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New Theories
• Fat studies is a field of scholarship that critically examines societal attitudes about body
weight and appearance, and that advocates equality for all people with respect to body
size.
• Fat studies seeks to remove the negative associations that society has about fat and the fat
body. It regards weight, like height, as a human characteristic that varies widely across
any population. Marilyn Wann (2009), one of the first activists to use the term “fat
studies,” stated, “Unlike traditional approaches to weight, a fat studies approach offers no
opposition to the simple fact of human weight diversity, but instead looks at what people
and societies make of this reality”
• Fat studies scholars ask why we oppress people who are fat and who benefits from that
oppression. In that regard, fat studies is similar to academic disciplines that focus on race,
ethnicity, gender, or age.

• The size acceptance movement began in 1969 when William Fabrey founded NAAFA,
the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance (initially the National Association
to Aid Fat Americans, see naafa.org).

• In the 1970s in Los Angeles, a group of fat women formed the Fat Underground as a
way to organize against discrimination of fat people by the medical profession via diets
and medical practices. Two of their members, Judy Freespirit and Aldebaran wrote the
Fat Liberation Manifesto (1983), which demanded respect and equal rights for fat people
• NAAFA and the Fat Underground both used the word “fat” instead of “obese” or
“overweight.” In English, medical terms (e.g., “obese”) tend to be based on Greek or
Latin terms, and as oppressed groups organize they often replace the former medical or
clinical diagnosis (e.g., “homosexual”) fat activists felt that the terms “overweight,”
“underweight,” and “normal weight” all imply that there is an attainable “ideal” weight
when in fact there is great diversity in weight
• Fat studies scholars realize that weight needs to be examined within the context of
gender, race/ethnicity, socioeconomic class, and sexual orientation.

• Because weight is so strongly correlated with income in western nations, being fat is
often synonymous with being poor (e.g., fat people don’t join health clubs can be
understood as poor people don’t join health clubs). Although it is illegal to discriminate
based on gender, race, and ethnicity in most institutions, only a handful of places—the
U.S. state of Michigan and the cities of Washington, DC; San Francisco and Santa Cruz,
California; Madison, Wisconsin; and Binghamton, New York; as well as Victoria,
Australia—currently have legislation prohibiting discrimination based on weight
• In the 1980s and 1990s, researchers from the size-acceptance movement tended to be
trained in health-related disciplines such as medicine, public health, nutrition, and

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exercise physiology. Their research examined and critiqued the health risks of fatness and
the effectiveness of dieting. In the 21st Century, fat studies has become more
interdisciplinary.

• The Popular Culture Association and the National Women’s Studies Association have fat
studies tracks. The Smith College conference Fat and the Academy in 2006 focused on
fat studies as an academic discipline, and the New York Times focused on fat studies in
academia later that year (Ellin, 2006). Fat studies became the focus of research in
literature, cultural studies, theatre, film and media studies, and the fine arts (see Rothblum
and Solovay, 2009). Scholars have examined fat characters in short stories, novels,
television sitcoms, films, and plays

Posthumanist Criticism

• Posthumanism marks a careful, ongoing, overdue rethinking of the dominant humanist

(or anthropocentric) account of who “we” are as human beings. In the light of
posthumanist theory and culture, “we” are not who “we” once believed ourselves to be.
And neither are “our” others

• According to humanism – a clear and influential example of which can be found in René
Descartes’s Discourse on the Method (1637) – the human being occupies a natural and
eternal place at the very center of things, where it is distinguished absolutely from
machines, animals, and other inhuman entities; where it shares with all other human
beings a unique essence; where it is the origin of meaning and the sovereign subject of
history; and where it behaves and believes according to something called “human
nature.” In the humanist account, human beings are exceptional, autonomous, and set
above the world that lies at their feet. “Man,” to use the profoundly problematic signifier
conventionally found in descriptions of “the human condition,” is the hegemonic measure
of all things.1 Posthumanism, by way of contrast, emerges from a recognition that “Man”
is not the privileged and protected center, because humans are no longer – and perhaps
never were – utterly distinct from animals, machines, and other forms of the “inhuman”;
are the products of historical and cultural differences that invalidate any appeal to a
universal, transhistorical human essence; are constituted as subjects by a linguistic system
that pre-exists and transcends them; and are unable to direct the course of world history
towards a uniquely human goal. In short, posthumanism arises from the theoretical and
practical inadequacy – or even impossibility – of humanism, from the relativization of the
human that follows from its “coupling … to some other order of being

