Kendall Dinniene
Scholar of 20th and 21st-century American literature and culture with a focus on race, gender, and body weight.
Research
Kendall’s current book project, Fat Fictions: Racializing Narratives of Fatness in American Literature and Culture, mobilizes Black feminist theories of the flesh to demonstrate that literature is a key site of meaning-making about fatness and its fraught relationship to gender and race.
Kendall’s second book project, Black Fat Feminisms, uses extensive archival research to argue that twentieth-century Black women activists articulated an intersectional fat politics that both shaped and was shaped by contemporary Black feminisms.
You can find Kendall’s research in venues including Studies in American Fiction, Ethnic Studies Review, Fat Studies, and Experiments in Black Feminism.
Publications
Published and forthcoming research, reviews, and public-facing writing.
Peer-Reviewed Articles and Book Chapters
“‘On being fat’: Toward a Black Fat Feminist Politics of Limitlessness,” accepted for publication in Experiments in Black Feminism, eds. Jennifer C. Nash and Mishana Garschi. NYU Press (under review).
“Wounding the Heteropatriarchy: Queered and Disabled Histories in Forgetting the Alamo and Caballero,” Studies in American Fiction, vol. 51, no. 1, 2026, pp. 25-40.
“‘A Sensual People, and Doomed’: Anti-Fatness and/as Anti-Mexican Racism in America’s First Mass Medium,” Ethnic Studies Review, vol. 47, no. 2-3, 2024, pp. 3–20.
“‘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 Reviews
Review of Beans Velocci’s Sex Isn’t Real: The Invention of an Incoherent Binary, Feminist Studies. Forthcoming.
Review of Sami Schalk’s Black Disability Politics, The Black Scholar, vol. 53, no. 3-4, 2023, pp. 133-136.
Review of E-K Daufin’s On Fat and Faith: Ending Weight Stigma in Yourself, Your Sanctuary, and Society, Excessive Bodies, vol. 1, no. 1, 2023, pp. 259-264.
Public-Facing and Creative Writing
“Neighbors,” LA Review of Books: PubLab, 2024.
“‘Eat a Salad, Sweetie‘: What Few Know About Diet and Weight,” Conceptions Review, 2021.
Upcoming Conference Presentations
Modern Language Association Convention 2027
“Black Fat Flesh in Morrison’s The Bluest Eye,” Los Angeles, CA, January 7-10.
National Women’s Studies Association Conference 2026
“Black, Fat, and Wild: Ann Atwater’s Militant Black Feminist Politics,” Atlanta, GA, November 5-8.
American Studies Association Conference 2026
“Reductive Futurism, or Fat Improvisation at the End of the World,” Chicago, IL, October 22-25.
Kendall Dinniene, Ph.D. 