Fat Studies in the UK is inspired by the first British UK Fat Studies seminar held in York in May 2008. The seminar helped bring together academics, health practitioners, activists and artists to discuss how contemporary UK culture represents, attempts to control and demonises fat, and to share and generate ways of countering these ideas on many fronts. FSUK contains articles, cartoons, personal reflection and reports of activism that offer a variety of ways to understand and respond to mainstream perspectives on fat, as well as stirring and suggestive calls to action in the classroom and in the gym, on the page and on the streets, in the home and in clothes shops.

Fat Studies in the UK is designed to appeal to a wide audience, including practitioners, fat activists, students and academics in the fields of health and medicine, sociology, and media and cultural studies, and anyone who is concerned with the ideas perpetrated in the current 'obesity epidemic' by government, health bodies, and mainstream media.

Wow, is this a wonderful book! Necessary, smart, beautiful, healthy, rebellious, righteous, fierce, and pioneering…just like fat people! In the not-too-distant future, when historians start counting the score and telling the story of the happily concluded war to end weight-based hate in the UK, this book, its contributors, and its inevitable fans, will rank among the early-adopting, fabulous heroes of all sizes who questioned the allegedly unquestionable bases of an inaccurate, unnecessary, damaging paradigm.
Marilyn Wann author of FAT!SO?—Because You Don't Have to Apologize for Your Size!

This excellent collection presents a timely and much needed celebratory reading of the fat body, countering the harmful, partial discourse about fatness which dominates public debate. Both angry and hopeful.
Dr Bethan Evans Manchester Metropolitan University
 
More praise for Fat Studies in the UK

CONTENTS

read online Health At Every Size (see Part Three)
 
Preface by Kathleen LeBesco
 
Introduction: Corinna Tomrley
 

PART ONE: STUDIES IN FAT
 
chapter one: Charlotte Cooper
Fat Activism in Ten Astonishing, Beguiling, Inspiring and Beautiful Episodes
 
chapter two: Jason Elvis Barker
Transfatty
 
chapter three: Don Kulick
Fat Pets
 
chapter four: Corinna Tomrley
Beth Ditto, Spectacular Spectacle in Blue Spandex: Looking for fat positive images in celebrity gossip
 
chapter five: Kimi Tayler
Drowning and Desserted
 
chapter six: Rachel White
Undesirable Consequences? Resignifying Discursive Constructions of Fatness in the Obesity Epidemic
 
chapter seven: Maral Kassabian Svendsen and Anahid Kassabian
A Daughter, a Mother and a Move: A meditation in ten scenes
 
chapter eight: Lucy Aphramor
It took a lot of willpower but I finally stopped recommending dieting
 
chapter nine: The Bop Collective
Unskinny Bop  

PART TWO: Fat Studies Seminar May 2008
 
Fat Reflections: Ann Kaloski Naylor
 
Fat Thoughts
 
FSUK Reflections Charlotte Cooper :: Kaitlyn Kernek:: Louise Mansfield
 
Fat Thoughts
 
Fat Studies in the UK Roundtable extract
 

PART THREE: FAT RESOURCES
 
Resource List
 
Health At Every Size
 
Contributors