“You can only be happy if you’re thin!” Normalcy, happiness, and the lacking body

ABSTRACT

Within the expanding field of fat studies, we have come to understand different ways that fat bodies have been scrutinized for their “deviance” from the anticipated norms of society. The author interrogates the role racializing assemblages play in categorizing and disciplining bodies based on humanism and its fixed sizeist-normative temporality. With the supported idealized form, the human template as well as racialized and fat bodies are distinguished as lacking under the criteria of deficit. Subsequently, the promise of happiness in the context of Whiteness and thinness is set up as a form of normative time that must be followed to gain access to the privilege of being human. An autoethnographic methodology is used to situate the author’s own experience as a fat, racialized woman grounded in theory. In the latter portion of the paper the author discusses the affirmation of the body and its materiality within a new materialist framework. What is of utmost importance to consider in affirmative politics is that one’s race and fatness can be accentuated and accepted as forms of difference informing and intermingling with each other and our surroundings as they are brought to the forefront.

KEYWORDS:

• Fatness
• race
• human template
• promise of happiness
• difference in itself
• heterotopic imagination

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank two anonymous reviewers for their helpful and constructive comments. The author gives her sincerest thanks to the editors of this special issue on queer temporality for their editorial guidance for this article. Last, the author would like to thank Dr. James Overboe for his constant support and invaluable feedback.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ramanpreet Annie Bahra

Ramanpreet Annie Bahra holds her Master of Arts in Sociology from Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Canada, and is presently undertaking her PhD in Sociology at York University, Toronto, Canada. Her current research concentrates on social theory and fat studies. Ramanpreet has been working towards offering an alternative perspective on the notion of the body through exploring the affirmative politics of new materialism and affect studies.