One of my New Year’s resolutions is to get back to blogging after the long hiatus. I took a break after school, and had a tough time launching back into regular posting.
Riots not Diets, from flickr user gaelx
Anyways! One of the most exciting reasons I haven’t been posting is that I have been reading all about Fat Studies. My good friend and coworker Kate and I will be presenting on information bias inherent in academia surrounding fatness, and especially focusing on the impact in cataloging. It’s also been really interesting looking at the links between disability studies, queer studies, and fat studies.
Currently, academia and society both medicalize fatness, turning it into a disease (which it’s not, for many reasons). One of the many problems with this is that talking about the sociological or anthropological aspects of Fat Studies becomes almost taboo in conventional academia, and body positive books end up being cataloged under “Obesity,” clearly labeling all fat people diseased. We’ll also be looking at very “unacademic” sources of information like zines and blogs, and talking about how perfectly valid information can be gleaned from them.
There’s so much to this that hasn’t been explored yet. If you’re interested in reading up on Fat Studies, Kate has a great list of resources on her blog.
Kate and I will be presenting at the Sarah Lawrence College Women’s History Month conference (March 4th and 5th, 2011) which will be all about body politics. Check it out!
