Exploring a Contrarian Point of View: Teaching Fat Studies in a Liberal Arts College

• In Event: Toward a Fat Pedagogy: Addressing Weight-Based Oppression in Higher Education

Abstract

In teaching for social justice, one of the first challenges is overcoming students’ reluctance or unwillingness to engage in the subject matter, due to strong held prejudices or the “stigma threat” generated by the instructor or the subject matter (Escalera, 2009; Goffman, 1963). That is, confronted with an idea—or a person—that carries a stigmatized identity, the student will often react with nervousness and hostility, thereby preventing the ability to consider new ideas and points of view. In teaching for social justice one of the other challenges is constructing a syllabus and course plan that simultaneously addresses the key issue under examination (in this case, the phenomenon of fat stigma) while neither ignoring the intersectionality of all oppressions and identities nor losing its specificity within the multiple relationships of that intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1989).

This study focuses on four iterations of teaching a course entitled “Fat Studies” as a cross-listed American Studies and Women’s and Gender Studies intermediate-level topics course. This study first explores the methods used to navigate the stigma threat generated by a course whose premise runs in opposition to the “common sense” that students know when coming into the class—that obesity is an epidemic that needs to be controlled. Building on the “mindfulness” techniques becoming increasingly important in primary and secondary education (Schoeberlein 2009), the course first asks students to note and observe their own affective and intellectual reactions to the material without engaging in those reactions. This technique allows space for the students to consider new ideas—the challenges to the idea that obesity is always physically dangerous, for instance—which can often be more difficult if students are using all their thoughtfulness to challenge the material before they even can consider it. The study next explores the construction of the syllabus itself, whose design highlights the ways that fat stigma works across time (Farrell, 2011) and intersects with nation (Kulick & Meneley, 2005), gender (Herndon, in press), race (Sapphire, 1996), class (Ernsberger, 2009), and sexualities (Bergman, 2009; Vade & Solovay, 2009;). Finally, the study explores the routes of “empathic interpretation” that the course takes in requiring students to research and write about the goals, strategies and tactics of a fat activist individual or group. That is, the students move to a place where they must think through the work of fat activists in order to be successful, which means that they must consider the ideas of fat activists rather than spending their energy in mockery, derision, or hostility. This study then concludes with an examination of student response to the class, drawing from four sets of end of the semester written evaluations, in order to measure the efficacy of these pedagogic methods of mindfulness, empathic interpretation, and an intersectional approach to the study of fat stigma. (463)

Author

• Amy Farrell, Dickinson College