SOCIAL SEMIOTICS

VOLUME 14

NUMBER. 3

(DECEMBER 2004)

Locating Aesthetics: Sexing the Fat Woman

Samantha Murray

In the West, the fat woman is most often relegated to the asexual category of the "big girl". The soft dimpled curves of her thighs, the fleshy rolls of her stomach, the alarming swell of her breasts, all seem a parody of female sexuality, a distortion of contemporary paradigms of feminine beauty and desirability. The fat woman's corporeal experience is constituted largely by the expectation of a constant disavowal of her flesh, an enforced disconnection from her body and a refusal of herself as a sexual being. The fat female body in Western societies stands as a symbol of a body that is uncared for, uncultivated and, indeed, as a body that has failed as the subject of aesthetics. In Ttie Use of Pleasure, Foucault suggests "we have to create ourselves as a work of art", and advocates living a "beautiful life" by engaging with practices that seek to produce a "cultivated self". In this paper I wish to examine Foucault's notion of an "aesthetics of existence", and the implicit bodily transformation that is effected through his "practices of the self". In light of this, I seek to interrogate the problem of aesthetics in Foucauldian ethics, and the prescriptive modes of becoming that aesthetic ideals inevitably produce. Does "making our lives a work of art" enable a means of overturning dominant discourses around the fat body that relate to the perceived neglect of bodily maintenance and failure of the will by thinking through new ways of living the fat body, or does an "aesthetics of existence" reinforces these discourses, by insisting upon sets of practices that disallow the fat "self" from ever coming into being as it is. Can we choose the level of investment we have in aesthetic ideals, and do Foucault's aesthetics for a "beautiful life" irrevocably discipline the fat body, deprive it of its sexuality, and seek to overcome its very flesh in order to transform it into a socially sanctioned "work of art"? Keywords fatness; sexuality; Foucault; aesthetics

Just over a year ago, I attended a seminar in a series of papers on sexuality. In this particular session, the paper delivered explored issues relating to masculinity. A colleague had conducted interviews with young male cadets training at the Australian Defence Force Academy, where a number of young
ISSN 1035-0330 print; 1470-1219 online/04/030237-11 ^ ^ Taylor & Francis Ltd
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men talked openly about their sexual experiences and practices. One of the young cadets relayed the story of an apparently common sexual activity known as the "Rodeo". This practice involved a group of about 10 cadets, who would gather in a hotel room. The boys would make an agreement that one of them would go out to a local pub or club, and find the most obese woman he could, pretend he was sexually interested in her, make her feel desirable, and then lure her back to the hotel room. The other nine boys would wait in the hotel room for the couple, hiding behind couches, in the bathroom, in wardrobes. Once the young male cadet and the fat girl arrived, the boy would seduce the girl, and begin to undress her, encouraging her to believe that he was about to have sex with her. He would then ask her to kneel on the bed on all fours, and he would produce a scarf to blindfold her. The fat girl would be lulled into thinking this was just a kinky start to sex with the young cadet. Instead, the young boy would call out a signal to the other boys and they would run out from their hiding places. One by one, they would jump on the fat girl's back, kicking at the soft flesh of her hips and belly, riding her like she was some sort of animal. They would ignore her tears and her screams, and once they had all had their turn, and the fat girl was completely humiliated, they would kick her out of the room. I sat in the audience, listening to this story in horror. I suddenly became acutely aware of my own fat bulges and folds. I imagined every eye in the room on me, shaking their heads in pity, revulsion and even morbid curiosity. I pulled my shirt surreptitiously away from the bulges of my belly and my hips, trying to separate the appearance from the reality. I shifted in my chair, and felt my cheeks burn hot and my stomach churn. I was angry, so angry, so humiliated for the fat girl who had suffered at the hands of these young boys: she was just a girl, a girl like I was and had been, and she had been made into a ravenous, libidinous, ridiculous creature. And yet I was ashamed. I was aware of the disgust my body inspired, its complete unacceptability and invisibility in the sexual domain, apart from as a figure of ridicule. I felt hot tears sting my eyes, and I knew I had to get out. I squeezed my wide hips between the rows of chairs, and fled the room. It was not that I did not realize that society does not think fatness is sexy. It was not that I had never had the experience of being relegated to the category of the asexual "big girl" or been laughed at, or positioned as sexually undesirable. It was that this story was so illustrative of these attitudes and so callous and violent in the way they were played out. I could reason things out along lines that fatness was not abhorrent to everyone, that this kind of cruelty was the exception rather than the rule. That this story highlighted the privileged position of heteronormative understandings of sexual desirability, where the woman is expected to conform to certain notions of feminine beauty in order to be desired by a man. But in the midst of this reason, I experienced myself as split. I saw myself as the fat girl at the centre of the "Rodeo", and realized that as a fat woman I am expected to

