ABSTRACT
This chapter explores queerness, fatness, and gender. Using queer theory, Fat Studies scholars trouble the negative associations of fatness and the fat body, un-fixing assumptions about what bodies are desirable, worthy, and worth celebrating. And within the history of white fat liberation in North America and the United Kingdom, queer people, especially queer women, have been at the forefront of the movement. Fat Studies scholars have used queer theory to question the negative assumptions made about fatness and the fat body, to rethink the value in stories of sadness and anger, and to consider new kinds of fat futures. Fat Studies has also used queer theory to understand the relationship between fatness and gender. Much of this scholarship has focused on ways that fatness queers gender, destabilizing normative binary categories and presentations and troubling dominant ways of being, doing, and identifying gender. When fatness is read by dominant binary gender discourses, it can create spaces for both anxiety and affirmation for queer people. Queerness, in turn, presents new and exciting ways to embody fatness and think about fat.
