Fat Representation
Why do we need fat representation in romance novels?
I am a fat woman. I also happen to love reading, specifically romance novels. However, while I do love romance novels, I have never really felt that it was my place to be in them, only to read them. I have never really felt connected to the main characters of the books that I am reading. They are almost always stick thin, effortlessly beautiful girls, and I am definitely not that, so it’s hard to see myself in their shoes. Growing up, I never felt that I would find the kind of love that I read about in novels because I didn’t think that it could happen for someone who looked like me. It’s a complex that I am still working through today, and it is the reason I feel so strongly that fat representation is important.
Everyone deserves to be represented in the literature they read, and yet, within the romance genre, there is a clear lack of fat representation and body diversity. When I was growing up, I don’t think that I ever read a single book featuring a fat main character. Today, that has changed. I’ve discovered a niche array of authors, like Olivia Dade and Julie Murphy, who are working to put out romance novels with better representation than we had growing up. That being said, there is still a lot of work to be done.
While there are some novels featuring fat main characters, the vast majority of novels published today still feature thin protagonists. Madison Nankervis, author of “Diversity in Romance Novels,” explains, “I can assert that the publishing industry is improving in its acquisition and publishing of diverse adult romance novels, but there is still a long way to go. Everyone has a different story, a different lived experience, we cannot just publish a handful of these stories and pat ourselves on the back for checking the boxes.” Often, publishers will publish one or two novels and call it a day, but this is not enough. The work should not be left to just a handful of authors. There needs to be equal representation. Nankervis continues, “The real world is full of diverse humans, and our romance novels should reflect that. It is our job as readers and publishers to promote these voices and stories, to give them a platform to stand on. It rests in the hands of the publishing houses to take on these novels and put in the effort to market them.” Publishers should be making a greater effort to publish more novels that feature better body diversity. The small number of novels that exist today, while a start, is not enough.
It is the job of publishers to ensure that the novels being published are representative of everyone, not just a select group of people. A large portion of the United States population is overweight, and yet our literature and popular media do not reflect this. Beth Younger, in the article, “Pleasure, Pain, and the Power of Being Thin: Female Sexuality in Young Adult Literature,” writes, “Weight appears to function in the same way that white often serves as a default for race. […] An unacknowledged weightism functions similarly: unless the weight of a character is specifically mentioned, the reader will most likely assume the character is thin.” Most romance novels feature thin protagonists. Thin is the beauty standard within our society, so when we read a romance novel, we expect to see a thin main character. Younger continues, “Only if the character is considered abnormal, i.e., fat or chubby, is her weight mentioned at all. Women and girls who are heavy are always identified as such. Even in diverse and otherwise progressive texts, the fat person is marked as Other.” Thus, the default in romance novels is thin protagonists, and when there are fat characters, they are automatically viewed as “other” because they are not the standard protagonist. This is why it is not enough to publish one or two novels with positive fat representation and be done. There needs to be a push for body diversity so that we don’t open a romance novel and automatically assume the protagonist is thin. Our literature should reflect the world around us, and not everyone is thin. We should not be othering people within the books we read.
Representation in media matters. The topics we read about in novels influence our ideas of how the world should be. In “The Troubling Gap Between Fat Representation and Fat Acceptance in Romance,” author Carole V. Bell writes, “‘Media representations provide cues about who belongs in a society, which groups are to be devalued, and what sanctions are permissible for stigmatized groups.’ Romance novels, the literature of love and hope, are a vital part of that.” Romance novels, in particular, dictate our ideas of love. When certain groups of people are not represented in romance novels, this reinforces the idea that some people are not deserving of love. Bell explains, “Vicarious operant conditioning, for example, is a particular kind of social learning that’s particularly relevant to romance. […] It means that we learn by watching what happens to others. We see certain characteristics and behaviors being rewarded or punished and learn their value.” We learn from the novels we read, and when the fat woman is portrayed as single, and the thin woman gets the romantic partner, we tend to equate those characteristics with the act of deserving that love. In other words, we form this idea in our minds that fat people are just not deserving of love and that, in order to find love, one needs to be thin. This is not true, and in fact, it is a very unhealthy mindset—one that I am still working through myself.
