“It frequently happens that when the dominant culture loses a vision or actively suppresses it, this lost knowledge arises again among those excluded from that culture. Thus, if we wish to discover other meanings in the large size of a woman, we should look at works in which it is women who are fashioning portraits of women. There, we can see the body portrayed without hatred, without fear of its girth, without horror at its rolls of flesh…What is apparent [in these artworks] is the fact that these large women inspire no revulsion and feel none for themselves; in these big bodies there is not the slightest trace of self-hatred or shame…there is no alienation from the flesh, so that it appears grotesque, either to the beholder, or to the woman-spirit it carries, which is here sensitive and intelligent, masterful, and proud….for we know that these are women as women regard them, with a vision that poses a radical critique to this culture with its tyranny of slenderness, its hatred for the flesh.”
-Kim Chernin, The Obsession