The Fat Studies Reader

24. Fat Stories in the Classroom: What and How Are They Teaching About Us?

213 24 Fat Stories in the Classroom What and How Are They Teaching About Us? Susan Koppelman Our thoughts, feelings, judgments, and understanding of reality are all shaped by and subject to the power of stories. Theoreticians and strategists, people in the helping professions, advertisers, and propagandists analyze how stories can influence people and policies; parents, preachers, and politicians have always recognized this power. So do revolutionaries. Liberation movement leaders encourage new stories told, sung, and danced in the voices of the oppressed. They pressure existing publications to include these voices, and they create new publications. Call it size acceptance, fat civil rights, body diversity, or fat liberation, our civil rights movement is committed to bringing about an end to the demonizing, dehumanizing, pathologizing, victimizing, stigmatizing, bullying, humiliating, oppression, scapegoating, and hatred of fat people . We are telling our stories through all the arts, publishing and performing them, we demand positive images of us in all media, and we now insist on their inclusion in pre-K through graduate school across the curriculum in ways that maximize their revolutionary, liberatory impact. Are there already stories about fat people in the curriculum? Which stories? Which courses? And in what contexts are these stories being read? I queried six academic Listservs for information about short stories with significant fat characters. I examined the tables of contents of dozens of currently in-print short-story anthologies. Finally, I googled the title of the most frequently anthologized “fat” story—“The Fat Girl” by Andres Dubus—looking for syllabi that included that story. I analyzed those syllabi to garner some sense of what use was made (or was intended to be made) of that story A syllabus published online is both a public document and a literary text. Regardless of whether or not the class “makes” (i.e., isn’t cancelled), whether the author/ teacher retains control in the classroom and adheres to the authored, published text describing expectations and intent, or whether the author/teacher changes direction in medias res, the public document remains online until removed, and can therefore be analyzed. Although what is printed on a syllabus is at best an approximation of what actually happens in a classroom, reading the syllabus can tell us much about the intentions and attitudes of its author; after all, a syllabus is a formulaic literary text 214 Susan Koppelman expressing intentions, plans, expectations, and so forth. I analyzed syllabi as authored literary texts, statements of intent for a time bounded pedagogical endeavor that includes many elements: discussions, lectures, readings, attendance rules, accommodations for students with disabilities, grading, office hours, and the like. I consider specifically how the fictional fat person is positioned in the syllabi. The materials taught in conjunction with them are the most telling aspect of contextualization. “The Fat Girl” by Andre Dubus was first published in his 1977 collection, Adultery and Other Choices. It was then included in American Short Story Masterpieces (Carver & Jenks, 1987), The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Short Stories (Wolff, 1994), The Tyranny of the Normal (Donley & Buckley, 1996), College 101: A First-Year Reader (Lawry, 1999), What Are You Looking At? The First Fat Fiction Anthology (Jarrell & Sukrungruang, 2003), The Contemporary American Short Story (Nguyen & Shreve, 2004), An Introduction to Critical Reading (McCraney, 2006), and the fifth edition of Fiction: A Pocket Anthology (Gwynn, 2007). These anthologies are expensive to produce (most of the stories are still protected by copyright, and consequently reprint costs are substantial), widely used in classrooms, profitable, and likely to remain in print. We can assume the continuing ubiquity of “The Fat Girl.” So what is “The Fat Girl” about? And is it “good” for our cause? I believe that “The Fat Girl” is a story of prolonged child abuse. In that place/ space where a child should feel safest, most unconditionally loved and accepted, most nurtured—the family home—this girl child Louise is systematically and relentlessly deprived of food sufficient for her needs by her mother (who is systematically depriving herself as well), in concert with the passive collusion of her father. Being reminded at least twice a day at family meals that she is not acceptable, not “all right,” not adequate, insufficient in the area of personal worth that evidently mattered most, Louise is not happy. A fat activist might summarize the story as follows: Louise’s mother, who has internalized fat hatred and yet has a predisposition to be fat, fearing that her daughter will become fat, begins to severely...