A few weeks ago, I attended the Sally G. McMillen Lecture that featured artist, public scholar and theorist of the body Caleb Luna and their talk: “Filth Are My Politics: Toward an Anti-Racist Fat Queer Politic.” I was immediately struck by the way Luna (virtually) initially made the mood of the talk very welcoming and low-key, something most guest lecturers do not ever do. The fact that they were presenting virtually because they were very busy finishing their dissertation also allowed me to relate to Luna in the sense that we were both students who were busy with work. In terms of the content of the talk, Luna offered a fascinating history of fatness and fat phobia as they relate to race, which is an analysis I was completely new to. In their (paraphrased) words, fat phobia has little to do with health and more so with white supremacy’s goal of crafting a legitimate sex, race and class. To expand on this point, Luna spoke about the legacy of Saartje Baartman, in terms of how her body was commodified and put on display for the financial benefit and entertainment of white Europeans, and how it contributed to the creation of racialized genders and a conflation of fatness with conceptions of “racial Others.” Additionally, Luna spoke about art in the Baroque Period (17^th & 18^th centuries) and how it enshrined fat women, which some read as an acceptance of fatness back then. However, Luna problematizes this reading of the art and contends that the reason this depiction of fatness was acceptable was because the women were white. In the development of the “science” behind today’s normative conceptions of fatness, Luna claims there was also an underlining thread of anti-Blackness. After all, the European colonialists in Africa were exploiting and exporting the bodies and skeletons of Black Africans for “scientific” purposes during the 19^th and 20^th centuries. Some of these skeletons are still kept and featured at well-known European museums. This intersectional analysis provided by Luna illuminated a history I was almost completely unaware of prior to the talk. While I knew the story of Saartje Baartman, I did not know about how her story plays into the racialized history of fat phobia.

Throughout the talk Luna recommended the scholarship of numerous authors to explore this topic further such as:

• “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens” by Dr. Cathy J. Cohen
• “Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia” by Sabrina Strings
• “Spaces between Us: Queer Settler Colonialism and Indigenous Decolonization” by Scott Lauria Morgensen