Self Making, World Building

The sexuality of fat cisgender women in the public image is often intertwined with shame and mostly represented through fetishism or desexualization. Rarely are their sexualities discussed in a way that centers the agency and autonomy of fat women, therefore obscuring imaginings of what fat sexual liberation could look like. Through 30 in-depth interviews with fat cisgender women, I explore how the sexuality of fat women is fraught with additional power dynamics, including the framing of sex as social capital, ultimately demonstrating how fatphobia functions as an obstacle to sexual liberation for them. By leveraging Linda Martín Alcoff’s idea of sexual subjectivity, I present fat sexual self-making as not only a way to address fatphobia but also as a world-building tool to create a future where all bodies can achieve sexual liberation. This paper is a condensed version of a longer Master’s thesis.