FAT: the CREATION of the “FAT” FEMALE in 20TH CENTURY AMERICA by Leah Turner

PERFORMING FAT: THE CREATION OF THE “FAT” FEMALE IN 20TH CENTURY AMERICA by Leah Turner

A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of

The Harriet L. Wilkes Honors College

in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of

Bachelor of Arts in Liberal Arts and Sciences

with a Concentration in Women’s Studies

Wilkes Honors College of

Florida Atlantic University

Jupiter, Florida

August 2017

PERFORMING FAT: THE CREATION OF THE “FAT” FEMALE IN 20TH CENTURY AMERICA by Leah Turner

This thesis was prepared under the direction of the candidate’s thesis advisor, Dr. Wairimu Njambi, and has been approved by members of her supervisory committee. It was submitted to the faculty of The Honors College and was accepted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Bachelor of Arts in Liberal Arts and Sciences.

SUPERVISORY COMMITTEE:

______Dr. Wairimu Njambi

______Dr. Michael Harrawood

______Dean Ellen Goldey, Wilkes Honors College

______Date

Acknowledgments

All of my deepest respect and love must go to the entire Honors College staff, both academic and otherwise. I came to this university as a non-traditional student and honestly believed that I would not succeed. It was only with the help and (extreme) patience of the faculty and staff that I made it at all. From the bottom of my heart: thank you.

Special thanks go to all the Humanities professors, Dr. William O’Brien, Dr.

Jacqueline Fewkes, Dr. Miguel Vazquez (I’m sorry I’m not better with languages!), Dr.

Yasmine Shamma, and Dr. Gavin Sourgen. All of you give so much to this university and your students and, especially in my case, we could never do this without you.

Finally, to my thesis advisors Dr. Wairimu Njambi and Dr. Michael Harrawood, both of you have shown me what it means to not only care for your students, but to encourage and shape them into better human beings. Professor Harrawood, your endless positivity and optimism for my future was such a confidence boost and you saved me more often than I care to admit from falling into that dreaded hole of fear and self-doubt.

Professor Njambi, I tried so hard to fight against my calling to be in Gender Studies, but I think you knew from the beginning how this would all turn out. The knowledge you have given me, the confidence that I DO in fact know what I am talking about, is an irreplaceable gift. I can never repay both of you for what you have given me but I can try to make you both proud and succeed in the realm of academia. It is only because of you that I now feel prepared to do so. Thank you.

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ABSTRACT

Author: Leah Turner

Title: Performing Fat: The Creation of the “Fat” Female in 20th Century America

Institution: Wilkes Honors College of Florida Atlantic University

Thesis Advisor: Dr. Wairimu Njambi

Degree: Bachelor of Arts in Liberal Arts and Sciences

Concentration: Women’s Studies

Year: 2017

The body of the “fat” female in America is a place of convergence for many different conflicting social ideas. Feminist social theory has only recently begun to recognize the

“fat” female body as a battleground where social anxieties and inequalities have not only been built, but justified as well. While current academic research has explained the modern “fat” woman and the Freak Show “Fat Lady” separately, rarely has there been a line connecting them theoretically. The purpose of this research is to critically analyze and contextualize the created role of “fat” women throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Through this work I use studies of history and media culture to show how this characterization has been modified through the 20th century to reinforce American society’s changing attitudes and ideas about “fatness” and to show that the creation of

“fatness” is a representation of white, upper class, patriarchal control.

To My Sister Who Teaches Me To Laugh, My Father Who Teaches Me To Love,

And My Mother Who Teaches Me To Live

Table of Contents

Introduction…………………………………………………..……...…………1 Chapter One: The Historical Creation of Fatness………………..…………….8 The Freak Show “Fat Lady”……………………………..……...... ….8 The American Industrial Revolution, Immigration, Class, and Race...11 Women, the Home, and Patriarchal Space……….…………………..17

Chapter Two: Media Representations of Fat Women………….…………….25

The Modern Freak Show……………………….………………….…30

Melissa McCarthy’s “Fat” Woman…………………………….…….34

The Loss of Motherhood……………………………………….…….36

Conclusion………………………………………………………………....…37

Bibliography……………………………………………………………….…38

Introduction

American Actress Melissa McCarthy is a plus-sized TV and movie star well known for her comedic chops. She is funny, charming, and an outspoken “fat” rights activist. Watching her (as a fat woman myself) is not outwardly a negative experience and I often find myself laughing at the wonderful characterizations she seems to so effortlessly embody. Indeed, Melissa McCarthy plays characters which seem to encompass many different traits. She can be masculine and sexually aggressive as in the film Bridesmaids (2011), meek and relatively asexual as in Spy (2015), stupid and exaggerated but loveable in Tammy (2014), and even a strong and in-charge business woman in The Boss (2016). These characteristics, despite how unrelated they may seem, are stereotypical ideas which surround the fat female body in America. These stereotypes are often contradictory and that, in part, is what makes them so difficult to discern and disarm when applied to the fat body. They are the product of over a century of the creation, invention, and distortion of the fat female body in America. The purpose of this thesis is to explain how these characteristics have culminated into the idea of fatness that is understood today, and to illuminate the failings of our modern mass media to get us away from harmful images and largely fabricated ideas of what a fat woman in America should be.

Weight is never neutral. Depending upon cultural context, weight can have differing meanings that are both positive and negative. In our current societal context in

America, weight and particularly “fatness,” is viewed as decidedly negative. When we see a “fat” person, we are looking at the embodiment of multiple symbolic messages.

“Fatness” in America represents, in the words of Samantha Murray, “…a body that is uncared for, uncultivated, and, indeed, a body that has failed as the subject of aesthetics”

(Murray 2008, 237). What is important to realize is that these societal messages which surround the “fat” body, and particularly that of the “fat” female, are not universal perceptions, and, in fact, they aren’t even very old ideas.

I aim to trace the creation of the “fat” woman from the late 19th and early 20th century to her modern incarnation today by showing the evolution of the “fat” female body throughout the major social changes of America, with special emphasis on the

Freak Show “Fat Lady” and her comparison to the modern “fat” actress. Before delving deeper into the material, there are a few important questions which must be answered to fully understand the task at hand. First and foremost, we must ask: “What is “fat?’” or perhaps more specifically “How do we recognize someone else as “fat”? I believe there are two main ways to determine a “fat” body: by using the medical definition and the social definition. In the Preface to Weighty Issues, Jeffery Sobal and Donna Maurer use the terms “objectivist” and “constructionist” to make just this distinction between the approaches to defining social problems such as weight and, more specifically, “fatness”

(Sobal and Maurer 1999, vii).

An objectivist view is something like a scientific or medical approach and is described as an assumption that “…when a negative condition reaches an intolerable point, it self-evidently becomes recognized as a social problem”. On the topic of weight,

“Objectivists view overweight, for example, as a condition in which individuals develop excess fat stores. They define obesity as a social problem to the degree that people’s

2 weights are above medically accepted standards or ideals” (Sobal and Maurer, viii).

