Speculative Fiction and Fat Futures


Kendall Dinniene, Southern Methodist University

In September of 2023, a fat liberationist on Twitter called upon leftists to examine their own antifat bias, writing, “You can’t and won’t meaningfully be a good leftist/communist/anarchist if you are fatphobic and refuse to seriously analyze fatphobia as a systemic axis of oppression.” Replies to the tweet varied, with a number of respondents claiming that fatness is incompatible with producing and inhabiting the future the left imagines. One such user tweeted, “You can’t and won’t meaningfully be a good communist if you are ‘fitphobic’ and refuse to seriously analyze why the ruling class would seek to keep proletarians in a state of physical incompetency.” Another wrote, “I have to be real with you, you can not [sic] fight a revolution when overweight, peak fitness is required and should be worked towards by all comrades.” Responses to the original tweet demonstrate the ways that the left perpetuates and proliferates antifat, ableist, and eugenic discourses, even—and perhaps especially—when envisioning what would make possible an otherwise liberated future. This paper suggests that those of us invested in a future free from antifatness as well as anti-Blackness, capitalism, transmisogyny, imperialism, ableism, anti-Indigeneity, and indeed every oppressive force that currently shapes and prematurely ends our lives look to the pages of twenty-first century North American speculative fiction for instruction. I contend that these fictions can help us to create more capacious imaginaries and demands, and to build coalitions unfettered by antifatness. In the final chapter of his Never Satisfied: A Cultural History of Diets, Fantasies, and Fat, Hillel Schwartz imagines a utopia, a “fat society…that admired and rewarded fatness.” Contemporary speculative fiction imagines how this society might one day come to be. In speculative fiction by Nalo Hopkinson, Gretchen Felker-Martin, Carmen Maria Machado, and others, fat liberation arises from dystopic conditions and in collaboration with robust, intersectional movements for resistance and liberation. For example, in Hopkinson’s short story “A Habit of Waste,” a Canadian woman swaps her fat Black body for a thin, white one in a dystopic future in which bodies can be purchased, discarded, and donated. The story reveals how antifatness, anti-Blackness, and misogyny work in tandem and are in fact co-constituted. Through cultivating a relationship with an impoverished Black elder, Hopkinson’s protagonist begins to work through her antifat and classist biases as well as her internalized misogynoir. In Felker-Martin’s novel Manhunt, the world has been devastated by a virus that turns anyone with a high testosterone level into raging, raping, cannibalistic monster. Felker-Martin juxtaposes the faux-leftism of thin, wealthy whites who care about themselves only with the radical, intersectional resistance of trans people, fat people, and people of color who band together not only to protect themselves and each other but to battle in pursuit of a safer and more livable world. In this novel, fat people are not harmful or even merely peripheral to liberation, but crucial to it. The novel shows us how we might respond to the dystopic, overlapping crises of our world—genocide, climate catastrophe, an ongoing pandemic, and more—through radical collaboration that centers fat rather than excludes it.  

This paper will be presented at the following session: