Fat, so we are told, is a feminist issue. We live in a society obsessed with body image. Women who don’t fit the rather restrictive mould are offered an array of options in the form of the Atkins, the Dukan, slimming pills. Being fat is a choice, and those who take it are fair game for slim society’s disapproval and ridicule.
In the intro to Selina Thompson’s Chewing the Fat she references Susie Orbach’s “Fat is a Feminist Issue” in conversation with the audience. All of the truisms above are invoked, and it seems we’re likely settling in for an evening of polemic around body image.
Refreshingly, Thompson doesn’t take the road well travelled on this topic. She’s fat, she tell us from the outset. The obvious next move would be to tell us she’s proud – instead, Thompson takes us on an hour long journey through her relationship with her weight, her body and food. The full picture that emerges is not proud, nor ashamed, but conflicted.
The show takes the form of a monologue furnished with props including a stocked fridge, a rice pudding piñata, a set of scales and what must be an entire craft shop’s supply of glitter. It’s disarmingly confessional, with Thompson’s likeable and often very funny delivery as a Trojan horse for some uncomfortable truths about herself, her weight and our own perceptions and judgements.
It’s easy enough to conjure empathy and understanding in response to a carefully pitched and delivered story of struggles with compulsive eating as a child, teen and adult. It’s hard to maintain those same feelings, let alone watch, when confronted with the sight of the same woman cross legged in front of a fridge stuffing fistfuls of chicken into her mouth. It’s a disturbing and powerful image, throwing into relief the tension between “body proud” statements and the disgust that’s impossible to switch off when confronted with a version of the reality behind them.
Thompson acknowledges this and apologises to us after the scene, before sending Kit Kats around to the whole audience to “make us feel better”. It’s a neat trick, a light hearted way of making us all complicit.
It’s through tricks like these that Thompson avoids the easy polemic route in this piece, and it’s all the better for it. There’s no real message here: no judgements, no comfort and no moralising. Just an honest and unflinching study of one woman’s relationship with her body.