Fat has been ever-present in public imagination in various forms. Fat is perceived as a

public enemy and “demonized in medicine and public policy” (Blank 2020). It is “adored by chefs

and nutritional faddists, desired and abhorred when it comes to sex, and continually courted by a

multi-billion-dollar fitness and weight-loss industry” (Blank 2020). Yet, ‘Fat’ as an area of

academic research has remained remarkably underdeveloped in the Humanities and Social

Sciences domain. Only recently, it has emerged as a vibrant interdisciplinary field that interrogates

the cultural, political, and epistemological meanings attached to fatness. It primarily critiques

weight stigma as a structural problem, examines the moral and aesthetic regimes imposed on

bodies, and explores the intersectional dimensions of fat identity across gender, race, disability,

class, and sexuality.

Fat Studies, as established by seminal works such as The Fat Studies Reader (2009) and

The Routledge International Handbook of Fat Studies (2021), reconceptualises fatness as a site of

power, identity, and knowledge rather than pathology. It challenges dominant medicalised

narratives of “obesity,” foregrounds the lived experiences of fat individuals, and examines the

intersectional dimensions. However, despite the intellectual vibrancy of the field internationally,

Fat Studies remains strikingly underdeveloped in South Asia. There exists a substantial body of

epidemiological research on obesity prevalence, cardio-metabolic risk, lifestyle modification, and

behavioural intervention. Yet there is little engagement with fatness as a socially constructed,

affective, and political condition. This volume aims to address this gap by bringing together

scholars from the humanities, social sciences, cultural studies, film and media studies, queer

studies, and medical humanities to theorise fatness within South Asian contexts.

In doing so, this volume proposes to position itself as a pioneering intervention: the first

scholarly collection to articulate a distinctly South Asian Fat Studies, grounded in the region’s

histories, aesthetics, visual cultures, religious traditions, colonial legacies, caste logics, gender

regimes, and digital publics. This volume plans to situate fatness within South Asia’s

postcolonial formations and neoliberal transformations, and thus seeks to challenge universalised 

Western models of fat stigma and body politics and propose context-specific frameworks that

speak to the region’s cultural complexity. The list of subthemes on which papers are expected are

as follows:

· Fat, stigma, trauma

· Fat, food, nutrition

· Fat and Medical humanities

· Fat, plant, health humanities

· Fat and Animal Studies

· Fat as metaphor

· Fat, myth, religion

· Fat, morality, ethics

· Fat, sexual fetish, psychology of pleasure

· Fat and fitness industry

· Fat and Humour industry

· Fat, film, fashion

· Fat, Affect, media manipulation

· Fat and vulnerability studies

Editors-

Dr. Priyanka Chakraborty, Head and Assistant Professor of English, Sister Nivedita

University, Kolkata.

Dr. Aditya Ghosh, Head and Assistant Professor of English, ICFAI Tripura.

We are seeking original research papers that will enrich the discussion and add value to

the volume. 

Please submit your Abstracts within 300-400 words with 4/5 keywords along with an

Author's Bio (100 words) in a single MS Word/Doc file at studiesfat@gmail.com by 5th

March 2026.

A decision on the submission of the abstract will be communicated by the volume editors by April 30, 2026.

Publisher- Routledge has shown interest in the publication of the volume.