What if Black Studies studied fat for real for real?

ABSTRACT

Only four years after Black Studies departments began to form in the US, Johnnie Tillmon, then Chairwoman of the National Welfare Rights Organization, proclaimed in her 1972 article in Ms. magazine that her marginalized intersectional identities – woman, Black, poor, fat, middle-aged, and on welfare – gave her little to no value in the American imaginary. How, in the midst of establishing departments for the study of Black life, could Tillmon’s Black fat life not be studied as well? Cathy Cohen (1999) asserts that welfare reform, like women’s rights and HIV/AIDS, are “cross-cutting issues” that complicate “respectable,” singularized notions of group identity. Black Studies departments have long aligned with this “secondary marginalization,” and Black feminists have stepped in and fought to obtain epistemological space for Black women and femmes. However, there was a missed opportunity to connect Tillmon’s embodiment with the social justice work being done to establish Black Studies. Fat Black women, such as Fannie Lou Hamer, had been on the front lines, but their embodied experiences had no seats in the front of the Black liberation bus. Because of this disconnect, I posit that Black Studies’ secondary marginalization of fat Black women leaves a noticeable gap in its disciplinary project. I argue that Black Studies as a field must 1) engage with Fat Studies via a social justice commitment to disrupt Black fat women from being rendered hyper-visible as service-workers and hyper-invisible as decision-makers, and 2) utilize body size as an analytical category to gain more nuanced and deeper understandings of Black life.

KEYWORDS:

• Fat Studies
• Black Studies
• Black feminism
• fat Black women

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The Combahee River Collective Statement was dated April 1977, but first published in 1978 by Zillah Eisenstein. For reference purposes, I am using the 1982 version entitled “A Black feminist statement” printed in Hull, Bell-Scott, and Smith’s All the Women are White and the Blacks are Men, But Some of Us are Brave.

2. Looking specifically at how the CDC utilizes National Health Statistic Reports and its continued usage of racially biased BMI measurements via “obesity” and mortality rates, I saw in 2010, 2016, and again in 2021 (Stierman et al. 2021) that Black girls ages 2–19 in the sample were the fattest of every group, regardless of gender and socioeconomic status.

3. Black cultural obsessions with Brazilian Butt Lifts (BBLs) and/or tummy tucks have caused Black women to flock to plastic surgeons, both licensed and non-licensed individuals, to alter the look of their bodies in these specific areas. Shows like Botched (2014 to present) and My Killer Body (2022, with K. Michelle) show some of the turmoil mostly Blacky people experience from these procedures.

4. Jackson recently gave a lecture on my campus and at dinner she and I spoke about fatness. She expressed that she wanted to look at fatness without its materiality to contend with race and gender in ways that they have not been explored previously.

5. Transnational scholars like Hazel Carby, Stuart Hall and Richard Iton, Black Feminist thinkers like Darlene Clark Hine, Hortense Spillers, and Beverly Guy-Sheftall, and Black Queer authors like Barbara Smith, Audre Lorde, and E. Patrick Johnson have been trailblazers when discussing transnational, Black feminism, and Queer Studies, respectively. I do not have space to get into all of their work, but I suggest these people as a way of addressing breakthroughs in Black Studies.

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Notes on contributors

Courtney Patterson-Faye

Courtney Patterson-Faye is an African American Studies and sociology scholar in the Department of Sociology at Wesleyan University. Through an exploration of body size politics via popular culture and fashion studies lenses, her forthcoming book seeks to shift how the world regards the bodies of Black fat women. Her research and teaching interests include Black feminist thought, race, class and gender, Fat Studies, fashion studies, sexuality, cultural and medical sociology, and HIV/AIDS.