Obesity Timebomb

Headless fatties, the visual cliché that will not die

2012-01-30T14:26:00.002Z

My friend Substantia Jones recently shared a link to an interview with Cleo Berry in the New York Times: Imagine His Shock. His Leg Had Vanished. Berry is an actor who posed for some pictures a while back. To his astonishment his image has just turned up with one of his legs Photoshopped off in a health promotion campaign about diabetes.

It's not just the cropping out of a leg that makes this story significant. The advert is clearly part of a headless fatty tradition in advertising. I imagine Berry has been presented in this way because of anonymity, the business conditions under which Berry's image can be used and licensed, wanting to give the figure in the advert universal appeal. Yet headlessness produces a distancing rather than identification when viewers look at a picture of a headless fat person, and this campaign relies on stereotypes, which are also dehumanising. It presents the holy trinity of fat, consumption and disease in an image that is pure abjection and, I suspect, does more for fat-shaming than it does for health promotion. It hardly paints a generous picture of disability either. I haven't come across any commentary yet about the way that race, gender and class are also significant parts of the image.

New York City's Department of Health and Mental Hygiene sidestepped the issue of representation in the New York Times article to say that the advert is purely about the impact of diabetes. They have little interest in engaging with how they use images of fat people. This is not very ethical, you'd think that an organisation invested in public health would care about this sort of thing. This response shows that the use of headless fatties is not restricted to the worst of the tabloid media, it's a damaging visual cliché used by public service organisations too.

The quote in the article from Howard Wolfson, about having disability represented by someone who is not disabled, is naïve, in my opinion. Disabled activists have long campaigned against having able-bodied people represent them. Realness is important because it brings depth and humanity with it.

It's interesting to hear Berry talking about how the picture came to be, his attitude towards it, the depressing effects it might have on his career which, as a fat black actor looking for roles, is probably pretty tough as it is. He says a lot about fat and representation in a short interview, about money, power, the trade in images; his account is really rich.

I think that all fat people posing for photographs should try and be aware of how their images might be used, and make amendments to photo releases if they're concerned at all about being a future poster child for abjection. At the time the pictures were taken, Berry had no understanding of what it meant to have your image used for a stock photo company, or to sign a release agreeing that your image could be manipulated. I'm grateful that he's spoken up about what it's like to be depicted in this way. It reminds me of how powerful it is when people have opportunities to refuse dehumanisation, how speaking up can expose the systemic and seemingly overwhelming ways in which people are silenced. I wish that could happen more often.

Fat Studies in Wellington and Oakland calls for papers

2012-01-26T12:42:00.000Z

Calls for papers have just been announced for two Fat Studies gatherings that are taking place this year.

Fat Studies: Reflective Intersections
Massey University, Wellington, New Zealand
12-13 July 2012

This conference is being organised by Cat Pausé and Samantha Murray is delivering the keynote.

Key areas of interest for abstract submissions include, but are not limited to:

Intersections between Fat Studies and other academic disciplines
Interdisciplinary work on fat, fat identity, and fat embodiment
Fat activism as intersection
Useful methodologies for intersectionality in Fat Studies teaching and research
Theoretical frameworks related to Fat Studies intersectionality and interdisciplinary work
Critical reflections on intersectionality within Fat Studies

The abstract submission deadline is 31 March.

More information: Fat Studies: Reflective Intersections

Fat Studies Interest Group
The National Women's Studies Association (NWSA)
Oakland, California, USA
8-11 November

Papers on any topic at the intersection of women's studies/feminism/womanism/gender/sexuality and fat studies will be considered.

