Thickening Fat: Dialogues on Intersectionality, Social Justice & Fatness

In February 2018, scholars, activists, and artists from across Canada, the US, Europe, India, and New Zealand gathered at Toronto Metropolitan University in Toronto, Ontario, Canada for a two-day international symposium entitled Thickening Fat: Dialogues on Intersectionality, Social Justice & Fatness. The overarching aim of the event was to bring together established and emergent experts from around the world and across disciplines to engage in discussion on fatness as an entry-point into the complexity of embodied difference and privilege. Two days of complex and robust dialogue resulted from this extraordinary event. The symposium additionally featured an evening open mic event with local community artists and activists.

The book, Thickening Fat: Fat Bodies, Intersectionality, and Social Justice, edited by May Friedman, Jen Rinaldi and Carla Rice seeks to explore the multiple, variable, and embodied experiences of fat oppression and fat activisms. 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. 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.

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. The chapters in this collection ask what happens when we operationalize intersectionality in fat scholarship and politics, and we position difference at the centre and start of inquiry.