Hello, I’m Shelley Tremain and I’d like to welcome you to the ninety-sixth installment of Dialogues on Disability, the series of interviews that I am conducting with disabled philosophers and post to BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY on the third Wednesday of each month. The series is designed to provide a public venue for discussion with disabled philosophers about a range of topics, including their philosophical work on disability; the place of philosophy of disability vis-à-vis the discipline and profession; their experiences of institutional discrimination and exclusion, as well as personal and structural gaslighting in philosophy in particular and in academia more generally; resistance to ableism, racism, sexism, and other apparatuses of power; accessibility; and anti-oppressive pedagogy.

The land on which on which I sit to conduct these interviews is the traditional ancestral territory of the Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabeg nations. The territory was the subject of the Dish with One Spoon Wampum Belt Covenant, an agreement between the Iroquois Confederacy and the Ojibwe and allied nations around the Great Lakes. As a settler, I offer these interviews with respect for and in solidarity with Indigenous peoples of so-called Canada and other settler states who, for thousands of years, have held sacred the land, water, air, and sky, as well as their inhabitants, and who, for centuries, have struggled to protect them from the ravages and degradation of colonization and expropriation.

My guest today is Kristin Rodier. [Kristin has made an imperfect read aloud version of this interview that runs 37 minutes.]  Kristin is an assistant professor of philosophy at Athabasca University (an open online university in what is colonially known as Canada) who works in interdisciplinary feminist philosophy, specifically on the lived fat body in critical phenomenology; habit; and resistance to oppression. Some of her recent projects focus on critical fat phenomenology, teaching and assessment in philosophy, and fatphobia in the profession. She’s a mother, an avid gardener, and loves cross country skiing under an open prairie sky.

Welcome to Dialogues on Disability, Kristin! Your personal history and educational background are not typical of academics, and especially not of philosophers. Please describe these elements of your life for our readers and listeners, for I believe that they defy expectations about who can be a philosopher and how they come to the profession.

Thank you so much for having me, Shelley. I have admired this series for quite some time and have greatly benefited from it.

Hello, everyone, I’m Kristin Rodier (she/her), a white settler of French and German descent, and I grew up in Saskatchewan. Both sides of my family are farmers who settled on stolen lands in Saskatchewan, the rightful homelands of primarily the Plains Cree. My ancestors’ “settlement” in Saskatchewan was a result of the Dominions Land Act of Canada (1872), which led to the historic Battle of Batoche (1885), making it “safe to settle.” My parents grew up on remote farms with limited access to healthcare and education, eventually settling in Saskatoon. Rural communities and manual labour shaped my middle-class upbringing, both being relatively removed from whatever it might mean to be a philosopher.

[Description of photo below: A smiling Kristin, who is a fat white woman, is lying on her side, in the grass, with a large dog in front of her. She is wearing a hat and sunglasses. Trees fill the background of the shot and grass with dandelions appears in the foreground.]

My employment story is that I worked minimum wage jobs from age sixteen throughout my post-secondary training. You name it: service, retail, delivery jobs, cleaning, and dealing cards at casinos! I took out loans for my undergraduate degree and received minimal funding for my graduate work; so, I needed to have jobs outside of the academy. I completed my Ph.D. in late 2014 and had a baby the following year. I worked sessionally until 2018—at one point, my record was working, simultaneously, in five departments at three institutions.

After several unsuccessful job interviews, I left the tenure-track academic job market to work in a writing centre. Overlapping, since 2017, I had also been tutoring cultural and women’s and gender studies part-time online at Athabasca University, a union position with excellent benefits, including a tuition benefit. I used this benefit to take courses toward the Master of Education degree in Distance Education in order to learn how to design online courses. In late 2020, Athabasca University advertised a tenure-track position in philosophy, and I was encouraged to revive my job package and give this job a new last shot. I believe that working in online learning and learning support was a significant advantage in this search. I got the job and started as an assistant professor in April of 2021.

My story about defying expectations and becoming a philosopher can only be understood in relation to my lived experiences of a non-normative fat body—my shape, size, and the way I move—as well as my learning and neurological differences. I cannot separate the effects of my learning differences from those of my non-normative fat body in specific experiences: for example, I was never counselled to go to university in high school or asked by teachers what I wanted to do for a career.

