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Dr. Cat Pausé is a Fat Studies scholar and fat activist in New Zealand.

Education
Dr. Pausé completed a Bachelor of Arts in Sociology at Southwest Texas State University in 1999. She attained her Master of Arts at Texas Tech University in 2002, and completed her Doctorate of Philosophy in Human Development at Texas Tech University in 2007. Dr. Pausé’s doctoral work was done under Dr. Gwendolyn T. Sorell and included work on the Adult Identity Development Project. Her dissertation explored weight identity in very fat women. .

Career
Pausé is a senior lecturer at Massey University in Palmerston North, New Zealand.

Scholar
Dr. Pausé’s scholarship focuses on the impact of fat stigma on the health and well-being of fat people. She has published on coming out as fat, the barriers to health for fat people , , and the role of social media in fat activism and scholarship. She is also interested in fat pedagogies and fat ethics. Pausé is the lead editor of Queering Fat Embodiment. Against the backdrop of the ever-growing medicalisation, pathologisation, and commodification of fatness, coupled with the moral panic over an alleged ‘obesity epidemic’, this volume brings together the latest scholarship from various critical disciplines to challenge existing ideas of fat and fat embodiment. This volume brings together scholarship from various disciplines in order to examine the ways in which fat embodiment is lived, experienced, regulated and (re)produced across a range of cultural sites and contexts. QFE is a paradigm changing text that destablises established ideas about fat bodies and makes explicit the intersectionality of fat identities. The collection challenges the discipline of Fat Studies, which has primarily reproduced a white, ableist, heteronormative subjectivity in its analyses.

Dr. Pausé has hosted two international Fat Studies conferences. The first, Fat Studies: Reflective Intersections, took place in Palmerston North in 2012. It included presenters from around New Zealand and Australia and covered topics such as fat pride, obesity panic, and teaching children about fatness and fitness. Dr. Pausé guest edited a special issue of the Fat Studies journal on Reflective Intersections.

The second conference, Fat Studies: Identity, Agency, Embodiment, took place in Palmerston North in 2016. It included presentations from academics and activists from Canada, USA, Britain, Chile, Finland, Australia and New Zealand. Topics covered included fat embodiment and public health, the intersections between race and fatness, and how food corporations have marketed themselves as solving the so called childhood obesity epidemic. Attached to FSNZ16 was a spoken word event at the Palmerston North Library, Fat Out Loud, and an exhibition of Keynote Substantia Jones’ The Adipositivity Project at Te Manawa.

Books
Pausé, C. J., Wykes, J., & Murray, S (Eds). (2014). Queering fat embodiment. London: Ashgate.

Book chapters
Pausé, C. J. (2016). Promise to try: Teaching fat pedagogies in tertiary education. In E. Carter & C. Russell (Eds.), Fat pedagogy reader: Challenging weight-based oppression in education (pp. 53-60), Peter Lang Publishers.

Pausé, C. J. (2015). Human nature: On fat sexual identity and agency. In H. Hester & C. Walters (Eds.), Fat sex: New directions in theory and activism (pp. 37-50), Ashgate.

Pausé, C. J. (2014). Causing a commotion: Queering fatness in cyberspace. In C. J. Pausé, J. Wykes, & S. Murray (Eds.), Queering fat embodiment (pp. 75-88). London: Ashgate.

Pausé, C. J. (2014). Express yourself: Fat activism in the Web 2.0 age. In R. Chastain (Ed.), The politics of size: Perspectives from the fat-acceptance movement (pp. 1-8). Santa Barbara: Praeger Publishing.

Journal Articles
Lee, J. A. & Pausé, C. J. (2016). Stigma in practice: Barriers to health for fat women. Frontiers in Psychology, 7, 2063.

Pausé, C. J. & Russell, D. (2016). Sociable scholarship: The use of social media in the 21st century academy. Journal of Applied Social Theory, 1(1), 5-25. Retrieved from http://socialtheoryapplied.com/journal/jast/article/view/29

Pausé, C. J. (2015). Rebel heart: Performing fatness wrong online. M/C, 18(3). Retrieved from http://www.journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/view/977

Pausé, C. J. (2014). Die another day: The obstacles facing fat people in accessing shame-free and evidenced-based healthcare. Narrative Inquiry in Bioethics, 4 (3), 135-141. doi:10.1353/nib.2014.0039

Pausé, C. J. (2014). X-static process: Intersectionality within the field of fat studies. Fat Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Body Weight and Society, 3 (2), 80-85.