At minimum, your submission should fall under one of the following themes for NWSA 2012:

Revolutionary Futures
Traveling Theory
Social Networks, Power, and Change
Decolonising Knowledge
Creative Awakenings

While this is an open call, topic suggestions from last year's meeting include:

Fat intersections (including race, nationality, disability, sexuality, appearance/beauty)
Fatopias/Fat utopias
Transnational fat bodies (immigration, globalisation)
Teaching Fat Studies (professorial bodies, student bodies, resistance)
Knowledge-sharing/de-colonising
Fat feminist research methods (including role of the researcher body)
Fat feminists theorising the body
Fat performance/performing fatness/fat icons
Fat activism and feminism/Fatosphere

13 February is the submission deadline. Send the following to Michaela A. Null and Candice Buss.

Name, institutional affiliation, address, email, phone
NWSA Theme your paper fits under (and fat studies topic area/s if yours fits any of the above)
Title for your talk, a one-page, double-spaced abstract in which you lay out your topic and its relevance to this session
AND a 100 word truncated abstract

Papers should last 15 minutes, and there will be questions afterwards.

NB. In order to present you need to register for the conference and be a member of the NWSA - it all costs money, baby!

NWSA

Judith Stein and Meridith Lawrence: Fat Feminists Share Historic Activist Recordings

2012-01-23T12:08:00.008Z

Meridith Lawrence and Judith Stein

Last year I had the great good fortune to spend a bit of time with Judith Stein and Meridith Lawrence at their beautiful home in Massachusetts.

Stein and Lawrence are partners who pioneered fat activism in and around Boston in the early 1980s through support groups and gatherings called, variously, Boston Fat Liberation, Boston Area Fat Liberation, Boston Area Fat Feminist Liberation, and Boston Area Fat Lesbians. Stein was responsible for a slew of publications about fat, lesbian feminism and Jewish identity, and her New Haggadah is included in the collection at the National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia. She was also instrumental in politicising the Boston Women's Health Book Collective around fat, which led to the inclusion of fat feminism in Our Bodies Ourselves. Stein introduced many dykes to fat feminism through their presence at the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival, and through collaborations with other fat activists in the US.

During my visit, the pair shared with me recordings of a couple of radio shows they made with other contributors in 1984 and 1985 called 'Plain Talk About Fat' and '30 Big Minutes With Fat Liberation' respectively. These shows were produced for International Women's Day by a radio station at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Stein and Lawrence permitted me to make digital versions of the show for people to download and listen to.

Plain Talk About Fat - 1984 (.mp3 9.3mb)

30 Big Minutes With Fat Liberation - 1985 (.mp3 13mb)

I don't know about you but I find these shows beautiful, moving, funny, right-on, and a sheer pleasure to listen to. The team's creative use of radio is gorgeous, I like the non-professional nature of it, it feels very proto-DIY culture, the rough edges are what makes these recordings so special, and the lively atmosphere is delightfully contagious.

I think many fat activists today are alienated from historical fat activisms, especially pieces of work that were produced by radical lesbian feminists, and which formed the backbone of the movement for years. These recordings give a great idea of what fat feminist culture sounded like at the time, and offer hints about the forms that fat activist cultural production might take.

I'm very grateful to the lesbian feminists, many of whom were also Jewish, who helped develop and shape fat activism in its earlier incarnations. I offer deep gratitude too to Stein and Lawrence, not just for their hospitality towards me, but also for helping to build a movement that has had such a great influence on my life.

Selected publications

Stein, J. (1981) 'Fat Liberation: No Losers Here', Sojourner, 6:9, 8.

Stein, J., Sears, R., Mitchell, P., Newmark, R. & Purnell, J. (1981) 'The Political History of Fat Liberation: An Interview', The Second Wave, 3: 32-37.

Stein, J. (1982) Telling Bobbeh Meisehs: Notes on Identity and the Creation of Jewish Lesbian Culture, Cambridge, MA: Bobbeh Meisehs Press.

Stein, J. (1983) 'On Getting Strong: Notes From a Fat Woman, in Two Parts', in: Schoenfielder, L. & Wieser, B. (eds.) Shadow on a Tightrope: Writings by Women on Fat Oppression. Iowa City: Aunt Lute, 106-110.