Objectivists, then, are making the argument that due to data which they have compiled, it becomes self-evident that “fatness” is a problem. We recognize a “fat” body as fat because it is self-evident.

The constructionist perspective takes a different view: “While an objectivist designates particular conditions as problems, a constructionist examines the processes by which people come to identify certain phenomena as problematic”. In other words,

“…from a constructionist standpoint, a social problem has no independent ontological status; it depends on public definition” (Sobal and Maurer, viii-ix). I think more consideration can be given to this constructionist perspective rather than the objectivist perspective. When we consider the cultural understanding of a fat individual, it is determined by a universality of definition. Looking at the body of an actress like Melissa

McCarthy for instance, we all understand her to be a fat woman. We may have different feelings towards her regarding attractiveness, talent, or even level of fat (whether she is

“obese” or merely “chubby”), but we can all agree that fat is an appropriate term for her body. None of us came to this conclusion due to the self-evidence of her fatness, but rather, I argue, because we decided she is fat, or as is more likely, we as a society are told and taught that she is fat by media and the medical community, and believe it to be true.

The objectivist view ignores the social constructive background of “fatness,”and simply focuses on its current understanding, making it insufficient as an explanation.

Additionally, “fat” is described by Stefanie A. Jones to be as a term “…incredibly slippery” (Jones 2014, 33). She continues “…the term ‘fat’ pushes the limits of

3 definitional boundaries in its looseness; because it can be used to critique any imagined difference from the social ideal, there are few on whose bodies the term will not stick”

(Jones 2014, 33). What this means is that fatness is as much an applied perception as a reality. If we return to the original example of Melissa McCarthy, the mere fact that the same body can have varying levels of “fatness” depending upon the viewer’s opinion is proof of the necessity of the constructionist view. The objectivist view doesn’t account for this “slipperiness” in definition. As you will have more than likely already noticed, I have made a decision to put quotation marks around the terms “fat” and “fatness” throughout the paper. This is meant to act as a representation of the slipperiness of the definitions of the two terms.

As a result of this conclusion, the answer to my first question “how do we recognize someone as fat” has a rather unsatisfying answer: we just do. Fatness is a highly visual difference, meaning it is almost impossible not to notice that someone is

“fat.” Other bodily differences can be easily hidden, but in America, we see a “fat” person and find them apparent wherever they are; in short: they stick out like a sore thumb. In our society, looking at the fat body triggers a series of symbolic representations in our minds, often unconsciously. Even elsewhere around the world the fat body is hyper-present, if with differing cultural meanings, as discussed by Susan Bordo in her seminal book Unbearable Weight (Bordo 1993). In it, she mentions specific areas in

Africa which “…still celebrate voluptuous women. In some regions, brides are sent to fattening farms, to be plumped and massaged into shape for their wedding night” (Bordo

1993, xiv). While these areas may celebrate the “fat” body as opposed to American

4 society which despises it, the body is still highly noticeable and full of cultural symbolism on both sides. Whether loved or hated, the “fat” body is rarely, if ever, neutral.

In America, the “fat” body is associated with specific inferences into the life of the “fat” individual. This is partially caused by the medicalization of the “fat” body, which leads me to my next question. This paper aims to disassemble many of the social stereotypes associated with “fatness” and is not focused on medicalization of the “fat” body. As Samantha Murray states in her essay “Locating Aesthetics: Sexing the Fat

Woman”: “We talk about fatness as a major health crisis, an epidemic, a drain on resources, a symbol of the failed body, and as an aesthetic affront” (Murray 2004, 239). If merely talking about the “fat” body brings to mind these ideas as Murray claims, how then can I help to remove the medicalized aspect of fatness from the mind of the reader? I have taken pains to avoid terms which have medical connotations, such as “obese” and

“overweight,” and replace them with more socialized terms such as “fat” and “big,” despite their own negative connotations. My hope is that the immediate reaction to the

“fat” body as a medical entity will be replaced with ideas of the social aspects of

“fatness” instead.

Next, we reach a question of whose or which “fat” body is being discoursed.

While race is discussed, it should also be pointed out that most of this research is pointed to relate to “fat” white women rather than “fat” women of color. There are a few reasons for this, the largest being that the comparison choices I have made, between modern media stars and the Freak Show “Fat Lady,” require it to be based on white women. The

“Fat Lady” in the Freak Show was rarely, if ever (according to my research) a woman of color, making any conclusions I tried to draw between the treatment of “fat” white women and “fat” women of color conjecture at best. Additionally, a study of women of color and “fatness” has already been done, and done with more justice than I could ever give, in the book The Embodiment of Disobedience: Fat Black Women’s Unruly Political

Bodies by Andrea Elizabeth Shaw (Shaw 2006). This is not to say that the politics surrounding the “fat” white body do not apply to the “fat” body of a woman of color; merely that it is a topic which has been broached by someone else. I cannot, in good conscience, claim that my conclusions here are universal. Race does, however, play a key role in the observation of the “fat” white female body and more information on race will be provided later on in the race portion of the thesis.

The final question to be answered is where to begin tracing the “fat” body in history. The “fat” body has often gone in and out of style as conditions have changed for food availability, resources, social tastes, etc. The most current iteration of “fat” unpopularity, I argue, is different from past versions because of its focus on the moral ineptitude of the “fat” individual. A few factors have led to this change. Medical advances in the 19th and 20th centuries, while not discussed in depth here, are certainly one, but this thesis focuses more on the socially based changes in understanding

“fatness.” As a result, I begin my study of “fatness” with the American Industrial

Revolution and through to the present. My research covers a significant period of time and thus while I intend to be thorough; I must also be brief when covering specific subjects. Chapter One of this thesis includes, in the order presented in this paper: “The

Freak Show ‘Fat Lady’,” “The American Industrial Revolution, Immigration, Class, and

Race,” and “Women, the Home, and Patriarchal Space.” Chapter One acts mainly as a source of historical background and gives the frame for which we view Chapter Two of the thesis. Chapter Two is structured differently and presents specific examples of the problematic modern presentations of “fatness,” and will be ordered by the title of the media being discussed.

Chapter One: The Historical Creation of Fatness

The Freak Show “Fat Lady”

Freak shows became a staple part of American culture in the 1840’s with the opening of P.T. Barnum’s American Museum. The museum featured what came to be known as freaks, and the characters became so popular that other Freak Shows began touring the nation. The lifespan of the Freak Show in America is approximately 100 years, from the 1840’s to the 1940’s. The Fat Lady was a later addition to the shows, with records showing she was not a character of prominence until the late 19th- early 20th century. The Freak Show Fat Lady was not represented in her performance as a person, rather she was a caricature of herself presented as a creation somewhere between figment and reality, an inhuman entity.

The exaggeration of her character began from the first moment the carnival barkers spoke about her. They advertised her as being much larger than she is, often adding hundreds of pounds to her weight to make her seem more impressively large.

