Ramanpreet A . Bahra

Within the expanding field of fat studies, we have come to understand different ways that fat bodies have been scrutinized for their “deviance” from the anticipated norms of society. The author interrogates the role racializing assemblages play in categorizing and disciplining bodies based on humanism and its fixed sizeist-normative temporality. With the supported idealized form, the human template as well as racialized and fat bodies are distinguished as lacking under the criteria of deficit. Subsequently, the promise of happiness in the context of Whiteness and thinness is set up as a form of normative time that must be followed to gain access to the privilege of being human. An autoethnographic methodology is used to situate the author’s own experience as a fat, racialized woman grounded in theory. In the latter portion of the paper the author discusses the affirmation of the body and its materiality within a new materialist framework. What is of utmost importance to consider in affirmative politics is that one’s race and fatness can be accentuated and accepted as forms of difference informing and intermingling with each other and our surroundings as they are brought to the forefront.

This major research paper (MRP) interrogates the discourse of ableism and disableism and its impact on disabled and fat bodies. The general theme of this MRP is the division of life through the dichotomy of human and non-human, and nondisabled and disabled. Humanism, overall is the benchmark from which other life forms, the animate and non-animate, are disaffirmed and looked at as being a deficit. With the use of DisCrit and Fat studies, in particular, an autoethnographic methodology will be used to situate how the writer embodies racism, ableism and sizeism and the ways theory is carried through the body. It will conclude with discussing the affirmation of the body and its materiality as outlined by James Overboe in his work on affirming impairments.

Zygmunt Bauman’s "Community Seeking Safety in an Insecure World" (2001) is the primary source of literature used in order to gain a better understanding on how multiculturalism works within society and the building of communities along with its consequences when implemented in various nations. Bauman (2001) discusses an alternative to multiculturalism in terms of possessing this utopian community which will bring all members of society together from the individualistic turn society has currently taken to one that is collective. Multiculturalism is often celebrated as a positive aspect in terms of community; however it is actually a mask for disengagement and the maintenance of a hegemonic culture. In order to have a much more integrated and engaged community social theorists suggest multicommunitarianism as a possible alternative to the utopia multiculturalism is presented as to its citizens.

If you would like to use this paper or contact me for any questions, please feel free to email me at ramanpreetbahra77@gmail.com.

In Fall 2017 eight graduate students and one faculty member engaged in an inter- and trans- disciplinary graduate level course at the University of Guelph to study a “re-thinking of the human”. Collectively this group co-created course content, methods of evaluation and assessment, and formulated the pedagogy that would enable a truly co-taught, learner-centred, space. Topics ranged from decolonizing sex and gender, critical and feminist pedagogies, intersectional assemblage, sexuality studies, new materialism, posthumanism, and an overarching exploration of time and place. Great efforts were taken to prioritize Indigenous knowledges and writers to decolonize traditional models of teaching about the human. This transformative experience for all in the classroom centred the lives and experiences of queerness, disability, people of colour, fatness, and other marginalized bodies to meaningfully engage theoretical and applied learnings. As a panel, learners from this course will share how the course was designed and implemented, the successes and struggles of new learners with advanced content, and how this course impacted their understanding and engagement with becoming human. Furthermore, the panel will utilize specific examples from the course relevant to sex, gender, and sexuality to demonstrate the effectiveness of utilizing co-constructed graduate learning spaces as a way to challenge traditional pedagogy and foster an accessible and interdependent learning environment. The panel will create opportunities for the audience to engage with resources and materials from the course, discussion, and critical reflections on how re-thinking the human and queering our becomings has fostered new engaged sexuality scholars.

*This was co-presented with Angela Underhill

Drawing upon Fat Studies and Critical Disability Studies, this paper will broadly speak on the notion of the body as becoming. Literature influenced by New Materialist thought allows us to explore the fat body as a process of becoming (becoming-fat) through the impersonal. The impersonal registry allows us to reconceptualise fatness as an embodied materiality and expression of life. Whereas, under the personal register the fat body is suppressed and governed, the impersonal brings forth the generative aspects of fatness that are unfolding. In the relational process of the impersonal, what comes to unfold is bodily-becomings that are always in the process, changing and emergent. A shift towards thinking of fatness as impersonal offers a different way of thinking, knowing and relating to not only our own bodies, but also with other bodies and our surroundings. All in all, the co-presence of fatness and desirability as an expression of life can be brought forward by redefining fatness as a positive and affirming difference in itself.

