Most people, she writes, think very little of fat people, assuming that they are neither smart nor capable (2017: 241). In her memoir Hunger (2017), Roxane Gay, a feminist writer and academic, claims that people are often very surprised to see that a fat person could be so successful. The corpus of corpulence that Gay has created gives voice to the precariousness of a fat body's materialization. Moreover, I propose that Gay’s writing style-hesitating and circling – involves an example of corpus-writing. In my analysis, I identify how the materiality of fat engenders the meaning of embodiment, and how it shapes how a fat body can and cannot be a body. To apply Nancy’s conceptual frame to a concrete manifestation of fat embodiment, I provide a reading of Roxane Gay’s memoir Hunger (2017). Additionally, Nancy’s idea of the body in terms of a “corpus”-a collection of pieces without a unity-together with his idea of corpus-writing-fragmentary writing, without head and tail-can help us to mobilize fixed meanings of fat. As such, it can help us to understand the lived experiences of fat embodiment. His philosophy, so I argue, offers a form of materialism that allows for a phenomenological exploration of the body. I introduce Nancy’s approach to the body as an addition to contemporary new materialism.
This paper aims to mobilize the way we think and write about fat bodies while drawing on Jean-Luc Nancy’s philosophy of the body.