ABSTRACT
“Fat Stories” is a mediation on fat, gender, and story. Using tools from fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction, Susan Stinson explores how wilder, stranger, smarter stories about fatness can change both the experience of being fat and the ways that the world reflects fatness. She considers a big story about fatness and how the work of CDC researcher Katherine M. Flegal was aggressively challenged for reporting data that didn’t support a standard narrative about fatness and mortality. The experience of attending a reading of work by Judith Stein, a fat lesbian at New Words Feminist Bookstore in 1984 is evoked as one moment different stories about fat and gender were being told. Analysis by Sabrina Strings around how fear of the Black body was central to creating the ideal of slenderness for white women is juxtaposed with insights by Elana Dykewomon and Toni Morrison. There is a brief discussion of the concepts of implied author and implied reader in story as explained by Matthew Salesses in his book Craft in the Real World. The chapter ends with close readings of essays and stories by Samantha Irby, Elizabeth McCracken, and Carmen Maria Machado. These essays and stories use fatness as literary element. Each also includes beasts and monsters.
