Fatness and Intersectionality
“We aim to stretch the capacity of Fat Studies to consider the multiple, dynamic, and complex ways that fat may be layered into and muddled with other markers and materialities of identity and difference. This complexity surfaces the entanglements of fat with queer and trans embodiments and issues; with melanin alongside other physical markers of race as these entwine with racism and white supremacy; with colonial histories and their legacies for Indigenous bodies and lives; with critical approaches to disability and madness.”
(Friedman, May, et al. “Introduction.” Thickening Fat, Routledge, 2019, pp. 1–11, https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429507540.)
As a critical field intimately tied to bodies, intersectionality is a cornerstone of Fat Studies. Despite this, Fat Studies is not exempt from criticism—the subject of the field still defaults to a “young(ish), white, cisgender woman.” (Friedman et al.) These resources challenge the field’s inherent biases by explicitly examining how fatness exists alongside other aspects of identity, most specifically gender, sexuality, race, and disability.
Books
Thickening Fat by ISBN: 9780429507540Publication Date: 2019-08-30Moving beyond an analysis of fat oppression as singular, this book aims 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.
Belly of the Beast by ISBN: 9781623175979Publication Date: 2021-08-10Taking on desirability politics, the limitations of gender, the connection between anti-fatness and carcerality, and the incongruity of “health” and “healthiness” for the Black fat, Harrison viscerally and vividly illustrates the myriad harms of anti-fat anti-Blackness. They offer strategies for dismantling denial, unlearning the cultural programming that tells us “fat is bad,” and destroying the world as we know it, so the Black fat can inhabit a place not built on their subjugation.
Queering Fat Embodiment by ISBN: 9781409465430Publication Date: 2014-05-09Shedding light on the ways in which fat embodiment is lived, experienced, regulated and (re)produced across a range of cultural sites and contexts, Queering Fat Embodiment destabilizes established ideas about fat bodies, making explicit the intersectionality of fat identities and thereby countering the assertion that fat studies has in recent years reproduced a white, ableist, heteronormative subjectivity in its analyses.
The Contemporary Reader of Gender and Fat Studies by ISBN: 9780367691660Publication Date: 2023The Contemporary Reader of Gender and Fat Studies is a key reference work in contemporary scholarship situated at the intersection between Gender and Fat Studies, charting the connections and tensions between these two fields.
Fearing the Black Body by ISBN: 9781479886753Publication Date: 2019-05-07There is an obesity epidemic in this country and poor black women are particularly stigmatized as "diseased" and a burden on the public health care system. This is only the most recent incarnation of the fear of fat black women, which Sabrina Strings shows took root more than two hundred years ago. Fearing the Black Body argues convincingly that fat phobia isn't about health at all, but rather a means of using the body to validate race, class, and gender prejudice.
Fat Gay Men by ISBN: 9780814723906Publication Date: 2014-01-01Based on ethnographic interviews and in-depth field notes from more than 100 events, Fat Gay Men explores the woundedness that comes from being relegated to an inferior position in gay hierarchies, and yet celebrates how some gay men can reposition the shame of fat stigma through carnival, camp, and play.
Neoliberal Bodies and the Gendered Fat Body by ISBN: 9781317130420Publication Date: 2016-08-25Neoliberal bodies and the gendered fat body explores the relationships between fatness, health, and neoliberal discourse and the role of economic policy in the construction of the (gendered) fat body, and examines how neoliberal discourses join patriarchal and biomedical constructions of the fat female body.
Articles and other resources
Unvictimizable: Toward a Fat Black Disability Studies by Anna Mollow
Anna Mollow contends that racism, anti fat prejudice, and ableism intersect to create a double bind that depicts black people as incapable of being victimized, for two contradictory reasons: fat black bodies are figured as innately disabled but also as invulnerable to disability and suffering. Mollow begins the work of conceptualizing a new, transdisciplinary methodology, “fat black disability studies,” which brings together insights from critical race theory, fat studies, disability studies, and the Black Lives Matter movement.
Kōrero Mōmona, Kōrero ā-Hauora: a Kaupapa Māori and fat studies discussion of fatness, health and healthism by Andrea Gillon and Cat Pausé
Fatness for Indigenous peoples can be complex and an entanglement of multiple oppressions. Often Māori understandings of bodies and fatness that reflect whakapapa (genealogy, ancestry, layering of those we come from) and culture are excluded from health contexts and discourses. Gillon and Pausé suggest a shift away from public health approaches to fatness that can often be oppressive and perpetuate healthism, in favor of Kaupapa Māori and fat studies pathways that promote self-determination and agency, supporting the community and collective, and body sovereignty.
A Queer and Trans Fat Activist Timeline
A digital zine adapted from a physical timeline communally compiled at a 2010 workshop “The Time of Our Lives: Fighting Fat Panic Through Fat History, Memory, and Culture,” facilitated by notable Fat Studies scholar and fat activist Charlotte Cooper.