A Multisensory Assemblage of our Fatness

As two scholars situated in different provinces of Canada and disciplines, we often converse about how we participate in “rehearsals for living” in our marginalized bodies (Maynard & Simpson 2023). Due to systems of ‘healthism’, ableism, sizeism, racism, heteronormativity, marginalized bodies such as ours are framed as close to death, arriving at death, or already dead. There is no lively quality associated with our ‘Otherness’ hence the ‘rehearsals for living’ we come to experience under normalcy’s criterion of the body and embodiment. We present a duoethnographic methodology taken up to present multiple perspectives of our intersectional experiences of fatness, disability, gender, and racialization as we connect to our body in their entirety. Additionally, we reflect on the affective movement of social bodies such as ours and ‘what a body can do’ as we negotiate space and time and its entanglements through the layering of research-creation methods. Erin Manning (2016) conceptualizes this form of work as an artful practice that honours complex forms of knowing and a form of research that is collective at the core. While dominant forms of art-making are singularly focused on production, we focus on the artistic process. Within this paper, we offer a multisensory assemblage that captures a capacious understanding of the bodymind. A sensorial connection through art and worldmaking allows us to respond, create, and co-create affective meanings of “rehearsals for living”. Our article's art and sensorial focus invites a different mode of understanding the senses and connection as mixed with the world(s) and each other. That interconnectedness is the loci for our paper as we collectively work on centering the body-mind-spirit, and the affective entanglements of our fat kinship and politics, to exit the personal registry and its oppressive systems (i.e., sizeism/shapeism, ableism, heterosexism, etc.). We thus engage with one another and with this piece in an “unmethodical way” or form of “embodied writing”, painting, moving, or more (Thompson, 2017) to cultivate critical inquiry. Our stories and research-creation may draw parallels, tensions and contrasts, but our objective is to build a multisensory assemblage of our fatness through space and time.