UCLA Center for the Study of Women

If you were walking past the Dodd lecture hall on March 1st, you may have been startled to hear a group of people yelling “fat” at the top of their lungs. Usually, a single utterance, or worse, a cheerleading-style chant of the word “fat” is not a good thing—someone is probably being insulted or harassed. On this day, however, activist/scholar Marilyn Wann asked the gathered students and faculty to do just this, to shout out the word “fat” to launch the beginning of her talk, “Fighting Fat Fear During the War on ‘Obesity.’” Wann’s talk was the third and final talk in the Center for the Study of Women’s Winter 2010 Faculty Curator lecture series, “Gender and Body Size,” curated by Professor Abigail Saguy, Department of Sociology at UCLA .