Destigmatization of the fat female body in Size Zero and Dum Laga ke Haisha

What is it about?

This article examines the representation of the fat female body in two films, namely Inji Iduppazhagi (Size Zero, 2015) and Dum Laga ke Haisha (Give in All Your Energy, 2015). The author shows how fatness is alternatively reconfigured, in these two films, to foreground radical definitions of beauty, sexuality, romance, and body politics. The slim, curvaceous, and fair-complexioned female celebrity—an ideal that is constantly reiterated in South Asia through popular media discourses, numerous beauty pageants, predatory cosmetic enterprises, and mainstream Bollywood cinema—is effectively discarded here, in favor of capturing the interests, aspirations, and priorities of the fat female protagonist. Fatness, through these two cinematic representations, thus facilitates a subversive discourse of destigmatization, which, in turn, serves as a powerful antidote to the dominant assumptions, prejudices, and stereotypes surrounding the fat female body. Through such compelling counternarratives, the fat female protagonists are not only positively constructed as lively, desirable, adventurous, and fun-loving subjects, but also strategically pitted against social and cultural practices of fat shaming to sensitize and reorient hitherto existing discourses of popular culture.

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