Fat Shaming, Body Stigma and Corpus Writing in Roxane Gay’s A Memoir of (My) Body

Abstract

Identifying herself as the other in a world where thinness is a passport to ecstasy and social acceptance, the Haitian immigrant Roxane Gay impregnates her book Hunger with a plethora of traumatic experiences she withstands due to the pervasiveness of fat phobia and fat shaming in every nook and cranny of American society. Being an ardent proponent of feminism and fat acceptance, Gay shakes the ground of what Graham calls “lipoliteracy” through deconstructing the binary fat / thin, black / white. The first part highlights the current beauty standard. The second section examines the multifaceted oppression Gay experiences because of her fatness. This includes her hyper(in)visibility and cultural strangeness in social interaction, media paradigms, and medical establishment. The ultimate part charts Gay’s journey of coming to terms with her body. It zeroes in on the cathartic potential of “corpus vocabulary” by relying on the ideas of narrative psychologists. Through corpus writing, she sloughs off her former self and etches a new identity marked by power and self-value.