Kate Moss: nothing tastes as foul as media stereotypes and diet industry lies

Dear Kate Moss,

Everyone's up in arms because of a news report that's doing the rounds. In this report you are supposed to have said: "Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels". Someone on my Facebook feed called you a cunt, but they've never met you, how would they know what you're like?

I think 'Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels' is an asinine expression, it's beyond moronic, but the anger being directed at you for allegedly saying it is misplaced. It's a well-known slogan that was popularised years ago by diet companies such as Weight Watchers. These companies turned into global multinationals that profit massively from instilling and maintaining body hatred, sometimes through slogans just like this. It is them that people should be enraged with, not you.

I think people should also get angrier with the media. There are, to my mind rather facile, arguments about 'negative images' or 'Size Zero' or 'media bombardment' but little concern about the extent to which the media propagates lies. Maybe no-one could believe that lying could take place on such a scale, or that what they believe to be true is actually nothing of the kind.

I know that the papers lie about you. You're there, a massive cultural icon, but you rarely say anything in public so they have to make up things about you to put in their paper, which your body and mythology helps sell for them. I saw this happen at the Evans launch last summer. What I saw was not what was reported, stupid things, like the song you sang and the people you sang with, were reported differently.

So there are lies, and there are also clichés and stereotypes. These are the bread and butter of the popular media. They are well-worn things that people can recognise easily. Many journalists use clichés and stereotypes as a basis for a story. There are many clichés about you, and about modelling and also about fashion, the worlds you know best. Sometimes there is some truth to a claim, but a cliché or a stereotype is not a truth at all. The papers try and force clichés on things that are much too complicated to be reduced in that way because they are unable to deal with human complexity or nuance, or subtlety.

One cliché that has attached itself to you over the years is that because you are skinny you must hate fatness. Skinny must hate fat. This is not true, it is a pernicious and destructive lie. The papers deal in clichés, but you are not a cliché, what you are perceived to represent is not what or who you are.

I know that you championed Beth D and helped get her a fashion deal, that is pro-fat, even though the press tried to pitch you against her as fat vs skinny enemies. You did donut hands with me at Beth's party and told me I looked amazing. That is pro-fat. You posed for pictures with my big fat mannish dyke of a girlfriend, you did Blue Steel with her! That is pro-fat, and beautiful. I know you don't hate fat people because I have seen you digging us and I have enough of a radar to know when people's tolerance of me and my kind is false. I met you in queer fat space and I know you loved it and were at home there. I don't know what was said and how it came to be reported as it did, but I know you do not hate fat people, I know you are a friend to us, and I know you can see coolness and amazingness in all kinds of body shapes.

Ten years ago, when my book Fat & Proud was published, a journalist asked me what I thought of you. They were trying to get me to agree with the popular line at the time that Heroin Chic was a bad deal and that it was evidence that you hated fat people and were therefore my enemy. But the thing is, I love those pictures! The journalist tried to make out that Dawn French, the only fat celebrity at the time, would be my preferred role model, but that wasn't true and I said I'd choose you over her if I had to. Fat people don't hate skinny people either.

You work in an industry that hates a lot of things, including fatness, and ageing, which you yourself are now feeling the brunt of even though you're young. I hope your friend Anita Pallenberg, an amazing role model for getting older, is coaching you through this, and I hope Beth is on the phone to you too.

Yours,

Charlotte

Maya Angelou is a fatphobe?!

No! No! Say it ain't so!

At other times she sounds like the kind of elderly relative who has outlived the need for social convention. Arguing for honesty at every level of human contact, she writes: "When people ask, 'How are you?' have the nerve sometimes to answer truthfully. You must know, however, that people will start avoiding you..." Sure enough, halfway through the interview she tells me I'm fat and suggests I pay more attention to the size of my portions. "You are going to have to lose that weight. You're too young and too handsome. Don't do it to yourself."

Gary Younge patches up the damage pretty admirably here, I think, even as she slurs him.

Maya Angelou: 'I'm fine as wine in the summertime'

The Fat Studies Reader is out!

It's been a long time coming but The Fat Studies Reader, edited by Esther Rothblum and Sondra Solovay, is now available from all good bookshops.

If you're anywhere near San Francisco, you might want to consider attending The Fat Studies Reader Reading and Release Party where you can hear brilliant Reader contributors tease you with short, tantalizing, provocative excerpts from their groundbreaking chapters.

When? 3 PM on November 21, 2009

Where? Modern Times Bookstore in San Francisco at 888 Valencia Street
San Francisco, CA 94110. (Between 19th and 20th streets.)

Who? The lineup includes: Esther Rothblum, Sondra Solovay, Marilyn Wann, Elana Dykewomon, Lacy Asbill, Matilda St. John, Natalie Boero, Deb Burgard, Nat Pyle, Michael Loewy, Dana Schuster, Lisa Tealer, Elena Escalera, Dylan Vade, Beth Bernstein and Pat Lyons.

Plus! Make a day of it. Flabulous! - An Evening of Performance By and For People of Size & Their Allies is happening after the reading. This history making show is going to amaze, inspire and excite you. It features some of the most influential and inspiring performers of size from the west coast. There are two shows (7 and 9 PM on November 21st.) Tix are $15 and the show is at SomArts - 934 Brannan St., SF.

Questions?
For questions about the Release Party, email Esther at ERothblu@sdsu.edu or Sondra at Sondra@SolovayLaw.com
Flabulous! Facebook Event

Geek Alert: New Fat Studies Papers

A new batch of papers has been published that may be of interest to Fat Studies scholars. Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography 41(5) looks at critical geographies of fat/bigness/corpulence.

Academics can get the online version of the journal through their institutions, civilians can probably get inter-library loans. Drop me a line if you want to read this stuff and are having trouble accessing it.

Introduction: Questioning Obesity Politics
Rachel Colls and Bethan Evans

What to do with the 'Tubby Hubby'?'Obesity,' the Crisis of Masculinity, and the Nuclear Family in Early Cold War Canada
Deborah McPhail

Measuring Fatness, Governing Bodies: The Spatialities of the Body Mass Index (BMI) in Anti-Obesity Politics
Bethan Evans and Rachel Colls

Choosing Health? Exploring Children's Eating Practices at Home and at School
Emma Rawlins

Teaching the Politics of Obesity: Insights into Neoliberal Embodiment and Contemporary Biopolitics
Julie Guthman

Intersecting Trans and Fat: Similarities, Differences and All the Rest

I've been going through some old documents recently and I found some discussions exploring the links between fat and trans people. I've cobbled them together as a blog post because I think this stuff needs saying.

