CSJR Seminar: Fatness, Gender and Sexuality

*** please note change of date ***

Due to circumstances beyond our control we are postponing this event a week and it will now take place on Monday 7th April 2025 at 5pm in the Wells Street Forum (5th Floor, Wells Street Building).

Join the CSJR for an evening of Fat Studies talks exploring the queer relationships between fatness, gender and sexuality.

Sizing up desirable bodies – examining the fat-bodied boundaries of gender and sexuality

Sunniva Árja Tobiasen, University of Bergen

Introducing my ongoing PhD-project on gender-, sexuality- and bodynorms, with a particular focus on fatness. Through the context of the concept compulsory sexuality, I'll reflect on how and why fat people are not necessarily met with the same normative expectations when it comes to gender and sexuality. How do fatness, gender and sexuality work together – or against each other, when it comes to identity and how fat people experience, understand and navigate gender and sexuality?

From the ‘blank canvas’ to ‘going full Divine’ – navigating non-binary fat

Francis Ray White, University of Westminster

Fat is both an enabler and an enemy of binary gender. So-called ‘male’ and ‘female’ distributions of body fat shape gender’s legibility and legitimacy as binary, while at the same time fat produces bodies that subvert norms of masculinity and femininity and blur the binary distinction between them. Given this queer relationship between fat and gender, this paper asks, how do non-binary people navigate the gendering properties of fat?

While non-binary experiences of embodiment are not always distinct from other trans experiences, the question of what it means to embody or ‘look’ non-binary is often vexed, especially for fat folk who find themselves having to negotiate with the ‘blank canvas’ model of non-binary embodiment – one that equates it with a (white, able-bodied) skinny, androgynous body devoid of the gendering taint of fatness. The aim of the paper is to draw out the range of ways non-binary people use, or not, their fat to ‘do’ their gender in order to develop understandings of how bodies ‘do’ gender at all.

About the speakers

Sunniva Árja Tobiasen (they/them) is a PhD research fellow at the Centre for Women’s and Gender Research at the University of Bergen, Norway. They have a MA in Gender Studies from the University of Oslo and have worked there at the Centre for Gender Research as a research assistant and lecturer before they started their PhD in august 2023.

Francis Ray White (they/them) is a Reader in Sociology at the University of Westminster where they mostly teach gender, sexuality and body studies. Francis’ recent research projects have focused on fat/trans embodiment, trans pregnancy and the experiences of non-binary people in HE. Their writing is published in journals and books including Fat Studies, Sexualities, Somatechnics, Thickening Fat (Routledge, 2019) and The Routledge International Handbook of Fat Studies (2021).

About the CSJR

Established in 2023 at the University of Westminster, the Centre for Social Justice Research (CSJR) sets out to understand contemporary social inequalities and challenge the power relations and institutions that sustain them in order to bring about meaningful social change.

Venue Information

The Wells Street Forum is on the fifth floor of the university's Wells Street building, 32-38 Wells St, London, W1T 3UW. External visitors please register at reception when you arrive. There is a ramp to the main entrance and lifts available to the fifth floor. For full accessibility information please see here.