Serendipity, and mixed reviews
I have a couple of Google News alerts set up for things I’m interested in - terms like “fat studies” and “Marilyn Wann” among them. Unable to sleep, I opened Al (my laptop) to check on ticket prices for flights home this winter, and checked my email while waiting for the search to go through. The latter was a bust - tickets right now are about 600 dollars (who could predict travel to Hartford would be so pricey?) - but in my email I had a news alert for “Marilyn Wann”. I went to the New York Times article and read
ASK Sheana Director for a detailed description of herself, and chances are the word fat will come up. It is not uttered with shame or ire or any sense of embarrassment; it’s simply one of the things she is, fat.
I knew the article was coming out in this Sunday’s “Style” section of the Times, but I didn’t expect it to be out a day early online. Even more awesome, I didn’t know the article was opening with that bit about me and the org and Smith, and I was totally flabbergasted to see pictures of one of my professors, Esther Rothblum, along with a picture of Megan and Ginny, two other awesome kids who are currently running Size Matters. Total rockstars! If anything motivates me to get to work on that presentation for this week, this will.
Which isn’t to say, of course, that my thoughts on the article are all glowing - they’re not. I guess I just expected the article to focus on fat studies, which is why I was perplexed to see a “weight loss specialist” paraded out to talk about how, yup, fat isn’t really healthy.
Only slightly less irksome - or maybe more irksome, I’m not sure yet - was the quote by affluent white male, I mean Stephen H. Balch, that ““Ethnic studies, women’s studies, queer studies — they’re all about vindicating the grievances of some particular group. That’s not what the academy should be about.”
Pardon moi? It’s good that Balch knows just what should be included in the academy - and what shouldn’t. Although, I have to confess, it seems to be a little out of touch with reality - or at least “ethnic studies, women’s studies, queer studies” to say that the sole point of these disciplines is to vindicate grievances. Yes, they all have activist roots and are still tied to activism, but does that mean that they don’t produce anything valuable in the academy? Where does the line between what does and what doesn’t belong in the academy get drawn? And, more importantly, who is drawing that line?
The article does give a pretty good intro to this burgeoning new field, and it poses many of the questions that people are asking - like those above, about whether it “counts” as a discipline. Obviously I think so, but at least it’s out there, and maybe it’ll bring some folks to look at the dialogue in this country about fat more critically. Since yours truly is in the article - and after all, isn’t that newsworthy enough? - I definitely recommend picking up the paper this Sunday, but even if you can’t, check out the online version to see what all the (er, my)
Leave a Comment
If you would like to make a comment, please fill out the form below.
The criticisms of my students would serve as a good warning to visitors of Seeworthy: she talks too fast, she's too hard on us, she assigns too much work, and you have to be a dyke to get a good grade.
In other words, I'm a big, fat, queer, feminist meanie, and I am totally out to get you. Graaagh!
HOLY CRAP! You’re a rockstar!!!!
*beams with pride*
Haha, well, rockstar is debatable, but I’ll take the pride
I think there is a real difference between the fields of queer, women’s, ethnic studies, and fat studies. In an article about the politics of fatness, I’m not sure why ethnicity, women’s studies and queer studies were thought to be of any comparison. Maybe it’s just me but I don’t see the correlation between racism, sexism, homophobia, and fat-phobia (I guess you might call it?). I never knew someone’s race, sex, or sexual orientation to be medically unhealthy, and being fat, regardless of what the stigma society has around weight might have perpetuated, is unhealthy. Also, wouldn’t sociological classes centering on issues of Body Politics and Women’s Studies courses already cover the material in what would be Fat Studies.
As for the passage you quoted, I love how this guy claims that women’s studies/queer studies are vindicating grievances. I guess his white male privilege has blinded him to how these academic fields are attempting to deconstruct racist, sexist and homophobic
institutions? Ethnocentrism, patriarchy, heteronormativity… they must mean nothing to him.
To be honest, I’m not sure Fat Studies has a place of its own in academia, but issues around the politics of bodies, and the way media constructs these things absolutely need to be addressed. I just don’t think that Fat Studies should use the foundation that was built for queer studies, women’s studies, ect. to build it’s own. Fat Studies and the disciplines mentioned are quite different. I don’t think Fat Phobia is institutionalized the way racism, homophobia and sexism are.
First, to the fat being unhealthy thing - there’s a remarkably large (and as yet ignored) body of research which suggests otherwise, that being fat isn’t actually unhealthy in itself, but rather being sedentary or eating very poorly is unhealthy - not to mention the fact that fat people are disproportionately working class, and thus also affected by classism. As far as sociology and Women’s Studies courses on the body covering fatness… well, yes and no. For example, we read one essay on fat in my sociology class in college, and nothing on fat in my current Women’s Studies seminar.