• Posthumanist criticism has certain things in common with the “antihumanism” commonly
associated with the work of theorists such as Louis Althusser, Michel Foucault, and
Jacques Lacan, but tends to depart from anti humanist discourse when it comes to the
matter of approaching the figure of “Man.”2 Antihumanists regularly set out actively to
shatter the hegemony of humanism by making a radical, sometimes avowedly scientific,
break from the legacy of the human. Althusser, for instance, wrote in For Marx of how

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“the myth of Man is reduced to ashes'' by the mature science of historical materialism
(Althusser 1965: 229), while Foucault set out in his History of Madness to tell the tale of
insanity itself in order to correct the rational, anthropocentric accounts habitually offered
by psychiatry, “which is a monologue by reason about madness” (Foucault 1961: xxviii).
And, although he confessed to appreciating humanism when “it at least has a certain
candor about it,” Lacan also admitted that he was “flattered” to find the term “a-human”
used to describe his work in psychoanalysis (Lacan 1966: 701). Posthumanism, however,
often takes as its starting point not the illegitimacy but the inherent instability of
humanism. “Man” does not necessarily need to be toppled or left behind with a giant
leap, because “he” is already a fallen or falling figure, and the task of the critic or artist
committed to posthumanism therefore becomes one of mapping and encouraging this
fading

• Much scholarship has explicitly and extensively addressed different aspects of

posthumanism in recent times; indeed, as Bruce Clarke has acutely observed, in “the last
two decades the theoretical trope of the posthuman has upped the ante on the notion of
the postmodern” (Clarke 2008: 2). In fact, in 2002 the Modern Language Association of
America (MLA) announced in one of its newsletters that it was, given the growing
interest, considering adding the subject term “the posthuman” to its influential MLA
International Bibliography (Grazevich 2002: 6). The recent statistical information from
the online MLA Bibliography provided by Richard Nash in his chapter on Animal
Studies in this volume would appear to confirm that the MLA was unable to resist the rise
of “the posthuman.” And the sheer range of academic disciplines in which posthumanist
concerns have been addressed – literary studies, cultural studies, philosophy, film studies,
theology, geography, animal studies, architecture, politics, law, sociology, anthropology,
science and technology studies, education, gender studies, and psychoanalysis, for
example – testifies to the ways in which posthumanism cuts across conventional
disciplinary boundaries. Posthumanism belongs nowhere in particular in the modern
university, in that it has no fixed abode, but its presence is everywhere felt

• But posthumanism is not merely an abstract academic affair, for popular culture has been
crucial in the examination and expansion of posthumanist existence. Works of fiction
such as William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984), Bruce Sterling’s Crystal Express (1989),
Richard Powers’s Galatea 2.2 (1995), and China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station (2000)
have – along with television series such as Star Trek: The Next Generation and films
such as Blade Runner (dir. Ridley Scott, 1982), Tetsuo: The Iron Man (dir. Shinya
Tsukamoto, 1989), Ghost in the Shell (dir. Mamoru Oshii, 1995), and eXistenZ (dir.
David Cronenberg, 1999) – depicted humans and machines interfacing with and
transforming each other in new, complex, provocative, pleasurable, and sometimes highly
eroticized ways. To encounter such narratives is to see the certainties of humanism fade
and to find bodies, minds, desires, limits, knowledge, and being itself reimagined in ways
for which traditional anthropocentrism cannot possibly account. For instance, Galatea 2.2
refers at one point to “the crumbling bastions of the spent, pre-posthumanist tradition”
(Powers 1995: 193). Upon these ruins dances posthumanism. That is to say,
posthumanism is as much a matter of theory as it is a question of fiction. In fact, one of
the recognitions of posthumanist culture has been that “the boundary between science