Some of the ideas below were proposed by people who took part in a LiveJournal discussion, on 25 April 2007, which is friends-locked. I remain thankful and grateful to Stacy Bias, Grant Denkinson, Fflo, Zoe Meleo-Erwin, Nine and Leah Strock for their contributions to this discussion. I've also edited in a passage from an email concerning parallels between weight loss surgery (WLS) and gender surgery because that seems to fit here too.

There's been a recent thread on the Fat Studies list about the intersections between fat and trans stuff. One fat activist said that he didn't see that there was any connection, he got jumped on by lots of people who think that there is.

I did no jumping, but I've long had a mini-list stewing in my brain about the things that fat and trans people have in common, and don't. I've resisted posting about it because I worry that I'm too worthy and precious about this stuff, too serious. But it is serious. I also get pretty bored when people obsess about identity and begin an announcement with something like "As a _______ ________ ________, who is ______ and ______, I think...". Just because you have a label for yourself doesn't mean that you speak for everyone else who shares those labels. Hopefully this won't invite too much of that.

This isn't a comprehensive list, it's just my preliminary thoughts, and in notes. I continue to welcome additions, comments and suggestions.

Similarities between trans and fat people and communities

• A lot of fat people have never heard of transgender and a lot of transgender people have never heard of fat activism
• Being fat and being trans are not mutually exclusive identities, you can be both, more, or neither
• Fat and trans people are often categorised as a spectrum of types and bodies
• Both groups are about being the impossible, embodying what a lot of people can barely imagine
• Both groups of people are blamed for not trying hard enough to be normal, both are presumed to be culpable
• Both have been regarded as comic stereotypes
• Both have some funny kind of magical power, but only sometimes and only in particular settings; think about the magical power that drag queens have in a room full of straight people, or the magical power of The Cool Fatty
• Both identities can involve some kind of coming out to oneself, or self-acceptance
• Capitalism banks on fatphobia and transphobia to sell product
• Clichés: inside a fat person there's supposedly a thin one waiting to escape; similarly, some trans people talk about growing up as one gender and knowing that they were really its opposite inside
• Growing politicisation, community, social justice, legal rights
• It's all about the body, its secrets and possibilities
• It's sort of about repositioning ourselves as valid and worthy in the face of oppression and/or self-hatred, also about developing positive self-images and feeling confident about taking up space in the world
• Medicalisation is a big part of our daily lives
• Our very existence forces people to question basic beliefs about big ideas, including: health, gender, the body, normality, difference
• People have funny theories about how we got this way and some of these theories have a lot of currency, even though they are really weird
• Scapegoating, discrimination and prejudice are also part of our lives and leave their imprint upon us
• Shame and denial are familiar things
• Some people like to fetishise us
• Surgery does and does not necessarily make us what we hope to be
• Television programme makers like us a lot and always want us to be on their crappy shows
• Trans and fat people are in the midst of developing our own aesthetics and norms regarding how we look and behave, we are developing our own cultures
• We both experience varying degrees of being visible to the wider culture, with all the prurience, pain and pleasure that entails.
• You can also be a fatphobic transperson, or a transphobic fat person. Hurrah!
• Both trans and fat people can always find work at a circus freakshow

Some crossovers but a lot of differences

• Medical intervention. Some trans people and fat people welcome all medical interventions and see doctors as their allies. There's a strong assimilationist streak in both groups, which can be validated to a certain extent through medical interventions. There are also fat and trans people who are very critical of the power held by health professionals and medical gatekeepers. There are probably more who are ambivalent. A lot of trans and fat people rely on drugs and medical equipment to get by in life. Both groups have had to learn a lot of self-advocacy skills in order to negotiate health provision.
• There are differences are in the way that medical intervention is regarded as elective for some trans people and mandatory for the fatties, though this isn't always the case
• Trans people are categorised as psychologically disordered in the DSM-IV as gender identity disorder, transvestic fetishism, or other types of paraphilia. Fat people are often lumped in together with people who have eating disorders, but fat doesn't appear in the DSM-IV as an official psychiatric disorder - yet.
• I suppose the medicalised categories that are used to demarcate different types of trans people don't really exist for fat people so much; overweight, obese and morbidly obese don't really match the whole host of acronyms and categorisations that trans people have.
• I think trans people's surgery is also relevant to the notion of finding some kind of fat lib accommodation of WLS. Some, in my view, anti-trans feminists have argued that gender reassignment surgery is mutilation, but the people that have it themselves think of it as life-saving.
• In various dyke communities I've heard nasty comments about "all the butches disappearing and becoming men," which to me is congruent with the line that WLS turns formerly fat lib activists into skinny pod people who are no longer of use or relevance to fat activist communities. In more progressive queer and feminist spaces there have been attempts to understand and incorporate trans people as a presence that is enriching to the community.
• I am critical of the way that trans bodies are often medicalised bodies, or the way that gender surgery is often presented as the only way of being authentic, trans, or gendered. Yet although I would not want that surgery myself, and do not recognise myself as being on the part of a gender spectrum where I might look for it, it's not as emotive to me as WLS. Perhaps this is because of my own identity and history.

Differences

• Do fat activists have any allies?! I think we are much more alone than trans activists
• Gatekeeping processes for surgery; it is common for trans people to have to construct an 'appropriate' narrative in order to access services, whereas WLS is more accessible for fat people, especially superfat people, it's almost mandatory.
• In some circumstances it's possible to pass as 'normal' if you are trans. Fat people can't pass as not fat. Passing or not passing is, of course, a complicated thing that is not necessarily useful, helpful or wanted. I also think there are trans people who couldn't pass even if they wanted to, and fat people that have other signifiers that enable them to sort of pass.
• I've noticed some episodes of unquestioned body fascism in trans communities, I think it's a bit more acceptable to be a body fascist there than it is in fat communities, though there are plenty of exceptions to this too
• Some - to my mind, discredited - theorists have suggested that the fat body is intrinsically gendered, but there's no consensus as to what that means, and I don't know of any theories that use the T word when this stuff is discussed. They say that fat = extreme femininity, that fat women are very manly or fat men are like women, that fat correlates with butch and femme. There's no similar theory that relates to trans people and fat.
• Trans people have a relationship with LGB communities and fat people don't so much, though this relationship is problematic as well as useful

Rad Fatty: Max Airborne

As one of the founding collective members of FaT GiRL, the zine for fat dykes and the women who want them, which came out of the Bay Area's queer SM punk scene in the mid-90s, Max Airborne's influence on a generation of fat people, including me, is beyond my ability to articulate. She's also a musician, a mover, shaker, artist, thinker and pickler. None of these descriptors come close to explaining what it's like to spend time with her, but hopefully this little interview will give you a clue. There's a tribe of us for whom Max is a keystone, I can't imagine my life without her.

