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Fat Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal

of Body Weight and Society
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Introduction to the Special Issue: Visual

Representations of Fat and Fatness
Stefanie Snider
Published online: 22 May 2013.

To cite this article: Stefanie Snider (2013) Introduction to the Special Issue: Visual Representations of
Fat and Fatness, Fat Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Body Weight and Society, 2:2, 114-117,
DOI: 10.1080/21604851.2013.782250

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 Fat Studies, 2:114–117, 2013
Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
ISSN: 2160-4851 print/2160-486X online
DOI: 10.1080/21604851.2013.782250

Introduction to the Special Issue: Visual

Representations of Fat and Fatness

STEFANIE SNIDER
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When people with stareable bodies [ . . . ] enter into the public eye, when
they no longer hide themselves or allow themselves to be hidden, the
visual landscape enlarges. Their public presence can expand the range
of bodies we expect to see and broaden the terrain where we expect
to see such bodies. [ . . . ] These encounters work to broaden collective
expectations of who can and should be seen in the public sphere and
help create a richer and more diverse human community.1

In my essay titled “Fatness and Visual Culture: A Brief Look at Some

Contemporary Projects,” published in the first issue of Fat Studies: An
Interdisciplinary Journal of Body Weight and Society in 2012, I called upon
scholars, artists, and activists in the field of fat studies to engage more deeply
with fat art through both a contemporary and historical lens. This spe-
cial issue of the journal on visual representations of fat and fatness takes
up my earlier plea and works to illuminate some of the darkened cor-
ners of the world of fat creativity. The essays in this issue of Fat Studies
explore a wide variety of visual representations of fat as an idea and fatness
as embodied by specific figures within art and popular culture. They cri-
tique negative imagery that imposes limitations on fat subjects, champion
the creation of positive imagery that fosters new ways of finding pleasure
in fat embodiment, and contemplate the ambiguities of visual representa-
tions that express the complexity of living fat lives in contemporary western
culture.
In her 2009 book, Staring: How We Look, disability studies scholar
Rosemarie Garland-Thomson described western culture as one of “obses-
sive occularity,” in which looking at images and people for lengthy periods
of time is the primary way in which humans gain knowledge of the world
around them.2 Staring, or intense looking, can be usefully provocative; it
can produce new narratives about human lives, about representations, and
about how “the other,” or in Garland-Thomson’s words, the “staree,” fig-
ures in both dominant and subcultural discourse. In contemporary western

Address correspondence to Stefanie Snider, E-mail: Snider.Stefanie@gmail.com

114
 Introduction to the Special Issue 115

culture, fat people are one of several “starees” that frequently get placed at
the center of the voyeuristic spectacle. Yet, Garland-Thomson argues, intense
looking at people and their visual representations do not always reproduce
a fetishistic and/or disgusted gaze in which the starer wields power over the
staree. Instead, she writes,

Triggered by the sight of someone who seems unlike us, staring can
begin an exploratory expedition into ourselves and outward into new
worlds. Because we come to expect one another to have certain kinds
of bodies and behaviors, stares flare up when we glimpse people who
look or act in ways that contradict our expectations. Seeing startlingly
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stare-able people challenges our assumptions by interrupting complacent

visual business-as-usual. Staring offers an occasion to rethink the status
quo. Who we are can shift into focus by staring at who we think we are
not.3

Garland-Thomson contends that deep looking is prompted for humans by

noticing something or someone novel in our conventional contexts. And
while staring can traditionally have negative connotations, as with the
objectification of the “other” or the nonnormative in a visual spectacle,
Garland-Thomson stresses the ways in which staring, looking, and view-
ing can open up our worlds and bring new people or communities together.
In particular, she places emphasis on the ways in which looking at others
helps us to gain knowledge about them and about ourselves:

Staring is a conduit to knowledge. Stares are urgent efforts to make

the unknown known, to render legible something that seems at first
glance incomprehensible. In this way, staring becomes a starer’s quest
to know and a staree’s opportunity to be known. Whatever or whomever
embodies the unpredictable, strange, or disordered prompts stares and
demands putting order to apparent disarray, taming the world with our
eyes. Because we are all starers, knowledge gathering is the most pro-
ductive aspect of staring in that it can offer an opportunity to recognize
one another in new ways.4

In focusing on visual imagery of fat embodiment, this special issue of Fat

Studies presents multiple ways in which fat subjects have been subject to
and/or renegotiated the terms of the stare or gaze as well as the spectacu-
larization of the fat body. Interrogating negative visual representations of fat
and fatness deconstructs the ways in which cultural precepts are deployed
in order to construct the fat body as other: as physically excessive, and
as morally insufficient. Exploring visual representations that members of fat
communities have created of their starable bodies, in contrast, can reconfig-
ure the meanings assigned to them by dominant cultural discourse while
 116 S. Snider

giving voice to people otherwise made socially unintelligible within the

history of art and visual culture. Whether confrontational or celebratory, such
representations establish new ways of seeing the frontier of uncontainable
bodies.
The essays selected for this special issue span several visual genres, for-
mats, and media. The issue contains an article on artwork featuring “fine art”
drawings of fat female figures; two articles on representations of gendered
and classed fat characters in film; an article on how a television program
frames its fat and female central character; an article on a racialized and
queered graphic novel and social media video project; an article on the cre-
ation of a collection of fat-positive stock photographs; and an article on the
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ways in which western culture has taken up the notion of the fat body as a
particularly visual project of transformation. Each of these articles represents
one facet of the broad intersection between fat studies and visual culture.
They illustrate that visual representations matter; that art, whether consid-
ered “high culture” and placed in galleries and museums, or pop culture
and part of the television, movies, books, and digital media we engage with
on a daily basis, are central to the shaping of our ideas about humanity,
of our selves, and of other people. All too frequently seen as apolitical or
immaterial to the “real” world, visual representations are, in fact, of utmost
importance in showing us how we should and should not behave in our
private lives; how we can and cannot act in public; and what is acceptable
and unacceptable regarding body size and shape. The visual representation
of fat and fatness, for good or bad, is a social justice issue entwining the
personal and the political in numerous ways.
It was my goal to be as expansive as possible in terms of including
several different forms, methods, and locations of visual representation in
this special issue of Fat Studies, but there are limitations worth mention-
ing here. These include the fact that these essays are primarily from and
about a globalized Western culture (represented here by the United States,
Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia) and analyze only contempo-
rary works produced within the last three decades. It is with my continued
hope, however—as fat studies, the field of study, and Fat Studies, the jour-
nal, continue to break down boundaries and foster interdisciplinary thought
and production—that more artists, scholars, and activists will produce work
about fat and fatness in their visual forms using non-western imagery and
perspectives and historical objects and events in order to continue to expand
this burgeoning field.
I would like to thank all of the authors who submitted their work for
consideration in this special issue of Fat Studies; the readers who responded
thoughtfully to the essays; Esther Rothblum, who supported the idea of this
special issue from its inception; and Sarah Doherty for her insights and
passion for this project.
 Introduction to the Special Issue 117

CONTRIBUTOR

Stefanie Snider earned her Doctorate in Art History at the University of

Southern California in 2010. Her field of study is contemporary feminist and
queer photography, fine art, and visual culture.

NOTES

1. Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Staring: How We Look. (New York: Oxford University Press,
2009) 9.
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2. Garland-Thomson 13. A focus on looking, or for Garland-Thomson, staring, does prompt a set
of worthwhile questions about vision, visualization, and visual representations with regard to people who
are blind or have vision disabilities that this art historian hopes to explore at a later date.
3. Garland-Thomson 6.
4. Garland-Thomson 15.