Digital Storytelling
Background: Obesity has become a moral panic for public health agencies, health researchers, and the popular press. Current clinical practices that advocate behavioural modification to achieve a target weight are complicit in reinforcing damaging cultural expectations about fitness and health. Critical scholars suggest that obesity should be regarded not as a disease or epidemic, but instead as a culturally produced artifact that is the target of discriminatory treatment. That discrimination is compounded for people organized into risk categories, including members of LGBTQ+ communities.
Aim: The projects described below engage with queer and transgender persons to build digital stories about their experiences of body management and weight stigma. These projects use an arts-informed methodology to contest dominant narratives about the so-called obesity epidemic.
Related Project: Through Thick and Thin
Objectives:
- What body image ideas or expectations and body management practices do queer women confront in both heteronormative and LGBTQ+ communities?
- What do queer women’s stories reveal about the gaps and tensions in mainstream eating disorder and obesity prevention and treatment?
- What counter-pedagogies, counter-cultural practices, and alternative knowledges exist in queer women’s stories which ground their resistance to and resilience around body image and body management? How can these stories inform provider practice?
Funding: Women’s College Hospital
Team Members:
- Jen Rinaldi – Project Co-Lead
- Loralee Gillis – Project Co-Lead and Community Partner
- Carla Rice – Co-Investigator
- Karleen Pendleton Jimenez – Co-Investigator
- May Friedman – Co-Investigator
- Margaret Robinson – Co-Investigator
- Deborah McPhail – Co-Investigator
- Andrea LaMarre – Student Collaborator
- Elisabeth Harrison – Student Collaborator
- Jill Andrew – Student Collaborator
Related Project: Transgressing Body Boundaries
Objectives:
- How does the policing of body shape and size affect trans, genderqueer, and gender non-conforming persons?
- How do trans persons navigate cultural expectations related to body shape and size?
- How do trans persons use fat and disordered eating practices to identify or express their gender?
Funding: SSHRC Partnership Grant
Team Members:
- Jen Rinaldi – Project Co-Lead
- Jake Pyne – Project Co-Lead
- May Friedman – Co-Investigator
- Karleen Pendleton Jimenez – Co-Investigator
- Deborah McPhail – Co-Investigator
- Phi Tran Trinh – Student Collaborator
- Bridget Liang – Student Collaborator
- Kai Preston – Student Collaborator
- Corrie Kayembe – Student Collaborator
