyful insurrections’: those joyfully discontinuous affirmative modes both embodied and relational, uproot the past, project hope into the future, and in the same move counter the modern production of difference (Braidotti 2015: p.241). She shifts “away from the reassuring platitudes of the past to the openings hinted at by the future perfect: this is the tense of a virtual sense of potential” (2006b: p.169). It is an affective force towards our desires, one which can act as a ‘passionate disobedience’ (Zarranz, 2016: p.17) yearning towards our feminist dreams.
As I persistently read the texts of Braidotti with a feeling of unfaltering optimism, she becomes so much more than a theoretical guise. Relegated to the past and with a promise of happiness (Ahmed 2010) exclusively for the obediently skinny, the future is frequently one of labouring and hopelessness for the fat woman. A nomadic project offers “a different starting point, a different metaphysics” for fat women (Barad 2003: p.812). Privileging rupturing movements and transformation, it becomes deeply infused with the language of joy, the belief that we are not deemed to repeat the memories of suffering, which requires us to be removed from our time or shed glorious fat skin (Braidotti 2015).
25
Chapter 3: Research Design: Speaking from the Skin of our Teeth
In addition to theorising the materialisation of the fat skin, a feminist nomadic project develops epistemological pathways into researching fat women. Braidotti’s (2006a) post-human
poststructuralist ethics are set against the dominant Eurocentric definition of morality clocked in claims of gender neutrality and universal rights, which has hindered the development of different ethical behaviours and subject positions. Beyond invoking ideals of time-space elasticity, the nomadic figure also provokes a liberation from essentialist trappings, vital to counter the othering and limiting of the fat woman to “reckless excess, prodigality, indulgence, lack of restraint, violation of order and space” (Braziel and LeBesco 2001: p.3). Inspired by this nomadic feminist ethics, this research design works against the system of thought which ‘others’ fat monsters and persistently distances
subject/object, social/self, emotionality/rationality, and knowledge/feeling, placing superior wisdom of her body in the overbearing palms of academia (Shildrick 1997).
Crosscutting bodies of epistemology, ontology, ethics, and materiality, I turn towards a nomadic ‘rhizomatic standpoint’ methodology; a form of inquiry “related to experience which implies a strengthened connection between thought and life, a renewed proximity of the thinking process to existential reality” (Braidotti 2011: p.2). Crucially, this ‘rhizomatic standpoint’ presupposes that all knowledge is produced from the situation of the knower (Haraway 1991). Considering Haraway her “travel companion” across nomadic landscapes (Braidotti 2006a: p.197), Braidotti’s nomad ethics endorses an ethos and practice of ‘situated knowledges’ (Haraway 1988). In both raising and
responding to the challenges for feminist methodology, Haraway reminds nomads that any appeal to knowledge is not innocent, but an ‘embodied vision’ one can only access through corporeality, or in this sense through the skin (Braidotti 2006a: p.197). Rejecting the position academics have
historically rewarded themselves as objective ‘truth’ providers, scholarly knowledge is grounded in both concrete perceptions- including unconsciousness, imagination, affect, dreams and memories (Braidotti 2013)- and the complex power dynamics which lay upon the surface. As our skin is always already tied up with the power position our body holds in advanced capitalism, no knowledge of it is created in a power vacuum.
With Braidotti and Haraway as ‘travel companions’, I epistemologically embrace “transformative experimentations with new technologies of the self, new arts of existence and ethical relations” containing elements of both “progressive emancipatory measures but also of radical experiments with self-styling or critical praxis” (Braidotti 2015: p.240). Energized by Braidotti’s and Haraway’s travel guide, this research forwards a set of nomadic feminist ethics, which consists of three predominant areas: (1) a creative writing tense, (2) an embodied epistemology, and (3) a nomadic flow between multiple theories, modes of data gathering, and analysis.
26 Firstly, conscious that academic writing has been moulded in a colonialist, Western, masculine, and symbolically violent culture, I aspire to transcend self-replicating, monotone, and sterile scholarly language through creative writing (Trinh T 1989). Never innocent, writing is an activity which constitutes the subject of discussion as well as craft the ontology of our time (Lacan 1988, Braidotti 2014). As Trinh T (1989) poetically puts it, “To write is to become. Not to become a writer (or a poet), but to become, intransitively” (p.119). This is even more fundamental when speaking of the skin; the inescapable medium which extends us outwards to the social world (Ahmed and Stacey 2001; Parkhouse 2015). It demands a style which creatively and imaginatively connects thoughts, sensations, and feelings. As Braidotti (2014) argues, “creativity is necessary, and more theoretical courage is needed in order to bring about the leap across inertia, nostalgia, aporia and the other forms of critical stasis induced by our historical condition” (p.163). Through semantics which seduce, descriptions which unravel affect, or language which connects and embodies, I work towards a nomadic tense. This involves elasticity between poetic, scholarly, and narrative forms, hoping at the same time to destabilise the modern production of bodies of knowledge and matter, and inspire others to follow (Braidotti 2014; Shildrick 1997).
