"Queering Fat Embodiment" (tentative title) - anthology - call for papers

Call for Papers

Tentative title: Queering Fat Embodiment

Type: Edited book

Submission deadline: January 15th, 2012

Contacts and editors:

Samantha Murray Samantha.murray@mq.edu.au (Main contact)

Cat Pausé c.pause@massey.ac.nz

Jackie Wykes wykesj@unimelb.edu.au

Scope:

Against the backdrop of the ever-growing medicalisation and pathologisation of fatness, the field of Fat Studies has emerged in recent years to offer an interdisciplinary critical interrogation of the dominant medical models of health, to give voice to the lived experience of fat bodies, and to offer critical insights into, and investigations of, the ethico-political implications of the cultural meanings that have come to be attached to fat bodies. This focus on the regulation, discipline and representation of fat bodies make it critically invaluable to the advancement of scholarship on embodiment.

This edited collection seeks to publish recent scholarship that embraces ‘queering’ as a mode of critical engagement in examining fat embodiment. Queer is a heterogeneous and multidisciplinary practice aimed at ‘bringing forth’ and thus denaturalising the taken for granted, the invisible, the normalized. This collection seeks to challenge and destabilise existing ideas of fat and fat embodiment both outside of and within the emerging field of Fat Studies. This volume will bring together scholarship from various disciplines in order to examine the ways in which fat embodiment is lived, experienced, regulated and (re)produced across a range of cultural sites and contexts. In queering established ideas about fat bodies, and presenting challenging inquiries/inqueeries into these notions, this collection will represent an innovative and critically invaluable contribution to the advancement of scholarship on fatness, and indeed on embodiment more generally.

Topics may include but are not limited to:

• fat activism and embodiment

• fat mental and physical health

• queer(y)ing ‘hard data’ on fatness/obesity science

• queer(y)ing health policies related to fat

• cross-cultural or global constructions of fat bodies

• cultural, historical, or philosophical meanings of fat and fat bodies

• fat embodiment in literature, film, music, nonfiction, and the visual arts

• fat as queering sex, beauty, gender, and other embodied performances

• fat sexuality

• fat materialities

• fat and space

• fat and biopolitics

• fat and citizenship

• fat and neoliberalism

• fatness and consumption

Please note that we are already in the process of completing a proposal to submit to publishers, which we will complete based on the submissions we receive. We have had some preliminary interest from publishers, but as yet, we have not secured a contract.

Full paper submissions are due January 15, 2012. Articles should range between 15 and 20 double-spaced pages. Please send submissions, along with an abstract of your paper and a brief biographical sketch, directly to Samantha.murray@mq.edu.au.

Popular & American Culture Associations conference (2012) - Fat Studies area - call for papers

My partner Julia McCrossin co-chairs the Fat Studies area of the Popular & American Culture Associations with Lesleigh Owen. Here's their CFP (call for papers) for next year's national conference (April 2012, Boston -- Julia should be living here with me by then, and I plan to attend the con for the first time; I'm also hoping to present).

PCA/ACA Fat Studies 2012 Call for Papers

Fat Studies is becoming an interdisciplinary, cross-disciplinary field of study that confronts and critiques cultural constraints against notions of “fatness” and “the fat body”; explores fat bodies as they live in, are shaped by, and remake the world; and creates paradigms for the development of fat acceptance or celebration within mass culture. Fat Studies uses body size as the starting part for a wide-ranging theorization and explication of how societies and cultures, past and present, have conceptualized all bodies and the political/cultural meanings ascribed to every body. Fat Studies reminds us that all bodies are inscribed with the fears and hopes of the particular culture they reside in, and these emotions often are mislabeled as objective “facts” of health and biology. More importantly, perhaps, Fat Studies insists on the recognition that fat identity can be as fundamental and world-shaping as other identity constructs analyzed within the academy and represented in media.

Proposals in the area of Fat Studies are being accepted for the 2012 PCA /ACA (Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association) National Conference in Boston, MA (April 11-14, 2011, meeting after, not before, Easter Sunday), at the Marriott Boston Copley Place. We welcome papers and performances from academics, researchers, intellectuals, activists, artists, and others, in any field of study, and at any stage in their career. We also welcome panels and roundtables on a variety of topics under the heading “Fat Studies.”

Topics may include but are not limited to:

- representations of fat people in literature, film, music, nonfiction, and the visual arts

- cross-cultural or global constructions of fatness and fat bodies

- cultural, historical, inter/intrapersonal, or philosophical meanings of fat and fat bodies

- the geography and lived experience of fatness and fat bodies

- portrayals of fat individuals and groups in news, media, magazines

- fatness as a social or political identity

- fat acceptance, activism, and/or pride movements and tactics

- approaches to fat and body image in philosophy, psychology, religion, sociology

- fat children in literature, media, and/or pedagogy

- fat as it intersects with race, ethnicity, class, religion, ability, gender, and/or sexuality

- history and/or critique of diet books and scams

- functions of fatphobia or fat oppression in economic and political systems

By December 15, 2011, please send an abstract of 100 - 250 words or a completed

paper to Fat Studies Area Co-Chairs Julia McCrossin (jmccross@gwmail.gwu.edu)

and Lesleigh Owen (goddess_les@yahoo.com).

Please include your complete contact information and a CV and/or 50 word bio, along with anticipated A/V needs. All submissions are welcome, but please use the information above to ensure your paper fits within the academic and political scopes of Fat Studies. Please also be mindful that Fat Studies is a political project and not merely an umbrella term for all discussions of larger bodies. Also, we encourage submitters to rethink using words like “obesity” and “overweight” in their presentations unless they are used ironically, within quotes, or accompanied by a political analysis.

Presenters must become members of the Popular Culture Association. Find more information on the conference and organization at

http://pcaaca.org/conference/national.php.