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deny my own sexual desires and identity because my body stands as an "embolism", to use Sedgwick's term, between my sexuality and my society (Sedgwick 1993, 217). In fact, the fat woman is supposed to be asexual: often, she is not permitted to experience sexual desire at all, let alone sexual pleasure. In the one moment that fat girl imagined herself as a sexual being, allowed herself to believe she was desirable, she was made an object of ridicule, had all her sexual anxieties thrown back in her face. I felt carved up, split in two: I felt that any conception of myself as a sexual being was ridiculous, and could only be imagined in my mind, never acted out by my body. I felt radically disconnected from my own flesh, my own sexuality. One only has to reflect on the ways in which we speak about fatness in this historical moment in Western societies to understand the way in which this mind/body split is generated/enforced. We talk about fatness as a major health crisis, an epidemic, a drain on resources, a symbol of the failed body, and as an aesthetic affront. We do not talk about fat and sex. The two appear as mutually exclusive. We do not almost plough into the car in front of us as we ogle a billboard displaying a fat woman in lacy lingerie. We do not gaze lasciviously at a bulbous bottom in tight jeans. We do not fantasize about the fleshy jiggles and wobbles of a fat body in the throes of sexual passion. Some of us might. But most of us do not. Or at least we know we are not supposed to. In Hanne Blank's Big Big Love: A Sourcebook on Sex For People of Size and Those Who Love Them, she discussed the ways in which we are conditioned to think about the linear progression of sex and desire:
Culturally, we're taught to believe that sexual activity happens as a result of sexual desire. Sexual desire, in turn, happens as a result of beauty, sexiness, sex appeal, love. (Blank 2000, 2)

So let us think about fat bodies having sex, fat bodies engaging in uncontained pleasures of excessive flesh. Our culture codes these imaginings as disgusting, perverse, perhaps an underground sexual fetish for kinks wanting to be dominated and smothered. But in the mainstream sexual marketplace, fat bodies are not marketable commodities. The fat body stands as a symbol of gluttonous obsessions, unmanaged desires and the failed self. In the midst of an historical epoch marked by a preoccupation with idealized body forms, and an eroticization of a slender bodily aesthetic, the fat body appears as a defiant blockage in a culture seduced by particularized notions of beauty and attractiveness. The body has come to be our visible representation to the world of our adherence to puritanistic lifestyle crusades, "correct" and "healthy" diets, exercise regimes and, most importantly, a reflection of the inner self. The body has come to be a representation of the "realized self.

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In 1978, Susie Orbach released her landmark text. Fat is a Feminist Issue. Orbach's central theory in this text was that fat women eat compulsively to stay fat, in order to create a sexual buffer between themselves and a repressive patriarchal society. The conception that fat surrounds a female body as a kind of armour to protect against one's sexuality, or the exploitation of it, is central. Orbach posits that we are taught from a very young age that our female bodies are coveted as sexual commodities, that we must be aesthetically pleasing in order to fulfil our roles as women (Orbach 1984, 20). The bodies of women must be constantly reigned in to conform to the image that the commodification of the female form has presented. The role of woman is then necessarily a sexualized one, and our participation in society is regulated by the attractiveness of our bodies and what they can offer. Orbach's model of sexuality suggests that fat must always equate to sexual rejection, and sex is a realm only inhabited by the normative thin female body. Fat emerges as a barrier to a fulfilment of traditional female sexual roles that are upheld by a continuing maintenance of the body (Orbach 1984, 43). Orbach asserts that while many fat women desire to be thin in order to have access to their female sexuality, becoming a sexual being also holds much fear. According to Orbach, staying fat means avoiding the issue of one's sexuality altogether, as the fat female body can never be conceptualized as a sexually desirable one. Orbach's understanding of the fat female body relies on an understanding that the fat body houses an "uncultivated self". In cultivating this self, the body that reflects this completed process is necessarily a thin one. Michel Foucault's later work (Foucault 1992), which is marked by a particular articulation of ethics, is also concerned with practices that allow for a "cultivation of the self". Foucault suggests that one might be able to create oneself as a "work of art", through sets of ethical practices that were less interested in the dictates of a universalizing moral code, and more to do with "techniques of the self". These techniques, he suggests enable a creative means of connecting oneself to one's body. Foucault stresses the importance of the aesthetic ideal in cultivating oneself:

What strikes me is the fact that in our society, art has become something which is related only to objects and not to individuals, or to life... But couldn't everyone's life become a work of art?... From the idea that the self is not given to us, I think that there is only one practical consequence: we have to create ourselves as a work of art. (Rabinow 1984, 350)

The way in which we conduct ourselves, then, and maintain our lives and bodies produces the lens through which we understand ourselves, and our world. Foucault references the Graeco-Roman world when he explains that to live a "beautiful life", one must avoid regimes of excess, and practice control in all aspects of one's existence.

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It is important to point out that despite his close examination of these classical societies, Foucault never suggests that the practices of the GraecoRoman world can be grafted unproblematically onto our contemporary society, and in his discussion of an "aesthetic of existence" he is not, he claims, looking for a solution for the modern subject in the practices of the Classical world. He speaks instead of his attempt to construct a genealogy of "problems", and to explore the "dangers" inherent in all modes of thinking and being. If all ways of being-in-the-world are dangerous, it is our task to decide whether the dangers of some modes of being outweigh others (Rabinow 1984, 343). Despite this, Foucault nevertheless suggests that "an aesthetics of existence" may have enabling possibilities for us, in so far as we could make of ourselves "works of art" by observing the fine balances these ancient people kept between the overarching binaries of activity and passivity, excess and restraint. What interests Foucault is: Those intentional and voluntary actions by which men not only set themselves rules of conduct, but also seek to transform themselves, to change themselves in their singular being, and to make their life into an oeuvre that carries certain aesthetic values and meets certain stylistic criteria. (Foucault 1992, 10-11) The subject of aesthetics, then, is not simply self-restraining, but is in factand Foucault seems oblivious to thisconstrained by culturally specific "stylistic criteria". In The Use of Pleasure, Foucault asserts that all systems of social morality imply self-discipline and control, including the expected maintenance of the body. One of the four areas of daily life that Foucault examines is that of dietetics and care of the body, where he analyses the "regimen" of the Classical Greeks as a set of practices that enabled a system of bodily ethics. The Classical regimen favoured restraint, and avoided excess. Foucault, then, implicitly intimates that ethics is directly related to aesthetics, and his understanding of being ethical relies on a concept of beautiful appearance. Who prescribes this aesthetic? I would argue that this aesthetic is not something spontaneously produced by us, but is a learned discursive production that allows us to understand and embody the dictates of beauty. The fat woman appears as an uncared for, unmanaged, excessive body. Her body is seen as one of gluttonous obsessions and unchecked desires. She is a body out of control, whereas an art of existence is all about a reigning in, of giving shape and form to one's life, one's desires, one's body. As Foucault insists: The individual fulfilled himself as an ethical subject by shaping a precisely measured conduct that was plainly visible to all and deserving to be long remembered. (Foucault 1992, 91) In this way, in order for the fat woman to conform to the aesthetic ideals that lie at the core of an art of existence, she needs to transform her body, and

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her flesh, to become normatively beautiful. She must achieve this through restraining her supposedly excessive desires, she must learn to exercise control in all aspects of her daily life, she must set about employing Foucault's "techniques of the self". Rather than focusing on the normalizing discourses associated with aesthetics, Foucault seems more interested in the element of choice we have in taking up the ethical practices in accordance with which we allegedly choose to construct our existence. Discussing ethics in Classical Greek society, he says:
It is that we have to build our existence as a beautiful existence; it Is an aesthetic mode ... nobody is obliged in classical ethics to behave in such a way as to be truthful to their wives, to not touch boys, and so on. But if they want to have a beautiful existence, if they want to have a good reputation ... they have to do that. So they accept those obligations in a conscious way for the beauty or the glory of existence. The choice, the aesthetic choice ... for which they decide to accept this kind of existence ... [is] a choice, it's a personal choice. (Rabinow 1984, 356)

