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.
You can find Kendall’s research in venues including Studies in American Fiction, Ethnic Studies Review, Fat Studies, and Unscripted: 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.
