European Scientific Journal September 2020 edition Vol.16, No.

26 ISSN: 1857-7881 (Print) e - ISSN 1857-7431

Roxane Gay’s Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body:

A Fat Studies Approach

Md Tapu Rayhan2, Assistant Professor

Nure Jannat3, Assistant Professor
Noakhali Science and Technology University, Noakhali, Bangladesh, PhD
Researcher at Novosibirsk State University, Novosibirsk, Russia
Maruf Rahman4, Assistant Professor
Department of English, Noakhali Science and Technology University,
Noakhali, Bangladesh

Doi:10.19044/esj.2020.v16n26p108 URL:[Link]

Abstract
There is much scholarly research about the impact of popular culture
messages regarding fatness on people, but there is limited study on people’s
attitudes to those fat-shaming messages. Roxane Gay’s Hunger: A Memoir of
(My) Body is a memoir of her own body, traumatic journey, and fatness. This
article looks through this memoir to find out Roxane Gay’s attitude towards
these messages in showing how people accept, react, and subvert these
messages. This study will present this memoir as a manifestation of the
prevailing negative representations of fat people in popular culture and how
Gay, before and after being fat, responds to those fat-shaming messages
produced by popular culture. This article, under the umbrella of Fat Studies,
will discuss how Gay, because of her fatness, has been treated as other and
marginalized in popular culture and how she presents herself as a proponent
of Fat Studies. This research, discussing Gay's attitude to popular culture
messages regarding fatness, will show how Gay, through this memoir, protests
against fat-shaming messages and how she becomes the voice of every fat
person.

Keywords: Fat studies, power and resistance, other, popular culture, fat-
shaming

2
Corresponding Author
3
First Author
4
Second Author

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Introduction
Roxane Gay (born on October 15, 1974) is an American writer,
professor, editor, and social commentator. Gay began writing essays in her
teens, and her works are highly influenced by the gang rape caused by her first
crush and his friends, which she had to go through when she was just a 12-
year-old girl. (Wikipedia, n.d.) In 2014, Gay published her debut novel, An
Untamed State, which is about Mireille Duval Jameson, a Haitian-American
woman who was kidnapped for ransom. This novel explores how the themes
of race, privilege, sexual violence, family, and immigrant experiences are
interlinked (Bass, 2014).
Roxane Gay has a knack for turning uncomfortable truths into
necessary reading. The author, whose much-celebrated
works Bad Feminist (2014) and Difficult Women (2017) made
her a hero for millennial feminists, has never shied away from
getting personal, but her latest project, a memoir
called Hunger, goes deep. Gay unflinchingly guides readers
through an exploration of pain, desire, and the realities of her
life as an overweight woman, following a cataclysmic early
trauma back to the root, and recording the reverberations that
event has had on the rest of her life. (Okwodu, 2017)

Her novel Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body was published in June

2017 which she says is a memoir of her own body, traumatic journey, and
fatness where she shares her experiences to document "what it’s like to live in
a world that tried to discipline unruly bodies.” (Bronis, 2016) In this book, she
throws light upon the culture’s punishing relationship with her fatness,
bisexuality, and blackness. At the same time, she juxtaposes her relationship
with her ‘unruly body’ with the influence of the American obsession with
weight to criticize popular culture messages regarding obesity and the world’s
response to it. The current research focuses on this memoir in order to explore
how Gay, telling her own story, encourages readers to reflect on the real
experiences of fat individuals and feel the reality of living with fatness that
has been defined as a problem by popular culture. Thus, this study will bring
out how she, being a fat woman, presents a briskly frank depiction of several
cases that are fraught with constant humiliations. This aims to help readers
understand how a person reacts to popular culture messages in the social
culture about their own and someone else's fat body.

Statement of the Problem

In our everyday lives, popular culture messages regarding body embed
fat-shaming messages have a significant influence on people's attitude to
fatness. These messages create fat hatred among individuals by presenting fat

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people as unhappy, unhealthy, defamed, and unnatural. The social culture is

not ready to accept a fat body, as a result of which a fat person feels
constrained in what (s)he is obliged to feel towards her/his own body and
experiences complicated relationships surrounding her/his subjectivity. In
short, popular culture is an extraordinarily “fat-aware” culture. In fact, the
whole world is indifferent to the feelings and lifestyles of fat people. This
indifference to fat people's reaction to these messages occupies a significant
room in this study. Therefore, this article is intended to explore Hunger: A
Memoir of (My) Body, where Roxane Gay shares her attitudes and reaction
towards fatness before and after weight gain, to take an in-depth look at
cultural artifacts, and to explore the reason and way fat people have become
stigmatized in our everyday lives.