You seem so at home in your freakhood, you never seem to care what the straight world thinks, you really "make your own kind of music and sing your own special song," as Mama Cass would say. Is this true? If so, how do you do it?

Thank you for the fabulous theme song!

I often forget what the straight world thinks, because I've built up a life that's so far outside of it. I'm so deeply immersed in a community of queer, fat and freaky people. A lot of my art and activism has been about building a culture in which we are the norm, rather than bothering to try and make space for ourselves in the straight world. It's an alternative society in which we can start healing from the pain, fear and oppression of growing up not fitting into the mould. It’s a world where we can learn to value and love ourselves as we are, we can blossom and thrive. It’s partly made possible by living in a metropolis that's a hub for queers, fat activists, and a variety of other freaky people, but I feel like it isn’t bound by location – it has members all over the world.

Over time I have come to appreciate that this kind of separatist approach has different sides. It can give us the space to blossom in ways we never could otherwise. And in some ways it makes us more vulnerable when we do have to be in the straight world – we're not prepared, we've forgotten how to repress ourselves in order to stay safe. Also, we’ve ceased to benefit from the good parts of cross-cultural exchange, like staying open to folks who are different from us and seeing the ways in which we are all human, with hearts and pains that maybe aren’t so different after all. There's a balance that needs to happen – ultimately I feel like society really needs a diversity that includes us, so while I'd like us to nurture ourselves in our alternative society, I still hope that we will somehow share our freakiness with the larger culture. I don't want us to close our hearts to people who are different from us. I think real, lasting, liberating change is made by people with open hearts. Working consciously to love ourselves puts us in a position to model that love to others.

And following on from that question, who influences and supports you?

My heroes are explorers who keep asking questions, who are doing their own inner work and trying to integrate it with their activism. My heroes are the artists whose lives are their medium. I am supported every day by many people, both in my life and in the world, who don’t stop trying to walk their talk. I have a wonderful family who keeps loving me through the hard stuff.

What were FaT GiRL's greatest achievements?

A dozen years later, people still write to me to say that FaT GiRL saved their lives. I have literally received hundreds of these messages, and every time it makes me cry. Saving a life is a tall order! We really helped somebody! And these are people who are making amazing contributions to life, to art and activism. Is it possible to be both proud and humbled? That's kind of how it feels to me. FaT GiRL became so much bigger than us, and its reverberations were/are magnificent for such a small thing!

FaT GiRL spread the word among a certain generation of freaky fatties that we can have an alternative society where we are valued, we can have community, sexuality, joy, and full lives as fat queers – without dieting or assimilation or apology. I think we had some influence on fat awareness and acceptance in the larger queer culture, and possibly elsewhere too, but that's hard to measure. FaT GiRL was unique, but it was also part of a movement that included the lives and work of Nomy Lamm, Marilyn Wann, Charlotte Cooper (that's you!), Allyson Mitchell and so many others.

What does fat activism feel like?

That's a hard question!

Lately I've been doing the kind of fat activism where I am the only fat person among thin people who've never heard of fat activism. It can be really draining! It's in the context of a social justice organisation I'm really committed to, and the people want to be fat allies, and are more open to it than most, so I press on, but sometimes I really need a break!

There's also a kind of fat activism that takes place amongst fat people, in the process of connecting and becoming allies, and then maintaining the relationships. Sometimes fat people are really scared of other fat people – they look at you and see what they don't want to be: FAT. Sometimes a fat person who's been a proud fat activist for years will get scared about getting older and more disabled, and their fears get pinned on being fat, so the fat activism gets chucked out the window. People will trade fatness (via surgery and other extreme measures) for horrible, painful health problems. It's really challenging to know how to keep being good to ourselves and each other through that stuff. It's painful for the whole fat activist community, really.

I feel like the struggles we have as a community call upon us to do our own internal fat activism. We need to be deeply aware of all our beliefs and fears. We need to let it all come out and look at it, and decide what parts of ourselves we want to nurture and what parts we don't. It's got to be a conscious effort. If I'm harbouring fears and rejections of parts of myself, and not letting myself see or admit them, those are going to come out later in my behaviour. I must not hide from myself. This is part of fat activism for me – full acceptance of my body and my experience, and making very conscious decisions about how I want to treat myself. It's a constant process, and not easy. But without it I'd be dead, pure and simple. It's the constant questioning of both the external world and the internal world that has kept me from jumping ship on life. Society lies to us, and the internal critic – the bit of society that lives within us – lies to us too. We need to question all the external and internal messages we hear, open our hearts and decide for ourselves what is true.

Could you say a bit about your journey into meditation?

Several years ago I noticed myself getting increasingly bitter about life. I was miserable – hating just about everything and everyone. I was truly scared about who I was becoming. I felt like I had become dead – totally shut down to life. It was clear to me that I needed to do something to change the direction of my life. I ended up at a local meditation centre taking a class that involved cultivating qualities like generosity and gratitude. Definitely an antidote to bitterness! I went every week to that class and cried and cried as I started uncovering my heart. The class was only six weeks long, but it really helped me begin to redirect my approach to life. After that I started going to a weekly queer meditation group, and going on occasional day- or week-long silent meditation retreats.

I try to keep a schedule that gives me space to sit in silence for 45 minutes almost every day, just trying to be fully present in the moment with myself. It’s a vital component of being fully alive for me. It’s easier for me to go through my daily life and see what state of mind I’m in at a given moment, and make better choices about how I want to act or what I want to say. It’s easier for me to handle the bumps in the road of life. It increases my ability to have compassion for myself and others in the face of shame, bitterness, anger, and all the other hard stuff.

My main practice happens at East Bay Meditation Center in Oakland, the city where I live. I have a very special love for EBMC because their whole mission is rooted in aligning the forces of mindfulness practice and social justice. I'm very active there, not just meditating, but also organising and other work that helps keep the centre going. It's a great opportunity to bring my meditation practice into the other work I feel passionate about, and it's such incredible teaching for me to be doing active work with folks who have been doing meditation for decades. They really bring it with them into the work, and inspire me to pay attention and bring patience and compassion into all aspects of life.

You seem to be someone who's often at the centre of things, others have noted how great you are at creating community, yet you are so laid back, sometimes even quite shy it seems. I often think all the activity is because you're really good at asking questions, but what do you think is going on?

