The Art of Fat Embodiment: Beauty, Abjection and Challenging the Mind/Body Split
by Elisabeth Walden
I wanted to create more a open and generous image of fatness, and that I wanted to challenge ideas of self-control and body mastery. I felt strongly that I had little control over my body’s size, but found that when I attempted to make an image of it, suddenly I had a different kind of control, one that rested in my ability to master various techniques in drawing and printmaking. I think that the illusion that I can control my body comes from the idea that my mind/self/personality is something apart from my body. This mind/body split is a false and damaging dichotomy. Furthermore, the mind/body split is problematically gendered in a way that consistently places the masculine value (mind) above the feminine (body). Postmodern theory attempts to collapse this binary (along with the others connected to it, particularly subject/object) with varying degrees of success, but the mind/body split persists in its power to shape our language and our thought.
With this as my ideological basis, I set out to make images of my body. I quickly ran into the problem of beauty. My instinct as an artist is to make images and objects that I find beautiful. When I took up my fat female body as a subject, that instinct took on a different significance, as fat women have been categorically excluded from the beautiful. Yet I do not want to merely reverse the beauty hierarchy of thin over fat, because simply reversing dualist hierarchies tends to reinforce the harmful dichotomy rather than dismantle it. I did not want to fall into this trap, yet I still crave beauty and yearn to access it.
My images are not created with the intention of inverting the “ideal” beautiful body from thin to fat, but to redefine, question and expand the category of beauty. This expansion of beauty is a collective process; it takes place in the studios of artists but also throughout various Fat Activist communities. We want to “pull beauty down from its pedestal,” not abolish it altogether. I hope that the pleasure I derive from drawing images of my fat body is replicated when a viewer looks at my art.
This obsession with beauty, both in my own work and in the Fat Acceptance movement, is an attempt to counter the dominant narrative of fat abjection. Fatness is often used as a device to define a (thin) person’s inherent goodness and subjectivity in opposition to the fat person’s grossness. Thus, a focus on beauty is essential. As Le’a Kent notes, “beginning to publish and circulate images valuing the fat female body (or even beginning to value one’s own fat female body) in what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has called a ‘fat abhorring world of images,’ a world in which fat women are charged with concentrating and representing ‘a general sense of the body’s offensiveness,’ requires radical confrontation with the representational status quo. It requires undermining the process of abjection that makes fat women’s bodies synonymous with the offensive, horrible, or deadly aspects of embodiment.”
My work began as an attempt at this radical confrontation. Working within the defined parameters of self-portraiture and figure drawing, and thinking always about the long history of the representation of the female body in art, I have tried to find the cracks and niches where I might start to build a beautiful representation of fat women and reunite my mind and my body. I have sought fat embodiment. Part of my process was defining my practice in contrast to much of the most famous art, especially painting, that dealt with the fat body as primarily abject. I do not need to cast my body off in order to be an active subject. Fat beauty and fat embodiment, not a rejection of my supposedly abject fat, is the basis of my artistic subjectivity.
I am my fat body. I cannot cast it off, my fat is me. To represent this fat embodiment in my work does “require finding a way of representing the self that is not body-neutral or disembodied ... but intimately connected with the body in a new vision of embodiment that no longer disdains the flesh.” This desire for embodiment is what compelled me to try to draw my body in the first place. I looked at my body and I drew it; I looked in the mirror and made prints; I closed my eyes and touched my body. I closed my eyes and pressed my body against copper plates, against paper. Ultimately, I think I was looking for immediacy and connection, to give the viewer a sense of what it feels like to be my body. All my images have some degree of mediation, whether through drawing or the intaglio printmaking process, but I want that visceral connection, so I have stripped away as much of it as I could, especially in my big body prints.
Embodiment requires acknowledging not only the inevitability of my death but also reconciling the fact that my identity is multifaceted, mutable and inextricably linked to the wider world. When I say that I want to fully be my body, it is with the understanding of the body/self as part of a larger system, and both are always changing. If I want to significantly change how fat is perceived, I must do more than simply love or accept my own body, I must strive to be my body/self, while understanding that I only exist in relation to the world. This is not simply a matter of changing my own or other people’s thoughts about fatness and beauty. Art is a kind of embodiment in and of itself. Art allows me to engage with my body, social ideas about fatness and a love of form, material and process. Art is liberating, even (or especially) when the concepts and processes used to make it are very constraining. Though my project began with a limited focus, I hope it addresses ideas about beauty, medium, form, fatness and bodies.
