Bad Fats
By Anna Mirzayan
Chewing, Lapping, Slurping…
Néstor Daniel Pérez Molière’s 2019 video short, Self-Indulgence, features the artist—a fat, queer, non-white man—genuflecting to a piece of tres leches cake, bringing it to his mouth over and over in a hypnotic acting of eating. Part of a larger immersive video series titled The Body is Still Experiencing/Expecting Some (Dis)Comfort, this piece is a gentle attempt to reconcile desires that can often seem at odds; most notably in Self-Indulgence, the artist presents a struggle with the simultaneous desire for the queer fat body to become the idealized standard of beauty, while also wanting to deconstruct hegemonic notions of beauty and desirability.
Food has long been associated with morality in Western art culture. During the 16th–18th centuries, Dutch masters created detailed still-life paintings known as vanitas paintings, which expressed the fleetingness of life in the face of mortality. Vanitas, Latin for vanity, signifies a futile and empty endeavor; as this painting style progressed and became intimately associated with Protestant values, vanity came to refer to the emptiness of a life without Christ. To make their points about the short nature of a mortal life, these paintings were heavily laden with symbolism: rotting fruit (particularly apples) and dead flies were often featured as stand-ins for the carnal body and the pleasures of the flesh, while wine or grapes represented the body of Christ and everlasting life in heaven. These paintings pushed viewers to abandon their sinful earthly pursuits and turn their eyes to the clean purity of Christendom. Mortality and morality went hand in hand.
Nowadays a new food moralism has risen in place of the Christian value system. Finger wagging at secular pleasure has turned into judgments about “good” and “bad” foods, and diet talk has disguised itself as the pursuit of “wellness.” Make no mistake—all of this discourse is rooted in fatphobia and anti-fat bias. Today’s fear of mortality is not about heaven or hell; it’s about the paralyzing fear of being fat. Fat studies scholar Dr. Caleb Luna, whose work against healthist-futurism is an outgrowth of queer theorist Lee Edelman's treatise against heteronormative reproductive futurism, theorizes fatness as a confrontation with one’s own mortality, which in turn inspires fear and repulsion. This is an outgrowth of the broader cultural pathologization of “unruly bodies” (like those of queer or Black folks) that flourishes within modern Western medicine. For example, John Harvey Kellogg, brother of cereal magnate Will Kellogg, was a physician who advocated that health could be found at the Protestant intersection of eating a limited, bland diet and abstaining from sexual activity. He was also a famous eugenicist.
Contemporary anti-fat sentiments have also produced a crop of fat artists who make work condemning, critiquing, or complicating the new food morality, harnessing the powerful dread conjured by the so-called ob*sity epidemic. These artists play with the often fraught experience of eating as a fat person, instead fostering pleasure indulgence as communal activity. Northern Ohio-based artist Jacq Garcia re-contextualizes the erotic practice of “cake-sitting,” made famous by kink performer Lindsay Dye. Jacq painstakingly bakes a life-sized queen bed made entirely of cake and then lounges on it. The fat body in this work indulges in three things fat people are often told to stay away from, or that they do not deserve: dessert, sexuality, and rest. Jacq’s work asks how the perception of cake-sitting changes when a fat person performs it. This work exists at the intersection of feminized labor (baking), sexuality, and fatness.
Reesa Beesa is a California-based artist who sells her collection of prints, pins, jewelry, and apparel on accessible sites like Shopify. Her colorful, lurid work often features fat, queer bodies caught in acts of everyday life—lounging in bed surrounded by pizza, hanging out at home with friends, sunbathing nude. The bright tonal colors emphasize the bodies’ shapes and features, from cellulite to body hair. Nothing is hidden. The works feature food and sexuality aplenty. Whereas fatness is often conflated with misery, loneliness, and shame (e.g. 2022’s dehumanizing film The Whale), the people Reesa depicts are joyful and take pleasure in life and community. In Reesa’s work, contrary to popular social messaging, bodies—especially fat bodies—are nothing to be ashamed of.
Fatness and queerness are often put into the same discourse of perversion, which is especially true for women (particularly BIPOC women), for whom being both fat and slutty means, paradoxically, public censorship and private fetishization. Jacq and Reesa make art that eschews mainstream narratives about body positivity, “curves,” and beauty, instead exploring queer fat femme communities through artworks that explicitly deal with food and sexuality. Making art that explicitly deals with the connection between fat bodies and the moralization of food allows us to challenge notions about what foods are good and bad, and in turn ask: which bodies are seen as worthwhile or desirable in contemporary society? This practice is vital to contemporary fat liberation.