After graduating high school with low grades, I worked in restaurants for three years until I had tendinitis in my hands so severe that I had to go on worker’s compensation: my impetus to get loans and do an undergraduate degree. Even then, I was only conditionally accepted as a mature student due to my low high-school grades. I share this story with some students, but rarely with philosophers, since I feel like there is a story in our discipline according to which philosophical ability is an expression of inborn genius that effortlessly emerges in a context of competition (and disinterested contemplation) from a normative body and mind. Thanks to Johnathan Flowers’s 2023 Dialogues on Disability interview for pointing me towards Peter Railton’s notion of the “culture of smartness” in philosophy.

Even my work history paints me as a “non-academic,” as if working service labour wastes a “real” academic’s time. My work experience can be (and has been) weaponized as proof that I’m not a real philosopher, not intelligent enough for my current position, nor a credible academic or teacher. I remember Simone de Beauvoir saying, “I’m not a philosopher,” and devoted my M.A. thesis to argue against her, which now seems wrongheaded. I think that I now understand the weight of what she was rejecting. I will say that I am a philosopher, but that I approach philosophy as primarily my work rather than an identity. 

While at the University of Saskatchewan from 2001 to 2007, I was active in the women’s centre, the campus pride centre, anti-globalization activism, environmentalism, and feminist activism, especially around abortion and sexual assault. During this time in Saskatchewan, specific forms of pervasive and ongoing colonial violence were starting to enter mainstream discussions, including “starlight tours” and missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls in Saskatchewan. I was unaware of these things, given how racially segregated my upbringing was. I have witnessed many academics “make fun” of Saskatchewan for its remoteness or political irrelevance; but these portrayals of Saskatchewan reinforce settler techniques of papering over ongoing colonial violence on the prairies. Sherene Razack’s (2000) work on the connection between space and racialized sexual violence continues to inform how I reflect on and construct myself as from Saskatchewan.

Kristin, you gave a wonderful presentation to Philosophy, Disability, and Social Change 3 (#PhiDisSocCH3) in December 2022 on what it is like to be a fat philosopher. You have in addition co-authored (with Samantha Brennan) a chapter for the forthcoming The Bloomsbury Guide to Philosophy of Disability about your respective experiences as fat philosophers and the ways in which fatphobia conditions perceptions of who counts as a philosopher and what qualities a philosopher should possess. Please describe this research and the motivation for it.

I appreciate the inclusion of our revised paper as a chapter in the forthcoming The Bloomsbury Guide to the Philosophy of Disability and the invitation to present at the #PhiDisSocCh3 conference. One of the recommendations that Sam and I make in both our earlier article and the forthcoming chapter is to reflect on whether fat philosophers are invited to give presentations, much less to give presentations on fatness. The fact that you asked me to present at the conference means a lot to me. I am hesitant to talk about this research and I recommend that fat philosophers be picky with respect to the venues in which they discuss these topics. I will start with a bit about my intellectual formation; then, I can talk about the chapter’s arguments.

My graduate training primed me to think about these areas of experience theoretically and critically. I was unbelievably lucky to work with Dr. Cressida Heyes at the University of Alberta when there was considerable attention to Foucault’s works in teaching and research in philosophy, notably, Heyes’ monograph Self-Transformations: Foucault, Ethics, and Normalized Bodies. Not only that, I benefited greatly from my inclusion in a cohort of emerging philosophers at the time, including, especially Catherine Clune-Taylor, Megan Dean, Emily Douglas, Joshua St. Pierre, and Hande Tuna.

During that time, I took a seminar course with Heyes on relational autonomy. The course included a unit on whether cosmetic surgery can be understood within liberal formulations of autonomy as an exercise of feminist autonomy. This problematic was also discussed in terms of whether dieting to lose weight can be a feminist choice. Zooming out of these “preference evaluation” discussions of women’s agency, drawing on Foucault offered a way to understand the operation of power through these contexts of choice, and my existential-phenomenological training turned me towards my own processes of self-understanding, description, and meaning making. These frames supported reflection on how norms of rationality functioned through my philosophical training and how my self-understanding has been shaped through the meaning made of my embodied experiences. But, I kept hitting a pretty difficult wall: what rational philosopher worth their salt would write about fatness?

[Description of photo below: Kristin, who has shoulder-length hair, is wearing a brightly-coloured blazer, tortoise-patterned glasses, and a gold necklace with an “O.” She is standing in front of a bookshelf which holds various feminist philosophy books.]

Here’s where I’m influenced by Susan Bordo, specifically The Flight to Objectivity—which I love, only in part because of how scholars of Descartes hate it—and Unbearable Weight. Philosophy has a special relationship to rationality: we are experts on what reason is, how to use it, how to teach it, etc. That relationship to rationality implies a formulation of the body and its value. And, if we take de Beauvoir’s, Bordo’s, and Heyes’s critiques of the autonomous rational subject seriously, then we can question how and where our culture assigns rationality according to several bodily features, one of which is a thin body, normatively gendered, clear thinking, and speaking, but also an unmarked, able body. After the seminar on feminist autonomy, there was a feminist philosophy reading group in which we read, in great detail, Saba Mahmood’s The Politics of Piety and Sara Ahmed’s The Promise of Happiness. These two works completely ended any conscious commitment that held to the Western liberal subject for theorizing resistance to oppression.  

Turning to the article on fatness in philosophy, I cannot overstate the impact of Kristie Dotson’s “How is this Paper Philosophy?” Dotson’s article was a Copernican revolution for me—using the tools of philosophy to both critique our meta-disciplinary norms and demonstrate how they operate as a technique to stifle the work of diverse practitioners cracked open my persistent feelings of failure to “argue” for my area’s philosophical importance. Around the same time, the volume Women in Philosophy: What Needs to Change? came out. Apart from my close reading of de Beauvoir, whose critique of sexism in Western philosophy continues to be piercing, Women in Philosophy was my first exposure to a detailed feminist critique of contemporary Western academic philosophical culture.

While the collection was influential, it had the paradoxical result of both missing the mark on my experiences as a fat disabled woman and profoundly upsetting many established professors in my surroundings, thereby revealing the deeply rooted nature of these issues. Although disciplinary and professional questions were on the rise, I nevertheless found that many of the intense discussions about health, food, and the environment, which were taking place in feminist philosophy, implicitly demonized fatness and sometimes explicitly did so. In combination, these factors led me to reflect on my experiences and the place of fatness in the discipline.

In 2013, Samantha Brennan approached me to write about fat stigma and to revisit the topic together after 2018. Our article, “Teaching (and) Fat Stigma in Philosophy,”—a revised version of which I discuss above that will appear in The Bloomsbury Guide to Philosophy of Disability—was published in Teaching Philosophy in 2022. I would not have wanted to write on this topic without a more established co-author. Samantha offered the support and analysis needed to complete the project. Our first presentation focused on practical rationality and the assumption that fat people are especially weak-willed individuals. We then narrowed the argument of the paper to address teaching, insofar as teaching can be separated from other aspects of the profession.

I think that this approach was a good one to take because the paper got through peer review easier than it otherwise would have if we had designed it for a mainstream philosophy journal. So, our emphasis on pedagogy unpacks how philosophers evoke stereotypes in their classrooms through examples of good taste, eating, and illnesses, as well as hypotheticals that imagine killing fat people: throwing them off of bridges, exploding them, and so on. We argue that there are philosophy-specific ways in which fat stigma appears because philosophers are required to perform a hyper-rationality.

Let me pull it together and give some background to the article from my experience. There have been implicit and explicit messages to my face and behind my back that I am incapable of being a “real” philosopher. These messages are directly connected to not having a “normal professor body.” People get my name wrong—wrong fat person—have walked out of my conference presentations or have assumed either that I am not the presenter or that I’m lost. There is a veneer of niceness and deniability around fatphobia. People rarely consider that the comments that they make about me behind my back find their way to me. One of my fat superpowers is that people confess things to me because I’m “non-threatening.” People think performing fat positivity is to tell me the most fatphobic things that “other” people say, which of course, ruins my opinion of people who were important to me. It also retraumatizes me. Some comments are thinly veiled attacks on my right to professional success. Others are predictable fatphobia, consisting of overt abjection around my gender and sexuality.

