Rolls and Race: Exploring Weight Stigma, Race and Racism

Fat Studies has come into its own as a field in the last 10-15 years. The study of weight stigma and the specific implications for fat bodies has gained increasing traction in a range of interdisciplinary settings. While the field has deeply intersectional investments in identity related scholarship such as critical disability studies and queer and trans literatures, Fat Studies has been rightly accused of a lack of attention to the specific implications of race. Though contemporary research aims to address this limitation (Friedman, Rice, and Rinaldi, 2020; Strings, 2019, among others), there is still a surprising lack of attention to the specificities of how fat phobia is displayed among BIPOC communities, particularly as these communities live within other complicated intersections and experiences. Rolls and Race has addressed this gap. Through immersive first-person storytelling in the form of digital stories, nine digital stories which illustrate the complexities, tenderness, and power at the intersections of weight and race were created. These stories embody and assert that “our bodies are more than our bodies.”