Bad Fat Black Femmes: Navigating the Nexus Between Fatphobia and Racialized Gender
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: In this article, I contextualize the intersecting nature of fatphobia, anti-Blackness, and misogyny to provide a lens through which readers can analyze the matriarchal character Delores from Nicole Dennis-Benn’s (2016) Here Comes the Sun. Delores, the novel’s protagonist, is a darkskinned, fat, Black, working-class mother of two whose agency is limited by fatphobia, colorism, and capitalism. Yet she is almost single-handedly blamed for her actions without any acknowledgment of how those systems of oppression hinder her from having the privilege of true free will. Instead, I offer a counternarrative reading of Delores’s “bad” behavior that views it as both a controversial practice of agency and a learned survival strategy she adopted after coming to understand the cruelty and indifference she is subjected to in her community. This alternative reading of Delores’s behavior as self-regard will hopefully provoke considerations about the role that poorly executed collectivism plays in driving multiply oppressed people, particularly fat Black women, to become both victims and agents of harm.
DOI: 10.17615/rdfe-qk68
Author: Jenkins, Alasia Nikia
Institution: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Language: English
Subfield: Gender Studies
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W4415196451
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