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Stephen Marche and the politics of “fat”

Toronto novelist Stephen Marche found himself in hot water over the weekend for a column appearing in Saturday’s Globe and Mail. Titled “Rob Ford is not popular despite being fat. He’s popular because of it,” the piece looks at the cultural implications of Toronto’s mayoral frontrunner being, well, fat. Using the word “fat’” 17 times in the story, Marche tells us that Ford is “so fat that his belly is invariably the first thing you notice about him,” that his “angry fat is perfectly of our time,” and that, moreover, “Fat is the physical manifestation of postindustrial life … the bodily equivalent of the boarded-up factories in once-industrial powerhouses like Windsor and St. Catharines.”

It’s hard to know what Marche, or his editors, were thinking. Intended as a kind of semiotic analysis of Ford’s girth, the piece comes off as the sort of arrogant pseudo-intellectualism that drives voters to candidates like Ford in the first place. The Globe hasn’t acquitted itself well, either: after giving Marche free rhetorical reign, the paper’s editors promptly pulled the column from the Web without comment early Saturday morning. (However, a version of the story can be read here.)

Marche isn’t unfamiliar with controversy in the annals of journalism: in a 2007 Toronto Star article, he elicited similar outrage for raging against the sacred cows of the CanLit crowd.