ABSTRACT
In The Fat Female Body, Samantha Murray analyses asexuality and lack of objectification as a common motif within representations of female fatness. By analysing cultural objects that depict female fat characters in a specifically oversexualised light, I argue that in a country like Greece, where Europeanness and modernity are not internalised identities but aspiring initiatives, a new field of interaction is uncovered. Thus, these cultural objects, where fatness is represented as both desired/sexualised and abhorred/desexualised, serve as what Rodanthi Tzanelli in “Not My Flag!” calls an “oscillation between subordination to European demands and resistance to them” that is “often typical of anti-imperial nationalism”. In this manner, the fat body is simultaneously hyper- and in-visible, with fatness serving as a simultaneously transparent and opaque actor, operating on the female body. Using Ian Chambers’ concept of the mediterranean and that of porous modernity, I examine the ways in which transparent and opaque fatness in the Greek paradigm demonstrate a certain failure of current fat scholarship to effectively theorise the (fat) body, outside the perceived center of modernity. On one hand, I explore how Greece as part of the mediterranean demonstrates “the continuities and discontinuities that emerge from the clumsy movement of the modern nation as it pushes its way through the unjust and uneven complexities of modernity” (Chambers). On the other, through porous modernity, a modernity that absorbs whatever it encounters, I focus on the ways in which the contradictory representations of fatness in Greece, can help in order to “articulate a sense of the past that disavows the homogeneous continuum of historical time, and disrupt the “usual chronologies of ‘progress’ in their linear accumulation of sense”.