They would make extreme claims like: “She’s so fat…it takes four men to hug her, and a boxcar to lug her.” One performer named Lizzie Harris “…was heralded as the “Largest

Mountain of Flesh Ever Seen” despite only weighing 676 pounds (Dennett 1996, 317).

Andrea Stulman Dennett explains that this culture of exaggeration was not unique within the Freak Show, or the circus in general. “Inches were added to the height of giants and subtracted from that of midgets; Fat Ladies gained pounds and Skeletal Men lost them.

Superlatives abounded, and every display was billed as the tallest, smallest, fattest, ugliest, or hairiest-and of course the most extraordinary or original” (Dennett 1996, 317). 8

By making the freaks fantastical it created an image of the performers as beyond human capability, thereby making them inhuman.

The Fat Lady was unique from these other examples though, in that her entire presentation and performance was dependent on the premise of exaggeration. It wasn’t just about her being naturally inhuman, but rather she was specifically created by the

Freak Show to be inhuman. For example, the Fat Lady was often put in outfits which amplified her weight. Baby-doll dresses which flared out to round her shape were common, as were bouncy Shirley temple curls to frame her large face, and her legs and arms were free of cloth to show off their size. Her stage name as well helped to exaggerate her form, acting as an indicator of her size and putting an idea of what the audience was going to see in their minds before she even walked on stage. Baby Ruth,

Dolly Dimples, and Helen Melon are some famous examples of these names. The name of the fat woman and its obvious contrivance allowed the audience a degree of separation from the object of its attention and gave the impression that the Fat Lady herself is in on the joke of her size. The audience is allowed to consider the fat woman as a performer and not as a human woman because it is given permission to do so. When you add this dehumanization of the Fat Lady to the nature of her performance, the result was a stage show which consistently drew large crowds.

The Fat Lady’s routine involved dolling herself up and performing flirtatiously with audience members, often spouting double entendre related to her ample parts. The performance of “The Fat Lady” creates two opposing ideas; first, by having her act flirtatiously, “The Fat Lady” is highlighting the joke of the entire display: that no one in

9 their right mind would purposely sleep with a woman with a body like hers. A woman of her size, who even during a time when extra weight was more acceptable was an extreme, behaving in an outright sexual way created a tension with the audience. Her status as a non-human meant that the audience was given permission to laugh at her act because her character and body were exaggerations and abnormal. Unkind perhaps, but the audience was nonetheless “in” on the joke. She is on presentation in a show which makes money by presenting the many differences of human variation. Surely the audience laughed and cracked jokes about the Fat Lady, but it was expected and shallow without much deeper meaning.

Fat women today, by comparison, are viewed as morally bankrupt, transgressive, and grotesque. A change has taken place in the awareness of the “fat” person, especially the “fat” female, with regards to how the public views her weight. The Freak Show, for all its faults in how it treated the Fat Lady, was openly invested in portraying the Fat

Lady as an inhuman property. She was a comedic property and was made fun of openly within the context of her performance, something even she was a part of as was clear by the qualities of her show. Today, a more insidious aspect has grown with the image of the

“fat” woman. She is made fun of and mistreated under the guise of progress and representation. Examples of this will be given more in-depth in the second part of this thesis, but first it’s important to explore how, in such a short period of time (a little over

200 years from the beginning of the 19th century to the present) these changes in the societal treatment and understanding of the “fat” female have come to pass.

The American Industrial Revolution, Immigration, Class, and Race

Changes were taking place rapidly in America with the start of the industrial revolution. Food was becoming more easily available, leading to a change in preference for the rich regarding size. Where previously the thicker waistline was a sign of prestige and wealth, the lower class were having an easier time procuring food, and thereby becoming less thin. The rich were losing a key trait which had so often separated them from the poor. How could they prove that they were of “superior” blood if the poor could be well fed too? The answer was for the upper class to begin restricting their diet, trying to prove that only they had the strength of will to restrict food intake and keep a slim figure. The medical community followed soon after their rich donors, and medical science, as has often happened through history, aimed to prove the legitimacy of a social opinion.

During “the 1870’s” as Fraser cites, “physicians had encouraged people to gain weight” (Fraser 2009, 13). And yet between the 1880’s and 1920’s, Fraser states the image of fat as a pleasant image thoroughly changed in the United States from a medical standpoint. As early as 1894 doctors were beginning to feel the social pressure to change their standard opinions about fatness as one Woods Hutchinson, a medical professor at the time, wrote. Fraser records his view with the following quote: “Adipose which is often pictured as a veritable Frankenstein, born of breeding and disease, sure to ride its possessor to death sooner or later, is really a most harmless, healthful, innocent tissue”

(Fraser 2009, 11). Later in his life, in the 1920’s, Hutchinson makes a disturbing prediction after learning that “physicians were deliberately underfeeding girls”. He wrote

“The longed-for slender and boyish figure is becoming a menace not only to the present, but also future generations” (Fraser 2009, 12). One need look no further than the rampant spread of eating disorders in most westernized nations today to see the result of this

“menace.”

The speed at which this transformation, in opinion, took place indicates that multiple factors caused the change at once:

1. The changing bodies of the lower class caused by the availability of food,

2. The influx of immigrants coming to the United States, and

3. The creation of race and its resulting impact in America.

The first factor is the simplest to explain. As briefly described above, the industrial revolution, for the first time in history, provided people with what Jeffery Sobal and Donna Maurer describe as “ample amounts of food to eat” (Sobal and Maurer 1999, vii). They continue by writing that “Prior to the 20th century, the major public concern was whether sufficient food was available. As food systems developed, the capability to provide increasingly stable and abundant food supplies, people focused more on limiting their individual food intake…Questions of food insufficiency were replaced with concerns about food excess” (Sobal and Maurer 1999, vii)1. Put more simply, the lower class often lacked for a consistent source of sustenance and the industrial revolution created new opportunities for the lower class to survive. More jobs, the reliable transport

1. I would add a caveat to this statement and claim that the poor and working class were not likely to be concerned with excess food for a few decades until the societal preference to be thin became more strictly enforced. More likely it was only those who had long afforded food that could afford to limit intake. 12 of crops, and a growing reliance on “store bought goods” allowed for the lower classes to be well fed, and by extension gain weight, for the first time (Fraser 2009, 12).

Where it was previously the privilege of the wealthy to have highly visual fatness, another sign of their wealth and prestige, the wealthy became obsessed with restricting their food intake. Laura Fraser argues that “The European tastes for slenderness” became all the more popular in America, with prominent figures viewing slenderness “as a sign of class distinction and finer sensibilities” (Fraser 2009, 12). “Fatness,” something which had previously been reserved only for the rich, became something the rich could never tolerate: common. The upper-class could never allow the lower classes any sort of commonality, and needed to find a way to again separate themselves from the masses.

