Femininity and fatness after midlife: Rachel Lynde and the invisibility of fat aging in Canadian literature

ABSTRACT Though theorists argue that experiences of race, gender and sexuality fluctuate and change across a full life course, the same thinking has not yet been applied to fat studies, where aging fat folks are often doubly marginalized by popular and academic culture. In a study of one Canadian literary depiction of fat aging, Rachel Lynde from L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables (1908), this article will examine the dialectical tensions between cultural delineations of invisibility in aging and hyper-visibility in fatness, and desexualization in midlife and hypersexuality in fatness. This article proposes that while there may be some overlap or experiences in common for fat folks generally, the mental, physical, and cultural experience of fatness alters over the life course. There may be a space in the margins from which to reconsider and repatriate fat, aging feminine bodies.