Revolting Bodies? : The Struggle to Redefine Fat Identity / Kathleen A. LeBesco.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

LeBesco, Kathleen A., author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Obesity--Social aspects.

Obesity.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (ix, 162 pages)

Other Title:

Revolting Bodies?

Place of Publication:

Amherst, Massachusetts : University of Massachusetts Press, 2003.

Summary:

Revolting Bodies examines a number of sites of struggle over the cultural meaning of fatness. The book is grounded in scholarship on identity politics, the social construction of beauty, and the subversion of hegemonic medical ideas about the dangers of fatness. It explains how the redefinition of fat identities has been undertaken by people who challenge conventional understandings of nature, health, and beauty and, in so doing, alter their individual and collective relationships to power. LeBesco explores how the bearer of a fat body is marked as a failed citizen, inasmuch as her powers as a worker, shopper, and sexually "desirable" subject are called into question. At the same time, she highlights fat fashion, relations among fat, queer, and disability politics and activism, and online communities as opportunities for transforming these pejorative stereotypes of fatness. Her discussion of the long-term ramifications of denying bodily agency-in effect, letting biological determinism run rampant-has implications not only for our understanding of fatness but also for future political practice.

Contents:

Introduction: The discourse of revolt

Organization and embodiment: politicizing and historicizing fatness

Antidotes to medical discourse about fatness

Sexy/beautiful/fat

Citizen profane: consumerism, class, race, and body

Revolution on a rack: fatness, fashion, and commodification

Framing fatness: representations of obesity as disability

The queerness of fat

The resignification of fat in cyberspace

Fat politics and the will to innocence.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on: online resource; title from PDF information screen (ACLS, viewed on December 2, 2022).

Publisher Number:

2027/heb34584 hdl