Fattening fabulousness: the joys and risks of troubling gender through fat fashion

ABSTRACT

Gender and weight are produced through dress before a child comes into the world. But dressing the body in ways that produce and embody one’s own understanding of gender is challenging for fat bodies because they have limited or no choice of available clothing sizes and styles. As a result, finding clothes that produce and embody fat people’s desired gender identities and expressions tends to be a source of struggle. This article tells a different story. Drawing on interviews and participatory photography, we use madison moore’s theory of “fabulousness” to explore how six fat, curvy and thick-identified people of diverse gender and fat embodiments create their gender and fat identities through their favorite fashion object. We also explore how participatory photography allows our participants and research team to co-create new understandings of fat, gender and fashion. Our work centers participants’ pleasure from finding and wearing clothing that produces and embodies their desired gender and fat identities, but participants also share how risk is inescapable when they dress their bodies in their favorite pieces in the social world. We argue that our participants practice “fabulousness” because their embodied dressing leads them to experience both pleasure and risk by stretching dominant understandings of gender and fat. Our findings contribute to fat studies and fashion studies by introducing underrepresented experiences of gender and weight, demonstrating how participatory photography generates more layered understandings of gender, fat and embodied dressing, and revealing the possibilities of fabulousness to connect both fields.

KEYWORDS:

• Fashion
• dress
• intersectionality
• gender non-conforming
• non-binary

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. We understand gender and fat as dynamic, fluid and open-ended identities and embodiments. However, the gendered categorization and numerical sizing designations of fashion reduce gender and fat to linear spectrums and constrain wearers to engage with this framing when they buy, assemble and wear clothing. Our research recognizes the contradiction between how gender and fat are conceptualized through the reality of wearers’ embodiments and the fashion industry.

2. These terms were generated after a team meeting in which we considered the positive and negative attributes to various terms used to describe bodies at the larger end of human experience.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Faculty of Communication and Design at Ryerson University.

Notes on contributors

Ben Barry

Ben Barry is Associate Professor of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion in the School of Fashion. Through his research, teaching and academic leadership, he is devoted to systemically transforming the fashion system to center liberation for all bodies. His arts-based research program explores gender and fashion at the intersections of fat and disability.

Calla Evans

Calla Evans is a PhD student in Communication and Culture. Her work explores visual social media platforms, embodied identity performance and fat activism. She is also a celebrated lifestyle and documentary photographer.

May Friedman

May Friedman's research looks at unstable identities, including bodies that do not conform to traditional racial and national or esthetic lines. Most recently much of May’s research has focused on intersectional approaches to fat studies considering the multiple and fluid experiences of both fat oppression and fat activism. May works as a faculty member in the School of Social Work and in the Ryerson/York graduate program in Communication and Culture.