Slender TroubleFrom Berlant's Cruel Figuring of Figure to Sedgwick's Fat Presence
This article argues that queer theory must depart from three temporalities often attributed to fat bodies even in queer circles and theory—most notably by Lauren Berlant in the much-lauded Cruel Optimism. It asserts that figural exploitations of fatness have been too quickly accepted and demands that we rethink how we "figure" the matter of figure. Against fat temporalities that work according to the logics of fort/da, Nachträglichkeit, "before and after," or, as Berlant puts it, fat as a "congealed form of history that hurts," this article turns to often-ignored work on fat by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. A sustained reading of Sedgwick's poem "The Use of Being Fat" becomes the way through which this article argues for the possibility of a fat present/presence and the new fat hermeneutics required to notice the same. Queer theory will be left with two important methodological questions. First, how will accounts of queer affect weigh the import of fat and size, especially given the near ubiquity of homonormative abjections of fatness? Second, how will largesse live as and within queer readings and hermeneutics in such fat times
fat, queer, poetry, Sedgwick, Berlant, affect, temporality
Scarcely a minute passes that a faceless fat body—cropped so as to narrow the focus to guts and butts—does not sashay across the screens of Western newscasts, asking viewers to misrecognize ourselves as or against these nonhuman images. Few moments go by that the funhouse mirrors of myriads do not reflect back fatter faces to those who fret about the caloric content of a morning omelet. Fat occupies. Still, who has time for fat?
Fat has partly replaced queer as the figure of decadent desire through which narratives of degeneracy and epidemic are filtered; as Sander Gilman (2004: 14) suggests, "The 'moral panic,' which was associated in the 1980s with HIV/AIDS as a potentially global disease, [has been] transferred to obesity." Crucially, this attribution of devolution to fat locates fat's time as always already past or even as pushing us back toward it. Likewise, fat does not live in represented futures. As Francis Ray White argues in "Fat, Queer, Dead: 'Obesity' and the Death Drive" (2012–13), it may even be the case that fat people now occupy the role of the death drive in the cultural symbolic of the West. By reading for tropes of degeneracy in the UK's Change4Life anti-obesity campaign, White shows that "the bleak future foretold by dominant 'obesity' discourse is born in part from fears of social disintegration or regression that are frequently manifested in the idea of a death drive" (ibid.: 2). As happens with queers in the face of HIV/AIDS, the concept of the obesity epidemic has been framed as an "evolutionary inevitability" (ibid.: 9)—as a plague that has arrived to return the human race to a purportedly natural moral order. With a similar desire to close the narrative of the fat body, our reality programs stage the spectacle of dieting with all the pain and predictability of repetition compulsion, installing again and again a sense of finality to the "After" of weight loss that just cannot keep its promises. [End Page 447]
Following Lee Edelman's (2004) lead, White does not combat the equation of fat with death but instead breathes new life into the insult by refiguring it as a queer ethics of the body. However, not all queer theorists would condone White's maneuver; Lauren Berlant (2011: 117), for example, dismisses fat and eating as matters that exercise only a "lateral" or weak form of agency that is "not a projection toward a future," a figuration to which the present article returns. A preliminary question, however: isn't "eating right" generally held aloft as the golden ticket—or is it a dangling carrot?—that is supposed to lead fat people to locate our truest selves only in the future, following one's weight-loss-to-come? If anything, fat people are mandated to live in the future exclusively, all the while being denied access to any cultural fantasies of such a future. At a time when fat people are increasingly forced to live out the temporal paradox of simultaneously inhabiting such ever-deferred futures and traumatic pasts—to carve out a plus-sized seat in the interstices of "Before" and "After"—it is fair to say that, discursively, we are on borrowed time. Or, are we timeless? As Gilman (2004) points out, the notion that the world is decaying because of excessive girth was a popular idea for the ancient Romans and many who have come after, even though fat people have not yet succeeded in eating/ending the world. What is at stake in this discourse is not actual life expectancy but instead a fever to rhetorically starve fatness out of any tenable position in discourse.
This article acknowledges that despite and because of all the time spent on fat in the past two decades, there is, rhetorically, no such thing as a fat present—or, therefore, fat presence. When fat bodies can be permitted only if they can "pass as on-the-way-to-thin" (LeBesco 2004: 95), it is not even possible to say that anyone is fat; fat people are launched into the future anterior tense in which we "will have been" fat.1 To move against this temporal conundrum, this fat queer author will, in what follows, develop a theory of fat presence that lingers on immediate scenes of fat bodily contact. By so doing, I also show that queer theory's scarce interest in fat has led us to underestimate the vital ideas about fat produced by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Primary among her works that address fat is her poetry book, Fat Art, Thin Art (1994b), which contains a short poem, "The Use of Being Fat." In this piece, the famous theorist remembers hugging a cherished body. I argue that this poem figures fatness as a folding and folded space in which XXX and XXXL come together or, moreover, are shown to have always come from the same (stretchy) cloth. Against Berlant's work and the other slender-normative approaches detailed below, this desire to imagine fat presence/presents demands of queer theory that we develop both a new three-dimensional approach to bodies that eschews the spatial binary of surface/depth and also a new way to figure "figure." [End Page 448]
To clarify: "exclusion" of fat people is not what is at stake; while neoliberal activism might have a fat person fight one's way into the present through evocations of one's happy usefulness, neither Sedgwick nor the present article take such an unambiguously affirmative approach, opting instead for a recurring fat scene imbued with pain and sorrow as much as possibility and sexuality.2 To practice or even notice the fat temporalities of Sedgwick's fat text means at least three hermeneutical and figural shifts are necessary: (1) a refusal to rush to the causes and consequences of fat whenever such bodies emerge—in other words, to refuse to allow the Western medical model of the body to sneak back into queer theory via fat; (2) a development of one's capacity to read as though fat bodies were affectively present and perhaps even sustaining/sustainable to the degree that other bodies may be; and (3) a remaking of the slippage between bodily "figure" and literary "figure"—in other words, the development of a new metaphorical language of the body that does not lazily make fat into a catchall metaphor for all bad things and for the limits of language. This is not an argument about fat people not deserving the violence of figuration, as if an unfigured life were somehow possible. Indeed, as I show, Sedgwick herself traffics in metaphors of fat. Rather, this article pries back open the affective and interpretive capacities that have been shut down by particularly expedient figurations of fat in queer theory and elsewhere. An underlying question emerges: what possibilities for queer reading and relations does such figural expediency conceal? Certainly, if fat becomes present as death when our language fails, this attests less to the marginalization of fat than to the centrality of its role as figure—as the deficiency or large empty space from which the presumably slender text, writer, and reader speak.
No Time for Fat
Before proceeding to Sedgwick and fat presence, it is useful to illustrate the constraining fat temporalities from which this article emerges.
Exhibit A: an August 2003 cover of Newsweek features the profile of a fat white man, from the moustache down, framed by the headline "Fat World" and a pronouncement that "obesity is the globe's newest epidemic." The background is outer space, and, over the perfect sphere of the fat man's white-undershirted belly, a round photograph of the Earth has been photoshopped. In this particular cosmos of fatness, a fat man seems to be pregnant with the whole world—a world that he is thought, nonetheless, to be killing. In this representational economy, a fat man becomes a bad mother who has already "miscarried" his weight-cum-world, even though it is normative culture that "orbits" the fat body, circulating it (and around [End Page 449] it) with pioneer spirit. The whiteness and attire of this body suggest it is a distinctly "American" body/politic that will deliver this future fat world by virtue of having the power to spread even its problems around the world or universe. This new American space program, like the real one, imagines extending itself into unfamiliar lands.3 That this imagery routes its fat panic through both the language of epidemic and the symbolism of pregnancy means that it is routed equally through sexual reproduction, gender, and the phantom of a recent and ongoing history of HIV/AIDS as the "epidemic" associated with deviant forms of sex. Here fatness can make even pregnancy signify not the future of the world but its death; fat people practice, apparently, the wrong kind of "delivery."
