In keeping with its esteemed tradition of academic excellence, Princeton University is offering its students the opportunity to study fat people dancing for course credit.
The Ivy League institution will offer a variety of dance courses in the Fall of 2016, including a course titled “FAT: The F-Word and the Public Body.” According to the university, the course “investigates discourses and politics around the fat body from a performance studies perspective.”
Students taking the course will tackle tough questions such as “How does this ‘f-word’ discipline and regulate bodies in /as public?” and “How might fat be a liberating counterperformance?”
Assignments for the course include a “group performance” and class participation. The group performance will investigate the “relationship between fat and performative elements of public life.”
The students will have to do some reading and writing, too.
The sample reading list for the course includes books titled Fat Politics, Queering Fat Embodiment, Fat Talk Nation, and The Fat Studies Reader.
Students in the course will also be expected to write three short papers on topics such as “an ethnography of the normative Princeton body” and “a close reading of the ways fat works in a specific example.”
The course will be taught by Professor Judith Hamera, whose Ph.D. is in “Interpretation and Performance Studies.”
Princeton is just the latest school to indulge fatness. As noted by The Daily Caller back in January, the “Fat Studies” phenomenon is rapidly consuming the nation.
Described as an “emerging academic field” that focuses on combating “weightism,” “fat stigma,” and the “weight based oppression” of fat people, “fat studies” courses are popping up on college campuses across the country.
Typically found in women and gender studies departments, fat studies courses don’t study obesity as a leading cause of death in America but rather approach fatness as a “social justice” issue, and usually focus on “fat liberation” movements and activism as ways to combat the “stigma” attached to obesity.
Oregon State University, the University of Maryland, Tufts University and Dickinson College have all offered “Fat Studies” courses this year.
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