Vision: The Centre for Art and Social Justice as a leading-edge creative research center with a mandate to foster inclusive communities, well-being, equity, and justice.Carla Rice is Professor and Canada Research Chair specializing in Embodiment/Subjectivity Studies and in Arts-based/Research Creation Methodologies at the University of Guelph, and she holds a PhD from York University in Gender and Women’s Studies. Friedman has a long publication history including the award-winning monograph Mommyblogs and the Changing Face of Motherhood (2013), as well as several edited collections. May Friedman is an Associate Professor in the Ryerson University School of Social Work and Ryerson/York graduate program in Communication and Culture, and she holds a PhD in Women’s Studies from York University. The chapters in this collection ask what happens when we operationalize intersectionality in fat scholarship and politics, and we position difference at the center and start of inquiry.
Cognizant that the concept of intersectionality has been filled out in a plurality of ways, Thickening Fat poses critical questions around how to render analysis of fatness intersectional and to thicken up intersectionality, where intersectionality is attenuated to the shifting and composite and material dimensions to identity, rather than reduced to an “add difference and stir” approach.
In addition, Thickening Fat explores the full range of intersectional and liminal analyses that push beyond the simple addition of two or more subjectivities, looking instead at the complex alchemy of layered and unstable markers of difference and privilege. Moving beyond an analysis of fat oppression as singular, this book will aim to unpack the volatility of fat-the mutability of fat embodiments as they correlate with other embodied subjectivities, and the threshold where fat begins to be reviled, celebrated, or amended. Thickening Fat: Fat Bodies, Intersectionality, and Social Justice seeks to explore the multiple, variable, and embodied experiences of fat oppression and fat activisms.