Exposed social flesh: Toward an embodied fat pedagogy

Recently, a small but growing literature has emerged investigating and outlining what a fat studies pedagogy might entail. Missing from much of this literature is a discussion about how the material body becomes a site through which “obesity” discourse is resisted or reproduced in the classroom. The authors attempt to fill this gap by focusing in particular on the educator’s body. They present the deepened understanding that results when three differentially positioned feminist and fat studies educator-scholars engage in a reflexive analysis regarding their experiences of teaching fat pedagogy within the academy. They argue that for educators of a marginalized topic such as fat studies, corporeal risks emerge as classrooms become spaces where the social stigma of fatness intersects with and instigates careful surveillance of (fat) bodies. Each of the authors explores her experiences of these risks, interrogating how her body is voluntarily and involuntarily interpolated (or not) into the epistemological and theoretical frames of fat studies or critical weight curricula to become a site of learning for students. In addition, the authors reflect on how critical weight and fat studies—not only through the offering of critical fat studies literature, but also through students’ readings of their teacher’s flesh, can be used in the university as a means to resist “obesity” ideology and potentiate a reconstituting subjectivity, thus reinforcing a socially just pedagogy that upholds the necessary view that bodies of all shapes and sizes count.