Full Description
Thickening Fat: Fat Bodies, Intersectionality, and Social Justice seeks to explore the multiple, variable, and embodied experiences of fat oppression and fat activisms. Moving beyond an analysis of fat oppression as singular, this book will aim to unpack the volatility of fat—the mutability of fat embodiments as they correlate with other embodied subjectivities, and the threshold where fat begins to be reviled, celebrated, or amended. In addition, Thickening Fat explores the full range of intersectional and liminal analyses that push beyond the simple addition of two or more subjectivities, looking instead at the complex alchemy of layered and unstable markers of difference and privilege.
Cognizant that the concept of intersectionality has been filled out in a plurality of ways, Thickening Fat poses critical questions around how to render analysis of fatness intersectional and to thicken up intersectionality, where intersectionality is attenuated to the shifting and composite and material dimensions to identity, rather than reduced to an "add difference and stir" approach. The chapters in this collection ask what happens when we operationalize intersectionality in fat scholarship and politics, and we position difference at the centre and start of inquiry.
Contents
Acknowledgments. Introduction. Part I: Our Heavy Inheritance 1. The Big Colonial Bones of Indigenous North America's "Obesity Epidemic". 2. Origin Stories: Thickening Fat and the Problem of Historiography. 3. Fat Pedagogy for Queers: Chicana Body Becoming in Four Acts. 4. "May My Children Always Have Milk and Rice": Problematizing the Role of Mothers in Childhood Fatness in India. 5. Tracing Fatness Through the Eating Disorder Assemblage. Part II: Exploding Our Expectations 6. Critiquing the DSM-V Narrative of "Obesity" as "Mental Illness". 7. Taking Up Space in the Doctor's Office: How My Racialized Fat Body Confronts Medical Discourse. 8. "You're Just Another Friggin' Number to Add to the Problem": Constructing the Racialized (M)other in Contemporary Discourses of Pregnancy Fatness. 9. Embodying the Fat/Trans Intersection. 10. Medicalization, Maternity, and the Materiality of Resistance: "Maternal Obesity" and Experiences of Reproductive Care. Part III: Expanding Our Activisms 11. No Bad Fatties Allowed?: Negotiating the Meaning and Power of the Mutable Body. 12. Oppressive Liberation: BBW Bashes and the Affective Rollercoaster. 13. Thick Sistahs and Heavy Disprivilege: Black Women, Intersectionality, and Weight Stigma. 14. Photographing Fatness: Resisting Assimilation Through Fat Activist Calendars. 15. Queering Fat Activism: A Study in Whiteness. Part IV: Our Gainful Failures
16. Working Towards the Affirmation of Fatness and Impairment. 17. "Hey, Little Fat Kid": My Impaired, Fat, Hairy, White, Male Body. 18. Reading and Affirming Alternatives in the Academy: Black Fat Queer Femme Embodiment. 19. Fat Camp: A Conversation on YA Fiction, Fat Shame, and Queer Love. 20. Dismantling the Empire: In Defense of Incoherence and Intersectionality. Contributor Biographies. Index.
