Tuesday, May 27, 2008

updates 'n such

i've been taking it easy on the beach the last few days since finishing finals. i have about 100 things i want to post about, but a slower than slow internet connection on which to do it. so i'm jotting things down and making notes of all the things i need to get down on this blog once i get home. so for now, it's back to the sand and the gulf, but expect to be hit with a barrage of updates in no time at all. don't lose faith in me yet tiny, but faithful and lovely, handful of readers!

xo.

fat/queer anthology project!

here's one of the many side projects i'm working on! i say "side" because anything not part of coursework or studying for prelim exams counts as "side." bleh.

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Call for Submissions

Working Title: Spilling Over: A Fat, Queer Anthology
Contact: spillingover@gmail.com
Submission Deadline: December 1, 2008

Despite the attention given by queer studies to the materiality of bodies and the cultural and social inscriptions that designate them, still a dearth of both scholarship and literature exists around intersections of gender, sexuality, and fatness. As fat studies begins to emerge as a viable academic location of inquiry, questions surface as to how fat bodies, deemed “excessive” in their trespasses of size and space, create even more complex subject positions when compounded by queer desires. This proposed anthology seeks contributions addressing junctions of “fat” and “queer” in pieces that consider the representations and resistances of non-normative corporeality and also writings considering the theoretical conceptions of these intricate subjectivities. Spilling Over will reflect the notions of excess, boundaries, and containment implied by the labels “fat” and “queer” both singularly and collectively. In the form of scholarly writing and creative non-fiction pieces, essay submissions might consider (but are not limited to):

  • theorizing the concept of “excess” as it pertains to fatness and queerness
  • fat and queer identities; personal narratives; reclaiming “fat” and “queer”
  • notions of (in)visibility, hypervisibility, and passing and/or privilege
  • intersections of race, class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, (dis)ability, age, and religion
  • the economics of the obesity “epidemic” and the diet industry
  • fat, queer art and performance; performativity
  • pleasure, sex-positivity, eroticizing non-normative bodies
  • acceptance movements, political activism, resistance
  • the engagement of feminism with fatness
  • global, transnational, transcultural constructions of fat, queer bodies and lives
  • critical reflections of fatness and queerness in media, literature, film, music, and visual arts
  • the rhetoric of fat oppression, fatphobia, homophobia, transphobia, bigotry, responding to and/or addressing hate speech

By December 1, 2008, please send your 2,000 – 6,000 word submission, along with your complete contact information and a 50-100 word biography, to spillingover@gmail.com with the subject line of “Spilling Over – Submission.” Submissions must be received in 12 point Times New Roman font and sent in via Word documents (PDFs will not be accepted). Pieces will be reviewed and decisions made by April 2009. Please note that accepted submissions will be approved on a tentative basis, pending editorial board approval once the anthology has secured a publisher.

Questions can be directed to me at spillingover@gmail.com or visit the MySpace page at www.myspace.com/spillingoveranthology

Please distribute widely.

Monday, May 12, 2008

also.

despite colossal arguments that make my blood pressure shoot through the roof, how else am i to write my last final paper of all time when in a week and three days, i'm going to be here:



mmm. sanibel island, fl.
who cares if i'm going with my parents and my 83 yr. old g'ma?
whateva, haters.

Monday, May 5, 2008

excess baggage.

i'm thinking more and more lately about the intersections of fatness and queerness, particularly now in my own day-to-day life, not just academically, and what that means for the spaces i'm comfortable in and those where i'm not. it's interesting how when i'm in public and looked at because of my size, it is absent also of a queer read. because i'm femme and thus usually invisible as queer, the spectacle that my body becomes is only because of the "excessiveness" of my size and not also a reaction to my gender or my sexuality. this, of course, becomes complicated when i am in the presence of people who are visibly queer and takes on another dimension entirely when that person is clearly romantically linked to me. these are moments that i both cherish and fear because the transgressions are actually palpable. my fatness and my queerness, when they're both noticeable, create opportunities for rethinking love, desire, and sex despite size and despite who i'm fucking. these opportunities for conceiving differently, progressively even, of fat queer bodies, though, is also of course, made possible by the fact that i'm white and that i'm seemingly within a normative economic class. so there's potential here for blowing people's minds a bit, but there's also this overwhelming sense of danger that goes beyond queer bashing and the already serious danger of that. because now what must be taken into consideration is not only hatred of queerness, but also of fatness and the feelings of repulsion that inspires in people, let alone when fat sexuality is being made so open.

this is all to say that yesterday, when i was at a may day festival, surrounded by thousands of people and my friend - a brown, non-American, butch, my former lover - attempted to hold my hand as we made our way through cheese curd stands and kids running haywire with pink and purple paper streamers, i froze for a reason. and not because i didn't want her to take my hand because i feared what holding hands would signify in a relationship that is already complicated by our past as people who once loved a little and fucked a lot. i hesitated because of just how queer - because of the "excess" present in my size, our gender, our intimacy, our difference in skins - we were in a space where things seemed safe enough, but how and when do you really know? it was only two seconds worth of deliberation before i folded my fingers up with hers, but it's another example of thinking about this junction between sexuality and size and how it's real world stuff, daily stuff, that constantly reinspires my academic work on all of this.