Yet if we think about "revolting" in a different way, Kathleen LeBesco argues, we can recognize fatness as not simply an aesthetic state or a medical condition, but a political one. If we think of revolting in terms of overthrowing authority, rebelling, protesting, and rejecting, then corpulence carries a whole new weight as a subversive cultural practice that calls into question received notions about health, beauty, and nature. Revolting Bodies examines a number of sites of struggle over the cultural meaning of fatness. The book is grounded in scholarship on identity politics, the social construction of beauty, and the subversion of hegemonic medical ideas about the dangers of fatness. It explains how the redefinition of fat identities has been undertaken by people who challenge conventional understandings of nature, health, and beauty and, in so doing, alter their individual and collective relationships to power. LeBesco explores how the bearer of a fat body is marked as a failed citizen, inasmuch as her powers as a worker, shopper, and sexually "desirable" subject are called into question. At the same time, she highlights fat fashion, relations among fat, queer, and disability politics and activism, and online communities as opportunities for transforming these pejorative stereotypes of fatness. Her discussion of the long-term ramifications of denying bodily agency—in effect, letting biological determinism run rampant—has implications not only for our understanding of fatness but also for future political practice.

    To counter these limited images, internationally exhibited photographer Laurie Toby Edison provides this suite of nude photographs of a wide variety of men. The men represent a huge variety in age, race, ethnicity, body type, social class, and level of physical ability. The men photographed include college professors, rock musicians, aerospace and warehouse workers, computer consultants, retired businessmen, dancers, disability activists, museum directors, and tattoo artists. The text, by Debbie Notkin and Richard F. Dutcher, features a long essay, "To Be a Man," as well as an assortment of quotations on masculinity from models and others.

    This book celebrates these women principally through its many reproductions of paintings, and through quotations from those who argue for the attractiveness of zaftig women. The arguments for feminine substance are arranged the matically, and include an attack on the cult of thinness, a defense of zaftig as a natural state, an exploration of eras such as the Victorian age, in which abundance was preferred, and an examination of subcultures in which heavy women rule, as on the opera stage.