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fiction and social reality is an optical illusion” (Haraway 1985: 66), for with the
deconstruction of the opposition between the human and the inhuman also comes a
waning of the conventional distinction between fact and fiction

• The timing of this flourishing has meant that the term “posthuman” often feels like a
fairly recent invention, as if it were perhaps coined with the rise of online existence or the
creation of the microchip. But “post-Human” (with the hyphen, subsequent capital letter,
and italics) can actually be traced back as far as 1888, when it was briefly used in H.P.
Blavatsky’s The Secret Doctrine, a strange and dense theosophical treatise (Blavatsky
1888: 2: 684).3 Blavatsky did not develop a detailed theory of the posthuman, however,
and neither did the handful of writers – Jack Kerouac among them (Kerouac 1995: 81) –
who used the term in passing at various points in the first half of the twentieth century.
The signifier seems to have been born too soon and to have waited patiently for its
moment to come

• That moment was almost certainly the publication of Donna J. Haraway’s “A manifesto
for cyborgs” (1985). Although she did not actually use the terms “posthumanism,”
“posthumanist,” or “posthuman” anywhere in her essay, Haraway proposed that a series
of three interrelated “boundary breakdowns” (Haraway 1985: 68) have transformed the
long-established and long-dominant figure of the human into a hybrid cyborg.4
Humanism, Haraway noted, has always relied upon firm and fierce distinctions between
human and animal, organism and machine, and physical and non-physical, but a host of
dramatic modern developments (in science, science fiction, technology, capitalism, race
and ethnicity studies, militarism, animal studies, and feminism, for example) had made
such rigid, absolutist thinking unsustainable and politically dubious. “By the late
twentieth century,” she wrote, “our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized
and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs. The cyborg is
our ontology; it gives us our politics” (66). The human has become obsolete; the figure of
“Man” has been replaced, and we “cannot go back ideologically or materially

• Although Haraway notes that the cyborg has troubled and troubling roots in “militarism
and patriarchal capitalism” (68), and although from “one perspective, a cyborg world is
about the final imposition of a grid of control on the planet, about the final abstraction
embodied in a Star Wars apocalypse waged in the name of defense, about the final
appropriation of women’s bodies in a masculinist orgy of war” (72), her essay argues
powerfully for seeing hope and promise in a different reading of the cyborg. “From
another perspective,” she continues, “a cyborg world might be about lived social and
bodily realities in which people are not afraid of their joint kinship with animals and
machines, not afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints” (72).
A certain incarnation of the cyborg is to be embraced and celebrated, in other words, for
its ability to expose the problems of thinking in essences and universals, and for the way
in which it can “suggest a way out of the maze of dualisms in which we have explained
our bodies and our tools to ourselves” (100–101). The passage from humanism to a
posthumanist cyborg condition need not alarm those whom Haraway calls “progressive
people” (71), for it is in the pollution of the “last beachheads of [human] uniqueness”

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(68) that enchanting new possibilities for being and becoming, for ethics and politics,
sparkle

• In the wake of Haraway’s intoxicating and widely reproduced manifesto, many accounts
of posthumanism have addressed how modern technoscientific culture has radically
undermined the hegemony of anthropocentrism. In N. Katherine Hayles How We Became
Posthuman (1999), Chris Hables Gray’s Cyborg Citizen (2001), Elaine L. Graham’s
Representations of the Post/human (2002), and Thomas Foster’s The Souls of Cyberfolk
(2005), for instance, the posthumanist implications of cybernetics and cyberspace,
informatics, artificial intelligence, genetics, and medicine have been examined in detail
(often with reference to Donna Haraway’s groundbreaking manifesto). When computers
can beat humans at chess, when life is understood as a readable code, when death can be
deferred or redefined by radical medical intervention, when the Genome Project has
revealed that humans share 98 percent of their genetic composition with chimpanzees,
when artificial limbs outperform and blend seamlessly with their organic counterparts,
and when some experts in the field of artificial intelligence believe that it will soon be
possible for humans to achieve immortality by transferring themselves into a computer,
the old humanist model seems desperately incapable of speaking to the present order of
things. The rigid and absolutist position developed in Descartes’s Discourse on Method
loses its pervasiveness, and only a thoroughly revised account – a posthumanist account –
can make sense of such shifted scenes

