Abstract
This essay aims to explore the construction of excessive female embodiment in Fay Weldon's The Fat Woman's Joke, and the ways in which Weldon's engagement with the female body functions not only as a critical exploration of a society that is preoccupied with surface appearances, but also as an allegorical design to explore hidden implications of physical embodiment in relation to the social and cultural. Bakhtin's revolutionary discourse of the grotesque and Second Wave Feminism, as this essay argues, provide a historical and political context in which to read Weldon's construction of excessive female embodiment in her novel, and thus to unveil the social and symbolic implications attributed to the fat female body in the late 1960s.
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