Luckily, the popular sciences of phrenology and eugenics along with the convenient creation of race gave the rich a solution to their problem. Their solution was a trick that they had used before to claim superiority, namely to argue that “fatness” was a sign of primitivity, of both moral and genetic ineptitude. Farrell describes that eugenics, the belief that there is a biological hierarchy of races, played a role in the stigmatization of

“fatness.” This leads to an exploration of the next two factors of change in the perception of “fatness”: immigration and race. Both are inextricably intertwined and must be presented simultaneously to fully understand their impact and importance.

As mentioned above, eugenics worked on the premise that there was a biological hierarchy of races. This hierarchy also had certain subsets including class and gender.

While these ideas may all seem separate today, at the time (1890’s-1930s was eugenics’ peak popularity) they were all believed to be linked. David R. Roediger explains this idea

13 quite well in his book Working Towards Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants Became

White (Roediger 2005). Roediger notes that:

This loose, state-endorsed linkage of biology to culture, history, and class can mislead modern historians of race who characteristically attempt to disentangle the biological from other rationales for oppression, regarding the former as underpinning racism and the latter as underpinning other kinds of prejudice. But what was so striking about restrictionist and racist thought at the beginning (and, indeed, at the end) of the twentieth century was its very entanglement of the biological and the cultural. (Roediger 2005, 66)

This led to a “…widespread fear about the contamination threatened by the influx of immigrants to the United States and by the newly emancipated African Americans”

(Farrell 2009, 259). These two groups were (and still are) constantly conflated with each other. Roediger goes further with his explanation, writing:

Just as greasers2, for example, were racialized in various times and places on the basis of their poverty, jobs, speech, DIET (emphasis mine), and other “environmental” characteristics…Their problems were those of race, but also of class and history. Their diseases and deficiencies…were traced to both “germs” and “genes.” (Roediger 2005, 66)

Greaser is a term for a specific lower-class type of immigrant. These immigrant groups were often conflated with racist African American stereotypes as a way to prove their low status. The racial epithet “guinea” for example, was used for African Americans as well as darker skinned Italians and was linked with “ape” imagery (Roediger 2005, 37-

41). Similarly, the term “hunky” was also used in this way with Roediger describing “The

2. Greaser was originally “a class and occupational term” for “those who greased sheep in pre-industrial England and those who lubricated ships and railroad machinery in the nineteenth century.” The term eventually “crossed (and were crossed by) racial and national lines” (Roediger 2005, 40). 14 iconography of the Brutish Hun as an ape partook of earlier anti-hunky/ hun stereotypes focusing on eastern Europeans” (Roediger 2005, 43). This comparison was based on the image of black people and immigrants as “’…physically strong [and] self-sufficient” but

“also intrinsically dull and stupid’” (Roediger 2005, 43-44).

This link can be further explained by a quote from “the nation’s leading evolutionary biologist, E.D. Cope” who believed that there were “four inferior forms of humanity: ‘non-white races, all women, southern as opposed to northern Europeans and lower classes within superior races’” (Roediger 2005, 66). “Fatness” or even being large or stocky, as the working class tended to be, became a sign of low breeding and subsequently a lower form of humanity. An argument of primitivism was used to explain the growing waistlines of the lower class, with American physician Dr. Leonard Williams being quoted by Farrell as saying that “It is to be admitted that there exists a settled belief among the uneducated, and even among many of the educated, that it is a man’s duty to eat as much as he possibly can in order to keep up his strength. This belief reaches back to the most primitive days when food was scarce and its enjoyment intermittent” (Farrell

2009, 260). Eating “excessively” then became associated with the primitive. “Fatness” or even just a thicker body caused by heavy labor became signs of low breeding.

By extension, attraction to “fatness” also became associated with primitivity.

Farrell quotes an author of the time, Henry Finck, who makes the connection more apparent by claiming that “the beauty standards” of people of color were different from that of the standards of British people and Americans. People of color, the “Hottentots,

Moors, and Turks” to quote Finck’s description, are an “inferior form of humanity” to

15 return to Cope’s description. Because people of color are primitive and find “fatness” to be attractive, it follows that to be attracted to fatness when one is white is to give in to one’s primitive nature, and, by extension, also be primitive yourself. I will return to

Farrell’s article and the words of Dr. Williams one more time, because I believe it introduces my next point beautifully:

As Dr. Williams wrote in 1926, ‘Certain it is that in many savage tribes and even among people that are no means savage, that men prefer fat women.’ He argued, however, that ‘civilization’ was changing men’s ‘natural’ sexual instinct. They were beginning to realize that they preferred thin women. And to accommodate this preference, he explained, women were taking part in slimming campaigns, fighting their natural— that is, primitive—‘endocrinal’ tendency to gain weight. As Williams approvingly noted, white women in ‘civilized countries’ were beginning to realize (and presumably men were ‘learning’ it too) that men preferred slim women. As Williams concluded, fat women were ‘repulsive sights, degrading alike to their sex and civilization. (Farrell 2009, 260)

It can be assumed that when Williams states that “fat” women are “degrading…to their sex and civilization” he is referring to “fat” white women. If we again return to E.D.

Cope and his description of the “four inferior forms of humanity”3 we can see that it is doubtful that Williams would need to include black women in his condemnation. White women, especially upper class white women, are unique in that while they are beneath the white male on the hierarchy of humanity, they are above other races and classes.

“Fat” white women are betraying their race by giving in to primitive urges, and eating excessively. The “fat” white woman, then, has gone from the non-human of the Freak

Show Fat Lady to the sub-human of a “lesser” race.

3. These again being “non-white races, all women, southern as opposed to northern Europeans and lower classes within superior races” (Roediger 2005, 66) 16

Women, the Home, and Patriarchal Space

Farrell’s article is entitled “The White Man’s Burden: Female Sexuality, Tourist

Postcards, and the Place of the Fat Woman in Early 20th Century U.S. Culture.” The title

“The White Man’s Burden” is of course a famous quote by Rudyard Kipling on the role of the white man in civilizing the “lesser” races, but it is also used on a postcard which

Farrell describes. On the postcard, she explains that “we see a photo of a white, well- dressed man sitting in a drawing room with a heavy woman on his lap. The caption reads

‘The White Man’s Burden’” (Farrell 2009, 261). This suggests that not only do more civilized white men abhor a fleshy and sexually exuberant woman, Farrell explains, but

“also that it is his ‘responsibility’ to tame her” (Farrell 2009, 261). The responsibility of man taming women is a leftover idea taken from the Enlightenment, and particularly

Descartes. Cartesian theory claims that “man” is the supreme logical animal and that

“woman,” conversely, is illogical, emotional, and connected with nature. Christianity teaches that it is man’s duty to tame the elements of nature, in this case: woman. If woman is already connected to nature, then the fat woman is even more so, because her body is too like the body of the “lesser” races. Their primitivity is now hers.

