Fat Studies Student Projects: Fat-Positive Cultural Activism

Featured here in our Student Spotlight are some amazing projects from Professor Claudia Cortese’s Fall 2021 upper-level special topics class, Fat Studies: Race, Class, Gender, Queerness. This is the first Fat Studies course that Montclair State has offered. The class explored fat activism; the history of anti-fatness and the origins of diet culture; the ways that weight stigma and diet culture are experienced today; and how fat identity intersects with race, class, gender, queerness, and disability.

For students’ final projects, they created pieces of cultural activism. During the course, students discussed how anti-fatness harms people of all body sizes, though it most greatly harms superfat and infinifat people. They examined anti-fatness through an intersectional lens, exploring how fat identity intersects with other minoritized identities. These discussions revealed the extent to which anti-fatness promotes stigma in social and medical settings, as well as leads to workplace discrimination and a wage gap between thin and fat people. These discussions also revealed the anti-fat stereotypes that are often promoted in the media.

One way to combat anti-fatness is through “cultural work,” which involves creating representations and artwork that challenge weight stigma. For the final project, students created cultural texts—music videos, digital essays, manifestos, children’s books, poems, photo projects, social media pages, to name a few examples—that combat fatphobia, humanize fat people, and diversify representations of fatness. These texts are both political and personal, social and embodied, unpacking how anti-fatness has shaped students’ relationships to food and their bodies.

Gab Davila – Fat birth death and afterlife

Talia Fulton –Fat Studies; Spoken Poetry Movement

Nicole Guardado – my body is a garden in full bloom

Keely Hoehl – https://www.instagram.com/fat_kiwi_1999/

Emilia Siracusa – https://www.instagram.com/emrose302/

Anonymous –  Four Poems by Anonymous Students

Spencer Crines – The Ten-Step Fat Fag Guide