https://doi.org/10.67147/literariness.v1i3.046
The Body at the Table: Food, Shame, and Diasporic Femininity in Fatty Fatty Boom Boom: A Memoir of Food, Fat, and Family
SHAHADA K P
Research Scholar
Department of English
Farook College (Autonomous)
Affiliated to the University of Calicut
Email: kpshahada@gmail.com
DR. UBAID. V. P. C
Assistant Professor
Department of English
Farook College (Autonomous)
Affiliated to the University of Calicut
Email: drubaidvpc@farookcollege.ac.in
Abstract: The persistent critical neglect of fat embodiment as a serious analytical category within South Asian diasporic literary studies has rendered the fat female body visible in domestic anecdotes and familial commentary yet absent from sustained theoretical examination. Among the texts that demand such examination is Rabia Chaudry’s Fatty Fatty Boom Boom: A Memoir of Food, Fat, and Family (2022), which traces the narrator’s experiences growing up Pakistani American while navigating the intimate intersections of appetite, shame, kinship, and bodily visibility across two cultures whose relationship to the female body and to food itself proves irreconcilable. By centring the culinary as the primary site through which diasporic femininity is both constituted and disciplined, Chaudry’s memoir challenges the tendency within both Fat Studies and diaspora criticism to theorise the fat South Asian female body in abstraction from the familial feeding practices, gendered surveillance, and cultural anxieties that produce it. In a contemporary moment when the fat diasporic female body remains suspended between fields that are too racialised for dominant Fat Studies and too embodied for conventional diaspora criticism, this paper reads Fatty Fatty Boom Boom through the combined frameworks of Elspeth Probyn’s alimentary assemblages, Anita Mannur’s culinary fictions, and Susan Bordo’s feminist critique of bodily regulation, arguing that the memoir reveals feeding and watching as mutually constitutive rather than opposing forces, and that the fat South Asian female body it constructs is not a site of individual failure but of diasporic, gendered, and cultural production that resists resolution into either shame or celebration.
Keywords: Fatty Fatty Boom Boom, Alimentary Assemblages, Diasporic Femininity, Fat Studies, Culinary Fictions, Bodily Surveillance, South Asian Diaspora, Memoir
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