ABSTRACT
This chapter talks back to the dynamics of white silence in fat activism by considering the terms in which it is conceptualized as queer. This paper surveys the queer feminist literature on fatness, arguing that when activists and scholars argue that fatness displaces normative femininity, that whiteness implicitly structures the conversation. I argue that codes of white femininity are what get transgressed through fatness, and that the ways that fatness gets narrativized as a social oppression often involve white subjects articulating their experience of inhabiting a marked body. I consider the ways that this trend in fatness studies offers an invitation for a critical anti-racist politic within the queer communities that locates its struggle within the politics of the body. This critical anti-racist politic engages ways that bodies are marked as “other”, highlighting the ways that fatness and racialization intersect to queer gender norms. I argue for a thickened politics of white recognition within Fat Studies, so that scholars can better situate queer codes as aligned with the rejection of white civility.
