Many Breitbart readers will be familiar with the myriad of gender studies and critical race theory classes on U.S. campuses designed to emphasise differences and conflicts between groups. Now, a new course is to be added to the pantheon of identity politics: “Fat Studies.”
Via Campus Reform:
Students at the University of Maryland will have the chance to “engage fatness” next term as part of a “Fat Studies” course offered by the school’s American Studies department.
“Introduction to Fat Studies” will not engage “fatness” as a social or medical problem, according to a syllabus for the course posted online. Instead, the course will approach fatness as “an aspect of human diversity, experience, and identity.”
The syllabus goes on to say that the course “will function as an introduction to the recent (and growing) field known as Fat Studies.” The field of Fat Studies, the syllabus claims, is “a field that is not concerned with the eradication of fatness, but with offering a sustained critique of anti-fat sentiment, discrimination, and policy.”
In other words, students will be encouraged to not see weight issues as a problem to overcome, but as an identity. Following the pattern of courses on gender and race, students will be encouraged to view overweight people as victims of society rather than a poor diet and lack of excercise.
Viewing fatness as “an aspect of human diversity, experience, and identity” also suggests a move towards “fat pride,” following the pattern established by the LGBT liberation movement.
The cocktail of victimhood mixed with insecure, overbearing “celebration” will likely make “Fat Acceptance” a hot course for social justice warriors at U.S. universities, who spent most of the autumn term terrorising students and faculty members alike with vicious racial politics.
It’s not just the University of Maryland either. The proliferation of “Fat Studies” courses at other universities, including Oregon State and Willamette. Lakehead College in Canada is also offering a Fat Studies course. The University of New Hampshire, meanwhile, has approved a group called “People Opposing Weightism.”
(I’ll let the word “weightism” sink in for a moment.)
The proliferation of Fat Studies courses was perhaps inevitable. A “fat acceptance” movement has been building on the internet for some time, with well known centres of fat activism including Tumblr and various feminist communities on Reddit. A 2009 Campus Reform article on a Fat Studies course at San Diego State University suggests that a movement to politicise fatness on campus has been active for some time.
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