Eight Bites of Fat Time

Literary science fiction has the unique ability to create speculative visions of the future that either challenge or reinforce current cultural anxieties. This is particularly important for groups who desire profound social change (Jenkins & Tulloch, 1995), with the genre able to envision justice and explore liberation from the status quo. With this activist function in mind, there is one significant question for fat studies scholars: where are all the liberated fat women in the future? We are certainly abundant in the present, and yet significant representation of joyous and revolutionary fat women in mainstream science fiction has either been annihilated (Gerbner and Gross, 1976), or our unruly bodies are punished (Hartley, 2001). Have we been contained to the past? Using McFarland et al.’s (2018) assertion that fat bodies are chrononormative failures, I pursue this concept as a possible explanation for the lack of positive representations of fat women in literary science fiction. In particular, I use Carmen Maria Machado’s (2019) science fiction-horror short story “Eight Bites,” from the collection “Her Body and Other Parties,” as a case study to demonstrate how science fiction futures can reinforce notions of hetero- and chrono- normativity. As the unnamed protagonist experiences her body as a fat woman, as a mother, and in relation to her sisters, this analysis puts a spotlight on what it takes to be considered “successful” in a chrononormative timestream and demonstrates how fat women either disappear entirely through reintegration into thin futures, or are rendered unhappy (Bahra, 2018) for daring to exist in a future that limits which normative bodies are supposed to thrive.