Depicting Fatness in Picturebooks: Fat Temporality in Malin Kivelä’s and Linda Bondestam’s Den ofantliga Rosabel and Anete Melece’s Kiosks
Depicting Fatness in Picturebooks: Fat Temporality in Malin Kivelä’s and Linda Bondestam’s Den ofantliga Rosabel and Anete Melece’s Kiosks

Summary/Abstract: In this article, we analyze how fat bodies are written into two contemporary picturebooks, Finland-Swedish Malin Kivelä’s and Linda Bondestam’s Den ofantliga Rosabel (The Immense Rosabel, 2017), and Latvian Anete Melece’s Kiosks (The Kiosk, 2019). They are representative of two prominent tendencies in contemporary picturebooks: the displacement of fat children’s bodies and, depicted in their place, fat adult or animal bodies. We explore the depiction of fatness in relation to this lack of representation and show what narrative strategies enclose this absence. In contrast to earlier studies, we explore how fat-positive depictions are shaped. We use a theoretical approach new to picturebook studies, on how time and timelines put in relation to representations of fat produce meaning. Via the queer-theoretical concept fat temporality we discuss how manifestations of fatness in the two picturebooks express temporality. In Kiosks the fat temporality manifests a way of being in the world other than a normatively organized life span, and in Den ofantliga Rosabel queer paraphernalia simultaneously create a queer temporality and a queer utopia. The analyses conclude that both stories resist the predefined way of thinking about fat and time and that neither narrative centers on changing the person or the fat body. Instead, it is the protagonists’ changed circumstances that lead to closure. However, the strategy of using anthropomorphization and fat adult characters in picturebooks aimed at children shows that fat is a complex issue, addressed in various and contradicting ways. The displacement strategies raise the broader question of how body norms and sizes are inscribed, and referred to, in contemporary picturebooks in general.

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