Call for proposals for Fat Studies Journal:

The “Fatness and Temporality” special issue of Fat Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Body Weight and Society considers the relationship between fat identity and the social construction of time. The editors invite papers on a variety of topics that explore, for example, how fat bodies interrupt, disrupt, engage, or resist ideas about normative timelines and expectations of the human lifespan. Building upon queer theory’s temporal turn, our interrogation of fat temporalities considers the impacts of affect, sensation, and memory through the lens of fat citizenship. We seek to answer questions such as: what is the fat body’s imagined past and future? How might we theorize fat futurity? How do fat subjects “fall out of time” in their disavowal of normative life scripts?

This special issue invites papers across disciplines that may consider themes such as:

● Fat bodies as sites of metamorphosis and, thus, atemporality;

● Age-specific weight guidelines and the normative construction of the growing adolescent body;

● The exclusion of fat bodies from “youthful” standards of idealized bodies;

● The pressures to lose weight in anticipation of rites of passage like marriage;

● The “perils” of fat as violations of the necessity of long life and prosperity at any cost;

● Fat bodies as retreating to childlike states in terms of both external controls and the imperative to shrink;

● The recursiveness of fat bodies which may yoyo through different states;

● Fat as outside of normative timelines of romance and reproduction and the limitations and opportunities offered by existing outside of these frames;

● Implications for fat reproduction and/or fat parenting as impossible or highly fraught states;

● Fat history and the association of obesity with industrial modernity.

To submit a proposal for inclusion in this special issue of the journal, please send a 250-500 word summary of your article as well as a current CV to Jen Rinaldi, at Jen.Rinaldi@uoit.ca by October 1, 2016. Any questions about the special issue can be directed to this email address as well.