Stein, J. (1984) A New Haggadah: A Jewish Lesbian Seder. Cambridge MA: Bobbeh Meisehs Press.

Stein, J. (1986). Get Your Foot Off My Neck: Fat Liberation. Gay Community News, 28 June 1986.

Stein, J. (1997) 'Making A Big Splash: The Pleasures of Water Aerobics' [Online]. Berkeley, CA: Radiance. Available: http://www.radiancemagazine.com/issues/1997/spring97_jstein.html [Accessed 23 January 2012].

Plain Talk About Fat and 30 Big Minutes With Fat Liberation by Judith Stein, Meridith Lawrence et al is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://obesitytimebomb.blogspot.com. This means you can share these recordings as long as you credit them, but you can't change them or profit from them. If you want to talk about licencing issues, contact Charlotte Cooper at this blog and she will put you in touch with the people who made the original recordings.

Thanks to Simon Murphy for help with digitising the audio.

Fat Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Body Weight and Society

2012-01-20T11:47:00.001Z

I'm absolutely delighted to announce that the first edition of Fat Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Body Weight and Society has been published. I am a member of the editorial board for this journal, and my article about queering fat activism through my Queer and Trans Fat Activist Timeline project is published in the first issue.

Fat Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Body Weight and Society is, in academic-speak, a peer-reviewed interdisciplinary journal. Peer-review is the gold standard of academic publishing, it means that each article has been through a rigorous process of review by other people who work in the field so that it represents high quality work, basically the cutting edge.

Unfortunately, like most academic journals, you can't go and buy this at a shop. It's available to students and scholars through academic and major libraries, part of a wider process of keeping ideas away from the plebs, or at least away from people who can't afford tuition fees. Non-students can buy articles or issues, but it can be pricey. If you want to read this journal and can't get access, drop me a line and I'll do my best to help.

Fat Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Body Weight and Society is not the first journal to explore more radical views of fatness. Let's not forget the important work by Frances Berg and the Healthy Weight Journal, and later Jon Robison with Health At Every Size. But what Fat Studies does is shift critical and scholarly discussions of fatness out of health or 'Obesity Epidemic' and into a much broader arena where things like culture, community, rights, embodiment can be addressed. This new publication is an important moment in developing ideas about what it is to be fat and, unlike the odd conference or course, it's ongoing and international.

Let's hear loud applause for Esther Rothblum, the journal's editor, and also the co-editor of The Fat Studies Reader. Her commitment to generating new dialogue about fatness is second-to-none. If you're not excited about this journal then you probably don't even know you're born!

Call for contributions: Fat Mook

2012-01-19T14:35:00.000Z

Jackie Wykes and Jennifer Lee are editing a mook - a hybrid magazine-book - about fat. They're looking for contributors, so get busy.

Everything you could possibly want to know about the project is here.

Come and see me in real life

2012-01-17T10:38:00.000Z

I've added some new events to the Forthcoming Events page, just so you know.

Burger Queen is back!

2012-01-17T10:03:00.000Z

Great news! There's only a month and a half of wintery misery to go until Scottee opens the house for a second round of Burger Queen.

Why should you care? Ten Reasons to Love Burger Queen

Dates, times, tickets and entry forms are available at Burger Queen of course.

Do not miss it!

The YMCA's Body Confidence campaign and the All Party Parliamentary Group on Body Image

2012-01-12T10:55:00.001Z

The YMCA is campaigning on behalf of 'body confidence' in the UK and is supporting a number of meetings of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Body Image, which started in November and will continue through to the end of February. These meetings are open to the public and involve expert testimony from representatives of academia, mental health, youth and education services, media, fitness, fashion, health and cosmetic surgery industries.

Those not able to attend are invited to give written evidence to the All Party Parliamentary Group on Body Image via an online survey. I submitted my response to this yesterday and encourage others to do the same.

