Fattening Queer Femininities: The Pitfalls, Politics, and Promises of Queer Fat Femme Embodiments

This dissertation identifies and documents how women and non-binary people in Canada negotiate and resist fatphobia, heteronormativity, and femmephobia, alongside other oppressions. More precisely, using qualitative research methods— a combination of narrative inquiry, photo elicitation, and autoethnography— this dissertation explores how women and non-binary people in Canada who identify as queer, fat, and femme experience and challenge these intersecting forms of oppression. I argue that queer fat fem(me)ininities are sites of intense regulation and policing and, at the same time, sources of collective resistance, resilience, and healing. I focus specifically on the ways in which queer fat femmes strategies of resistance, resilience, and healing contain glimmers of more livable worlds for queer fat femmes, where they are valued and desired. Ultimately, by bringing together the fields of fat studies, critical femininities, and queer theory, and through the use of interview, photographic, and autoethnographic data, this dissertation offers thickened understandings of the significance of queer fat femme embodiments, first, for queer, fat, and fem(me)inine people themselves and, second, for (re)conceptualizing normative notions of fatness, fem(me)ininity, and queerness more broadly.