Excessive weight is a cultural construction, one which was in part created to punish women who were going outside the parameters (both literal and metaphorical) which were created around their bodies. The term ‘excess” becomes very important as

America approaches the 1930’s and The Great Depression. Consumer excess can have disastrous consequences, as shown by the excessive use of credit which contributed to the

17 eventual stock market crash. Frugality became a sign of virtue and personal strength.

Farrell explains: “As we moved from a primarily rural farm-oriented nation to a primarily urban one, there were concerns of consumer excess. Woman, with her connection to nature, was more likely to embody this excess with her corporeality because their rational qualities were not sufficiently developed to control their bodies” and by extension their fatness (Farrell 2009, 257). The stereotype that women love to shop and have no control over their spending is a result of this thinking. Add to this the common saying that a fat person (usually a woman) simply lacks the “willpower” to be thin is a direct consequence of the fear of the excessive woman. Not only is she excessive with her shopping, but with her eating as well.

Another factor of larger bodies which created unease within the patriarchal structure was that of the “fat” woman’s bodies and their excessive sexuality. As mentioned before, the connection of the larger body with the primitive or “lower” races was one reason for the shift in preference within the body size hierarchy from fatness to thinness. Another reason was the anxiety created by the hypersexuality which related to larger body parts. This concept again returns to a racialized background, beginning most notably with the oft mentioned Saartjie Baartman. Saartjie Baartman was a “Hottentot” woman of South Africa. She was “most likely an indentured servant, and in 1810 when she was twenty years old, she was taken by her employer from Cape Town to England for what became a life full of sexual exploitation” (Shaw 2006, 47). Baartman was shown around Europe as the “Hottentot Venus” and was always shown with her sexual organs

(breasts, buttocks, and vagina) prominently on display. It was believed that because these

18 sexual organs were larger than those of white females, that black women had far more intense sexual desires. Add to this their perceived innate primitivity and the black woman became a sexual deviant (and curiosity), especially in the minds of white men.

However, with the change in understanding of weight in the early 19th century, it became necessary to break the association of weight with higher sexual function. If weight was no longer desirable and instead acted as evidence of lower hierarchical status, then it must be re-associated with a new concept. Andrea Elizabeth Shaw explains that this “needed” change was found in the figure of the black female “Mammy.” This figure is the culmination of many different stereotypes, but for the purpose of this argument, I will be focusing on the impact of this character on societal weight relations. The

“Mammy” is a stereotype that was constructed during the American slavery, of a large black woman who cooks, cleans, and generally presents as a subservient, motherly figure.

She is similar to the Freak Show “Fat” Lady in that she is more exaggeration than reality.

She represents a created ideal, “a formulated and unrepresentative staging of black womanhood that conforms to a white hegemonic ideal of an acquiescent, subordinate, and nondisruptive version of black femininity” (Shaw 2006, 20).

Shaw makes this statement and argues that the creation of this character helped to disarm the idea of the overtly sexual “fat” black woman and “mollifies white female fears about white men’s interracial liaisons” (Shaw 2006, 20). I agree with this determination, but wish to take it a step farther and note that the “Mammy” character subverted the sexuality of not only “fat” black women, but “fat” white women as well. An association of fatness with lowly work, motherhood, and asexuality became the norm throughout

America. The “Mammy” is not a sexual creation, she exists as a nonsexual, and yet completely subservient, ideal. The “fat” body became appropriate in the context of the home and child-rearing, became representative of domesticity as a result of the “Mammy” creation.

The full effect of this focus on the home was interrupted by two major events in

U.S. history. First, during the 1930’s, The Great Depression caused a disruption of normal home life. Unemployment, loss of food production, and the move from rural to urban ways of living led to a focus on frugality. This frugality continued to rise in importance and even became a version of patriotism throughout the 1940’s and World

War II. The lack of male spectators of female body weight during the war was a chance for weight to lose some of its stigma, however the dishonor of being unpatriotic and being thought of as eating more than one’s share was enough to keep ideas of weight essentially in stasis, appropriate in the context of home only, until the men came back from conflict. The return of the men meant a quick snap to the return of patriarchal control, partially enforced by a patriotic duty to repopulate the country. As Angela

Stukator puts it: “women in postwar America were relocated from factory to home and coerced into the ideology of maternal, domestic femininity” (Stukator 2001, 198).

The 1950’s is of course the first period which comes to one’s mind when considering “domestic femininity”. Women were homemakers, procreators, and most of all, supportive of their husbands and family. This applies mainly to white middle and upper-class families, as immigrant families and families of color were rarely an accepted part of the standard patriarchal structure of America. Within the home, curves are

20 acceptable in the context of motherhood, as the “fat” woman is in a space which is strongly and decidedly under male control, but also in a place where her presence is not encroaching overly into other masculine spaces. The woman is in the home, unseen and unheard except by her family. Her sexuality, as well, is attached to her place in the home.

While she is there, her sexuality is contained and present only for her male partner.

In the 1960’s there is a definite shift in the shape of the fashionable or “preferred” body, as well as a move of sexuality from the home to the public sphere (the free love movement being a good example). I would also say this is where we see a shift in the media’s preference for a thinner body. The larger body, which was socially acceptable under certain parameters even within the media4, became entirely unpopular. Rather, it

“was succeeded by the boyish slenderness and androgynous look popularized by

Twiggy” (Stukator 2001, 198). The media has a long history of supporting the patriarchal hierarchy over women, however this change seems abrupt, so what was the catalyst for this change? In the 1960’s, and especially the 1970’s, women began leaving the home and entering the male populated workforce. Previously when women had left the home in the 1940’s, she had done so with a lack of male presence enforcing her gender role as wife and mother, and she had done so under the excuse of necessity for the war effort.

This time, women were leaving the home and doing so with a large male populace present. She began to encroach upon male dominated space, and her sexuality came along

4. Those parameters being “fatness” in the correct places, such as the hourglass ideal which allowed fat in the breasts and hips exclusively; places which indicated fertility. 21 with her. It became necessary to once again contain woman and her “excessive” sexuality.

The media was pushing a new fashion for thinness among women, a trend originally embraced by feminists, which had mixed consequences. Nita Mary McKinley writes:

Beginning with the 1970’s wave of feminism, ‘androgyny’ replaced ‘femininity’ as the norm for the ideal woman in dominant culture…the dichotomous ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine’ categories were challenged and the ideal woman was reconstructed…The popular representations of this androgynous woman might be expressive, but more typically, she rejected traditional roles and was assertive and strong. She was in control of her life and ready to enter the masculine public sphere. (McKinley 1999, 101)

While helping to rewrite the meaning of the new preferred thin body, the 70’s feminist’s focus on androgyny ostracized those among women who were unable to meet the thin body expectation. In their efforts to join the masculine-centric world they lived in and separate themselves from feminine expectations of motherhood and homemaking, feminists accidentally abandoned certain types of femininity, among white women and most certainly among women of color. This rejection of the feminine reinforced a value of the male, with McKinley writing: “the fit, fat-free body that popular media portrays as ideal in weight is rare in women, and is more typical of the bodies of men, and is therefore the perfect body for the male sphere” (McKinley 1999, 101).

