Fat studies is a new college course

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Jacqueline Johnson knows what it's like to be shunned because of her weight. In the early 2000s fat activism was edging into existence, and Johnson, a weight studies scholar, was deemed too skinny to take part. "I tried to join a fat activist group, and I was rejected because I was not of size," she remembers. The movement was gaining momentum as a response to America's growing weight paranoia, and its members, most of them frustrated, plus-size women, were skittish about admitting slender outsiders. "At the time I did understand they were apprehensive that I could be the enemy, trying to filter in and see what they were doing," she says.

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Today it's a different story. Johnson, who teaches a course on weight and society at George Washington University, is currently a professor with 25 students of all heights and widths. Her Fat Studies class is one of a handful popping up on campuses across the country, teaching students to think about body size critically, politically, and regularly. But despite such courses' popularity among students, critics worry that such classes emphasize bleeding-heart politics over intellectual rigor.

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