Sensing Fat in the Everyday City: Towards a Situated Political Ecology of Fat Masculinities in Metro Manila, Philippines

Sensing Fat in the Everyday City considers the relationships between Filipino masculinities, fatness and body size by learning from the everyday experiences of diverse Filipino men living in Metro Manila and its surrounding cities in the Philippines. I will utilise a hybrid conceptual approach that unsettles and retheorises the relationship between fatness and urban away from determinist accounts of obesity causation, while also resisting a static and bounded view of the city. I am to document and understand men?s narrative accounts of dietary practices, exercise and leisure. The research combines text and image-based analyses of ethnographic interviews with men, and takes interdisciplinary inspiration from contemporary academic work on critical fat studies, critical masculinities, and Southern urban theory. The overall goal of the study is transforming gender and fat politics in ways that rebuild everyday equitable and holistic health among diverse groups of men in the city.