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Abstract
In this article I consider the lived fat body and its relation to clothing by thinking fat experience as analogous to the situation of women as laid out in The Second Sex ([1949, 1951] 2010).

To be fat hasn't always occasioned the level of hysteria that this condition receives today and indeed was once considered an admirable trait. Fat Shame: Stigma and the Fat Body in American Culture explores this arc, from veneration to shame, examining the historic roots of our contemporary anxiety about fatness. Tracing the cultural denigration of fatness to the mid 19th century, Amy Farrell argues that the stigma associated with a fat body preceded any health concerns about a large body size. Firmly in place by the time the diet industry began to flourish in the 1920s, the development of fat

This article brings together two concepts, 'phantom fat' and 'liminal fat', which both aim to grasp how fat in contemporary culture becomes a kind of material immateriality, corporeality in suspension. Comparing the spheres of representation and experience, we examine the challenges and usefulness of these concepts, and feminist fat studies perspectives more broadly, to feminist scholarship on the body. We ask what connects and disconnects fat corporeality and fat studies from ways of theorising other embodied differences, like gender, 'race', disability, class and sexuality, especially when thinking through their perceived mutability or removability, and assumptions about their relevance for subjectivity. While it is important to consider corporeality and selfhood as malleable and open to change in order to mobilise oppressive normativities around gendered bodies and selves, we argue that more attention should also be paid to the persistence of corporeality and a feeling of a relatively stable self, and the potential for empowerment in not engaging with or idealising continuous transformation and becoming. Furthermore, we suggest that the concepts of phantom fat and liminal fat can help shed light on some problematic ways in which feminist studies have approached – or not approached – questions of fat corporeality in relation to the politics of health and bodily appearance. Questions of weight, when critically interrogated together with other axes of difference, highlight how experiential and subjugated knowledges, as well as critical inquiry of internal prejudices, must remain of continued key importance to feminist projects. ; peerReviewed

Winner, 2020 Body and Embodiment Best Publication Award, given by the American Sociological AssociationHonorable Mention, 2020 Sociology of Sex and Gender Distinguished Book Award, given by the American Sociological AssociationHow the female body has been racialized for over two hundred years There is an obesity epidemic in this country and poor black women are particularly stigmatized as "diseased" and a burden on the public health care system. This is only the most recent incarnation of the fear of fat black women, which Sabrina Strings shows took root more than two hundred years ago.Strings weaves together an eye-opening historical narrative ranging from the Renaissance to the current moment, analyzing important works of art, newspaper and magazine articles, and scientific literature and medical journals—where fat bodies were once praised—showing that fat phobia, as it relates to black women, did not originate with medical findings, but with the Enlightenment era belief that fatness was evidence of "savagery" and racial inferiority. The author argues that the contemporary ideal of slenderness is, at its very core, racialized and racist. Indeed, it was not until the early twentieth century, when racialized attitudes against fatness were already entrenched in the culture, that the medical establishment began its crusade against obesity. An important and original work, Fearing the Black Body argues convincingly that fat phobia isn't about health at all, but rather a means of using the body to validate race, class, and gender prejudice

2021 Summer. ; Includes bibliographical references. ; This dissertation uses a queer rhetorical approach augmented by a critical/cultural sensibility and autoethnographic performance to examine how body positive activists, influencers, and public figures carve out moments for fat-positive (queer) worldmaking within the online body positive movement. In particular, this project explores how body positivity shifts contextually from a set of depoliticized philosophies around self-love and positive body image to moments of worldmaking via radical body politics. The primary goal of this project is to examine how the body positive movement carves out possibilities for positive representation, humanization, and liberation for fat and otherwise non-normative bodies. To pursue this goal, I engage three distinct case studies of fat-positive queer worldmaking within body positivity after situating this project as joining and contributing to broader scholarly conversations around embodied social movement rhetoric as well as disciplinary perspectives on queer worldmaking. The first case study explores how two body positive social media influencers, @Sassy_latte and Melissa Gibson, use Instagram posts and the digital radio show format to develop radical, fat activist body politics around the notion of "body justice." The second case study focuses on hip-hop artist Lizzo and her role in the changing nature of body positivity in the current moment, analyzing how her social media, lyrics, and music videos engage in fat-positive queer worldmaking that recenters fat, Black femme bodies. The final case study takes on the character of autoethnographic performance in which I center my own body, my own journey with body positivity and fat activism, as well as grapple with the relationship between my role as a critic and my role as part of the rhetoric I analyze. In and through these case studies, I ultimately argue that it is through particular kinds of rhetorical labor—namely decolonial, intersectional, and queer forms—that body positive rhetors make possible moments of fat-positive queer worldmaking.

This article brings together two concepts, 'phantom fat' and 'liminal fat', which both aim to grasp how fat in contemporary culture becomes a kind of material immateriality, corporeality in suspension. Comparing the spheres of representation and experience, we examine the challenges and usefulness of these concepts, and feminist fat studies perspectives more broadly, to feminist scholarship on the body. We ask what connects and disconnects fat corporeality and fat studies from ways of theorising other embodied differences, like gender, 'race', disability, class and sexuality, especially when thinking through their perceived mutability or removability, and assumptions about their relevance for subjectivity. While it is important to consider corporeality and selfhood as malleable and open to change in order to mobilise oppressive normativities around gendered bodies and selves, we argue that more attention should also be paid to the persistence of corporeality and a feeling of a relatively stable self, and the potential for empowerment in not engaging with or idealising continuous transformation and becoming. Furthermore, we suggest that the concepts of phantom fat and liminal fat can help shed light on some problematic ways in which feminist studies have approached – or not approached – questions of fat corporeality in relation to the politics of health and bodily appearance. Questions of weight, when critically interrogated together with other axes of difference, highlight how experiential and subjugated knowledges, as well as critical inquiry of internal prejudices, must remain of continued key importance to feminist projects.