Fat Girl’s Wet Dream: Girl Sexuality, Fatness, and Mental Disability in My Mad Fat Diary

This article examines alternative narratives of fat girlhood, disabled girlhood, and fat identity through the lens of sexuality and embodiment to show the complexities of young female fatness as depicted in the British TV series My Mad Fat Diary (E4 2013–2015). We argue that the series is unique in its representation of fat girlhood because it emphasizes the main character’s subjectivity and agency by allowing her to have sexual desires, fantasies, and experiences that are not demonized or ridiculed. Fatness, mental illness, girlhood, and sexual desire are depicted as equally important and inseparable aspects of the main character’s identity, so the series lends itself to an intersectional analysis employing fat studies, disability studies, and girlhood studies. By focusing on identities that are understood as transitory or impermanent (girl, fat, mentally ill), the article questions the very idea of fixed identity categories. Crucially, the series rejects the notion of fixing the aspects of protagonist’s identity normatively understood as problems (fatness, madness, sexual inexperience) through heterosexual epiphany or any other normative cure.