No Fat Future?: The uses of anti-social queer theory for fat activism.

Date: 23 February 2011, 16.00
Location: Seminar Room, Beechgrove House

Gender Studies Seminar
Dr Rachel White, University of Westminster

This paper explores the connections between anti-social queer theory and fat politics, and considers the former's usefulness for theorising fat activism. Intersections between fat and queer identities have previously been explored within fat studies. However, the recent 'anti-social' turn in queer theory (Edelman, 2004) may open up new possibilities for fat activism to move beyond both liberal individualist and resignificatory frames.

Fat politics fit this turn in queer theory because contemporary discourses of the obesity 'epidemic' in the West are engaged in the construction of fat, not only as an individual moral failure, but as profoundly anti-social. The fat subject is being made knowable through its proximity to death, disease and sterility and the strain it places on collective resources. Thus, this paper argues, it is being produced as a figure with 'no future'. Moreover, anti-obesity discourses, for example government public health campaigns and commercial weight-loss literature, envision a future that is not just fat free, but heteronormatively gendered and fully reproductive. It is not only fat, but the fat subject's queerness that is under threat of erasure.

Following Edelman's call for queers to embrace their future-negating constitution, this paper will examine whether this is also a useful approach for fat activism. It will take UK-based fat/queer activist group The Chubsters as a case-study and ask whether a truly anti-social politics is possible, or whether fat activism is always implicitly invested in creating liveable lives for future fat/queer subjects.