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HLTH 430 Critical Weight Studies Units: 3.00
We live in a fat- phobic world where discrimination on the basis of body size is a socially acceptable form of prejudice. This seminar style course draws on the rapidly developing literature in the scholarly field of fat studies to consider body weight and fat-phobia from critical, cultural perspectives.
Learning Hours: 120 (36 Seminar, 84 Private Study)
Requirements: Prerequisite (Level 3 or above and registration in a HLTH Major or Joint Honours Plan) or (Level 3 or above in the KINE Specialization Plan and [HLTH 333/3.0 or HLTH 334/3.0]).
Offering Faculty: Faculty of Arts and Science
Course Learning Outcomes:
- Critically engage with biomedical understandings of body weight and size by using socio-cultural perspectives.
- Explore implications of thinking about body size only in terms of health and apply socio-cultural ways of understanding body size instead.
- Apply different theoretical approaches to studying body size, including social constructionism, feminism, Foucauldian governmentality theory, critical race theory, queer theory, and masculinity theory.
- Evaluate how understandings of body weight reinforce or resist other systems of privilege and oppression, including gender, race, class, and sexuality.
- Analyze our own positions in our system of weight-based privilege and oppression.
- Identify and analyze the ways in which bio-medicine and society more generally reproduces fat-phobia and fat-hatred.
- Apply advanced critical thinking and writing skills to analyses of body size from socio-cultural perspectives. Contribute meaningfully to seminar discussions.