I support this campaign in vague and general terms, I'd rather it existed than not, but I have many misgivings about it. I'm offering this critique not because I think this work should go away, but because it could and should be very much stronger and more emancipatory. Here's a brief explanation of why I'm wary:

There will be no discussion with health professionals or representatives from the National Health Service other than psychiatrists and psychologists. The hectoring use of BMI charts, plans to encourage everyone from chiropodists to pharmacists to 'helpfully' enquire about your diet and exercise every time you pick up some medicine or get your bunions seen to, and the public-private partnerships being set up between the NHS and weight loss companies would suggest that this is a significant area that affects people's embodied self esteem.

I'm assuming that this group has been omitted because they don't represent the more faddish side of weight loss, but this sets up a false distinction between good and bad weight loss; some doctors advocate very low calorie diets for fat people, for example. The campaign's website talks about problematic 'quick fixes' for body image anxiety, including cosmetic surgery, steroids, and fad diets, but it does not attack weight loss in general as something that is likely to screw up your sense of body image. This echoes a previous attempt to use the British government to support an anti-diet agenda, which was tabled by Mary Evans Young in the early 1990s with the support of Alice Mahon MP. In that instance diets were attacked as detrimental to people's health and wellbeing, but weight loss was deemed acceptable for 'the obese'. Presumably dieting or poor body image is only a problem if you are normatively-sized, everyone else is fair game.

There's no mention in the campaign of alternative paradigms that are already well-established, including fat activism and Health At Every Size. No representatives of these models have been invited to speak, it is as though they don't exist when actually there's a wealth of material and expertise and experience to draw on. The lack of connection to a wider context for this sort of work makes the campaign appear superficial, ahistorical and self-aggrandising to me.

Similarly, the role of dominant ideologies are omitted. Capitalism and neoliberalism are prime reasons why so many of us do not feel at home in our bodies. Racism and oppression in general have a massive part to play in it too. Fatphobia is at the heart of why kids are measured and dieted before they've learned to tie their shoelaces. Governmentality and medicalisation are surely implicated. The broader picture is not being addressed in this campaign, instead there is a pathetic insistence that the red herrings of 'celebrity culture' or 'the media' (which is never defined, and around which we all become passive dupes rather than active consumers or producers, or involved in any other relationship to it - and yes, the bombarded by images cliché is invoked) are the problem.

The online survey through which stakeholders are invited to give written evidence to the All Party Parliamentary Group on Body Image is poorly designed and full of leading questions, sometimes you only get a line to answer a fantastically complicated question, for example, which hints at the campaign's lack of understanding of the issues involved. The language and assumptions behind some of the questions is fatphobic, for example "What are the links, if any, between obesity, eating disorders and poor body image?" implies that the three concepts are more than likely linked and stems from a particular popular discourse of fat as a product of compulsive eating, an immature coping mechanism. Because it's a government platform, and this particular government is all about a neoliberal reduction of state funding, there are many questions about the economic impact of negative body image, which can get quite wearing, as if that's the only kind of impact that matters.

The YMCA is synonymous with gym culture, are they really the best organisation to advise on developing stronger strategies around health and self-image? Gok Wan endorses the campaign, truly a turn-off for me given his own weight maintenance regime. The YMCA's interest in the campaign is to "reduce body image as a barrier to participation" which suggests that they are looking at a business case as a rationale for this work. But I don't want good body image to be a means of transforming me into a more eager consumer of gym memberships, that's not why I do the work I do, my activism is anti-capitalist! Likewise, although I see fat activism as a broad endeavour where many kinds of activities can be sustained, including All Party Parliamentary Groups, I am an anarchist and government lobbying is not my preferred location for social change.

And what does body image mean anyway? The campaign's website defines it as "our idea of how our body looks and is perceived by others" but this is so vague, faux-apolitical and unrooted as to be meaningless.

Finally, you know what? There's not a single fat person in the promotional imagery. Bah.

Be Lovely and Slim in 2012

2011-12-31T16:46:00.001Z

I thought I'd welcome in the most tedious, fatphobic and diet-filled month of the year with a little film I made in 2009, which premiered at the London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival in 2010. Old news! Oh well.