Not only is the lack of representation harmful, but a lot of the fat representation that we do have is not actually good representation. Bell explains, “Plus-size protagonists are still relatively uncommon in romance, and many of the books that focus on fat main characters expose them to ridicule because of their size, reinforcing the idea that social sanction must necessarily be a part of the lives of fat people.” For example, most romance novels with fat protagonists highlight the fact that the protagonist is fat, rather than simply letting them exist. They make use of this trauma of being a fat person as a plot device, and this is particularly harmful because it forces readers to see their own trauma painted on the page when all they wanted was a simple romance.
This isn’t the only harmful type of representation. Nankervis adds, “It isn’t just the lack of fat representation in main characters that is a problem, it is also the hurtful and inaccurate representation of fat side characters or tertiary characters. These characters are sometimes reduced to merely being the comedic relief or they are spoken about in a way that demeans or villianizes them for their fatness. They are used a plot device and are not treated as human” (359). Fat characters, sometimes, aren’t even viewed as human. Rather, they are just a part of the story to be the brunt of the joke (often related to their weight or appearance) or to be villianized. Simply including a fat protagonist is not enough, especially when the novel is perpetuating harmful stereotypes, such as these, or simply using the fat experience as a plot device. Bell explains, “Beyond making certain tropes less ubiquitous, the main thing is to just stop conflating the basic descriptive representation of having a main character who’s plus-size with the idea of fat acceptance or positivity. Representation matters. But the content, quality, and ideas embedded in that representation matter too. There is a danger in equating mere fat representation with fat acceptance.” The fat representation needs to be positive representation, not just representation for the sake of having it because this can be just as damaging.
Negative representation can lead people to form body image issues. A study was done to discover whether poor representation in “chick lit” could cause body image issues, and the results were not promising. According to Kaminski and Magee of Virginia Tech University, “This study extended body image research to chick lit novels. These novels are an underexplored medium in body image research, and the current study provided evidence that text-based representations of the thin ideal and low body esteem in excerpts from these novels can have a negative impact on women's weight concern and perceived sexual attractiveness.” Essentially, the study showed that novels with poor representation can, in fact, have harmful repercussions, such as body image issues, which, in turn, can lead to other problems, such as eating disorders and depression. When we are not able to see ourselves in the novels we read or we only see harmful depictions of people who like us, it is easy to fall into this mindset that we are not good enough, that are bodies are not deserving of the same love that others are.
For this reason, positive representation is incredibly important. Romance novels have the power to shape our mentalities when it comes to love and our own self-worth. Nankervis writes, “[Talia] Hibbert [a romance novelist] stated that she feels like ‘romance has the ability to act as a blueprint to show who is worthy of love, which, of course, is everyone.’” While everyone is deserving of love, this is easy to lose sight of when you are unable to see it on the page, to have that positive reinforcement that yes, you do deserve to be loved, just as much as the next person. Nankervis quotes romance novelist Olivia Dade saying, “‘If all you see on the page again and again and again are people who are different from you or not like you, who don’t have your marginalization, there is a message there. And that message is “you do not get love. You do not get a happy ending.” And it is very powerful to see on the page someone who represents part of your identity.’” Representation is important because it shows that you do have a place within society and that you are just as deserving of the same things as everyone else.
For this reason, publishers need to take the issue of fat representation more seriously. Publishing a handful of novels is not enough, especially when many of these novels contain harmful stereotypes and portrayals of fat people. Publishing houses need to make it their mission to increase the number of romance novels with fat representation to close the gap of body diversity in literature, and this representation needs to be well written. Negative representation is just as harmful, if not more so, than no representation. We need positive representation, and we need it now—for the girls just like me who will grow up without believing that they too can have a storybook romance (well, sort of, but that’s a story for another day).
Courtney Smith (’23) is a senior at Susquehanna University where she is a triple major in publishing & editing, English literature, and Spanish with an honors minor. She is involved in way too much on campus from serving as director of philanthropy in her sorority to running the social media for the Publishing & Editing Program. In the little spare time she has, Courtney loves reading, baking, and rewatching the same couple of shows over and over again.