May Friedman
Biographic Data
| ID | 3587507 |
|---|---|
| NAME | May Friedman |
| GIVEN NAMES | May |
| FAMILY NAME | Friedman |
| SIGNATURE | FRIEDMAN M |
| AFFILIATIONS | Toronto Metropolitan University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3790-1139 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 15 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 83 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 15 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2011 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
On Being Impossible
Who is an impossible body? An impossible body is the antithesis of the normative subject upon which our everyday lives are premised. An impossible body is hidden from view in popular culture, is maligned in social and economic contexts, is irrelevant to the discussion of policy. This ‘impossibility’ may be rebellious, it may be painful, but it may also offer opportunities for a shift in thinking. In considering which bodies and lives are consider…
Intersectionality Gets Fashionably Fat
The authors’ research project, Sizing Up Gender, explored the experiences of thirteen participants at the intersections of gender expression and fat. Through a series of photographs of participants and their garments, the project pushed the boundaries of art, identities, representations, and research. This article seeks to consider the ways in which innovative arts-based practice with a deep focus on justice and anti-oppression can allow for a th…
Fattening fabulousness
Gender and weight are produced through dress before a child comes into the world. But dressing the body in ways that produce and embody one’s own understanding of gender is challenging for fat bodies because they have limited or no choice of available clothing sizes and styles. As a result, finding clothes that produce and embody fat people’s desired gender identities and expressions tends to be a source of struggle. This article tells a differen…
Carrying stories
Over the past decade, we have worked alongside storytellers to bring their stories into the world. These encounters have been challenging, exciting, and intimate. In this paper, we reflect on a digital/multimedia storytelling project in which we engaged with people who have experienced weight stigma in fertility, pregnancy, and motherhood care. We use the metaphors of story midwifery and surrogacy to describe the methodological-substantive interp…
Image-Makers in Residence
A High-Risk Body for Whom? On Fat, Risk, Recognition and Reclamation in Restorying Reproductive Care through Digital Storytelling
This paper explores issues of weight stigma in fertility, reproduction, pregnancy and parenting through a fat reproductive justice lens. We engage with multimedia/digital stories co-written and co-produced with participants involved in Reproducing Stigma: Obesity and Women’s Experiences of Reproductive Care. This mixed methods research project which took place between 2015-2018 used interview and video-making methods with women-identified and tra…
Fat Reproductive Justice
In this paper, we explored the experiences of people in larger bodies seeking fertility and/or pregnancy care through a reproductive justice lens, integrating an understanding of weight stigma with an understanding of who has access to reproductive technologies, who is “allowed” to become pregnant, and the discourses that surround pregnancy. We conducted a thematic analysis of the narratives of 17 participants who had been labeled “overweight” or…
Religious freedom restoration acts and sexual minority population health in the United States
Religious freedom restoration acts (RFRAs) in the United States potentially facilitate discrimination against lesbian, gay, and bisexual individuals (i.e., sexual minorities). In the current investigation, we explored whether a population health metric among sexual minority adults changed over time based on the presence, absence, or introduction of a state RFRA. Data are from 21 of the United States that gathered sexual orientation data from popu…
Doing Justice to Intersectionality in Research
Intersectionality involves the study of the ways that race, gender, disability, sexuality, class, age, and other social categories are mutually shaped and interrelated through forces such as colonialism, neoliberalism, geopolitics, and cultural configurations to produce shifting relations of power and oppression. The concept does not always offer a clear set of tools for conducting social research. Instead, it offers varied strands of thought, po…
Reconceptualizing temporality in and through multimedia storytelling
What lessons about linearity are illuminated by the stories that engage our experience of queer fat bodies? The authors examine stories generated in the collaborative, community-based research project Through Thick and Thin. They analyze a selection of 3- to 7-minute microdocumentaries produced in the project that feature assemblages of queer sexuality, gender expression and identity, and other privileged or minoritized identifications (race, dis…
Introduction to the special issue
As scholars, artists, and activists continue to contend with the question of who has a future, we are drawn to the relationship between fat and the social construction of time. In this introduction to the special issue of Fat Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Body Weight and Society, we explore what fat reveals about time and what fat studies offers to current conceptions of temporality. We consider how fat existence and fat interventions …
Mad/Fat/Diary
My Mad Fat Diary profiles young people falling in and out of love, fighting with their parents, experimenting with drugs and alcohol, and testing limits. Yet the show offers a fresh look at tired tropes by ignoring dramatic conventions that suggest that ugly truths or non-normative bodies should remain out of view and instead sheds light on ignored, but common, teen experiences and identities. In doing so, this television program engages with com…
Pops in Pop Culture
Mother Blame, Fat Shame, and Moral Panic
This article seeks to examine the scholarly journal articles and print media that describe the intersections of child protection and pediatric "obesity," arguing that presentations of these cases and related interventions rest at the nexus of dominant discourses of child-centered parenting and fears of the "obesity epidemic." The messaging in both scholarly literature and news media on this topic echoes taken-for-granted truths about fatness and …
Growing Up Transnational
Stereotypes and cultural imperialism often provide a framework of fixed characteristics for postmodern life, yet fail to address the implications of questions such as, "Where are you from?" Growing Up Transnational challenges the assumptions behind this fixed framework to look at the interconnectivity, conflict, and contradictions within current discussions of identity and kinship.This collection offers a fresh, feminist perspective on family rel…
Doing Justice to Intersectionality in Research
Intersectionality involves the study of the ways that race, gender, disability, sexuality, class, age, and other social categories are mutually shaped and interrelated through forces such as colonialism, neoliberalism, geopolitics, and cultural configurations to produce shifting relations of power and oppression. The concept does not always offer a clear set of tools for conducting social research. Instead, it offers varied strands of thought, po…
Fat Reproductive Justice
In this paper, we explored the experiences of people in larger bodies seeking fertility and/or pregnancy care through a reproductive justice lens, integrating an understanding of weight stigma with an understanding of who has access to reproductive technologies, who is “allowed” to become pregnant, and the discourses that surround pregnancy. We conducted a thematic analysis of the narratives of 17 participants who had been labeled “overweight” or…
Mad/Fat/Diary
My Mad Fat Diary profiles young people falling in and out of love, fighting with their parents, experimenting with drugs and alcohol, and testing limits. Yet the show offers a fresh look at tired tropes by ignoring dramatic conventions that suggest that ugly truths or non-normative bodies should remain out of view and instead sheds light on ignored, but common, teen experiences and identities. In doing so, this television program engages with com…
Growing Up Transnational
Stereotypes and cultural imperialism often provide a framework of fixed characteristics for postmodern life, yet fail to address the implications of questions such as, "Where are you from?" Growing Up Transnational challenges the assumptions behind this fixed framework to look at the interconnectivity, conflict, and contradictions within current discussions of identity and kinship.This collection offers a fresh, feminist perspective on family rel…
Mother Blame, Fat Shame, and Moral Panic
This article seeks to examine the scholarly journal articles and print media that describe the intersections of child protection and pediatric "obesity," arguing that presentations of these cases and related interventions rest at the nexus of dominant discourses of child-centered parenting and fears of the "obesity epidemic." The messaging in both scholarly literature and news media on this topic echoes taken-for-granted truths about fatness and …
Pops in Pop Culture
Mad/Fat/Diary
My Mad Fat Diary profiles young people falling in and out of love, fighting with their parents, experimenting with drugs and alcohol, and testing limits. Yet the show offers a fresh look at tired tropes by ignoring dramatic conventions that suggest that ugly truths or non-normative bodies should remain out of view and instead sheds light on ignored, but common, teen experiences and identities. In doing so, this television program engages with com…
Reconceptualizing temporality in and through multimedia storytelling
