‘Everything louder than everything else’: fatness, mobility, and identity in Meat Loaf’s live performances, 1977–78

In mainstream discourses, fat stands for extremity in all directions. Paradoxically, it signifies lack and over-abundance, hyper- and a-sexuality/impotence, hyper-visibility and invisibility. These contradictory over-determinations produce an impossible subject; as Kent (2001, 132) writes, fat is ‘an identity that can communicate only its own failure, an identity for which all other identities are impossible’. Yet there are other landscapes where extremity is desirable, and rock music is one of them. Meat Loaf is barely researched, despite representing one of the most prominent staged engagements with fatness. In this early-career period, Meat Loaf performed fat masculinity as ‘rock “n” roll’ excess, an embodied corollary to the vastness of his music. This contrasts with scholarship which has mapped a bleak landscape for fat performance, constantly returning artists to the problem of resisting abjection. A key aspect, I suggest, is the specific theatrical devices, which create a staged environment in which multiple extremes can, paradoxically and euphorically, be sustained. Meat Loaf performs this transgressive abundance through the mutually supportive categories of fatness and ‘rock‘n’roll’ excess; the unsustainable, potentially explosive qualities of each find a scaffolding articulation in the other.