ABSTRACT
This chapter is a content analysis research study of contemporary popular culture media unpacking fatphobia and the politics of morbidity as a direct correlation to Blackness/antiblackness. Black fat femme bodies are characterized as representations of death, deadly, weaponized, and simultaneously hunted and scapegoated. Within representations of contemporary popular culture, Black fat femme imagery is used as antiblack minstrelsy through the lens of the dangerous white and non-fat imaginary. Utilizing the evidence within media such as Big Mama’s House, Tyler Perry’s Madea, Precious, The Parkers, For Colored Girls, and Why Did I Get Married, in addition to the analytical data from The Fat Census and incidents of violence against individual Black fat women and femmes, this work will uncover the reality that all Black fat femmes embody afrofuturism as we exist in a realm of being deemed as dead and while embodying impossibility/the miraculous. In doing so, I also aim to analyze how the Black fat femme lived experience versus the entrapment of fictional narratives present alternative ways of existing, healing, and surviving beyond the morbidity we’re imprisoned to.