Justification of the Study

This study will add a new arena in the field of Fat Studies, which
focuses mainly on the impact of popular culture messages regarding fatness
on people, but less on how people respond to these messages. At the same
time, this article can contribute to changing people's perception of body size
because it reveals the inner pains and sufferings of fat people. Since this study
focuses on Roxane Gay, who raises her voice through this memoir against the
negative representation of fat people in popular culture, this study will
embolden fat people and show them how to protest, resist, and subvert the fat-
shaming messages. On the other hand, in reading this article, readers who
consider Roxane Gay as a feminist will begin to think of her as a proponent of
Fat Studies.

Research Methodology
The qualitative research methodology is especially useful in analyzing
human behaviors, relationships, and emotions in different intangible
conditions, like questions over body weight.
Since this research aims to critically analyze the experience of Roxane
Gay shared in Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body, qualitative and descriptive
research methodologies are used to serve the purpose. The close reading
technique makes it possible to understand how Roxane Gay juxtaposes her
experiences, relationships, attitudes, and Fat Studies to critique popular culture
and fat-shaming messages. Moreover, taking Fat Studies as the theoretical
framework and considering Roxane Gay as a proponent of Fat Studies, the
purpose of this research is to interpret the attitude of people towards fatness
critically.

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Fat Studies
In 1969, the foundation of NAAFA (National Association to Advance
Fat Acceptance) by William Fabrey accelerated the emergence of the size
acceptance movement. Later in the 1970s in Los Angeles, a group of fat
women formed the Fat Underground as a reaction against discrimination of fat
people in the medical sector. Two of their members, Judy Freespirit and
Aldebaran, sought respect and equal rights for fat people by writing the Fat
Liberation Manifesto (1983). NAAFA and the Fat Underground both used the
word ‘fat’ instead of ‘obese’ or ‘overweight.’ (Rothblum, 2012)
At first glance, it seems that the words ‘Fat,’ ‘Overweight,’ and
’
‘Obese mean the same thing, although these words differ in connotative
meanings. ‘Overweight’ and ‘Obese” are medical terms that are usually used
in medical science and defined by Body Mass Index (BMI), while ‘Fat’ is a
cultural term that describes how a person looks, embracing the idea of both
being overweight and obese.
This fat acceptance movement, later on, worked as a bottom line for
Fat Studies, which became more multifaceted in the 21 st Century when Fat
Studies tracks in the Popular Culture Association and the National Women’s
Studies Association. In 2006, The Smith College Conference and the Academy
regarded Fat Studies as an academic discipline, and the New York Times
focused on it in academia (Ellin, 2006). For this reason, Fat Studies is seen as
an area of study that is based on Marxist theory, Feminist theory, Cultural
Studies, and Sociology. It explores the intersections of not only social
identities but also of politics, medicine, economics, society, and culture.
Fat Studies, with an extensive history and interdisciplinary literature,
questions and criticizes traditional attitudes to fatness and draws upon the
language, culture, and theory of civil rights, social justice, and social change.
Fat Studies redefines the problem of fatness where, instead of the fat body, the
main concern is cultural messages regarding fatphobia (Cooper, 2010).
Studying people's attitudes toward body weight and appearance, Fat Studies
speaks for the equality of all people in terms of weight. It considers weight as
a human characteristic that varies widely in any population and aims at
eliminating the negative aspects that social culture has regarding fatness. It is
similar to academic disciplines that focus on race, ethnicity, gender, or age
(Rothblum, 2012).
By glorifying thinness and presenting fatness as a social problem,
popular culture messages create one kind of fat politics which arouses fat
consciousness among the individuals. This fat consciousness challenges the
pathologization of fat; emphasizes well-being over weight loss; rejects moral
panic surrounding fat; questions dominant representations of the mutual
exclusiveness of beauty, health, fitness and fat; celebrates diverse bodies;
demands responsive healthcare; and critiques fat discrimination. This

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politicization of fat is taken up in a growing field of research called Fat Studies

(Rothblum & Solovay, The Fat Studies Reader, 2009). Fat studies emerged as
a reaction against ‘Fat Politics,’ which “traces the political consequences of
an ideology that equates thinness with virtue and fat with vice. Indeed, this
ideology drives both the science and culture of our national obsession with
weight and weight control.” (Campos, 2004) With this emergence, it very
briskly became the center of research in literature, cultural studies, theatre,
film and media studies, as well as the fine arts (Rothblum & Solovay, The Fat
Studies Reader, 2009).
Research in Fat Studies requires a deep study of Foucault’s work
because by exploring biological determinism and social constructions,
Foucault's work discusses how the body is biologically and historically
constructed and is thus relevant when considering the fat body. As among
various Foucauldian theories, the theory of power and resistance from The
History of Sexuality is critically analyzed in Fat Studies; it also demands to
investigate the complex relationship between power and resistance as Foucault
theorizes. In The History of Sexuality, Foucault says: “Where there is power,
there is resistance, and yet, or rather consequently, this resistance is never in a
position of exteriority in relation to power.” (Foucault, 1978) Here, “what he
seems to mean is this: because power is not coercive in the sense of direct
threat of violence, it must be understood as an asymmetrical set of relations in
which the existence of this multiplicity of nodal points or relations necessarily
entails the possibility of resistance.” (Malott & Porfilio, 2011)
Fat Studies, along with the theory of power and resistance, helps this
research to find out how Roxane Gay, a representative of fat people, responded
to the oppressive power inherent in the social norms surrounding her fat body
and how Roxane Gay, as a writer, in Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body,
unravels the stigmas surrounding the fat body by arguing against fat-shaming
which creates discrimination against individuals and raises her voice for
reducing fat shaming.

Discussion and Findings

The book begins with Gay declaring: “The story of my body is not a
story of triumph. This is not a weight-loss memoir.” (Gay, 2017, p. 11) She
very boldly reveals that at her highest, she weighed 577 pounds at six feet,
three inches tall, which, as she proceeds, is an ‘unfathomable’ number but the
‘shameful truth’ of her body. This truth is shameful not because she was
ashamed of her body, but because of the judgmental advice of people, as well
as their attitude towards her fat body: “This is a memoir of (my) body because,
more often than not, stories of bodies like mine are ignored or dismissed or
derided. People see bodies like mine and make their assumptions.” (Gay,
2017, p. 11)

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These assumptions are the results of popular culture messages

regarding body weight. Popular culture has a problem with the fatness of
bodies. According to Gay, “Few areas of popular culture focus on obesity
more than reality television, and that focus is glaring, harsh, often cruel.” (Gay,
2017, p. 87) Within our media-centric world, we are constrained by cultural
productions of the fat body. This cultural production is pervasively hostile,
where the fat people are not seen as normal human beings and, at the same
time, instills traumatic feelings in them: “I am terrified of other people. I am
terrified of the way they are likely to look at me, stare, talk about me, or say
cruel things to me.” (Gay, 2017, p. 120)
This feeling can be justified by what Amy Erdman Farrell writes about
the differences between fat and thin body:
…by the late 19th-century fatness became a sign of a deficient
body, one linked to the primitive, to the female, to the African, to
the Hottentot. The thin body, in contrast, was one that was
superior in quality: European-American, white, closest to the
divine. (Farrell, 2011)

How people feel their own and other people’s fat bodies are both
regressive and progressive. How people respond to the popular culture
messages they are exposed to regarding body weight is responsible for
complex relationships they have with others due to fatness: “What’s wrong
with fat?... the answer to this basic question depends on how fatness is framed.
And this has critical social implications.” (Saguy, 2013) Gay, as a fat woman,
faced the complexities and consequences of these negative cultural messages,
but like a proponent of Fat Studies, she tried to resist and even subvert these
fat-shaming messages:
There is a price to be paid for visibility, and there is even more
of a price to be paid when you are hyper-visible. I am
opinionated, and as a cultural critic, I share my opinions
regularly. I am confident in my opinions and believe I have a
right to share my point of view without apology. (Gay, 2017, p.
180)

She divides her life into two parts: “There is the before and the after.
Before I gained weight. After I gained weight. Before I was raped. After I was
raped.” (Gay, 2017, p. 18) Like this, her attitudes towards fatness can be split
into two parts: her attitude regarding a fat body, which was highly influenced
by the popular culture messages, and her experiences of living with fatness.
Before she became fat, she studied the bodies of naked thin women
from magazines that she found in Christopher’s bedroom and realized: “He
clearly found these women exciting, sexually attractive, and I knew, even then,

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that I was nothing like them.” (Gay, 2017, p. 42) These too skinny bodies had
been glorified there, which usually instigate man’s desire for thin bodies. This
very unattainable body type is considered as a standard of beauty in popular
culture. In fact, this glorification of the super-thin body made Gay realize that
thin female is more sexy and attractive.
For this reason, she tried to lose weight to be more attractive to
Christopher: “Before this terrible thing happened, I had already started to lose
my body.” (Gay, 2017, p. 41) However, after being raped, as she started to
hate her own body, she made the decision to go outside the ‘norm’ by
becoming fat because those boys treated her ‘like nothing,’ she says starkly,
‘so I became nothing.’ Paradoxically, becoming nothing means becoming fat
to make her unattractive and unwanted. She wanted to be fat, to be big, to be
ignored by men, and to be safe. She considered a fat body as a desexualized
as well as a protective state. She understood that to be fat was to be
‘undesirable’ to men, to be ‘beneath their contempt.’ She understood it
because the messages, the knowledge that she received from culture and
society, were all about accepting the thin body as superbly perfect and moral
and the fat body as defective and immoral. Here, the cultural message that she
received was: to be thin is to be attractive, and to be fat is to be unattractive.
This message arouses a kind of hunger within her to be fat to be unwanted,
which can never be satisfied. This hunger can be seen as an embodiment and
the detrimental side-effects of popular culture’s shaping of the body, for which
she started operating within the framework of historically created systems of
a ‘good body’ and a ‘bad body.’ Moreover, finally, she created a ‘new body'
that was shameful to her but gave her a sense of security, like ‘a fortress,
impermeable’ that she desperately needed. She accepted the established
concept of fatness and embraced a new fat body because, during this time, she
was too young and knew ‘nothing about anything.’ Nevertheless, after she
became fat, she voiced the experiences she went through as a fat woman to
resist unreasonable standards for how a body should look by writing this
memoir. She realized that living with fatness in a culture that is toxic to women
and tries to discipline women's bodies is quite challenging. She feels that
women need to feel comfortable in their bodies, without wanting to change
anything about their bodies to find that comfort. She shares her experiences
because she wants everyone to believe the worth of a human being does not
depend on body weight.
The popular culture messages placed her body as a crime scene. People
used to look at her body as something horrible, something that should be
‘cordoned off and investigated.’ In trying to get rid of her childhood trauma,
she became fat and began to think that she was safe, but her body became a
cage for her, in which she always struggled with the cultural perception of
fatness. However, she broke her silence:

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Today, I am a fat woman. I don’t think I am ugly. I don’t hate

myself in the way society would have me hate myself, but I do
live in the world. I live in this body in this world, and I hate
how the world all too often responds to this body. Intellectually,
I recognize that I am not the problem. (Gay, 2017, p. 25)

She realized that thinness is a social currency because the social culture
put her in an awkward situation where she felt that people around her only
tolerated her out of pity. For society, maintaining the body is a kind of ‘social
responsibility.’ From the classroom to cloth shop everywhere, she was treated
as ‘other’ because of her fatness: “At the end of that first class, as the students
filed out of the room, I wanted to collapse with relief because I had survived
those fifty minutes of being fat in front of twenty-two eighteen- and nineteen-
year-olds.” (Gay, 2017, p. 77) She talks about how the cultural concept and its
relationship to fatness destroy the inner strength of a fat person. Virgie Tovar
describes the reason for this destruction by saying, “Because of the way fat
people are positioned in our culture, people learn to fear becoming fat. They
are afraid of discrimination and hatred.” (Tovar, 2018)
Gay, as a fat woman, was outraged that people used to focus on her
body as if her body became a matter of ‘public record’ and was always on
display, which was unruly and frustrating, and it completely shut her down.
She felt her body became a subject of ‘public discourse.’ This very unusual
feeling was imposed upon her by the social and cultural construction.
According to Virgie Tovar:
We as a culture have characterized being fat as an inherently
bad thing when in reality, body size is meaningless and lacks
the good or bad associations imposed by wider culture. We
were not born thinking fat is bad and thin is good. We learn
these things through an ongoing cultural education. (Tovar,
2018)

This cultural education categorizes a fat person as stupid, unaware, and

delusional: “They forget that you are a person.” (Gay, 2017, p. 84) In this
memoir, though she describes her recovery journey, at the same time, she
announces her position against the popular culture focusing on fatness.
Her experiences and feelings about her fat body are not linear; they are
recursive. Before being fat, she accepted fat-shaming messages, but raised her
voice to resist them after gaining weight: “Few areas of popular culture focus
on obesity more than reality television, and that focus is glaring, harsh, often
cruel.” (Gay, 2017, p. 87)
Using the allusion of The Biggest Loser, which is a TV show about fat
as an ‘enemy’ and a ‘contagion,’ she shows how the media, as a part of popular

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culture, is producing the positive and negative images of body weight.

Addressing this TV show as ‘weight-loss industrial complex’ and ‘anti-obesity
propaganda,’ she also criticizes the capitalistic approach to body weight. She
hated this program but used to watch it to understand a world constructed by
popular culture, which is not ready to accommodate the fat people. It was her
way to subvert the fat-shaming messages to resist the stigmatization of her
weight. She critically criticizes the TV programs by exposing her situation:
“These commercials drive me crazy. They encourage self-loathing. They tell
us, most of us, that we aren’t good enough in our bodies as they are. They offer
us the cruellest aspiration.” (Gay, 2017, p. 92)
Fat Studies discusses strategies for resisting and subverting fat-
shaming messages to break the socio-cultural boundaries set on fat bodies.
Each person has their way of resisting fat-shaming messages. Individual
experiences of resistance are also different. Gay’s experiences and feelings
reveal how most of the fat people negotiate their resistance in popular culture
of which they are embedded. To understand why they negotiate their
resistance, it is essential to focus on what Foucault says. He posits that
resistance must operate within the current power structures, which are all
around us and which we are a part of, and that resistance manifests itself in
different ways, at different times, and in different spaces (Foucault, 1978).
Like this, Roxane Gay also has her own, like her recovery journey, which
changes with times and places. To Gay, fat-shaming is real, constant, and
instead pointed, which torments her internally. This inner pain gives her the
power to resist them by delivering her message to the readers about how the
popular culture messages influence the lifestyle of a person defining what is
good/bad, what is (un)happiness, and how a person should respond to those
messages. Gay’s idea of this message can be linked with Tasha Fierce’s idea:
“Viewed as both unhealthy and unattractive, fat people are widely represented
in popular culture and in interpersonal interactions as revolting as agents of
abhorrence and disgust.” (Fierce, 2010)
Gay’s presentation of media is also another way how she resists media
messages of fatness. She criticizes the media concept which glorifies the
thinness by slandering fatness and considers the body of a celebrity as a
commercial product which should have a unique thin look: “they are
thinspiration—thin inspiration—a constant reminder of the distance between
our bodies and what our bodies could be with the proper discipline.” (Gay,
2017, p. 96)
Gay, to some extent, thinks like Virgie Tovar, who says,
There is no shortage of examples when it comes to the ways
that fat people create cultural anxiety. It is no accident that fat
people are underrepresented in the workplace, academia, and
mass media. When we are visible, we are portrayed as

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unintelligent, lacking in grace or complexity, inherently

amusing, abject, and either sexually insatiable or lacking any
sexual desire. (Tovar, 2018)

For this, along with social media, she criticizes the working
environment for fat people. She says that a fat woman in polite company is
considered ‘BBW (a big beautiful woman)’ or ‘SSBBW (super-sized big
beautiful woman).’ She is seen as “round, curvy, chubby, rotund, pleasantly
plump, “healthy,” heavy … buffalo, whale, elephant, two tons of fun, and a
slew of names I don’t have the heart to share.” (Gay, 2017, p. 98)
Gay also talks about the foundation garments.
Although it is frequently argued that niche markets are
currently replacing mass markets, and that consequently
products are now tailored to meet the needs of specific targeted
groups rather than those of a hypothetical average individual,
the notion of an adaptable body remains central to the
manufacturer's vision of the consumer. Clothes marketed
specifically to larger women, for instance, still come in
standard sizes with fixed proportions to which individual
bodies must adapt. In fact, such clothing is usually marketed
along with products such as “foundation garments,” which are
designed to facilitate this adaptation. (Rothblum & Solovay,
The Fat Studies Reader, 2009)