Biopolitics and its affective economy work to distinguish what bodies belong, have a voice and are valued. This is done in accordance to a realm of judgment and its following processes of normalization, causing sites of discipline and control to exist. This paper will interrogate how
theories of race and disability justify the categorization, governing or eradication of bodies. What such theorization around difference does is unleash socio-political acts as state interventions in the name of public health. Both Alexander Weheliye and Jasbir Puar’s concepts of racializing assemblage and debility will be discussed to illustrate how different bodies are categorized and disciplined on the basis of humanism and neoliberal mandates. The human and its economic value creates a shift via optimizing life or ultimately pushing them into the position of Giorgio Agamben’s bare life. As a result of the strong connection between the body and its’ economic purposes, acts of corrective technologies and elimination of non-humanness is naturalized.

Social discourses, within a realm of judgement, come to associated markers of identity that are not only felt upon the body, but also embodied and transferred via affective tendencies. What is embodied, is this sense of not being good enough or in humanist dialectics not-quite human and/or non-human. This paper following a autoethnographic methodology analyzes the writers own lived embodiment as the fat, South Asian, female body. It initially begins with discuss the way the body is theorized and disciplined in accordance to Alexander G. Weheliye's concept of racialzing assemblages. Furthermore, Sara Ahmed's concept of "the promise of happiness," in the context of thinness and whiteness as a temporality that negates and 'Others' difference is analyzed. The paper ends with the politics of affirmation that is occurring within campaigns such as "The Unfair and Lovely," where fatness and race can be accentuated and accepted instead of concealed in terms of conforming to the myth of normal.

This is the introductory chapter to the edited collection of Fat Studies in Canada: (Re)Mapping the Field (Taylor et al., 2023).

Bahra, R. A., Evans, C., Ioannoni, K. and Taylor, A. E. (2023). Introduction: Our Fat Liminal Grounds. Fat studies in Canada : (re)mapping the field (A. E. Taylor, K. Ioannoni, R. A. Bahra, C. Evans, A. Scriver, & M. Friedman, Eds.). Inanna Publications, xxi-xliv.

Drawing upon Critical Disability Studies, Fat Studies, Affect Studies and Deleuze Studies broadly speaking this chapter seeks to critique the human grid of the personal registry. To affirm expressions of life that derive from fatness and impairment, this chapter argues there needs to be a shift in registry from the personal to the impersonal. The merging of Critical Disability Studies and Fat Studies, along with the use of a duoethnographic methodology will enable us to consider the embodiment and experience of fatness and impairment as equated to a negative and hopeless state of being under the personal register. However, with the notion of impairment in the nexus of fatness and disability, we are working towards affirming fatness and disability through itself under the impersonal register, instead of it being contingent upon a prescriptive notion of proper being.

The essence of this chapter is to bring forward a new way of thinking, where spasms or other impairments or fatness as simply matter that can be generative and creative as expressions of life. Within the Deleuzeguattarian affect, non-normative bodily capacities are understood to be innately creative and joyous. However, joy does not only refer to a positive outcome; joy in fact can be disruptive and painful. Nevertheless, these various versions of joy that is felt can be affirming for the materiality that is fatness and disability. We share a dialogue on how difference is experienced under the personal and impersonal registers as we think through affect and exposure. We offer a reconceptualization of fatness and spasms within the affective realm while questioning what can a fat and disabled body do? Thus, Affect Studies and a new materialist approach allows the exploration of the co-presence of fatness, disability, race and gender as a creative site in of offering a bodily-becoming that allows for possibilities of different forms of life and affects through exposure.

Key words: impersonal register, sizeism, ableism, affect, new materialism, becoming