Contemporary Reader of Gender and Fat Studies

Amy Erdman Farrell is the James Hope Caldwell Memorial Chair and Professor of American Studies and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Dickinson College. The author of Yours in Sisterhood: Ms. Magazine and the Promise of Popular Feminism and Fat Shame: Stigma and the Fat Body in American Culture, she has shared her research on national popular media, including Bitch, the New Yorker, Psychology Today, NPR, CNN, and The Colbert Report. From 2019 to 2020 she served as an American Council of Learned Societies fellow and in 2021–2022 she was in residence at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, where she worked on a project focusing on key moments in the history of the Girl Scouts of the United States of America.

"Fatness is highly intertwined with gender, given that fat stigma affects women and so do appearance norms. I was delighted to see a book devoted to this intersection with an impressive array of scholarly articles."Esther Rothblum, Editor, Fat Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Body Weight and Society"A must read for insurgent activist-intellectuals working for fat liberation and the radical change that involves, imagines, and incites. Authors in The Contemporary Reader of Gender and Fat Studies, yet again, with rigour, courage, originality, and a commitment to the collective, raise the bar for engaged scholarship."Lucy Aphramor, Associate Professor Gender, Power, and the Right to Food, Centre for Agroecology, Water and Resilience, Coventry University UK

• Part I: Introduction; 1 Connecting Gender and Fat: Feminism, Intersectionality and Stigma; Part II: Discourses of Gender and Fat; 2 Undesirably Different: Hyper(in)visibilty and the Gendered Fat Body; 3 Gendered Fat Bodies as Neoliberal Bodies ; 4 To Have and Not to Hold: Queering Fatness; 5 Antiblackness, Gender and Fat; Part III: Narrating Gender and Fat; 6 Embodied Narration; 7 Fat Stories; Part IV: Historicizing Fatness; 8 The Politics of Fat and Gender in the Ancient World; 9 Historicizing Black Women’s Anti-Fatness; Part V: Gender and Fat in Institutions and Public Policy; 10 Public Policy and the Repercussions of Fat Stigma on Women and Children; April Michelle Herndon ; 11 Anti-fat and Anti-Latina Discourse and Policy in the United States; 12 Fatness, Gender, and Academic Achievement in Secondary and Postsecondary Education; Part VI: Gender and Fat in Health and Medicine ; 13 Eating Disorders, Gender, and Fat: Theorizing the Fat Body in Feminist Theories of Eating Disorders; 14 Immovable Subjects, Unstoppable Forces: Bariatric Surgery, Gender, and the Body; 15 Gender, Fat, and "Reproductive" Healthcare: Negotiating Fat Pregnancy in the Context of Eugenics; Part VII: Gender and Fat in Popular Culture and Media ; 16 Sexy, Docile Bodies: The Objectification and Paternalistic Management of Plus-Size Models; 17 Big-Gay Men Entering the Twenty-First Century: Global Perspectives on Fat-Affirming Subcultures and Imagery; 18 From Hattie McDaniel to Queen Latifah: Examining a New Mammy and other Fat Black Women Representations in Contemporary Media ; Part VIII: Gender, Fat and Resistance ; 19 Coming Out as Fat; 20 Fat Community; 21: Belle di Faccia: Fat Activism in Italy; 22 "Your belly is a heap of wheat:" a Torah of Fat Liberation; 23 Don’t Forget to Be Yourself; Part IX: In Memoriam Chapter 24 Friend of Cat