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Fat Studies

Fat Activism and Fat Liberation

“If the work of Fat Studies is to confront and critique cultural constraints against notions of “fat-ness” and “the fat body” and explore fat bodies as they live in, are shaped by, and remake the world; and theorize how society conceptualizes and pathologizes fat bodies; then the fat activist has been charged and continues to answer the question of ‘what then?’”

(Taylor, Cat Pausé, Sonya Renee. “Fattening up Scholarship.” The Routledge International Handbook of Fat Studies, Routledge, 2021, pp. 1–18, https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003049401.)

Books

Articles and other resources

Fat Liberation Archive
A collection of the fat liberation cultural and organizing history we have access to: zines, flyers, articles, audio recordings, and other evidence of the lives of fat liberation-oriented queers, anarchists, feminists, lesbians, and revolutionaries from the 1970s to today, mostly from the US and the UK. This is a people’s archive, a labor of community love meant to ensure the fat activists of today and tomorrow know some of the radical Fat Liberation history that made our lives possible: the dreams and joys and community and epiphanies and love, the struggles and pains and ignorance and mistakes.

Fat Liberation Manifesto, November 1973
Originally published by the Fat Underground in 1973, the Fat Liberation Manifesto is one of the earliest texts of fat activism and liberation.

Life In The Fat Underground by Sara Golda Bracha Fishman
A reflection on the radical collective The Fat Underground. The Fat Underground was active in Los Angeles throughout the decade of the 1970s. Feminist in perspective, it asserted that American culture fears fat because it fears powerful women, particularly their sensuality and their sexuality. The Fat Underground employed slashing rhetoric: Doctors are the enemy. Weight loss is genocide. Friends in the mainstream-sympathetic academics and others in the early fat rights movement—urged them to tone it down, but ultimately came to adopt much of the Fat Underground's underlying logic as their own.


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