On Learning to Teach Fat Feminism

As a feminist theorist who frequently teaches theorizing that starts from embodied experience, I have begun to incorporate fat feminism into my teaching.¹ As a neophyte and a relatively thin woman, I have been self-conscious about broaching issues related to fat bodies in my teaching, even though they clearly raise important issues about size bigotry, thin privilege, and body acceptance. Why should a feminist teacher want to teach about fat bodies? Why might she (and why did I) find it scary and intimidating to do so? What approaches did I take to teaching fat feminism, and what approaches will I take next time I teach thinking from the body? By sharing my fledgling efforts, misgivings and breakthroughs alike, I hope to encourage feminist teachers to explore work on fatness and integrate it into their teaching.

Why Would Feminist Teachers Want to Teach about Fat Bodies?

One enormous draw to teaching about social constructions of bodies, especially those related to body size and weight, is that it’s interesting: students are drawn to the topic. We live in a society that incessantly discusses size and weight, idealizing trim, toned bodies and simultaneously marketing tasty, high-caloric foods at every turn. We have bodies, we eat and diet and binge, and many of us worry about whether we have the right balance between the calories we eat and those we burn, whether we’re too fat, whether we’re acquiring unsightly bulges, and so on. And in most classes there are a few students who have had, or still have, eating disorders, and many who do not have normative slender (or buff) bodies.

Students find deeply resonant arguments that bodies are cultural artifacts, socially constructed by the particular expectations and practices of the time and place in which one lives. I recently taught a graduate theory seminar in which students read chapters from Susan Bordo’s Unbearable Weight, which deals with social constructions of the body. The half dozen reader reports from students demonstrated that the issues she discusses are crucial to their lives. Many of them shared intensely personal reflections and stories as well as more academic ones. Clearly, relating to their bodies is a charged issue, and this was so across multiple differences, as this group of writers included men and women, people who are white, African American, Hispanic, disabled, working class, young, middle-aged, straight, lesbian, gay, thin, fat, and in-between.

In passage after passage, Bordo explains how thin and fat bodies are “read,” focusing on the credit that thin-bodied people get and the blame directed at fat-bodied folks. Small wonder people obsess about their body size when controlling one’s weight and developing a taut, muscular body are read as having mastery over one’s impulses and appetites. Those who succeed in the constant watchfulness and self-discipline of appetite control and strenuous exercise feel good about themselves, and are happy, confident, and upbeat, simply on account of having succeeded in controlling their weight and body size. Conversely, we’re told repeatedly that if we’re fat, we’re weak, unable to exercise control, continually caving into the insistent demands of our bodies and appetites.

Such readings of thin and fat bodies reflect mind-body dualisms that go back to ancient Greece and to Augustine and other early Christian thinkers. These dualisms cast the body as the enemy of one’s higher purposes, reinforcing the idea that a fleshy, corpulent body reflects unrestrained appetite, a body that has slipped the control of the mind or spirit. It is a point that Elizabeth Grosz makes, too (5). Not only have traditional dichotomies read bodies, the flesh, carnality, and nature as feminine and opposed to mind, intellect, self-control, discipline, and culture, which are read as masculine, but female bodies are held up to different standards than male ones. A fat girl or woman is more likely to be held in contempt than a fat boy or man, and to be blamed for her size and shape; likewise, a slender girl or woman is valued on that account and is more likely to...