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Disability Studies Gets Fat

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 November 2014

Anna Mollow
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Abstract

This article invites disability scholars to “get fat,” that is, to support the goals of the fat justice movement. I argue that the contemporary politics of fatness can productively be read through the lens of disability studies’ social model. At the same time, I mobilize feminist critiques of the social model to push fat disability studies toward a more in‐depth engagement with the topics of health and illness. Additionally, I contend that feminist scholars’ accounts of our personal relationships to fatness and disability can make crucial contributions to our scholarly work. These arguments take shape within a new interpretive framework that I introduce: “setpoint epistemology,” which brings together the feminist disability studies notion of “sitpoint theory” and the scientific concept of “setpoint theory.”

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Articles
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Hypatia , Volume 30 , Issue 1: Special Issue: New Conversations in Feminist Disability Studies , Winter 2015 , pp. 199 - 216
Copyright
Copyright © 2015 by Hypatia, Inc.

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Footnotes

This essay was greatly improved by feedback from Merri Lisa Johnson, Jane Arlene Herman, Julia McCrossin, Mycroft Masada Holmes, Georgina Kleege, Robert McRuer, Kim Q. Hall, and two anonymous readers from Hypatia. Without my magnificent typing assistants, Jennifer Nicole Herman and Josieda Lord, this article could not have been completed.

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