What lessons about linearity are illuminated by the stories that engage our experience of queer fat bodies? The authors examine stories generated in the collaborative, community-based research project Through Thick and Thin. They analyze a selection of 3- to 7-minute microdocumentaries produced in the project that feature assemblages of queer sexuality, gender expression and identity, and other privileged or minoritized identifications (race, dis…
Introduction to the special issue
As scholars, artists, and activists continue to contend with the question of who has a future, we are drawn to the relationship between fat and the social construction of time. In this introduction to the special issue of Fat Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Body Weight and Society, we explore what fat reveals about time and what fat studies offers to current conceptions of temporality. We consider how fat existence and fat interventions …
Religious freedom restoration acts and sexual minority population health in the United States
Religious freedom restoration acts (RFRAs) in the United States potentially facilitate discrimination against lesbian, gay, and bisexual individuals (i.e., sexual minorities). In the current investigation, we explored whether a population health metric among sexual minority adults changed over time based on the presence, absence, or introduction of a state RFRA. Data are from 21 of the United States that gathered sexual orientation data from popu…
Doing Justice to Intersectionality in Research
Intersectionality involves the study of the ways that race, gender, disability, sexuality, class, age, and other social categories are mutually shaped and interrelated through forces such as colonialism, neoliberalism, geopolitics, and cultural configurations to produce shifting relations of power and oppression. The concept does not always offer a clear set of tools for conducting social research. Instead, it offers varied strands of thought, po…
Image-Makers in Residence
A High-Risk Body for Whom? On Fat, Risk, Recognition and Reclamation in Restorying Reproductive Care through Digital Storytelling
This paper explores issues of weight stigma in fertility, reproduction, pregnancy and parenting through a fat reproductive justice lens. We engage with multimedia/digital stories co-written and co-produced with participants involved in Reproducing Stigma: Obesity and Women’s Experiences of Reproductive Care. This mixed methods research project which took place between 2015-2018 used interview and video-making methods with women-identified and tra…
Fat Reproductive Justice
In this paper, we explored the experiences of people in larger bodies seeking fertility and/or pregnancy care through a reproductive justice lens, integrating an understanding of weight stigma with an understanding of who has access to reproductive technologies, who is “allowed” to become pregnant, and the discourses that surround pregnancy. We conducted a thematic analysis of the narratives of 17 participants who had been labeled “overweight” or…
Fattening fabulousness
Gender and weight are produced through dress before a child comes into the world. But dressing the body in ways that produce and embody one’s own understanding of gender is challenging for fat bodies because they have limited or no choice of available clothing sizes and styles. As a result, finding clothes that produce and embody fat people’s desired gender identities and expressions tends to be a source of struggle. This article tells a differen…
Carrying stories
Over the past decade, we have worked alongside storytellers to bring their stories into the world. These encounters have been challenging, exciting, and intimate. In this paper, we reflect on a digital/multimedia storytelling project in which we engaged with people who have experienced weight stigma in fertility, pregnancy, and motherhood care. We use the metaphors of story midwifery and surrogacy to describe the methodological-substantive interp…
Intersectionality Gets Fashionably Fat
The authors’ research project, Sizing Up Gender, explored the experiences of thirteen participants at the intersections of gender expression and fat. Through a series of photographs of participants and their garments, the project pushed the boundaries of art, identities, representations, and research. This article seeks to consider the ways in which innovative arts-based practice with a deep focus on justice and anti-oppression can allow for a th…
On Being Impossible
Who is an impossible body? An impossible body is the antithesis of the normative subject upon which our everyday lives are premised. An impossible body is hidden from view in popular culture, is maligned in social and economic contexts, is irrelevant to the discussion of policy. This ‘impossibility’ may be rebellious, it may be painful, but it may also offer opportunities for a shift in thinking. In considering which bodies and lives are consider…
Sociology (12 works) · Political science (9 works) · Art (7 works) · Gender Studies (7 works) · Obesity and Health Practices (6 works) · Psychology (6 works) · Aesthetics (5 works) · Epistemology (5 works) · Law (5 works) · Narrative (5 works)