Northwestern 'Critical Fat Studies' course will study 'queer fat liberation movement'

A university in Evanston, Illinois, will be offering a “Critical Fat Studies” course this fall. 

The class, taught by Professor S.B. West, will subject students to many topics surrounding “fatness,” including “cultural flashpoints that inform anti-fat biases” and the “queer fat liberation movement.” 

“We emphasize gender, ability, class, race and whiteness throughout this course,” the class description reads. 

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The class “explores fat studies as a corpus of theory and research that critically examines the medical, social, and cultural pathologization of weight and size. In the first half of the course, we will examine cultural flashpoints that inform anti-fat biases, including the emergence of the body mass index scale, the invention of ‘diet’ foods, and the shortcomings of studying fatness in empirical studies.”

“In the second half of the course, we will consider multiple responses to anti-fatness that attempt to reimagine health and wellness by reducing weight stigma,” the description continues.

Writing to Campus Reform, Professor West recommended the “Maintenance Phase” podcast, since her class “will be engaging portions of this podcast alongside a corpus of peer-reviewed research in the humanities and social sciences.” The podcast claims to “debunk the junk science behind health and wellness fads.”

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West, who uses “they/them” pronouns, focuses on “decolonial and trans feminisms,” according to her Northwestern biography. West did not provide a course syllabus, per Campus Reform’s request. 

Critical Fat Studies is one of many Gender and Sexuality courses available in the 2024-2025 curriculum. Another class, “Black Life. Trans Life,” will explore how “Popular discourse has either depicted black trans people as glamorous superstars or always and already predisposed to death.”

Brown University in Rhode Island is also offering a pre-college summer program covering the “politics of fatness”, titled “The F-Word: Examining the Science, Culture, and Politics of Fatness.”