Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene (1590, 1596), an allegorical romance epic, begins with Redcross, the fledgling hero of holiness who struggles to live up to his name. Time and again, he veers from the steady camaraderie of Una—an embodiment of the one, true, Protestant church—for the femme fatale Duessa, who’s stunning to look at but rotten to the core. Of course, the latter is a lively confederate for hunting down dragons—the one who’s always up for traipsing through even the most morally bankrupt palace—but eventually gets her beau locked in a giant’s dungeon, as happens occasionally when one goes on dates with strangers. It’s then up to Una and her new friend—the hero of all heroes, the eventual king—Arthur to rescue Redcross and expose Duessa as a fraud. Together, they strip away the conniver’s clothes to expose her beauty as nothing but a façade:
… her misshaped parts did them appall,
A loathly, wrinckled hag, ill favoured, old,
Whose secret filth good manners biddeth not be told. (I.viii.46.7-9)
The details of Duessa’s true appearance have all the hallmarks of Spenser’s virtues and vices alike—ridiculous kitsch and pictorial virtuosity, obvious chauvinism and sensual seduction—in a bravura twist on the epic catalog: her “crafty head” is “altogether bald” (47.1); her body is overrun with scabs (3); her teeth tumble out of “rotten gums” (4); her “dugs”—or breasts—are “dried” like deflated bladders (6); and her halitosis could offend even the most anosmic of schnozzes (5). What matters most of all is the affective wallop these traits pack for those taking them in: the surprised disgust of Redcross and company, not so much at what they see—though surely dug dryness doesn’t help—but at how terribly they’ve misread Duessa’s figure. In moral terms, the enchantress is guilty of demonic duplicity. But in physical terms, her transgression is to catfish Redcross to dangerous, disastrous, potentially irrevocable, ends.
I’ve begun this essay with The Faerie Queene because Duessa’s plight brings into relief one of the most vexing aspects of “skinny fatness,” my focus here: its oxymoronic placement of a person both within and without our culture’s standards of beauty and wellness in ways that—as I’ll show—everyone from doctors to lovers often stigmatize as mendacious. Rather than mark a departure from the typical protocols of human embodiment, however, the paradoxical plight of the skinny fat only makes explicit a fundamental, though sometimes implicit, truth of human corporeality that for all the clarifying recent work in fat and disability studies requires further discussion. Embodied existence is not only a matter of alternating passports, between those of the kingdoms of the “well” and the “sick,” as Susan Sontag famously put it (3), but often of carrying both passports at the same time: of looking “well” enough that onlookers never guess you’re “sick” until it’s too late and until they’ve assumed you’re one of them, only to be disappointed and disgusted and disparaging in turn. Living with a body of flesh and bone, in other words, means constantly surprising oneself and others, and yet, some people seem far abler to limit the scale and frequency of their disturbing revelations than Duessa is—or than I am, for that matter.
