May Friedman

Mother Blame, Fat Shame, and Moral Panic: “Obesity” and Child Welfare

This article seeks to examine the scholarly journal articles and print media that describe the intersections of child protection and pediatric “obesity,” arguing that presentations of these cases and related interventions rest at the nexus of dominant discourses of child-centered parenting and fears of the “obesity epidemic.” The messaging in both scholarly literature and news media on this topic echoes taken-for-granted truths about fatness and parenting and applies them to the contentious terrain of child welfare. In so doing, this literature reifies myths of both poor parenting and bodily failures and inscribes these failures on the bodies of the children described therein.

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.

Mad/Fat/Diary: exploring contemporary feminist thought through My Mad Fat Diary

Abstract My Mad Fat Diary profiles young people falling in and out of love, fighting with their parents, experimenting with drugs and alcohol, and testing limits. Yet the show offers a fresh look at tired tropes by ignoring dramatic conventions that suggest that ugly truths or non-normative bodies should remain out of view and instead sheds light on ignored, but common, teen experiences and identities. In doing so, this television program engages with complex feminist concepts such as intersectionality and narrative instability and renders these concepts intelligible to audiences with varying degrees of theoretical familiarity. This analysis considers how My Mad Fat Diary explores complex feminist concepts and identities. In particular, the show considers the ways that both fat and madness can be viewed as identities which are often stigmatized, but which may also morph into sites of pride through body acceptance work, aligned with fat activism, and a rejection of sanist discourses, in line with emergent work in the field of mad studies. In both its intersectional presentation of teenage experiences and identities and the multifaceted nuances of truth-telling and narrative arc, the show portrays an instance of contemporary feminist grappling with embodied identity, sanity, and complicated and intersected subjectivities.