Articles by Sharon Stanley

June 14, 2023

🦋 Weight stigma, citizenship and neoliberal democracy

Sharon Stanley

Kathryn Hicks and Sharon Stanley argue that the contemporary moral panic around obesity emerges from and exacerbates neoliberal tendencies that diminish democratic institutions and imaginaries. Given historical associations between race, gender and fatness, the ostensibly neutral language of health deepens existing lines of democratic exclusion

Sharon Stanley

Professor, University of Memphis

Sharon specialises in political theory and public law.

Her broad research interests focus upon modern and contemporary political thought, with two separate emphases: the Enlightenment, its critics, and its contested legacy, and the politics of racial justice in the United States and throughout the Americas.

She is currently working on a new project that juxtaposes the US discourse of post-racialism to the Brazilian discourse of racial democracy.

Sharon was awarded the Early Career Research Award in 2012, a Dunavant Professorship in 2014–2017, and a Distinguished Teaching Award in 2016.

The French Enlightenment and the Emergence of Modern Cynicism
Cambridge University Press, 2012

An Impossible Dream? Racial Integration in the United States
Oxford University Press, 2017

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