The obese female body has often been portrayed as the other to the slender body. However this
process of othering or viewing as different has created a repressive discourse where excess
has increasingly come to be studied as a physical abnormality or a signifier of a personality
defect in contemporary Western society. This book engages with the multifarious re-imaginings
of the excessive embodiment in contemporary women s writing drawing specifically on the
construction of this form of embodiment in the works of Fay Weldon Jeanette Winterson
Margaret Atwood Claude Tardat and Judith Moore whose texts offer a distinct literary
response to the rigidly homogeneous and limiting representations of fatness while prompting
heterogeneous approaches to reading the excessive female embodiment.
