Revealing Brazilian fat activism through visual arts: the cases of Elisa Queiroz and Fernanda Magalhães

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article analyzes the development of fat activism in Brazil considering two artists, Elisa Queiroz and Fernanda Magalhães at the end of the twentieth century. Both artists started to develop dialogs related to visual arts and their bodies, reflecting on prejudices still strongly present in Brazil and offering a rethinking and re-envisioning of the fat body. The artists use the body as provocation, as a struggle against the imposition of hegemonic discourses, making a point to stand out as “marginal,” rather than striving for normativity. Considering works that address the fat body in European and North American scenarios, I seek to understand the development of fat activism in Latin American territories, recognizing the scarcity of studies focused on the subject. Queer approaches by fat activists are relevant mainly by their antinormative and indefinable character and by the possibility of understanding artistic practices that refuse to normalize the fat body as “harmless.” White, patriarchal heteronormativity reinforces hegemonic or rigid body ideals, including mainstream media perpetuating notions of ideal femininity associated with thinness or ideal masculinity associated with muscularity. In response to heteronormativity’s regulation of fat bodies, new possibilities of fat transgression are presented in artistic activism, despite the growing medicalization, pathologization, and commodification of bodies out of bounds in medicine and the beauty industry. The results of my studying art as an activist intervention into sizeism indicate the possibility of recognizing a record of fat activism in visual arts in Brazil, allowing the subversion of corporeal standards and making room for emergent discussions about gender, culture, and identities.