In an interview, when she was asked about the chapter of this book
devoted to the difficulty of finding clothing, she replied,
It’s infuriating. We all deserve to look cute and feel attractive.
What’s so wonderful about fashion is that a good outfit makes
you feel bold and sexy and beautiful, but we have to work so
hard to find outfits that allow us to do that. Even the quality of
the clothing [for plus sizes] isn’t great; it’s made poorly.
(Okwodu, 2017)

In this chapter, she talks about the fashion trend which, as a part of
popular culture, shows less concern for fat people and makes them unnoticed
and unprivileged by representing them as shameful, insulting, marginalized,
other, different, and excluded from the general society. Even most of the stores
are designed for thin people, and there are ‘a mere handful of stores’ that can
offer suitable dresses for fat people. For this reason, Gay expresses her hatred
of this trend and culture of the fashion industry: “I am angry that the fashion
industry is completely unwilling to design for a more diverse range of human
bodies.” (Gay, 2017, p. 124) The clothing of plus sizes in stores is usually

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stored in a separate corner as if these fabrics are intended for ‘others’ who are
not worthy of being included in the general section. These cloths can be seen
as a metaphor for fat people who are always highly visible but are treated as
superbly invisible: “I am highly visible, but I am regularly treated like I am
invisible. My body receives no respect or consideration or cares in public
spaces. My body is treated as a public space.” (Gay, 2017, p. 142)
Like her body, the plus size clothing is also both visible in its size and
invisible. This (in)visibility can be justified by The Hyper(in)visible Fat
Woman: Weight and Gender Discourse in Contemporary Society where
Gailey says :
Fat presents an apparent paradox because it is visible and
dissected publicly; in this respect, it is hypervisible. Fat is also
marginalized and erased; in this respect, it is hyperinvisible....
To be hyper(in)visible means that a person is sometimes paid
exceptional attention and is sometimes exceptionally
overlooked, and it can happen simultaneously (7, original
emphasis). (Gailey, 2014)

Furthermore, this (in)visibility causes fat people to receive fat-shaming

messages even in the cloth stores, and these messages make them unhappy:
“I’ve been that girl, too big for the clothes in the store, just trying to find
something, anything, that fits, while also dealing with the commentary of
someone else who means well but can’t help but make pointed, insensitive
comments.” (Gay, 2017, p. 124) This made Gay understand that a fat person
needs to pay the price for ‘visibility’ and sometimes needs to pay even more
of a price when (s)he is ‘hypervisible.’ As a cultural critic, she considers it her
responsibility to share her opinions regularly, and instead of living in this
culture, she raises her voice by this piece of writing: “I wanted to burn the
store down. I wanted to scream.” (Gay, 2017, p. 125) This desire to protest
against this culture of attitude towards fat people positions her voice as the
voice of every fat person. This desire is described as Fat activists’ objectives
in BODIES OUT OF BOUNDS: “One of our objectives, then, is unmasking
the fat body, rendering it visible and present, rather than invisible and absent:
seen, rather than unsightly.” (Brazie & LeBesco, 2001)
Gay also speaks about doctors’ and nurses’ attitudes to fatness, which
is also a concern of Fat Studies. Fat Studies have investigated the systematic
marginalization of fat people in various fields, including healthcare
(Pomeranz, 2008).
From her personal experience, she refers to the oath of doctors as the
‘Hippocratic oath,’ where they swear to abide by the ‘code of ethics,’ but in
the case of an overweight patient, doctors seem fundamentally incapable of

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heeding their oath. At the same time, she criticizes the hospital management
as well as hospital culture, which is not ready to treat the fat people:
There is the humiliation of simply being in the doctor’s office,
which is, all too often, ill-equipped for the obese body, despite
all the public hysteria about obesity and health. Many scales
cannot weigh patients who weigh over 350 pounds. Blood
pressure cuffs are always too small, as are the threadbare
hospital gowns. It is difficult to climb onto the exam table. It is
difficult to lie back, to make myself vulnerable, to be splayed
wide open. (Gay, 2017, p. 185)

Thus, in this book, she explores what it is like to live in a world that is
not ready to accept fat people. To her, this is not that book where typically, we
read about weight loss and triumph and a woman standing on the cover of the
book in half her fat pants, but it feels challenging and exhausting, but
necessary (Bronis, 2016).
It is challenging because it is a memoir of her own body, trauma, and
weight. Nevertheless, it is necessary because here she attempts to change
people’s attitude in order to create a world ready to accept fat people as a
human being by juxtaposing her relationship with her fat body. This
relationship with her ‘unruly body’ in popular culture explores the reality of
living in a fat body that is categorized as unnatural and problematic in society
because “We live in a culture that tells the average American woman, dozens
of times per day, that the shape of her body is the most important thing about
her, and that she should be disgusted by it.” (Campos, 2004)
Social culture never creates the opportunity to think about the need for
fat people. In fact, it makes the fat people powerless to resist fat-shaming
messages because resistance is closely related to power and occurs wherever
there is power. Gay, as a fat woman, mightily complains explicitly about the
shape of chairs that are not meant and designed to accommodate her. To her,
‘chairs with arms’ are intensely painful: “My thighs have been bruised, more
often than not, for the past twenty-four years.” (Gay, 2017, p. 139) This
suffering can be seen as the result of the development of people's taste, which
is highly dependent on the necessity created by popular culture. Usually,
Taste makes a virtue out of necessity. People develop
preferences for what is available to them. The development of
taste, which can be seen as a conscious manifestation of
habitus, is embodied and deeply affects people's orientations to
their bodies. (Shilling, 1993)

This development of taste makes the needs of fat people unavailable,

which is one kind of unspoken humiliation. This taste orientates a fat body as

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something that should be neglected to be marginalized and creates a culture

where people do not react by observing how fat people struggle to cope in a
space that has no interest in accommodating them. In fact, the corner where
the fat people are pushed to survive is inhospitable to them. For Gay, this is
‘casual cruelty’ or ‘willful ignorance’ instilled in them by popular culture.
By juxtaposing the relationship between ‘fat and traveling,’ she talks
about many uncomfortable situations that make fat people think of themselves
as untouchable. This untouchability is pervasive and brings numerous negative
consequences in their life. It is never easy for any person to accept
himself/herself as untouchable. This causes them to suffer from severe
anxiety. This anxiety is the bitter result of culture because, according to Virgie
Tovar, “The culture puts a lot of energy into forcing people to stay in that sad
place of unquestioned fatphobia.” (Tovar, 2018) Gay also found herself in
this sad place: “I tried not to cry. Eventually, the agitated man was reseated
elsewhere, and once the plane took off, I curled into the side of the plane and
cried as invisibly, as silently, as I took off, I curled into the side of the plane
and cried as invisibly, as silently, as I could.” (Gay, 2017, p. 143) Gay’s
experience can be connected with the issues for which Southwest Airlines
enforced a long-standing policy requiring large passengers to pay higher fares.
“In June 2002, Southwest Airlines announced its intention to make passengers
with hips spanning over seventeen inches pay for two airline seats. It claimed
that the policy was created in response to customer complaints regarding fat
passengers.” (Huff, 2017)
Gay writes that although airlines prefer two tickets for a fat person,
most airline employees have no idea how to deal with two boarding passes
and an empty seat once the plane is fully loaded. This makes the journey
more humiliating: “Even when you’ve bought two coach seats, travel is rife
with humiliations.” (Gay, 2017, p. 143) Moreover, these humiliations show
us:
Our cultural context is rich in messages about what fat means
for people, their worth, and their worthiness. Social attitudes
are constantly informed by these messages. Popular culture
and literature provide ample opportunities to reflect on the
representation and construction of fatness and are especially
active areas of fat studies scholarship. (Rothblum & Solovay,
The Fat Studies Reader, 2009)

Roxane Gay’s experiences unlock the complexities of acceptance

and/or resistance and how, as Foucault asserts, “…the points, knots, or focuses
of resistance are spread over time and space at varying densities…” (Foucault,
1978).

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Conclusion
The results of this study reveal that Roxane Gay, living in a fat body,
shows how fatness is framed by popular culture messages and sheds light on
its critical social implications. The current study identifies Roxane Gay as a
proponent of Fat Studies who writes against popular culture messages that
create a sense of fat-shaming, which stigmatizes fat(ness) as the worst thing,
presenting fat person as someone having no place in society, whose life is
miserable, unhealthy, unnatural, devalued, subhuman, unworthy of living, and
in dire need of improvement. At the same time, this study investigates Gay’s
presentation of how fat-shaming affects people’s attitude to fatness and how
popular culture frames our fat bodies as something that must be changed for a
normal life. Thus, the findings of this research reveal that from the very
beginning to the end, Gay remains very honest and bold about what she feels
as a victim and believes in as a proponent of Fat Studies.

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