Fat bodies of today are commonly assumed to have no future at all. In this line of thinking, a fat life is framed as failure, and a fast track towards death itself. Meanwhile, the histories of modern fat existence, communities, activists, and artists have been essentially unknown, written out of origins and existence. Most medical and cultural evaluations of fat have rendered the fat body more and more visible, and yet the lived experiences of fat people are continually erased. At a moment when scholars from various disciplines are contending with the question of who has a future, this book explores the relationship between fat experience and the social construction of time. The works in this volume draw from fields as diverse as social geography, women and gender studies, critical race theory, disability studies, cultural studies, visual art and craft, social work, communication studies, and queer theory, generating renewed understandings of the relationship between fatness and temporality. The Future Is Fat reimagines understandings of time to allow for new expressions of fat experience. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Fat Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Body Weight and Society.

Fat bodies of today are commonly assumed to have no future at all. In this line of thinking, a fat life is framed as failure, and a fast track towards death itself. Meanwhile, the histories of modern fat existence, communities, activists, and artists have been essentially unknown, written out of origins and existence. Most medical and cultural evaluations of fat have rendered the fat body more and more visible, and yet the lived experiences of fat people are continually erased. At a moment when scholars from various disciplines are contending with the question of who has a future, this book explores the relationship between fat experience and the social construction of time. The works in this volume draw from fields as diverse as social geography, women and gender studies, critical race theory, disability studies, cultural studies, visual art and craft, social work, communication studies, and queer theory, generating renewed understandings of the relationship between fatness and temporality. The Future Is Fat reimagines understandings of time to allow for new expressions of fat experience. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Fat Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Body Weight and Society.

"This was several times with that damn cribbage board. I hate cribbage boards to this very day. They never beat us on the arms or legs or stuff, it was always on the bottom of the feet, I couldn't figure it out." Brian L., Huronia Regional Centre Survivor Over the past two decades, the public has borne witness to ongoing revelations of shocking, intense, and even sadistic forms of violence in spaces meant to provide care. This has been particularly true in institutions designed to care for people with disabilities. In this work, the authors not only describe institutional violence, but work to make sense of how and why institutional violence within care settings is both so pervasive and so profound. Drawing on a wide range of primary data, including oral histories of institutional survivors and staff, ethnographic observation, legal proceedings and archival data, this book asks: What does institutional violence look like in practice and how might it be usefully categorized? How have extreme forms violence and neglect come to be the cultural norm across institutions? What organizational strategies in institutions foster the abdication of personal morality and therefore violence? How is institutional care the crucial "first step" in creating a culture that accepts violence as the norm? This highly interdisciplinary work develops scholarly analysis of the history and importance of institutional violence and, as such, is of particular interest to scholars whose work engages with issues of disability, health care law and policy, violence, incarceration, organizational behaviour, and critical theory.

Thickening Fat: Fat Bodies, Intersectionality, and Social Justice seeks to explore the multiple, variable, and embodied experiences of fat oppression and fat activisms. Moving beyond an analysis of fat oppression as singular, this book will aim to unpack the volatility of fat-the mutability of fat embodiments as they correlate with other embodied subjectivities, and the threshold where fat begins to be reviled, celebrated, or amended. In addition, Thickening Fat explores the full range of intersectional and liminal analyses that push beyond the simple addition of two or more subjectivities, looking instead at the complex alchemy of layered and unstable markers of difference and privilege. Cognizant that the concept of intersectionality has been filled out in a plurality of ways, Thickening Fat poses critical questions around how to render analysis of fatness intersectional and to thicken up intersectionality, where intersectionality is attenuated to the shifting and composite and material dimensions to identity, rather than reduced to an "add difference and stir" approach. The chapters in this collection ask what happens when we operationalize intersectionality in fat scholarship and politics, and we position difference at the centre and start of inquiry.

"This was several times with that damn cribbage board. I hate cribbage boards to this very day. They never beat us on the arms or legs or stuff, it was always on the bottom of the feet, I couldn't figure it out." Brian L., Huronia Regional Centre Survivor Over the past two decades, the public has borne witness to ongoing revelations of shocking, intense, and even sadistic forms of violence in spaces meant to provide care. This has been particularly true in institutions designed to care for people with disabilities. In this work, the authors not only describe institutional violence, but work to make sense of how and why institutional violence within care settings is both so pervasive and so profound. Drawing on a wide range of primary data, including oral histories of institutional survivors and staff, ethnographic observation, legal proceedings and archival data, this book asks: What does institutional violence look like in practice and how might it be usefully categorized? How have extreme forms violence and neglect come to be the cultural norm across institutions? What organizational strategies in institutions foster the abdication of personal morality and therefore violence? How is institutional care the crucial "first step" in creating a culture that accepts violence as the norm? This highly interdisciplinary work develops scholarly analysis of the history and importance of institutional violence and, as such, is of particular interest to scholars whose work engages with issues of disability, health care law and policy, violence, incarceration, organizational behaviour, and critical theory.

Thickening Fat: Fat Bodies, Intersectionality, and Social Justice seeks to explore the multiple, variable, and embodied experiences of fat oppression and fat activisms. Moving beyond an analysis of fat oppression as singular, this book will aim to unpack the volatility of fat-the mutability of fat embodiments as they correlate with other embodied subjectivities, and the threshold where fat begins to be reviled, celebrated, or amended. In addition, Thickening Fat explores the full range of intersectional and liminal analyses that push beyond the simple addition of two or more subjectivities, looking instead at the complex alchemy of layered and unstable markers of difference and privilege. Cognizant that the concept of intersectionality has been filled out in a plurality of ways, Thickening Fat poses critical questions around how to render analysis of fatness intersectional and to thicken up intersectionality, where intersectionality is attenuated to the shifting and composite and material dimensions to identity, rather than reduced to an "add difference and stir" approach. The chapters in this collection ask what happens when we operationalize intersectionality in fat scholarship and politics, and we position difference at the centre and start of inquiry.