It's called Lovely and Slim and is based on a song that came about when I really tried hard to think of the benefits of being thin – sorry, 'slim', apparently the polite way of saying thin. When I was growing up, 'lovely and slim' was the opposite concept to 'fat and ugly'. I hope that I have subverted the former and reclaimed the latter with this little film.

Sorry about the online vid quality, I need to learn more about formats and sharing and whatnot. Oh dear!

Lovely and Slim lyrics – sing along!

It's great to be slim
You can wear tiny things
If there's a gap in the wall
You'll get through if you're small
It's great to be slim

It's great to be slim
You can keep in trim
You can go on a bender
And wake up still slender
It's great to be slim

Chorus:
Slim, slim, lovely and slim

It's great to be slim
When you're down at the gym
The people who see you
They all wanna be you
It's great to be slim

It's great to be slim
You can fit right in
When the weather is sunny
You can show off your tummy
It's great to be slim

It's great to be slim
It proves you're not dim
It's ever so clever
To be light as a feather
It's great to be slim

It's great to be slim
If you're not, you're a crim
With a low BMI
You can reach for the sky
It's great to be slim

My beautiful legs
My elegant neck
My delicate wrists
My tight upper arms
My willowy hips
My internal organs
ALL LOVELY AND SLIM

Original music composed by Simon Murphy
Original lyrics and performance by Simon Murphy, Charlotte Cooper and Kay Hyatt

Body Love Revolutionaries Telesummits 2012

2011-12-30T09:38:00.000Z

I'm taking part in a series of telesummits called Body Love Revolutionaries, about fat culture and community, organised by Golda Poretsky, which runs more or less weekly from 31 January to 28 February 2012.

On 23 February I'm going to be talking about fat and queer and, more than likely, femme with gorgeous gussies Bevin Branlandingham and Jessica Jarchow. We'll be online at 7pm GMT (use a Time Zone Converter to find out what that means for you).

What's a telesummit? I've never participated in one before but I think it's like a conference phone call where anybody can ring in but where there are invited guests who will say their piece and who will be available for questions and discussion. This particular series of telesummits is accessible via Skype, and possibly other free internet telephony applications, which means that people participating internationally and long-distance needn't rack-up huge phone bills. The downside for people outside North America, where the telesummits are being organised, is that the time difference can be quite brutal. Recordings of the telesummits will be available free for 24 hours after they take place, as long as you register, and then for a fee on a sliding scale.

Register for access details at http://www.bodyloverevolution.com

Here's the schedule for the rest of the telesummits, with a whole mess of links. All of the times are in Eastern Standard Time, use the Time Zone Converter link above for local times.

Tuesday 31 January, 8pm EST
Activism
Peggy Howell, Amanda Levitt and Marilyn Wann.

Thursday 2 February, 7pm EST
Health
Linda Bacon and Ragen Chastain.

Tuesday 7 February, 8pm EST
Fatshion
Marie Denee, Rachel Kacenjar and Yuliya Raquel.

Thursday 9 February, 8pm EST
Sex
Hanne Blank and Virgie Tovar.

Thursday 16 February, 8pm EST
Blogging
Marianne Kirby, Margitte Leah Kristjansson, and Brian Stuart.

Tuesday 21 February, 8pm EST
Fitness
Jeanette DePatie and Anna Guest-Jelley.

Thursday 23 February, 3pm EST
Fatness/Queerness
Bevin Branlandingham, Jessica Jarchow and me.

Tuesday 28 February, 8pm EST
Politics/History
Paul Campos and Amy Erdman Farrell.

You can add yourself to the Facebook Event and tell all your friends, and Tweet about it with the hashtag #blrev if you're so inclined. Golda's got it all covered.

