Gender, Sexuality and Fatness (KVIK206)

What is fatness and what does it do? Can we say that fatness creates, enables, disrupts and destroys gender and sexuality?

Fatness as a topic is often ignored, shunned or only discussed as a biomedical issue. This means that fatness is usually problematized within a biomedical framework, where it is reduced to a medical problem that needs a solution, and by some argued to be an illness or a chronic illness. In this course, we are moving beyond this narrow perspective on fatness, as well as actively engaging with it.

The critical field of fat studies has over the last 25 years or so continued to analyze and discuss the problematization of fatness. In fat studies, the focus is on consequences of the medicalization of body fat, weight stigma and discrimination of fat people, as well as the (re)presentation of fatness in literature and visual media; throughout history as well as in our present time.

Learning about gender-, sexual- and body normativity can teach us something about the relationships between gender, sexuality, fatness, and humanness. In this course, we will explore what fatness does and how fatness is created in relation to gender, sexuality, as well as processes of racialization, ableism and classism. We will discuss processes of marginalization, desexualization and hypersexualization, and center fatness through class and seminar discussion. This is an interdisciplinary course, which means that we will read texts from gender studies, queer studies, fat studies and related critical fields of study such as asexuality studies and more.

There will be lectures and seminars, as well as weekly mandatory student assignments.  The assignment is created with the intent for students to engage with the weekly readings and lectures in a practical and creative way.