Contemporary Reader of Gender and Fat Studies

The Contemporary Reader of Gender and Fat Studies is a key reference work in contemporary scholarship situated at the intersection between Gender and Fat Studies, charting the connections and tensions between these two fields.Comprising over 20 essays from a range of diverse and international contributors, the reader is structured around the following key themes: theorizing gender and fat; narrating gender and fat; historicizing gender and fat; institutions and public policy; health and medicine; popular culture and media; and resistance. It is an intersectional collection, highlighting the ways that "gender" and "fat" always exist in connection with multiple other structures, forms of oppression, and identities, including race, ethnicity, sexualities, age, nationalities, disabilities, religion, and class. The Contemporary Reader of Gender and Fat Studies is essential reading for scholars and advanced students in Gender Studies, Sexuality Studies, Sociology, Body Studies, Cultural Studies, Psychology and Health.

"Fatness is highly intertwined with gender, given that fat stigma affects women and so do appearance norms. I was delighted to see a book devoted to this intersection with an impressive array of scholarly articles."Esther Rothblum, Editor, Fat Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Body Weight and Society"A must read for insurgent activist-intellectuals working for fat liberation and the radical change that involves, imagines, and incites. Authors in The Contemporary Reader of Gender and Fat Studies, yet again, with rigour, courage, originality, and a commitment to the collective, raise the bar for engaged scholarship."Lucy Aphramor, Associate Professor Gender, Power, and the Right to Food, Centre for Agroecology, Water and Resilience, Coventry University UK

Amy Erdman Farrell is the James Hope Caldwell Memorial Chair and Professor of American Studies and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Dickinson College. The author of Yours in Sisterhood: Ms. Magazine and the Promise of Popular Feminism and Fat Shame: Stigma and the Fat Body in American Culture, she has shared her research on national popular media, including Bitch, the New Yorker, Psychology Today, NPR, CNN, and The Colbert Report. From 2019-2020 she served as an American Council of Learned Societies fellow and in 2021-2022 she was in residence at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, where she worked on a project focusing on key moments in the history of the Girl Scouts of the USA.