Full Description
Fat bodies of today are commonly assumed to have no future at all. In this line of thinking, a fat life is framed as failure, and a fast track towards death itself. Meanwhile, the histories of modern fat existence, communities, activists, and artists have been essentially unknown, written out of origins and existence. Most medical and cultural evaluations of fat have rendered the fat body more and more visible, and yet the lived experiences of fat people are continually erased.
At a moment when scholars from various disciplines are contending with the question of who has a future, this book explores the relationship between fat experience and the social construction of time. The works in this volume draw from fields as diverse as social geography, women and gender studies, critical race theory, disability studies, cultural studies, visual art and craft, social work, communication studies, and queer theory, generating renewed understandings of the relationship between fatness and temporality. The Future Is Fat reimagines understandings of time to allow for new expressions of fat experience.
The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Fat Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Body Weight and Society.
Contents
Introduction
Tracy Tidgwell, May Friedman, Jen Rinaldi, Crystal Kotow, and Emily R.M. Lind
1. Pregnant with possibility: Negotiating fat maternal subjectivity in the "War on Obesity"
George Parker and Cat Pausé
2. Tempo-rarily fat: A queer exploration of fat time
Jami McFarland, Van Slothouber, and Allison Taylor
3. Sedentary lifestyle: Fat queer craft
Allyson Mitchell
4. "Fats," futurity, and the contemporary young adult novel
Michele Byers
5. One summer to change: Fat temporality and coming of age in I Used to Be Fat and Huge
Margaret Hass
6. Reconceptualizing temporality in and through multimedia storytelling: Making time with through thick and thin
Emily R. M. Lind, Crystal Kotow, Carla Rice, Jen Rinaldi, Andrea LaMarre, May Friedman, and Tracy Tidgwell
7. "You can only be happy if you're thin!" Normalcy, happiness, and the lacking body
Ramanpreet Annie Bahra
8. Imagining body size over time: Adolescents' relational perspectives on body weight and place
Jennifer Dean
9. Against progress: Understanding and resisting the temporality of transformational weight loss narratives
Rachel Fox
10. The (fat) body and the archive: Toward the creation of a fat community archive
Laura Pratt
