Contesting settler control over Indigenous bodies (introducing a special issue): Ashlea Gillon, Bronwyn Carlson, ‘Indigenous(ly) fat, fat(ly) Indigenous’, Fat Studies, 2026 | settler colonial studies blog

Contesting settler control over Indigenous bodies (introducing a special issue): Ashlea Gillon, Bronwyn Carlson, ‘Indigenous(ly) fat, fat(ly) Indigenous’, Fat Studies, 2026

01Apr26

Excerpt: This special issue asks the question: What does Indigenous fat studies look like, particularly when we refuse coloniality? It questions what happens when fat Indigenous bodies are not positioned as problems to be solved, but as sovereign sites of knowledge, memory, resistance, and futurity. Across (un)settler colonial contexts, Indigenous Peoples have been rendered (hyper)(in)visible through surveillance and medicalization, while simultaneously oppressed as sovereign thinkers and embodied knowledge holders. Anti-fatness, in particular, has been mobilized as a colonial technology, intertwined with racialization, missionary morality, public health moral panic, neoliberalism, and more. For Indigenous Peoples, fat bias and fat hatred are not simply matters of dislike, they are intersecting systems of oppression that entangle with the theft of land, food system and relationship disruption, sexualized violence, and the ongoing (mis)governance of Indigenous lives. The articles in this special issue do not merely critique these regimes; they refuse them.

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