Kendall Dinniene

Kendall’s current book project, Fat Fictions: Racializing Narratives of Fatness in American Literature and Culture, mobilizes fat studies and Black feminist theory to read texts including Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, Oscar Zeta Acosta’s Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo, and Ryan Coogler’s film, Sinners. The book demonstrates how stereotypes about fat people as unhealthy, ugly, greedy, lazy, and un-American perpetuate myths about race and gender through discourses about health. Fat Fictions reveals that some American artists grapple with the racialization of body weight not by distancing race and gender from corporeal excess but by embracing excess as a complicated but hopeful exercise toward liberation.

Kendall’s second book project, Black Fat Feminisms, uses extensive archival research to argue that late twentieth-century Black feminist authors and activists articulated an intersectional fat politics with the potential to shape interdisciplinary scholarship and political activism today.

You can find Kendall’s research in venues including Studies in American Fiction, Ethnic Studies Review, Fat Studies, and Experiments in Black Feminism.

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. Forthcoming.

“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.

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.