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About the study

Interviews

IU IRB #14067
Spring 2022
Conducted via Zoom
31 participants
All US-based librarians in public-facing roles
Average interview duration: 37 minutes

Participants

45% non-white
32% male, non-binary, or other
45% queer
32% disabled
52% working in academic libraries when interviewed
Even distribution across career stages (from <5 to >20 years)

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Broad themes from study

Challenges of navigating normative spaces
Bodies under surveillance
Performing professionalism
Complexity of visibility

(Galasso, 2023)

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Most relevant questions from the study (1)

How has your experience doing public-facing library work in a fat body informed your approach to librarianship?
To what extent does your fatness align or conflict with your professional identity as a librarian, and in what ways?

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Most relevant questions from the study (2)

Do you think that your size makes you more or less approachable to users compared to other colleagues? Please describe.
In what ways do you see other aspects of your identity (e.g. gender, sexual orientation, ability, race or ethnicity) as intersecting with your fatness in how you are perceived by others?

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Embodied and performed professional identity �for fat librarians

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Professional identity and personas

“One is not a librarian by virtue of an elegantly lofty job title or description, but rather by virtue of the numerous messy, complex, and unique relations that emerge through interactions between librarians and library users.” (Klein & Lenart, 2020, p.2)
“Librarians are in the business of presentation.” (Pagowsky & Rigby, 2014, p.1)

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Fatness, whiteness, and femaleness

“Pretty, pudgy girls who eat snacks and curl up and read books”
“Old motherly librarian behind the desk”
“It’s not seen as transgressive to be a fat white librarian who’s also female.”

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Fatness, stereotypes, and sexualization

Fatness as protective from the “fetishized” and “eroticized”
“Marian the Librarian: prude, skinny”
“It’s annoying and shitty in the sense that I’m a full-ass professional, and you are reducing me to this juicy booty.”

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Fatness and stereotypes for men

“Oh, you’re a male librarian and you’re not married – you must be gay! There’s this assumption that if you’re a man in a typically female profession, and you’re not like a PE teacher, people will start to question…Unless you’re a director – directors are old straight white men. But people don’t realize that they had to climb up the ranks while you were making these assumptions about them.”

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Choosing a career in librarianship

“I need to find a field that I can be myself in. I don’t want to wear makeup, I don’t want to wear high-heeled shoes, I don’t want to wear nylons. I chose the librarian profession because I saw more women like me there. I saw it as a place where I will be accepted and someplace I can grow old in. I looked at offices and said there aren’t many older women there, so I went for a field that welcomed women, welcomed diverse women. I went into a field that I could grow into.”

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A career as a fat librarian

“I have worked with enough other librarians to know that we come in all shapes and sizes.”
“Librarianship is more accepting than other fields, like I see more diversity of gender and fatness, not necessarily diversity as far as people of color – we all know that.”

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Race and belonging in librarianship

“The idea that when I moved up in the library world that there would be less people of color? That was mind-blowing to me.”
“I felt like I had to work three times as hard as everyone else for basically no recognition, for people just to take my work or not take me seriously. After that, I don’t want to say I ditched my identity because of that, but I didn’t wear it on my sleeve like I used to. But unfortunately, being fat is something I can’t hide. It’s something that I am.”

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Boundaries on belongingness

“I feel like I have to be a million times better than the next person because I have an automatic negative in my column.”
“How is my body perceived? Is it perceived as a leader, or is it perceived as a jolly fat children’s librarian?”

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Fatness and friendliness

“Less intimidating” and “less pretentious”
“A jolly happy fat woman”
“A persona that’s friendly and emphatic, almost aggressively so: Come to the library! I want to help you – that’s my job! You’re doing a project? I want to help – I want to know everything!”

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Perceived friendliness as an asset

“Students perceive me as a very nonthreatening, approachable person, and I’ve tried to just lean hard into that…I try to be friendly and fun and a jovial fat person in a way that makes people more comfortable.”

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Fatness in an idealized professional identity

“In my ideal mind, my professional identity as a librarian is friendly, approachable, ready to answer any questions...I feel like my size makes me friendlier to others. I tend to gravitate more to someone who is plus-sized. I don’t know if it’s how my mind perceives it or if it’s just personal preference, but I feel like I hope that if that’s true of my own perception then it’s true of others’ perception as well. Like they see me and sort gravitate towards me like, yes I can certainly help you, I’m definitely more friendly.”

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Fatness, friendliness, and compliance

“I take up more space physically, and I don’t feel like that lends itself to causing problems, or saying no, or having an off-hour at the desk – an off-hour being like, I don’t want to perform this customer service. Fatness is taking up too much space to allow for resting bitch face.”

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Ambivalence in fatness and identity

“I experience ambivalence about both [fatness and professional identity]. The feeling of wanting to have more of an identity, or confidence in my identity, both as a librarian and as a fat person – wanting to approach both with consciousness and sensitivity, or self-compassion.”

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Fatness and librarianship as radical (1)

“My fatness aligns with my professional identity in the sense of being an outlier in the dominant culture by just rejecting those ideals of body conformity.”
“We side with liberation and liberatory practices, beliefs, and such – especially freedom of information – so it aligns very well.”

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Fatness and librarianship as radical (2)

“It’s a very radical stance to say I’m okay with being fat, and I think that I would definitely be considered a pretty radical librarian...I tend to be a very inclusive librarian, not one for the status quo but more a burn it down and start from scratch and make it something that’s actually for everyone kind of librarian.”

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Fat librarians in the changing landscape of anti-fatness

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Google Trends: Ozempic since January 2022

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Rise of GLP-1s

Renewed fetishization of anti-fatness
Anti-fat drugs sold with anti-bias messaging
Impacts of broader adoption
Newest incarnation of medical interventions on fatness

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Diversity initiatives under assault

Book challenges and bans
Legislative and judicial attacks on affirmative action and DEI initiatives in higher education
Organizations obeying in advance

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Fascism and eugenics in policy and culture

Enabled and enacted by patriarchal, capital-driven tech industry leaders and politicians
Targeting of trans folks, anti-war activists, immigrants
Ableist and “pro-natalist” rhetoric and policy
Fueled by and fueling anti-intellectualism

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What this means for fat librarians

We, particularly those of us who embody multiple marginalized identities, are carrying the additional burden of intensified anti-fatness in a climate hostile to the mission and values of librarianship.

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Some final thoughts & reflections

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Confronting anti-fat bias to create more inclusive libraries

Galasso, M. (2025). Confronting anti-fat bias to create more inclusive libraries. In B. L. Newman (Ed.), Well-being in the library workplace: A handbook for managers (pp. 141-158). ALA Editions.

Link to read this chapter for free (also in References):

go.iu.edu/8tlV

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