Jen Rinaldi

Pedagogical Possibilities for Unruly Bodies.

ABSTRACT Project Re•Vision uses disability arts to disrupt stereotypical understandings of disability and difference that create barriers to healthcare. In this paper, we examine how digital stories produced through Re•Vision disrupt biopedagogies by working as body-becoming pedagogies to create non-didactic possibilities for living in/with difference. We engage in meaning making about eight stories made by women and trans people living with disabilities and differences, with our interpretations guided by the following considerations: what these stories ‘teach’ about new ways of living with disability; how these stories resist neoliberalism through their production of new possibilities for living; how digital stories wrestle with representing disability in a culture in which disabled bodies are on display or hidden away; how vulnerability and receptivity become ‘conditions of possibility’ for the embodiments represented in digital stories; and how curatorial practice allows disability-identified artists to explore possibilities of ‘looking back’ at ableist gazes.

Recovering Bodies: The Production of the Recoverable Subject in Eating Disorder Treatment Regimes

In this chapter, we critique biopedagogies that inform eating disorder treatment. We employ a body-becoming counter-pedagogy as a theoretical frame in order to explore how youth develop and enact particular subjectivities when treated for eating disorders. Correspondingly, we consider how the failure or the refusal to enact an idealized subjectivity, one shaped by race and class and of particular interest to this chapter, sex and sexual orientation, results in the marking of bodies as unrecovered, even unrecoverable. We provide an account of biopedagogies of eating disorder recovery, against which we develop a body-becoming pedagogy. Using this philosophical framework we demonstrate how eating disorder treatment regimes sex bodies, and by extension how sex is conceptualized within heterosexual matrices.

Reconceptualizing temporality in and through multimedia storytelling: Making time with through thick and thin

ABSTRACT What lessons about linearity are illuminated by the stories that engage our experience of queer fat bodies? The authors examine stories generated in the collaborative, community-based research project Through Thick and Thin. They analyze a selection of 3- to 7-minute microdocumentaries produced in the project that feature assemblages of queer sexuality, gender expression and identity, and other privileged or minoritized identifications (race, disability, class, indigeneity) in confrontation with weight-based stigma, expectations around eating and exercise, and experiences of pathologization. The athors argue that linearity requires a constant labor of improvement that seeks to restore and recover fat queer bodies to imagined state(s) of normalcy/health. By using concepts of queer and crip time, the authors illustrate how queer subjectivity—queered in terms of not only sexuality, but also body shape and size, and/or eating dis/order practice—finds itself out of sync with time: that is, how the project’s storytellers are refused or engage in acts of refusing available futurities and instead construct and live subversive temporalities. In the authors’ range of examples, they show and value how Through Thick and Thin storytellers, and by extension persons with queer and non-normative embodiments, live and move through and in effect, re-make time.

Introduction to the special issue: Fatness and temporality

ABSTRACT As scholars, artists, and activists continue to contend with the question of who has a future, we are drawn to the relationship between fat and the social construction of time. In this introduction to the special issue of Fat Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Body Weight and Society, we explore what fat reveals about time and what fat studies offers to current conceptions of temporality. We consider how fat existence and fat interventions cultivate temporal economies other than linear, capitalist, colonial ones, and reflect on how fat studies scholarship is amplified and reconfigured by intersecting ways of knowing about time through the lived experience of fatness.

Recounting Huronia Faithfully: Attenuating Our Methodology to the “Fabulation” of Truths-Telling

If telling the truth is considered vital to research methodology, what happens in methodological spaces where “telling the truth” is futile? In this article, we examine the limitations, possibility, and even desirability of normative forms of empirically verifiable truth-telling and the potentialities for storied or fabulated truths with regard to knowledges that have historically been dismissed by their audiences as unreliable and even deceptive. To do so, we draw from critical theory, and Deleuzian theory in particular, to offer a detailed theoretical framework for understanding the notion of fabulated truth. We then turn to our own research to describe a project that embraced the potential of fabulation as a deeply generative methodological practice in regard to better understanding experiences of trauma. This project, which involved working alongside people with intellectual disabilities who have survived institutional incarceration, used fluid arts-based methods to help engage the affective force of trauma to story multiple truths about an otherwise unspeakable history.