It was my hearing aids that first elicited a second glance from interlocutors when I was a child, but after my spinal-cord injury at age 19, the cane and brace I use today began, more quickly, to procure the gawps of passersby. Lately, my body has become spectacular in yet another, albeit more latent, way. After losing 75 pounds over the first years of the COVID-19 pandemic, I’ve now joined the ranks of the skinny fat, more formally known as those with “normal weight obesity.”[1] The terms describe “excess body fat”—perhaps as high as thirty percent—“in individuals with adequate body mass index” (BMI) (Franco). More simply put, skinny fat people have a “normal” BMI and don’t look “overweight.” In a pinch, they can borrow the clothes of a fitter friend (like a pair of slacks for a cocktail party, as I did not two months ago). But strip away the cover of these habiliments, and you’ll find, at best, a nondescript thinness and, at worst in certain tellings, flesh that droops down like withered bunches of congealed grapes—and, in any event, neither the bundle of a bicep nor the contour of a calf in sight. By all accounts, this kind of “normal weight obesity” is ubiquitous, yet researchers suggest there’s no strength in numbers when its consequences include cardiovascular disease, diabetes, high blood pressure, and stroke (Khonsari). Nor do such statistics ameliorate the aberrance of skinny fatness in the rarefied spaces of American academia that I call home, where the default for students and emerging scholars alike is a trim, fit firmness: musculature that’s subtle if not always pronounced.[2]
But despite the fact that “skinny fatness” is shaping the lived experiences of people even as I write this—and has already saturated American culture via ads for body-building programs on YouTube; articles in People and Sports Illustrated about physically reformed celebrities; clickbait doggerel on tabloids and questionable health sites; the list goes on—the idea has attracted scant attention from my own brood: scholars in the humanities. (One notable exception, however, is Robyn Peers’ insightful piece, in this very publication.) “Skinny fat” shows up nowhere in the only two, pathbreaking Fat Studies readers published to date (one edited by Esther Rothblum and Sondra Solovay; the other, by Amy Erdman Farrell). The term also lacks an entry in the Oxford English Dictionary, so it’s hard to say when, even, “skinny fat” entered our lexicon. From what I can tell, “normal weight obesity” is the object mostly of papers in the sciences or social sciences, and no one in one of my fields of expertise—disability studies—has written about it thus far.
On the one hand, this relative silence is to be expected: my own experience of skinny fatness is that it’s relatively nondisabling in social or physiological terms, largely because the number of pounds the skinny fat body weighs allows it to elude the worst of the “negative assumptions, stereotypes, and stigma placed on fat and the fat body” in a fatphobic world: as Solovay and Rothblum put it, the focus of the “aggressive, consistent, rigorous”—and, I’d add, essential—“critique” to which Fat Studies has committed itself (2). Formal clothes are much easier to purchase; sidelong looks from Equinoxed waiters no longer fell me when ordering food; healthcare costs less, and doctors more readily believe me; and I’m, generally, more confident in contexts both professional and personal. On the other hand, humanists should take a moment to consider “normal weight obesity” because the notion that someone can be both skinny and fat—and that this is a bad thing, in some cases downright menacing for all involved—can tell us a great deal about the ways we Americans—myself included—not only idolize as normal a body size that’s actually closer to an ideal but also depend upon our ability to glean meaning from figures that we assume are as easily readable as open-access documents.[3] The strange, ostensibly absurd concept of “skinny fat” tells us a great deal, that is, about how we expect bodies to look and behave and what happens when they—like Duessa’s—defy these assumptions.
Before going any further, though, let’s pause over the words, and signifying range, of the terms in question. “Skinny fat” and “normal weight obesity” both describe a physical state that’s oxymoronic by perversely yoking opposites together: an act of rhetorical violence meant to capture our attention. Why does this matter? The device implies a sort of alien otherworldliness. As Renaissance England’s influential literary tastemaker George Puttenham said of paradox—and oxymoron is a distilled version of this more expansive figure—when a writer is “carried by some occasion to report of a thing that is marvelous,” “then he will seem not to speak it simply but with some sign of admiration” (Whigham and Rebhorn 311). To be clear, “admiration” in this context bears the semantic freight of bewilderment rather than fandom. It’s unsurprising, then, that Puttenham’s epithet for paradoxon is “the Wonderer”: the textual equivalent of a moon eclipsing the sun or an untold comet making the night sky light.[4]
Contemporary accounts of skinny fat people often echo this prodigiousness, that they are, in Peers’ phrase, troublingly “at odds with themselves.” Consider, for instance, the lede of an article in Time with the title “The dangers of being skinny fat”: “When Elizabeth Chanatry was 16 years old, she was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes. You’d never know it by looking at the 5-foot-3-inch tall, 117-pound 19-year-old” (Sifferlin). Here, the paradoxes of skinny fatness have been magnified to startling, life-threatening proportions in the figure of Chanatry herself, self-described as “thin” but not “toned.” The young woman’s story is a cautionary tale of the risks of putting “too much weight on weight,” that hallowed number on the scale. Such a premise—committed onto the virtual pages of Time a decade ago now—had the potential to erode the ominous crags of fatphobia. But instead, it seems only to have reaffirmed the importance of a particular kind of normal, healthy body whose appearance reflects its salubrious inner workings. Almost every doctor interviewed for the piece reiterated something to the effect that they see “these people all the time”: “On the outside they look incredibly healthy, but on the inside they’re a wreck.” Particularly telling is the resonance of ruined seafaring here, even if the semantic field of “wreck” has expanded since its original context. The ill effects of skinny fatness may well be unexpected and unforeseen but rarely unpreventable, as if the person steering this middling sleeve of gelatinous flesh were a captain too proud to double check his navigational calculations. The article minces few words on this point of culpability: “skinny fat” people “never eat vegetables, love steak, and haven’t exercised since eighth grade gym class.” And Chanatry herself readily takes responsibility for the shattered shards of wood and far-flung cargo of her body: “People look at us”—her sister and her—“and think we’re healthy, but they don’t know.” Luckily, we now have the information to make better assessments of our own.