Foucault's assertion here encapsulates my concern with the question of the degree to which we are free to choose our investment in aesthetic ideals. What the quote clearly demonstrates is that in order to be seen to be living a "beautiful life"and thus to be positioned as and to take up the position of the subject of aestheticsone must necessarily conform to the aesthetic expectations of others. After reading Foucault, I thought back to the way I experienced my "self in response to the story about the fat girl at the centre of the "Rodeo". I felt myself split, I removed my self from my flesh, trying to keep my self and my offensive body separate. Foucault at first seemed to offer me a means of reconnecting my "self" to my body, of living a "beautiful life", free of the humiliation and shame of dominant understandings of the fat female body. However, in thinking through these practices of the self, new questions emerged. Can we choose the level of investment we have in historically and culturally specific aesthetic ideals necessary for living this "beautiful existence"? If an aesthetic is indeed, as Foucault might insist, a discursive production, if we cultivate ourselves in relation to that ideal, to what extent can the self be created as a free and autonomous being? Further, what about the role of the other in this notion of living a "beautiful life"? It would seem that an "aesthetics of existence" is never just a relation of self to self, but is necessarily a relation to others and the world, and we are irrevocably constructed by the aesthetic ideals of others and the world. It is this point that Foucault seems to ignore. If we think back to the sexual practice of the "Rodeo", with which I opened this paper, we see that the ridicule of the fat woman comes from society's own implicit understanding of aesthetic values, and the ways in which her body contravenes them. She is situated as a ridiculous sexual creature, ravenously and libidinally out of control. She is

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made ridiculous by her seeming refusal to bear witness to the offensiveness of her own body. To actively become sexual, she must act on her body to transform it or, as Foucault suggests, to master it, to resolve the affront it presents to dominant aesthetic values. We measure beauty through aesthetics, which is a learned understanding of what is attractive and sublime, and what is ugly and ridiculous. It would seem to me, given that Foucault does not clearly explain the way in which he understands the concept of aesthetics, that the fat woman must cultivate herself by transforming her ugly and ridiculous body to a thinner, more aesthetically pleasing, attractive and sublime form. In cultivating herself, she must overcome her fat body. The fat body can never be seen to be living a "beautiful life" in the way Foucault suggests, as it is always already read in terms of its associations with gluttony, lack of self-control and excess. While in dominant discourses woman is always already associated with characteristics such as excess and immoderation, the fat woman embodies the worst of them. In the popular imagination, her desires have run wild, and she stands as a symbol of moral and ethical decay. She does not fulfil feminine expectations of beauty and submission: she takes up too much space, she is uncontained and excessive. In short, she does not, and cannot (be seen to be) live(ing) a "beautiful life". So, is it possible to elaborate an aesthetics that does not structurally exclude the fat woman? An aesthetic that could operate independently of dominant historically and culturally specific ways of coding feminine beauty? It is my argument that while forming a counter-aesthetic is possible, there is an inherent impossibility in the ways in which it can be taken up and seen as "beautiful" by mainstream society. In deriving this "beauty and glory of life" that Foucault suggests an arts of existence affords, do we not have to conform in some way to the expectations of what we should be, in order to be aesthetic subjects, do we not have to rely on the desires and pleasures of others to bring us into being? In so far as one is able to take up the position of the subject of aestheticsthat is, to see oneself, and be seen by others, as living a "beautiful life", then one is also able to experience pleasure in one's self, one's actions, and one's life. But what happens if onefor example, the fat womanis structurally excluded from this position? How does the person who is excluded from the dominant aesthetic ideal experience pleasure in his/her self and his/her actions? In America in 1969, Llewellyn Louderback, a husband tired of seeing the distress caused to his wife by a society who reviled her fat body, founded the National Association to Aid Fat Americans (NAAFA). Later, it was renamed the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance. NAAFA works to stop the daily discrimination against fat people through political action such as lobbying airlines who insist on charging two airfares for a fat passenger to travel, movie theatres who do not accommodate the expansive hips of fat patrons, and other sites of size discrimination. NAAFA attempts to celebrate fatness through events such as pool parties.