Allyson Mitchell's fat feminist art and me

2011-12-21T16:26:00.001Z

I won't lie, xmas makes me feel mentally ill and if I smoked crack I would be huffing on a big fat pipe of it right now. In past years I've published a Hits and Shits list on this blog in an attempt to create some kind of temporal narrative about fat. This year I've given up.

Instead I'm going to mark the end of the year by sharing a drawing that one of my favourite artists, Allyson Mitchell, has produced. Allyson is one of the founders of the now defunct fat activist group Pretty, Porky and Pissed Off, who reclaimed the streets of Toronto a while back. She's also an assistant Professor in the School of Women's Studies at York University. Oh yeah, and she co-owns the Feminist Art Gallery (FAG) and is an accomplished artist in her own right. I've added that last but actually it should go first.

So, picture the scene, I'm sitting at my computer, contemplating xmas-related suicide, and up pops an email from Allyson. She's attached a drawing that features me. The email says that I am in the middle and the image comes from a photo shoot I did for FaT GiRL in 1996. It goes on to say that the other figures are also based on women in FaT GiRL and that I was the inspiration for the piece.

The drawing is part of a project started by Ulrike Müller, who I don't know and have never met, that Allyson has worked on. Allyson wrote in her email: "Ulrike took the titles of images that are archived in the Lesbian Herstory Archives in Brooklyn. Artists were asked to draw an image that represents the title in some way without seeing the actual image. I randomly got the title 'A Group of Naked Women...Very Curvy' – what luck!!!!"

It's now a few days later and I'm still trying to work it out. I feel very happy and proud that something I did a long time ago can be part of something really excellent today, it makes me reflect on the importance not just of developing fat queer cultural production, but also the value of using our bodies within the things we make. I love Allyson's art and am absolutely delighted to feature in it. Thinking about this drawing makes me feel as though I'm swirling around in a whirlpool of beautiful things that mean a great deal to me: queer archives and especially the Lesbian Herstory Archives, fat dykes, activism, Allyson's art, FaT GiRL, wooooo! The picture reminds me of an incredible time in my life when I kind of bloomed into my queer-fat self after a long time of feeling frozen. Playing naked on a Californian beach exemplifies that period so well. It's also amazing to see my nudey fat body there, I'm feeling a lot of self-love about that, and that's a precious feeling for people like me. Not only that, but it's amongst the other bodies too; I know that I couldn't have inhabited that emotional-embodied-social-political space without the others. It feels really fantastic to see myself acknowledged as part of this amazing fat feminist movement, in ways that I relate to, by someone who knows and who is also implicated in it herself. I love the luck and randomness of how the image came about. It gives me chills of happiness to think about other people seeing this work as it becomes circulated in new spaces that Ulrike is developing, and it becoming part of other people's consciousness.

Woah, head explodes.

Image courtesy of Allyson Mitchell

Queer Fat Performer film: Go Big or Go Home

2011-12-10T15:13:00.000Z

I'm in this. Take a look and support the project if you can.

http://queerfatperformerfilm.wordpress.com

Fattist and the fat and proud brigade - language and the movement

2011-12-08T13:04:00.000Z

My friend sizeoftheocean posted on Twitter the other day that she really dislikes the term 'fattist'. I also dislike this term and hoped that she, being very smart, would be able to shed light on my own ire. She said that it has a defensive tone to it and is used by people who are not otherwise into fat stuff. I agree. My own dislike also extends to its linguistic construction – yes, my snobbery knows no bounds – sexist, racist, classist, disablist/ablist, heterosexist, fattist, right? You'd think it would work because it's consistent an allies fat with other kinds of identities. But I still can't get on board with it when I have 'fat hatred,' 'fatphobia,' 'fat oppression' as means of naming the same sort of thing, concepts that are rooted in histories and cultures of fat activism, rather than something that seems tacked-on. I feel similarly about 'looksist,' which to me seems too shallow a way of describing the systemic marginalisation of people who represent difference; it's not just about the act of looking or one's 'looks'.