Of course, I won’t gainsay the potential ill-effects of skinny fatness—Lord knows the warnings of doctors have informed my own work-out routine, for weal and woe alike—but I will take issue with the need for, and even possibility of, knowing (to use Chanatry’s word) and interpreting the body aright. In part, my antipathy to such confidence relies on the fact—familiar to many disability scholars—that hermeneutic operations like these deny the body its lived realities and experiential texture; they objectify and stabilize its multiple dimensions instead.[5] Spenser once more proves helpful for thinking with, about the feasibility of corporeal exegesis—his greatest poem far less removed from the contingencies of contemporary life than readers (again, including myself) often believe it to be on a first pass.[6] On one level—as the scene above reflects—he suggests that we can get better at scanning for meaning in the ciphers and images daily confronting us, in the forms of bodies most of all. Redcross eventually perceives Duessa for who she is and, we’re led to believe, won’t fall for her wiles again. On another level, though, characters in The Faerie Queene have a habit of making the same mistake over and over again, and they often pay the price for their intransigence.[7] What the discourse of “skinny fatness” reveals is that many of us–medical professionals and laypeople alike—approach our own embodied encounters in these terms of the romance genre: as moments replete with meaning and the possibility of going astray, of interpreting wrong, and of reaping the consequences of making such an error.
Let me give one more example, from within the last year, a piece in the Wall Street Journal on “The U.S. Military’s Weighty Challenge: ‘Skinny-Fat’ Recruits.” Here, the danger of “normal weight obesity” resides not simply on an individual plane but on national and even international ones too. For one of the Army’s more pressing problems of late has become “a high number of ‘skinny-fat’ recruits,” “people who don’t look out of shape but, indeed, are because of sedentary lifestyles that have left them with low muscle mass and frail bones and connective tissue” (Kesling). As Army research scientist Dr. Karl D. Friedl put it–in a description that, mutatis mutandis, could apply to Duessa–these are “guys who look good in skinny jeans, but they have high fat because there’s no muscle.” The Marine Corps has come up with an especially advanced solution to the problem. “Bioelectrical impedance analysis” and/or a “dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry” scan will be employed to calculate whether someone is fit enough to serve. (Though one might have questioned the sustainability of a single, stable definition of “fitness” before investing in such gadgets.) Now at last, we can take the guessing game out of physical hermeneutics, the pesky ambiguities of paradox cast eagerly to the side.
But I suspect that the questions which guide this WSJ piece, “Can fit people have large waists? Are skinny people automatically in shape?” (Kesling), will persist all the same—and not just because of the novelty of the Marine Corp’s machines. From one angle, these queries point to a positive reassessment of traditional measures of fitness backed up by real science: people of all sizes can be—in a word—“healthy.” The phrase “Health at Every Size” has even become an accreditation. From another, more cynical direction, they reflect a persistent, recalcitrant need for the body to remain a trustworthy source of information about who someone is, what they are all about, and how seriously—or desirably—they should be taken. As the renowned bioethicist Rosemarie Garland-Thomson puts it in her book Staring: How We Look, “Expectations about the ways bodies should look and work affect how we see each other as well” (37).
