Narratives of 'obesity' and body Transformation: fat Phobia and the anxieties of weight gain in Vazandar (2019)


Aswathy A., Vellore Institute of Technology, Vellore

In the narratives of pathologization, fatness constitutes double deviance, from normative body standards as well as normative gender configurations. However, compared to its male counterpart, it is female fatness that is treated as the more unpardonable since the fat female body also challenges the patriarchal constitution of the ‘desirable’ female body, i.e., one meant to satiate the male gaze. This deeply rooted fat phobia in our society is reinforced through the flawed depictions of fat bodies on screen with the narratives created through these movies deciding for the viewers what the ideal body measurements should be. In this discourse, the fat female body is not just judged on account of its violation of normative aesthetic standards, but also normative moral standards. The trend of the fat body as an abject, predominantly seen in Bollywood cinema, has slowly crept into the Indian regional cinematic culture producing a unified body standard for actors to fit in. The popularity and approval given to the stories of body transformation of actresses in India further narrow down fatness into an alterable, liminal state of being. This paper tries to analyze the construction of fatness as a liminal state of being in Indian movies through the study of the Marathi movie Vazandar (2019), directed by Sachi Kundalkar. The film showcases the ever-increasing anxieties over weight gain Indian women experience in a fat-phobic world ruled by diet culture and fitspiration. In this world, a woman’s corpulence is a moral failing, traced to her ‘wrong’ individual preferences regarding consumption and related lifestyle choices. Through the analysis of the narratives centered on obesity and the body transformation of two fat women, I intend to unravel the construction of the liminality of fat female bodies and explore how it leads to the hyper-visibility and hyper-feminization of fat women.

This paper will be presented at the following session: