Fat Studies: A Critical Dialogue
Deadline: 16/04/2010
To be held 10 - 11 September, 2010
Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia
While cultural anxieties about fatness and stigmatisation of fat bodies in
Western cultures have been central to dominant discourses about bodily
OEpropriety¹ since the early twentieth century, the rise of the OEdisease¹
category of obesity and the moral panic over an alleged global OEobesity
epidemic¹ has lent a medical authority and legitimacy to what can be
described as OEfat-phobia¹. Against the backdrop of the ever-growing
medicalisation and pathologisation of fatness, the field of Fat Studies has
emerged in recent years to offer an interdisciplinary critical interrogation
of the dominant medical models of health, gives voice to the lived
experience of fat bodies, and offers critical insights into, and
investigates the ethico-political implications of, the cultural meanings
that have come to be attached to fat bodies.
This two-day event will put Australasian Fat Studies into conversation with
critical fat scholarship from around the globe by gathering together
scholars from across a spectrum of disciplinary backgrounds, as well as
activists, health care professionals, performers and artists. This
conference seeks to open a dialogue between scholars, health care
professionals and activists about the productive and enabling critical
possibilities Fat Studies offers for rethinking dominant notions about
health and pathology, gender and bodily aesthetics, political interventions,
and beyond.
Confirmed keynote speakers:
* Charlotte Cooper
(Department of Sociology, University of Limerick)
* Karen Throsby
(Department of Sociology, University of Warwick)
Abstracts are sought that engage with topics such as (but not limited to):
* Interventions to normalise fat bodies (such as diet regimes, exercise
programs, weight loss pharmaceuticals and bariatric surgeries);
* The ethico-political implications of the medicalisation of OEobesity¹;
* Constructions of the OEfat child¹ in childhood obesity media reportage;
* Representations of fat bodies in film, television, literature or art;
* Intersections of medical discourse and morality around OEobesity¹;
* The somatechnics of fatness;
* Fat performance art, fat positive performance troupes;
* Histories of fat activism and/or strategies for political intervention;
* Fat and queer histories/identities;
* Fat embodiment online, the Fat-O-Sphere;
* Feminist responses to fatness;
* Constructions of fatness in a range of cultural contexts;
* Systems of body quantification, measurement, and conceptualizations of
(in)appropriate OEsize¹;
* Fat as it intersects with race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, gender,
disability and/or ageing.
Please send abstracts of 300 words, or panel proposals, to Dr Samantha
Murray via email at Samantha.murray@mq.edu.au by Friday, 16 April 2010.
