When Eddie Murphy plays a fat woman called Rasputia Latimore in Norbit (Brian Robbins, 2007), he is not just wearing a fat suit. In several key sequences, his prosthetic-covered face is digitally grafted onto the body of Lauren Miller, a real fat Black woman performer whose identity is effaced despite her flesh structuring the performance. This article argues that Norbit transforms the fat-suit comedy’s familiar tropes into a digital workflow, producing what I call the human fat suit: the use of a real fat performer’s body as substrate for a star’s identity, with digital tools separating face from body and reassembling them into a character whose fatness is treated as manipulable spectacle. Drawing on feminist theory and Fat Studies, I situate Rasputia within long-standing controlling images of Black womanhood and the misogynoir that constitutes her depiction. Rasputia is a composite body, assembled across prosthetics, CGI, and erased labor. Taken together, the film’s production choices, narrative, and visual cues show how digital effects make fat suits more harmful by relying on a real fat woman’s body while denying her visibility or agency.
Nicholas Krause (Wed,) studied this question.