The Fault of Our Forms: Fatness and Race in 20th and 21st-Century American Literature and Culture

Although much of the world currently understands fat bodies as objectively undesirable and unhealthy, and even a threat to the overall health of civilization, this dissertation shows that this view is frequently complicated and contested in contemporary American cultural production. I argue that twentieth- and twenty-first-century American authors and filmmakers including Toni Morrison and Oscar Zeta Acosta complicate and transform racializing narratives of fatness that render the fat body sick, ugly, alien, and prematurely dead. In doing so, these artists (de)construct the ways that dominant narratives of fatness inflect and even help to constitute conceptions of race, as well as those of gender, sexuality, and national belonging.