Fat Activism: A Radical Social Movement

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charlotte Cooper

What is fat activism and why is it important? To answer this question, Charlotte Cooper presents an expansive grassroots study that traces the forty-year history of international fat activism and grounds its actions in their proper historical and geographical contexts. She details fat activist methods, analyses existing literature in the field, challenges long-held assumptions that uphold systemic fatphobia, and makes clear how crucial feminism, queer theory and anti-racism are to the lifeblood of the movement. She also considers fat activism’s proxy concerns, including body image, body positivity, the obesity epidemic and fat stigma.

2021 ◽  
pp. 026858092110053
Author(s):  
Naoto Higuchi

Between the decline of mass protests in the 1970s and the Great East Japan Earthquake and Fukushima nuclear meltdown in the 2010s, which resulted in the resurgence of mass demonstrations, social movements were widely regarded as uncommon in Japan. In this essay, the author reviews Japan’s social movement studies in the last decade, focusing on the influence of the lack of mass protest since the 1970s on scholarly interests. The essay examines the following four topics: (1) slow responses to the resurgence of mass demonstrations in post-3.11 Japan, (2) quick responses to the rise of the radical right movement, (3) the emergence of cynical approaches to studying social movements, and (4) the redemption of the history of Japan’s postwar social movements. Despite some twists and turns, we can see how social protests are a perpetual element of Japanese society that sociologists study as a common phenomenon.


1993 ◽  
Vol 38 (7) ◽  
pp. 469-471 ◽  
Author(s):  
Clifford W. Sharp

A woman aged 58 who has been blind since the age of nine months presented with major depression and a 40 year history of an eating disorder characterized by a restriction of food intake and body disparagement. The case is additional evidence that a specifically visual body image is not essential for the development of anorexia nervosa and supports the view that the concept of body image is unnecessary and unproductive in eating disorders. Greater emphasis should be placed on attitudes and feelings toward the body, and the possibility of an eating disorder should be considered in cases of older women with an atypical presentation.


2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 10-38
Author(s):  
Phillip Joy ◽  
Matthew Numer ◽  
Sara F. L. Kirk ◽  
Megan Aston

The construction of masculinities is an important component of the bodies and lives of gay men. The role of gay culture on body standards, body dissatisfaction, and the health of gay men was explored using poststructuralism and queer theory within an arts-based framework. Nine gay men were recruited within the city of Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. Participants were asked to photograph their beliefs, values, and practices relating to their bodies and food. Semi-structured interviews were conducted, using the photographs as guides. Data were analyzed by critical discourse analysis and resulted in three overarching threads of discourse including: (1) Muscles: The Bigger the Better, (2) The Silence of Hegemonic Masculinity, and (3) Embracing a New Day. Participants believed that challenging hegemonic masculinity was a way to work through body image tension.


PEDIATRICS ◽  
1979 ◽  
Vol 63 (4) ◽  
pp. 517-519
Author(s):  
Gerald S. Golden

Two children are reported who had recurrent attacks of impairment of time sense, body image, and visual analysis of the environment. These occurred with a clear state of consciousness and in the absence of any evidence of an encephalitic process, seizures, drug ingestion, or psychiatric illness. Both children had recurrent headaches; one was clearly migrainous. There was a family history of migraine in both cases. These children represent examples of the Alice in Wonderland syndrome in juvenile migraine.


Sexualities ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 428-445 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ali E Erol

During the summer of 2013, Turkey witnessed the largest protest movement in the history of the republic. The protests began with environmentalist concerns to save a public park in central Istanbul, Gezi Park, from becoming a shopping mall. However, in a matter of days, the protests turned into a reaction against what many protestors perceived to be the authoritarian rule of the prime minister at the time. While the mainstream protest discourses focused on reacting against such perceptions, which produced sexist and heterosexist discourses, queer discourses were centered on celebrating coexistence and diversity through resistance. Drawing on literatures of queer theory that focus on queer space and moral geography, this article builds on Foucault’s notion of heterotopic space. Using queer linguistics to investigate blog posts that were written at the time of the protest by queer individuals who were taking part in protest, this article investigates the ways in which queer discourses construct the moral geography of the Gezi Park and at the same time challenge neoliberal and heteronormative moral geographies.


