Teaching and learning about gender, sexuality and fatness
This is a resource page for students and staff at the University of Bergen to increase competence on diversity thinking that includes body size and weight.
Main content
Please note that this information page will be updated with more information before summer 2026.
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.
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.
Teaching and learning about fatness
Learning about gender-, sexual- and body normativity can teach us something about the relationships between gender, sexuality, fatness, and humanness.
In the course KVIK206, Gender, Sexuality and Fatness, which was taught at the Centre for Women's and Gender Research (SKOK) during spring 2026, students and lectures explored what fatness does and how fatness is created in relation to gender, sexuality, as well as processes of racialization, ableism and classism.
They discussed processes of marginalization, desexualization and hypersexualization, and centered fatness through class and seminar discussion. As this was a interdisciplinary course, the students read texts from gender studies, queer studies, fat studies and related critical fields of study such as asexuality studies and more.
Each week, the students submitted a photo they took themselves and wrote a short text based on that week’s theme and course readings. The images and texts showcase the students’ learning process, as well as their academic and creative engagement with the syllabus.
Resources on gender, sexuality and fatness
The students' work will be displayed at an event for UiB staff and students on 29 April 2026, at which there will also be an introduction by course leader Sunniva Árja Tobiasen: Teaching and learning about gender, sexuality and fatness.
After the event, this information page will be updated with resources for those at UiB who teach about, research, work with, or are interested in these topics. Among the resources will be a report based on our experiences with this course, which we will make available upon request.
This learning-based pilot project has received support from UiB Universal.
