FYI.

Call for proposals for a special issue of Fat Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Body Weight and Society on “Fatness and COVID-19”

To be considered for inclusion in this special issue, please send a 250-400 word proposal and current CV or resume to both co-editors, Rachel Colls (rachel.colls@durham.ac.uk)  and Julia E. Rogers (jerogers@ucsd.edu)  by September 15, 2020.  Any questions should be emailed to the co-editors.

This special issue of Fat Studies on Fatness and COVID-19 seeks to explore the symbolic, lived, and political life of fatness and fat people in the midst of the global pandemic.  COVID-19, and the public health response to it, have radically transformed the daily lived experiences of people all over the world. From lockdowns to contain the virus to a global economic downturn life in a “post-COVID” world looks, feels, tastes, and sounds different than before.  As populations were told to lockdown and the movement of bodies were policed and regulated, fatness came to the fore in different ways. Amidst this massive social, political, and economic shift, fatness has once again been positioned as a prime concern for individuals, governments, and the medical establishment.  From widespread expressions of fear about gaining weight during lockdown to discussions of withholding ventilator support for fat individuals in the event of “rationing” of care the pre-existing societal preoccupation with fatness has thread its way throughout the pandemic.   Even before there was any available biomedical data on morbidity or mortality rates for fat patients, The World Obesity Federation (2020) identified  people who were “overweight” and “obese” as more at risk of becoming seriously ill , needing  hospitalization, and intensive care treatment if they contracted SARS-COV-2. Indeed, countries are responding to the risks that fat bodies pose  by implementing public health campaigns, such as the UK government’s (2020) ‘Better Health’ 12 week weight loss programme which seeks to reduce people’s body size as well as protect valuable healthcare resources.  In the United States of America a familiar narrative about risk, personal responsibility, and blame has emerged reminiscent of the “moral danger” (Lupton, 1993) of the AIDS epidemic as the nation debates stay-at-home orders, mask use, and worthiness and expendability of the lives of people with risk factors..

For this special issue we seek papers that consider how fat people have been differentially affected by this novel virus and the social and political response to the pandemic. Fat and fatness are already deeply connected to topics of health, public health, personal well-being, health moralism, and conceptions of risk, blame, and responsibility in relation to public and personal health.  We welcome papers exploring the ways fatness has been pathologized, represented and experienced across a range of international and national contexts.  In addition, we seek papers that investigate the ways that fat, fatness, and fat embodiment have interacted with shifts in the social, political, and virtual world due to COVID-19. What has life under and post-lockdown been like for fat people and their advocates? How have fat people responded to the concerns expressed about their ‘health’’; and how have fat people built solidarity and community during a time when fatness is denigrated and feared?  We also seek papers that explore the overlapping oppressions that fat people face through intersectional analysis of race, gender, sexuality, social class, fatness and disability status during COVID-19.  COVID-19 has differentially affected communities of color and one way this suffering has been dismissed is through the leveraging of “obesity,” “culture,” and “lifestyle” to shift blame toward these communities and away from more structural explanations.

Proposed topics might include, but are not limited to:

• Everyday experiences of fatness under lockdown
• Critical assessments of public health policy,  anti-obesity public health campaigns, or COVID-19 risk assessment practices
• Discussion of fat bodies as expendable, unworthy of protection, or deserving of harm during the pandemic
• Representations of fatness and COVID-19
• Popular use of images of fatness or preoccupation with fatness, weight gain, or “overeating” under lockdown
• Medicalization of  fat bodies
• Risk and fatness
• Disability and fatness in a COVID-19 context
• Building (virtual and real life) fat communities
• Experiences of isolation, loneliness, or loss of  community during lockdown centered around fatness
• Impacts upon fat-owned or fat serving businesses
• Experiences of anti-fat bias or discrimination in context of job loss, shifts in job responsibilities, or work-from-home practices
• Fat phobia and discrimination
• Eating and drinking
• Making and creating under lockdown
• Movement and physical activity
• Hospitalisation and treatment
• Mental health and emotions
• Intersectional experiences of overlapping oppressions during COVID-19
• Antiblackness and Antifatness intersecting in the construction of risk groups during COVID-19
• Anti-fatness, COVID-19 and Black Lives Matter

Please send proposals and a current CV for proposed articles to Guest Editors:

Rachel Colls (rachel.colls@durham.ac.uk

Julia Rogers (jerogers@ucsd.edu)

Refs:

Lupton, Deborah. “Risk as moral danger: the social and political functions of risk discourse in public health.” International journal of health services 23, no. 3 (1993): 425-435.

