Missing Bodies: The Fat Child in _____

Juana Martinez-Neal and Mara Rockliff’s new book The Perfect Fit: How Lena “Lane” Bryant Changed the Shape of Fashion is a nonfiction picturebook that tells the story of the woman that birthed arguably the most prolific plus size clothing franchise in existence today. It is a book that encourages its readers to recognize needs, and fill them where they arise, and emphasizes the entrepreneurial spirit of its protagonist. While the existence of the book is something to be celebrated, it is a story exclusively about adults, which places it firmly in the tradition of fat picturebooks, namely, a tradition that avoids depicting fat children in favor of adults and occasionally animals.

As Warnqvist and Österlund point out “the strategy of avoiding fat children and instead using anthropomorphization and fat adult characters erases fat child bodies and renders them “missing bodies” (28). The fat child in picturebook is an almost nonexistent entity, with a few notable exceptions cropping up in recent years, such as Francis Discovers Possible by Ashley Latimer and illustrated by Shahrzad Maydani, Beautifully Me by Nabela Noor and illustrated by Nabi H. Ali, and Her Body Can by Katie Crenshaw and Ady Meschke, illustrated by Li Liu. However, these books are written to tackle body positivity and self-image. While that in and of itself is not a bad thing, it is not ideal for the entirety of a form’s canon to have only one narrative surrounding a protagonist existing in a marginalized body. Instead of allowing fat children to exist in picturebooks free of commentary on their bodies, they are replaced by lovable fat animals, or comically grotesque adults, or the rare celebrated adult, as Martinez-Neal depicts in her illustrations. Nina Christensen quotes John Stephens as saying “Picture books can, of course, exist for fun, but they can never be said to exist without either a socializing or educational intention, or else without a specific orientation towards the reality constructed by the society that produces them” (361). The necessary consequence of this statement being true is that picturebooks not only have the power to reflect reality, but also shape the perceived reality of their readers. Right now, picturebook readers are presented a society that is largely homogenous within the picturebooks they consume, and presented with fat children only as a part of a certain narrative. If this is the case, then what is the socializing or educational intention behind this reality?  

Works Cited

Christensen, Nina. “Picturebooks and Representations of Childhood.” The Routledge Companion to Picturebooks. Ed. Bettina Kummerling-Meibaurer. Routledge 2018

Martinez-Neal, Juana. The Perfect Fit: How Lena “Lane” Bryant Changed the Shape of Fashion. Written by Mara Rockliff. Clarion Books 2022.

Warnqvist, Åsa and Mia Österlund. “Depicting Fatness in Picturebooks: Fat Temporality in Malian Kivelä’s and Linda Bondestam’s Den ofantliga Rosabel and Andre Melee’s Kiosks.” Analize – Journal of Gender and Feminist Studies. Issue 16, 2021.

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