Sick, Fat, Ugly, Useless: Disability and Fat Studies

We are now in the twenty-first century: why do we still have so much prejudice about bodies that differ from the so-called norm? What, indeed, is the norm and why is it so important to us? In this course, students are introduced to fat studies and disability studies in tandem to explore the politics of the body. We examine questions drawn from disability studies about bioethics, community organization, and the use of technology; and we examine questions drawn from fat liberation about the construction of aesthetics, the history of fatphobia and racism, and the way we layer symbolic meaning on the body. We look at stereotypes of disabled and fat people in media studies, examine prejudice in sociology, and ask some hard questions about the persistence of eugenics through the lens of bio-power and necropolitics.