Stern Center, Great Room, 7 p.m.

Love Your Body Week Keynote

Out of Time: Fatness, Disability, and Fat Crip Time

April Herndon,  Winona State University

This talk explores the ways fat and/or disabled bodies are often depicted as being part of the past but not of a collective future because they are deemed too expensive, too much a reminder of vulnerability, too much in general. As a result, those of us living in fat and/or disabled bodies are often disciplined and pushed to pursue imagined futures—where many of us do not exist—through “treatments” and “cures,” robbing us of the present. Using my personal experiences as a fat and disabled woman and an intersectional Fat Studies and Disability Studies lens, I’ll explain how fat and/or disabled bodies challenge normative concepts of time. I’ll also suggest that Fat Crip Time, which acknowledges that fatness and disability can mean a person experiences time differently, can help us live in the present, know fat and disabled bodies as potential sites of joy rather than only hardship, and offer a framework for justice and liberation.

The event is sponsored by the Clarke Forum for Contemporary Issues and by the Women’s & Gender Resource Center. The program is part of Love Your Body Week programming.

Biography (provided by the speaker)

Dr. April Herndon earned her Ph.D. in American studies at Michigan State University. She currently teaches in the English dept. at Winona State University.  Her published work addresses fatphobia and ableism in American culture from an interdisciplinary and intersectional perspective. Her book, Fat Blame: How the War on Obesity Victimizes Women and Children, specifically examines how America’s obsession with fatness is especially harmful to women and children—even more so if those women and children are also marginalized via race, class, socioeconomic status, and/or disability. Dr. Herndon self-identifies as a Fat, queer, cisgendered woman with multiple disabilities who loves cats, gardening, cooking, and playing her ukulele and singing on her screen porch.