The Hidden Lives of Big Beautiful Women

This book is a deep dive into the largely unexplored space of BBW “bashes”—multi-day gatherings of fat women and their admirers. Using a range of feminist theories of embodiment and affect, the project is guided by autoethnography and in-depth interviews with twelve participants. Participant experiences are first analyzed with a key focus on experiences that cause grief and disenfranchisement; subsequently, the book looks at experiences that may be radical or revelatory. The book does not seek to either villainize or valorize BBW spaces but instead sheds a bright light on the experience of this cultural subspace and all it may offer to analyses of fat life.