Secondly, I endorse an embodied epistemology paying attention to and monitoring the complexity of rhythms which flow between the bodies of researcher and researched. As already mentioned in relation to Haraway’s (1991) work, our bodies – and more crucially the skin – are the lines of demarcation between subjects. Our knowledge of the bodily surface is only apparent through ourselves inhabiting and touching our skin (Parkhouse 2015). Connecting, responding, and encountering through our bodies, the skin comes to structure the subject of exploration, both
researcher and researched alike (Braidotti 2015). Lefervre (2004) teases apart this relationship in the metaphor of the ‘metronome.’ Lefebvre (2004) labels the body of the researcher as a ‘bundle or bouquet of rhythms’ which leak into the body from the outside world. The body of the researcher “serves him as a metronome” (p.19); it tastes, it beats, it sees, it feels, and it perceives all that is worldly. Whilst more will be said on this point when delving into my methods of inquiry, I find it imperative to address my orientation to the fat skin and fat feminine pedagogies.
Lastly, I will guide readers in a nomadic style through a branching, flowing, and rupturing of theories, and both data gathering and analysis, to do justice to the ‘complex crystallisation’ of matter on the feminine skin (Bordo 2003: p.35). Through a historical searching, classification, categorisation, and coding of knowledge, academia has impinged upon the opening of space for a production of counter-knowledge. The messiness of fat matter cannot be easily contained nor explained away. Rather through borrowing concepts, connecting sources, creating approaches, and forming new assemblages, I hope to enlarge territory for fat subjectivities (Pierre and Jackson 2014). Whilst in the previous chapter I demonstrated the ‘development’ of both fat and skin theorising, in the next chapters I refuse
27 to dig my feet into one field. Instead I play with self-styling and critical praxis, simultaneously
grounding and un-grounding my work to nuance academic knowledge production (Hill-Collins 1992). Knowingly I glide and drift between the fat studies, queer theory, feminist geographies,
post-structural feminists, the accounts of fat women, auto-ethnographical accounts, and those narratives that refuse to be situated. Continuing this nomadic theme, my data-gathering induces multiple methodologies journeying through semi-structured interviews, skin dairies, and auto-ethnography. This is embedded within a somatographic inquiry- my chosen form of data analysis- i.e. “critical thought and creative theoretical alternatives adequate to the task of expressing nomadic, embodied, and multilayered subjectivities” (Clarke-Keefe 2014: p.790-1).
The wonderful fat women who participated in this research project are self-proclaimed members of the fat acceptance movement and/or fat activists. Taking cyberspace by storm, this movement offers virtual spaces to share narratives, images, and memories which cultivate diverse bodily acceptability (Sastre 2014). This is an example of what Braidotti (2015) describes as the new wave of feminist movements where “‘life’ is not taken for granted, but is approached as an ethical-political praxis of struggle, confrontation – critique and creativity joining hands” (p.242). It is a collective politics of ‘joyful affirmation’ (Braidotti 2015) or ‘radical self love’ which takes the body as its starting point to negotiate the spiralling shaming and discrimination of the fat body in western modernity.
With a growing virtual presence, this movement targets a spectrum of diverse bodies. The individuals I contacted not only self-identified as ‘fat’ and ‘feminine’, but bodily acceptance was a shared feature of the women at the heart of this research. Whilst criticisms would consider this a limitation in epistemological objectivity, I take objectivity down from its masculine and Eurocentric pedestal. Turning to Braidotti (2006b), I value an ethics based upon positionality or an “absolute immersion of one's sensibility in the field of forces - music, colour, light, speed, temperature, and intensity” (p.307). In the introduction I positioned my feminist political ethics. As made clear in my research question, this nomadic feminist research project has both political and epistemological intended learning outcomes. With a full heart, I hope the joyful insurrections of these empowered and empowering women can be distributed through the fat ranks.
After locating fat women on Instragam, a growing imaged-based social media outlet, through the corresponding hashtags #fatbabes, #fatactivists, #fatacceptance and #fatfemmes, thirty-two participants were privately messaged requesting their email for further contact. Out of this twelve women agreed to contribute: three women for both diary collection and interviewing, seven were only available for interviewing, and an additional two respondents participated exclusively in diary
collection. Once agreed, informed consent was then obtained from all participants via email
confirmation and verbally at the beginning of each interview. Participants were given three weeks to collect skin diaries, after which interviews were conducted. As mentioned, all of the participants
