ABSTRACT
While gender has always been a prominent concern within Fat Studies, specific considerations of transgender issues, identities and experiences have, until recently, been relatively absent. This chapter will seek to explore the complex intersection of fatness and transgender both through accounts of how it is lived, and how it is accounted for (or not) in existing theoretical and activist discourses. A key concern will be to highlight the gaps and silences that neglecting this intersection has created in both Fat and Transgender Studies, with the aim of demonstrating not only what a consideration of transgender can bring to Fat Studies, but what a critical perspective on fatness might bring to theorizations of transgender. In particular this chapter will reconsider the relationship between gender and fat in terms of how the feminizing and/or masculinizing properties of fat have been understood primarily in terms of cis-gendered bodies. Drawing on existing writings by fat trans folk, it will ask how fat may figure differently for trans people, in their everyday lives, in their efforts to access (trans) healthcare and in terms of how their bodies are “read” as male, female or non-binary. Following this, the chapter will analyze conceptualizations of bodily agency, malleability and the ethics of body modification that have underpinned Fat Studies scholarship and activism, not to expose some foundational cis-centrism within Fat Studies, but in order to consider how these differ from similar conceptions in Transgender Studies. While there are certainly points where these perspectives clash and contradict each other, the chapter will finally consider work within Fat Studies which perhaps offers more fruitful ways of thinking through the fat/trans intersection – namely, Fat Studies work which draws on queer theoretical perspectives, insights from disability studies and work that addresses ambiguity and liminality in bodily being. The overall aim of the chapter is to suggest not only how Fat Studies, and activism, might be more inclusive of people who are both fat and transgender, but how new ways of understanding the multiple meanings of fatness might emerge from this intersection.
