Artist Statement.

Through collaboratively constructed macro photographs, this exhibition explores the relationship between gender and fat through fashion. Borrowing from performance theory, this project considers embodied performances including, but not limited to gender, as simultaneously agentic and constrained. This exhibition is the culmination of a comprehensive research project involving 15 participants from diverse backgrounds representing their lived experience with dress, identity, gender and size.

How do the round curves of fat flesh enhance femininity? Can enormous rolls big up masculine identity?  How does fat act upon identity in the delicious in-between spaces of non-binary and gender non-conforming people?  And how do all of these manifestations of fat and gender spread out across other embodiments and their various intersections?

To explore these questions, this presentation will examine people’s experiences at the intersections of fat and gender through one of the most visible and embodied ways in which we construct and resist dominant narratives about these subject positions: fashion and self-fashioning. We draw on a year-long project that considers the crossroads of fat and gender through an intersectional analysis. Our project engaged 14 self-identified cis-gender, trans, non-binary and two-spirit fat people across diverse race, class and other subject positions. Participants completed a questionnaire about their experiences of fat, gender and fashion. They then took part in a photo shoot in which brought in a garment that represented a personal experience of fat and gender and collaborated with a photographer to capture the garment on their body. The result was a co-created abstract photograph that aimed to expand understandings of the intersectional interstices of fat and gender. By drawing on frameworks in fat, gender and fashion studies, we analyze participant responses alongside their photographs to generate new perspectives about fat, gender and fashion. We also illuminate how our arts-based method provides methodological possibilities for generating these new understandings by grounding collaboration between artists, researchers and participants.