CFP: Fat Studies (Australia)

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 ‘propriety’ since the early twentieth century, the rise of the ‘disease’ category of obesity and the moral panic over an alleged global ‘obesity epidemic’ has lent a medical authority and legitimacy to what can be described as ‘fat-phobia’. 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 ‘obesity’;
* Constructions of the ‘fat child’ in childhood obesity media reportage;
* Representations of fat bodies in film, television, literature or art;
* Intersections of medical discourse and morality around ‘obesity’;
* 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 ‘size’;
* 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@mq.edu.au by Friday, 30 April 2010.
Sponsored and hosted by the Somatechnics Research Centre, Macquarie University, Australia.