Sick of the City: Unpacking the Fat Body Politics of Wilderness

The rising fat liberation movement in the US is giving a voice to experiences of exclusion amongst fat outdoorists in nature spaces. To understand the origin of this marginalisation, we examine American environmental history from the late 1800s to the early 1900s and use corporeal analysis to reveal how anxieties of elite white men shaped wilderness and outdoor culture. We track the redefinition of wilderness from dark savage landscapes to pure nature spaces that existed in opposition to cities and how wilderness then became an antidote to the overcivilisation of urban bodies. Through this work, we argue that body size was a culturally impactful factor in establishing the ideal fit environmental body and the alienation of subjugated bodies from nature. Tracing these socio-historical constructions of environmental bodies allows for the assumptions upon which they are built to be exposed and provides a path to continue dismantling elitism concerning outdoor spaces. This article was published open access under a CC BY licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ .