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Des militantes de l\u2019acceptation puis de la lib\u00e9ration des corps gros aux tendances num\u00e9riques de l\u2019amour de soi et de la positivit\u00e9 corporelle, le corps gros gagne objectivement du terrain dans le champ politique comme \u00e9conomique. Les fat studies<\/em>, \u00e9tudes sur la grosseur, se d\u00e9veloppent \u00e9galement dans certaines universit\u00e9s et la notion de grossophobie est de plus en plus int\u00e9gr\u00e9e dans les discours f\u00e9ministes critiques \u00e0 l\u2019\u00e9gard des syst\u00e8mes de domination1<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 1 <\/a> - On peut citer, pour donner envie de les lire et situer davantage les sources de mon point de vue, quelques chercheurs, chercheuses et militant\u00b7e\u00b7s contemporain\u00b7e\u00b7s f\u00e9ministes, queers et intersectionnel\u00b7le\u00b7s, notamment Charlotte Cooper, Daria Marx, Roxane Gay, Gabrielle Lisa Collard, Ga\u00eblle Prudencio, Corpscools, Asher Larmie et Sonalee Rashatwar.<\/span>. Analyses th\u00e9oriques des universitaires, motivations commerciales des marques pour \u00e9tendre un march\u00e9, militantisme social nourri de bienveillance\u2026 les intentions et les r\u00e9percussions sur les personnes concern\u00e9es sont certainement variables, voire contradictoires. Il faut toutefois reconnaitre dans toutes ces initiatives leurs effets salutaires, qui sont parfois inattendus. <\/p>\n\n\n\n What of the world of contemporary art, aesthetics, and the revamped images of fatness in the visual arts? What strategies can be adopted to provide new representations of fat bodies? Among these strategies, I am drawn to those of Shoog McDaniel, Laura Aguilar, and Julischka Stengele because they foreground the bodies of the artists employing them. All three are or have been fat and have asserted themselves as such by using photography to highlight their bodies. The lens they fix upon fat bodies thus functions with a testimonial power that enables the transformation of the collective gaze. In philosopher Paul Ric\u0153ur\u2019s perspective, there is, in the gesture of the subject who narrates him- or herself, a step toward the recognition of their story, person, and value by the other. In this gesture is a promise, the promise of furthering the evolution of one\u2019s social identity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n These artists offer us a new understanding of fat bodies through nudity. The fat body is, it exists, and its contours are best shown without grossophobic prejudices, which are often embodied in medicalizing, aestheticizing, or exoticizing discourses. Presented on the Internet as well as in galleries and other exhibition spaces, the photographs by these artists provide the possibility of seeing nude fat individuals in unusual settings, in representations drawn neither from pornographic websites nor from the Instagram profiles of large-bodied influencers. Of course, one might object that there are many nude fat bodies scattered throughout Western art history\u200a\u2014\u200aone thinks of Pierre Paul Rubens or Lucian Freud, of Fernando Botero or Niki de Saint Phalle. But in these cases, it isn\u2019t a matter of situated, personal testimony, nor of gestures politically oriented toward the acceptance of socially rejected bodies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Throughout his work, American photographer Shoog McDaniel has been very interested in fat-bodied flesh as a material, as we discover on his website, but also on his Instagram profile, which is richly illustrated with images that trace the course of his work through everyday life. McDaniel mainly photographs fat bodies that intersect with other marginalities and exclusionary situations: elderly people, the handicapped, the non-white, or those of non-normative gender. He often portrays his subjects in close-up without concealing the red, purple or white stretch marks, the lumpy cellulite, the wrinkled, tight or sagging skin, bellies that hide the genitals, heavy breasts. The postures taken do not strive to shape the silhouettes, and the volumes are not distributed to approximate gender stereotypes. There is something frontal in the way the bodies are photographed, but this does not veer into the sensational: it is as if the eye were scanning the bodies with kindness, open to the unexpected. Any fat person can recognize themselves here, and any non-fat person can discover a physical reality. McDaniel, therefore, opposes the term obesity, which conveys a clinical perspective that favours pathologizing fatness as social stigma. Showing other fat bodies to a fat person also provides them with a way out of shame and morbid fantasies of exclusion.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n During the first worldwide lockdown of March 2020, McDaniel produced videos and photographic images remotely, reaffirming a desire to show fat bodies from all perspectives, each shot using several cameras simultaneously (smartphones, webcams, etc.). The person\u2019s body thus appears from several angles, giving a more complete image of the model\u2019s physiognomy. This strategy also foils any internalized fatphobia that would potentially prompt models to show themselves in a putatively more flattering light. By calling on numerous international figures in fat activism and by providing free sessions to non-white models, McDaniel is engaging his work in a process of social justice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Other artists have made the transformation of our views of fat people a central issue of photography. One thinks of Laura Aguilar, a Chicana and queer artist from Los Angeles. Aguilar, who died in 2018, produced many portraits and self-portraits presenting non-normative identities in the 1990s, particularly in her Clothed\/Unclothed<\/i> series (1990\u200a\u2014\u200a94) of black and white photographs that juxtapose two portraits of the same model, clothed in one image, naked in the other. The artist participated in the series herself, posing in a shirt and then without one as if something in the social gaze had come apart to enter the intimacy of the naked body. In the self-portrait In Sandy\u2019s Room<\/i> (1990), we also see this liberation of the fat naked body in the private sphere; here, we see Aguilar sitting in an armchair, relaxed and refreshed by a fan during a heat wave. Similarly, Austrian artist, author, and curator Julischka Stengele often performs nude on stage or in artist centres, indoors or outdoors, literally facing the audience\u2019s clothed and often thin bodies.