I suppose we’ll have to disagree on whether fat studies has a place in academia… I think that, just as we have queer studies (instead of “sexuality studies”) and women’s studies (instead of “men’s and women’s studies”), fat studies is important because it examines the factor of that identity (fatness) that is oppressed - our society doesn’t judge thin people negatively because they’re thin, but it does judge fat people negatively because they’re fat. Furthermore, “body studies” is incredibly ambiguous - the body has a race, gender, sexuality, weight and height, so I can see how a “body studies” could just lump all these differences together.
As for using the foundations of queer studies… why not? Queer studies borrowed from women’s studies, which has, to some degree, intermingled with race studies, class studies, etc. You can’t say that one field should only stick to its own field and not rely upon important work in another - should women’s studies ignore entirely Judith Butler, whose work many consider foundational in queer studies? Should the writings of bell hooks be confined to Black or ethnic studies, and not taught in women’s studies - even though her writing addresses a myriad of identities and oppressions? Quite the opposite, it’d be folly not to include these important works, to ignore the impact they had and continue to have across academic fields.
Lastly… as to fatphobia or sizeism, I’m not really up for comparing which kind of oppression is a bigger problem/more salient/more institutionalized in society - I think that’s a messed up and ultimately dangerous game to play. I will say, though, that fatphobia is definitely entrenched, at least in the US, in public policy, and that with the current language of the “obesity epidemic” it’s impossible to deny that fat-based oppression is institutionalized in, well, almost every institution in the country.
bell hooks and Judith Butler would never be ignored in Women’s Studies classes or discourse, because while they may write about racism and sexuality, bell hooks writes about Black WOMEN, and Judith Butler about sexuality and gender in part, relating to women. Women’s Studies is not separate from race and sexuality… so why would those academics ever be left? Women are never just women.
Of course I am not comparing one oppression to the next, which is more important, or bigger of an issue, but I think racism, sexism, classism, heteronormativity are set up in a much different way than size-ism.
I’m not saying the field shouldn’t be studied, I think critically examining anything is never a bad idea, I just have a hard time believing that fat studies will ever be what women’s studies, ethnic studies, and queer studies have become. I think fat studies will be what say, disablity studies is, a school of thought intermingled into other academic programs.
I also think that this could become really carried away. People with green eyes may have a different experience in life than people with blue eyes, should we invent a field of thought called Green Eyed Studies? Queer Theory came about because gay people were being killed and society was looking the other way, there was no protection, they weren’t even acknowledged as people, Women’s Studies much the same, and Ethnic Studies absolutely… I don’t know too many cases in which fat people died because they were fat.
Hmm… but what if what Butler writes about sexuality and gender, and hooks writes about race and gender, are also relevant to theory on the fat body? Just as you say Women’s Studies is not separate from race and sexuality, neither is fat studies separate from women’s studies, race studies and sexuality studies.
I agree that racism is constructed differently than sizeism, which is different from classism, heterosexism and sexism. To say that racism and sexism are constructed the same, but sizeism isn’t is to ignore both the commonalities of all three oppressions, and to ignore the differences between racism and sexism and the way they operate and are supported.
It’s honestly hard to say where fat studies will go… but we can’t really say “Women’s Studies has made it” when so many women’s studies scholars end up being absorbed, when they become faculty, into other departments, teaching “women’s history” or “women’s English” or feminist race studies - the number of women’s studies graduate (and even undergrad) programs pales in comparison to other, more mainstream programs - like econ or history or english, and the headway it has made has come about largely in the last twenty/thirty years. I think it’s unfair to say “fat studies will never be what women’s studies, etc. is” when fat studies is emerging now… who can say where it will be in thirty years? Who can say where disability studies will be?
And, as to it getting carried away, I’m actually kind of offended by the statement that you ‘don’t know too many cases in which fat people died because they were fat” - does this mean it’s not valid, that unless we’re being murdered we’re not worth studying? And just because there isn’t coverage of murders of fat people doesn’t mean fat people aren’t being killed - fat people die as a result of organ amputation surgeries, and studies have shown that fat people go to the doctor less because of the stigma, resulting in poorer health and possibly even death - fatphobia still kills fat people, just in different ways than other oppressions. And, furthermore, maybe there are victims of fatal hate crimes that just aren’t documented - who knows yet? Just like you say “a woman is never just a woman”, a fat person is never just a fat person - there are fat women, fat men, fat dykes, fat Jews, fat Latinas and fat black women and fat disabled women and combinations of all of the above. A hate crime against a fat queer woman may not just be a hate crime against the person because they’re queer, but because they’re fat - but because society takes fat hate for granted, it may not even be proposed that the crime was motivated, perhaps in part, by fatphobia. There’s no legislation that declares murder because someone is fat as a hate crime, so even if someone was killing fat people because of their weight, we don’t even have it in policy to say that these are hate crimes.
I’ll agree to disagree and bow out of this one.
Very newsworthy indeed! Congrats!