Critical Studies in Food and Culture

Call for Anthology Submissions Tentative title: The Unbearable Fatness of Being: Enlarging Theories of Embodiment Publication Date: 2010-11-01 (in 26 days)
Date Submitted: 2010-07-21
Announcement H-NET ID: 177654

This edited collection seeks to publish recent scholarship that pushes at the boundaries of the existent scholarship on embodiment, from a Fat Studies perspective. As Fat Studies is an emerging field, there are copious amounts of terrain left to map out, and this collection will display the provocatively expansive ways that emergent Fat Studies scholars conceptualize the fat body and the cultural work the fat body does in various times, places, and societies. The purpose of this work includes pushing back at the “obesity epidemic” rhetorics in ways that are at once connected to affiliated work in fields like disability studies, queer studies, gender studies (to name a few), and yet uniquely their own. In conclusion, this edited collection will offer crucial new pathways for the generative field of Fat Studies, as well as offer an exciting look at the developing scholars in this field. Perhaps one might say that Fat Studies seeks to integrate within cultural studies and the academy in general a critical body of work on fatness, layering our current understandings of the material body along with metaphoric and/or immaterial ways that fatness saturates our (post) modern world.




Topics may include but are not limited to:

• representations of fat people in literature, film, music, nonfiction, and the visual arts
• cross-cultural or global constructions of fat bodies
• cultural, historical, or philosophical meanings of fat and fat bodies
• portrayals of fat individuals and groups in news, media, magazines
• fatness as a social, political, personal, and/or performed identity
• phenomenology of fat movement and be-ing in a variety of physical (and physiological) contexts
• fat as queering sex, beauty, gender, and other embodied performances
• negotiating fat within locations, space, and time
• representing weighted embodiments in such creative or abstract forms as, for example, visual art, poetry, personal narratives, and literature
• fat acceptance, activism, and/or pride movements and tactics
• approaches to fat and body image in philosophy, psychology, religion, sociology
• fat children in literature, media, and/or pedagogy
• fat as it intersects with race, ethnicity, class, religion, ability, gender, nationality, and/or sexuality
• functions of fatphobia or fat oppression in economic and political systems



Submissions are due November 1, 2010. We welcome traditional and non-traditional formats, including research articles, photographs, poetry, reports of performance art, and others. Articles and papers should range between 15 and 20 double-spaced pages. Please send submissions, along with a brief biographical sketch, directly to jmccross@gwmail.gwu.edu and/or lesleigh.owen@gmail.com.
Contacts and editors: Julia McCrossin, jmccross@gwmail.gwu.edu;


Lesleigh Owen, Ph.D., lesleigh.owen@gmail.com