
Description
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.
Product Details
Publisher | University of Massachusetts Press |
Publish Date | December 16, 2003 |
Pages | 162 |
Language | English |
Type | |
EAN/UPC | 9781558494299 |
Dimensions | 8.8 X 6.0 X 0.5 inches | 0.6 pounds |
About the Author
Reviews
"I can think of no other book that resembles Revolting Bodies? No one else has theorized on the shifting, self-contradicting, wildly political rhetoric of fat oppression. I look forward to using the book in my undergraduate women's studies classes, and I can imagine that it will be used in graduate courses in anthropology, philosophy, and psychology, as well as more professionally oriented classes in social work and nursing. . . . Lively, accessible, stimulating, and at times even profound."--Michèle A. Barale, coeditor of The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader
"Revolting Bodies?The Struggle to Redefine Fat Identity, is a seminal work in fat studies. 'Katie is trying to erase the line between fat and thin, ' says Marilyn Wann, an activist who started a fat-studies e-mail list last year that has 120 subscribers. 'Her work is foundational.'"--The Chronicle of Higher Education
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