Keynote-Lecture: Da'Shaun L. Harrison (USA) - The politics of Anti-fatness as Anti-Blackness

Da'Shaun L. Harrison is a trans theorist, activist editor, and an abolitionist born and raised in the southern states of Atlanta. Harrison now lectures and guest lectures at universities and colleges such as Harvard Law School, Yale University, Northwestern University, Spelman College, University of Cincinnati, Trinity College and many others. Their research and writings have appeared in anthologies and other texts, including Black Love Matters (2022), In Pursuit of Revolutionary Love: Precarity, Power, Communities (2022), and The Contemporary Reader of Gender and Fat Studies (2023). 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 awards. In this book, Harrison addresses the politics of desirability, the limits of gender constructions, the connection between fatphobia and physicality, and the incongruence of "health" and "wholesomeness" for Black people of size, vividly illustrating the myriad harms of fatphobic structures, including those related to anti-Black racism. They offer strategies for dismantling denial, unlearning the culturally conditioned fatphobic imprint that tells us "fat is bad," and reimagining the world as we know it, shaped by diet culture and thin-body norms, so that Black people and people of size can inhabit a place that is not built on their subjugation.

Book table (hosted by ChickLit bookshop): On site
topic-related books as well as copies of the work BELLY OF THE BEAST
(to be signed by Da'Shaun L. Harrison) can be purchased on site. Only cash payment possible.

Projektleitung: Dshamilja Gosteli. Mitfinanziert und maßgeblich unterstützt durch die Abteilung Organisationskultur und Gleichstellung der Universität Wien, den Arbeitskreis für Gleichbehandlungsfragen der Akademie der bildenden Künste Wien, Master in Critical Studies und das Institut für Kunst und Architektur der Akademie der bildenden Künste Wien, die BaGru Gender Studies (Studierendenvertretung des Masterstudiengangs Gender Studies), die Forschungsplattform GAIN (Gender: Ambivalent In_Visibilities), und mit herzlichem Dank an die Technische Universität Wien. Spezieller Dank geht an die Buchhandlung ChickLit Wien, an Sunanda Mesquita & Ina Holub (Salon Soft&Cut) und im Besonderen an das gesamte Team des RGF.