ABSTRACT
This chapter demonstrates the nature and significance of intra-body touching through an interrogation of two over-life-sized paintings such as Branded and Propped by the artist Jenny Saville. Written on Saville's body in Branded are the words Supportive, Irrational, Delicate, Decorative, Petite; all of which encompass the qualities of traditional feminine beauty and psychology. In the Propped painting Saville consciously represents the breasts of a fat female body in ways that differ from the traditional or phallocentric conventions of representing the female body. The chapter highlights the role and value of feminist critical and theoretical work on the body for making sense of the fat female subject. An attentiveness to intra-body touching would mean reconsidering the relationships between subject-object, self-other and interior-exterior relations as they are present within and upon specific bodies. In order to theorise the significance of intra-body touching in Jenny Saville's over-life sized paintings, Luce Irigaray's notion of the morphologic is utilised.
