Price: $34.95
Page Count: 240
Publication Date: December 2020
ISBN: 978-1-77258-254-3
Body Stories is a thoughtful anthology of stories, theoretically-grounded reflections, and pedagogical explorations of fatness. This book is a useful complement for women’s/gender studies, body studies, queer studies and fat studies courses.
- Patricia Thille, PhD, University of Manitoba
Body Stories makes an important new contribution to discussions about body acceptance, fat experience and speaking up, and back, to body oppressions. The book uniquely combines scholarly, personal, and creative narratives but at its centre are stories, leading the reader through a series of insights into the heart of struggles to carve out peaceful fat embodiment and demands for fat justice.
- Dr George Parker, Lecturer, School of Midwifery, Otago Polytechnic
Body Stories is a healthy contribution to the field of Fat Studies. This intersectional investigation of fat as an identity, embodiment and experience is a very important one using personal accounts and creative content to give gravity and provide grounding to stories of embodiment and fatness.
- Allyson Mitchell, artist, academic and founder of Pretty, Porky and Pissed Off
Introduction
Jill Andrew
Chapter 1: Because I’m fat, I don’t deserve satisfaction?: A young fat woman’s experience of sex
Samantha Keene
Chapter 2: “Neither Sari, Nor Sorry”: Open Letter to the Indian Yummy Mummy
Sucharita Sarkar
Creative submission: Beautiful/Ugly
Lori Don Levan
Chapter 3: I’m Not Fat, I’m Pregnant: A Critical Discussion of Current Debates in Body Size, Fatness, Pregnancy and Motherhood
Alys Einion
Chapter 4: Eating while fat: Mapping the Journey
Crystal Kotow and Sam Abel
Creative submission: (not) Too Fat to Tango
LC DiMarco
Chapter 5: “Who's Afraid of the Big Fat Feminist?”: An Auto-ethnography Study of Fatness in Academic Feminist Spaces
Melanie Stone and Allison Taylor
Chapter 6: The Rock Goddess in Large
Beatrice Hogg
Chapter 7: The Unpopularity of Being Fat and Black in Popular Culture: A Case Study on Gabourey Sidibe
Simone Samuels
Creative submission: She Says
Carrie Cox
Chapter 8: The Elephant in the (Class)room
Christin L. Seher
Chapter 9: “Your Wheelchair is so slim”: A Meditation on the Social Enactment of Beauty and Disability
Samantha Walsh
Chapter 10: My Body is My Business
Liis Windischmann
Chapter 11: On learning self-love: how one curvy disabled brown femme navigates the body as a site of daily struggle of living with/in pain
Anoop Kaur
Creative submission: the line
Tracy Royce
Chapter 12: Just what the doctor ordered? Interrogating the narrative of ‘curing’ the fat body
Kelsey Ioannoni
Chapter 13: Body Lessons
Sonja Boon
Chapter 14: “Here Comes Fat May”: Learning and Relearning to Love My Body
May Lui
Chapter 15: My new skin – tattoos and skin-deep body-love
Dorothée Jankuhn
Creative submission: A call for self-love
Tierra Hohn
Chapter 16: Self-Acceptance: An Unfinished, Intergenerational Story
Judy Verseghy
Chapter 17: Braced
Sam Abel
Chapter 18: Lessons learned from Fat Women on TV
Idil Abdillahi and May Friedman
Creative submission: Embodied: the Female Body as a Repository of Experience
Leesa Streifler
Chapter 19: Substitute for love: My fat body and public health campaigns in New Zealand
Cat Pausé
Chapter 20: "Men are not dogs, they don't throw themselves on the bones": Fat as desirable
Victoria Team
Chapter 21: Being Gentle with Myself: A Lifelong Work in Progress
Steph Agosta
Creative submissions: The Flaps & Weight in Gold
Aries Hines
Chapter 22: Interpretation
Jessica Jagdeo
Chapter 23: We are the seeds: Conversations on beauty, body image and identity with Urban Indigenous women in Toronto
Emily Claire Blackmoon
Chapter 24: Bowel blues, bowel blows
Jill Andrew
Afterword:
May Friedman
Contributor Biographies
Jill’s Bio: Dr. Jill Andrew’s PhD “Put Together”: Black Women’s Body Stories in Toronto: (AD)Dressing Identity and the Threads that Bind explores the ‘trifecta’ of racism, sexism, fat hatred and their accommodation/resistance through fashion, activism, self-valuation & social interactions. Jill co-founded Body Confidence Canada, #SizeismSUCKS and is a politician NDP MPP Toronto-St.Paul’s.
May’s Bio: May Friedman’s research looks at unstable identities, including bodies that do not conform to traditional racial and national or aesthetic lines. Most recently much of May’s research has focused on intersectional approaches to fat studies considering the multiple and fluid experiences of both fat oppression and fat activism. May works at Ryerson University as a faculty member in the School of Social Work and in the Ryerson/York graduate program in Communication and Culture.
