Fat Studies for Liberation

Developed by Kelsey Foster
Administrative Assistant
Office of the GWS Librarian
Universities of Wisconsin
December 2024

This bibliography is number 107b in the series “Bibliographies in Gender and Women’s Studies,” published by the University of Wisconsin System Office of the Gender and Women’s Studies Librarian. It was developed as part of “Embodying Feminism: Calling In, Calling Out, Calling to Action – A set of bibliographies supporting the 2025 Conference of the UW System Women’s and Gender Studies Consortium.”

Introduction

Fat studies is an area of scholarly inquiry that deals with body shape and size as one of the many variations in human embodiment, a dimension of difference that informs experiences of privilege and oppression. It considers how body shape and size impact and interact with other aspects of identity like race, gender, (dis)ability, sexuality, socioeconomic circumstance, and more. Fat liberation, the praxis piece of fat studies, imagines a future free of oppression based on body size and the tyranny of healthism, which makes “health” a moral obligation. This bibliography shares resources that take an intersectional and interdisciplinary critical view of both popular and academic ideas about the body while centering fat people’s lived experiences. Topics include weight stigma and body shame; healthcare for fat people; fat representations in pop culture and the media; diet culture and the wellness industrial complex; fat activism; and more.

This is the first bibliography in our collection to focus on any of these topics. It is not intended to be all-encompassing. Each of the subsections here could be expanded into their own long and detailed bibliography. Additionally, there is much more out there that speaks to the history of fatness, body image, weight and health, and so on. Perhaps in future the office will create more bibliographies in these subject areas. For now, please take this as an introduction to the topic.