Rethinking Fat Female Monstrosity in Carmen Maria Machado’s “Eight Bites”
Rethinking Fat Female Monstrosity in Carmen Maria Machado’s “Eight Bites”

Summary/Abstract: The presence of fat female bodies signals deviation from the norm, and fat is often viewed as immoral, threatening, and monstrous. However, fatness is also potentially transgressive and opens up the possibility for resistance against restrictive beauty standards and the cultural imperative of small size and female weakness. Constructed by such contrasting discourses, fatness functions as simultaneously dehumanising and liberating. In this article, I study the ambivalence towards fat female bodies in the context of feminist debates on the workings of disciplinary power. I use the critical insight into the cultural meanings of fat female bodies provided by fat studies research to analyse Carmen Maria Machado’s 2017 short story “Eight Bites” in the context of moving beyond the dichotomy of oppression and liberation in reading fat and fatness. I claim that the story, which focuses on an unnamed woman’s bariatric surgery and its consequences, narrativizes the ambivalence of the monstrous fat female body and explores the more pervasive, insidious ways disciplinary power acts on and through unruly bodies. I suggest that the persistence of the monster’s presence in the protagonist’s home after her weight loss procedure makes flesh both the complexity of cultural discourses on fatness and their relentless hold over our bodies.

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