The weight of queerness: Reflections on a digital storytelling project

Pendleton Jiménez, K., & Rinaldi, J. (2021). The Weight of queerness: Reflections on a digital storytelling project. Studies in Canadian Literature, 46(1), 189–208. https://doi.org/10.7202/1086616ar

Abstract

We came to write this article as collaborators on a 2015 digital storytelling project entitled Through Thick and Thin,1 which focused on queer women’s navigation of weight stigma and disordered eating. Our team comprised senior and junior professors, graduate students, community partners, and artists, with core members all queer-identified. Our queerness was complicated by body markers related to body shape and size, gender identity and expression, race and Indigeneity, mental and physical disability, class and age. That complexity only multiplied when our team recruited participants through our community partner. We asked potential recruits how they self-identify in relation to a range of identity markers, so as to ensure that among those invited to participate the most privileged identities were not overrepresented. Our selective recruitment method reflected a project commitment to diverse representation, established because of our team’s vested interest in telling stories that celebrate difference. Across these differences, everyone involved in the project was in some way queer and had a complicated relationship with their body weight.