When Our Lips Speak Together Analysis

“If we continue to speak in this sameness, speak as men have spoken for centuries, we will fail each other” (Irigaray & Burke, 1980, p. 69)

This is a quote from feminist writer Luce Irigaray’s When Our Lips Speak Together, an essay that attempts to re-appropriate the female body by deconstructing the patriarchal language that has been projected onto it for centuries. It overlies artist Jenny Saville’s Propped (Figure 1) (Saville, 1992), a self-portrait in which she perches on a stool, her body heavily distorted, with expressive strokes of oranges and blues further emphasising the physical bulk and corpulence of her flesh. Whilst the title refers to her literal pose, it also alludes to the way in which her body is displayed as a ‘prop’, sustained

I begin with a brief overview of corpulence in history, explaining the fashion for thinness than has been perpetuated by medical science. The following sections then draw upon gender studies and the emerging field of fat studies to discuss how the fat body is a site of multiple converging discourses rather than solely a medical issue. Finally, I use social studies and epidemiological research to examine common assumptions and investigate weight-based discrimination in healthcare and the

Peter Paul Rubens in the late sixteenth century painted fleshy women so much that such body types are now referred to as ‘Rubenesque’ (Sweet, 2014). Many subsequent artists cited him as an influence on their own portrayals of fat bodies, for example Lucian Freud, whose contemporary nudes have been widely recognised as advancing societal views of the body. The realistic and uncompromising nature of his paintings have earnt him a place as one of the most celebrated modern portraitists (Button,