About Elena Levy-Navarro:

levye@uww.edu

Elena Levy-Navarro, Professor of English at University of Wisconsin—Whitewater, is author of The Culture of Obesity in Early and Late Modernity: Shakespeare, Jonson, Middleton, and Skelton (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008) and editor of the essay collection Historicizing Fat in Anglo-American Culture (Ohio State University Press, 2010). Her current work in progress explores how nineteenth-century conceptions of fat and thin bodies influence their understanding of the early modern period.

Articles by the author:

Boris Johnson’s Fat Body, Covid-19, and the War on Fat

Posted on by Elena Levy-Navarro

The “personal is the political,” a slogan of second-wave feminism, was also embraced by fat feminists in the 1960s and 70s. A founding member of the Fat Underground, a fat feminist liberation group, Vivian Mayer explained that they taught women to “relate ordinary ‘personal’ problems . . . to political injustices. The goal is to teach people how to support and encourage one another, and how to work together to change oppressive social relations” (xi).  In recent stories circulating around Boris Johnson’s (fat) body and his experience of COVID-19, the personal is political in a very different and problematic way. At the time of this writing, the United Kingdom has over 40,000 confirmed deaths related to the disease. The government’s…

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Will Power, or Reducing (Fat) Shakespeare

Posted on by Elena Levy-Navarro

Consider the photograph here of the half-length statue of Shakespeare on his funerary memorial in Trinity Church, Stratford, with the image of Shakespeare in popular culture, and especially Shakespeare as a young artist and lover in the 1998 blockbuster Shakespeare in Love.  Consider how unrecognizable the Shakespeare in the monument is, as Shakespeare, because Shakespeare is assumed to be youthful and thin. Nineteenth-century responses to the monument help us trace the development of a particularly toxic modern understanding of the fat and thin body, in which the fat body is seen as slow, slow-witted, and eventually prematurely aged, and the thin body is seen as vibrant, quick-witted, and young. As Shakespeare cannot be imagined as “fat,”, so too a fat…

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