Because my brain has a non-normative approach to processing language and information, I take a circuitous route to my point and have been categorized as disorganized and unclear in speaking and writing—these norms slip right into stereotypes of fat people as lazy and careless. These experiences connect to my rural “first-in-family” experience of not belonging in academia. I have experienced white graduate students, primarily from Canada, make fun of my speaking style—and by that, they mean a regional Saskatchewan accent.

I must take their word on it, but I do notice that I will use the occasional “gonna” instead of “going to” or “kinda” instead of “kind of,” as well as other pronunciations. I have had peers make banjo-plucking sounds (referencing the “dueling banjos” scene with a white trash disabled boy in the movie “Deliverance”) at me when I walked by them or when I violated an academic norm, such as using a word wrong or not having “refined taste”. These references use my “cultural outsider” status in academia for laughs, but function to reinforce ongoing eugenic exclusions in philosophy. Philosophers have called me a “redneck” and told me to go back to Saskatchewan, which is both rich and violent, given that they are commanding that I move from one colonized space where I’m an uninvited settler to another colonized space where I would be uninvited.

How are sizeism and fatphobia related to classism, racism, gender, and other apparatuses of power?

There’s a great deal of good work in fat studies emerging from activist work, primarily around discrimination in medicine and especially in relation to the BMI (Body Mass Index) which is a “health marker” that, although it has been resoundingly criticized, remains durable in insurance, medicine, and public health. Although I take a different approach, I recognize that this literature is essential for understanding disparities in healthcare for fat-bodied patients. I have written about obesity panic creating a crisis phenomenology that affects embodied possibilities for the future. However, I primarily take a sociocultural approach to fatness, drawing heavily on two texts: Amy Farrell’s Fat Shame: Stigma and the Fat Body in American Culture and Sabrina Strings’s Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia.

Farrell’s book details representations of the body in the early twentieth century and how representations of fatness in postcards and political cartoons were deployed to constitute fat as a threat posed to gender and racial orders in a civilized nation’s progress. I recently used Farrell’s work to talk about how, during the early pandemic, both sides of the political spectrum used fat people in political cartoons to convey messages about restraints on progress toward ending the pandemic.

Strings’s work is so interesting because she develops a theory of how fatness has been used as a racial marker to deem Black bodies as lower evolutionarily and to discipline white bodies. For example, Strings discusses how fatness in elite white men has been used to signify a “dull mind” and reifies “advanced” bodies as those marked for the highest intellectual labour. Racialized “lower” bodies, which allegedly carry “lower” intellects, have thus been assigned to manual labour on this basis. This racist rationale connects back to fat philosophers: insofar as philosophy often considers itself the highest form of contemplation (intellectual labour), the mind must be of the highest quality. The philosopher’s body should tacitly manifest both intelligence and a functioning rational will.

How can philosophers work against sizeism and fatphobia in their classrooms, universities, and professional philosophy more generally?

I need to resist the urge to theorize this question because I work on resisting oppression. But, I want to be practical. Like with “tips and tricks” or “do’s and don’ts” for improvement, I fear pressure for “perfect activism” and how it relates to neoliberal academic “soundbite culture.” I find that, as with teaching Peggy McIntosh on white privilege, the easiest recommendations to implement take up all the air space—band-aids, anyone? I also want to point out that fatphobic experiences in general and in philosophy are heterogenous, so you are getting my opinion here.

So, strictly practically speaking: Get a thin privilege checklist and do the work. When organizing events, minimally check the size of your chairs and the booths at the restaurant where you plan to eat. Quit the diet talk. Stop teaching thought experiments about killing fat people. When a fat person dies, notice the urge to victim blame in the media and your circles. Try holding the thesis that the loss of this person is as important as the loss of any other person. It sucks for anyone to have a hard time finding clothes that they like; but, consider the experience of a fat person who finds clothes that they like and that fit the professional context in which they will wear them, yet is still read as sloppy, lazy, and underprepared. If you follow fat influencers online, ask yourself if at least part of why you do so is to make you feel better about yourself by comparison. Assume fat people deserve love and care: Hold a fat person’s hand in public.

I want to speak directly to feminist philosophers here. If you have thin privilege, please stop taking up all the epistemic credibility and expertise around fatphobia. Entertain the possibility that doing so is taking all the oxygen out of the room. While anyone can experience or reinforce fatphobia, fat bodies will have different concrete exclusions and marginalizations. If you want to write about fatphobia, please cite the arguments of fat thinkers that you implicitly draw upon and do not instrumentalize fat experiences without proper care and context. You might feel fat or be fatter than you previously were but ask yourself what concrete oppressions you have experienced based on that experience compared to people much bigger than you. There is significant fragility and defensiveness when feminist philosophers are called out about this, which in turn demands emotional labour from fat academics.

Last Fall, I gave a talk at the most recent conference of the Canadian Society for Women in Philosophy in which I articulated a critical phenomenology of fat aversion. Afterwards, a fat graduate student came up to me in tears and told me about something that they had experienced en route to the conference which perfectly exemplified what I was talking about. I asked to hug them and gave my contact info. I share this encounter here because I want to emphasize that the world is already structured towards violence against fat people.

While philosophy does an especially good job of echoing and clarifying violence against fat people, I would suggest that our profession isn’t where activist communities should put their precious energy. Critical fat studies is a lively area of scholarship that will do all the theoretical work that needs to be done, without philosophers engaging in their own conceptual violence toward it. Fat activism is joyful as much as it is internally difficult and contentious; but I don’t think fatness needs the attention of philosophers until they change significantly. Many of us are trying to do that work. My resistance is hugging fat philosophers and offering my contact info. We are celebrating each other, making each other soup and watching each other’s kids. We are there for each other when it gets ugly and we need to keep caring for each other. Keeping each other afloat builds numbers over time, making us harder to ignore. To quote the brilliant Ethel Tungohan (of the Academic Aunties podcast), “Don’t be an Asshole.”

Do you have plans for future research on size and fatness in particular? If so, what are they? If not, in what other directions do you plan to take your research?

I’m working a lot on teasing out competing representations of the body and implicit theories of the subject at the intersection of fat activism and feminism. The implicit theories of the subject that I’m usually identifying connect to the idea that rational control of one’s body and mind is both possible and good, thereby requiring political recognition. One area of research on which I’ve been working is how fat women’s bodies figure into rape narratives differently than thin women’s bodies. Feminist analysis of rape culture narratives carries theories of sexual agency co-defined with consent. How different bodies take on meaning will challenge these theories of agency.

My book chapter, “Taking What You Can Get and Taking Care of Yourself: Mapping Fat Women’s Sexual Agency through Television Stereotypes,” explored how, when sexual violence against fat people does show up in the media, its representation denies their sexual agency, thus undermining their status as victims of assault. I discuss how elite white heteromasculinity is partially secured through public sexual rejection of fat women and, at the same time, the sexualized deployment of the bodies of fat women for laughs or sport. Healthy and normal sexuality are weaponized against fat victims of assault: insofar as no “real man” wants them, they are likely the actual aggressors in a situation in which, in any case, their bodies are physically unassaultable. Here the theory of the subject crops up in terms of a “good victim” being one whose desires are constrained (Projanski 2001) and thus whose body is worthy of protection. Don’t read the paper if you don’t want me to kill the joy of shows such as This Is Us, Friends, The Office, Curb Your Enthusiasm, and The Sopranos. It was a very heavy paper to write.

“Rethinking Fat Studies and Activism in Women’s and Gender Studies Textbooks: Fatspiration, ‘Thin Saviours,’ and Sexist Beauty Culture,” my paper about the terms of inclusion of fat-positive writings in women’s and gender studies textbooks will be out soon. The paper identifies women’s and gender studies as a different site of figurations of the subject: it is an academic discipline but also a site of feminist subject formation. One trend that I identify is that fat writings appear almost exclusively within discussions of beauty culture and eating disorders, reducing fat politics to how one feels about their body.

The collapse of fat critique into beauty culture positions feminist agency as exemplified in how we think and feel about our bodies and thus asks fat people to do far more heavy lifting in “liberating their minds” from fatphobia because it is their lived reality. Choosing to love your body plays into neoliberal self-care and self-improvement discourses and maintains the over-association of health with purity diets for self-improvement. The prevalence of this neoliberal tactic underscores the need for critique of individualist approaches to feminist autonomy which effectively cut off fat denigration from the systems of medial, sexual, and racial violence that maintain it.  

