ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with an examination of various frameworks for understanding fat embodiment. It explores the need to move away from quotidian understandings of 'fat' and phenomenological understandings of 'embodiment' towards a performance understanding of fat embodiment. This social frame is well-elucidated by a relational exploration of the meaning of fat embodiment. The relational social reception of performances of fat helps us understand the manifesting materiality of bodies as receptors or resisters of capitalist, racist, and heteronormative desires. The chapter then explores the way that structures of class, sexuality, and race play with and around negotiations over desire and fat bodies in performance. Murray's observations of the spectre of the 'normal' body used to connect Western moral understandings of the body to clinical discourse. Murray's suggests that fat comes into play by haunting certain performances of power struggle. Although access to the house of the heteromasculine couple is restricted, the body persists creepily, threateningly outside the window.