Exhibit B: the award-winning May 2010 cover of the Atlantic morphs the Statue of Liberty into an extremely fat woman. Under the title "FAT NATION," the plus-size green giant becomes America's fatness personified. While Exhibit A shows America's fatness taking over the world, here it is the United States' avatar of immigration that appears bloated. In this fantasy, she who would welcome the hungry or wounded becomes an icon of the idea that one's body is national property. "Hungry" citizens are welcomed, the statue's text reads, but this magazine cover suggests that nobody take that word too far; a responsible American will not let the nation greet the world with fat. However, the humor of the image relies on something equally disturbing: a juxtaposition of fatness with the statue's association with freedom. What is "liberty," many might ask, if not a thin body?4 Liberty becomes the liberty to choose exacting norms of slenderness. What usually stands as a proud sign of the nation's openness to arrivals, that is, the new, becomes a self-flagellating call to return to nonprodigal diets, a reinstatement of normalcy that shall be celebrated with anything but a fatted calf—perhaps with yogurt, which, as the New York Times (2014) reports, is now the official snack of New York State. On this magazine cover, it is not the queerly gendered fat man who will miscarry the world but the queerly evoked immigrant and nation who have perhaps desired "wrongly" in the land of plenty. Again, anxiety about misdirected desire is the underbelly of what may appear to many as just another fat joke.
Exhibit C: Michelle Obama appreciates a good apple. The fruit replaces the letter "O" in the visual identity of her "Let's Move!" campaign. Apples have also featured in at least two magazine covers featuring this First Lady whose mission it was to lead us back to the garden of clearly defined good and evil eats. On the cover of a March 2010 Newsweek, Obama sits, teacher-like, behind an apple that sits atop a desk. The apple occupies the center of the photo, lending that all-important "balance" that mythically keeps the doctor away. The headline, which describes Obama's authored article, takes the odd form of a lesson: "FEED YOUR [End Page 450] CHILDREN WELL." Looking down at the camera slightly, Obama's posed body and its setting return the adult readers who "need" her lesson to the status of child by sitting them in a remedial classroom. (To be clear, while parents certainly have some agency while living within economic and racialized conditions not of their choosing, the headline overestimates this agency. This is not to mention just how narrowly many of us tend to define the quest to eat "well.") At a time when questions of childhood fatness are tainted by accusations of child abuse (Doyle 2014), this image tells us that fat children need help not because they are treated horribly or live with injustice but because the people feeding them have yet to grow up.5 A lesson in proper parenting delivered by a governmental figure contains an inherent lesson in heterosexual relationality, where such relationality becomes tantamount to citizenship. Viewers of this cover get a glimpse into the rapidly cohering cultural truth that what it means to be a fit parent is to be a "fit" parent. Not "fitting in" to the family form is or used to be a queer story; here it is relocated, equally sexualized and gender charged, to the fat body.
Obviously, judgments about time underlie specifically hetero- and gender-normative ideas about fat bodies, where fat bodies can stand in for now-unacceptable explicit homophobia. In Exhibit A, readers see fat people as simultaneously pregnant with the future and as threatening that future. In Exhibit B, the very icon of the better futures of American fantasy threatens to block all ports while the magazine's instructions on "how to beat obesity" promise a better path forward. The imagery and tone of Exhibit C return readers to the classroom and to the historically but not gastronomically rich symbol of the apple and its seeds. Though the stories behind these covers deserve analysis of their own, I insist that magazine stories about fat must, in a sense, be judged by their cover: to read these covers in isolation is to read them in the manner of the browsing customer for whom a picture of fat must be worth a thousand words. (This is not to mention that the most common way in which fat people encounter others is for several seconds on a sidewalk or other public space; thus, this is the speed at which fat bodies are often read.) When faced with these vivid images in which fat bodies become the new icon for inappropriate desire, miscarriages of the future, and "unfit" parenting, we would do well to demand of queer theory a hearty response, one that turns work on queer temporality toward the fat-phobia and implicit queer-phobia of such images. We would do well to demand that queer theoretical work on fat both understand the heterosexism of quotidian fat panic and also undertake the hard work of asking just how queer affect and queer temporality exist when such projects are, as they always are, involved with fat bodies, with fat foods, and fat fantasy of so many harmful or exciting or mysterious kinds. [End Page 451]
Yet, as I show here with Exhibit D, the heaviest hitter on fatness in queer theory is an author who employs fat in a manner that jars with queer theory's ethos of fighting the normalization and disciplining of bodies. Namely, I turn to Lauren Berlant's much-lauded Cruel Optimism (2011), which imbues fat with tremendously weighty metaphorical power in three ways. First, Berlant associates fat with "slow death": "the physical wearing out of a population . . . the mass physical attenuation under global-national regimes of capitalist structural subordination"; second, she describes fat as "the congealed form of history that hurts"; and, finally, Berlant regards fat and pleasure-eating as forms of "lateral agency" (ibid.: 95, 142, 95), a figure that mistakes the literal spreading of fat for one's unacknowledged or falsely conscious temporal divestment from the future. This lack of "presence," as I then suggest with reference to Berlant and Edelman's Sex, or the Unbearable (2013), leads to Berlant's incapacity to be present to fat.
Fat Nachträglichkeit
One of Berlant's (2011: 142) essays, "Two Girls, Fat and Thin," defines fat as, in a tidy phrase worth repeating, "the congealed form of history that hurts."6 In this model, fat is the bodily trace of eating that one pursued during or in the wake of traumatic pasts. In other words, fat experience resembles what Sigmund Freud ([1918] 1995) calls Nachträglichkeit; a fat body is a body onto and as which trauma has returned, belatedly. Berlant's equation presumes a sequence: trauma makes one eat more; eating more is what "causes" fatness; fatness is therefore a manifestation of that trauma. As a first response to this model of fat as Nachträglichkeit, it is useful to point out that all sorts of body modification regimes may be understood as responses to trauma, loss, and one's inevitably scarring confrontations with life. Dieting, exercise regimens, television marathons, junk food binges, daily eyebrow plucking, and the promotion of vegan ethics can all be understood as such responses, since all are bodily practices to which one has formed an attachment. While Berlant may not disagree with that, readers should perhaps be, therefore, all the more taken aback that Berlant makes example of eating and fatness with such frequency. The enjoyment of the labor of self-denial and discipline goes missing in Berlant's account, despite the fact that fat people are not the sole owners, or even the most obvious owners, of relationships to hurt that are managed via eating and exercise regimens. This is a difficult point to accept because "comfort eating" is such a highly recognizable trope, while "comfort dieting" seems conveniently imperceptible as an emotional project or a response to injury. Likewise, because talking about one's traumatic past is required of those participating in the weight [End Page 452] loss genre, these very few permitted narratives of fatness also guide fat subjects to narrate themselves in excessively retrospective fashion.
