Abstract
The purpose of this essay is to explore and examine the history and iconography of fat and femme cartoon characters who have permeated the imagination of western media narrative styles and representations. In this paper, I will first define my use of the term “fat femme” and then analyze multiple cartoon characters within their respective series to showcase how the historiography of the “fat femme” has shifted to reflect the ideals surrounding queerness and body politics within the American popular imagination. The “fat femme” character in correlation with their food consumption is the best tool of measurement to indicate how American culture has shifted its views of food consumption and fatness over time. In my observation of each character, food consumption is my initial entry way into examining the intersections of their ideological presentations. In determining a historiography of the “fat femme” in animation, I chose Miss Piggy, Lumpy Space Princess, Mammy Two-Shoes and Amethyst for this particular project, because they represent measurable shifts in how the “fat femme” is constructed and viewed over time, adapting within the American popular imagination. All four characters exemplify how the “fat femme” has morphed alongside the historical development and intersectional understanding of body politics, queer identities, and feminism. What was once a savory experience of simply identifying and experiencing characters that looked similar to me within animation, has now become a shifting perspective viewed through theoretical lenses, allowing me to examine the ingredients that formulate the construction, value, and use of this particular character.
Mimi Tempestt (she/they) is a multidisciplinary artist, poet, and daughter of California. She has a MA in Literature from Mills College, and is currently a doctoral student in the Creative/Critical PhD in Literature at UC Santa Cruz. Her debut collection of poems, the monumental misrememberings, is published with Co-Conspirator Press (2020). She was chosen for participation in the Lambda Literary Writers Retreat for Emerging LGBTQ Voices for poetry in 2021, and is currently a creative fellow at The Ruby in San Francisco. Her works can be found in Foglifter, Apogee Journal, Interim Poetics, and The Studio Museum in Harlem.
As a fat black femme, I’m often subjected to an intersection of fatphobic, racist, and sexist ideologies that indicate that my voice, visibility, and claim to power are provisional. Growing up and throughout my adulthood, watching cartoons became a source of escape—a source to make the impossible possible and to frame the unimaginable as a short-lived reality. Watching characters that look like me in animation allowed (and continues to allow) my imagination the opportunity to facilitate worlds unlike my own, and imagine a series of possibilities that transcend my current reality. As an adult, I understand that this imaginative disconnect from reality can only be short-lived, but as someone who loves to explore different literary and narratives styles, identifying with these characters in animation becomes essential to keeping my child-like wonder about the world. I’m invested in examining the fat femme in animation, and nearly all literary and media formats, because I desire to see myself represented in a variety of narratives. Fat femme characters represent fatness and queerness in variant ways, but what I find common in the narrative constructions through animation, which I will consider in this project, whether by their creators intentions or not, is a longing for voice, visibility, and essentially, power to simply be. What was once a savory experience of simply identifying and experiencing characters that looked similar to me within animation, has now become a shifting perspective viewed through theoretical lenses, allowing me to examine the ingredients that formulate the construction, value, and use of the fat femme.
In this paper, I explore how animated characters across time and media styles provide a critical way in to understanding the cultural power of the fat femme and representational politics. Characters such as Miss Piggy from The Muppets, Lumpy Space Princess from Adventure Time, and Amethyst from Steven Universe all demonstrate a trajectory of how the “fat femme” has been constructed and developed over time within animation. This paper argues that their illustrated bodies, characterizations, character arcs and the animated settings in which they participate suggests that the “fat femme” is prevalent in our culture, while also revealing that the current existence of these bodies makes way to create, interpret, and value new possibilities in media and narrative styles. Although these characters are relevant at varying points in television history, their representations are crucial to examine the ways in which patriarchal society constructs and sees the “fat femme.” In this paper, I will first define my use of the term “fat femme” and then analyze multiple cartoon characters within their respective series. Through my analysis, I will illustrate how the historiography of the fat femme has shifted to reflect the ideals surrounding queerness and body politics within the American popular imagination. My desire for this academic work, in its final form, is that it expands the understanding of fat femme characters to increase the potentiality of experiencing their representations more frequently, complexly, and non-stereotypical within popular media.
What is the “fat femme?’
In establishing the importance of the fat femme, it’s essential to understand the origins of this term, and how it is actively used within this critical work. The term “femme” is expansive and actively transitions through many connotations depending on context, speaker, and historical reference. The term “femme” began, and remains as, the French term for “woman” or “wife,” later transitioning into variant feminist discussions and critiques in the 1950’s. To be “femme” in these contexts generally suggested a lesbian whose appearance and behavior was seen as traditionally female.
By 1993, the literary magazine Off Our Backs interviewed the lesbian feminist writer Joan Nestle, who is noted as establishing the term “femme” in her book The Persistent Desire: A Femme-Butch Reader. Within her interview she stated, “To me the [femme] woman is still the least understood woman, either historically or contemporaneously. Yet it’s also clear to me that the [femme] woman is the key to all of this gender discussion because the layers of womanness that surround her and how she subverts traditional womanness.”1 The “femme’s” subversion of “womanness” can be seen as essential in noting the components of how the word is understood and experienced; meaning the “femme” experience is always concerned with its juxtaposition to traditional female roles and expectations within patriarchal constructs. Female roles often leave the “femme” subject to the assumption that heterosexual identity and desires are inherent over other identity categories. In her initial works, Nestle was referring to lesbian women and their butch counterparts in gendered and binary terms. Her definition and many other early “feminist critics” notions, although lending to the evolution of the word “femme,” was constricted in the inclusion of all bodies and experiences. The word now has shifted from a lesbian-erotic calibration to a reference term for queer bodies that fluctuate within and outside gendered and heteronormative experiences. In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, Fatima Jamal (also known by their online moniker @FatFemme), discusses how the terms "fat" and specifically "femme" are representative of spaces that people are afraid to occupy due to the stigma of being ostracized. These labels are considered too radical within the structure of societal norms that reinforce gender and body politics.
