Embracing Body Diversity in "Undead Girl Gang" and "Gabi: A Girl in Pieces"

Recent discussions about children’s and young adult literature have focused on diversity—or the lack thereof—in the field. Activists and authors alike have launched campaigns like the We Need Diverse Books nonprofit and many, many panels at academic conferences like ChLA, which hosted activist and scholar Debbie Reese last year. These efforts are a good start, though we can always do better, and I find myself gravitating more and more towards discussing representation in my own academic work. My dissertation project focuses on the representation of weight in young adult literature, and specifically how the worlds of these novels handle the nonnormative young adult body. Most novels that feature a fat protagonist are problem novels, focused on the weight of the main character and little else. Books like Kelly Barson’s 45 Pounds (More or Less) might discuss body image more broadly, but the main thrust of the plot is all about weight loss. In problem novels about weight loss, the protagonist might find that she hits a road block in losing weight, struggling throughout the novel with binge eating, but by the end the weight magically falls away, much easier to lose once she stops worrying about it. Or maybe she gains confidence and then the weight melts away as a result of not worrying about her body. Or maybe all that diet and exercise really does work and she loses weight in a healthy, normal way.

Fat teens in young adult novels are almost always girls and they usually feel like their bodies are something to be ashamed of. As a fat woman myself, living in the same world of American beauty ideals as everyone else, I often feel tired when I hear there’s a new novel featuring a fat character, or a new TV show that casts a fat actress (I’m looking at you, This is Us). These stories always seem to play out the same way, with the main character feeling an overwhelming shame and guilt and never truly making peace with her body or feeling good about herself. Even Roxane Gay’s 2017 memoir Hunger illustrated the self-loathing fat bodies often inspire. It’s built into our culture. Worse yet, America exports unrealistic beauty standards to other countries via pervasive ad campaigns, television, and movies. While each country might have their vision of the ideal body, American culture has had a significant impact on what this body looks like. Documentaries like Elena Rossini’s The Illusionists discuss this fad (you can read more about the documentary here), but the origin of these cultural ideals go largely unexamined. Even though America exports beauty ideals alongside the “American Dream,” consumers of media often do not pause to examine where these ideals come from or why.

In the spirit of Gene Yang’s Reading Without Walls challenge, I’ve been reading books about characters who aren’t like me—that is, not middle class and white—and I’ve been excited to see that many of these books discuss the body from a different perspective than the one most often attributed to young white girls. Two novels in particular—Gabi: A Girl in Pieces by Isabel Quintero and Undead Girl Gang by Lily Anderson—stick out to me from my reading in the past year.

I listened to Undead Girl Gang in the car on a long road trip from South Mississippi to San Antonio for the 2018 ChLA conference. My carmates, who were also presenting at the conference, and I took turns guessing the answer to the main mystery of the novel—who killed a slew of teenage girls and why—while also poking fun at the audiobook voice acting. Aside from our criticism, the book did something unusual and wonderful: it allowed a character to be fat and have that fat be a backburner issue to the main plot. The novel’s heroine, Mila Flores, dislikes most aspects of her life, most notably because her best friend has just died. With the help of witchcraft, Mila brings her friend Riley (and two other girls, June and Dayton, who have also been murdered) back to life for a limited amount of time in order to solve the mystery of who killed them. The plot of the novel is classic young adult murder mystery, but Mila herself proves to be an interesting character because of how she navigates her own displeasure with her body and how she coaches her undead friends on dealing with their own deteriorating bodies. Throughout the book, Mila’s weight is never a true issue; she mentions her body when she thinks of her crush, Xander, and she contemplates if she’s beautiful enough to attract his attention, but she never determines she needs to lose weight in order to appear more attractive to him, nor does she turn her hatred inward to harm herself (as in novels like Fat Angie by e.E. Charlton-Trujillo and My Mad Fat Teenage Diary by Rachel Earl). Mila is, relatively, proud of herself, and especially of the power that she exhibits over her surroundings via her magic.