However, because fat pasts are not the only traumatic or complex ones, and because no fat body has as direct a relation to trauma as Berlant's metaphor suggests, a question is necessary: what upholds this inclination to regard fat bodies in particular as the belated effect of trauma? The answer, I argue, is a simple decision to attribute causality and linear temporalities far more casually to fat bodies than to normative ones. In this model, fat must be regarded as primarily a result, rather than a state of being or becoming with phenomenological characteristics that are not wholly self-evident. As Gilman (2004) shows, even the etymology of our current vocabulary for fat bodies—"obesity"—betrays this colloquial sense of fat's (re)turn to the past. As he puts it: "The word obesity has an odd double meaning. The Latin obesus refers to a body that is eaten away and lean as well as one that has eaten itself fat. It is the past participle of obedere, to devour . . . A slippage between 'medical' labels for the fat body and popular, pejorative ones is . . . evident" (ibid.: 9). The most important thing to note here with regard to fat temporality is that even the most widely recognized word for fatness defines the fat present as a past act precisely by laying claim to medicine's constructed objectivity about "obesity," despite the word's origin in the pejorative. This is a simple equation but one that is extraordinarily difficult to live with or to refuse: fat only "is" what one "has done." This is not to argue that fat has no relation to the past; it is to suggest that we need to query how it happens that some bodies are interpreted as a moving set of devolutionary symptoms and others are invited to fantasize their bodies as being entirely in the present, without history, and as deserving of futures. Berlant (2011: 143) too acknowledges this etymology: "For insurance purposes obesity had been deemed an illness, the rest of the literature call it something like a chronic condition, etymologically a disease of time, and vernacularly a condition that can never be cured, only managed."
Cruel Optimism is interestingly inconsistent when it comes to diagnosing the temporal conditions of this "disease." Berlant's adoption of the model of Nachträglichkeit, in which fat is the belated congealment of loss, clashes with her other argument that disordered eating is "a condition different from that of melancholia" (ibid.: 24). This suggestion has at its heart a judgment about temporality in particular: the melancholic subject, she suggests, "desire[s] to temporize and experience the loss of an object," while it is possible to say of an eater engaged in an attachment of "cruel optimism" that "whatever the content of the attachment is, the continuity of its form provides something of the continuity of the subject's sense [End Page 453] of what it means to keep on living on and to look forward to being in the world" (ibid.). Here attached eaters alone are configured as temporally stupid, requiring and prioritizing stability above the content of their attachments. Might not an eater with strict discipline and routine have made an equally or even more appropriate avatar of this temporality? When all bodies are archives that do not just remember their pasts but are built of these pasts, why are fat bodies given nearly mythical powers to signify traumatic experience? What dissimulated archives of eating, trauma, and construction lie behind the privileged position of the slender-normative body that is interpreted as inhabiting the present, unfettered by history? For Berlant, as discussed below, part of the way this is accomplished is through an overinvestment in excessively literal readings of the fat body.
Lateral Fat: Fat Is Stuck in the Present
Elsewhere in Cruel Optimism, Berlant departs from this theory of eating as a haunted way to deal with hurt in order to instead describe fat as a form of "lateral agency" that does not extend into a future. To repeat her words: "Eating adds up to something, many things: maybe the good life, but usually a well-being that spreads out for a moment, not a projection toward a future" (Berlant 2011: 117). This figure of "lateral agency"—the "spreading out for a moment" that she distinguishes from "upright" agency that extends up into the future—capitalizes on the literal spreading of fat matter and uses this physiological characteristic to stand in for conceptions of weakness with regard to agency, action, and futurity. Even at a phenomenological level, this is incorrect in its presumptions about how "eating affects" or "food feelings" work; eating not only stokes the future becomings of the body but also, as a bodily, social, aesthetic, and perceptive experience, leaves the body with an archive of knowledge and feeling, just as music listened to solely for enjoyment, or sex undertaken solely for pleasure, also affect us in ways that we cannot presume to know fully. This figural "lateral" move requires readers to switch from literal fatness to metaphorical and back again, bringing along a judgment that has been accomplished by diction. Berlant may well believe that fat bodies or fat people do not extend anything useful into the future, but the fact that fat matter sometimes spreads is not an argument for it. (And, later in the present article, Sedgwick is seen to take apart any such simple conception of "use.") It is just as easy to say that the spread of fat matter shows that fat people's bodies extend farther into space than others or that fat moves one toward the other, both of which are interpretations loaded with "projection[s] toward a future" (Berlant 2011: 117). It would be equally easy to say that slender bodies starve themselves of queer affect, emaciate the possibilities of becoming, or narrow the horizons of [End Page 454] their futures, but none of these are necessarily true. The narrative maneuvering from literal to metaphorical fat and back is itself a lateral move. It is tempting in this moment, at which Berlant has foreclosed fat futures in almost apocalyptic fashion in favor of temporal binaries that obscure fat life, to quote Sex, or the Unbearable. As she writes there, "Part of my resistance to apocalyptic crescendos is that they can well blot out the delicacies that got us there" (Berlant and Edelman 2013: 19). Indeed, gestures toward the inevitability of fat disaster or even of the fat apocalypse do "blot out" the "delicacies"—a term as loaded as a baked potato—that got us to these bodies and to this point in the history of fatness. Given the way in which Berlant discusses food and eating in the rest of her oeuvre, it is not hard to understand this use of the word delicacies as wholly figural, as emptied of any literal connotation of food. Is actual eating simply not "delicate" enough a matter to enter into these food-based figurations?
Conveniently, as if to show that Berlant's reading is indeed steeped in a slender-troubled abjection of fat possibility, another queer theorist has already interpreted the literally "lateral" or "sideways" spread of fat in a very different way: Kathryn Bond Stockton, in The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century (2009). For Stockton, it is precisely the queer/fat child's propensity for "sideways growth" (ibid.: 20), his or her capacity to grow away from "the stature of straightness," that allows that child to grow into a different future. This is an unsurprising idea for those of us whose fatness disqualified us from heteronormative gazes early in life, which is a mode of childhood queerness less acknowledged than many others. In turn, we seldom understand the drive to pathologize and normativize fat children's bodies as a new mode of forcing queer bodies extinct.
While Berlant discusses fat as a ghost of trauma that manifests belatedly, Stockton analyzes representations of fat ghosts: the actual body of a fat teen hanging from a noose in The Hanging Garden. As I show with Sedgwick, Stockton (2009: 21) reads the fat ghost as a node of queer affect and temporality; in her words, the image of the fat teen hanging gives the audience "a moving suspension at the crossroads of adulthood." Berlant's fat ghost is fat itself, coming to get a heretofore slender person, while Stockton's ghost is the visible effect of a fat past and the violence that that particular fat past endured, or not. In any case, by finding much to admire in "sideways growth," Stockton shows that fat's "spread" can indeed be co-opted for purposes besides attaching to a future.
A 2014 advertisement produced by Change4Life (a collaboration between the UK Department of Health, Cancer Research UK, Diabetes UK, and the British Heart Foundation) summarizes the stakes of this temporal mode of lateral agency: a young white boy sits lifelessly playing video games, with large bold letters above [End Page 455] him: "RISK AN EARLY DEATH, JUST DO NOTHING." Another ad shows a small white girl contemplating a cupcake. As in Berlant, intertwined conceptions of agency and temporality are routed through images of laziness and eating: eating and its pleasures, as well as those of video gaming, are regarded as "doing nothing." This may sound sensible, but consider the following: the ad would certainly not work if it were to feature an equally sedentary activity that better aligns with normative family values, such as a "family games night," "girls' night in," or a marathon of football viewing. This is not to say anything in favor of or against sedentary lives; rather, it is to point out that the strong sense of action and agency attributed to normative modes of health depends on a juxtaposition with eating and fat as "doing nothing," as only a "lateral" agency. In this rhetoric, fat people do not just have a weak ability to do "healthy" things; we have only a weak ability to do.
