Phantom/liminal fat and feminist theories of the body

Abstract

This article brings together two concepts, 'phantom fat' and 'liminal fat', which both aim to grasp how fat in contemporary culture becomes a kind of material immateriality, corporeality in suspension. Comparing the spheres of representation and experience, we examine the challenges and usefulness of these concepts, and feminist fat studies perspectives more broadly, to feminist scholarship on the body. We ask what connects and disconnects fat corporeality and fat studies from ways of theorising other embodied differences, like gender, 'race', disability, class and sexuality, especially when thinking through their perceived mutability or removability, and assumptions about their relevance for subjectivity. While it is important to consider corporeality and selfhood as malleable and open to change in order to mobilise oppressive normativities around gendered bodies and selves, we argue that more attention should also be paid to the persistence of corporeality and a feeling of a relatively stable self, and the potential for empowerment in not engaging with or idealising continuous transformation and becoming. Furthermore, we suggest that the concepts of phantom fat and liminal fat can help shed light on some problematic ways in which feminist studies have approached-or not approached-questions of fat corporeality in relation to the politics of health and bodily appearance. Questions of weight, when critically interrogated together with other axes of difference, highlight how experiential and subjugated knowledges, as well as critical inquiry of internal prejudices, must remain of continued key importance to feminist projects.

The Multifaceted Nature of Weight-Related Self-Stigma: Validation of the Two-Factor Weight Bias Internalization Scale (WBIS-2F)

“…In a study of 53 higher-weight adults enrolled in a weight-loss intervention, participants demonstrated high levels of both explicit and implicit negative attitudes toward higher-weight individuals in general; however, implicit attitudes testing suggested that despite their self-assigned “overweight” status and their participation in a weight-loss intervention, they saw themselves as significantly thinner, better, and more attractive, active, disciplined, and likely to eat healthily than fat others (Carels et al, 2011). In fact, it appears that many fat people do not self-identify as fat – perhaps envisioning themselves as thin people in merely temporarily fat bodies (Quinn and Crocker, 1998; Murray, 2005; Kyrölä and Harjunen, 2017).…”

Fighting for a (wide enough) seat at the table: weight stigma in law and policy

“…It should be noted that many higher-weight individuals may also reject a fat identity, considering themselves as atypical of "other" fat people and being, in truth, a thin person in a temporarily fat body(Kyrölä & Harjunen, 2017).…”

Moving beyond the image: Theorising ‘extreme’ female bodies

“…While research on female bodybuilding remains constrained by polarised imaginings, in recent years fat studies and anorexia research have made significant strides in overcoming these limitations. This has been achieved by expanding on and developing theoretical frameworks for thinking about 'mediate fleshiness'; the 'phantom', affectual, neither material nor immaterial, inbetweenness, which integrates and connects the interoceptive body and the representational (Blackman 2012;Kyrölä and Harjunen 2017). In this final discussion, we demonstrate that by exploring the embodied relationality between image/corpus and engaging with female subjects as the point of entry, one is able to develop nuanced and interdisciplinary theoretical models for understanding female embodiment in its multiple and diverse forms.…”

“…Fat studies scholars Kyrölä and Harjunen (2017) have taken on the important work of theoretically bridging the material and the image through their concepts of 'phantom' and 'liminal' fat. These concepts, which capture the embodied stigma of lived fatness as well as the persistent threat of fatness, attempt to better explain the 'relationship between or mutual constitution of experience and representation ' (2017, 101).…”