Fat and Forgotten: The exclusion of fat women in sexual liberation and the implications for sexual public health
Open AccessIn the same way that all oppression is connected, all liberation is as well. The fat liberation and the sexual liberation movement both have their origins in the 1970s, and both movements have significantly changed and transformed over the years. There have been some academic explorations at the intersection of these ideologies but not an exploration of fat women’s sexuality in the contexts of both fat and sexual liberation. The studies that do exist have been primarily in the medical field, which is not only a field infamously unkind to the fat female body but also does not provide an understanding or inquiry into fat women’s sexual experiences. This gap in the literature means the sexual liberation movement hasn’t fully grappled with the impact of fatphobia and the fat liberation movement, which albeit occasionally has addressed issues of fetishization, has not fully come to terms with the sexual liberation as a necessary “frontier” of freedom within the fat liberation movement. Through in-depth interviews with 30 women, I explore how fatphobia functions as an obstacle to fat sexual liberation and explain why we must explicitly include fat individuals, especially fat women, in conceptualizing and fighting for sexual liberation. Through these interviews and leveraging Linda Martín Alcoff’s idea of sexual subjectivity, I begin to illuminate the intersection between sexual liberation and fat liberation and start to flesh out their interconnectedness. As the relationship between sexual liberation and sexual health is inextricable, these interviews also shed light on the way that fat oppression has specifically impacted the sexual health of the participants and provide recommendations on how leveraging sexual education policy and improving sexual health care might begin to set us on a path towards a sexually liberated future for fat women.
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