The Fat Studies Reader

With 40 essays that span an impressive array of academic and popular approaches, this book is the first to collect the essential texts of the blossoming discipline known as fat studies, which explores why the oppression of fat people remains acceptable in American culture. As contributor Bianca D.M. Wilson notes in her piece, fat studies is an arena where the personal, political and scientific converge, and with this book, readers can mount an informed challenge to the medical construction of obesity and size, the diet industry, insurance companies, public policy and popular culture. Arranged thematically, the essays survey the “social and historical construction of fatness,” “fatness as social inequality” and even “size-ism in popular culture and literature.” While one essay points out the North American biases of the current state of fat studies, new cross-cultural work would do well to attend to this volume first. It may be too soon for the movement to offer utopian alternatives, but these essays offer a rich supply of tools for the activist and scholar willing to start the revolution, including a “fat liberation manifesto.” (Dec.)