Fat Studies: The Basics

Fat Studies: The Basics introduces the reading of fat bodies and the ways that Fat Studies, as a field, has responded to waves of ideas about fat people, their lives, and choices.

Part civil rights discourse and part academic discipline, Fat Studies is a dynamic project that involves contradiction and discussion. In order to understand this field, the book also explores its intersections with race, class, gender, sexuality, age, disability, ethnicity, migration and beyond. In addition to thinking through terminology and history, this book will aim to unpack three key myths which often guide Fat Studies, showing that:

1. fat is a meaningful site of oppression intersected with other forms of discrimination and hatred
2. to be fat is not a choice (but also that a discussion of choice is itself problematic); and
3. fat cannot be unambiguously correlated with a lack of health

Fat Studies: The Basics is a lively and accessible foundation for students of Gender Studies, Sociology, Psychology, and Media Studies, as well as anyone interested in learning more about this emergent field.

May Friedman is a Professor at Toronto Metropolitan University. Her research explores fat studies and unstable identities, including bodies that do not conform to traditional racial and national or aesthetic lines.