Assistant Professor
Specialization:
fat studies, queer of color critique, performance studies, media studies, disability studies, women of color feminisms
Education:
Ph.D. with a Designated Emphasis in Women’s and Gender Studies, University of California, Berkeley 2022
B.A. Double major in Anthropology and Women’s and Gender Studies, The University of Texas at Austin, 2015
Bio:
Caleb Luna is an Assistant Professor of Feminist Studies at University of California, Santa Barbara and a former UC President’s and Mellon Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in the same department.
They are the bestselling author of REVENGE BODY (Nomadic Press, 2022), an award-winning educator and scholar and co-host of the podcast Unsolicited: Fatties Talk Back. Publishing, performing and teaching across genre and medium, Caleb's cultural work examines race size sexuality and disability in media and culture. Ultimately, they are interested in engaging embodied difference as a generative resource toward fatter understandings of collective freedom.
Caleb holds a Ph.D. in Performance Studies with a Designated Emphasis in Gender and Women’s Studies from the University of California, Berkeley. Their writing can be found in the journals Fat Studies and Performance Matters, the anthologies Queer Nightlife and Fat and Queer and more.
Research:
fat studies, sexuality, race and racial formation, anti/colonialism, visual arts and culture, body politics, popular culture, public health, HIV/AIDS, disordered eating and eating disorders, BDSM/kink, pornography
Publications:
Dorrance, Jess, Julia Havard, Caleb Luna and Olivia Young. “Cripping the Accommodation Statement: Chronic Femme Dreaming for A More Accessible Syllabus (and Classroom)!” Performance Matters special issue on the syllabus, 8(2), 50-71.
Luna, Caleb and Jules Pashall. “Fat Kinship for Love and Liberation: A Dialogue Across Difference”, Fat Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Body Weight and Society special issue on Fat Kinship, 12(2), 325-337.
“Jockstraps and Crop Tops: Fat Queer Femmes Dressing for the Night.” Queer Nightlife, eds. Kareem Khubchandani, Kemi Adeyemi and Ramón H. Rivera-Servera,University of Michigan Press, 31-41.
Senyonga, Mary and Caleb Luna. “‘If I’m shinin’, everybody gonna shine’: centering Black fat women and femmes within body and fat positivity”, Fat Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Body Weight and Society special issue on Fat Activism, 10(3), 268-282.
Poetry
REVENGE BODY, Nomadic Press, 2022.