VIRGIE TOVAR TO SPEAK AT CSUSB ON HOW TO "LOSE HATE NOT WEIGHT"

SAN BERNARDINO, CALIF. - One of the nation’s leading experts and lecturers on fat discrimination and body image, Virgie Tovar, will speak to students at Cal State San Bernardino on Monday, Feb. 8.

The event will be held at the university’s Santos Manuel Student Union Events Center from noon- 2 p.m. Sponsored by the Women’s Resource Center, the public is invited to attend the free discussion. Daily parking is $6 per vehicle.

Editor of the book “Hot & Heavy: Fierce Fat Girls on Life, Love & Fashion,” Tovar wrote, “I was born into a world where fat women are outlaws: a band of lawless revolutionaries, fighting against myopic standards of beauty and archaic forms of femininity.” The anthology is made up of 31 personal stories, submitted by women who identify as fat.

“That’s what I love about this book. It’s the honesty of the path,” said Tovar. “A lot of the fat phobia messaging around women attacks our sexuality and femininity. Sexuality can be this place where we start from because that’s fundamentally where we were undermined.”

In order to decenter self-hatred and re-center self-care and love, Tovar created the hashtag #LoseHateNotWeight. Thousands of social media users have since been attaching the hashtag along with images of their curvy bodies.

“What I really want people to do is think of fat phobia as retrograde, as something that doesn’t have a place in our culture,” she explained. “#LoseHateNotWeight is about refusing to give into societal messaging that some bodies are good and most bodies are bad.”

The plus-size style writer for BuzzFeed also created “Babe Camp” an online boot camp. “Babe Camp” is a 4-week virtual course designed for those wanting to break their diet culture and focus on developing body confidence. For 30 days, users will receive daily action mails and weekly journaling exercises in order to promote self-expression and reflection. For more information on “Babe Camp” visit their website at http://virgietovar.com/babecamp.

Tovar has taught “Female Sexuality” at the University of California, Berkley. She completed her bachelor’s degree in political science from UC Berkley in 2005 and also earned a master’s degree in “Human Sexuality” with a focus on the intersections of body size, race and gender.

She has been featured by the New York Times, MTV, NPR, Yahoo Health, Al Jazeera, the San Francisco Chronicle, Huffington Post, and Cosmopolitan (online) magazine, to name a few.

For more information about the Virgie Tovar lecture, contact the CSUSB Women’s Resource Center at (909) 537-7715 or visit the Women’s Resource Center website at http://studentunion.csusb.edu/departments/wrc.

Set in the foothills of the beautiful San Bernardino Mountains, CSUSB is a preeminent center of intellectual and cultural activity in inland Southern California. Celebrating its 50th anniversary in 2015-2016, CSUSB serves more than 20,000 students each year and graduates about 4,000 students annually.

For more information about Cal State San Bernardino, contact the university’s Office of Strategic Communication at (909) 537-5007 and visit news.csusb.edu.

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