East Carolina Honors College offers course examining theater and media through ‘feminist and fat studies lens’

East Carolina University (ECU) students can enroll next spring in a course titled “Fat in Performance,” which examines theater and media through a “feminist and fat studies lens.”

The honors-level course, titled “Fat in Performance: Unpacking Stigma, Identity and Representation,” provides students with a general education credit.

[RELATED: Fat studies is the field that teaches students to view obesity as ‘oppression’]

“This course explores representations of fat bodies onstage, screen and in popular media through a feminist and fat studies lens,” a course description on the Greenville, North Carolina-based university’s website says. 

The description continues: “Students will examine how fat bodies are presented and received in popular culture and performance,” and analyze “how cultural, social, and historical norms overlap with performance” and “cultural constructions of fat and intersectional identities in popular representations.”

Jen-Scott Mobley, an associate professor of theatre, is listed as the instructor for “Fat in Performance.” 

According to Mobley’s university bio, the associate professor is the author of “Female Bodies On the American Stage: Enter Fat Actress.”

“The fat female body is a unique construction in American culture that has been understood in various ways during the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries,” the book’s description says.

“Analyzing post-WWII stage and screen performances, Mobley argues that the fat actress’s body signals myriad cultural assumptions and suggests new ways of reading the body in performance,” the description adds.

The ECU course aligns with a broader trend of colleges and universities promoting “fat studies” and condemning “fatphobia.”

The University of California, Berkeley, maintains a page dedicated to combating “anti-fatness” on campus. The university’s health service offers “Body Diversity and Weight Inclusion trainings” and hosts a “Body Diversity and Weight Inclusion Work Group.”

The University of Illinois Chicago’s website has a similar page on “weight stigma” and “fatphobia.” The page recommends not using BMI as a health standard and praises “medical facilities that do not weigh patients.”

[RELATED: San Diego State University Pride Center says ‘fatphobia’ is ‘rooted in anti-Blackness,’ calls on students to champion ‘fat bodies’]

This past summer, Harvard University offered a course titled “Sick, Fat, Ugly, Useless: Disability and Fat Studies.” The course posed questions such as “why do we still have so much prejudice about bodies that differ from the so-called norm.”

In April, the University of Wisconsin hosted a conference on “queer theory, disability studies, and fat studies.”

Campus Reform contacted East Carolina University, the Honors College, and Jen-Scott Mobley for comment. This article will be updated accordingly.