Fatness and its Images.

Fatness and its Images

This project will make a vital intervention in the history of the body by providing the first analysis of the visual and material culture of ‘fatness’ in Britain and its empire in the long eighteenth century (c.1680-1830). This was a period in which size took on unprecedented cultural currency: with the corpulent bodies of the nobility lampooned in satirical prints, and famously large people commodified in portraits, prints, and decorative consumable goods. Fatness also emerged as a shared language that shaped interactions between colonized peoples and their British colonizers, as demonstrated in both visual images and printed texts. At the same time, those bodies marked by unusual corpulence were put on public display as spectacular objects, while the clothing that evidenced their former owners’ size, and furniture made or altered to accommodate fat bodies, became desirable items and objects of renown.

Despite this cultural proliferation, to date there has been no sustained account of eighteenth-century corpulence written from any disciplinary perspective. Although changing ideas of fatness have been sketched in broad and transhistorical terms by cultural historians such as Sander L. Gilman and Georges Vigarello, attention to eighteenth-century fatness has been shallow, fragmentary, and unduly focused on its pathologisation through medicalised discourse. Following work that firmly establishes the necessity of visual and material approaches to the body, such as Susan Bordo’s Unbearable Weight and Bill Brown’s conception of the body as a ‘thing among things’, this project contends that previous accounts have fundamentally misunderstood the fat body by overlooking the crucial role played by visual and material culture in its manifestation, representation, and materialisation. Offering a corrective to these earlier studies, this project uses visual depiction and display to understand how corpulence was culturally inscribed during the long eighteenth century, and employs surviving material objects to consider the everyday realities and lived experience of being overweight at this time. Examining both reality and representation, this project’s first objective will therefore be to document and analyse the visual and material culture of fatness in order to provide a richer and more nuanced account of the eighteenth-century body. As the first visual and material history of fatness of any historical period, it will demonstrate the importance of art historical methodologies to creating a deeper understanding of a condition that is characterised by the co-option of visual space and the perceived undisciplined materiality of the body.

This project’s second objective will be to identify the eighteenth-century as a unique moment during which fatness became particularly prevalent due to the convergence of a number of distinctive social, intellectual, economic, and cultural contexts. Among these factors was the rise of print culture, the increased availability of food, and the so-called ‘consumer revolution’—characterised by unprecedented access to luxury consumables and other forms of material culture—all of which made the eighteenth century a period of new material profusion. This societal transformation sparked an intense discourse over the nature of needs versus desires, known as the ‘luxury debates’, which were central to the moralising approaches to fatness that surfaced at this time. The eighteenth century was also the period in which the ‘modern self’ can be said to have emerged, a time characterised by active attempts to delineate identity categories such as race, class, and gender, whose ideal forms became increasingly definitive as the century progressed. This crystallization of individual characteristics was also evidenced through contemporaneous changes in beauty standards and attitudes towards the body, which decisively shifted in the second half of the century to establish thinness as the preferred body type for women, an ideal that still resonates today. Images and discussions of corpulence were consistently utilised in these debates, making their analysis essential for interrogating the construction of ideas such as ideal femininity, racialized identity, and even what it meant to be human during this period. Reading these sources against the intellectual framework of the luxury debates, this project will accordingly question how fatness contributed to the articulation, expression, and transgression of a range of eighteenth-century identities.

This project’s third objective will be to ask how an examination of eighteenth-century fatness allows us to better understand current attitudes towards obesity. Although 2018 marked the 40th anniversary of Susie Orbach’s Fat is a Feminist Issue, negative attitudes towards the fat body and its representations remain prevalent. This was exemplified by reactions to the October 2018 UK edition of Cosmopolitan magazine, which featured the plus-size model Tess Holliday on its front cover, a choice that drew vicious criticism. Showing Holliday as an unapologetically fat woman, the cover represented a deliberately visual intrusion into a space usually reserved for conventionally-attractive bodies. By placing such images in relation to their long and complex history, this project will therefore identify the fat body as a cultural and historical construction with a powerful and enduring inheritance.

These aims and objectives will be pursued by addressing the following research questions:

How did fatness manifest in eighteenth-century visual and material culture?
How does this visual and material culture relate to broader eighteenth-century discourses surrounding luxury and consumption, beauty and the body, health and medicine, religion and morality, and class and status?
How did this visual and material culture shape, consolidate, and relate to the creation of eighteenth-century identity categories (e.g. gender, race, sexuality, age, species, nationality, class, and disability), and reflect anxieties over their transgression?
How does an art historical approach to the body allow us to better understand contemporary attitudes towards fatness, both positive and negative?