Additionally, the androgynous and thin body is problematic because when women left the home and joined male spaces, it became important that their bodies take up as little of the male space as possible. In trying to fit a media ideal or a feminist ideal,

22 women ultimately fit a patriarchal ideal. Stukator writes, “As Naomi Wolf notes in The

Beauty Myth, the thin woman has a contradictory status: she ‘has the freedom from the constraints of reproduction of the earlier generation while reassuring men with her suggestion of female weakness, asexuality, and hunger’” (Stukator 2001, 198-199).

McKinley notes this phenomenon as well, noting the thin body is “feminine” because it is

“small, fragile, and vulnerable” while at the same time being “masculine” due to its lack of “female breasts and hips” (McKinley 1999, 100). The thin body lacked blatant femininity, and therefore blatant sexuality. The “fat” body, however, was too sexual, too excessive. Her perceived inability to control her eating, her lack of “frugality” and

“willpower”, was conflated with an idea that she was also unable to control her sexuality.

“The ideal woman,” McKinley writes, “must be sexual, but not too sexual. The ‘frigid’ woman threatens male pleasure; the ‘oversexed’ woman threatens male virility. In dominant culture, female desire for its own sake is often portrayed as dangerous and loathsome” (McKinley 1999, 105).

The “fat” body soon became unacceptable within society. Her body represents unwillingness to “fit” into patriarchal ruled spaces and an excess of femininity. This often happens when bodies are “excessively female…such as those that are pregnant, menstrual, or menopausal” and thus “cannot fit easily into the body politic” (Shaw 2006,

46). The “fat” body is unique in that it is a flagrant disregard (whether intentional or not) of the ideal thinness now required within our society. The “fat” woman is perceived as having excessive desire for food and sex and threatens male virility with her incapability to curb either appetite. Her size encroaches on male space literally, and also does so

23 symbolically as it has no recognizable masculinity like a thinner body does. This leads to a significant anxiety in within the patriarchal hierarchical society which is modern

America.

The dissonance caused by the “fat” body must be subdued and fixed; social defamation or “fat shaming” is a common way to attempt to humiliate the “fat” person into compliance with the non-threatening normativity of thinness. Chapter Two of this thesis focuses on specific modern examples of media and their attempts to portray the

“fat” body in such a way as to make her less threatening, or shame her for her size. These portrayals use many stereotypes which are carried over from their creation in the historical past, of which I tried to present in Chapter One.

Chapter Two: Media Representations of Fat Women

Chapter One of this thesis describes the history of the social creation of “fatness” in America. Chapter Two uses these ideas and applies them to their modern-day iterations. The presentation of the “fat” female today in media is still reminiscent of prior versions of the “fat” woman. However, whereas in the past there were blatant examples of bias (think of the non-humanity of the Freak Show Fat Lady) now our representations of her are both contradictory and more characteristic of a being which is less than the average human rather than exceeding humanity altogether. The current depictions of

“fatness” are often misconstrued to be harmless, tolerable or even positive towards the

“fat” body. There is a sociological reason for this change in perception which, while not specifically used to explain discrimination against “fat” individuals, is useful in this argument.

It is accepted within the academic community that when it comes to discrimination there is a distinction of severity. When, for example, one looks at racism,

Stephen J. Gould describes a distinction between “hard-liners” and “soft-liners” (Gould

1993, 85). Hard-liners are those who “held that blacks were inferior and that their biological status justified enslavement and colonization” while soft-liners “agreed that blacks were inferior but held that a people’s right to freedom did not depend upon their level of intelligence” (Gould 1993, 85). Similarly, sociologists Peter Glick and Susan T.

Fiske in 1997 published an article which makes a distinction between “hostile” and

“benevolent” sexism (Glick and Fiske 1997, 119-135). Again, this is a different topic but the same distinction of severity is used, albeit with a different name.

To simplify the idea, “hard-line” or “hostile” discrimination is blatant. The person or institution which is discriminating is not trying to hide their discrimination, nor are they attempting to make it more palatable. In a way, one could argue that hard-line or hostile discrimination is more honest, or at least easier to identify, than the alternative.

“Soft-line” or “benevolent” discrimination is more insidious as it often hides behind good intentions. Something along the lines of telling a woman that she is doing a respectable job despite her gender, or a black person that they speak especially “white” would be obvious examples of soft-line or benevolent bias. When applying these ideas to images it can be much more difficult to find fault, especially if the images presented tend to entertain as is often the case with “fat” representation in the present.

If we borrow these ideals from Gould, Glick, and Fiske and apply them to “fat” discrimination then we could say that “hard” “fat” discrimination is represented in the

Freak Show Fat Lady. She is openly mocked and despised and her inferiority, or as I argue her inhumanity, is never in question by those who view her. “Soft” “fat” discrimination conversely is more nuanced. Those who view the fat body think that it is indeed inferior, but that it is due to other reasons such as the fat person’s innate primitivity and inability to control their eating. “Soft” sizeism like other forms of

“benevolent” bias is still just as representative of the hegemonic system as “hard,” but the

“soft” ideologies are ultimately more beneficial to the dominant group as it relieves them of the guilt of their bias. An especially common form of “soft” “fat” discrimination is the employment of the excuse that the perceived dominant (thin) group is merely worried about the health of the subordinate (fat) group. While there is research that obesity may

26 be harmful to the health of a fat individual, the argument that thin people are trying to save them is, I think, a thinly veiled excuse for size bias. All that the non-fat people want to do is save “fat” individuals from themselves; it becomes in essence “The Thin Man’s

Burden.” A way to seem sympathetic to a group of people while still separating oneself from it and claiming a moral superiority in the process.

There are many phrases we use to describe a body which is outgrowing its prescribed boundaries; things like “losing control” of eating, “letting themselves go” or

“giving in to temptation”. These turns of phrase are common within the American language; they have the applied undertone of a loss of control, of willpower, of an inability to regulate oneself. By pressuring the excessive individual to decrease their size, the dominant group is not only reinforcing its hegemonic power by forcing its will on a subordinate group member, the dominant group is also “saving” the “fat” person from themselves. Additionally, “soft” bias provides the subordinate group with incentive to return their bodies from excess to ideal weight standards through the form of dominant group acceptance and praise. In other words, as Glick and Fiske describe:

These [benevolent] ideologies serve both as a balm for the conscious of benevolent group members (We aren’t exploiting anyone; they couldn’t get along without us telling them what to do and taking care of them) as well as a more effective and pleasant means of coercing cooperation from the subordinate group, whose members receive various perks and even affection in return for knowing their place. (Glick and Fiske 1997, 120)

Glick and Fiske make an excellent point here, as it’s important to remember that there are rewards for the individual who returns to ideal weight. “Fat” people internalize the ideals of the dominant hegemonic group and will often admit their attempts to lose weight as a 27 form of cohesion with and ultimately protection from the societal focus on their weight.