In Berlant's portions of Sex, or the Unbearable, this simple notion of fat being unable to do much becomes a trend of interpreting fat as not able to signify much. In the book's analysis of Miranda July's 2005 film, Me and You and Everyone We Know, the "gestures of feeling" (Berlant and Edelman 2013: 22) and unsettled relations that Berlant champions rely specifically on images of fat and of fatty foods, a crucial factor that she elides. In the film, two young boys of color have a cyber-flirtation with a white adult woman (an art curator), which ends up focusing on the boys' anal-erotic image of "poop" being passed between "butts" forever. While much is made of the poop in Berlant and Edelman's dialogic text, the same cannot be said for the following food and fat moments. As Berlant writes: "Before there is a relation durable enough to become event there are the gestures of feeling that are never fully absent from intimacy's long middle. Robby gets curious. He wants to know if the woman likes bologna; Peter asks her if she's got big bosoms" (Berlant and Edelman 2013: 22). Perhaps the "middle" of this intimacy is not "long" but instead round, or gelatinous, or chubby! In any case, the "gestures of feeling" of which Berlant speaks are, precisely, intimate questions about the curator's tastes in food and about her sexualized fat flesh ("bosoms"). That such exploratory affective gestures are expressed as desires for food and fat signifies that eating and being composed of fat are the matters through which relations could be made differently; in other words, food and fat are the unique figures (of figure) through which gestures of feeling are made, "without a mutually agreed-on idiom of optimistic misrecognition like identity or love" (ibid.: 21). It is fat that makes the queer affect of the scene possible, just as it is food that makes poop (whether passed between butts or not) possible.
More important, as the scene continues to unfold, it is on the precise possibility of the fat body that the excitement and unsettledness of the scene's queer [End Page 456] relations depend. That is, as Berlant puts it, the young boys "do not even know that the writer is a 'she' because, as Peter points out, 'she's probably a man . . . a fat guy with a little wiener,' or something else, as 'everyone just makes stuff up on these things,' these chat rooms" (ibid.). To maintain the fantastical element of their online encounter, the boys summon specters of fat gender-liars (where "little wiener" seems to go naturally with "fat guy"). The specter of fat gender-crossing does not pose risk or create fear for the boys; it does not cause them to give up on the connection; on the contrary, the attractive tenuousness of the connection they have made remains exciting because a fat man might be writing to them. Here the small "wiener," which is a short step from the "bologna" about which Robby is curious, operates as yet another fatty connector to the unknown, this time to literal fat embodiment. Berlant praises the "nonknowledge" of the conversation's participants, and she suggests that this "nonknowledge" means that they share no illusions about truly knowing the other to whom they speak; nonknowledge is part of "becom[ing] non-sovereign in a different way" (ibid.). In this scene, the non-knowledge pivots meaningfully between fat man or bosomed woman, or between wiener and bologna. These mechanically separated meats and the technologically (dis)connected bodies that they signify are the unnamed material figures through which Berlant's reading flows.
When her fat temporalities and elisions are taken together, it is clear that Berlant's (2011) fat is both a ghost from the past and an effect to be experienced in the future, even though it also lacks the signifying capacity to project toward a future or to constitute the unsettled relations Berlant imagines in Sex, or the Unbearable. Fat is not "present" to Berlant, or might we suggest instead that Berlant is not able to be present to fat? What feelings and habits does this performed and repeated denial of fat presence and futurity both validate and reinforce for what queer theory must finally name and recognize as the form of the slender-normative subject? In the absence of slender-normative desires and anxieties, in the absence of the need to abject fat matter and fat bodies, in the absence of the compulsion to play a never-ending game of fort/da on the scale, what affective room becomes available to fat, and what will we do with it?
Refuse, Reuse, Recycle: "The Use of Being Fat"
In contrast to the cultural texts exhibited above, Sedgwick's "The Use of Being Fat" invests heavily in fat presents and fat presence. In this poem, readers witness a recursive fat moment into which we ourselves are folded as readers. I suggest that this fat enfolding of the reader could be a model for future considerations of how to [End Page 457] build fat encounters between text and reader, where "fat" may refer more to affect than to body size. After all, most of us "feel fat" these days; why not put this affective experience to better use than public self-flagellation? In addition to developing a theory of the fat present, then, an underlying methodological question here is: how can a reader become involved with a queer-fat reading encounter? To begin, here is the poem in its entirety:
I used to have a superstition thatthere was this use to being fat:no one I loved could come to harm enfolded in my touch —that lot of me would blot it up,the rattling chill, night sweat or terror.I've learned that I was wrong.Held, even heldthey withdraw to the secretscenes of their unmaking.But then I thinkit is true they turn away inside.It feels so like refusalmaybe still there is something to my superstition.
With a poem this succinct, it is necessary to dispense with the common-sense interpretation it may invite. This reading might proceed like this: "I used to think there was some point to being fat. I thought fat could protect my cherished others when they're sick. But fat can't protect them; they still die. But, well—when they turn away, I feel rejected. So maybe my fat protects me. Maybe there is some point of fat—to protect me from feeling refused." This reading is possible only if the reader consents to normative ideas about fat; Sedgwick, as I show, does not. For this commonsense reading to cohere, fat must be seen as a failed protector of others and of oneself. This interpretation therefore relies on the well-trod belief, one that Berlant echoes, that fat may be understood as a way to pack on protection from society in favor of social withdrawal—a preemptive strike against an inevitably hurtful society, accomplished via backward-appearing desires to "cushion" such blows. Indeed, as Berlant (2011: 28) describes one of her primary text's protagonists, "Obesity and ugliness create a force field around her, seeming to neutralize what, in those 'gatherings of the normally proportioned,' might come from others—curiosity or attachment." One immediate response: as many readers may know, fat neither shields nor hides oneself, neither dulls one's senses nor makes [End Page 458] one invisible or impervious to connection, disappointment, and other feelings. As Gilman (2008: 45–46) points out, this notion that fat is a protector that dulls feeling is a relic of nineteenth-century Anglophone equations of fat with "coarseness of feeling," "insensitivity of emotional response," and with a general affective "impairment," which are all equations that Gilman argues have their basis in the age-old idea that "fat people are stupid" and are therefore less responsive or, in other words, less capable of feeling—of, in other words, being present or projecting presence. Given that Sedgwick's poem is so thick with emotion, and given that her work on theoretical fatness focuses on feeling in particular, that hermeneutic makes little sense as an approach to Sedgwick's poem.
Reading this poem as a theory of fat presence, temporality, and feeling is far more in line with Sedgwick's abiding interests and with the poem's subtext. Sedgwick's temporalities, culled by critics from other texts, can be witnessed here. Stephen Barber and David Clark (2002: 8), for instance, argue in their introduction to Regarding Sedgwick that a "persistent present" underlies the "queer temporality" of Sedgwick's work. By this, they mean that "queer" becomes a "continuing moment" that constantly disrupts regular linear temporality while also troubling the body's felt habits or tendencies. As they put it, Sedgwick's "queer temporality . . . is at once indefinite and virtual but also forceful, resilient, undeniable . . . a crossing of temporality with force" (ibid.). We can understand this to mean, in part, that Sedgwick's work generates in the reader a felt disorientation from linear time.7 "The Use of Being Fat" is a textbook case of this "persistent present," with its affect-loaded and dizzying temporal mode. In these folds of time, the speaker "used to have a superstition" "but then . . . think[s]" otherwise, only to end by reasserting the original thought, but provisionally and with a different feeling: "maybe still there is something to my superstition." The persistent present of fat feeling keeps remaking itself here by returning with difference to condition a new moment. Instead of being read into a traumatic past or deathlike future, fat keeps reinstating itself by repeating with a twist: fat is not a "chronic" condition here but is instead a chronic interruption to any stable sense of feeling. It is anything but a layer of protection that makes one not-present to feeling or the world.
A careful reading of the poem's tenses reveals at least six folds of time, italicized here: it is a turn to refusal that is a retrospective reclaiming of a memory of a superstition. Layers of temporal distance are enfolded in the immediate presence of a hug; folds of time become actual folds of fat that both perform the singular event of each hug and also contain the bodily memories that make these hugs into a chronicle. This translation of words into fat is very much in keeping with Sedgwick's own understanding of her writing as sustenance and as fat; as [End Page 459] Jason Edwards (2009: 99–100) points out, when "discussing her long, incomplete, narrative poem, 'The Warm Decembers,' Sedgwick pondered the text's 'swollen proportions'" while "she also appetisingly described her haikus as 'fat, buttery condensation[s].'" This last figuration is another example of how one might understand the contingency of the figuration of fat in ways other than Berlant's (2011) sense of "congealed" hurt. As Sedgwick already thinks of her poetic works in particular as fat, a reading of this poem as performatively fat has delicious precedent; the temporally folded body of the poem enfolds the reader just as the body in the poem enfolds the other to whom it is attached affectively. To remake a familiar fat insult: even the folds of this poem have folds! While Sedgwick's fatty metaphors here rely on similar slippages between bodily figure and literary figure, some crucial offerings she makes in her "figurings of figure" are to link ostensibly temporary fat to the permanence of text; to use metaphor in such a way that guides the reader to view fattiness as luscious and present; and to make fat into a performative matter that requires the participation, via enfolding, of the reader.
To extend this last point: in the form of a folded fat poem, the reader is not delivered to any synthesized next step because distinctions such as forward/backward and inside/outside are suspended. As such, the reader hangs out in a present that nonetheless keeps happening. It is necessary to remember that one of Berlant's (2011) overarching moves in Cruel Optimism is to critique what she calls the "stretched-out present" of constant-crisis culture. Sedgwick, however, shows that rather than a stretched-out present in which nothing ever arrives, we might instead live in a "persistent present" (Barber and Clark 2002: 8) in which immediacy and contact are possible, and in which the ever-deferment of futurity is best represented not by the chronic condition of "obesity" but instead by the persistence of fat to survive, to grow, to occur, to fold, or, in other words, to be present. For Barber and Clark, Sedgwick's "persistent present" is best characterized as a queer temporality; we can add that it is literal fat that is the occasion for and generator of this persistence, despite opposing "figures of figure" from Berlant.
In contrast to Berlant's sense of fat as an unfeeling protective layer, then, the main event of Sedgwick's poem is a fat feeling that recurs and changes. The event of the poem is an immediate, embracing assemblage of bodies that, when becoming something new together, produce the feeling and direction of "refusal." As the poem reads, the friends or lovers or others being hugged "turn away inside. It feels so like refusal." Such "turns" and the "refusal" they make are complex temporal figures, as Heather Love shows in Feeling Backward (2007). There she argues that a turn in literature may be most usefully understood as a literal and metaphorical refusal to face forward by prioritizing futurity above all. For Sedgwick, [End Page 460] this goes a step farther: the fat of this queerly turning temporality blurs or even breaks down the boundaries of the human subject. Indeed, in addition to the multiply folded bodies and times of the poem (which, to repeat myself, already muddy spatiotemporal binaries such as past/present and inside/outside), the subjectivities of the huggers are made ambiguous. Instead of "he" or "she," Sedgwick uses the nongendered plural pronoun "they," a choice that suggests that the poem's scene, seemingly a highly unique and intimate one, has already been repeated before its story of chronicity itself is told here; "they," the speaker's partners in hugging, become an indeterminate and indeterminately gendered series, rather than one or many unique bodies or people. (Although "they" could indeed refer to just one person in 2017, this was not the case in 1994.) This implication of recurrence, and its attendant impossibility of definitively pinning down any subject in the poem, is vital to the poem's openness and persistence. It leaves the attentive reader with many questions: does the subject turn away from the speaker despite the hug, from the illness because of the hug's strength, or toward the illness despite the hug? Does the turn "inside" refer to inside the hug, inside the illness, inside oneself, or into a privileged interior that excludes the speaker? If so, doesn't the entanglement of fat and temporal folds confound this architecture? Is the speaker's hug refused, her fatness, her protection, or her superstition? In these enfolded ambiguities, a "turn" to "refusal" occurs, but the agency of any such turn—a subjective location for feeling—is not clearly situated. In this sense, fat in this poem becomes a matter of connection and assemblage rather than a matter of attempted withdrawal from society; fat becomes a connective tissue through which queer acts of refusal are generated together, even if painfully. To presume for a moment that Sedgwick's own life of witnessing is implicated in the poem, here fat becomes the matter through which her attachments to AIDS and death are felt; fat connects her to, rather than withdraws her from, the pain and memory of death, and connects her to the possibility of persisting, which, in a poem about recurrence, is not the same as "moving on." If readers can fairly imagine the speaker hugging friends or lovers who may die of AIDS, then the poem's contradictory movements are especially novel and poignant: fat and AIDS are finally connected not through a hyperbolic juxtaposition of greed versus illness or fat versus very thin but instead through fat envelopment, persistence, and the painful refusal of all bodies to persist infinitely.
Given the sense of pain the reader finds in this poem, it is necessary to ask about the qualities of this feeling of "refusal." This is a quintessentially temporal question and a queer question; Love (2007: 137) calls refusal "a form . . . of queer negativity . . . that we have yet to consider because [its] connection to any [End Page 461] recognizable form of politics is too tenuous." What is at stake here, then, is the question of whether refusal has any use for the future. This is Sedgwick's question as well; recall the title of the poem! Love goes on to suggest that the imperative to "alchemize queer suffering" (ibid.) into something useful is to, by adopting a too utilitarian approach, make suffering into happiness prematurely. Sedgwick also refuses the imperative to be positive and productive, but a key difference between these thinkers exists in their respective spatial figurings of refusal as a possible use. Sedgwick's turn is not around or backward; as the line reads, "they turn away inside." While, for Love, these turns away from the future are nostalgic and are mired in loss and trauma, my reading of Sedgwick's turn configures a fat turn or refusal as a turn toward undoing and remaking, what readers of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari ([1980] 2004) might understand as an involutionary turn.8 This is an enfolding turn inward, a creative turn, and a continuous, repetitive, turn that is the very opposite of the marches forward or backward presupposed by narratives of evolution or by the narratives of degeneration and decay that are attributed to fatness. The refusal created in the recurring fat assemblage of this poem can therefore be recast as acts of re-fusing, as repeatedly interrupted and reconnecting flesh and feeling. The persistence of fat re-fusing across the boundaries of fat, queer, and AIDS becomes for the speaker a not-painless collaborative refuge not from but in a world that regards many of us as so much refuse, bodies as good as quickly or slowly dead.
This emphasis on refusal may well sound excessively negative or reactionary rather than generative. Berlant and Edelman (2013: vii), however, view negativity as "the relentless force that unsettle[s] the fantasy of sovereignty." I agree with this view, but find it troubling that Berlant does not apply the following statement to her considerations of fat: negativity's "effects . . . are not just negative, since negativity unleashes the energy that allows for the possibility of change" (ibid.: vii–viii). While fat, read by Berlant as negative, does unleash energy, it is unclear why she offers no ideas about how this negativity could "allow . . . for the possibility of change." Surely there are other changes, other ways that fatness (even if one is determined to define it as wholly negative) can and does generate change in ways that override the subject's feigned sovereignty. Inasmuch as uncontrollable appetites for food are one of, if not the, key image of an "encounter with non-sovereignty" (Berlant and Edelman 2013: vii) in our cultural imagination, it is indeed curious that Berlant shrinks from food and fat as an exemplar of this ethic.
In the above paragraphs, as in the title of Sedgwick's poem itself, it is clear that "use" value is often the unchecked mode of assessment when it comes to discussing fat people and our stake in the future. For Berlant, fat is more useful when [End Page 462] it can figure as a tidy antithesis to thriving, not when it may question the modes of heroic agency implicit in the fat figurations she uses so often. By this, I mean that while Berlant seeks alternatives to heroic agency, her fat figurations derive from commonsense notions about fat that are underpinned by the idea that there is nothing more heroic, personal, or agential than losing weight. Being fat is now treated as one of the most serious failures of will or agency that a person can commit, yet Berlant's figurations leave that bodily project unmarked while piling figural weight onto weight bodies. Fat is indeed very "useful" to Berlant, but only in particular ways.
Even though queer people are accustomed to critiquing the reduction of bodies to economic signs, such rhetoric and the "value" judgments on which it is based do survive in queer theory. For instance, Barber and Clark (2002: 32) state correctly that Berlant, in "Two Girls, Fat and Thin," understands the hunger of a fat person as an "allegory of insatiability" and as a figure for "maddening absence." This figuring leaves a fat person wondering why it is fat people and fat hunger in particular that carry such metaphorical weight with regard to the constitutive lack of the human subject. Again, might not the cruelly optimistic and insatiable desire for interminable weight loss with its always brand-new magic bullets, new clothes, new foods, and new exercise regimens make an even more compelling figuration of lack? In a reading that presumes normative notions of "use" and "economies" of the body, bodies fat and otherwise can only be simple symptoms of ideologies, rather than ambiguous refusers of the very symptoms they may show. It is in this way that Berlant's (2011: 108) "slow death" focuses on "the destruction of bodies by capital" while configuring as false consciousness the ways that eaters, among others, attempt to keep living within and during destruction.9 This is not to say that bodies are sovereign and capable of living outside destructive systems, or to valorize any sense of pure agency or self-determination; rather, it is to show that how we choose to see ambiguous flashes of agency within capitalism matters. Unlike Berlant's more unilateral sense of destruction and the false consciousness of cruelly optimistic attachments, Sedgwick's ambiguous bodies act together and separately in inscrutable ways that defy normative conceptions of sovereignty and agency, but still persist and refuse, even with pain and with life conditions not of their choosing. Sedgwick's poem, then, announces itself as one about "use" that ends with an act of "refuse," which my reading rearticulates as re-fuse, or fusing with others again. Bodies are undergoing "destruction" in Sedgwick's poem, but her reparative mode leads her to experiment with what can be made, "used" and "re-fused," in the fat present, with the willingness of the reader to read fat in a similarly reparative mode. [End Page 463]
Elsewhere in her oeuvre, Sedgwick laments the reduction of fat to use value and economic rhetoric in a way that encourages us to further rethink "use" in this poem. For example, as she writes in A Dialogue on Love, "the issue was never fat or not fat, but—given fat—worth something or worth nothing?" (Sedgwick 1994a: 68). Even at this moment in which Sedgwick is affirming that she "did identify with that sense of myself [as fat]" (ibid.), it is the question of worth and value that defines her self-conception. Her dialogue with Michael Moon, "Divinity: A Dossier, a Performance Piece, a Little-Understood Emotion" (1990–91), is the work that most forcefully complicates the way in which fat bodies are put to "work" as economic metaphor. In language that echoes my doubling of refuse with refuse, Moon suggests there that "the fat woman's work of emblematizing the circulatory embolisms of a culture might be said to fall into the economic category not of either production or reproduction but rather of waste management" (ibid.: 30). In such a culture, waste management and waist management become the same thing. The labor and capital that one invests in one's slender body are not just signs of personal mastery but of economic responsibility; as Sedgwick puts it when discussing Dickens's loathing of fat women, "not her bodily opulence but her bodily meagerness comes to be the guarantee of the woman of substance" (ibid.). This moralizing of bodily traits is the result, Sedgwick suggests, of reading the fat body "phobogenically," as the "literal image of exploitative accumulation" (ibid.). By invoking "phobogenics," Sedgwick traces the purportedly neutral figuration of fatness as capitalist accumulation par excellence to a suspect and dissimulated affect, to a fear or "phobia" of fatness.
Ironically, however, fat people are often excluded from the capitalist economy as which we are so often figured. As Sedgwick and Moon (1990–91: 14) suggest, the most serious insult one can deliver in a capitalist culture is to say to a would-be consumer that "there's nothing here for you to spend your money on." When we consider that many or most fat people have great difficulty finding clothes to wear, we see the true strength of phobic fat affect; after all, when are capitalist marketplaces not flexible enough to find a way to profit from such a large market? Fat people are treated to "the primal denial . . . of a stake in the symbolic order"; you cannot accumulate because you are accumulation; or "who and what you are means that there's nothing here for you" (ibid.). Again, fat people are made to inhabit a paradox; as Sedgwick and Moon put it, we are both "a disruptive embolism in the flow of economic circulation" and the "very emblem of that circulation" (ibid.: 15–16). These paradoxical conceptions of "use" and circulation hinge, once again, on fraught fantasies about fat temporality; fat bodies are interpreted as having unfairly stockpiled resources, as having planned for the wrong future. This is [End Page 464] an ironic state of discourse given that fat people are also barred from investing in fat futures and from accumulations in terms of clothes and access to other money-spending projects. (This is not to worship at the slender feet of consumer goods, to be sure, but clothes, for instance, are definitely something required to maintain the semblance of a subjectivity!) The literal denial of access to the marketplace of subjectivity cannot help but confirm for the fat subject that she or he or they cannot access cultural fantasies of futurity.
