MA Critical Studies Lecture Series: Da'Shaun L. Harrison "Belly of the Beast - The Politics of Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness

Students of the Master Critical Studies and anyone who is interested are warmly invited to participate in a moderated talk with Da’Shaun L. Harrison at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. The talk focuses on themes from Da’Shaun’s award-winning book Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness in which they address the necropolitical dimension of the interconnected health-industrial and prison-industrial complex. The book shows how linking anti-fatness to anti-blackness can destabilize oppressive notions of gender and race, and ties fat liberation to queer liberation and to the abolitionist project. 

The conversation with Da’Shaun will also focus on their writing practice. As students of the MA in Critical Studies we are interested in the connection between their editing work, community organizing, writing practice, and political work: How do these practices inform each other and how can we talk about writing/editing as organizing? To what extent can these practices be understood as part of the abolitionist project?

Da’Shaun L. Harrison is a trans theorist and Southern-born and bred abolitionist in Atlanta, GA. They are the author of Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness, which won the 2022 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Nonfiction and several other media/literary honors. As an editor, movement media and narrative strategist, Harrison uses their extensive history as a community organizer—which began in 2014 during their first year at Morehouse College—to frame their political thought and cultural criticism. Through the lens of what Harrison calls “Black Fat Studies,” they lecture on blackness, fatness, gender, and their intersections. Harrison serves as Editor-at-Large at Scalawag Magazine, is a co-host of the podcast “Unsolicited: Fatties Talk Back,” ⅓ of the video podcast “In The Middle,” and is a co-founder of Media Against Apartheid & Displacement (MAAD). Between the years 2019 and 2021, Harrison served as Associate Editor—and later as Managing Editor—of Wear Your Voice Magazine.

There is also an event series organized around the topics in Da'Shaun L. Harrison's book, organized by the Universität Wien, in cooperation with the MA Critical Studies Lecture Series, among others. On October 21, there is the keynote lecture by Harrison at the Academy of Fine Arts.