1st Edition
The Contemporary Reader of Gender and Fat Studies
The 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.
Comprising over 20 chapters from a range of diverse and international contributors, the Reader is structured around the following key themes: theorizing gender and fat; narrating gender and fat; historicizing gender and fat; institutions and public policy; health and medicine; popular culture and media; and resistance. It is an intersectional collection, highlighting the ways that "gender" and "fat" always exist in connection with multiple other structures, forms of oppression, and identities, including race, ethnicity, sexualities, age, nationalities, disabilities, religion, and class.
The Contemporary Reader of Gender and Fat Studies is essential reading for scholars and advanced students in Gender Studies, Sexuality Studies, Sociology, Body Studies, Cultural Studies, Psychology, and Health.
The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons [Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND)] 4.0 license.
Part 1: Introduction
1: Connecting Gender and Fat : Feminism, Intersectionality and Stigma
Amy Erdman Farrell
Part II: Discourses of Gender and Fat:
2: Undesirably Different: Hyper(in)visibilty and the Gendered Fat Body
Jeannine Gailey
3 Gendered Fat Bodies as Neoliberal Bodies
Hannele Harjunen
4 To Have and Not to Hold: Queering Fatness
Cat Pausé
5 Antiblackness, Gender and Fat
Da’Shaun Harrison
Part III: Narrating Gender and Fat
6 Embodied Narration
Kimberly Dark
7 Fat Stories
Susan Stinson
Part IV: Historicizing Fatness
8 The Politics of Fat and Gender in the Ancient World
Susan Hill
9 Historicizing Black Women’s Anti-Fatness
Ava Purkiss
Part V: Gender and Fat in Institutions and Public Policy
10: Public Policy and the Repercussions of Fat Stigma on Women and Children
April Michelle Herndon
11: Anti-fat and Anti-Latina Discourse and Policy in the United States
E. Cassandra Dame-Griff
12: Fatness, Gender, and Academic Achievement in Secondary and Postsecondary Education
Heather A. Brown
Part VI: Gender and Fat in Health and Medicine
13: Eating Disorders, Gender, and Fat: Theorizing the Fat Body in Feminist Theories
of Eating Disorders
Erin N. Harrop
14: Immovable Subjects, Unstoppable Forces: Bariatric Surgery, Gender, and the
Body
Nikkolette Lee
15: Gender, Fat, and "Reproductive" Healthcare: Negotiating Fat Pregnancy in the
Context of Eugenics
Emma Lind, Deborah McPhail, and Lindsey Mazur
Part VII: Gender and Fat in Popular Culture and Media
16: Sexy, Docile Bodies: The Objectification and Paternalistic Management of Plus-
Size Models
Amanda M. Czerniawski
17: Big-Gay Men Entering the Twenty-First Century: Global Perspectives on Fat-
Affirming Subcultures and Imagery
Jason Whitesel
18: From Hattie McDaniel to Queen Latifah: Examining a New Mammy and other
Fat Black Women Representations in Contemporary Media
Roshaunda L. Breeden and Terah J. Stewart
Part VIII: Gender, Fat and Resistance
19: Coming Out as Fat
Rachele Salvatelli
20: Fat Community
Judith Stein with Meridith Lawrence and Susan Stinson
21: Belle di Faccia: Fat Activism in Italy
Mara Mibelli and Chiara Meloni
22: "Your belly is a heap of wheat:" a Torah of Fat Liberation
Rabbi Minna Bromberg
23: Don’t Forget to Be Yourself
Joy Cox
Part IX: In Memoriam
Chapter 24: Friend of Cat
Substantia Jones
Biography
Amy Erdman Farrell is the James Hope Caldwell Memorial Chair and Professor of American Studies and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Dickinson College. The author of Yours in Sisterhood: Ms. Magazine and the Promise of Popular Feminism and Fat Shame: Stigma and the Fat Body in American Culture, she has shared her research on national popular media, including Bitch, the New Yorker, Psychology Today, NPR, CNN, and The Colbert Report. From 2019 to 2020 she served as an American Council of Learned Societies fellow and in 2021–2022 she was in residence at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, where she worked on a project focusing on key moments in the history of the Girl Scouts of the United States of America.
"Fatness is highly intertwined with gender, given that fat stigma affects women and so do appearance norms. I was delighted to see a book devoted to this intersection with an impressive array of scholarly articles."
Esther Rothblum, Editor, Fat Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Body Weight and Society
"A must read for insurgent activist-intellectuals working for fat liberation and the radical change that involves, imagines, and incites. Authors in The Contemporary Reader of Gender and Fat Studies, yet again, with rigour, courage, originality, and a commitment to the collective, raise the bar for engaged scholarship."
Lucy Aphramor, Associate Professor Gender, Power, and the Right to Food, Centre for Agroecology, Water and Resilience, Coventry University UK
