“My body is the universe!”: expansive fat presence in contemporary Indigenous literature
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Not enough critical and creative work focuses on fat bodies and expansive fat presence in contemporary literature by Indigenous people. In the personal narrative “Desirability as Access: Navigating life at the intersection of fat, Black, dark and female” from The Routledge International Handbook of Fat Studies, after sharing the joys and pains of her lived experiences, Nomonde Mxhalisa surmises: “You have to believe in your own magic; in your own wildness; in your own wanton wonderfulness” (2021, p. 209). Drawing on Mxhalisa’s first-person call for “magic, wildness and wanton wonderfulness,” this essay reads Indigenous fatness through personal narratives of fat, Indigenous expression regarding the textile banner “WHENUA” by Marama Salsano (Ngāi Tūhoe, Te Aitanga-a-Māhaki, Ngāti Porou, Ngāti Wairere). The essay then traces fatness and defiance in the poem “Fat Queer Colony” by Andrew Farrell (Wodi Wodi) and in the poem “Big Fat Brown Bitch 1” from the collection Big Fat Brown Bitch by Samoan writer Tusiata Avia, before contemplating human and beyond-human fat presence in the short story “Maggie Sue” by Chelsea Vowel (Métis). By bringing together contemporary Indigenous literature in different literary forms from across the world, this essay celebrates the “magic, wild, wanton wonderfulness” of expansive fatness, and simultaneously seeks to expand the waistline of critical and creative writing about fat Indigenous bodies in creative and literary studies.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".