November 26, 2006 Big People on Campus By ABBY ELLIN

ASK Sheana Director for a detailed description of herself, and chances
are the word fat will come up. It is not uttered with shame or ire or
any sense of embarrassment; it's simply one of the things she is, fat.

"Why should I be ashamed?" said Ms. Director, 22, a graduate
student in women's studies at San Diego State University, who wields
the word with both defiance and pride, the way the gay community uses
queer. "I'm fat. So what?"

During her sophomore year at Smith College, Ms. Director attended
a discussion on fat discrimination: the way the super-sized are
marginalized, the way excessive girth is seen as a moral failing rather
than the result of complicated factors. But the academic community, she
felt, didn't really give the topic proper consideration. She decided
to do something about it.

In December 2004, she helped found the organization Size Matters, whose
goal was to promote size acceptance and positive body image. In April,
the group sponsored a conference called Fat and the Academy, a three-day
event at Smith of panel discussions and performances by academics,
researchers, activists and artists. Nearly 150 people attended.

Even as science, medicine and government have defined obesity as a threat
to the nation's health and treasury, fat studies is emerging as a new
interdisciplinary area of study on campuses across the country and is
gaining interest in Australia and Britain. Nestled within the humanities
and social sciences fields, fat studies explores the social and political
consequences of being fat.

For most scholars of fat, though, it is not an objective
pursuit. Proponents of fat studies see it as the sister subject - and
it is most often women promoting the study, many of whom are lesbian
activists - to women's studies, queer studies, disability studies
and ethnic studies. In many of its permutations, then, it is the study
of a people its supporters believe are victims of prejudice, stereotypes
and oppression by mainstream society.

"It's about a dominant culture's ideals of what a real person should
be," said Stefanie Snider, 29, a graduate student at the University of
Southern California, whose dissertation will be on the intersection of
queer and fat identities in the United States in the 20th century. "And
whether that has to do with skin color or heritage or sexual orientation
or ability, it ends up being similar in a lot of ways."

Fat studies is still a fringe area of scholarship, but it is gaining
traction. Three years ago, the Popular Culture Association/American
Culture Association, which promotes scholarly research of popular culture,
added a fat studies component to regional and national conferences.

Professors in sociology, exercise physiology, history, English and law
are shoehorning discussions of fat into their teachings and research.

At the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, the subject has emerged in
a course, "The Social Construction of Obesity," taught by Margaret
Carlisle Duncan, a professor in the department of human movement sciences,
who takes a skeptical view of the "war on obesity."

At the New College of California School of Law, Sondra Solovay, a
diversity lawyer and author of "Tipping the Scales of Justice,"
talks about weightism in her torts classes.

Out of the classroom, students on at least a dozen campuses are organizing
groups focusing on fat politics and acceptance.

Nearly 120 people, including many academics, belong to a fat studies
list serve on Yahoo!, which was started in 2004 by activist Marilyn Wann,
the author of "Fat!So?"

And the first "Fat Studies Reader," an anthology of scholarly research
on fat, is being shopped to university presses. It covers a range of
topics, from the intersection of fat, gender, race, age, disability and
class to fat heroines in chick lit, the role of fat burlesque dancers and
the use of fat suits in film. Chapter titles include "Access to the
Sky: Airplane Seat and Fat Bodies as Contested Spaces": "Jiggle in
My Walk: The Iconic Power of the Big Butt in American Pop Culture,"
and "The Roseanne Benedict Arnolds: How Fat Women are Betrayed by
their Celebrity Icons."

Esther Rothblum, a professor of women's studies at San Diego State
University, said she received more than 80 letters from people, mostly
those with Ph.D.s, interested in contributing to the book, though she
and Ms. Solovay, her co-editor, had room for only 45. "We were bowled
over with the response," she said.

As with most academic disciplines that chronicle the plight of the
disenfranchised, fat studies grew out of political activism over body
size. In 1973, a group of women formed the Fat Underground, a faction
of the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance, which was founded
four years earlier. In 1983, they published "Shadow on a Tightrope,"
a collection of essays, articles and memoirs on fat liberation that's
viewed as the seminal work in this field.

It has taken a few decades for the subject to shift from public
finger-wagging by fat advocates to study in the classroom. Susan
Koppelman, a retired professor of women's studies and editor of "The
Strange History of Suzanne LaFleshe," a collection of essays on body
politics, likened it to the other social and political movements of the
last century that gained credence on college campuses.

"How far back does the black civil rights movement go in America
before we have a field called African-American studies?" Ms. Koppelman
said. "The academic world, like the American government, has a system
of checks and balances that makes change very slow to happen."

Others argue, though, that a movement does not make a scholarly pursuit
and that this is simply a way to institutionalize victimhood.

"In one field after another, passion and venting have come to define
the nature of what academics do," said Stephen H. Balch, president of
the National Association of Scholars, a group of university professors and
academics who have a more traditional view of higher education. "Ethnic
studies, women's studies, queer studies - they're all about
vindicating the grievances of some particular group. That's not what
the academy should be about.

"Obviously in the classroom you can look at issues of right and wrong
and justice and injustice," he added, "But if the purpose is to
vindicate fatness, to make fatness seem better in the eyes of society,
then that purpose begs a fundamental intellectual question."

Or as Big Arm Woman, a blogger, wrote: "I don't care if people are
fat or thin. I do, however, care that universities are spending money
on scholarship about the ‘politics of fatness' when half of the
freshman class can't read or write at the college level."

