If you walked by at just the right moment, you would have heard a woman yell, “F-you!” followed by thunderous applause. It wasn’t a barroom brawl, but rather me at the 2023 Popular Culture Association’s annual international conference, Fat Studies Area, in San Antonio, Texas last month. It was an Author Spotlight on my new book, On Fat And Faith: Ending Weight Stigma in Yourself, Your Sanctuary and Society. For a session sample see here or here. For the “French,” as in excuse-my… you’ll have to read the book (OnFatAndFaith.com, that section’s free under the “Look Inside” feature here)!

The Fat Studies Area offerings were as robust as ever in this first year of face-to-face meetings since the pandemic became endemic. Though we know Lizzo is not (yet) a HAES® aligned Fat Activist, Associate Professor of Art & Design Erin “Z” Zerb Comer showed us some of the positive changes the twerking flutist’s show, poised for a second season, is making in, “Watch Out for the Big Grrrls: Shifting Perceptions of Fatness in Lizzo’s Reality TV Show.”

York University Sociology Doctoral Candidate Ramanpreet Annie Bahra blew our minds with Fat interspecies theory in, “Our Excessively Fat World-Making,” as well as announcing her and her Canadian colleagues’ book, Fat Studies in Canada: (Re)Mapping the Field (for those with the means to purchase, you can find it here). Fat and Lesbian Novelist Susan Stinson was honored for her lifelong body of work. “Even” for this straight Fat Black blogger, Stinson’s Martha Moody is marvelous!

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