The social worth and status of the “fat” person will rise with the admission of fault because they are admitting to their own inability to exercise control without the interference of an outside source. Eventually becoming thin proves that the individual has the strength of character and breeding to control themselves, and that their excessiveness is no longer a danger to the dominant patriarchal hegemonic power. Yet, if a “fat” person/s admits fault but does not lose weight, they have marked themselves as somehow broken or disabled and their worth is lower within the society by their own self- characterization.

If the “fat” person is unwilling to change their excessive bodies there is another form of social control which can keep them harmless within the hierarchy of size.

Another method of the dominant group is to render the “fat” person, in particular the

“fat” female, as comedic. As Andrea Stukator writes:

Rendering the unruly fat woman as comic spectacle is one common strategy for designating her doubly marginal status—as a woman and as a fat woman—and ridiculing her aberrant body. As a genre, comedy is progressive, for it has the capacity to demystify the world, to expose oppressive hierarchies…Yet comedy is also inherently conservative, for it involves the use of cultural stereotypes and archetypes. (Stukator 2001, 199)

The beginning of the use of comedy to marginalize the “fat” people, and particularly the

“fat” female goes back to the Freak Show Fat Lady. The exaggerations surrounding her body were an early form of comedy which de-escalated the threat of her excessive aberration. Stukator argues that the earlier form of comedy used during the Freak Shows

28 was something called the carnivalesque. The “carnivalesque” “abolishes hierarchies, prohibitions, and regulations in favor of a view of the world from below, a view that privileges the marginal and excluded …” (Stukator 2001, 201). It is true that while on stage the Fat Lady was privileged over the heteronormativity of the audience, however the very nature of the show ended up alienating the Fat Lady further. The audience is separate from the Fat Lady and looking up at her on a stage. She is isolated and alone, the audience is safe from her excessiveness while still able to take part in her performance as passive observers. Robert Bogdan explains that “Usually the humor took the form of exaggerations” such as those surrounding the Fat Lady. Those exaggerations helped to make these “aberrant” bodies featured in the Freak show even more different and inhuman compared to the audience’s bodies. “The fabrications, the appearance of the freak, and the overall presentation were so outlandish that both the talker and most in the audience shared a sense of the ridiculous” (Bogdan 1996, 32). Again, this sense of the ridiculous separates the audience from the Freak Show Fat Lady so that the audience is safe from her abnormality, and her inhumanity.

Today the audience still takes part in the ridiculous through “fat” representations in media, however the representations have moved from the simple “carnivalesque” representations to showings of moral ineptitude disguised through the lens of comedy.

Partially this is due to a change in context. “Fat” women in media today are shown as a part of the populace and are no longer separate from the observers of her excessiveness. It became necessary to remove the threat of “fat” women in media by giving her specific roles and expected standards to play. The “fat” woman represented today embodies the

29 type of “conservative” comedy which Stukator warns about; “it involves the use of cultural stereotypes and archetypes” (Stukator 2001, 199). These stereotypical roles create an expectation of “fat” women as safe and non-threatening. The stereotypes themselves designate the “fat” woman as subhuman and reinforce her lack of place within the patriarchal hegemonic structure.

For this discussion on modern media use of “fat” female representation, I will be focusing on examples of film and television which coincides with the topics discoursed in

Chapter One. These examples will show that the historical creation of fatness is still very present in her iterations in film and television, but has moved from a “hard” representation to a “soft” one. The sources I will use for this portion of the thesis are all comedy film and television shows, and will be separated by their relevance to one of the historical problems from Chapter One.

The Modern Freak Show

There are two television shows which I want to bring attention to in this section.

These shows take place in a Freak Show/ carnivalesque setting and both feature a “Fat

Lady” and yet they exist as a strange hybrid between the older Freak Show Fat Lady and the moralistic interpretation of “fat” women today. What this means is that both shows have a “fat” woman within a Freak Show setting in the early 20th century, but the women are characterized with the moral ineptitudes which are applied to “fat” women today.

The first example is the HBO show Carnivale which was on the air from 2003 until 2005. The show dealt with deep biblical ideas through the lens of a travelling carnival during the dustbowl of the 1930’s and those biblical ideas translated to the morality of characters within the show. A carnival, as has been established, is somewhat incomplete without a resident “Fat Lady.” In Carnivale, the Dreifuss family were the ones who provided the “fat” lady but she was presented in the form of a “cooch show.”

Within the mythology of Carnivale all carnivals needed a special show for adults (usually men) which involved a strip tease. These shows were put on by the Dreifuss family which had two daughters who would participate in the show: Dora Mae and Rita Sue. Rita Sue is very thin and represents the “normal” size of women. Dora Mae is the more special body type, the one who is considered “fat”. Both women perform in the cooch show, and both women are involved in sexual transactions afterwards. However, in the season one episode entitled “Babylon” only one of the sisters is killed.

Dora Mae, the “fat” sister, is murdered by the residents of the town of Babylon.

She has the word “harlot” carved onto her forehead and, through some of the supernatural elements of the show, her soul is trapped in the town to sexually service the male residents. Babylon is a representation of hell, and yet only one of the sisters is murdered and trapped there. If we look closer at the events surrounding Dora Mae’s death, there is a symbolic meaning behind the events that took place. Dora Mae is a highly sexual “fat” woman. The men in the town want her sexually but only under their terms as they were bound by their “Thin Man’s Burden”. First, the male residents needed to remove her independence and shame her into compliance. Her murder is the literal destruction of her

31 free will, with the word “harlot” inscribed on her head to show the world she is not worthy of pity. Not only is she a “fat” woman, but she is an overtly sexual “fat” woman.

Dora Mae was unacceptable and needed to be brought under patriarchal control. Her death and subsequent entrapment to be used by the men, unable to escape, is a poignant metaphor for the role women are supposed to play in society. Their sexuality must be contained and used only under certain parameters and with male permission.

One other important detail about Dora Mae’s death is the way that she is killed.

Dora Mae, despite having a word carved into her head, was not stabbed but lynched

(Carnivale 2003-2005). The obvious connection the show is making is that of Dora Mae being a subhuman entity. Her size and her sexuality were both enough to mark her as primitive and therefore she was treated to the same death that a black person would have received at the time. The show is not only connecting the link between blackness and fatness but its depiction of Dora Mae’s death encourages and reinforces the connection.

This links back to the fear of the hypersexuality of larger body parts on black women, and fear of their primitivity which could spread to white men. The “fat” body represents the primitive and the uncontrollable, and it is the role of men to tame it by any means necessary, even murder.