I think there actually might be a genetic component, which sounds a little ridiculous, but my sister and parents also tend to be at the hub of things, too.

One thing that comes to mind is that I’m very enthusiastic when it comes to starting projects that feel important to me, and when I’m in that state, I tend to get very focused and driven, so I initially work really hard to get a project together, and in a way it becomes part of my identity. It’s a mixed blessing, because after a while I just can’t sustain that amount of energy output, and it gets harder to keep following through. It’s true that I’m a bit shy – a lot of being so public and social produces a certain amount of anxiety for me and at some point I need to withdraw and recover a bit, which is also more difficult when a project becomes part of your identity. It's challenging, and something I'm working on.

Please tell me about your household's pickling projects.

A few years ago I started developing an interest in making my own sauerkraut. I’m interested in learning something about the culture of my ancestors. As a European-American whose grandparents and great grandparents came to America and assimilated into the generic privileged construct of Whiteness, I was raised with absolutely no clue about my ethnic heritage, even though, for example, my dad was the first generation on his dad’s side (from Friesland) to be born in America. One of the aspects of culture that’s easiest to access is food. I love pickled foods, and they’re common among several of my ancestral cultures, hence the interest in sauerkraut.

My housemates were sceptical when I first broached the subject, and they begged me not to do it in the house because they imagined rotting cabbage would stink up the place. I thought maybe I’d set it up in the garage, but that seemed like a pain, so my drive was thwarted.

Then I got my hands on a book about pickling called Wild Fermentation, which happened to be written by a freaky queer guy named Sandor Katz, and even included a discussion of gender pronoun choices. My interest was renewed, and so I started pushing the issue again with my housemates. Around that time my housemates and I went to a party where someone happened to have brought their very own homemade sauerkraut. It tasted incredibly good, and we spent quite a long time grilling the maker with questions about it. Satisfied that it would not make our kitchen smell like a port-a-potty, my housemates gave me the go-ahead. That was over a year ago now, and pickling has become a constant activity in our kitchen. We’ve pickled cabbage, garlic, carrots, celery, ginger, squash, cucumbers, peaches, green beans, beets, radishes, onions, lemons, limes, turnips, cauliflower, peppers, and probably a dozen other things I’m forgetting. And of course pickling is common to many cultures around the world, so while it is a delicious and fun way to eat what my ancestors ate, it’s also become a geekiness unto itself to discover what different cultures do with pickling. And my girlfriend, who is a total dynamo in the kitchen, is at least as into pickling as I am, perhaps even more so. I call her 'Kraut Papa.'

What else would you like to say?

Well, I’d really like to take this opportunity to say how much I appreciate you, Charlotte. I am hugely grateful for you, how alive you are, how you strive to be awake and honest, asking hard questions, generating lots of fun and laughter and freedom along the way. You help me remember who I want to be in this life. (Charlotte: blub! I love you Maxie!)

Max's Comics
FaT GiRL back issues for sale
East Bay Meditation Center

Talking at the Weekend

I'm speaking on a panel this Sunday with Sharon Curtis and Kathryn Szrodecki. It's being convened by Lucy Aphramor. There's going to be a screening of a DVD from The Body Positive, a Health At Every Size project from the US, and then a discussion.

Come along eh? It's in Coventry, city of The Specials, and host to the annual Peace Festival, which is currently running. Right on!

Sunday 8 November
12.30-3pm
The Herbert
Jordan Well, Coventry, CV1 5QP

Shapewear

Shapewear
Charlotte Cooper and Kay Hyatt
1 November 2009
10 mins 11 secs

Shapewear is what happens when two badass fat dykes take over the changing room at a shopping centre.

When the only clothes available for a fat mannish lady are made for girly-girls, Kay Hyatt decides to try and feminise her body using body-sculpting underwear, with eye-popping results. Her girlfriend, Charlotte Cooper, lends a not-so helping hand.

Filmed guerrilla-style on Charlotte's mobile phone, this film features shameless nudity and a big belly.

Watch Shapewear.

Pissing on Pity: fat media representation following Kathryn Srodecki

Kathryn Szrodecki's piece for the BBC about discrimination against fat people has sparked a flurry of UK media interest that is making me want to bang my head against the wall.

In theory you'd think that more recognition for fatphobia would be a good thing. Some fat activists are glad that these stories are appearing, and whilst I agree that it's probably better they're out in the world, I'm not pathetically grateful for this representation. Accounts such as the attack on Marsha Coupe are being presented through the prism of a fatphobic media whose only language for fat is steeped in prurience and tragedy, they bring to mind the disability activist slogan: Piss on Pity.

This BBC news web's magazine article is one such related piece. It makes me want to scream, and not just because of the preposterous headless fatty measuring his tummy that they've chosen to illustrate it. Why this picture, picture editors? Why? Why?

Firstly, the promo link (the little link with the picture that leads to the main article) features the text: "Why do some of us hate fat people so much?" What does this text say about the assumed reader of the piece? Who is this "us"? The subtle language in this tiny little link normalises hatred as just one of those things that some of us project.

Secondly, the fat people in the article have their weights listed, but nobody else does, especially not the professionals quoted. I don't understand this. Is it to assure the reader that these people are really, properly fat? Their weights are helpfully given in imperial and metric measures too, what's with that?

Thirdly, there's the reliance on The Expert to explain things for us. Unfortunately Obesity Experts have little expertise in my life, especially not the 'specialist' at a 'university hospital' and 'honorary medical director' Dr Ian Campbell of Weight Concern, who is trotted out once again to give his moronic and ill-informed comments. Whilst hand-wringing about stigma (which has nothing to do with his work in 'Obesity' apparently) he is quoted here as suggesting that hatred is innate. "The result is the people who need the most help don't seek it. They are left feeling guilty and undeserving." This seems compassionate at first sight but the kind of help he's talking about is very limited because his only frame of reference for fat people is as medical management projects. Nowhere is the suggestion that help could involve getting some rad fatty politics, for example, or finding fat community that isn't tied to weight loss in some way. And I don't feel guilty or undeserving of Weight Concern's attention, they can sod off, they're part of the problem but are unable to see it. (The BBC links to Weight Concern too, imagine the traffic they must get, lovely free publicity).

Lastly, this article is loaded with clichés. 'Some people are fat and happy,' 'people who hate fat people do so because they hate themselves'. Fatness, bodies, embodiment, hatred, stigma, these are all ferociously complicated parts of human experience. This kind of journalistic simplification reduces the complexity into meaninglessness.

Snarking on the media has become the main focus of much fat activism, usually without any knowledge of how media is produced. I find this tiresome, a dead end that rarely translates into action, and an activity that makes me feel shitty and powerless. Anyone can bitch about the abundance of crappy representations of fat people, it's so easy to do, but how can the situation be made better? What would it take to improve fat representation? Is such a thing even possible given the vast spread of media today?

Creating media toolkits and training for journalists might be an option, but these too are problematic in terms of whose interests they represent, or their relationship to censorship. Having our own Experts might also help, but the activism that is meaningful to me supports the democratisation of expertise, The Expert is a paradigm that doesn't work for me, which means that having a handful of representatives is also going to be a sensitive issue. Taking control of media and making our own media makes sense to me, though this will likely always be a small-scale endeavour.

Is it possible for mainstream media to get it right? Just so you know, Jezebel.com has been producing some righteous fat-related content lately, thanks possibly to an alliance with Kate Harding, they even have a fatpanic tag, though as usual don't bother reading the comments.

Rad Fatty: Erin Remick

Her best friends are a dinosaur and a cat, and when she looks in the mirror she sees a demented panda. Welcome to Erin Remick's all-singing all-dancing world o' fat activism. Fat Dinosty, her beautiful video series, has enjoyed screenings to appreciative audiences in the US, UK and Germany, and her longer work, Embodied Revolution, explores the intersections between bodies, difference, identity and more. I wanted to know more about this gal and her projects, so I sent her an email and asked her some questions. Luckily she replied, and this is what she said.

How did you get into fat stuff?

My lovely friend Nora Bee got me into fat activism. I’m not sure if she realises this but she totally nudged me into my first moments of body consciousness. I like using the word conscious because I feel like it implies deep personal reflection and work versus limiting our thoughts about bodies to what the surrounding culture and media has to say. I’ve always been sceptical of beauty ideals, and have probably been a feminist since I understood what the word equality meant, but I never realised how much all the negative crap* had infiltrated my body until I met Nora.

Growing up, I kept myself above self-hate by using the phrase, "it’s what is on the inside that counts" as my personal mantra. It only took me 20 years to figure out that ignoring my body so I could focus on my spirituality and brains was detrimental to my personal growth (I was a really religious and nerdy kid). Nora really helped me with that by being my friend and one of the first people who ever talked candidly to me about their body without hesitation, question, or insecurity.

My second nudge, which was more like a punch in the gut, came from Gloria Anzaldúa. In high school I had read This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, edited by Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga. It was probably the first feminist book I ever read and it completely shaped my activism and feminist identity. A few years later it was reading Interviews/Entrevistas, a compilation of interviews with Anzaldúa, which drastically shifted the way I thought about my body and all bodies.

Anzaldúa is often noted for her writings about the borderlands but much of her work focusing on bodies and spiritual activism has been overlooked. At a very young age Anzaldúa began to separate herself from her body due to a rare hormonal dysfunction that left her in immense pain starting in early childhood, much of her writing about bodies entails the personal journey of remembering her own.

Her pain and separation felt very real to me and pushed me to go back into my life and essentially remember my own body’s history. A lot of the writing I’ve done for myself and in my zine tends to focus on that concept of remembering. I guess you can say that Anzaldúa reminded me that I exist on this planet in a body. It’s a bit strange when I put it that way, but I think that’s the truth. Everything I do for body activism is because of and for Gloria Anzaldúa and her life’s work. I get kind of choked up thinking about it sometimes because I truly do not know where I would be without her words in my life.

*that’s my eloquent term for fatphobia, queerphobia, sexism, etc etc

How do you explain Fat Dinosty to people who have never seen it?

It’s about a fat girl, me, and a dinosaur, Sebastian, who have lots of fun while deconstructing fatphobia and other bad stuff. Oh, and there is an androgynous kitty too!

Hmmm.. maybe it’s just one of those things you have to see to understand.

What are your plans for Fat Dinosty?

Well, I’m currently writing the next episode and planning to shoot at the end of November if all goes well. I’m actually going to school right now for a video production certificate, so I’m hoping to take advantage of the fancy equipment while I can and maybe even work on Fat Dinosty for a class project, now wouldn’t that be awesome?

I definitely want to keep the series going. My sweetheart is helping me a lot with the writing and that’s a lot of fun. I think we’re a good team.

It’s been so amazing to see the response to the project. That definitely keeps me motivated and upbeat about it all as well. I’m all about bringing more fat positivity into the video realm, and it’s pretty clear that Sebastian is needed in the world!

I'm interested in how you use cuteness in Fat Dinosty, these films are amazingly cute, so cute, insanely cute! Is cuteness a conscious decision, or an activist strategy for you? Tell me about the cuteness!

This question is really funny to me because a few years ago I wrote an alarming amount about cuteness and its relation to fat.

I’ve been called 'cute' all my life but rarely anything else like 'sexy,' 'attractive,' 'hot,' 'beautiful,' etc. In my contemplating, I linked this phenomenon to the idea that my fatness somehow made people think I looked childish and therefore 'cute.' Part of my deconstructing involved a lot of consideration about my chubby hands and how they remind me of little kid hands. I still feel a lot of truth in this theory and often believe I’m not taken seriously because I’m fat, or like someone would like to pat me on the head when I do something good. It’s weird but I totally feel it. For a lot of us fat folks, growing up we are told we will 'grow out of' our 'baby fat.' So, in some weird way, it’s like the world thinks I haven’t grown up when they have because I still have baby fat and therefore haven’t acted enough like an adult to grow out of it.

Maybe Fat Dinosty is my subconscious attempt to debunk this by being ridiculous and grotesquely cute. I like to think of it that way. Plus I really like to draw people in with cute shiny things and then make them learn something or think differently about an issue without realizing it until they’ve been brainwashed. Yes!

Embodied Revolution brings together gender and body activism. What is it that makes these such crucial intersections? How can activist alliances be built around gender and body stuff? I think it can be hard to create bridges between communities where there may already be fat- and/or transphobia.

My own activism greatly focuses on the intersection of oppressions and understanding the importance of this when creating movements for social change. When I originally set out to film Embodied Revolution I intended to focus on interviewing people involved in gender activism but that shifted into something much more inclusive as the project progressed. I learned so much just by talking with people and found within these stories a very simple connection, the body. Over and over it became clear that most of this work focused on healing communities that had experienced discrimination based on physical appearance.

