Ashamed to be an Academic

I don't know if I have mentioned this before, but scholars have finally ran out of things to study.

Here is a fairly dated article on a new "subdiscipline" in the academy called
fat studies. In our efforts to brand everyone according to their "identity" and give "marginalized people" their voices, a good percentage of scholarship in the humanities and social sciences now deals with particular groups of people. We have African-American Studies, Women's Studies, Masculinity Studies, Native American Studies, etc. All these are well and good (though I think that the walls that scholars build up between these fields tends to obscure their common discourse and ascribe too much to the cultural hegemony of Western culture), but moving beyond race, class, and gender into "body type" is taking it way too far.

Also interesting is this article from the Chronicle of Highere Education where a Fat Studies pioneer lost weight and now feels as if she is somehow not authentic. This sort of "scholarship" is the kind of things state legislators hear about in budget hearings just before they drop the ax on the annual higher education budget.