Dec 19

Dec 19 Da'Shaun L. Harrison

Da’Shaun Harrison is a trans theorist and Southern-born and bred abolitionist in Atlanta, GA. They are the author of Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness, which won the 2022 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Nonfiction and several other media/literary honors. As an editor, movement media and narrative strategist, and storyteller, Harrison uses their extensive history as a community organizer—which began in 2014 during their first year at Morehouse College—to frame their political thought and cultural criticism. Through the lens of what Harrison calls “Black Fat Studies,” they lecture on blackness, fatness, gender, and their intersections. Harrison currently serves as Editor-at-Large at Scalawag Magazine, is a co-host of the podcast “Unsolicited: Fatties Talk Back,” and ⅓ of the video podcast “In The Middle.” Between the years 2019 and 2021, Harrison served as Associate Editor—and later as Managing Editor—of Wear Your Voice Magazine.

As a speaker, Harrison has delivered keynotes and guest lectures at universities and colleges such as Harvard Law School, Yale University, Northwestern University, Spelman College, University of Cincinnati, Trinity College, and more. Their research and writing has appeared in anthologies and other texts, including Black Love Matters (2022), In Pursuit of Revolutionary Love: Precarity, Power, Communities (2022), and The Contemporary Reader of Gender and Fat Studies (2023). As a public intellectual, Harrison’s work is regularly in conversation with thinkers such as Sabrina Strings, Kiese Laymon, Joy James, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Hortense Spillers, C. Riley Snorton, Jamil al-Amin and others on the topics of (anti-)fatness, (trans)gender and sexuality, Black Feminism, Afropessimism, and Socialist thought, to name a few.

Harrison’s writing has appeared in PhiladelphiaPrint, Scalawag Magazine, Wear Your Voice, THEM, Black Youth Project, BET, and elsewhere. They have also been featured in/interviewed by Black Power Media, The Takeaway, Rolling Stone, Los Angeles Times, The ACLU, The Fader, Teen Vogue, the New York Times, and a host of other podcasts and digital media platforms.