One of the most enlightening comments for me came from Amanda Piasecki, a fat activist who considers herself a body autonomist. She said that fat bodies are generally considered public property and can be commented upon without question or consequence. This concept of bodies being public property can also be applied to folks who fall somewhere outside of the 'appropriate' gender roles set by our culture. The more and more I started to consider this idea, the more I realised how much it applied to a great deal of 'isms.' Our bodies are constantly being judged for one reason or another; skin tone, shape, ability, fat content, sex, symmetry, gender presentation, etc. It seems simple to me that the fight for equality often begins with the body. We all fight, every day, for the right to live in this body we’re given without being questioned, judged, discriminated against, or attacked. That message should ring true to nearly every social justice movement. Although it’s a simple concept it can be a powerful way to connect all these issues on an incredibly tangible and for some, even a spiritual level.

I definitely feel you when you say it’s hard to create bridges within communities when there may be fatphobia/transphobia. I think a lot of this goes back to the idea that bodies are considered public property. We’ve kind of learned from the media, our families, and peers, what bodily things are okay to judge people for. Fat and gender both generally exist in the 'it’s okay to comment and place judgment' category, which can make it incredibly difficult to go into a situation where you know this to be true. Sometimes all I have to do to deal with something like that is to remember how far I’ve come within my own self-acceptance and to remember that no matter what a person might appear to look like, pretty much everyone has experienced body hatred at some point. I think it’s valuable to focus on how our issues are similar and create a common bond with that, then open up about what our needs are as a fat community, or genderqueer community, or what have you.

What needs to happen for people to be able to see this film?

Sadly, I haven’t done a showing in over a year but I’m definitely open to it. I’ve also considered having copies made to sell for a good while but financially I have just not been able to do it. Originally I thought that I would be travelling and showing the film more, but life happens I guess. Part of me thinks that I stopped focusing so much on that simply because I still consider the film a work in progress. It was for my senior thesis and initially I was planning on creating a 20 minute piece but, as things like this often do, it sort of took a life of its own and decided to be much more than that. Because it was for my thesis I ended up having to edit a 90 minute documentary in 6 months, hello stressful and challenging! There are a lot of voices that got left out in the rush and lots of ideas I’d like to revisit in the future. Aside from that, I do believe it’s important that people have access to the film to be able to hear about the social justice work that the amazing interviewees are involved in. I try to keep in touch with anyone who wants copies and figure out a way to get one to them. So yeah, if you want one just email me and I’ll try to work something out!

What kind of films would you like to make in the future?

I really want to make a young adult fantasy movie with queer leading roles. I’m still embarrassingly obsessed with fantasy movies like Return to Oz and The Neverending Story from my childhood. I think working on something like that would be the most magical and thrilling thing.

Other than that, I would love to film more documentaries. Working on Embodied Revolution was so empowering for me and just felt good. Making documentaries completely validates people and what they do/who they are. I read this book once called The Feminine Face of God where this woman interviewed women from a wide range of religions and spiritual practices who were considered spiritual leaders in their communities. In the intro, the author talked about how some of the women cried when she asked them to participate in the book because no one had ever asked them to talk about that part of their lives before. I thought about that a lot when shooting and editing Embodied Revolution. So much passion and work goes unrecognised. I can’t believe the stories and inspiration that exists around me, sometimes it’s too much to even think about!

People fascinate me and making documentaries lets me ask questions that I normally would not or could not ask in a regular setting. I’m a really introverted person but if I have an excuse, like making a documentary, to get to know someone and hear their story then it’s the perfect way to get over my shyness.

I think I am a sociologist at heart so it makes sense that I have such an interest in documentaries. I’d like to go to grad school for sociology at some point and find a way to link my video skills with this study. My main interest is social justice movements, it’s super fascinating to me how they are created and sustained. I can see myself interviewing hundreds of people about their activism and some day making a series about it all. It is very important to me that the stories and personalities involved in creating social change are not lost or forgotten. I definitely feel like documenting the people involved in these movements is going to be a huge part of my life’s work.

What's next for you?

Right now I’m pretty focused on getting through this certificate programme and getting my foot into a door, any door, in the industry. Up until now I’ve mostly been a self-taught filmmaker. It’s been really great learning all of the little details that make video go from being good to amazing. I’m really starting to feel more like an artist in the editing room and that’s a great place to be.

Other than that, my sweetheart and I are working quite diligently on a week-long body image workshop for a conference this summer. It’s something I’ve wanted to do for a long time and it’s wonderful to be working on. We would both like to bring it to even more communities in the future. One of our other collective future hopes in life is that we can buy some land and start a fat positive camp for youth. I’m all about people accepting and loving their bodies from an early age!

What else would you like to say?

Bodies are amazing things, don’t forget to treat yours well and appreciate it every day!

Dirty Love
Erin's YouTube Channel
Embodied Revolution

Chubsters Gang Meeting in Hamburg

Back in March the London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival at the British Film Institute hosted an event called Invasion of the Chubsters. Ines Voigt and Gesine Claus from Hamburg's Lesbisch Schwule Filmtage were there. Ines had the idea of doing something similar in Germany, she emailed me and eventually we worked something out and it all pulled together.

So last week we all held a Chubster Gang Meeting in Hamburg, at a beautiful cinema called B-Movie, as part of the film festival. The event was supported and documented by Bildwechsel, an incredible feminist-queer-trans-etc archive and arts organisation. The screening sold out, some people sat in the aisles, and the atmosphere was warm and friendly and good.

We showed our miniature Chubster video, and some footage from the Fat of the Land. I talked about some film clips of Divine and Marianne Sägebrecht, and showed off a lot. There were some short films by and about fat queer themes, and time for questions and answers afterwards.

There were some subsidiary events too: Butch Husky, Weasel and I were interviewed on the red sofa at the Nachtbar, an amazing semi-squatted after-hours club and hangout that exists for the duration of the festival. It was a hoot. I got interviewed for the super-duper Hugs and Kisses magazine, here's the English version (.pdf, 56kb). The photographs on this post are the ones that Christiane Stephan took of us.

It was a big thrill to attend the festival. I dream of queer-fat culture that isn't in English. I wonder if at last I can start to look east into Europe and beyond, rather than west to the US, for rad fat community and activism. I hope so. The festival hosted some impressive work, and I feel excited by the possibilities for building links in Germany and beyond.

I want to give gigantic and grateful thanks and love to Ines and Gesine for welcoming me and my fellow Chubsters to Hamburg. Thanks also to the excellent Bildwechsel, Hugs and Kisses, and the sexy Filmtage organisers for making our stay a complete delight.