Jamal is Black and transgender. Her documentary “No Fats, No Femmes” signifies how gay culture insinuates heteronormative values of gender binaries to reinforce power which, as result, often inflicts emotional, psychological, and physical violence onto its trans counterparts. In the article, Lewis speaks on gender and highlights how most people, in an attempt to perform within gender binaries often fail despite their sexual identities. She states: “People are afraid to wrestle with the fact that they too fail gender and are trans, in a way, and fail these normative notions of gender [...] If we all understood how much we fail gender, we would approach conversations around trans-ness and gender nonconformity differently.”2 Lewis’ notion of “failing gender” adds to the construction of the term “femme,” because it references Nestle’s ideas of subverting “womaness,” but pushes the boundary of its connotation even further for all bodies, and all experiences to make claim to this identity construction. Arguably, the term “femme” in today’s social and political context, can now also be considered and experienced as the fluidity of genderqueer, transgender, and non-binary identities and bodies.
The term “fat” has also endured its own shifts in social and political connotations. It holds its weight in the conversation within feminist critique and theory, but more specifically the ever-going conversations surrounding “fat acceptance” and “body positivity” takes precedence when referring to “fat.” When thinking of and experiencing the term “fat,” I’m referring to an aesthetic of the body that rejects the notion that weight is the sole indicator of health. Arguably, when thinking of “fat” I am denoting the diet culture that is ever-present in our society that idealizes thin bodies, elucidates weight bias, promotes food restrictions, and reinforces societal, familial, and peer pressure against bodies that do not fit within these molds. “Fat” is being used in this paper, and by other theorists and activists, to break down systemic anti-fatness and hold these systems accountable for the treatment of people whose bodies are variants of the heteropatriarchal bodies deemed worthy of desire, production, and commercial consumption.
When placing “fat” and “femme” together, I am highlighting the intersections of queerness that correspond in one individual and unique existence. “Fat” being the aesthetic presentation of the body that is queer, because of its rejection of what is seen as healthy in our society; and “femme” being the descriptor of an individual who has socially and/or politically denounced traditional female roles. When considering the “fat femme,” we can examine how, due to the oppressive nature of heteronormative patriarchy, the intersections of this particular identity, leaves the individual, and subsequently the cultural and social reproductions of them through media, imagined as “naturally” undesired, underrepresented and too often, misrepresented.
Should you really be eating that? Food Consumption as Historiography
Cecilia Hartley’s “Letting Ourselves Go,” reflects on how fatness within American culture is a marker of moral deviation from “the feminine ideal.” She argues that women who are fat are often subjected to oppression, and held to a series of stereotypes that indicates gluttony as the source of their moral and societal ineptitude. She writes: “Fat has become a moral issue unlike any other type of deviation from what society considers normal. The fat woman is often dismissed as sloppy, carless, lazy, and self-indulgent.”3 The cultural reproductions of this trope are consistent in American cinema. Movies like Shallow Hal, Norbit, and Precious all utilize the misconception of over-eating and food indulgence as the source of conflict for fat women characters. In American media, the correlation between fatness and food consumption are eerily inescapable. This correlation is the foundation of a diet industry that grosses $33 billion annually. When we talk about fatness, in any cultural reproduction, we are also addressing food consumption. Although their imaginative capacity transcends the capabilities of actors on a movie screen, fat femme cartoon characters cannot escape the trope of fatness as a marker of moral deviation from “the feminine ideal.” As such, the ways in which fat femme characters negotiate food is key to analyzing the effects of fat femme media.
The fat femme character in correlation to food consumption is the best tool of measurment to indicate how Amercian culture has shifted its own views to food consumption and fatness through time. In my observation of each character, food consumption is my initial entry way into examining the intersections of their ideological presentations. Because fatness is often synonymous with gluttony, the consumption of food typically becomes the context for the audience to gain insight into the development of each character and their story arcs. In determining a historiography of the fat femme in animation, I chose Miss Piggy, Lumpy Space Princess, and Amethyst for this particular project, because they represent measurable shifts in the how the fat femme is constructed and viewed through time within the American popular imagination. All three characters exemplify how the fat femme has morphed alongside the historical development and understandings of the intersections within and between body politics, queer identities, and feminism.
Miss Piggy on Center Stage
In the one-hour ABC Special, The Fantastic Miss Piggy Show, Miss Piggy from Jim Henson’s The Muppets, debuted in a variety of comedic, musical, and acting sketches.4 Throughout the special, Miss Piggy is dramatized as a diva-like chanteuse who is hard to work with, and is increasingly concerned with her looks, aesthetic presentation, and performance in order to get a fully syndicated “weekly primetime series” approved by the ABC Network Vice President Kevin T. Gregory. The entire special is filled with Miss Piggy enduring many costume changes, jokes filled with sexual innuendos (mainly hinting at phallic symbols or the desirability of her body), and bits relying on her relationship to food, diet, and exercise. The way that the special highlights food and exercise to generate a comedic effect and characterize Miss Piggy’s body demonstrates a crucial example of how the fat femme is appropriated to reinforce diet culture and eurocentric beauty values. On the one hand, Miss Piggy is “the star of the show”—centering and celebrating the fat femme. On the other hand, the skit highlights this reinforcement of diet and exercise norms. I argue that the portrayal of Miss Piggy in the sketch “Snackcercise,” makes her quintessential when observing the contemporary historiography of the fat femme. Though her character reinforces that beauty isn’t only correlated with thinness, upon close reading of the skit, her participation in the enacting of dietary and exercise norms demonstrates the negative correlations of fatness in American and eurocentric culture.
