Cut Guts: "Eight Bites" and Loving Fat

Abstract

In this essay, I outline the colonial origins of the prevailing beliefs and attitudes towards fatness and current justifications for marginalizing fat bodies. I argue that, because the lineages of anti-fatness are beholden to the violence of colonialism and anti-Blackness, any theorization of fat that relies upon the pathological concept of "obesity" reinforces the imaginative purchase this history continues to exert within literary treatments of fat. As a remedy to this, I argue that Carmen Maria Machado's short story "Eight Bites" provides an alternate interpretive framework that invests in the capacity of a fat belly to nourish and even mother bodies as the organ that cares for those bodies the most. By framing weight-loss surgery as a loss to be mourned, Machado challenges the ongoing "duress" caused by anti-fatness and contends that fat can be generative and even reparative, rather than a perpetual signifier of illness and premature death.