This journal and your next journal will be annotated bibliographies meant to help you begin working on your final paper. You will find research (part of a book, an article online, an academic article) and provide a summary with key quotations and then explain how it connects to the topic you want to research.
This is a good time to go ahead and put your source in Chicago Style, which is one less thing you’ll have to do when you’re writing your paper. (Examples of Chicago style are available under Files, final paper.
Your journal should be about 450 words.
Here’s an example annotated bibliography:
Harrison, Da’Shaun. Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness. Canada:
North Atlantic Books, 2021.
Harrison examines the intersection of anti-fatness and anti-Blackness in relation to race, police violence, gender identity and health. Central to their argument is forwarding an idea of Black liberation that must also include fat liberation. They explain that the concept of “body positivity” places the burden of combating anti-fat bias on the shoulders of fat people. Harrison suggests that ideas of “body positivity” are rooted in social norms of thinness as ideals. In other words, it is up to fat people to work to feel good in a society that excludes them.
Harrison goes on to describe the inherent feminization of the fat Black body in the U.S. as it connects to mammy figures, enslaved women who cooked, cleaned, and cared for white children. Harrison explained that femininity and fatness is only viewed as acceptable when it belongs to or can be used for someone else. “(T)he only acceptable time to love/touch/assign femininity to a fat, dark-skinned Black person’s body is when it is performing for someone else, and especially when that body belongs to a woman” (29). While we do not know what the women looked like who were forced to work as patients and nurses for Dr. J. Marion Sims, but Harrison helps us understand how the “fatness” of pregnancy may have shaped the way they were viewed. Normally just seen as just as tough as men laboring in the fields, and despite operating on these enslaved women and nurses without anesthesia, he at least acknowledged and described their agony. In this way, because of the complexities of the acceptability of feminine fatness through pregnancy, the nurses become complex figures whose bodies were forced to be of service toward white male achievement and white female medicine, but who were also seen, even subconsciously, as intelligent and biologically equal to white women.
Harrison’s text helps make a case for fatness to include the state of pregnancy and post-pregnancy, allowing for ideas of anti-fatness and anti-Blackness to map onto the pregnant body.