Since I began with a literary anecdote, let me end with a personal one that foregrounds the ways “skinny fatness” can disrupt these expectations in stigmatizing ways more clearly than any of the other evidence I have adduced so far. It’s another story of duplicity, my own this time—not Duessa’s. Admittedly, I don’t take the breath away as she does at first blush—nor, in my case, is baldness concealable. But I have been told that I’m cute, at least, and have a warm smile. My BMI places me in the “normal” range; my jawline is visible; and my arms, at the time, were just beginning to show the signs of regular weight-lifting. Sometimes, this is enough. It was for someone, in medical school, with whom I connected about a year ago now. They were housesitting in Princeton, and I was up late finishing an article, and we decided to meet. Pictures were exchanged. Confirmation was given that our bodies were “average.” Eventually, they arrived in my dorm room, but eventually, too, their line of sight drifted away from me to the piles of books stacked atop my desk. And then to their cell phone. And soon enough, they were asking me to put my underwear back on. “How did your body end up like that?” they inquired, pointing to my flabby midriff and to the suprapubic fat pad below. “Do you have CP?” Explaining that in fact I lived with a spinal cord injury—and that I’d lost weight, but that some of the fat persisted—seemed completely beside the point. I tried, though, and they eventually left. The salty droplets that dripped from my eyes kindly held back till the door shut behind them.
In the intervening year, I’ve not so much internalized the disdain of this future doctor—a horrifying thought—as I’ve acted on the disdain stored up within me, like the fat in a camel’s hump, which their words convinced me to access. I’ve shed a few more pounds of adipose tissue, gained a few more pounds of muscle, stared gleefully at my reflection in the mirror when the ridge of my quads became visible over my knee, and sometimes catch myself extending my arm just so I can feel the hard edge of my growing triceps. Yes, that lump below my belly button has begun to recede as well. I’m embarrassed to admit this not because I’m alone in admiring what’s been framed as personal progress—those mirrors in the gym do more than allow folks to check form—but because I can feel myself surrendering to the same facile assumptions about bodies, the ways their visible and less visible features should tell a dependable story, and the part I’ve played in why mine still refuses to do so that I’ve critiqued in this very piece. I can feel myself capitulating, that is, to the ridiculous repudiation of a body size whose difference from the norm—as coveted as it is elusive—can be summed up no better than with a phrase that shouldn’t make sense to begin with, in words that should cancel one another out but in the end only generate a different kind of stigma than they do on their own, no matter the previous fitness journey or history of the person upon whom they’re sicced.
I write of “skinny fatness,” then, to do more than convince early modernists that Spenser’s Fairyland is one of flesh-and-blood creatures rather than allegorical wraiths or to anatomize a term that has brutally anatomized others; I write of “normal weight obesity,” ultimately, to understand a way out from beneath its scalpel. Such a path involves fat and disability studies, as I’ve made use of them here. It also involves—invaluably—an increasing awareness of paradox and our disdain for it, in no realm more so than the corporeal. In no sphere can we afford to begrudge the discomfort of oxymoronic tension less than in this one. Trying to generate a cohesive, totalizing story of a body means, inevitably, hurting others and abusing ourselves. It means tearing the clothes from Duessa and recoiling from what we find underneath: the anomalies not of singular monstrosity but of humanity itself. Indeed, sooner or later, everyone will end up–in some way, big or small–the one with “misshaped parts.” Let us ensure, together, that they elicit a reaction far different than “appalled.”
Notes
[1] In Vox and Synapsis, I have previously written about my own experiences of fatness as a white, disabled man, though given the space I have here, I’ll be able to revisit these intersectional dynamics only in future pieces. The most impressive, recent guide to the crucible of stigma in which fatphobia is often forged, however, is Farrell’s reader with its explicit focus on and inquiry into “the connections between fatness and gender” on three interrelated levels, the visceral, structural, and academic (4).
