FYI. Special issue of Fat Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Body Weight and Society

Call for abstracts: Themed Issue on Fat in Theatre and Performance

If you are interested in contributing to this themed issue, please send Jennifer-Scott Mobley (mobleyj15@ecu.edu) an article title and an abstract of 250-500 words outlining what you would propose to cover by 21 August 2017. Final submissions will be no longer than 7,000 words, including the abstract, all notes and references.

This themed issue, to be edited by Professor Jennifer-Scott Mobley focuses on fat in performance and aims to explore representations of fat in live performance as well as film, and media. How is fat portrayed, performed, or “read” in various cultural representations?

In keeping with the journal’s emphasis on ‘body weight and society,’ this issue invites contributions from a sociocultural as well as performative/performance studies perspective. Topics may address but are not limited to the following prompts:

–How do we understand or read bodies in performance and what are social constructions of fat on stage, screen, and in commercial media?
–How do perceptions of body size impact casting or audience reception?
–What is the connection between character and performing body and what does it mean when performers choose to gain or lose weight for a role?
–How do performers use their non-normative bodies to uphold or refute stereotypes or stigmas associated with fat?
–What is the interplay between race, queerness, disability, and fat in representation?
–How do constructions of fat in representation intersect with constructions of gender?
–Fat-activist/fat-positive performance
–Critical reception to fat and corporeality or non-normative bodies in dance
–Affective response to fat bodies in live performance
–Critical examinations of fat performance through the theoretical lens of the grotesque or carnivalesque

Fat Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Body Weight and Society is the first academic journal in the field of scholarship that critically examines theory, research, practices, and programs related to body weight and appearance. Content includes original research and overviews exploring the intersection of gender, race/ethnicity, sexuality, age, ability, and socioeconomic status. Articles critically examine representations of fat in health and medical sciences, the Health at Every Size model, the pharmaceutical industry, psychology, sociology, cultural studies, legal issues, literature, pedagogy, art, theater, popular culture, media studies, and activism.

Fat Studies is an interdisciplinary, international field of scholarship that critically examines societal attitudes and practices about body weight and appearance. Fat Studies advocates equality for all people regardless of body size. It explores the way fat people are oppressed, the reasons why, who benefits from that oppression and how to liberate fat people from oppression. Fat Studies seeks to challenge and remove the negative associations that society has about fat and the fat body. It regards weight, like height, as a human characteristic that varies widely across any population. Fat Studies is similar to academic disciplines that focus on race, ethnicity, gender, or age.