Tuesday, May 27, 2008
updates 'n such
xo.
fat/queer anthology project!
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Call for Submissions
Working Title: Spilling Over: A Fat, Queer Anthology
Submission Deadline:
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
Please distribute widely.
Monday, May 12, 2008
also.
Monday, May 5, 2008
excess baggage.
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.