Obesity and the Representation of the Male Body in American Literature

Locating representations of the male body in literature has traditionally proven more difficult than tracing representations of the female body, which have been extensively theorized since the emergence of feminist criticism in the 1970s. This paper examines the representation of the obese male body in contemporary American literature, focusing on Louis Gallo’s long poem “Fat Man at the Aquarium” alongside Raymond Carver’s short story “Fat.” While obesity is frequently framed within cultural discourse as abnormal or aberrant, this study explores how literary form mediates such judgments. Through a comparative analysis, the paper argues that Carver’s minimalist narrative contains bodily difference through restraint and exteriorization, whereas Gallo’s poem radicalizes the gaze, transforming the obese male body into a site of anxiety, projection, and symbolic violence. Read together, these texts illuminate how regimes of bodily normativity shape the visibility, interpretation, and dehumanization of the obese male body in modern American culture.