Trajectories of Fat Women Artists: Body, Memory, and Practices of Resistance in the Art Field

corpo, memória e práticas de resistência no campo da arte

Abstract

This article analyzes the trajectories of visual artists Fernanda Magalhães and Camila Fontenele through the articulation of body, art, and memory within the contemporary artistic field. Grounded in qualitative research with a cartographic approach, the study follows narratives, artworks, and creative processes, understanding trajectory as a situated and non-linear process of self-production. Considering fatness as a social marker that structures regimes of visibility, recognition, and exclusion, it argues that their artistic practices operate as ethical-aesthetic-political interventions that challenge the artistic canon and displace hegemonic ways of perceiving the female body. By reinscribing their bodies as sites of enunciation and creation, the artists transform experiences marked by normativity and silencing into public and shareable matter, producing dissident spaces of memory. In this process, art emerges as a field of subjectivity and symbolic dispute, expanding the limits of what can be lived, recognized, and shared.