Love Your Body Week Keynote: 'Bearing Witness to Myself'
Psyche Williams-Forson
Bearing Witness to Myself: Womanness, Blackness, Fatness, Wholeness and … the Twisted Work of Trauma
by Shayna Herzfeld '25
Author and scholar Psyche Williams-Forson will discuss food shaming and the marginalization of Black bodies in America in the keynote address for Dickinson's Love Your Body Week. The lecture, “Bearing Witness to Myself: Womanness, Blackness, Fatness, Wholeness and... the Twisted Work of Trauma,” will take place on Wednesday, Feb. 22, at 7 p.m. in the Anita Tuvin Schlechter (ATS) Auditorium. This event is free and open to the public. Masks are optional but welcome. The program will also be livestreamed.
Williams-Forson will discuss the ways gender, race, fatness and wholeness connect to personal agency. She will examine the concept of health and what constitutes a healthy body while pushing back against the demonization of foods with cultural significance to African American communities. Williams-Forson will demonstrate how reconsidering assumptions about health, while also prioritizing social, economic, cultural and spiritual well-being, is central to healing and empowering people to live without shame or the fear of being shamed.
Williams-Forson is a professor and department chair of American studies at the University of Maryland College Park. She’s the author of Eating While Black: Food Shaming and Race in America, Taking Food Public: Redefining Food in a Changing World, and the award-winning Building Houses out of Chicken Legs: Black Women, Food, and Power. She is a pioneer in the subfield of Black food studies, researching the intersection of food with race and gender, as well as with power, literature and sustainability. Her work has been featured on NPR, in The New York Times and The Washington Post and in documentary films.
This event is sponsored by The Clarke Forum for Contemporary Issues and co-sponsored by The Women’s & Gender Resource Center, and the departments of women’s, gender & sexuality studies, American studies, Africana studies, anthropology, and the food studies program.
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Published February 20, 2023