2014 ◽  
Vol 42 (4) ◽  
pp. 755-771 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard A. Kaye

Much of the critical writingon Queer Theory and Sexuality Studies in a Victorian context over the last decade or so has been absorbing, exploring, complicating, and working under the burden of the influence of Michel Foucault's theoretical writings on erotic relations and identity. The first volume of Foucault'sThe History of Sexuality(1978), in fact, had begun with a gauntlet thrown down before Victorian Studies, a chapter-long critique of Steven Marcus'sThe Other Victorians(1966), a work that had offered an entirely new and at the time, quite bold avenue of exploring nineteenth-century culture – namely, through the pornographic imagination that Marcus taxonomized with precise, clinical flair as a “pornotopia” in which “all men . . . are always infinitely potent; all women fecundate with lust and flow inexhaustibly with sap or both. Everyone is always ready for everything” (276). In Foucault's telling, however, Marcus demonstrated a theoretically impoverished faith in Freudian models of “repression” in Marcus's examination of “underground” Victorian sexualities. It was Marcus's reliance on the “repressive fallacy,” his conviction that there existed a demarcated spatial and psychic Victorian counter-world thatThe History of Sexualityhad so forcefully undermined.


2016 ◽  
Vol 90 ◽  
pp. 5-11 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Merrill ◽  
Susan J. Schurman

AbstractWorkers’ education, understood to mean the education of workers by workers for purposes they themselves determine, has always been highly contested terrain, just like work itself. If there is to be an adequate global history of workers’ education, it will need to be guided by a suitable general theory. Hegel most expansively and Durkheim most persuasively argued that societies are cognitive and moral projects, of which education is constitutive: knowing and social being are inextricably bound up with one another. In the global democratic revolutions of the last 250 years, the labor movement distinguished itself as simultaneously a social movement, an education in democracy, and a struggle for a democratic education. The history of workers’ education is a history of workers striving to remake their communities into democracies and themselves into democrats. This brief essay introduces a collection of essays representative of a new generation of scholarship on the history of workers’ education, which we hope will help both traditional and emerging labor movements understand their past and think more clearly about their future.


2019 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 103-125
Author(s):  
Mirosław Górecki

This text is a draft of Carl Sonnenschein (1876–1929) biography. He was a German Catholic priest, theologian, philosopher, social reformer, charismatic social activist, founder of the Catholic social movement in Germany, the creator of new forms of metropolitan pastoral ministry, the apostle of Berlin, after his death he was called Saint Francis of Berlin. In Poland, his figure is almost unknown. The aim of this article is to bring closer his profile, the climate accompanying his activities and to contribute to the understanding of the aura of fascination and uniqueness, which surrounds not so much his work as a person, so important in the history of the German and universal Catholic Church and also for followers of other religions.


Author(s):  
Joe Rollins

This chapter outlines the theoretical and methodological framework for the book. The theoretical foundation is developed from a survey of the long history of scholarship on feminism and queer theory in order to examine heterosexuality, reproduction, abortion rights, and childhood in greater detail. Drawing on law and culture scholarship, the chapter proposes a methodology that utilizes thick description to explore the legal and cultural changes in marriage, particularly insofar as the sexuality of the institution has changed in recent decades. The common theme running through the chapter is the elusiveness of heterosexuality as a concept and its resistance to sustained investigation and critique. Working backward across the timeline of life—from adult marriage, to childhood, to fetuses—the chapter foreshadows the end of the book and the ways that the marriage debate is part of the same set of social and political conflicts as childhood sexuality, fetuses, women’s bodies, and reproductive rights.


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