Longing for Fat Futures: Creating Fat Utopian Performatives in Burlesque

Performing Fat Liberation: Pretty Porky and Pissed Off’s Affective Politics and Archive

“…By staging the undiscovered possibilities of fat embodiment, PPPOd engaged and implicated the audience in micro-acts of worlding with an impassioned commitment to cultivating livable fat lives. Fat studies scholars such as Chalklin (2016a) and Hernandez (2020) demonstrate the world-making potential of fat performances using the late queer theorist José Esteban Muñoz's (2009) notion of a queer utopia. Muñoz queers utopia to push against fantasies of the "future perfect"-the hegemonic vision of utopia that white masculinist philosophers have built based on the tenets of sameness, order, and reason, and that has depended on the elimination or assimilation of all bodies, individual and social, that exceed or transgress its hard-edged orderly bounds (Rice et al 2017, p. 217).…”

“…In this account, performers and audiences come together to make and re-make worlds over the span of a performance, joining in co-creating micro-worlds in which the participants and audiences want to live (Rice et al 2022a). As Hernandez (2020) writes in her performance autoethnography of a fat women of color burlesque troupe, "the cowitnessing of fat flesh onstage makes it possible to be hopeful about a fat future in which [audiences] too can engage in a fat-liberating present/future" (109).…”