Fat bodies are mentioned most often in terms of the negative space left behind by the pounds lost, the dress sizes dropped, the inches shrunk—fat bodies are only valued for their absence.
There's a phrase you may have heard, that 'inside every fat person, there's a thin person waiting to get out'. It makes fat bodies sound like a prison, like the grotesque carapace of Kafka's beetle, with the real self like a trapped and frightened Gregor Samsa inside. Society is deeply permeated with the idea that my fat body isn't my 'real' body, and that I need to dig and excavate and starve out my true self, rescuing my inner thin princess from the imprisoning tower of my body.
This idea taught me not to feel fully connected to my body—after all, so much of my body is dead weight, it's not really me, my fatness isn't who I am, so why bother fully inhabiting it?
For years I didn't embrace my body. I was like someone squatting in a few rooms of a mansion, pretending that I was living in a condo and ignoring the three wings, twenty-four bedrooms, ballroom, bowling alley, and the entire library from Disney's Beauty and the Beast that make up my body.
—‘Where Are the Fat Girls? The Absence of Plus-Size Characters in Fantasy Literature’ by Charis M. Ellison [video]
