My Stomach is Flat* (The “L” is Silent): A Liberative Body Hermeneutic

            In her book Fat Church, Rev. Dr. Anastasia E. B. Kidd opens by naming the ways in which humans from marginalized groups, specifically marginalized Christian humans, have come together to liberate themselves, or begin the process of liberation, citing such groups as the LGBTQIA+ community. Kidd proceeds to invite her readers to an anti-paternalism party beginning with “‘people who struggle with their weight’ in whatever form that takes” (Kidd, i). Kidd continues by inviting “any folks whose bodies are deemed ‘other’ in society, because the struggle for fat liberation is necessarily concerned with your liberation, as well. Fat liberation cannot happen without ending the racialization, ageism, sexism, poverty, patriarchy, and capitalist hierarchy of ‘productive bodies’”. (Kidd, ii) In this way, Kidd’s work continues by employing a feminist, interdisciplinary methodology to engage the ways in which the Church has been complicit in perpetuating fatphobia historically, as well as how it continues to do so today. 

            In addition to Kidd’s arguments, Dr. Hannah Bacon, in her article published in Religions (2023, 14, 696) titled, Embodying a Different Word about Fat: The need for Critical Feminist Theologies of Fat Liberation, rightly asserts, “Christian theology has protected itself from the contaminating touch of fat by refusing to engage in honest ‘fat talk’. This is alarming given the way fat phobia and weight-based stigma are destroying the lives of multitudes of people across the globe, especially women, contributing to a range of intersecting inequalities including economic, sexuality, and race disparities.” (Bacon, 1) Bacon continues to denote the alarming absence of fat from within the liberation theology subthemes, especially naming feminist theologies, as fat is traditionally gendered and adversely impacts women in far greater numbers than men. (Bacon, 2) 

            Kidd and Bacon, when taken together, are making critical feminist theological advances toward both the dismantling of paternalistic systems that continue to keep women—especially fat women—of all intersectionalities, under bodily control, as well as calling for feminist theologians and the Christian Church to take up the mantle of fat liberation or opening the Gospel wider. Bacon succinctly writes, “liberation theologies have not connected the good news of the gospel to revolt against the oppressive social systems of sizeism, but the task could not be more urgent.” (Bacon, 4)

            In this paper, I engage the work of fat liberation theology through an interdisciplinary approach. The primary work of fat liberation theology is to free all bodies from oppression based on size, as well as corollary intersectionalities. However, when considering liberative theologies, it becomes critical to engage Scripture as a source. Thus, this paper proposes a new hermeneutical lens—a lens that gives primacy to the form of the body—as a means of understanding the will of God toward all bodies, but specifically fat bodies. A Liberative Body Hermeneutic is, quite frankly, as straightforward as it sounds. It is a reading of Scripture that prioritizes the form of the human body—where, how, and what Christian Sacred Texts have to say, or ignore, about the size of each human’s body—to liberate fat people from the shame implemented by the white supremacist, capitalist, patriarchal systems of Western society maintained by the Church. 

            To formulate this new hermeneutic, an interwoven framework of extant methodologies will be used. First, feminist biblical criticism will be employed as the primary method of interpretation. To this end, within a broad feminist biblical interpretation, many different hermeneutical approaches will be employed—those of suspicion, domination and social location, experience, critical evaluation, and creative imagination—and used circularly to inform one another.

Second, this Liberative Body Hermeneutic aims to not only provide a new lens from which to read the biblical text, but to propel forward the theological scholarship around bodies. Thus, a liberation theology framework will also be employed as texts are engaged. This project seeks to encourage the intertwining of feminist biblical interpretation and liberation theology as each of these is always engaged for or against the oppressed which ultimately encourages non-persons (to use an expression of Gustavo Gutiérrez) to be subjects of interpretation and historical agents of change. 

Additionally, an ethical hermeneutic is intended, which then informs an ethical interpretation. This means to communicate that the biblical text itself is intended to be taken seriously—understood in its context, with regard for responsible scholarly interpretation—as well as recognizing the contemporary world in which its interpretation will be discerned and comprehended.

Thus, I will conclude my paper by employing the newly developed hermeneutic and applying it directly to the text to offer a new reading and understanding toward the goal of advancing fat liberation theology, with a more robust understanding of, and engagement with the biblical text as a result. This promises to give fat people, as well as anyone living in a body, a new understanding of how God understands the human form.