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The Casual Cruelty of Fat Phobia: An Intersectional Analysis of “Unruly” Feminine Corporeality in Selected Texts by Anne Tyler

Abstract By reading selected texts by Anne Tyler with a focus on their representations of fat female characters, this article demonstrates that fatness has become a lazy literary shorthand for myriad, always negative, assumptions about women. I argue that such examples can be found in the work of this award-winning female author. When such an author uses fatness to denigrate female characters, and that goes by without comment from scholars, we do a disservice to the millions of women who are reading these texts and receiving the message that a woman’s primary responsibility continues to be to tame her “unruly” body. Fat is disruptive and a visual signal of the female body that refuses to conform to patriarchal discipline. We need to ask why this is a cause for derision rather than celebration in the work of this female author.