Abigail Saguy
Department of Sociology

Gender and Body Size

A couple of decades ago, feminist scholars had much to say about fat. Recently, however, discussions of body weight have been dominated by health policy concerns over the so-called obesity epidemic. Despite a long tradition of feminist critique of fat hatred as a problem of patriarchy, there has been very little critique of the growing emphasis on the importance of slenderness for health reasons. Moreover, while feminist scholars have spilt much ink on the pressures on average size women to be as thin as emaciated fashion women, there has been very little feminist work on the experiences of very fat women. A new interdisciplinary field in “fat studies” is emerging that addresses these topics.

Speakers:


"Fat and Identity Politics"

Paul Campos, Professor of Law, University of Colorado

"Weight and Mortality: The Population Perspective"

Katherine M. Flegal, Ph.D.
National Center for Health Statistics,
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention



"The Real F-word: Fighting Fat Fear During the War on 'Obesity'”

Marilyn Wann, activist and author of Fat! So?

Kathleen McHugh
Cinema and Media Studies Program, Department of Theater, Film, and Television
Department of English

Changing the Object: New Feminist Film Histories

Feminist film scholars are changing the way film history is done. Film histories, whether focused on Hollywood, national, world, or alternative cinemas, often relegate women's contributions to footnotes, last chapters, anomalous honorable mentions, or special case studies. Feminist film historians are changing that. Incorporating the insights of feminist film theory, their focus has shifted from the portrayal of women on screen to women as producers. Often to access the latter, feminist scholars change or invent new objects of study in order to chronicle the expressive dimension of women's participation in Hollywood and other modes of filmmaking. The scholars in this series write new film histories by considering women's production of ephemera, memoirs, and non-industrial film projects. They consider the star as producer and engage the history of feminism within film studies.

Speakers:

Patricia White, Swarthmore
Amelie Hastie, UCSC

Joseph Bristow
Department of English

Race in Sexuality: The Color of LGBT

This series addresses the flourishing body of recent scholarship that stands at the point where feminist-oriented studies of gender, analyses of dissident sexuality, and inquiries into race and ethnicity (often uncomfortably) meet. All of the speakers in this series have developed pioneering research that examines how race and gender are constitutive components of insubordinate desire. Jasbir Puar's groundbreaking 2007 monograph, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times, typifies this new current of innovative thinking that aims to denaturalize a number of "homonormative" assumptions about masculinity/femininity and racialized otherness. By comparison, David L. Eng's scholarship includes not only his fine book on "managing masculinity" in Asian-American literature and culture. He has also made significant editorial interventions on the racial and nationalist aspects of the mainstreaming of queer identities in an era of neoliberalism. Similarly, the recent work of Kathryn Bond Stockton--Beautiful Bottom, Beautiful Shame: Where "Black" Meets "Queer" (2007)-- looks at the ways American cultural production (in particular, film and literature) have addressed racialized passivity.

Videocasts:

WATCH Kathryn Stockton: Oedipus Raced, or the Child Queered by Color
‘Gay’ Child and ‘Black’ Child in Liberal Race Films