ABSTRACT
An important part of resolving the personal fat complex is to embrace my own fat body, to come out as fat. It is a little strange to think about coming out as fat when anyone who sees me knows. It’s not like I could hide what I am and pretend to be thin; I cannot escape being fat, not in anyone’s wildest imagination, unless of course I am in a room full of blind people.
Unlike the gay body, the fat body is always already out. The fat body is of course hypervisible in terms of its mass in relation to the thinner bodies that surround it. As Moon suggests, the fat body displays “a stigma that could never be hidden because it simply is the stigma of visibility”, and asks the question “What kind of secret can the body of the fat woman keep?”
(Murray, 2005a, p. 153)