ABSTRACT
The fat woman in Western fiction, culture and scholarship is half myth and half human. At her most potent and powerful, the fat woman is a goddess—Venus herself—with abundant, giving flesh that inspires readers, writers and scholars alike. At her lowest, she is not quite there at all—a sad, invisible figure laden with a body that leaves her alienated from the social world. These extremes of character are the recognizable “types” of the fat subject, a figure relegated to the fringe of “normal.” However, the fat woman is both and always hypersexed and asexual. The othering of fat sexuality is not a binary but a continuum that is shifting, fluid and interdependent.
