Bodies at the Intersections: Refiguring Intersectionality through Queer Women's Complex Embodiments S itting around a large boardroom table in a Toronto health-care center, two dozen queer women make videos. They are writing, editing, taking photos, shooting footage, crafting images, and recording voices. They work urgently to assemble their stories by the end of a four-day workshop. They come with a purpose: to speak from their embodied and embedded locations and back to mainstream research that casts fatness and food distress as serious problems requiring medical intervention and behavioral modification. By narrating their embodied experience as assemblages of identities, histories, and possibilities, they push against the misconceptions that queer women are "at risk" for fatness and immune to disordered dieting and eating.The participatory video research project Through Thick and Thin: Investigating Body Image and Body Management among Queer Women (hereafter Through Thick and Thin) explores the impact of body standards on queer women and how queer women take up and resist these standards. Video, as a practice and medium, demands the use of image and sound, and encouragesWe'd like to thank our main funders, the Women's College Hospital's Women's Xchange $15K Challenge and Canada Research Chairs Program. Research team members also thank their home institutions:

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In this study we examine how discourses of obesity and eating disorders reinforce cissexist and heteronormative body standards. Sixteen queer women in Canada produced autobiographical micro-documentaries over the course of two workshops. We identified three major themes across these films: bodily control, bodies as sites of metamorphosis, and celebration of bodies. Such films can be memorable, cultivate empathy, disrupt misunderstanding of queer bodies, and inform medical practice. Our analysis suggests that research and policy on ‘disordered’ bodies must better account for how people negotiate discourses around body shape and size, how shaming is internalised, how regulation can function as resistance, and how variant bodies can be embraced, desired, and celebrated. Community-grounded, arts-based research points to new ways of gathering and producing knowledge.

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