About

Caleb Luna is an Assistant Professor of Feminist Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. They are a former UC President’s and Mellon Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in the same department. Caleb Luna holds a Ph.D. in Performance Studies with a Designated Emphasis in Gender and Women’s Studies from the University of California, Berkeley, and a B.A. double major in Anthropology and Women’s and Gender Studies from The University of Texas at Austin. Their cultural work examines race, size, sexuality, and disability in media and culture, with a focus on engaging embodied difference as a resource toward broader understandings of collective freedom. Caleb Luna is 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. Their research interests include 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, and pornography.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Law
• Pedagogy
• Gender studies

Selected publications

• Fat kinship for love and liberation: a dialogue across difference

  2025-04-11

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Caleb Luna and Jules Pashall are artists and cultural workers who first met in Austin, Texas in 2013. After cultivating a deep friendship over the course of several years, on November 6, 2020 we interviewed one other about our kinship as fat embodied subjects across lines of difference in race, class, and gender. We discuss how our relationship came to be; fat identity and fat politics; how our political thinking is informed by our relationship; and offer reflections on how fat kinship can be a container for healing individually and interpersonally and be supportive in a larger struggle for collective liberation. This conversation is a snapshot of one moment in time between two fat artists and activists on a journey, and we offer it in hopes it can support other fat embodied subjects in their relationships with themselves and their loved ones of all sizes.

  PublisherDOI

• Healthy. Looking.

  Excessive Bodies A Journal of Artistic and Critical Fat Praxis and World Making · 2025-12-16

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Bridging Fat Studies with Queer of Color critique, this article reads the so-called ob*s*ty epidemic and HIV/AIDS crisis as twinned events that have shaped how queer male, and especially queers of color, think about their bodies in the 22nd century. Placing pressure on the colonial logics of science and medicine through the racializing mechanisms of fat embodiment, I extend this biopolitical function to the HIV/AIDS crisis. In the 1980’s and 1990’s, queer men became deeply aware of how their bodily production signaled illness or health in a moment of collective crisis. This moment also saw the rise of bear communities, partially in response to extreme thinness as evidence of ill health. I consider how this crisis, alongside the subsequent declaration of the ob*s*ty epidemic in 1999, have been instrumental in shaping affective orientations towards queerness and fatness through associating both with disease and early death for queers of color especially. Ultimately, I connect cultural discourses of health with eroticism—shaped by fatphobia as an affective structure—that impact how we relate to our own and each others’ bodies.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• “They tried to exterminate us”: Tricia Rainwater’s fat feminist Indigiqueer embodied presence

  Fat Studies · 2025-12-22

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Feeling Fat: Affect, Stigma and Colonialism

  2024-06-17

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Bridging Fat Studies with Queer of Color critique, this talk posits the obesity epidemic and AIDS crisis as twinned events under colonialism that have deeply shaped how queer male, and especially queers of color, think about their bodies in the 22nd century. Starting from the condition known as ‘wasting syndrome’—an early indicator of seroconversion—to the intentional development of lean muscle to counteract the impacts of the virus on the body, queer men became deeply aware of how their bodily production signaled illness or health in a moment of collective crisis. The 1980’s and 1990’s also saw the rise of bear communities, partially in response to extreme thinness as evidence of ill health. I consider how this crisis, alongside the subsequent declaration of the so-called ‘Obesity Epidemic’ in 1999, have been instrumental in shaping affective orientations towards both queerness and fatness through stigmatic associations with disease and early death for queers of color especially. I place these histories into conversation with the ongoing colonial project, and the prevalence of eating disorders and disordered eating in contemporary LGBT communities, where queers of color statistically remain most susceptible to these practices. Ultimately, I connect cultural discourses of health with colonialism— shaped by fatphobia as an affective structure—that deeply impact how we relate to our own and each others’ bodies.

  PublisherDOI

• Fat on Film: Gender, Race and Body Size in Contemporary Hollywood Cinema <b>Fat on Film: Gender, Race and Body Size in Contemporary Hollywood Cinema</b> , by Barbara Plotz, Bloomsbury Academic, 2021, $40.95(paperback)

  Fat Studies · 2023-04-10

  article1st authorCorresponding

  "Fat on Film: Gender, Race and Body Size in Contemporary Hollywood Cinema." Fat Studies, ahead-of-print(ahead-of-print), pp. 1–2 Additional informationNotes on contributorsCaleb LunaCaleb Luna is a UC President's and Mellon Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in Feminist Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

  PublisherDOI

• Awe of What a Body Can Be: Disability Justice, the Syllabus, and Academic Labour

  Performance Matters · 2023 · 2 citations

  • Sociology
  • Sociology
  • Pedagogy

  This article explores the practice of critically and lovingly manifesting access in syllabus construction and examines how axes of oppression shape our classrooms via the syllabus. We are a collective of multi-racial queer and trans disabled academics writing from our personal experiences and our engagements with performance studies and Disability Justice. We argue that the academy must shift from discussions of accommodations to access, surface questions of Disability Justice and teaching labour in graduate school and higher education at large, and offer a series of questions for teachers to examine their approach to disability in their classrooms.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Fat kinship for love and liberation: a dialogue across difference

  Fat Studies · 2022-01-31 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Caleb Luna and Jules Pashall are artists and cultural workers who first met in Austin, Texas in 2013. After cultivating a deep friendship over the course of several years, on November 6, 2020 we interviewed one other about our kinship as fat embodied subjects across lines of difference in race, class, and gender. We discuss how our relationship came to be; fat identity and fat politics; how our political thinking is informed by our relationship; and offer reflections on how fat kinship can be a container for healing individually and interpersonally and be supportive in a larger struggle for collective liberation. This conversation is a snapshot of one moment in time between two fat artists and activists on a journey, and we offer it in hopes it can support other fat embodied subjects in their relationships with themselves and their loved ones of all sizes.

  PublisherDOI

• “If I’m shinin’, everybody gonna shine”: centering Black fat women and femmes within body and fat positivity

  Fat Studies · 2021-04-19 · 17 citations

  articleSenior author

  In this article, we negotiate the tension of Lizzo’s embodiment and the work she is forced to perform to appease and mollify both thin and non-Black audiences. As a Black fat rapper, singer, dancer, and performer, Lizzo at once disrupts the normative image of a performer and becomes a commodified representation of body positivity. Her self-love messaging undoubtedly touches a broad fan base who look to her for guidance and inspiration. But how is she taken up by audiences dissimilar to her? Lizzo’s body-positive politic is presented as being particularly interested in disrupting body terrorism, while some audiences perceive it as a neoliberal model of self-love, failing to challenge systems. We consider ways in which Black fat bodies are consumed and used for their utility, while broader relationships to other Black fat people remain unchanged. We map selections from Lizzo’s creative output in 2019 to demonstrate racialization and fat embodiment intertwined in her performances, leading to the necessary coalition that fat activism must adopt.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Julia Havard

  Dartmouth College

  2 shared

• Jess Dorrance

  University of California, Berkeley

  1 shared

• Mary Senyonga

  University of California, Los Angeles

  1 shared

• Olivia K. Young

  1 shared

• Jules Pashall

  University of California, Berkeley

  1 shared

Education

• PhD, Performance Studies

  University of California, Berkeley

  2022

Awards & honors

• UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship
• Mellon Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship