Fattening fabulousness: the joys and risks of troubling gender through fat fashion

Abstract

Gender and weight are produced through dress before a child comes into the world. But dressing the body in ways that produce and embody one’s own understanding of gender is challenging for fat bodies because they have limited or no choice of available clothing sizes and styles. As a result, finding clothes that produce and embody fat people’s desired gender identities and expressions tends to be a source of struggle. This article tells a different story. Drawing on interviews and participatory photography, we use madison moore’s theory of “fabulousness” to explore how six fat, curvy and thick-identified people of diverse gender and fat embodiments create their gender and fat identities through their favorite fashion object. We also explore how participatory photography allows our participants and research team to co-create new understandings of fat, gender and fashion. Our work centers participants’ pleasure from finding and wearing clothing that produces and embodies their desired gender and fat identities, but participants also share how risk is inescapable when they dress their bodies in their favorite pieces in the social world. We argue that our participants practice “fabulousness” because their embodied dressing leads them to experience both pleasure and risk by stretching dominant understandings of gender and fat. Our findings contribute to fat studies and fashion studies by introducing underrepresented experiences of gender and weight, demonstrating how participatory photography generates more layered understandings of gender, fat and embodied dressing, and revealing the possibilities of fabulousness to connect both fields.

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