Throughout “Snackercise,” Miss Piggy is satirically placed as the face of her own aerobic-style exercise class. In the 1980’s, a growing multi-million dollar trend of televised exercise routines, known as “jazzercise” and “aerobic-style” movements, were highly popularized in America. Notable figures such as Jane Fonda and Richard Simmons were the faces of this “golden era” of fitness, and more notably the 1981 hit “Let’s Get Physical” by Olivia Newton-John was a lead single in the Billboard 100. Miss Piggy’s acceptance of her fatness and indifferent attitude towards diet and exercise delineates how fat bodies are typically stereotyped within this particular era of American media. In her essay “Placing Fat Women on Center Stage,” JuliaGrace Jester addresses the complexity of centralizing the fat femme in the “visual sphere.” She argues that the theatre is “traditionally designed for the male gaze,” and in the progress of bringing the fat femme to more mainstream audiences through television and cinema, the fat femme can “choose to either identify with the thin lead, who will never really represent them, or they can choose to fight this misrepresentation of ‘the female.’”5 Through this theoretical lense, the construction and characterization of Miss Piggy is imagined in a way that highlights our capacity to choose
the latter.
Throughout the skit, Miss Piggy yells at her backup dancers to stop exercising and gives the audience a set of diet and exercise tips such as “never eat, right before eating,” and to “munch, crunch, chomp and chew” on a candy bar after eating an entire banana split. This characterization of the fat femme through Miss Piggy as an overeater and physically lazy is an example of how the fat femme’s body has been used to appease a narrative that mystifies and denounces the potential of human bodies coming in a variety in shapes and sizes, thus reinforcing a negative stereotype commonly held about people with fat bodies. The audience is well-aware that Miss Piggy isn’t a real woman able to consume food, but her body is representative of how the culture sees real fat femmes. This representation denies a complexity of narrative interpretations of the fat femme and instead, exploits the body of the fat femme to reinforce the culture’s obsession of diet and food culture.
In the skit, Miss Piggy and her body are not interpreted as fully nuanced or complex. The appropriation and exploitation of fat bodies must be understood, as Jester writes, as a crucial part of the mechanics of fat exploitation:
To address the representations of fat women and to begin understanding the theatricality of fat performance, we need to see how fat women are portrayed as leads, how fatness is performed and represented, and how [media] can demonstrate the objectification of fat women. These representations of fat women, though they can be transformative and empowering, are complicated by the tendencies both to oversimplify the means of overcoming fat discrimination and to rely on comedy as a means of addressing what are difficult and serious issues for fat women.”6
The fact that food and diet are constantly used as a comedic trope throughout The Fantastic Miss Piggy Show, i.e. in “Snackercise,” and “The Luau” (a segment in which Miss Piggy is being chased by the attendees to be consumed as the ceremonial pig), allows us to see how the imagination of the fat femme, within a 1980s historical and pop cultural context, was used to reinforce negative body stereotypes that aided in the pinnicalization of diet culture. Moreover, these representations represent the lack of cultural autonomy that the fat femme possessed to create their own narratives about their bodies and experiences during that time, further showcasing the ways in which that gap left ample room for the misrepresentation of the fat femme through Miss Piggy’s character in popular culture.
In addition to the misrepresentation of the fat femme body through Miss Piggy, we can also examine her character and story arc as a way to see the construction and effects of transversing gender binaries. The overarching plot and intention of the varied segments are positioned throughout The Fantastic Miss Piggy Show as ploys to get Miss Piggy her own syndicated weekly primetime series on the ABC network. The ongoing gag, that is visible to the audience and to the other muppets (producing the show in the control room under the leadership of Kermit the Frog), but remains unnoticed by Miss Piggy, is that she was never positioned to receive her weekly primetime series. In a segment where Kevin T. Gregory, the VP of the ABC Network, reveals to her that her performance was strictly for a one night special. Miss Piggy retaliates by punching the VP in pure rage, running off stage, and refusing to perform the closing finale of the show. Prior to delivering the punch, she asks Kevin T. Gregory “Listen here? You’re standing here in front of my billions of fans and saying I’ve been killing myself for one crumby show?”
At this point, the audience laughs at her anger, and the plot of the show reaches its climax. I can’t help but think of Jester’s idea of the fat femme lead failing at taking the identity of her “thing” counterpart. Because Miss Piggy has adhered to the objectification of her body and the exploitation of her talents in order to appease the desirability of her audience, she has, in a sense, killed herself. Through her rage she finally chooses to fight her misrepresentation of the “ideal female.” The irony of her hyperbolic statement “killing myself,” becomes more jarring when considering how her body was used as an object of sexual admiration by her co-host John Ritter or sexual damnation by other co-host George Hamilton. This violence is maximized when factoring in how she painfully tires herself out in segments like “A Salute to the Year,” and all the sexual puns and gags that trickle throughout the show. As result, the fat femme in this specific context, much like Miss Piggy in her attempt to gain more visibility, lacks in complexity, has unimagined potentiality, and also lacks in futurity.
