May Friedman

Jill Andrews

In and Out and With and Through Fat

Body Stories

Body stories capture a nuanced, interconnected, interactive, and complex telling of our understanding, perception, and experience of and through our bodies. Plenty has been published on body image but image suggests a static fixed body, unmitigated through our social interactions and varying times and spaces. This book is not a "how-to" guide for fat confidence. It's not a compendium of fat suffering. It's simply a collection of narratives about what it's like to survive in a weight-hating world. It resists the ways that marginalized bodies are being written and researched and put into other people's ideas about our existence. The stories in this book are celebratory and are painful. They look at intersections of race and queerness; they destabilize womanhood by presenting a range of possible female embodiments. They explore issues of disability and madness. The full range of possibilities that are collected here give a picture of what it means to live in a society with strong and powerful messages about size, about normalcy, about what a moral and healthy life and body look like. This book is a snapshot of its place and time, but these stories remind us that we're here to stay. The body stories will change but we will keep owning our own narratives. While story, especially written by women, is often seen as outside the academic canon, these stories, these creative offerings, are theory, are research, and are activism. They are nothing less than the blueprint for liberation. Writing about fat and about bodies outside of medicalized narratives, without ignoring the impact of race, sexuality, class, ability, gender, fashion, appearance, and beyond, is radical and rigorous. It is impossible to think about the future without wishing for liberation. Liberation can come in many forms. It can mean an awareness, the ability to confront. The stories in this book display the ways that liberation isn't a finish line or a thing we can complete—rather it is a million small actio

Shana L. Calixte

At the 2005 BlogHer conference writer and mommyblogger Alice Bradley (finslippy.com) responded to criticisms that mommyblogging was solipsistic and self-indulgent by stating that "Mommyblogging is a "radical act." This collection seeks to interrogate this emergent genre in all its contradiction and complexity, looking equally at the ways that mommyblogs benefit some mothers while relegating others to the margins. Most importantly, however, this collection sheds light on a growing and overwhelming site of maternal narrative where many mothers are able to take on the "radical act" of speaking for themselves.

The Radical Act of the Mommyblog

Mothering and Blogging

Carla Rice

Jen Rinaldi

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.

Fat Bodies, Intersectionality, and Social Justice

Thickening Fat

Emily R.M. Lind

Crystal Kotow

Tracy Tidgwell

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.

Theorizing Time in Relation to Body Weight and Stigma

The Future Is Fat

Andrea O'Reilly

Alyssa Teekah

Erika Jane Scholz

In April 2011, a team of five people put together SlutWalk Toronto, a protest responding to slut shaming and victim blaming culture, exemplified by a recent event at Osgoode Hall Law School at York University. In the name of campus "safety," Toronto Police Constable Michael Sanguinetti advised "women should avoid dressing like sluts in order to not be victimized." The sentiment of those in the over 3000 person crowd that day were shared by folks around the globe -- leading to over 200 SlutWalks internationally and the establishment of "SlutWalk" organizing groups. This collection engenders a critical engagement with the global phenomenon of the SlutWalk movement, considering both its strengths and limitations. The chapters take up SlutWalk through a feminist lens (broadly defined) considering SlutWalk as a successful social movement, a site of tremendous controversy, and an ongoing discussion among and between waves of feminists across the life cycle and across the globe. Through poetry, photography, scholarly articles, creative non-fiction, personal essays, the collection seeks to unpack the discursive performance of SlutWalk as well as explore the experiences of people who attended various and diverse SlutWalks marches/protests in North America and Asia.

Perspectives on the SlutWalk Movement

This is what a Feminist Slut Looks Like

Silvia Schultermandl

The essays in Click and Kin span the globe, examining transnational connections that touch in the United States, Canada, Mexico, India, Pakistan, and elsewhere.

Transnational Identity and Quick Media

Click and Kin

Stereotypes and cultural imperialism often provide a framework of fixed characteristics for postmodern life, yet fail to address the implications of questions such as, "Where are you from?" Growing Up Transnational challenges the assumptions behind this fixed framework to look at the interconnectivity, conflict, and contradictions within current discussions of identity and kinship. This collection offers a fresh, feminist perspective on family relations, identity politics, and cultural locations in a global era. Using an interdisciplinary approach from fields including gender studies, postcolonial theory, and literary theory, this volume questions the concept of hybridity and the tangible implications of assumed identities. The rich personal narratives of the authors explore hyphenated identities, hybridized families, and the challenges and rewards of lives on and beyond borders. The result is a new transnational sensibility that explores the redefinition of the self, the family, and the nation.

May Friedman

About

Books

Join the club