Body Stories: In and Out and With and Through Fat





Price: $34.95

Page Count: 240

Publication Date: December 2020

ISBN: 978-1-77258-254-3

Body stories capture a nuanced, interconnected, interactive and complex telling of our understanding, perception and experience of and through our bodies. Plenty has been published on body image but image suggests a static fixed body unmitigated through our social interactions and varying times and spaces.  This book is not a “how-to” guide for fat confidence.  It’s not a compendium of fat suffering.  It’s simply a collection of narratives about what it’s like to survive in a weight-hating world.  It resists the ways that marginalized bodies are being written and researched and put into other people’s ideas about our existence.
The stories in this book are celebratory and are painful.  They look at intersections of race and queerness; they destabilize womanhood by presenting a range of possible female embodiments.  They explore issues of disability and madness.  The full range of possibilities that are collected here give a picture of what it means to live in a society with strong and powerful messages about size, about normalcy, about what a moral and healthy life and body look like.
This book is a snapshot of its place and time, but these stories remind us that we’re here to stay.  The body stories will change but we will keep owning our own narratives.  While story, especially written by women, is often seen as outside the academic canon, these stories, these creative offerings, are theory, are research, and are activism.  They are nothing less than the blueprint for liberation.  Writing about fat and about bodies outside of medicalized narratives, without ignoring the impact of race, sexuality, class, ability, gender, fashion, appearance and beyond, is radical and rigorous.
It is impossible to think about the future without wishing for liberation. Liberation can come in many forms.  It can mean an awareness, the ability to confront.  The stories in this book display the ways that liberation isn’t a finish line or a thing we can complete—rather it is a million small actions and understandings in aid of a renewed and hopeful world.

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

An Interdisciplinary Journal of Body Weight and Society

Click here to read a review by Elyse Neumann

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.