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lingerie shows and fashion parades for their fat members. However, this is problematic in that they are simply reversing the dominant aesthetic ideal, rather than dismantling and subverting it. Perhaps the fat woman could find a space for her body by drawing on marginalized counter-discourses,' but this is not likely to be very successful precisely because her being as a subject of a counter-aesthetics is not recognized or validated by the dominant social powers. So the question, then, is how could we recognize the pleasure of the other and/or his/her aesthetic practices as examples of an alternative 'beautiful life'? Foucault asks: Are we able to have an ethics of acts and their pleasures which would be able to take into account the pleasure of the other? Is the pleasure of the other something which can be integrated in our pleasure? (Rabinow 1984, 346) Here, Foucault poses a problematic question of whether, in fact, the pleasure of the other can be incorporated into our own pleasure. I would argue that this seems to erase difference and attempts to normalize the experience of pleasure, even as it appears to be other-oriented.^ To further illustrate these claims, I will turn now to the example of Feederism. Feederism is an underground fat sexual practice that involves women who allow themselves to be submissively force-fed though a funnel by a dominant male master, who derives sexual excitement from watching his submissive servant grow fatter and fatter as he forces her to eat more and more. There is a "goal weight" for the women who allow themselves to be force-fed, which is over 500 lbs, at which time they are said to have joined the "500-club" (Blank 2000, 240). Disturbingly, men who engage in this sexual fetish (known as "feeders") often force-feed the feedee to the point where she is completely immobilized, so fat she can no longer move, clean herself or leave the house. Once the dominant male feeder has achieved the goal of incapacitating his feedee, he will leave the woman and go and find another who is interested in what is termed "erotic weight gain" (Manheim 1999, 131). Camryn Manheim in her book Wake Up, I'm Fat! discovers this sexual fetish in her exploration of the fat underground, and comes across the following personal advert in Dimensions magazine:
Hi, My name is Cathy. I'm a 681-Ib submissive eating machine that is addicted to eating and being so stuffed I can't move! Would like to talk to anyone who is supportive of my lifestyle. I am actively being force-fed and funnel-fed, and the fatter I get, the fatter I WANT TO BE. Would like to talk to women and men who share my relentless need to be stuffed and packed with fattening foods till I can't move. (1999, 131) 1. There is an active Fat Pride movement, mainly based in the United States, headed by NAAFA. For a detailed explanation of the aims of the movement, consult the NAAFA website (http:// www.naafa.org, last accessed 29 April 2004). 2. For a more detailed analysis of Foucault's economy of pleasure, see Nikki Sullivan's (2001, 47-84) "(Re)Writing subjectivity: a different economy of bodies and pleasures?".

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The woman who describes herself in this personal advert positions herself as an active participant in "erotic weight gain". I would argue that this further problematizes the concept of choice that Foucault posits, where he assumes an autonomous and free subject who can choose the modes of being to embody and live out, independent of dominant ideals. It is hard for most of us to imagine that a woman would want to put herself in a position of mortal danger in order to be desired and to be allowed to imagine herself as a sexual being. However, as Hanne Blank explains:
A fat person who has been taught all his or her life that he or she was disgusting and physically undesirable might even find a feeder's erotic interest so gratifying that he or she becomes a willing feedee simply in order to find him or her overtly sexy. (2000, 243) For me, one of t h e most troubling aspects of the relationship between the

dominant male feeder and the submissive female feedee is that it suggests a kind of creationist fantasy for the male, in which he derives sexual pleasure from bringing a monstrous creature into being.^ What this fantasy disavows is the debt to the other that is incurred in the construction of that self as god-like. In this way, the pleasures of the other exist only in so far as they serve the purposes of the projectwhich remain tacit rather than implicit of the cultivation of the self. Similarly, what emerges from Foucault's account of erotic relations in the Classical world is that the subject of aesthetics creates himself through a relation to the other that is disavowed. Let me elucidate this. Unlike the feeder, whose primary focus is on the other, the subject of aesthetics in the Foucauldian schema is concerned primarily with the self, the relation to itself, and practices of self-transformation that allegedly contribute to a "beautiful life." However, I would posit that the subject of aesthetics can only (re)create himself as such by structurally denying the other any such possibility. In short, through this process of self-cultivation, the subject of aesthetics, like the male feeder, comes into being through the simultaneous production of the other as an object. What this demonstrates is that self and other are inextricably bound and it is impossible to construct the self without reference to others and the intersubjective world, despite Foucault's insistence that the "aesthetics of existence" is fundamentally a relation of the self to itself. At the same time, the female feedee, like the spectre of the other in