It is in both (1) this highly charged discourse about use, accumulation, and capital and (2) Sedgwick's long-standing urge to refuse the contours of this discourse that the poem's use of the word lot can be best understood. Why, in a poem that queers the idea of fat "use" and temporality, might Sedgwick describe her fat body as "that lot of me"? By talking about fat as "a lot," Sedgwick translates the economic rhetoric of fat-as-excess into one of fat-as-abundance. By using a word that captures the general ethos of capitalist accumulation—that is, having a lot—Sedgwick opens to the fat reader the possibility that our discursive position vis-à-vis accumulation could be rewritten. In a generous reading, lot could remind us of the now-obsolete European unit of weight measurement that, until last century, was equal to the literal mass of one unit of the local currency. Here the double meaning of pound assumes its full meaning; mass and wealth were truly transposable. However, since the poem features a "turn" and a "refusal," this "lot" of fatness might well remind us of one of Love's (2007) main examples of the queer turn from futurity: the biblical Lot, whose wife disobeyed divine advice, turned to look back on Sodom, and was transformed into a pillar of salt, the representative "sin" of which has now shifted from greedy sodomy to greedy gluttony and cholesterol. This "Lot" lives with the staid outcomes of a rule-breaking woman who turns toward the locale of queerness and punishment, and must also live with the fact that he offers his daughters to Sodomites to prevent his male houseguests from being raped. Reciprocally, Sedgwick's "lot" is also an archive of gendered unruliness, of involutionary turns, and of her celebration of anal pleasures. Most significant, given that the biblical Lot also reminds us of Sedgwick's penchant for connecting queer and Jewish thought, it should be emphasized that the Hebrew etymology of Lot's name is the verb lut, "to wrap closely or to envelope."10 Lot queers the economic rhetoric of fatness, connects us to queerness and Jewish history, and, yes, even captures the recurring enfolding/enveloping hug of Sedgwick's poem. One derivative of lut, the masculine noun lat, takes us directly to Sedgwick's ongoing theorization of what it means to know a fat body; the word also carries resonances of secrecy. It is no coincidence, then, that when discussing the "closet of size," Sedgwick and Moon (1990–91: 26–27) ask a question that retains [End Page 465] this definition of fat-as-lots: "What kind of secret can the body of the fat woman keep?" People tend to receive fat bodies in public as ones that cannot help but give up the truth of their habits and morals, but via Sedgwick and Moon's theories, it becomes clear that in Sedgwick's poem, being a "lot" of person can create new secret worlds into which to turn recursively. Being a lot can mean new folds of fat assemblage to inhabit, ones that may not be perceived by those who expect to be able to read the bodies of others at a distance. The poem's fat folds, which we can think of as the poem's "lots," or its "hugs-as-secrets," eschew any two-dimensional understanding of the body as a matter of surface/depth, a binary that persists in queer theory, to instead demand that a queer reader feel out the less determinate matter of shape when involving oneself with a text. The root of lot in lat also brings us to a radical revision of Berlant's (2011) "lateral agency." The lat of the fat body's secrets is the same lat of lateral. The difference between Berlant and Sedgwick becomes clear: Berlant's "lat" moves fatness to the periphery, taking it sideways out of futurity, while Sedgwick's "lat" makes the fat body a "lot" and sees potential, pain, and ambiguous relations in the fat present and its envelopments.
Conclusion: Slender Trouble
This article has developed a queer theory of fat presents/presence in three ways. First, fat presence was defined as a mode of temporality that refuses to be pulled between traumatic pasts and slender futures; second, Sedgwick's particular fat temporality was seen to function in the mode of recursion or involution rather than evolution or degeneration, which are temporal terms often used to validate treatment of both queers and fat people; and, finally, in this "refusal" to "face" or be ruled by a deferred and ever-slenderer future, fat presence was imbued with the possibility of casting off the economic rhetorics of personal investment and accumulation in favor of being a "lot." These fat temporal modes refuse, in turn, the popular fat temporalities with which the article began: fat Nachträglichkeit, fat as temporally lateral, future anterior fat, and fat as slow death. Queer theory cares about temporality; this alone is an argument for the relevance of disturbing the temporalities attributed to body size in general and to attend to the fat temporalities of an emblematic queer theorist in particular.11 However, I conclude by bringing this article's ideas to bear on three matters.
First, to return to the reproductive futurist magazine covers with which I began: it is indeed possible, even necessary and queer, to find ways to experience and to address fat children as something other than symptoms of their own negated futures. Indeed, fat moves the child's body outside heteronormative desirability, [End Page 466] which can give a child the appealing if difficult opportunity to craft affective habits with other materials, in other directions, and perhaps on different timelines. This possibility, long known to be an exciting one to many fat queers, is even recognized indirectly by those who wish to fight unambiguously against the very existence of fat children. For instance, a group called Children's Healthcare of Atlanta (2011) launched a campaign called "Strong4Life," in which black-and-white photos of sad fat children are emblazoned with warnings, a form that gently recalls the aesthetic of cigarette packets. One young white girl, arms crossed, is labeled with the following line: "It's hard to be a little girl / if you're not." This warning is laced with the threat of fat's possible interruption to the heteronormative life trajectory. As such, it gets to the heart of Stockton's proposal that fat children may queer the body; not being a "little" girl does indeed break the form of the "little girl" as a particularly heteronormative avatar of childhood. The genders and desires of fat children have a special possibility of growing "sideways" as well.12 Queer theory's ongoing work on temporality, often routed through considerations of children, must take up fatness if it is to be attentive to what is probably now the most frequent bodily trait through which children are made heterosexually legible tokens of a normative future.
Second: how, in the clearest terms, does this article provide an alternative to Berlant's Cruel Optimism? If we were to accept that we live in a cruelly optimistic world in which affective attachment is antagonistic to one's flourishing, the question would remain: how do we, as attaching bodies, develop modes of attachment that are neither cruel nor optimistic, that work against the capitalist and falsely conscious modes of which Berlant writes, and that view attachment as both inevitable and, sometimes, as a tool for flourishing? Sedgwick's response is to let a painful fat embrace fold and unfold in chronic fashion, with neither optimism about cure (and certainly not weight loss) nor pessimism about the usefulness of a hug between pained and limited bodies. Put differently, the alternative Sedgwick offers is one that eschews cruel pessimism without falling into myths of neoliberal fat dignity or of restored agency or of any form of self-presence being complete; indeed, the poem's hug persists; it is a pained attachment that nonetheless does something else, too. Earlier, I suggested that Sedgwick's reparative mode is enacted between reader, author, and text; still earlier, I argued that readers are drawn by the text into an enfolded and folding world of fat affect. Now, if it is possible to rethink the word repair, another step is added to this fat hermeneutic. Repair, in addition to being a noun of cure, is also a verb of persistent action; the "repairs" of this persistent hug, while they do not repair anyone in the sense of protection or cure, are indeed the scene of collaborative repairing, which also becomes recursive [End Page 467] re-pairing. A homonym of repair gives us another sense: when one "repairs to the kitchen" or "repairs to the boudoir," one imagines an old place to which one intends to return anew, after an event. This hug, then, is reparative—but without cure, cruelty, or even optimism. The poem's pained attachments do not ascend or aspire to any telos but their own failure, a failure to protect that becomes a success as an assemblage of bodies and readers, a success that may depart from the will of the acts' doers.
In Sex, or the Unbearable, Berlant links repair and temporality in a useful way, something she does not do throughout her works on fat:
Most fantasies of repairing what's broken . . . are ways of staying bound to the possibility of staying bound to a world whose terms of reciprocity—whether in intimate personal or political idioms—are not entirely in anyone's control and which yet can be changed by a radical collective refusal of normative causality, of the normative relation of event to effect.