More intensely than Undead Girl Gang, Gabi: A Girl in Pieces follows the title character as she attempts to deal with trauma in her immediate surroundings while also growing up and facing teenage hardships. Many of Gabi’s issues with her own body center on her relationships with the adults in her life, including her mother. After recounting a particularly embarrassing incident with a dress and exposed underwear, Gabi thinks, “My mom doesn’t understand this. She never does. I don’t get it. I guess it’s because we have a lightswitch relationship. Sometimes she’s wonderful. Sometimes not so much. When she says, ‘No comas tanto. You’re getting fatter than a pregnant woman,’ she’s not so wonderful” (26). The tension between mother and daughter (especially over issues related to weight) permeate the book and inform every aspect of Gabi’s relationships. Gabi feels insecure in her own body both because of the American ideals projected to her through media and because of her mother’s desire for her to be thin and beautiful, like Sandra, another local girl who Gabi’s mother admires.

Gabi eventually begins channeling her emotions through poetry (a move I greatly admire!), but her concerns over her weight wiggle in there, too. While the novel does acknowledge Gabi’s weight as an issue that concerns her, it’s framed within a larger context of her displeasure with her changing teenage body and her relationship with boys and (potentially) sex. Under the guidance of her mother, Gabi fears sex and longs for it while also equating her worth with her virginity. As the novel progresses, Gabi talks about her fat in more neutral terms, ditching the self-loathing for a measured understanding of how body image is often culturally constructed. Midway through the novel, Gabi writes a zine as part of a class project. In a beautiful illustration, medical diagrams and magazine clippings are pieced together along with Gabi’s poetry about the female body. Here’s an excerpt from one of her poems:

Diagram One.

This is the female body.

Do you see the curvature of the waist?

The hourglass figure you will probably never have but always strive for?

You might not want to eat some days.

You will notice how your waist is a little wider than (pretty much any name can be inserted here)

You will carry a child there in the middle

maybe

unless you can’t. (196)

Gabi’s first poem in her zine highlights her developing perception of the female body, and particularly how that perception is shaped by the culture she lives in. She acknowledges that women will never be as skinny as they want to be, and that some might develop eating disorders to cope with that fact. She also nods towards the American obsession with celebrity culture with “wider than (pretty much any name can be inserted here).” Though the novel has many references to Gabi’s daily life and feelings about her friends and her body, the main plot focuses on Gabi’s changing family dynamics: her father dies, her best friend has a baby, her aunt confesses to sleeping with men outside of marriage. Gabi comes to realize, through the struggles of others and her own examinations of her feelings, that everyone experiences insecurity and self-loathing—even adults. All of this cultural commentary is nestled within Gabi’s Latinx background (and all of the cultural expectations that accompany it), and the novel marries English and Spanish beautifully.

I bring up these two novels because they show a type of diversity we don’t often talk about in casual conversation: body diversity. We need novels that represent all sorts of bodies, not just normative, thin, American bodies. We need people of color, fat bodies, scarred bodies, disabled bodies—and everything in between. In the conversation on why representation is so important, let us not forget the types of representation that we might not want to face as a society because it means examining our own prejudices. Gabi: A Girl in Pieces and Undead Girl Gang both acknowledge that there’s nothing wrong or unusual about fat bodies, and that one can live a happy life full of love and joy in a fat body. Where American beauty standards seek to shame fat bodies, Gabi and Mila’s Latinx cultures seem to place less pressure on being thin and conventionally attractive—which is a beautiful thing. Instead of forcing American beauty ideals on the rest of the world, American culture should embrace the diverse and beautiful bodies of all cultures, not just its own.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Mary Stephens is a PhD candidate in children’s literature and disability studies at the University of Southern Mississippi. Her work on The Walking Dead is forthcoming in Southern Studies later in 2019. She focuses on issues of body image and disability, pop culture, and young adult literature. You can hear her talk about books and pop culture on #BookSquadGoals, a podcast she cohosts.