The second modern example is from the popular American Horror Story series and also features a highly sexual woman. Her sexuality and excessiveness are shown in a different way than Dora Mae’s in that this character’s excessive eating is a symbol which represents her excessive sexuality. The character, Barbara, is a “fat” woman who is recruited for the Freak Show from a “Fat Recovery Center”. She is at first reluctant to

32 join until the recruiter waves a Baby Ruth chocolate bar in front of her face. Barbara’s eyes latch on to the bar with a single-minded and nearly sexual attention (Turner 2015,

8). The show continues with a subplot of Ima having a romance with another freak,

Jimmy and their meeting is especially interesting because:

When she is introduced to the main male protagonist, Jimmy, another freak with fused fingers, he looks at her with extreme disgust, and shakes her hand with wide eyes full of mortification. This is a character who has an ongoing romance with a woman with two heads, and yet it is somehow outside of his comfort zone to be presented with an extremely fat woman. Jimmy has a drinking problem and as his drinking intensifies, his attraction towards Ima grows as well. (Turner 2015, 8)

Later, Ima and Jimmy begin a sexual relationship. The more time he spends with her, the less control he has over his drinking which causes him to make the “wrong” choice of having sex with her. This relationship between Ima and Jimmy represents the moral contagion of fatness. The more time Jimmy spends with Ima, whose fatness is a result of her lack of self-control, the more corrupted his own morality becomes. As mentioned in

Chapter One, finding a fat woman attractive was/is a sign of one’s own low breeding and morality. This show takes that idea and turns it from a sign of poor genetics to a moral contagion. Ima’s fatness and primitivity make Jimmy worse than he was before, her lack or morality corrupts him. It is only when Jimmy leaves her romantically that he succeeds in overcoming his alcoholism (American Horror Story 2011-).

These “fat” characters are punished for their excessive weight, but they also represent excessive femininity and by extension excessive appetite for both food and consumerism. They both are highly sexual, both have no problem showing skin, and both

33 have ample curves which cannot ever be mistaken for a masculine body. There is an opposite to these characters which both contradicts and reinforces the stereotypes of

“fatness”. These characters are often played by Melissa McCarthy and she has made nearly an entire subgenre of comedy which revolves around this type of character: The sexually aggressive, masculine, “fat” woman.

Melissa McCarthy’s “Fat” Woman

Whether intentional or not, Melissa McCarthy is typecast into playing the same type of role very frequently. While “fat” women are often portrayed as masculine figures,

Melissa McCarthy has arguably made an entire career out of one particular characterization of “fat” women. This is the character of the masculine and sexually aggressive “fat” woman. This is not to say that a woman who is unfeminine is less of a woman, however in the case of “fat” women she is portrayed in this way to separate the

“fat” body from any idea of femininity. This is done forcefully to the “fat” female roles and characters and without consent. Many of Melissa McCarthy’s films fulfill this stereotype, with one example being the film Tammy (2014) which features Melissa

McCarthy in the title role. Tammy is an unlikeable woman who gets fired from her job at a fast food restaurant and comes home to find her husband with another woman. She decides to go on a trip with her alcoholic grandmother and along the way “finds herself” and attempts to get her life together.

Tammy is not an attractive woman. Her personality is aggressive and extreme, she isn’t very intelligent, and her personal hygiene is questionable at best. Her character 34 dresses in oversized t-shirts which highlight her weight more than hide it. When she quits her job at the restaurant, she steals hamburgers on her way out. Later in the movie when attempting to rob another fast food establishment she tells the employees to not only give her all of the money, but all of the pies as well. Everything about Tammy is extreme and irrational. She has excessive weight and an excessive personality to go along with it. At key moments in the film, Tammy is shamed about her size and actions. When in a bar with her grandmother, Tammy confidently approaches a man and asks him to have sex with her. At this point Melissa McCarthy tends to do a fair amount of physical comedy which makes the entire scenario absurd. The physical comedy, its extremity, reinforces the idea that a woman of her size who is so blatantly masculine and excessively “fat” could not ever have a romantic relationship (Tammy 2014).

A similar scene takes place in the film Bridesmaids when McCarthy’s character

“Megan” follows a man on her flight to the bathroom. When he leaves the restroom, she asks if he wants to go back in and have sex with her. The proposal of sex is a traditionally masculine role, and when McCarthy takes over this role it is a representation of her literally taking up male space. The film, again, must show the absurdity of a “fat” woman proposing sex by using physical comedy. McCarthy’s character lifts her leg above her head and states “Uh-oh, somebody found a souvenir! You feel that steam heat coming?

That’s from my undercarriage” (Bridesmaids 2011). This line combined with the physical comedy is of course hilarious, but it also removes the sexuality from McCarthy’s character. The use of the ridiculous, the carnivalesque, removes any power behind the sexuality of the Megan character, effectively making her as asexual as the Mammy

35 figure.

The Loss of Motherhood

The final example I will give is a more general television trope. Often when an actress gets pregnant her character on her show isn’t pregnant at the same time. There are the usual tricks that television producers will use to hide the pregnancy, such as dark clothing, or large objects strategically placed in front of the baby bump, but sometimes producers will choose, rather than to hide the pregnancy, to write into the show a situation which causes the character to suddenly gain weight. The Nanny for instance had the character C.C. Babcock (played by Lauren Lane) go through a mental breakdown after the main character she loved got engaged to someone else. This caused her to gain weight to the point C.C. was put into a mental institution, only to eventually be “healed” in the hospital and return to the show as thin as ever (The Nanny 1993-1999). This entire storyline was written in to cover up Lauren Lane’s pregnancy.

Another example has the character Peggy from the show Mad Men in almost an opposite situation. Her character is pregnant in the show, but the office and family members all believe that she is gaining excessive weight, with even Peggy not being aware of her pregnancy until later on (Mad Men 2007-2015). For Peggy, her pregnancy is incongruous with her size, and it isn’t until late in the pregnancy that the connection is made at all. In both these examples and many others there is a distinct separation of the

“fat” female from motherhood. During the 1970’s when women were leaving the home for the workplace and the pill was becoming more commonly used, the androgynous 36 body took the place of the “fat” body (or rather the hourglass curved body) as the ideal body type.

Motherhood, rather counter-intuitively, also moved away from its association with larger hips and breasts and instead came to be associated with women who ascribe to ideal weight. McKinley describes that: “According to sociological discourse, for a woman to be reproductively successful, she must attract a mate by demonstrating her reproductive value through cues to her health and age” (McKinley 1999, 103). If the social cues for health and youth have been redefined to only include the thin body, then the “fat” woman has not only been removed as a viable mate, but she has also lost her worth as a mother. Television and films reinforce this removal by denying the fat woman motherhood, both as a character and in the real world.

Conclusion

The social creation of fatness is present throughout modern media, the examples I have given only scratch the surface. The point here is not to trace every single example, that could fill an entire book on its own, but rather to raise awareness about the history of fatness in America. “Soft” sizeism subverts every part of our culture, and its roots are not innocent, but rather a reflection of some of America’s most shameful ideas. The goal of this thesis is to get society thinking about its most harmful norms and to hopefully make the reader active participants in the redefinition of “fatness” -- taking “fatness” from a place of shame and, through the recognition of it’s past, creating an America which is more accepting of the “fat” female body. 37

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