Massive congratulations and love are due to Corinna Tomrley and Ann Kaloski Naylor whose book Fat Studies in the UK has just been published.This is a really important book for fat activism and scholarship, not just in the UK but anywhere. Why? Because there is currently so little documentation of any depth and strength, which this book has in spades. More Fat Studies books are in the pipeline, Sondra Solovay and Esther Rothblum's magnificent Fat Studies Reader is due in November, but Fat Studies in the UK is kicking things off and providing a base from which things can start to flourish.
I encourage everyone to buy buy buy (and read) this book, which is available through any bookshop, online or off. Go on, do it!
Fat Studies in the UK
Posts
5 comments:
You probably don't mean it that way, but I'd avoid saying "kicking things off" as if there has not been a number of fat studies books in the past. You have covered a lot of fat studies books from the past, including, to throw out one book almost arbitrarily, _Shadow on the Tightrope_.
I hear you gabfly, and I honour those amazing and powerful works that came before. I guess what I'm seeing as different is that Corinna and Ann's book, and Sondy and Esther's too, specifically locate themselves as Fat Studies. As far as I know, this has not really happened before.
Charlotte: I've always appreciated your insistence on recognizing others. Here, I'd only say that Katie LeBesco's book uses "fat" so much in an affirmative way and as an object of study (and a subject position) that we have to acknowledge it as a fat studies book. Also, _The Culture of Obesity in Early and Late Modernity_ by Levy-Navarro is a fat studies book. In fact, it elicited the first review in the _TLS_ that I'm aware of that made the simple pronouncement that "fat" deserves attention as a cultural category as much as race, gender, and class.
Having said this, you know I think it is terrific that _Fat Studies in the UK_ is being published, and I have ordered it for my library. Congratulations for your involvement in it!
gabfly1, I agree that those works are hugely important and defining studies. I am being linguistically pedantic in that FSUK is one of, or the first, to call itself Fat Studies, to use that phrase explicitly.
I would add that 'fat' as a positively reclaimed word goes back to the beginnings of the fat activist movement - think Fat Underground and Lew Louderback's Fat Power. However 'Fat Studies' as a term in itself does has its own particular meanings and life. And those of us arguing for its use, trying to legitimize it both as an academic discipline and as a valid, cultural movement that is growing out of the current 'obesity epidemic' discourse would probably recognise it as being a very particular term. One thing about fat studies is it *is* about recognising and recording all that has come before - as well as recognising fat studies work now and looking forward. So whilst I agree that work such as 'Shadows' and Katie's work is part of fat studies - no doubt about it - it kind of predates the term as a description of this work.
In a way it's like calling work feminist or queer that existed before those terms were actually used in those contexts - it's right but it is also about historical attribution. It would be interesting to see when people did start calling their work specifically 'fat studies' and what it meant to them using the term.
Working in fat studies and bringing that term out into the open through the York conference in 2008 and now this book has made me realise how important it is to use it and that it encompases so much but is also quite specific.
Post a Comment