My newer project is about how fat people relationally embody space. What is it like to make fat entrances into spaces and relations constructed through hegemonic disgust? This question (and responses to it) leads to the question of what techniques and possibilities are open in these encounters and what do they do? I draw on Christine Negus’ writing on fat arrivals, which is a “thickening” of Sara Ahmed’s queer phenomenology where fat stomachs are “out of line” when they don’t fit. Christine develops normative arrivals in space as head-first, deliberate, and volitional—these arrivals prepare habits and shapes that expect valued bodies. I describe a phenomenology of the other to the fat arrival, detailing habits of fear and recoil that enact an expanded spatial embodiment for fat people when they fat-arrive. These embodied extensions justify violence against fat people because their bodies are understood to be assaulting in the space that they occupy.

For example: last week, I was swimming in a public pool and a white teenager very loudly told his friends that he had to close his eyes, shielding them from the pain of seeing me. Da’Shaun Harrison’s work demonstrates how spatiality of fat Black men’s bodies constructs and justifies violence done to them: they are considered older, bigger, more aggressive, and threatening because of their race, size, and gender. Harrison outlines these contradictory justifications for police brutality: these victims are aggressors, who are physically overpowering, and their fat bodies are the reason that, in fact, they actually killed themselves. Through these tensions, I’m trying to outline a fat critical phenomenology of forced spatial expansion and map out possibilities for resistance. Christine, Ramanpreet Bahra, and I are working on an edited volume on critical fat phenomenology that will include pieces on these issues, as well as visual and creative works on fat embodiment.

Kristin, how would you like to end this interview? Would you like to say anything more about something that we have discussed? Is there anything that you would like to talk about that we have not touched upon? Do you want to recommend any articles or other materials related to something you’ve mentioned in this interview?

In order to write my dissertation, I researched resistance to oppression, using habit and temporality as central concepts because I struggled with reading, writing, organization, and focus. I went through the popular writing on habit formation and willpower, working through the lifehacking and procrastination literature, but I sought more than what amounted to individual choices made within oppressive constraints and structures.

While I worked at the writing centre, many of my educational struggles began to make sense to me. A much larger percentage of students with disabilities use the writing centre than do nondisabled students in the general student population. Working one-on-one with students who struggled to get their ideas on to paper hit me like a ton of bricks about my own neuro differences. I worked closely with a learning specialist to understand how to help neurodivergent students write papers, which shifted into thinking about how my own philosophy pedagogy was creating barriers for students with disabilities.

I’m very proud of a paper that I co-authored with my colleague Deanna Fidelak about how to reduce barriers for philosophy students on writing assignments. Deanna and I have also worked on reducing barriers to reading in philosophy. I’m currently writing a paper with colleagues at the Athabasca University writing centre on how philosophers can give more enabling feedback on articles. This work has been part of unlearning my own internalized oppression about my neuro, class, and embodied differences. It wasn’t until I started to understand myself differently that I clarified what I was trying to “solve” through my philosophical investigation of habit and temporality. Because of this understanding, I have oriented much of my current research program towards the removal of barriers to student success in philosophy, hoping that some students will not struggle as I did.

Kristin, thank you so much for this fantastic interview. I am certain that many of our readers and listeners are very grateful for your insightful reflections and the numerous references that you have provided, including to your own published and forthcoming work.

Readers/listeners are invited to use the Comments section below to respond to Kristin Rodier’s remarks, ask questions, and so on. Comments will be moderated. As always, although signed comments are preferred, anonymous comments may be permitted.

The entire Dialogues on Disability series is archived on BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY here.

From April 2015 to May 2021, I coordinated, edited, and produced the Dialogues on Disability series without any institutional or other financial support. A Patreon account now supports the series, enabling me to continue to create it. You can add your support for these vital interviews with disabled philosophers at the Dialogues on Disability Patreon account page here.

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Please join me here again on Wednesday, April 19, for the eighth-anniversary installment of the Dialogues on Disability series and, indeed, on every third Wednesday of the months ahead. I have a fabulous line-up of interviews planned. If you would like to nominate someone to be interviewed (self-nominations are welcomed), please feel free to write me at s.tremain@yahoo.ca. I prioritize diversity with respect to disability, class, race, gender, institutional status, nationality, culture, age, and sexuality in my selection of interviewees and my scheduling of interviews.