University of Maryland offers $5,000 ‘fat studies’ course on how ‘fatness’ and ‘Blackness’ intersect

A top university is offering students a ‘fat studies’ course, which it says will help them explore the ‘intersection’ of ‘fatness’ and ‘blackness’.

A course description on the University of Maryland registration site says the course “examines fatness as an area of ​​human difference subject to privilege and discrimination that intersects with other systems of oppression based on gender, race, class, sexual orientation, and ability .’

Students will also “consider fatness as intersectional” and materials “will particularly highlight the relationship between fatness and blackness.”

The course, titled ‘Intro to Fat Studies: Fatness, Blackness and Their Intersections’, is worth three credits and is part of the university’s diversity quota – with most students required to take two diversity courses before graduating.

For part-time out-of-state students, the university charges $1,645 per credit. For full-time out-of-state students, a semester, including completing 12 or more credits, costs $19,732.

The course is led by Dr Sydney Lewis, a senior lecturer said online that she was “crying in the bathtub” after Donald Trump’s first presidential victory and feared for her citizenship.

Intro to Fat Studies is completely full and all 20 seats have been claimed by students planning to take the course in spring 2025. There are also eight people on the waiting list.

Dr. Richard Vatz, professor emeritus at a nearby university, labeled the course “laughable” and said it was “unlikely to help anyone get a job.”

The expert from Towson University told us The National News Agency: ‘I have to be honest, this is quite a laughable, laughable subject. This stuff is just ridiculous.”

Others have responded online, decrying the course as “insanity is real” and saying that “maybe exercise classes would be a good idea.”

The course is offered by the university’s Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies.

It is open to all students regardless of their field of study, including engineering, economics and computer programming.

There is no syllabus available for the course, but the reading material does include the books What we don’t talk about when we talk about fat And Belly of the beast: The politics of anti-fatness as anti-blackness.

The website “Planet Terp,” which helps students at the University of Maryland choose their courses, says that 70 percent of students in the course typically get an A.

The description of the class published online continues: “We approach this area of ​​study from an interdisciplinary humanities and social science lens, emphasizing fatness as a social justice issue.

‘The course concludes with an exploration of fat liberation as liberation for all bodies, with a particular emphasis on performing arts and activism as a vehicle for liberation and challenging fatmisia.’

There are twenty places on the course, and all are already taken – with another eight students on the waiting list

Dr. Lewis was the author of the essay “Love in the time of Trump,” which was published after 2020 on the website Rooted, which says it works to “build affirming, healing spaces for the Black LGBTQ community.”

In the essay, she wrote, “The night of the 2016 election, I sat in a bathtub and cried.

“I knew that as a queer black woman I was already teetering on the edge of non-citizenship, and I desired, no, I deserved, whatever privileges I could get.”

She added: ‘I’m afraid my health is not good enough to beat the virus [Covid]should I contract it? I’m afraid there won’t be enough ventilators and my fat body will have to be sacrificed.’

Dr. Continuing her course, Vatz added: ‘I don’t think if you went to a job interview and the interviewer said, “What have you done recently?” and the respondent said, “Well, I’m taking a fat studies course, but at the intersection of blackness and fatness,” that this would put you in a position to get a big part of the job.

“So the usefulness of this and the labor market is probably quite questionable.”

Dr. Lewis is described online as a lecturer at the University of Maryland with interests in 21st century African-American culture, black feminism, and queer and gender studies.

Her dissertation was entitled: ‘Looking forward to the past: Queering Black Female Sexuality in “Neo” cultural productions.’ According to one description, it combines black feminist theory with cultural studies and queer theory.

The University of Maryland has 40,000 students, with the average duration of study lasting four years and costing students approximately $40,000 for academics alone.

DailyMail.com has contacted the University of Maryland for comment.