When she refuses to participate in the closing finale, a moment that can also be seen as a metaphorical killing of “the false woman,” the remaining muppets in the control room panic and devise a plan (created by Fozzie Bear) to continue the show. Everyone takes their places, the dancers are cued, the music plays, and when the light opens to Miss Piggy, the audience finds her co-host, John Ritter (who has been manically and inappropriately sexually obsessed with Miss Piggy throughout the show) in a dress, blonde wig, high heels, and fake pig’s nose instead. When Miss Piggy sees John Ritter impersonating her, this causes her to continue her violent tirade. She topples down a giant column (almost killing the dancers), chases John Ritter around the stage claiming she is going to kill him, and smashes the camera causing electric circuit explosions and chaos. This scene is so unique in the imagination of the fat femme, because it exposes the ways in which the media sees the fat femme who fails to submit to their roles of objectification and male desirability.
Her anger becomes a caricature of feminine rage that is undermined by its existence within patriarchal and societal structures. The replacement of Miss Piggy by John Ritter performing as a cross-dressing man is an example of how media interprets and recreates the fat femme. Because the fat femme lacks in complexity and potentiality, her characterization is simplified to being a man in women’s clothing. In this scene, we can examine how the media acknowledges the queerness of the fat femme by replacing Miss Piggy for John Ritter, but this acknowledgment isn’t used to create visibility of queerness, transgender identity, or gender fluidity. Instead, this scene is used as a visual gag to undermine the identity and presence of the fat femme in pop culture. Miss Piggy’s violent outburst and destruction of the set furthers this analysis. She exerts exaggerated strength in her blinding rage. Through Miss Piggy we can observe how the fat femme becomes a stereotypical caricature of fatness and false womanhood by the media who, at the time, was unable to fully conceptualize this type of character within the limits of sexist binary and fat phobic narrative.
It’s important to shed light on Miss Piggy as a cultural reproduction of the fat femme because she is one of the first of this type of character to be seen, historically revisited, and actualized. Although her character lacks in complexity, her aesthetic (muppet body) and character traits, leads to other formulations and potentiality for how the fat femme could be reproduced in animation.
Back to Black: Mammy Two-Shoes and 'Scrub Me Mama with a Boogie Beat'
Miss Piggy, although a signature character in establishing the historiography of the fat femme, aesthetically presents as a white woman. She is a pig personified as a human woman, but her platinum blonde Hair, white complexion, and blue eyes signify to the audience that she is racialized as such. It’s important to highlight this factor because racialization plays an important part in how the aesthetic presentation and racial context of the fat femme is used in different cartoons. An example of this can be seen in the now-banned cartoon, “Scrub Me Mama with a Boogie Beat.”7 The cartoon takes place in the rural south where black people are depicted as lazy, unmotivated, and living in abject states of poverty. The physical features of the characters take on traits of blackface (theatrical makeup made famous in minstrels shows during the Jim Crow era) by having dark skin, excessively big noses, and pronounced lips. The most notable transition is when a light-skinned, thin black woman hops off a fairy boat from Harlem, and ignites the people of the town to become more active. When she hops off the boat, she sashays in front of the men who lay lazily on the dirt road. Their jaws drop and their eyes become enlarged, signaling their sexual attraction towards her. Shortly after this interaction, she makes her way towards a fat black woman who is scrubbing clothes in a washtub. The woman is stereotyped as a “mammy figure” against the thin woman who is stereotyped as a “jezebel.” The thin black woman confronts the fat black woman, and states to her that she isn’t washing the clothes correctly because she doesn’t have rhythm, to which the fat woman stumbles in response with a voice that is clearly done by a male, “wh--wh--wh--whaaaat do you all mean rhythm?” The thin black woman chuckles and proceeds to lead the entire town into the song “Boogie Beat,” resulting in them becoming more productive and upbeat as a result of her presence
and guidance.
This episode is significant to note in the historiography of the fat femme, because thinness is racialized as sexually desirable, proactive, motivating, productive and correlated with its proximity to whiteness while fatness is racialized as sexually undesirable, lazy, ignorant, incoherent, manly, and correlated with its proximity to blackness. According to Sabrina Strings’ book Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia, this phenomenon stems from the construction of solidifying the body as text made famous by “race scientists' ' as early as the 1600’s. She signifies that the appearance of Sarah Baartman (a.k.a “The Hottentot Venus”), a Khoisan woman whose enlarged body (specifically her buttocks, breasts, and belly) was paraded around for European high society in the 1800s, as the major player in racializing thinness to whiteness and fatness
to blackness.
She writes:
But perhaps the most important factor in the reinvention of the Hottentot from slender to stout was the encounter with and subsequent exhibition by the English of a presumed archetype of Hottentot female beauty. Her presence as a symbol of black femininity helped transform the image of the Hottentot from thin to fat. It also helped make fatness intrinsically black, and implicitly off-putting, a form of feminine embodiment in the European scientific and popular imagination.8
With this in mind, “Scrub Me Mama with a Boogie Beat” is simply one example of the ways in which fatness became racialized as blackness in the imagination of popular cartoons in America by the 1900s. Arguably, the most famous example is Mammy Two-Shoes from Tom and Jerry. From 1940–1952, the character Mammy Two-Shoes was depicted as a middle-aged black woman who was the housemaid within the house where Tom the cat and Jerry the mouse would famously chase each other around. Her face was never shown, but her large body (mainly the buttocks, breasts, and belly) and southern voice were most apparent on screen.
The escapades of Tom and Jerry often resulted in the house being completely trashed, which resulted in the presence of Mammy Two-Shoes. Notably, anytime she was on screen, Tom and Jerry were terrified. She was depicted as being reckless, loud, and aggressive, often causing more damage to the house. Anytime the animals interacted with her body, it was always with her buttocks while she faced away from the audience. Here, like Miss Piggy, we have a fat femme who has power to frighten and wreak havoc, but not enough to generate her own desire. On the one hand, her rage is energizing, but on the other, it plays into stereotypical racist and sexist ideologies.