While I agree with this, the present article shows that it is quite necessary to refuse (via Sedgwick's "refusal") the "normative causality" of Berlant's fat-focused oeuvre, the causality in which certain traumas cause certain congealed bodies. This refusal is also a refusal of Berlant's "normative relation of event to effect" (Berlant and Edelman 2013: 20), in which she traps fat in past events and future effects. This is all to underline the following: while Berlant certainly does exploit fat via the promulgation of normative figurations of it, any such "misrepresentation" of fat bodies is not the main event here. Rather, it is Berlant's failure to imagine how bodies, big and small, can attach and flourish—even while dying—via routes other than falsely conscious optimistic models of pure subjectivity or the accumulation of capital, via routes that do not remain stuck exclusively in traumatic pasts or impossible futures.
Third, how might the development of a fat present/presence influence considerations of queer hermeneutics and queer method, which are receiving renewed energy at the moment? I suggest that one overarching change is especially significant in light of this article. As Sedgwick and Butler shifted critical focus from gay and lesbian inclusion to an affective architectonics of heteronormative subjectivities, we too must move from questions of the inclusion, dignity, and mis/representation of fat subjectivities to instead notice and refuse to settle for the styles, tendencies, and melancholies of the normative and heretofore unmarked category with regard to fatness: the slender. We must trace out the form and structure of the [End Page 468] slender-normative subject and its reading practices. Many questions come to mind as next steps. What are slender hermeneutics and by what affective debilities are they motivated? Do the affective habits of the slender-normative subject conflict with queer flourishing? Does a thin hermeneutic produce "flat" affect? If Sedgwick is correct to trace suspicious interpretations of fat bodies back to "phobogenic" origins, then what is the quality of the fat fear of the slender-normative subject? What injuries are concealed by one's abjection of fat through figuration? (Here we can remember the digestive and edible scenes of Butler's (1990) other becoming shit, and of Kristeva's ([1908] 1982) gagging at the skin that grows atop milk; abjection is already about wrong kinds of eating and indigestion.) If queer theory has encouraged us to see man-woman sexual partnerships as potentially queer in their cultural meanings and outcomes, and to see many same-sex relationships as homonormative, then when and how shall we know if our readings and bodies are "fat" or "slender"? Sedgwick insists that fat bodily contact, persistence, being a "lot," rethinking the "usefulness" of bodies, a willingness to involve oneself with fat matter, and developing reparative modes of reading and feeling are key questions in any such determination. "Fat" and "thin" do not, then, become floating signifiers or simply a new spin on queer/heteronormative; indeed, the fat body, even in its figurations, remains present for Sedgwick and for the shift in queer theoretical reading that I propose here by way of conclusion. What other interpretive and affective possibilities may proliferate, right now, in the encroaching depths of our laboring and sweaty folds of flesh? Let such a question become the material of our fat future-to-come. Can the gift of that fat future be received, in due time?
Lucas Crawford is assistant professor of English at the University of New Brunswick. Lucas is the author of Sideshow Concessions (2015), which won the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry, and of Transgender Architectonics: The Shape of Change in Modernist Space (2016). Lucas edited the "Trans Lit" issue of Matrix Magazine (2016). This article is part of Lucas's manuscript in progress, Slender Trouble.
Notes
1. Readers of Jacques Derrida ([1976] 1997) will recognize the "future anterior" from Of Grammatology. Here Derrida shows the troubling way in which we project ourselves into the future and see our present as merely a future past.
2. After all, in "Divinity," Sedgwick (1990–91: 215) identifies, with "abjection and defiance," "as a gay man," while her (his?) coauthor Michael Moon refers to himself (herself?) "as a fat woman."
3. Gilman's chapter "Chinese Obesity" in Fat: A Cultural History of Obesity shows the nuanced way in which it has become almost a point of national pride to adopt Western models of public health and disease, especially if the disease itself may be represented as Western in origin. As he suggests: "China, like America, is suffering from a new epidemic, but one that documents its modernity; no model of oriental, primitive infectious diseases here. Rather, a claim of 'invasion from the West.' However, the [End Page 469] negative aspects of the new economy can be confronted through the importation of models of obesity from Western public health. Obesity and its treatment may both be understood as parts of a system of modernization, with all the pitfalls recognized and the 'cure' in sight" (Gilman 2008: 163).
4. As an anonymous peer reviewer pointed out, the "liberty" to be slender (i.e., the liberty to choose something culturally obligatory) is so much easier for many people to understand as liberty than, say, the liberty to eat to excess, the liberty to look and grow as one wants, etc. This all brings into focus the compromised and incomplete version of agency with which we must work when discussing any kind of "liberty."
5. Doyle (2014) reports in the Daily Mail that between 2009 and February 2014, seventy-four fat children were forcibly removed from their families and placed in state care in the UK. Panic about fatness and its threat to Western fantasies of childhood has created a situation in which being placed in state-run institutions is regarded as a better life than a fat one. It is possible that public distrust in fat has outgrown even our most conservative trust in the family form.
6. Though Berlant's essay appears in an earlier form (Barber and Clark 2002), I use the pagination of Cruel Optimism for simplicity.
7. Ironically, Barber and Clark's (2002) description of this "persistent present" is not so different from the "chronic" temporality that Berlant mentions.
8. Deleuze and Guattari ([1980] 2004: 238) use the term involution to refer to "evolution between heterogenous terms." This word allows them to reject the sense of progress or degeneration presupposed by vocabularies of evolution or devolution. It also suggests the manner by which such changes occur; involution is not the natural march of progress but is instead the action of "involving." As they say, "Becoming is involutionary, involution is creative" (ibid.: 238–39). I have suggested that the bodies of Sedgwick's poem are "involved." This kind of assemblage implies a very different temporality than do common understandings of fatness because the bodies and their involvement eschew any sense of progression or regression.
9. To witness Berlant (2011: 24) demarcating cruelly optimistic people as a case study in false consciousness, see the following passage especially: "One more thing: sometimes, the cruelty of an optimistic attachment is more easily perceived by an analyst who observes the cost of someone's or some group's attachment to x, since often persons and communities focus on some aspects of their relation to an object/world while disregarding others." While it is true that no person notices or cares about every aspect of every attachment that he, she, or they sustain, perhaps it could be said, more generously, that people prioritize the aspects of their attachments that are important to them. We may critique how people prioritize these aspects—and in this article I certainly take issue with the way that Berlant cannot perceive the affective investments of slenderness as a project—but to say that an "analyst" (Berlant?) is better suited to perceive a situation because he, she, or they are uninvested is both unfair and inaccurate. [End Page 470] Queers know too well what happens when only voices beyond an affected group are trusted; moreover, if one sees fit to interpret and publicly comment on a topic (as Berlant does very often with regard to fat), one is likely not uninvested personally. As queer theory has shown us that heteronormative people have a great deal at stake in representations of queerness, so does the slender subject require certain fantasies and abjections of fat. Berlant is "attached" to fat too.
10. Any Hebrew dictionary of Hebraic names contains this description. On this occasion, I have consulted the online "Biblical Name Vault" (n.d.).
11. For works on queer temporality, see, e.g., Freeman 2010, McCallum and Tuhkanen 2011, and Halberstam 2005.
12. Ironically, the image of a parent "making" a child fat is cause for great panic and concern in Western culture, while the image of "making" a child normatively gendered and heteronormative is seen as the pinnacle of good parenting. A queer understanding of public health discourse might lead us to ask: which is more detrimental to a child's "health"? And, can we imagine that not being a "little girl"—i.e., being written out of the fantasy of innocent childhood that Edelman and others critique—might be a good queer thing indeed?
