Becoming Fat ‘Differently’: Theorising ‘Embodied Re-visioning’

This article draws upon body becoming and new materialist paradigms, and specifically the conceptual repertoires of Deleuze and Guattari (becoming, assemblage, reterritorialisation) and Karen Barad (apparatus, and agential cut), to theorise the dynamism of fat embodiment within India. It proposes the concept of ‘embodied re-visioning’, and related processes of ‘seeing the other-within’ and ‘carrying the body’, to expound the conditions, mechanisms, agencies, and effects of evolving fat embodiments. This concept provides means to understand and critically interrogate the emergence and nature of the diverse strands of fat activism – ‘body positivity’, ‘body neutrality’, and so forth – revealing the nature of ‘cuts’ or boundary-marking practices that differently and relationally organise the possibilities for embodiment. The article moves beyond a comparative analysis of discourses or restricting its analytical scope to questions of (re)signification to reveal the entwined material-discursive dynamics of fat embodiment. Embodied re-visioning is conceptually advanced to understand and provide commentary on the ‘agential becoming’ of the fat body in the context of the global south.