It’s important to make this correlation within the historiography of the fat femme, because racialization within cartoons often leads to ostracization of their character’s body and narrative arc. The fat femme’s body and narrative, early in its construction and use, was a canvas for eurocentric beauty ideals and standards to be reinforced in the popular imagination.
Lumpy Space Princess Breaks the Rules
Lumpy Space Princess (LSP) is one of the most absurd, yet complex characters in animation history. Adventure Time, which debuted in 2008 on Cartoon Network, was created by Pendleton Ward who also voices her character. Set in a post-apocalyptic version of Earth 1000 years after a nuclear holocaust called “the Mushroom Wars,” Lumpy Space Princess is the byproduct and evolution of the atmosphere coming to life due to nuclear genetic mutations, and formulating its own society called “Lumpy Space.” As Pendleton Ward is the creator of the show and voice actor for Lumpy Space Princess, he has explicitly discussed how her character was developed. On the “The Grunge,” a YouTube channel and blog that provides fun facts in the history of entertainment, science, and popular culture, their article about Adventure Time best describes the characteristics of Lumpy Space Princess:
This unconventional character is a constant outsider, having been kicked out of her parent’s house in their dimension, and being shunned by the other Princesses in [the Land of] Ooo. From time to time, the character lives homeless in the woods, and stoops to terrorizing villagers for food when necessary. All of which makes it interesting that Ward, who has been described as quiet and shy, admitted that he identifies closely with this character who is constantly ostracized, lonely, and misunderstood.9
We can see how the inception of Lumpy Princess was intended to align with Ward’s own feelings of queerness, and I believe that making her body and gender presentation inherently adverse within the normative structures of the Land of Ooo was an essential strategy when producing her aesthetic value and creating her plot throughout the series. Lumpy Space Princess is racialized in a very specific way and that this racialization lends to her queerness. In the context of Adventure Time, the characterizations of what consists of race are different, but race within this imaginable playground isn’t erased. In her fat aesthetic presentation, Lumpy Space Princess’s lack of legs, ability to float, distinct purple color (alluding to a different racial presentation, because she is not from the Land of Ooo, but from the atmosphere of the Earth), and lumps provides characteristics that are inherently different from the other princesses; causing them to “other” her by denying visibility and full autonomy within the law making, official proceedings, and social normalities of the princess gatherings.
In Season Six, the episode titled “Princess Day” truly highlights the level of ostracization that Lumpy Space Princess endures from the other princesses in the Land of Ooo.10 At the start of the episode, all of the princesses hold a council meeting in the Breakfast Kingdom led by Breakfast Princess. Although the body of Breakfast Princess consists of various breakfast dishes such as bacon, eggs, and toast, she aesthetically presents as being blond-haired and blue-eyed. Her personality is pristine and official as she conducts “official business affairs,” leading the princesses’ council meeting. Breakfast Princess’s aesthetic presentation and character traits are important because as the episode develops they are seen as traditional when contrasted against Lumpy Space Princess. This contrast further paints her as a misfit by way of presentation to the other princesses while maintaining her outsider status by the physical proximity of her kingdom to Ooo, far away in the Lumpy Space dimension of Earth’s atmosphere.
While the princesses are arguing about resources, getting into menial debates, and increasingly reprimanding each other, Lumpy Space Princess decides she’s heard enough and has an emotional outburst that stops the procession of Princess Day, claiming that she is “bored out of her mind.” In response to Lumpy Space Princess’s outcry, Breakfast Princess says, “Lumpy Space Princess, I’m afraid you’ll have to be patient with us in our petty disputes. Not all of us have achieved the self-sufficiency that I assume you have in your kingdom. Oh wait, that’s right, you don’t have a kingdom! You live in a box in the woods![...] Sorry LSP, but the chair only recognizes real princesses, not bums. Am I right girls?” In this moment, Lumpy Space Princess is denied social acceptance by Breakfast Princess. None of the other princesses stand up to defend her because she is considered a racial outlier.
In response to her othering, Lumpy Space Princess retaliates and specifically uses food to make her presence known. She then yells at the other princesses, “I wasn’t invited! I’m crashing, and I already ate a bunch of your food! [while flailing her big belly around] Whatchu going to do about it, Princess Egg Breath?” Breakfast Princess orders her guards to remove Lumpy Space Princess from the kingdom, but right before they grab her, she yells out “Don’t touch me!” and subsequently begins swallowing an entire bowl of chips before violently exiting the conference room. The use of food to reinforce her fatness becomes a weapon for Lumpy Space Princess to take a stance against her subsidiary positionality within the kingdom, a position further reified and realized by Breakfast Princess’s treatment. I argue that Lumpy Space Princess can be read as the racialized other, because she is viewed as a refugee within the Land of Ooo, looked down upon for not adhering and valuing the traditions and customs held by the other princesses. Her lack of financial autonomy, social autonomy, and houselessness reinforces this comparison. Lumpy Space Princess’s actions become that of rebellion. Instead of gaining acceptance, she uses the consumption of food, inappropriate gestures, and insults to dismiss the norms of the majority. Within the context of The Land of Ooo, Breakfast Princess is representative of thin, white positionality—the positionality of those whose presence is in charge of dictating who can or cannot be a princess, and what the appropriate qualifications are to hold the title. By virtue of her racial and aesthetic difference and less distinctly through her behavior, Lumpy Space Princess is clearly denied the privileges allotted to the other princesses. Subsequently, she performs in a way that rejects this narrative realizing that she was never meant to fit into the role of a proper princess in the first place. Unlike Miss Piggy, the consumption of food by Lumpy Space Princess is used to express anger and frustration towards the normative structures imposed upon the fat femme within the racialized structures. When Lumpy Space Princess challenges Breakfast Princess by grabbing her belly and claiming that she has overeaten, it is seen as a break from the traditional representations of the fat femme, because food is used to give autonomy in a situation where she inherently remains weakened by structures and situations that make claim to her imposed inferiority.