Anti-discrimination rally in London

There's been a bunch of typically annoying news stories today about a rally outside City Hall in London calling for anti-discrimination laws for fat people. This has been spearheaded by Kathryn Szrodecki. I met Kathryn briefly at The Fat of the Land, but don't really know about what she's doing. I'm not sure if this rally is purely a media stunt, I think there's a BBC TV programme in production that Kathryn may or may not be involved with, or if it is something that is likely to generate more substance. Whatever the outcome, hopefully something good, I just wanted to note here that this is happening.

Revisiting What's Eating Gilbert Grape

I watched What's Eating Gilbert Grape again last night for the first time since it came out in 1993. There are spoilers here, don't read any more if that kind of thing bothers you, or go and read a synopsis if you're unfamiliar with it. Anyway, it's a film that gets name-checked because of its cast, made up of people who have gone on to conquer Hollywood, but it's extraordinary to me because of its depiction of a superfat woman in a dramatic role. This is something that never happens, and today I can imagine that same role might easily be cast to a thin actor wearing a fatsuit, for whatever stupid fatphobe war on obesity reason.

I'll get the bits I'm not so keen on out of the way first. Yes, Bonnie Grape is a downbeat character, she's dependent, a sad couch potato, tragic, and has to die, though I'm glad to see that actor Darlene Cates is still going strong at 61. The film is a right old schmaltz-fest, and the incidental music is really annoying. I won't go into the representational stuff about Leonardo DiCaprio's portrayal of a learning disabled person, but that's there too.

But here's what I like: Bonnie is complicated, she can be fierce, she is loving and loved, and just as flawed as any of the other characters. I like the depiction of people's reactions to Bonnie and how they affect her, not just the cruel stares, but also her family's love. I love the authenticity that Cates brings to the role. I think it's amazing that she's neither depicted as virtuous or villainous, and I love the way that her heft and bulk is shown, that seems very real and quite daring to me. The director, Lasse Hallström, picks up on her screen children's shame (and guilt about their shame) about their mother really sensitively. He's not suggesting that all families where there is a fat person experience this, it's localised to the family in the film, and well-observed, I think.

Most of all, I like to think about the Hollywood pretty people in the film, that they act together with Cates. It's appalling to think that they all went on to have amazing acting careers, and hers was more modest in comparison. Yet in this film, here they are, all together, in each others' worlds as equals. A really fat woman is shown as having space and presence in the world, she's not absent or abstract, and she's played by a real fatty. It's a great mix-up, though also a reminder of how little similar representation there is of characters like Bonnie Grape.

The war on obesity as a conflict map

I've been working on a paper about the war on obesity, using conflict analysis models to explore the war a bit, and thinking about the material reality of this metaphorical war. A little while back I wrote a piece about Foresight and their Obesity Maps, which I think are baloney (yeah, that's the official term). But clearly I am just as obsessed as they are in trying to create graphic interpretations of systems and processes.

Anyway, I wanted to share a conflict map I made and would welcome feedback and suggestions. The difference between my work and theirs is that I am able to recognise that there are critical voices in this system, and I don't base my analysis on the idea that fat people are fat because of problems with energy balance. Oh, and I haven't been funded millions of pounds of public money to produce this, which shows, of course, I did it in Word. I'm DIY all the way, baby!

The map shows people, organisations and entities that I think are central to the war on obesity. I've tried to draw the blobs in sizes relative to how I see their power. The stuff that I find myself critical of, as a fat activist, probably don't think of themselves as a unified entity, hence they are grouped within a dotted line. Other lines and arrows indicate relationships, which may or may not be mutual. Lightning bolts indicate a conflict, and these too are directional. The stuff in the bottom left-hand corner are 'shadow organisations', ie things that influence the war but are not chief antagonists. I've put media there because I think that the war on obesity is not their reason for existing, even though they enflame that war in profound ways. Also, hehehe, my word processor does not recognise Bariatric.

What have I missed? How could it be better laid-out? I tried to keep it to A4 but it's a bit of a crush and some of the edges got lost when I pdf-ed it. Any fat-friendly graphic designers in the house want to have a go at it? Tell me what you think. Also, is this an indication that I'm losing my marbles and should get out more often? Hey, don't cross the road, I'm talking to you!

The war on obesity, a conflict map by Charlotte Cooper, Oct 09 (.pdf, 40kb)

Do you think she will answer?

Dear Ms McKeith,

I am writing on behalf of the organising committee of a recent community harvest festival that was held at St Anne's Church on Dean Street, W1.

The purpose of the festival was to come together to celebrate good, seasonal food; to build community, and to have some fun. There was a political element to the event, most of us organising it are gay, and we wanted to make a statement against body fascism in the LGBT community, as well as critique the greed of the diet industry.

Ours was a non-profit event and, as is customary, we wanted our harvest festival to be a time of giving. We set up a collection box so that people could donate items they felt that they no longer had a use for. We wanted to encourage people to stop dieting and worrying about their weight, and to embrace wellness instead. People donated old diet books and weight loss paraphernalia.

Over 200 people attended the harvest festival. We held a vote to see who should be the recipient of the collection box and it was decided collectively that you would be an appropriate beneficiary because you are a key figurehead for the diet industry in the UK.

I have tried to find a mailing address for you, so that I can send you the collection, but you appear to be somewhat elusive!* Please could you let me know which is the best address for you. Better still, it would be wonderful if we could arrange a handing-over ceremony. Are you game?

Yours sincerely,

Charlotte Cooper
Co-organiser of The Fat of the Land: A Queer Chub Harvest Festival

* She has two addresses registered for McKeith Research Ltd, one is a commercial mailbox, the other is in a gated road in Hampstead (posh area of London, for non-Londoners reading this). I sent this letter to both, and her agent too.

The Chubsters are hosting a gang meeting in Hamburg

Are you likely to be in Northern Germany at the end of the month? Yes? Well come to our Chubsters Gang Meeting at the Hamburg lesbian and gay film festival. It's going to be a hoot.

Chubster stonemasonry

Yes, it is real. It was made by Thomas Appleton, and he is available for commissions. Get in touch if you'd like his details.

The Fat of the Land, mixed spaces, intersections and revolution

The Fat of the Land: A Queer Chub Harvest Festival is an event I co-organised, which happened in London at the weekend.

The Fat of the Land is a secular queerifying of a traditional harvest festival, with food and gratitude, but we used this format to promote fat politics amongst London's queer and trans communities, and created intersections between various entities, such as DIY culture, riot grrrl, fat studies, Health At Every Size, radical gardeners, slow food proponents, punk, craftivism, and more. We had minimal resources to pull it together, but plenty of enthusiasm and help from people. Around 200 people came to the event. It was a massive success.

