FAT ADMIRATION: CONSTRUCTING FAT-POSITIVE IDENTIFICATIONS By RATULA DASGUPTA Integrated Studies Project submitted to Dr. Gloria Filax in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts – Integrated Studies Athabasca, Alberta June, 2008 Acknowledgements I could not have completed this project without the guidance and support of a few very important people. I owe a special thanks to Dr. Gloria Filax, my advisor on this project. Our coffee meetings, your mentorship, wisdom, and availability whenever I had concerns about the project were invaluable to me. I owe much love and gratitude to my mother, Sikha, and older sister, Piali. Thank you for your unconditional love and belief in my ability to always do better. Thank you to my husband Ron for encouraging me to complete this project when I didn’t think I had the strength. And finally, I would like to dedicate this project to the memory of my late father, Dr. Debabrata Dasgupta. I never would have pursued the MAIS program if it hadn’t been for you. As proud as I am for reaching this goal by my own efforts, I know I couldn’t have done it without all of you. Contents Introduction...................................................................................................................1 Historical and Cross Cultural Acceptance of Fat Bodies...........................................3 The Initial Turn to Thinness .............................................................................................9 The Obsession with Thinness .......................................................................................15 Contemporary Interpretations of the Fat Body ........................................................25 Fat Admiration: A Brief Introduction ..........................................................................30 Methodology...............................................................................................................35 Methods.......................................................................................................................39 Typological Classification...........................................................................................40 The Attractiveness of Fat Bodies................................................................................47 Sexual Practices..........................................................................................................58 Body Type Discrimination ...........................................................................................67 Conclusion...................................................................................................................73 Bibliography.................................................................................................................76 Appendix 1- List of Abbreviations ..............................................................................79 Introduction It has been over century since mainstream Euro-American society has experienced a meaningful celebration of the fat body as a sexual and aesthetic ideal. Social, political, and economic changes since the turn of the century have brought about abhorrence towards corpulence that has seized public consciousness. The fat body no longer inhabits the status of health and beauty it once did, and thinness has become the norm to which most now aspire. In the last fifty years, in particular, this aspiration towards thinness has consumed the time, energy, and financial resources of the masses. The drive of males and females towards attaining a physical ideal based on the eradication of fat has engendered fatal physical and psychological consequences. So indoctrinated are individuals by a culture of thinness that many have lost the ability to ever achieve a sustained satisfaction with their bodies. The hatred people have of corpulence also manifests in stereotypes of fat people as being physically unattractive, sexless, unhealthy, immoral, gluttonous, lazy, unintelligent, dirty, and out of control. The attitudes that individuals have towards fat are not part of an innate belief system about the world, but rather are shaped by larger societal forces that construct “truths” about the fat body. The diet industry, medical community, mass media, academic and religious institutions produce anti-fat rhetoric through pseudo-science and subjective value systems as legitimate fact. With their guidance, the thin body has been accepted as being naturally and universally most attractive and healthy. The creation of thinness as a norm has rendered fatness as deviant. 1 Although fat is described as a feminist issue by Susie Orbach (1988), evidence has mounted in recent years that suggests fat is an issue that needs to addressed by researchers in the field of men’s studies. It is well known that females are preoccupied with their appearance. After all, society constructs femininity to be appearance centered. It is well known the types of unhealthy behaviors in which females engage in order to discipline their bodies and attain the Body Beautiful. What is not well known is that popular culture and cultural norms have as well facilitated a male preoccupation with the appearance of the body. There is a universe of anxieties men have about fat and their bodies arising from culture norms that each confronts in private. Further, what is not as well known is that a significant portion of the male population engages in similar behaviors. With that preoccupation comes a host of deleterious effects. No longer can anxieties about the fat body be considered solely the domain of females. This project is a qualitative study that investigates and analyzes the ways in which fat-positive identifications are constructed by a sexual fringe culture called Fat Admiration. The Fat Admiration subculture challenges dominant assumptions underpinning normalizing beliefs and sexual practices about fat as aesthetically displeasing and sexless by redefining the meaning of fatness and thereby creating new subject positions. I first consider the historical development of the slenderness ideal, addressing the cultural factors that influenced the turn away from fatness as a norm. This section of the paper shows how the fat body was once considered inhabitable and desirable by the masses, and therefore reveals historically recent, contemporary popular notions of the thin body as that which is naturally most attractive. A transition is made into a brief theoretical discussion of the Fat Admiration subculture, touching on its 2 history, beliefs, and practices. The final and largest portion of my paper is the presentation of the analysis of data I collected from two Internet discussion forums from two popular Fat Admiration websites, Dimensions and Biggercity.com. I reveal my discoveries about the typological classification system used by members in these cyber communities, the reasons why fat bodies are considered to be desirable, and the unique sexual practices of individuals in these communities. I also address whether or not norms of beauty and sexuality in Fat Admiration communities serve to exclude certain types of bodies, in order to understand how existing structures of power/knowledge (Foucault 1980) have the capability to reproduce in new ways. My project is informed by feminist, men’s studies, cultural studies, sociological and anthropological literature and is guided by post-structuralist schools of thought. This investigation is a contribution to a larger field of enquiry about the lived experiences of fat people. Historical and Cross Cultural Acceptance of Fat Bodies The meaning of the fat body has undergone an evolution in Euro-American society, yet the thin body as a natural and universal construct of physical beauty is a notion ingrained in the consciousness of contemporary society. Mitter writes “in the West, such a canon of beauty is so internalized that it is perceived to be based in common sense.” (2000:30) The value system of Euro-American societies deems the fat body as aesthetically and morally undesirable. The cultural meaning associated with fat and thin bodies in the West is a topic discussed later in this paper. I would like to first consider historical and cross-cultural representations of fat as a beauty ideal. This examination 3 disputes the notion that the fat body as a grotesque and immoral formation has always and everywhere been embraced. Art is a reflection of the culture in which it is produced, and ancient sculptures and statues represent a cultural appreciation for fat bodies. Stone age and Hellenistic Greek statues are two such examples. Found in caves in Germany and Italy and from France to Siberia, Stone Age statues --- termed by archeologists as Venuses --- are female “… with erotic zones (tits, belly, ass) that protrude abundantly.” (Klein 2001:21) The Venus of Willendorf is one of the most famous statues of the Stone Age era. “Twenty thousand years ago, more or less, this magnificently abundant woman was carved out of soapstone, her enormous proportions compressed within a tiny compass. Projected to a life size scale, she’s about the fattest woman one can imagine.” (Klein 2001:21) Archeologists generally accept Stone Age figurines like the Venus of Willendorf as fertility symbols endowed with ritualistic powers, and the curve of their belly taken to represent pregnancy. An alternate perspective of the Stone-Age Venuses has been put forth, that the curviness of the Venuses may simply represent admiration for the voluptuous female form. “Nothing