What if Black Studies studied fat for real for real?

Abstract

ABSTRACT Only four years after Black Studies departments began to form in the US, Johnnie Tillmon, then Chairwoman of the National Welfare Rights Organization, proclaimed in her 1972 article in Ms. magazine that her marginalized intersectional identities – woman, Black, poor, fat, middle-aged, and on welfare – gave her little to no value in the American imaginary. How, in the midst of establishing departments for the study of Black life, could Tillmon’s Black fat life not be studied as well? Cathy Cohen (1999) asserts that welfare reform, like women’s rights and HIV/AIDS, are “cross-cutting issues” that complicate “respectable,” singularized notions of group identity. Black Studies departments have long aligned with this “secondary marginalization,” and Black feminists have stepped in and fought to obtain epistemological space for Black women and femmes. However, there was a missed opportunity to connect Tillmon’s embodiment with the social justice work being done to establish Black Studies. Fat Black women, such as Fannie Lou Hamer, had been on the front lines, but their embodied experiences had no seats in the front of the Black liberation bus. Because of this disconnect, I posit that Black Studies’ secondary marginalization of fat Black women leaves a noticeable gap in its disciplinary project. I argue that Black Studies as a field must 1) engage with Fat Studies via a social justice commitment to disrupt Black fat women from being rendered hyper-visible as service-workers and hyper-invisible as decision-makers, and 2) utilize body size as an analytical category to gain more nuanced and deeper understandings of Black life.