In the context of Adventure Time, the fat femme is still acknowledged as adverse and othered within a racialized lens through fatness and queerness, but through Lumpy Space Princess, that fat femme is given more space as the protagonist to explore the patriarchal structures that procure her to have feelings and complex reactions to her placement. Unlike Miss Piggy and Mammy Two-Shoes, who are seen as caricatures of the fat femme, Lumpy Space Princess is given an emotional landscape to express her feelings and desires. Though this expression doesn’t change her positionality, audiences of the late 2000’s were more apt to empathize with her situation and reflect on their own feelings of queerness and race revealed by the structures imposed upon her character. The fat femme, as embodied by Lumpy Space Princess, is used as a catharsis of societal fears around fatness, racialization, and queerness.
Lumpy Space Princess is unique as the fat femme. In the ten seasons of the show, her character transitions from being insecure and misunderstood to autonomous and respected. By the series finale, she saved the entire Land of Ooo (due to her lumps being the antidote to a elemental virus that left everyone sick and zombie-like), found love with Lemongrab (another queer character misunderstood by the inhabitants of the land), was crowned as the official queen of the Lumpy Space Kingdom, and formed kinship with the most important princesses of the show, Marceline the Vampire and Princess Bubblegum (who are in a lesbian relationship). Noting how her character gains more autonomy throughout the show is crucial because this trajectory reflects how the fat femme is gaining visibility within our current culture. Lumpy Space Princess is an absolute fan favorite of Adventure Time. Her image is massively marketed through clothing merchandise, toys, and other accessories, and she is often a character that is reproduced through cosplay at popular comic and zine conventions. There is an overwhelming interest in her character, because she is representative of the diversity in body presentation, transness, and gender fluidity of which our current culture is examining and taking value. She is inspirational because her character never gives in to being anything but herself. Her character is indicative of an independent spirit, exemplifying how we should value individualism and the freedom to be oneself despite the traditional heteropatriarchal rhetoric that pushes against it.
Amethyst as The New Normal
Steven Universe is another Cartoon Network hit that debuted in 2013. Created by Rebecca Sugar, who was a storyboard artist and writer for Adventure Time. The show was widely successful, and was notable for its time as it was one of the first animated series that explicitly intersected themes of science fiction and the LGBTQ community. The series protagonist, Steven Universe, is a young boy raised by three magical femmes from outer space called the “Crystal Gems.” Similarly to how the physical and energetic properties of gemstones are identified here on Earth, Sugar personifies the gem characters to represent different types of personalities, appearances, and roles throughout the duration of the show; each gem taking on varied styles of speech, values, superpowers, and shapes. The main Crystal Gems consist of Pearl, Garnet, Steven, and Amethyst, and they are warriors who protect Earth from the oppressive tyranny of their original homeworld, rebelling against an oppressive class system (based on the functionality and roles perpetuated by the Gems) enforced by the rulers of their home planet. Each character is unique, but when considering how the fat femme is constructed within this narrative, we must consider the characteristics and aesthetic presentation of Amethyst, and the subsequent characters that are created when two or more of the Crystal Gems fuse together with her.
Amethyst is notable as the fat femme because she is distinct in body presentation, personality, and origin from Pearl and Garnet. In comparison to the other Crystal Gems, Amethyst is short, chubby, and has the ability to morph her body into different shapes and figures. She is also the byproduct of the “Prime Kindergarten,” a geo-weapons project that was created by the character Blue Diamond (one of the highest-ranking Gems and rulers of homeworld) that was designed to foster a cluster of Gems to destroy life on Earth. Because Amethyst isn’t from the homeworld like Garnet or Pearl, and has a dark origin as a gem from the Kindergarten (from which she suffered harsh physical and verbal abuse), she often has feelings of inadequacy and self-loathing. Subsequently, she connects more with a much-younger Steven, who also has no recollection of homeworld because he is half-human and half-Gem. These feelings of inadequacy and self-loathing are most noticeable when Amethyst’s body fails to perform and protect the people she loves. When she isn’t at an emotional low, she is vibrant, carefree, and has an intense sense of humor that makes her endearing and loveable, albeit immature at times.
In Season 3, in an episode entitled “Steven vs. Amethyst,” we get a true glimpse of how this self-deprecation plays out in Amethyst’s character.11 In the prior episode, Amethyst loses in battle against Jasper, a gem who is a bounty hunter from the homeworld trying to kidnap Steven. After Amethyst has been defeated, Steven temporarily defeats Jasper by forming a fusion with his friend Connie.12 It is Amethyst’s failure to effectively protect Steven that leads her into a depressive spiral. Following this event, we can examine how she is depressed by the way she interacts with and consumes food. The initial signs of her depression begin after Pearl and Garnet praise Steven for defeating Jasper. As Pearl is speaking to Steven about more training, Amethyst throws a series of eggs from the carton into the sink, and turns on the garbage disposal. When Steven approaches her and asks if she would like to join in watching his training, she responds in a low and dismissive manner with, “I can’t. I’m busy making an egg salad.” The abnormality of her behavior with the eggs is important to note, because we see how food is being used by Amethyst to express her feelings of failure. She doesn’t explicitly state that she is sad, but Steven and the audience understand this because of the ways in which she interacts with the eggs.
