CORPOREAL MAPPING AND SUBJUGATION IN FIPPS’ STARFISH: A BIOPOLITICAL STUDY

Abstract

This study analyzes corporeal mapping and subjugation in the middle-grade verse novel, Starfish (2021), by Lisa Fipps, and looks at this work biopolitically. This goal is to track fat's governance, pathologisation, and symbolic erasure by overlapping familial, medical and institutional regimes of power and to identify the counter-conducts with which the protagonist restores corporeal sovereignty. The theoretical framework is a combination of the theories of Michel Foucault on biopolitics and disciplinary power, Achille Mbembe on necolitics and Roxane Gay on the unruly body. This study uses research philosophy interpretivist and qualitative research method of close textual analysis. Data collection takes place through purposive documentary analysis and the analysis of 1 primary literary text (Starfish, 294 pages), 1 theoretical memoir (Gay's Hunger) and 28 peer-reviewed secondary sources (2003–2025; total purposive sample of 30 texts selected on criteria of theoretical relevance and currency). Data analysis is done by using a method called Biopolitical Textual Analysis (BTA) which combines three approaches, namely Foucauldian Discourse Analysis, Necropolitical Reading, and Corporeal Mapping Analysis. The findings show how the home, the clinic and the school are interlocking panoptic devices which reduce Ellie's body to a pathological deficit. Resistance is not a breaking, but a piling up of micro-conducts: poetic expression, spatial assertion, linguistic reclamation, and solidarity, all leading to the protagonist's assertion of embodied sovereignty, through the posture of the starfish.