Queerying Health Research: Living Big Lives: An Exploration of the Generative Entanglements of Fatness, Queerness, and Disability

The Centre for Sexual and Gender Minority Health Research welcomes Lauren Munro as our next guest speaker in our “Queerying Health Research” series. You can find out more about Lauren and her presentation below.

Title: Living Big Lives: An exploration of the generative entanglements of fatness, queerness, and disability

Abstract: Fat bodies are rarely represented as joyful, valuable, or as sites of pleasure beyond fetishization. Instead, they are often the subjects of a hostile gaze, with visual representations of fatness in mainstream media tending to reflect negative stereotypes, perpetuating the idea of fatness as failure. Exploring the generative entanglements of fatness, queerness, and disability, in this talk, I will review findings from The Living Big Lives project – a phenomenological photovoice project that explores fat women’s experiences of and responses to body-based judgments – and highlight the ways participants used photos and narratives to subvert fat erasure, challenge stereotypical depictions of fat bodies, explore pleasure, love, and desirability, and celebrate and hold space for their bodies. Drawing on alternative ways of knowing and being fat, I offer fat vitality as a perspective that looks to the fullness in fatness and the ways we can carve out a space not just for fat bodies, but for all, that is free from aspirational ideals that harm more than they heal.

Bio: Lauren Munro is a limited term faculty member in the School of Disability Studies at Toronto Metropolitan University and also holds an appointment as an Adjunct Professor at the Institute for Disability and Rehabilitation Research in the Faculty of Social Science and Humanities at Ontario Tech University. A community-based researcher at heart, Lauren aims to madden, thicken, and queer knowledge production by bringing critical theory and grassroots movement principles into conversation with each other in her work. Her scholarship to date has involved a wide array of projects focused on the health and well-being of 2SLGBTQ+ communities, body diversity and weight-based discrimination, mad studies and disability justice, arts-based research, centering service user epistemology in medical education, and issues related to sexual health and HIV vulnerability.

Register Here