This use of food, as an inverted and implicit signaling of how she feels, allows the audience to understand that Amethyst has the autonomy to express herself and to consume food in ways that aren't initiated by her fatness. In this instance, she doesn’t interact with the eggs because she is fat—she interacts with the eggs because she has complex feelings that are connected to and invested in how her body performs. Later in the episode, after she loses in a mock battle to Steven during a training session, her depression spirals even further. Once again, we know this because of the implicit signaling provided to us through her consumption of food.
After the training session, she sits beside the sink and swallows a handful of mayonnaise straight from the jar. We see this through Steven’s perspective, showing concern for her well-being and inviting her to play video games. This is a unique moment in the narrative of the fat femme because the consumption of food isn’t used to legitimize stereotypes of overeating or lack of exercise.Instead, this scene is used to express how different bodies cope with stress. This shift in representation humanizes the fat femme within the narrative structure and elucidates that she is visible to the audience as inherently complex and worthy of care and protection. I argue that this is a major shift in the characterization of the fat femme and contend that it paves a new way to interpret how fat bodies can be acknowledged and honored within narrative structures. In this instance, food becomes the catalyst to inscribe a new set of understandings and relatability to the fat femme, transitioning her queerness from othering, (as seen with Miss Piggy and Lumpy Space Princess) into a potentiality for gaining insight into her physical and emotional realities.
Fusing bodies amongst the Crystal Gems is the most exciting thing to watch in Steven Universe. When the Gems fuse bodies, they also fuse their personalities and characteristics, creating anticipation for the audience to see how the various fusions will perform and look. Both Amethyst’s fusions with Garnet and Pearl are essential to the performative value of the fat femme. Sugilite, the character created from her fusion with Garnet, is highly praised by Steven for her colossal size and immense strength. Though she is a little volatile, having a hard time adhering to rules and becoming distracted often by quests for power and autonomy, she is valued for her ability to perform powerfully and unrelentingly in battle.
Opal, the character created from her fusion with Pearl, is regarded for having a sense of peace and is praised for her intense protection of Steven. Because Amethyst and Pearl are opposites in both their aesthetic presentation and character traits, (Pearl being tall, skinny, and immaculate versus Amethyst who is short, fat, and carefree) Opal rarely takes form. Although this is true within the series, Opal is regarded as a “giant woman” by Steven, because of her statuesque physique, acrobatic fighting techniques, and mild-mannered attitude. In the episode where Opal first appears, Steven sings an entire song about Opal praising her size. We can see through Steven’s admiration for both Sugilite and Opal, how the fat femme is being given varying body aesthetics in which to appear in and perform. Through Steven, the audience is privy to experiencing how the fat femme transcends stereotypical body politics and narratives. The show thus suggests an endless potential of how fat bodies can be seen and what they can do.
The most interesting fusion in which Amethyst participates is the fusion that occurs between her and Steven When the pair accidentally fuse in the final battle against Jasper to become Smoky Quartz, we can examine how the fat femme is expressed through an identity that is genderfluid. In Season 4, in an episode entitled “Know Your Fusion,” Smoky Quartz interacts with Sardonyx, a character created from the fusion between Garnet and Pearl. Sardonyx is so ecstatic to meet Smoky Quartz that she invites them into a room within the Gem magical temple that is especially made for Sardonyx. When Smoky Quartz is invited into the room by Sardonyx, Sardonyx explicitly states, “It exists as long as I exist.” This crucial point in the episode alludes to Sardonyx’s investment in the importance of
identity construction.
Once in the room, Sardonyx creates an environment that is indicative of a late-night talk show called “Sardonyx Tonight,” of which Sardonyx is the host and Smoky Quartz is the guest. The “show” is viewed by an imaginary audience that is prompted by Sardonyx, made evident through a series of laugh tracks. Sardonyx begins to ask Smoky Quartz a series of questions about how they defeated Jasper, but after Smoky Quartz details their victory, Sardonyx wants to know more. She asks them, “But Smoky, I think, what we really want to know is who are you? Who is...Smoky...Quartz?” Once again, we can examine how Sardonyx, in her quest to connect with Smoky Quartz, becomes incessant with their identity construction to facilitate a way to understand them. Smoky’s response to Sardonyx’s prodding is most interesting. They respond with “Uh, well, between the fight and now, yeah, I’ve really only existed for about 10 minutes, so uh...I—I don’t know.” This interaction between Sardonyx and Smoky Quartz is essential to my examination of how the fat femme within this narrative structure may be used to shed light on the complexity surrounding gender identity construction.
I’m inevitably drawn here to Judith Butler’s “Imitation and Gender Insubordination,” which argues how claiming a specific identity leaves the individual constrained to a specific performance,excluding the possibility of enacting alternative forms of identity. Butler writes:
For if the “I” is a site of repetition, that is, if the “I” only achieves the semblance of identity through a certain repetition of itself, then the I is always displaced by the very repetition that sustains it. In other words, does or can the “I” ever repeat itself, cite itself, faithfully, or is there always from its former moment that establishes the permanently non-self-identical status of that “I” or its “being lesbian?”13
Through this theoretical lens, we can examine how Sardonyx is imposing upon Smoky Quartz the need to categorize themselves to give voice and shape to the “I” that results from their new existence. By prodding them to construct their identity, Sardonyx investigates what they can do in terms of battle. This is consistent throughout the episode as Sardonyx pressuresSmoky Quartz to perform in a series of tasks indicative of things the other fusions can do. Most notably, Smoky Quartz cannot perform any of these tasks, and when they fail in their attempts, they jokingly say towards the imaginative audience, “They say two wrongs don’t make a right, and I guess, I’m living proof that that’s true. I’m just one big super wrong, good for nothing, dud with a yo-yo!” It is at this moment that Sardonyx realizes her error in imposing upon Smoky Quartz the need to come up with a definitive “I.” In her comparisons of Smoky Quartz to the other fusions, she remained ignorant to the potentiality of what Smoky Quartz could do and who they could be. When she acknowledges her error, this creates an emotional disruption, causing her to unfuse back into Pearl and Garnet. Because the room only existed while Sardonyx existed, the room begins to collapse upon itself. Smoky Quartz senses the danger and saves the two Gems with their weapon, a yo-yo.
