[csaa-forum] EXTENDED CFP DEADLINE: 'Fat Studies: A Critical Dialogue' Conference
Samantha Murray
smurray78 at gmail.com
Sat Apr 17 16:17:14 CST 2010
** APOLOGIES FOR CROSS-POSTING **
CFP DEADLINE EXTENDED
** Following several requests, the deadline for abstracts has been extended
until 30 April 2010 **
Conference Call For Papers
Fat Studies: A Critical Dialogue
To be held 10 11 September, 2010
Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia
While cultural anxieties about fatness and stigmatisation of fat bodies in
Western cultures have been central to dominant discourses about bodily
propriety¹ since the early twentieth century, the rise of the disease¹
category of obesity and the moral panic over an alleged global obesity
epidemic¹ has lent a medical authority and legitimacy to what can be
described as fat-phobia¹. Against the backdrop of the ever-growing
medicalisation and pathologisation of fatness, the field of Fat Studies has
emerged in recent years to offer an interdisciplinary critical interrogation
of the dominant medical models of health, to give voice to the lived
experience of fat bodies, and to offer critical insights into, and
investigations of, the ethico-political implications of the cultural
meanings that have come to be attached to fat bodies.
This two-day event will put Australasian Fat Studies into conversation with
critical fat scholarship from around the globe by gathering together
scholars from across a spectrum of disciplinary backgrounds, as well as
activists, health care professionals, performers and artists. This
conference seeks to open a dialogue between scholars, health care
professionals and activists about the productive and enabling critical
possibilities Fat Studies offers for rethinking dominant notions about
health and pathology, gender and bodily aesthetics, political interventions,
and beyond.
Confirmed keynote speakers:
* Charlotte Cooper
(Department of Sociology, University of Limerick)
* Karen Throsby
(Department of Sociology, University of Warwick)
Abstracts are sought that engage with topics such as (but not limited to):
* Interventions to normalise fat bodies (such as diet regimes, exercise
programs, weight loss pharmaceuticals and bariatric surgeries);
* The ethico-political implications of the medicalisation of obesity¹;
* Constructions of the fat child¹ in childhood obesity media reportage;
* Representations of fat bodies in film, television, literature or art;
* Intersections of medical discourse and morality around obesity¹;
* The somatechnics of fatness;
* Fat performance art, fat positive performance troupes;
* Histories of fat activism and/or strategies for political intervention;
* Fat and queer histories/identities;
* Fat embodiment online, the Fat-O-Sphere;
* Feminist responses to fatness;
* Constructions of fatness in a range of cultural contexts;
* Systems of body quantification, measurement, and conceptualizations of
(in)appropriate size¹;
* Fat as it intersects with race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, gender,
disability and/or ageing.
Please send abstracts of 300 words, or panel proposals, to Dr Samantha
Murray via email at Samantha.murray at mq.edu.au by Friday, 30 April 2010.
Sponsored and hosted by the Somatechnics Research Centre, Macquarie
University, Australia.
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