National Health Service (NHS) (2020) ‘Better Health’ (Available from: https://www.nhs.uk/better-health/ (Date Accessed: 29/07/20).

World Obesity Forum (2020) ‘Statement: Coronavirus (Covid -19) and Obesity’ (Available from: https://www.worldobesity.org/news/statement-coronavirus-covid-19-obesity (Date Accessed: 29/07/20)

FYI.

Fat Studies in Canada: (Re)Mapping the Field

Edited By: Allison Taylor, Kelsey Ioannoni, Sonia Meerai, Calla Evans, Amanda Scriver, May Friedman

This edited collection will focus on the growing field of fat studies, specifically the emergence of fat studies theorists, academics, artists, and community activists in the colonial project known as Canada. As a field of research, fat studies criticizes dominant framings of fatness, particularly those of ‘obesity’ or an ‘obesity epidemic’, for the ways in which they marginalize fat bodies. Instead, fat studies seeks to understand the ways in which fatness functions simultaneously as a material experience and a cultural construct, with the aim of challenging—and ultimately dismantling— the fat oppression that is pervasive in contemporary Western cultures. Accordingly, fat studies takes a non-pathologizing approach to fatness, positing fatness as a form of human diversity and as a politicized embodiment and, therefore, offering a critical theoretical framework for identifying, analyzing, and resisting fat oppression. In critically examining attitudes around weight, fat studies argues that our knowledge of weight needs to be understood in an intersectional fashion, as weight cannot be understood without acknowledging the way people are situated in multiple forms of marginalization and oppression, embracing an intersectional approach to understanding fatness. Indeed, fat studies must consider how gender, race, class, disability, and other axes of oppression impact cultural ideas about, and individual and group embodied experiences of fatness.

While fat studies has been criticized for being U.S. (United States) centric, the field is growing in Canada, with scholars producing rich contributions to the field. With its focus on Canada, this edited book acknowledges that borders are a colonial construct and, therefore, posits Canada as an imagined space with real, material impacts on marginalized lives. As a settler society, in which the pathologization of body shape and size diversity plays a central role in the imposition and maintenance of white supremacy, it is especially urgent to consider fatness in a Canadian context. Indeed, it is imperative that analyses of fatness in a Canadian context consider the colonial and white supremacist nature of fatphobia because of the ways in which Canadian institutions such as policing target and enact violence against Indigenous, Black, and Brown bodies. It is within the context of an emergent fat studies field in Canada that we position this edited collection. This edited book thus looks to map the current state of fat studies in Canada, with particular focus on gendered analyses of fatness. In highlighting Canadian fat studies scholarship, we aim to chart the unique ways that scholars in Canada are troubling and thickening the larger fat studies literature.

Possible Topics Include:

• The landscape of/positioning fat studies in Canada

• Gender and fatness (femininities, masculinities, non-binary and trans genders)

• Indigenous and decolonial approaches to fat studies and Canada

• Race, racism, white supremacy, and fatness

• Disability and crip approaches to fatness

• Fatness and sexuality

• Fatness and age/ing

• Fatness, class, and poverty in the Canadian landscape

• Axes of privilege and oppression with fatness

• Canadian public policies, legislation, campaigns, and messaging relating to body shape, size, and weight

• The medicalization of fatness in Canada

• Fat activism in Canada: past, present, and future

• Canadian media representations of fatness

• mothering, fathering, and parenting and fatness in Canada

• Fatness in the community

• Variations in experiences of fat and size (i.e. superfats)

• Respectability politics

• Reconceptualizing ‘health’

• Fatness and COVID-19

We welcome additional ideas for submissions!

We invite people to submit academic articles, stories, alternative forms of narration, illustrations, poetry, and other art works that highlight issues relating to fat studies in Canada.

Abstracts/Statement of Interest – Due Monday August 31st 2020

Please submit an abstract (for academic work, up to 300 words) or explanation (up to 100 words) of your submission by August 31st 2020 to fatincanada2020@gmail.com. Acceptances will be notified mid September 2020. Full drafts will tentatively be due December 2020.

In recognizing the fraught and unprecedented nature of this current time surrounding COVID-19, if you are intending to submit but need more time (for either abstract or full submission), please let us know and we will do our best to work with your timeline.

Under contract with Inanna Publications (https://www.inanna.ca).