You can find out more about The Fat of the Land, and the build-up to it, over on the dedicated blog, http://queerchub.blogspot.com (and you'll understand why it has been somewhat quiet over here recently).

My co-organisers and I come from different disciplines and communities, although there is a lot of overlap between us. We all had different ideas concerning what the Fat of the Land was about. This is usually the kind of thing that causes a lot of friction, and I have seen identity politics destroy organisations, time and time again. But instead of trying to force it into one kind of shape, that suited only a limited number of people, we had the luxury of being able to go with what we wanted (for me, it was about building community, sparking ideas, expressing queer-fat culture, and having some fun). This meant that the event was multi-dimensional and expansive, and it showed.

I think that it is good to mix things up, it makes things strong. There were people at the Fat of the Land who I doubt would ever show their faces at more orthodox gatherings of rad fatties. This is partly because they would not be welcomed, they might have the 'wrong' gender, or body size, or history, for example; but also because they might feel that such spaces are irrelevant to them. But the Fat of the Land had many intersecting points and ended up being a dynamic place where there could be a positive meeting of cultures and viewpoints. It ended up being bigger than any one group could have created by themselves. I was delighted to see, for example, a venerable activist from one sphere engaged in a long conversation with an up and coming fat activist; such a meeting would be unlikely elsewhere, and is sure to have sparked new ideas and relationships. It was like the Studio 54 of fat liberation!

These are some of the reasons why I do not support closed spaces, or segregated space. I think that mixing things up can be risky, but that with mutual respect it can be amazingly powerful. I believe that many people must have an investment in fat stuff for extensive positive social change to occur, and that making things welcoming and fun is part of the work of generating people's interest in the issues.

I accept that there are fears of 'the message' being watered down or lost by people who 'don't get it', but I think these fears are overstated. Being fat itself tells you nothing about how a person is, attitude is what counts. Nobody can own or control what people think about fat or any of its intersections, we should accept that people are going to come to this stuff with their own histories and ideas, which we might think about working with, rather than fighting against. I think that there is room in the movement for everyone, we can come to it with our quirks and idiosyncrasies, and that we don't all have to be reading from the same page.

Eat Me! QueerFoodPorn: Call For Stuff!

Eat Me! is Rad Fatty Corinna Tomrley's new QueerFoodPorn zine project. Alright!

Here's the call for stuff:

We are looking for saucy and scrumptious submissions for a new queer zine on the topic of eating, seduction and beyond. Our remit is pretty flexible within these topics so feel free to play fast and loose with those themes!

This zine has an insatiable appetite and will be made to make your mouth water!

We want sticky-fingered fiction, non-fiction, poetry and any other text pieces, plus art cartoons, illustration – all the usual zine goodies!

Max 650 words
B&W A5 or smaller
Photocopyable

Submissions should be high in calories and steaminess and naughtiness and queerfoodfun! NB – sweet or savoury are equally welcome. We’re not adverse to a little salty treat…

Submit all queries & finished pieces to: eatmezine@rocketmail.com

Deadline: 30 November '09

We look forward to getting our sugary paws on your stuff! Don’t be shy... Come on and butter our muffins ♥

Thanks in advance, with a cherry on top xxx

http://eatmezine.blogspot.com/

'The Obese': Abstracting and Absenting Fat People

I was mooching around the library at Coventry University recently, I came across Fat Economics: nutrition, health, and economic policy by Mario Mazzocchi, W. Bruce Traill, and Jason F. Shogren (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), and gave it a flick. It made my hair stand on end.

Call me weird but I'm strangely fascinated by high level theory books and reports about obesity policy. I think what fascinates me is how far an idea can go, how rarefied the discourse can become, how unselfconscious people are when they write or opine pretentiously and pompously about fat. Adding to my fascination with accounts such as Mazzocchi et al's is this kind of Emperor's New Clothes effect, that all this stuff sounds reasonable, although overblown, but then you realise it is based on a really wobbly foundation, that is: fat = energy balance, fat = dangerous dysfunction, and fatness = problem to be managed and eradicated. The minute you question these fundaments is the minute that works like Mazzocchi's, or Foresight, lose credibility because they don't critique their basic premise.

Unfortunately the authors of these works do not question those beliefs. Even more unfortunately, they get to be published by extremely well-regarded academic publishing houses, or by official government channels. This is one of the processes that keeps problematic ideas about what it is to be fat in circulation, almost beyond criticism.

The main thing that I want to talk about here though is about how works like Fat Economics make fat people abstract. These are works that do not include accounts by fat people, they are not written by fat people, and fat people have absolutely no voice in these works. It's like the literary equivalent of the headless fatty. Such works refer to fat people as 'the obese', a term which treats fat people, like me, as a nebulous blob of Otherness, with no power or thoughts of our own. Research like this contributes to the notion of fat people as passive and stupid, people whose lives need mediating and explaining by thin 'experts' who arrogantly eye us as interesting scum in a petri dish.

Standpoint Theory takes the position that the best people to talk about a subject are the people directly affected by it. As a general rule of thumb I think this is pretty good, although it's worth bearing in mind that many fat people have internalised cultural messages about the awfulness of obesity, and that fat people are a diverse group rather than one with a generic perspective. It also needs stating that body size is not a good measure of where someone is coming from, attitude counts for a lot and, certainly, there are some very articulate and sound thin people who are currently producing excellent work around fatness. So it's complicated, as ever, just adding some 'voices of the obese' to the mix might not be what is really needed here, a fundamental paradigm shift is what is actually required.

Fat Economics makes universalist claims but only tells part of the story because it does not recognise fat people as having agency or a legitimate voice, and it doesn't seem to take a critically reflexive view of its own claims (I only skimmed the book, so maybe there's a sentence somewhere, but I didn't see it). Imagine how differently it would read if it did take critical perspectives of obesity into account, or was able to own and name its own limited perspective rather than assuming it to be universally true.

What if the authors of Fat Economics had actually talked to some fat activists, or were Fat Studies scholars themselves? What kind of questions would they have been able to ask? What economic questions would you like to ask? Here are some of mine: How much does body hatred cost? What is the financial impact of fatphobia and discrimination against fat people? What is the cost of a Health At Every Size programme compared to a weight loss programme? How much is spent on promoting fatphobia? And on it goes, useful questions that may never be answered because of the limitations of the academy, the wilful ignorance of its researchers, and the lack of political impetus for funding such work.