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AUTHOR
Katariina Kyrölä
Phantom/liminal fat and feminist theories of the body
This article brings together two concepts, ‘phantom fat’ and ‘liminal fat’, which both aim to grasp how fat in contemporary culture becomes a kind of material immateriality, corporeality in suspension. Comparing the spheres of representation and experience, we examine the challenges and usefulness of these concepts, and feminist fat studies perspectives more broadly, to feminist scholarship on the body. We ask what connects and disconnects fat corporeality and fat studies from ways of theorising other embodied differences, like gender, ‘race’, disability, class and sexuality, especially when thinking through their perceived mutability or removability, and assumptions about their relevance …
The multiple futures of feminism
Feminism as a concept and as a movement tends to provoke ambivalent responses. Although gender equality is a commonly shared value, feminism remains hotly debated in Finland, and explicit anti-feminism often intertwines with homophobic, xenophobic, and racist currents. To resist reactionary mobilization, new generations of feminists are defining their feminism as intersectional. For them, analysing gender and gender-based subordination is not enough, but racism, homophobia and transphobia need to be tackled just as urgently. The possible futures of feminism, its utopias and dystopias, were the topic of a panel discussion at the annual Finnish gender studies conference organized by the Unive…