The qualities of fat: Bodies, history, and materiality

Abstract

This article proposes that, at various historical moments, stereotypes about fat people as being corrupt, weak, and stupid have been complemented and perhaps even informed by perceptions of fat as a material substance with definite properties and qualities. In an effort to understand the formation and longevity of these three longstanding stereotypes this article submits that the material properties of fat – particularly its unctuousness, softness, and insensateness – have played important roles in motivating some of the responses this substance has generated both with reference to human bodies and their material worlds. Due to the conceptual slipperiness of ‘fat’ in its various forms (whether ‘frozen’ as a solid or liquefied as oil or grease), this analysis uses examples from ancient Greek, Roman and Hebrew texts to track the ways in which this substance has been perceived across these registers, revealing the surprisingly mercurial and ambiguous ways in which ‘fat’ has been understood culturally.