Fat Studies Cram Into Classrooms

Fat has entered the classroom with the growth of a new academic discipline that gives new meaning to the phrase “heavy reading.” Going beyond the standard medical and biological views of weight and obesity, “fat studies” examines the political and social ramifications of being overweight.

And even at Harvard, weight and body image issues are squeezing into the Faculty of Arts and Sciences’ course catalog. Lecturer on Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality (WGS) Karen P. Flood, who is acting director of studies for the department, teaches WGS 1402, “Body Sculpting in Modern America,” which tracks the increasing interest that Americans have in modifying their bodies.

“Like with any area of scholarship there are better and worse pieces of scholarship that come out of it,” Flood said about the emerging field.

Another new course, History of Science 153, “History of Dietetics,” taught by Ford Professor Steven Shapin, also touches on issues of obesity.

Shapin said he has included a segment on obesity in the 19th century because of the significant social role it has played.

“There is a transition from viewing people that were stout as a good thing to viewing people as corpulent or obese, which is a bad thing,” Shapin said.

Fat studies has emerged as a small but growing interdisciplinary field in universities across the country, The New York Times reported last month. University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, professor Margaret Carlisle Duncan, for example, offers a class on “The Social Construction of Obesity.” And Sondra Solovay, an adjunct faculty member at the New College of California School of Law who authored “Tipping the Scales of Justice,” discusses weight discrimination in her courses.

Fat studies proponents, who challenge the accepted message that obesity is both avoidable and unhealthy, face stiff opposition. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report that obesity, which afflicts 30 percent of American adults, increases the risk of diseases such as Type 2 diabetes and hypertension. Opponents say that fat studies is a way of masking that epidemic by making it a part of social discourse.

And though fat studies has begun to enter classrooms, the area still has a long way to go before becoming mainstream.

Even professors are not yet aware of its presence.

“I didn’t know that such a world existed at all, although I was aware of debates in the intellectual journals,” Shapin said.

At this point, the College has no plans to turn fat studies into an academic track, according to Flood, though she said she expects to see more integration of weight and body issues into the Harvard curriculum, reflecting an increased interest in the subject among Harvard students.

“If you were to conduct a survey of Harvard undergraduates, I think you would find that a large number, mostly women but men too, spend more time thinking about weight than they’d like,” Flood said.

An interdisciplinary course about obesity may be in the spirit of the Core Curriculum that currently guides general education at the College, Shapin said—but that would require a lot of administrative work, as it would draw from different departments.

“With a will and the right framework, it could come to exist,” Shapin said.