• Posthumanism is not purely a question of high technology, however, and not merely
because, as Hayles points out in How We Became Posthuman, technological rapture can
all too easily shore up some of the most fundamental assumptions of humanist
discourse.5 While it is true that a great deal of criticism and fiction has imagined the
posthuman as a technological figure, other strands of scholarship have examined
posthumanism in terms of architecture (Hays 1992), mathematics (Baofu 2008), intersex
(Morland 2007), geography (Castree and Nash 2006), education (Spanos 1993),
paleoanthropology (Mordsley 2007), sensation and cognition (Merrell 2003), rights (Baxi
2009), fetishism (Fernbach 2002), complexity theory (Smith and Jenks 2006),
extraterrestrials (Badmington 2004a), botany (Didur 2008), autopoietic systems theory
(Clarke 2008), and postcolonialism

• One of the most striking and persuasive texts to argue in recent years for a posthumanism
not reliant on technology is Cary Wolfe’s Animal Rites, where the focus falls upon the
“unexamined framework of speciesism” (Wolfe 2003a: 1) that underlies anthropocentric
discourse.6 Wolfe begins by noting how literary and cultural studies are still dominated
by speciesist assumptions, even though everyday American culture – in the form of
articles in popular publications such as Time and Newsweek, for instance – has at least
started to recognize that “the humanist habit of making even the possibility of
subjectivity coterminous with the species barrier is deeply problematic, if not clearly
untenable” (1–2; emphasis in original). Western humanism, Wolfe proposes, is founded
and fed upon the hierarchical binary opposition between “human” and “animal,” and “the

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aspiration of human freedom, extended to all, regardless of race or class or gender, has as
its material condition of possibility absolute control over the lives of nonhuman others

• Drawing notably upon the work of Jacques Derrida, Animal Rites proceeds to offer
productive ways to unsettle the sway of the discourse of species and to recognize that
“the ‘human’ … is not now, and never was, itself” (Wolfe 2003a: 9).7 Humanism is a
myth – a remarkably powerful myth, certainly, but an untenable and dubious myth
nonetheless. As long as “this humanist and speciesist structure of subjectivization
remains intact,” Wolfe concludes, in a powerful and convincing challenge to those who
believe that politics and ethics cannot continue without humanism: and as long as it is
institutionally taken for granted that it is all right to systematically exploit and kill
nonhuman animals simply because of their species, then the humanist discourse of
species will always be available for use by some humans against other humans as well, to
countenance violence against the social other of whatever species – or gender, or race, or
class, or sexual difference

• There is, in conclusion, no convenient consensus when it comes to questions of

posthumanism: different critics have approached the term in different ways and have
drawn different conclusions. And posthumanism is not the property or progeny of any
particular academic discipline; on the contrary, it touches and troubles across the lines
that conventionally separate field from field, mode from mode. One thing, however, is
certain: posthumanism has become a major site of debate in recent years because
anthropocentrism, with its assured insistence upon human exceptionalism, is no longer an
adequate or convincing account of the way of the world. As N. Katherine Hayles
reflected in 2005

• [T]he interplay between the liberal humanist subject and the posthuman that I used to
launch my analysis in How We Became Posthuman [in 1999] has already begun to fade
into the history of the twentieth century. In the twenty-first century, the debates are likely
to center not so much on the tension between the liberal humanist tradition and the
posthuman but on different versions of the posthuman as they continue to evolve in
conjunction with intelligent machines

Sources:
1. Oxford Companion to Critical Theory