A Black Feminist Study of Emotional Performativity of Fat Bodies in Rene Watson’s Skin and Bones

Abstract

This paper offers a Black feminist reading of emotional performativity in Renée Watson’s skin & bones (2024), arguing that the novel represents fat Black womanhood as an affective labor shaped by racialized fatphobia, respectability politics, and institutional care. Drawing on Sara Ahmed’s theorization of emotions as performative and circulating forces (affective economies), the study contends that Lena and her intimate circle are repeatedly positioned to perform socially acceptable emotions, gratitude, pleasantness, self-blame, and happiness, in order to be treated as legible, deserving, and safe within medical, commercial, and romantic spaces. At the same time, Watson’s narrative stages counter-performances of affect, anger, refusal, laughter, tenderness, and communal care, that reorient shame away from the body and toward the structures that stigmatize it. The study aims to map how emotions such as shame, disgust, fear attach to fat Black women’s bodies in the novel. Guided by close textual analysis and an intersectional framework informed by Black feminist and fat studies, the paper addresses two research questions: How does the novel depict the emotional regulation demanded of fat Black women in everyday institutions? The paper concludes that Watson’s novel reframes fat Black embodiment not as a personal problem to be corrected but as a politically charged site where emotions become both instruments of social control and resources for collective liberation.