The Future Is Fat
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.
Jen Rinaldi is an Associate Professor in Legal Studies at Ontario Tech University. She engages with narrative and arts-based methodologies to deconstruct eating disorder recovery, and to re-imagine recovery in relation to queer community. Rinaldi also works in collaboration with Recounting Huronia, an arts-based collective that documents institutional violence.
May Friedman is a faculty member in the Ryerson University School of Social Work and Ryerson/York graduate program in Communication and Culture. Mays research looks at unstable identities, including bodies that do not conform to traditional racial and national or aesthetic lines.
Emily R.M. Lind is a college professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Womens Studies at Okanagan College in Kelowna, British Columbia. Her research examines the intersections between power, embodiment, and identity. Recent publications explore feminist approaches to pregnancy loss, whiteness and anti-racist feminism, weight stigma in reproductive healthcare, and fat liberation.
Crystal Kotow is a writer, activist, and educator whose research explores fat womens relationships with their bodies. She got her PhD from York University, and is a self-identified fat feminist killjoy who practices radical vulnerability in her activism, storytelling, and community building.
Tracy Tidgwell is a cultural producer working in the folds of queer and disability arts. She is the creator of Fat Work, a photographic series of fat women that explores fatness, class, and labour, a core member of Fat Rose, a fat liberation cross-movement incubator, and the Research Project Manager at ReVision: The Centre for Art and Social Justice, University of Guelph.
The Future Is Fat
Theorizing Time in Relation to Body Weight and Stigma
Edited by
Jen Rinaldi, May Friedman, Emily R.M. Lind, Crystal Kotow, and Tracy Tidgwell
First published 2022
by Routledge
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN: 978-0-367-71493-2 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-367-71494-9 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-15231-6 (ebk)
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Publishers Note
The publisher accepts responsibility for any inconsistencies that may have arisen during the conversion of this book from journal articles to book chapters, namely the inclusion of journal terminology.
Disclaimer
Every effort has been made to contact copyright holders for their permission to reprint material in this book. The publishers would be grateful to hear from any copyright holder who is not here acknowledged and will undertake to rectify any errors or omissions in future editions of this book.
Contents
Tracy Tidgwell, May Friedman, Jen Rinaldi, Crystal Kotow, and Emily R.M. Lind
George Parker and Cat Paus
Jami McFarland, Van Slothouber, and Allison Taylor
Allyson Mitchell
Michele Byers
Margaret Hass
Emily R.M. Lind, Crystal Kotow, Carla Rice, Jen Rinaldi, Andrea LaMarre, May Friedman, and Tracy Tidgwell
Ramanpreet Annie Bahra
Jennifer Dean
Rachel Fox
Laura Pratt
The chapters in this book were originally published in Fat Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Body Weight & Society, volume 7, issue 2 (November 2018). When citing this material, please use the original page numbering for each article, as follows:
Introduction to the special issue: Fatness and temporality
Tracy Tidgwell, May Friedman, Jen Rinaldi, Crystal Kotow, and Emily R.M. Lind
Fat Studies, volume 7, issue 2 (November 2018), pp. 115123
Pregnant with possibility: Negotiating fat maternal subjectivity in the War on Obesity
George Parker and Cat Paus
Fat Studies, volume 7, issue 2 (November 2018), pp. 124134
Tempo-rarily fat: A queer exploration of fat time
Jami McFarland, Van Slothouber, and Allison Taylor
Fat Studies, volume 7, issue 2 (November 2018), pp. 135146
Sedentary lifestyle: Fat queer craft
Allyson Mitchell
Fat Studies, volume 7, issue 2 (November 2018), pp. 147158
Fats, futurity, and the contemporary young adult novel
Michele Byers
Fat Studies, volume 7, issue 2 (November 2018), pp. 159169
One summer to change: Fat temporality and coming of age in I Used to Be Fat and Huge
Margaret Hass
Fat Studies, volume 7, issue 2 (November 2018), pp. 170180
Reconceptualizing temporality in and through multimedia storytelling: Making time with through thick and thin