Pausé, C. J., Waitere, H., Wright, J., Powell, K., & gilling, m. (2012). We say what we are & we do as we say: Feminisms in practice. Feminist Review, 102, 79-96. DOI: 10.1057/fr.2011.50

Pausé, C. J. (2012). Live to tell: Coming out as fat. Somatechnics, 2 (1), 42-56. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/soma.2012.0038 Waitere, H., Tremaine, M., Wright, J., Brown, S., & Pausé, C. J. (2011). Choosing to resist or reinforce the new managerialism: The impact of performance based research funding on academic identity. Higher Education Research & Development, 30 (2), 205-217.

Public Intellectual
Dr. Pausé is recognized as a as a public intellectual in the area of Fat Studies within New Zealand and abroad. Her work has been featured in The Huffington Post, Yahoo, xoJane , Jezebel , and 20/20 New Zealand, among others. She is regularly invited to comment on stories related to fatness by national and international media outlets, including ones in Italy, the United Kingdom , Australia , and the United States. Across New Zealand, she has spoken to Rotary Clubs, DHBs, Colleges (secondary schools), and other groups. She also spoke to Permian Basin Mensa in the United States. She was the keynote speaker at the Women’s Health Action Trust Suffrage Breakfast in 2012 in Auckland, New Zealand.

Sociable Scholarship
Pausé believes that disseminating scholarship through social media provides for opportunities to broaden academic spaces, enable the participation of different voices, and address the academy’s commitment to social justice. To this end, she maintains a blog, Tumblr, and Twitter account, all named Friend of Marilyn. Pause has contributed to other online outlets, such as The Conversation (an online journal that provides information, analysis, and commentary; prepared by scholars for a lay audience) , Inside Higher Education , Conditionally Accepted , Health at Every Size blog , and more. She has also written two Op Eds for national New Zealand media outlets.

Friend of Marilyn Podcast
The Friend of Marilyn podcast began in 2011, hosted by 999AM Access Manawatu. Each episode is structured in three pieces: at the top of the show, Pausé reflects on current fat events and stories. This is followed by an interview with a fat activist, scholar, designer, blogger, etc. The third segment of the show shines a spotlight on a blog post from the Fatosphere. The show closes with a song from a fat artist. Friend of Marilyn has over 500 regular listeners from across the world, with many of them subscribing to the show through iTunes. The show began a world tour at the start of 2015 and has currently interviewed people across Oceania, Micronesia, Indonesia, Asia, India, and the Middle East. The show is currently interviewing people across the continent of Africa, and will move to Europe and then the Americas next.

Fat Activism
Pausé is an active fat activist. Her activism promotes that fat people deserve the same rights and dignity as non-fat people. Her work has included speaking up about discrimination against fat people in numerous areas of life, including workplace discrimination, , the lack of legal protections that fat people are afforded , fat shaming in the medical community and the erasure of fat people’s sexuality ,.

Fuck, Yeah! Fat PhDs
Fuck, Yeah! Fat PhDs is a Tumblr created by Pause. The Tumblr was created in response to Professor Geoffrey Miller tweeting that fat people did not have the willpower to complete a PhD program. The Tweet prompted backlash, and many individuals wrote to him or his employer to protest his comment. Pausé, however, created Fuck Yeah! Fat PhDs as a structural response to a commonly held anti-fat belief.

Pause writes, “I’m not interested in responding to Dr. Miller. While I appreciate those who want to call him out, and yes he deserves it, I’m more interested in addressing the social narratives in which individual comments like Dr. Miller’s are encouraged. I’m also interested in the structural aspects of fat oppression. I decided that what I wanted to do was to highlight all the amazing fat individuals who are in graduate school, or have completed graduate school – to provide a visual repository for anyone who doubts that fat individuals lack the abilities or qualities to succeed in academia.”