In the early days of the coronavirus quarantine, my Facebook feed was inundated with postings about the effects of both---Covid and the quarantine----on jobs, on health, on social connection. The fear was palpable. Amidst all the headlines and dire information, another thread appeared---about the bodies that would be produced during months of inactivity and nervous snacking. One was a chubby dog, clad in green bikini bottoms: Due to coronavirus my summer body will be postponed until 2021. Thank you for understanding. Another showed Batman grown large, a hairy belly hanging over a too tight yellow waistband. In yet another, captioned in both Italian and English, we see a buff, swaggering man dancing erotically; after the quarantine we see him fattened, his proud stance looking goofy. There was a separate thread of Barbie dolls, blonde hair, and pink dresses, the before slender with a tiny waist and perky breasts---the after a doll with a double chin and droopy chest. And one showed a woman pulling up a pair of jeans: When none of your jeans fit after being quarantined so now you have thigh high boots. I imagine people posted these memes to encourage a moment of laughter, imagining that a bit of fat shaming would ease the burden of a tremendously frightening period. But they also illuminate a pulsating cultural anxiety about fatness. Indeed, in these memes, the dread of a fattened body scurries alongside other fears---of lost jobs and evictions, of groceries hard to get, of air that carries dangerous particles, of unknown futures, of mortality. Even in this moment of danger, fat looms big. Indeed, in these memes fat marks death---both physical morbidity associated with obesity, and also social death, the becoming of an abhorrent body, a monster body, embarrassing and too much. And so much of that social death is connected to the way fatness messes up gender. Batman is no longer buff and masculine, but soft and hairy. The dancing man is no longer erotically seductive; he is goofy and embarrassing. The Barbie doll's double chin has cancelled her femininity; she looks silly in that precious pink dress. And the idea of awkwardly donned non-fitting jeans as sexually charged thigh boots is absurd. These newly fat bodies all do gender wrong.

Farrell, Amy Erdman. Connecting Gender and Fat: Feminism, Intersectionality, and Stigma. In The Contemporary Reader of Gender and Fat Studies, edited by Amy Erdman Farrell, 3-16. New York, NY: Routledge, 2023.

This is an Open Access publication made available under the Creative Commons [Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND)] 4.0 license. : http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.

Amy Farrell is a professor of American Studies and Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Dickinson College.

This published version is made available on Dickinson Scholar with the permission of the publisher. For more information on the published version, visit Routledge's Website. https://www.routledge.com/The-Contemporary-Reader-of-Gender-and-Fat-Studies/Farrell/p/book/9780367691684