ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how my Black Fat Queer Femme Body as embodied text disrupts the rigidity of the classroom. Similar to Mel Michelle Lewis (2011, p. 49) and her exploration of a “Black queer feminist pedagogy,” I imagine my teaching as a site of resisting limiting paradigms of knowledge production through centering experiential realities that are just as informative as traditional academic text and refusing the aesthetics of professionalization. I engage literature from a diverse set of fields such as Black Feminism, Fat Studies, and other critical perspectives to examine how fatphobia can be further complicated and understood by adding the lens of race and racism. This consideration of fatphobia thus allows me to recognize how similar to other forms of discrimination, that it is necessary to interrogate how schooling, and in this case higher education, continues to reify difference. Thus, I explore how I exist in the academy not as a numerical or intellectual tool, but as a critical scholar in search of alternative ways of being.