If fat studies proponents have an underlying agenda, it is to challenge
what they consider the alarmist message of the health community about
the obesity epidemic in America. According to the National Center for
Health Statistics, 66.3 percent of Americans are overweight or obese;
32 percent of Americans are obese. Overweight is defined as having a
body mass index of 25 to 29.9, and obese is an index of 30 or higher.

Scientists have linked obesity to Type 2 diabetes, sleep apnea, stroke,
hypertension and some cancers, prompting a multitude of government
initiatives about food, weight and exercise.

But proponents of fat studies challenge the science behind those
conclusions and firmly believe that obesity research is shaped by
society's bias against fat people and that the consequences of excessive
weight are not as bad as scientists portray.

"When you look at the data you realize that the claims are completely
exaggerated and in some places misleading based on the actual science,"
said Dr. Abigail C. Saguy, a professor of sociology at the University of
California in Los Angeles. "That raises really interesting sociological
questions: Why has this become such the concern that it is and why are
we so worried about weight?"

But the surgeon general of the Public Health Service, groups like the
American Heart Association, individual researchers and doctors all say
the health risks from obesity are real.

"It's scientifically proven that if you're overweight you have
an increased risk of coming down with numerous medical conditions,"
said Dr. Howard Shapiro, a New York weight loss specialist and author
of the "Picture Perfect Weight loss" books. "It's a no brainer,
and anyone who says that it's discriminatory is just trying to protect
themselves."

Sheldon Krimsky, a professor at Tufts University whose work focuses on
the links between science, ethics and public policy, said it is well
and good to question scientific assumptions - but up to a point.

"People sometimes use the fact that there are controversies in science
to disparage all of science or to neglect the fact that there's also
a lot of consensus in science," Professor Krimsky said. "Sometimes
people on the margins that are critiquing the mainstream can be right. You
have to have permeable walls in science. But that doesn't mean the
critics of today are going to be the mainstream of tomorrow."

THE destigmatization of fat people is the thread that runs through fat
studies pursuits. The subject is most likely to show up on campus as
a focus of a paper or thesis, or be incorporated into a broader course
curriculum.

Anna Kirkland, an assistant professor in women's studies and political
science at the University of Michigan, discusses it in classes on gender,
identity and the law.

"We talk about the classic occupants of antidiscrimination laws -
race and gender - and then I bring in transgender discrimination
and fat discrimination," she said, adding that Michigan is the only
state where it's illegal to discriminate on the basis of a person's
weight. (The cities of Santa Cruz, Calif., San Francisco and Washington
have laws on the books).

In a few cases, fat has emerged as a theme through research, the
traditional academic route.

Robert Bucholz, a history professor at Loyola University, in Chicago,
has spent years trying to figure out why Queen Anne, the British monarch
who reigned from 1702 to 1714, has gotten so little attention. Britain
prospered under her guardianship yet, "few people even think about
her," he said. Finally, he figured out why: She was fat.

"I didn't even realize that what I was talking about was fat
studies," said Professor Bucholz, who presented a paper on the
subject at the popular culture association's meeting last month in
Indianapolis. "I didn't know that I was onto something that other
people were onto."

But others see fat studies as a necessary response to the articles and
television programs detailing the evils of fat.

"You can be a cigarette smoking junkie but as long as you're thin,
people will think you're healthy," said Cookie Woolner, 32, a graduate
student in humanities at San Francisco State University.

Ms. Woolner, who is a Size 18 and is a burlesque dancer, wrote her
undergraduate thesis at Hampshire College on positive representations
of fat women in fanzines and underground media. Her interest arose from
her desire to find positive likenesses of herself, she said.

Indeed, most people land in the field because of a personal interest. But
not all are fat.

This came up recently when Kathleen LeBesco, a professor of communications
at Marymount Manhattan College and author of the 2004 book, "Revolting
Bodies: The Struggle to Redefine Fat Identity," lost more than 70
pounds.

"Size acceptance is something I believe in, and it doesn't matter
what size you are," Professor LeBesco said. So when her weight loss was
the focus of a June 2006 article in The Chronicle of Higher Education,
she was appalled, she said.

"It's similar to discussions within feminism," she said. "Can you
support the team if you're a man? Or can you be into queer activism if
you're not queer?" In the end, she said, the attention to her size
proved the theory that society can't keep its sights off women's
bodies.

Whether activism is an appropriate goal for academia is a controversial
notion. Joseph B. Juhasz, a social psychologist who teaches at the
University of Colorado, said the possibilities are endless.

"Certainly we have not reached a point where we can do away with
queer studies or race studies or women's studies," Professor Juhasz
said. "But where do you draw the line? Is there going to be a department
of man-boy-love studies? Do we need polygamy studies? At which point do
you say, enough already?"

Elena Escalera, an assistant professor of psychology at St. Mary's
College in Moraga, Calif., vehemently disagrees with the idea that fat
studies perpetuates a victim's mentality.

"This is not about victimhood, but about becoming empowered," she
said. "Did Martin Luther King and Malcolm X espouse victimhood? Did
Susan B. Anthony? It's really easy for people to feel that fat people
are trying to find an excuse."

Fat scholars believe they are serving justice and many hope that one day
fat studies will be as ubiquitous on campus as Shakespeare. Professor
Bucholz said he sees the attention on "groups that have been ignored"
as crucial to improving their lot.

"There's an element of trying to right the balance," he
said. "It's time for the fat to receive their due."