[2] On anti-fat bias in academia, see Elena Andrea Escalera’s smart and sobering essay “Stigma Threat and the Fat Professor: Reducing Student Prejudice in the Classroom” in Rothblum and Solovay’s reader (205-212).
[3] I emphasize the American context since it frames much of the work in Fat Studies as well as my own experiences. On questions of fatness and geography, however, see Charlotte Cooper, “Maybe It Should Be Called Fat American Studies,” in Rothblum and Solovay’s reader (327-333).
[4] Though the “skinny fat” body achieves a particular kind of prodigiousness for its ability to surprise and dismay, all kinds of fat can be coded as verging on the monstrous in cultural spaces that valorize slimness. As Laura Fraser points out in her virtuosically economical narrative of “fat” in the United States—“The Inner Corset: A Brief History of Fat in the United States,” from Rothblum and Solovay’s reader (4-7)—one response to the late nineteenth century’s nascent fatphobia invoked Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: “Adipose,” wrote the medical professor Woods Hutchinson, “while often pictured as a veritable Frankenstein, born of and breeding disease, sure to ride its possessor to death sooner or later, is really a most harmless, healthful, innocent tissue” (11).
[5] On this problematic aspect of metaphor in the context of The Faerie Queene, see Rachel Hile, “Disabling Allegories in Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene,” Recovering Disability in Early Modern England, ed. Allison P. Hobgood and David Houston Wood (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2013), 88-104.
[6] The best and most comprehensive guide to the reception of The Faerie Queene is Catherine Nicholson’s Reading and Not Reading The Faerie Queene: Spenser and the Making of Literary Criticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020).
[7] See Jeff Dolven’s wonderfully written book, Scenes of Instruction in Renaissance Romance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), for a superb account of how characters in The Faerie Queene–and perhaps its author himself–never seem to learn from their mistakes.
Works Cited
Amy Erdman Farrell, ed., The Contemporary Reader of Gender and Fat Studies (London: Routledge, 2023).
Lana P. Franco, Carla C. Morais, and Cristiane Cominetti. “Normal-weight obesity síndrome diagnosis, prevalence, and clinical implications.” Nutrition Reviews 74.9 (2016): 558-570.
Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Staring: How We Look (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
Nami Mohammadian Khonsari, et al. “Normal Weight Obesity and Cardiometabolic Risk Factors: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis,” Frontiers in Endocrinology 13 (2022): 1-16.
Ben Kesling, “The U.S. Military’s Weighty Challenge: ‘Skinny-Fat’ Recruits,” The Wall Street Journal (1 Oct. 2023), https://www.wsj.com/us-news/us-military-unfit-recruits-weight-aa17996b.
Robyn Peers, “Inside-Out: TOFI, Skinny-Fat, and the Logic of Epidemic ‘Obesity,'” Synapsis: A Health Humanities Journal (7 July 2023), https://medicalhealthhumanities.com/2023/07/07/inside-out-tofi-skinny-fat-and-the-logic-of-epidemic-obesity/.
Esther Rothblum and Sondra Solovay, “Introduction,” The Fat Studies Reader, ed. Sondra Solovay and Esther Rohblum (New York: NYU Press, 2009), 1-7.
Alexandra Sifferlin, “The Hidden Dangers of ‘Skinny Fat,’” Time (10 March 2014), https://time.com/14407/the-hidden-dangers-of-skinny-fat/.
Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor (New York: Picador, 1978).
Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. A.C. Hamilton, 2nd ed., rev. Hiroshi Yamashita and Toshiyuki Suzuki (London: Routledge, 2007).
Frank Whigham and Wayne A. Rebhorn, eds., George Puttenham, The Art of English Poesy: A Critical Edition (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007).
Image information
George Frederic Watts, Una and the Red Cross Knight (ca. 1860), via Wikimedia Commons and in the public domain.
Description: A somber-looking young man (the Redcross Knight from Spenser’s Faerie Queene) looks down from his armored horse at his consort Una, upon a smaller, white steed.
