Law Commons^™

Civil Rights Reform And The Body, Tobias Barrington Wolff

All Faculty Scholarship

Discrimination on the basis of gender identity or expression has emerged as a major focus of civil rights reform. Opponents of these reforms have structured their opposition around one dominant image: the bathroom. With striking consistency, opponents have invoked anxiety over the bathroom -- who uses bathrooms, what happens in bathrooms, and what traumas one might experience while occupying a bathroom -- as the reason to permit discrimination in the workplace, housing, and places of public accommodation. This rhetoric of the bathroom in the debate over gender-identity protections seeks to exploit an underlying anxiety that has played a role in …

The Right To Be Fat, Yofi Tirosh

Yofi Tirosh

Policy discussions on the increasing weight of Americans, portrayed as a problem of monumental and grim outlook, preoccupy public health experts, scientists, economists, and the popular media. In the legal field, however, discussions have tended to focus on whether weight should be a protected category under antidiscrimination law and on cost-benefit models for creating incentives to lose weight. This Article takes a novel approach to thinking about weight in the legal context. First, it maps the diverse ways in which the law is recruited to “the war against obesity,” thus providing an unprecedented account of what it means to be …

Weighty Speech: Addressing Body Size In The Classroom, Yofi Tirosh

Yofi Tirosh

The politics of body size has been the topic of intriguing feminist work. Although in my view this issue is still undertheorized, I have long sought for a way to bring what does exist in the literature into my academic activities. The opportunity arose when, as a graduate student at the University of Michigan in 2001, I taught an undergraduate mini-course in the women's studies program, which I named Weight as a Cultural Question.

This essay discusses two pedagogical challenges I faced while teaching a class. Both questions deal with the extent to which it is productive to talk about …