Fatness, Chronic Illness, and Disability in US Culture

Catalog description

In this humanities course, we will explore how stigmatizing narratives around fatness, disability, and chronic illness not only shape the identities of all people. Moreover, it will demonstrate how this stigma functions to support neoliberal capitalism and definitions of who counts as a good citizen. It explores the histories of labor, immigration, economics, and medicine to understand how these stigmas have been central to defining US culture, especially through discourses around race and gender that intersect with these conditions. Additionally, the course focuses on activist movements to understand the work that narratives about fatness, disability, and chronic illness does in United States culture and can consider whether and how we might challenge them.