This session will present new work by emerging scholars on liberatory depictions of fatness in contemporary speculative fiction, exploring both fat sorrow and joy. Historically, speculative authors have largely used fatness similarly to realist authors who deploy fat bodies to indicate greed, stupidity, and evil, but we posit that there is a growing trend in twenty-first-century speculative fiction to interrogate these normative assumptions about the meaning of fatness. As writer Nalo Hopkinson explains in a 2001interview, “ in fantastical fiction...I can create [a world] in which relative fatness or slimness has about the same significance as eye color.” What Hopkinson is articulating here resonates with current scholarship in the interdisciplinary field of Fat Studies, which contends that fatness is a bodily characteristic with socially and politically produced significance that is subject to change. This panel calls attention to the ways in which some speculative authors in our century have been working to intentionally dismantle and transform normative understandings of fatness in varied and powerful ways.

The panel intervenes in both Fat Studies and Literary Criticism by bringing these fields together to examine how speculative authors attempt to expand and radically alter the meaning of fatness and the fat body in the popular imagination. While Fat Studies scholars critique the ways that neoliberal governments, medicalizing institutions, and the media shape (mis)understandings of the lives of fat people, few of these scholars trace how authors intentionally resist these efforts. Additionally, while literary critics attend to the centrality of the body to fiction narratives and the world the produces them, few grapple with how constructions of fatness work to create meaning in literary texts. Thus, this panel will make a unique contribution to both of these fields and spark further discussion about how authors reflect upon and refuse anti-fatness in our world.

In order to ensure ample time for discussion, the four panelists will be limited to 10-12 minutes each. Following the panel, respondent Kendall Dinniene will pose questions to the panelists in order to begin discussion and encourage queries from the audience.

We will begin with Dr. Ana Quiring’s “Ungendering the Fat Body: Girlhood, Eating Disorders, and Trans-Substantiation.” In this paper, Quiring examines Margaret and the Mystery of the Missing Body, Megan Milk’s 2021 queer and trans coming-of-age novel. Quiring will show how this text reimagines what it means for youth to come out as both transgender and as fat in the intensely fatphobic 1990s, and also calls attention to how fat and queer characters find joy in their identities despite overwhelming societal messaging attempting to condemn these figures to alienation, self-hatred, and sorrow. Quiring’s paper is one of two on our panel that will consider subversive uses of fatness in speculative Young Adult fiction, highlighting the ways that both YA and speculative novels have tended to deploy fatness toward liberation in the past decade or so, especially by probing the intersections of fatness and queerness. Sam Sorenson’s “’Love the Body You Do Have or the One You Create for Yourself’: Fat Liberation in Juliet Takes a Breath” demonstrates how author Gabby Rivera works to undo the simultaneous invisibility and hyper-visibility of the fat, queer, and racialized body in her 2016 novel. Sorenson argues that, by centering this body in her novel, Rivera reveals how people committed to liberation movements often leave the oppression of fat people outside the scope of their political and social critiques, and how this might be prevented in the future. These two papers will underline the importance of an intersectional, liberatory politics that centers rather than marginalizes fatness.

Kendall Dinniene’s paper, “Fat Margins in Nalo Hopkinson’s Speculative Short Fiction,” takes a different tack by showing how Hopkinson uses narrative margins as opportunities for learning and self-liberation. In “A Habit of Waste” (2001) protagonist Cynthia buys a slim white body and discards her fat Black one, relegating fatness and Blackness to the margins of her life. This unsettling distance spurs her to reflect upon the ways she has suppressed her own desires to gain a joyless, tenuous acceptance in our anti-fat and anti-Black world.

The panel will close with Maggie O’Leary’s “Cut Guts, ‘Eight Bites,’ and Fat Futures,” which also takes up speculative short fiction, looking to how Carmen Maria Machado’s 2017 short story interrogates anti-fatness, bariatric surgery, and neoliberal notions of the healthy and productive body. O’Leary posits that the excision of Machado’s protagonists’ belly fat is “a loss to be mourned” and that this mourning illuminates the need to think differently about fat, and the future.