Here the audience can see how the collapsing room that resulted from Sardonyx’s unfusing, is an apt analogy for the disruption in claiming gender binaries. Through Smoky Quartz, the fat femme is able to assume and perform a stance of gender fluidity and transness that doesn’t have to answer to an authoritative figure that assumes gender binaries are essential in determining one’s identity. When Smoky Quartz claims “I don’t know” to being asked who they are, it legitimizes a freedom for the fat femme to determine who she is, and as consequence, opens up an endless portal of possibilities of what they can do. This episode is crucial to the formulation of the fat femme because it generates a pathway for how this character can maintain complexity without being stereotyped, exploited, or misrepresented within the narrative structure. When the fat femme refuses to claim a definitive “I,” she deconstructs assumed biases established by pre-existing narratives, creating space to begin imagining something new.
A New Saga: The Journey within Imagination through Queer Futurity
The imagination is the only space that has the potential to transcend the racial, economical, social, and cultural temporal landscape of the American construct. My identity will always be tied into American ideologies that facilitate my (lack of) power based on my aesthetic, racial, and economical background—an identity viewed as subordinate and historically underrepresented in the popular imagination. But through cartoons, there is time and potential towards imagining and re-imagining the possibilities of multiple, diverse, equitable and recognizable representations of the fat femme. I take this notion from José Estaban Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (Sexual Cultures), which implicitly states that queerness isn’t a final destination, but a state of potential that is worked within through praxis. Muñoz writes:
It is equally polemical to argue that we are not quite queer yet, that queerness, what we will really be known as queerness, does not exist yet. I suggest that we hold queerness in a sort of ontologically humble state, under a conceptual grid in which we do not claim to always already know queerness in the world, potentially staves off the ossifying effects of neoliberal ideology and the degradation of politics brought about by representations of queerness in contemporary popular culture.14
Based on the ideology of Muñoz’s queer futurity, the fat femme in animation, being fully autonomous, actualized, empowered, nuanced and complex, hasn’t even arrived yet. In examining each of these characters, I’ve come to realize that they are simply an iteration towards a potentiality that can only be manifested in an imaginable future. This leaves me with hope. Creating and seeking non-stereotyped and nuanced representation is something that marginalized groups have actively fought for throughout American history, but in understanding that this fight isn’t a means to an end, I can imagine that the historiography of the fat femme doesn’t end here. For the fat femme in animation, the possibilites are endless, and her journey towards equitable representation is barely beginning
ENDNOTES
1. Joan Nestle, “Interview: Joan Nestle: A Fem Relects on Four Decades of Lesbian Self—Expression,” interview by carol anne douglas and amy hamilton, Off Our Backs 23, no. 8 (1993): 2–18. http://www.jstor.org/ stable/20834527.
2. Tre’vell Anderson, “This Documentarian Is Fighting Back against Gay Culture’s ‘No Fats, No Femmes’ Mantra,” The Los Angeles Times, May 2, 2016, https://www. latimes.com/entertainment/movies/moviesnow/ la-et-mn-0430-no-fats-no-femmes-feature-story. html.
3. Cecilia Hartley, “Letting Ourselves Go,” in The Politics of Women’s Bodies: Sexuality, Appearance, and Behavior (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 65.
4. The Fantastic Miss Piggy Show, directed by Jim Henson, featuring Frank Oz, John Ritter, George Hamilton, aired September 17, 1982, in broadcast syndication. https://youtu.be/GV4_wLfbN-A
5. JuliaGrace Jester, “Placing Fat Women on Center Stage,” in Fat Studies Reader (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 249.
6.Jester, 250
7.“Scrub Me Mama with a Boogie Beat,” directed by Walter Lantzer (1941, Universal Pictures), video, 6:51, https://youtu.be/UacUR7bPnMM
8.Sabrina Strings, Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia (New York, New York University Press, 2019), 89.
9.Chris Snellgrove and Brian Boone, “The Untold Truth Of Adventure Time,” The Grunge, last updated Feb. 7, 2022, https://www.grunge.com/64714/
untold-truth-adventure-time/.
10. Adventure Time, season 6, episode 14, “Princess Day.” Directed by Bong Hee Han, written by Seo Kim and Somvilay Xayaphone. Aired July 31, 2014 in broadcast syndication, https://www. hulu.com/series/adventure-time-d072c7a0- 5570-45bd-80fb-227ff42aca49.
11. Steven Universe, season 3, episode 19, “Steven vs. Amethyst.”
Directed by Kat Morris, written by Hilary Florido and Jesse Zuke. Aired Aug. 3, 2016 in broadcast syndication, https://www. hulu.com/series/steven-universe-73e1e605- f760-470c-9a58-0148abe73270.
12. Steven Universe, season 3, episode 18, “Crack the Whip.” Directed
by Kat Morris, written by Raven Molisee and Paul Villeco. Aired Aug. 2, 2016 in broadcast syndication, https://www.hulu. com/series/steven-universe-73e1e605-f760- 470c-9a58-0148abe73270.
13. Judith Butler, “Imitation and Gender Insubordination,” in The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends, edited by David H. Richter (New York: Bedford St Martin’s, Macmillan Learning, 2016), 1711.
14. José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: NYU Press, 2009), 22..ENDNOTES
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