<\/p><\/p>\n\n\n\n The three artists employ another strategy to work representations of fat bodies: associating them with settings that symbolize nature. McDaniel, for instance, takes most of his photographs outside, sometimes adding such accessories as fruit and flowers, and unhesitatingly proposes analogies between the particularities of the flesh and natural materials that are present on-site. Indeed, his first book, published in 2018, is entitled Bodies Like Oceans<\/i>, alluding to a notion of expansiveness that, when associated with natural elements, has a generally positive connotation. The formal familiarity between body and nature also plays a part in Aguilar\u2019s work, particularly in her Grounded<\/i> photo series (2006), in which the artist stages her naked body in the rocky landscape of Joshua Tree National Park in the United States. Aside from the explicitly political issues of borders and migration addressed by the work, there remains the analogy between the form of a fat body and the rock formations in this area. Minerals are the symbol of that which has been burnished by time, that which has existed for longer than humanity itself, thus making the corpulent body, by its forms, an ancestral and majestic element.<\/p><\/p>\n\n\n\n Associating these bodies with nature is not insignificant; it thwarts the connection between capitalism and obesity, one of the more powerful contemporary narratives on the subject of corpulence, a narrative involving the food industry and one that considers fat bodies as larval entities of immoral stupidity gulping down junk food day in, day out. Stengele opposes this grossophobic reading of large bodies. In her performance Fat Distribution<\/i> (2016), the artist dressed in a french-fry-patterned jumpsuit and offered her visitors fabric burgers and other parodies of greasy victuals. A very real cake representing her cellulite-dimpled posterior was also shared with the audience. In another exhibition presented in Berlin in 2019, Fat Femme Furious<\/i>, Stengele exhibited a photograph of herself nude, on all fours, her face behind a mask representing a pig\u2019s head. Stengele mocks the fatphobic looks her body attracts; she ridicules them by pushing their judgment to the extreme, thus returning the stigma.<\/p><\/p>\n\n\n\n Sur son profil Instagram, Stengele a l\u2019habitude d\u2019int\u00e9grer sa nudit\u00e9 au r\u00e9cit quotidien de ses balades sportives. Le 29 avril 2022, l\u2019artiste publie une vid\u00e9o l\u00e9gend\u00e9e Morning Ballet in the Alps<\/em>, que l\u2019on aurait envie de rapprocher des photographies de personnes nues dansant \u00e0 Monte Verit\u00e0 au si\u00e8cle dernier pour y voir une relecture critique de la Lebensreform<\/em>2<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 2 <\/a> - La Lebensreform<\/em>, litt\u00e9ralement \u00ab\u2009r\u00e9forme de la vie\u2009\u00bb en allemand, est un mouvement culturel hygi\u00e9niste critiquant l\u2019industrialisation et pr\u00f4nant le retour \u00e0 la nature et la sant\u00e9 du corps par l\u2019exercice physique et le v\u00e9g\u00e9tarisme. De la fin du 19e<\/sup> si\u00e8cle au milieu du 20e<\/sup> si\u00e8cle, en Allemagne et en Suisse, ce mouvement a influenc\u00e9 de nombreuses communaut\u00e9s, notamment celle de Monte Verit\u00e0.<\/span>, par l\u2019int\u00e9gration de son propre corps en mouvement qui prend le soleil en altitude tout \u00e9chappant par sa forme au st\u00e9r\u00e9otype du corps en sant\u00e9 v\u00e9hicul\u00e9 par ce m\u00eame mouvement id\u00e9ologique. Pr\u00e9sent\u00e9 dans un contexte symbolisant la nature, le corps gros s\u2019affranchit de ce r\u00e9cit industriel d\u00e9gradant au profit de l\u2019affirmation d\u2019une ant\u00e9riorit\u00e9, d\u2019un r\u00e9cit des origines qui l\u00e9gitime la grosseur. Ce d\u00e9sir de naturalisation de la grosseur s\u2019inscrit dans les pr\u00e9occupations \u00e9cologiques actuelles, qui con\u00e7oivent la nature comme une entit\u00e9 positive s\u2019opposant \u00e0 une industrialisation humaine abusive et destructrice.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n Finally, community and desire form yet another strategy that motivates the work of these three artists. Since we are rarely considered fat among others who are large-bodied, but often so when surrounded by those who are not, McDaniel and Aguilar manufacture images of small societies where solidarity and desire hold sway. As medical fatphobia is often attended by physical violence directed toward individuals, creating situations where touch is fostered, where the subject is recognized, accepted, and even desired, is both relevant and necessary. Such an ambition also seems to be the basis of Stengele\u2019s performance at the Festival of Naked Forms in Prague in 2016. The artist presented herself naked, sitting, and encircled by spectators who could put on lipstick and kiss her body where she could not do so herself. With this work, Stengele is not demanding compassion but calling for desire. Her gesture may be opening a breach in the erotic possibilities of those who watch her and participate. Desire, pleasure, and tender exchanges assuage the stigma, somewhat dissolving its power.\r\nTranslated from the French by Ron D. Ross\r\n<\/p>\n![\"Julischka-Stengele_NaturalHabitat\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/09\/106_DO_Andoka_Julischka-Stengele_NaturalHabitat_1820220822-scaled.jpg\")
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