3. This is not a universalisable theory, but is a response to dominant fetishistic heterosexual discourses. Fatness can play significantly different roles in other sexual subcultures. See, for example, the archived online zine FatGirl: For Fat Dykes and The Women Who Want Them! (no longer in publication) (http://www.lustydevil.com/fatgirl/, last accessed 29 April 2004). 4. Foucault makes no apologies for situating his explication of the ethical subject as an implicitly male subject. However, in imagining the possibilities of an arts of existence for the fat women, as Lois McNay points out, "Foucault fails to consider the dissonance that arises from a contemporary morality that addresses itself to women as ethical subjects, but draws, neven:heless, on a tradition in which woman has historically been positioned as the 'beautiful object'" (McNay 1994, 151).

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Foucault's beautiful lie, experiences her pleasure almost by proxy. What I mean by this is that her pleasure (if it exists at all) is always already an effect of the aesthetic practices and ideals of the male subject. The fat feedee, like the other, can never actively participate in her own self-cultivation. Foucault seems to discount the power of the intersubjective experience in his formulation of an aesthetics of existence, which focuses so strongly on the self's relation to itself as part of the practice of self-transformation. This focus not only ignores the role ofthe other in the constitution ofthe self, but at the same time prioritizes the self over the other, and a form of individualism over a theory of intersubjective becoming. Foucault never really explains his understanding of aesthetics and the ramifications it has for the subject who cannot help but be constituted by the power relations operating in his/her cultural context (McNay 1994, 155). I would argue that intersubjectivity produces an aesthetic, through the ways we talk to each other, what we desire, what it is okay to desire, and what is kinky or strange. It is produced in the ways we interact with each other sexually and intellectually, and the emotional responses we have to certain people or objects on an aesthetic level come to us through learned ways of seeing and interpreting attractiveness. Despite Foucault's claim that it is not valid to transplant, in any complete manner, the aesthetics of an ancient civilization into contemporary society, the adoption of the notion of an aesthetics of existence in the present day, and in relation to the fat woman, illustrates the impossibility of overcoming the dangers, that I would argue, are inherent in Graeco-Roman society. That is, in cultivating oneself in relation to an aesthetic ideal, one is always already reproducing the dominant ways of knowing and of bodily being that construct subjectivity at the expense of others. In so far as an aesthetics of existence appears to be normalizing, its effects are most dangerous for those situated as "other", and this paper is illustrative of one particular example of this. In the middle of a Western society currently preoccupied with cultivating an aesthetic body representative of a cultivated self, considering fatness and sexuality together foreground the potential of the fat body, and fat bodily being-in-the-world. That is, as I have shown, in the very impossibility of the fat female body conforming to the dominant aesthetic ideal, this body could be said to disrupt not only the aesthetic, but also the problematic assumptions on which it is founded. Macquarie University, Australia

References
Blank, N. 2000. Big big love: A sourcebook on sex for people of size and those who love them. Emeryville, Calif: Greenery Press.

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Fatgirl: For fat dykes and the women who want them! (no longer in publication) [accessed 29 April 2004]. Available from http://www.lustydevil.com/fatgirl/; INTERNET. Foucault, M. 1992. History of sexuality 2: The use of pleasure. London: Penguin Books. Manheim, C. 1999. Wake up, I'm fat! New York: Broadway Books. McNay, L. 1994. Foucault: A critical introduction. Cambridge: Polity Press. Orbach, S. 1984. Fat is a feminist issue: How to lose weight permanentlywithout dieting. London: Arrow Books. Rabinow, P., ed. 1984. The Foucault reader. New York: Pantheon Books. Sedgwick, E. 1993. Tendencies. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Sullivan, N. 2001. Tattooed bodies: Subjectivity textuality ethics and pleasure. Westport, Conn.: Praeger.