Kendall Dinniene

In my dissertation, titled The Fault of Our Forms: Fatness in Twentieth- and Twenty-First Century American Literature and Culture, I excavate the ways that American literature and film disrupt dominant narratives of fat bodies as sick, ugly, alien, and prematurely dead. My first chapter considers fiction, memoir, and film that depict fat whiteness as resulting from trauma, constructing what Kathleen LeBesco has described as a “rhetoric of innocence” that stabilizes white hegemony by marking fat white bodies as particularly sick departures from normative whiteness (LeBesco 2004). In my second chapter, I reveal the pro-fat Black feminist politics of works of poetry and literature by African American women including Lucille Clifton, Audre Lorde, and Toni Morrison. These texts work to reconfigure white supremacist conceptions of excess and to center the fat Black female body as a site of resistance and fugitivity. The third chapter examines fiction and plays that critique racist and anti-fat demands that Mexican Americans discipline themselves into thin, healthy, and ever-laboring bodies in order to assimilate into the U.S. My final chapter considers the ways that fat bodies are marked as always already dead, reading literature, poetry, and film that foreclose fat futures and denounce the possibility of fat life. In my conclusion, I gesture to the ways in which contemporary women’s speculative fiction imagines future fatness as not only possible but actually necessary for the creation of a more just and livable world.

In my classes, I ask students to think deeply about dominant narratives that constrain the way we engage with literature, institutions, and other people. I enjoy helping students cultivate a spirit of curiosity in a supportive environment that allows them to take intellectual risks. I have served as a graduate assistant at SMU’s Center for Teaching Excellence since February of 2023.

Publications

“’A Sensual People, and Doomed’: Anti-Fatness and/as Anti-Mexican Racism in America’s First Mass Medium.” Ethnic Studies Review , forthcoming.

“’My Heart’s Fine as Long as My Stomach’s Not Empty’: Patriarchal Violence, Women’s Excess, and Fat Liberation in Criminally Insane.” Fat Studies, vol. 13, no. 1, 2024, pp. 22-35.

Book review of Sami Schalk’s Black Disability Politics. The Black Scholar, vol. 53, no. 3-4, 2023, pp. 133-136.

Book review of E. K. Daufin’s On Fat and Faith: Ending Weight Stigma in Yourself, Your Sanctuary, and Society. Excessive Bodies Journal, vol. 1, no. 1, 2023, pp. 259-264.

Selected Honors, Awards, and Fellowships

Black Feminist Theory Summer Institute (2024)

L.A. Review of Books Summer Publishing Workshop Fellow (2024)

Summer Research and Writing Fellowship, Dedman College Interdisciplinary Institute, Southern Methodist University (2024)

Outstanding Graduate Student Instruction Award, Moody Graduate School, Southern Methodist University (2024)

Nina Schwartz Graduate Student Teaching Award, English Department, Southern Methodist University (2023)