I've been thinking about other terms that people use to describe what I think of as 'fat stuff,' or simply 'the movement,' or even just 'fat.' 'Size acceptance' and 'fat acceptance' are popular, though they are not for me because I find them too limited; I think self-acceptance is fine, but social acceptance is not enough for me, I'm more invested in social change. I want to change things more than I want to be accepted, in fact I realise that acceptance is not something that motivates me very much at all. 'Size' or 'weight' are too euphemistic for me. I tend to use 'fat activism,' sometimes 'fat politics,' occasionally the more restrictive 'fat rights,' but often feel that I could do with more language here.

As I've been researching, I've noticed a few references to 'fat pride.' Like fattist, these tend to be made pejoratively by people who feel burned by the movement in some way, and/or by people who would be less likely to understand the association between fat pride and queer or LGBT pride movements. Here pride is a slur, fat people shouldn't be proud because it connotes arrogance, the valuing of one type over another, smugness. In this context the ultimate goal is for fat to be stripped of any value, good or bad, just let it be what it is. I agree with this to some extent, but I also think that even if there were no negative connotations to fatness, I would probably seek out some kind of pride in myself, a pride that is associated with self-respect, pleasure, confidence, feeling as though you have value. As it is, fat pride is a useful concept in the current climate, which looks unlikely to change very much any time soon, and where there are many daily attempts to stomp these feelings out of fat people.

Again, 'the fat and proud movement,' or 'the fat pride movement' are not terms that I would use these days, perhaps I have become sensitised because of these attacks. I'll never forget an interview in which Shelley Bovey talks about "the fat and proud brigade", and compares the movement to fascists. I've wondered if this is a reference to me because of the title of my first book, in which I expressed misgivings about some of her work. Brigade is an interesting addition, it implies some kind of officious, blundering Dad's Army set-up; a group of pompous buffoons. Whilst there are many pompous buffoons in fat activism, including me, not to mention other extremely annoying people, this description doesn't really fit the diversity of the movement, it is a barbed caricature.

We could probably talk about preferred terms for how people think about fat until we are blue in the face. I agree that language creates meaning and that there is a lot of language in the world that denigrates fat embodiment, there are many terms I dislike. But policing language is problematic because the contexts in which words are used vary so greatly, being forceful around good and bad words is unacceptable, it's too close to censorship. Some words work for some people and not for others, where I feel uncomfortable about language I try and look for the intention rather than blame the form of the words; often people are just a little ignorant about fat and language. What I want is more words rather than fewer, I think the more fat language there is, the easier it becomes to think and talk about fat.

Are there any linguists in the area? Can you illuminate any of this?

References

Brooks, L. (2002) 'Size Matters' [Online]. Available: http://www.shelleybovey.com/frameset.html?/sizematters.html [Accessed 9 March 2010].

Cooper, C. (1998) Fat & Proud: The Politics of Size, London: The Women's Press.

Talking about fat and sexual harassment

2011-11-25T14:01:00.000Z

Twice in the past few weeks I've been grabbed in the street by strangers. The first stranger grabbed my arm and whispered "Ohh, big girl" at me as though he was sharing a sexy secret. The second, last night crept up behind me and as he walked past brushed his dick against my hand, grabbed my waist and said "Hello gorgeous" quietly in my ear and walked away. Apart from these incidents it's been a while since I've noticed anyone harassing me when I'm out and about, I felt that I could walk down the street like anyone else.

In both cases I pulled myself away and told the strangers to fuck off. Nobody is allowed to touch me without my consent, it's a relief that I know this deeply. But I've also found myself following a disturbing line of thought: how have I attracted this attention? Is it my clothes? Something about how I walk? Why is it happening now? What have I done? It's depressing how easily I fall into the belief that I must be responsible for someone's unwanted intrusion.

I am a catch. There are good reasons why someone's head might turn to look at me. This knowledge has been hard fought for over decades, and continues to be a battleground of sorts, and maybe always will be. I am also an ordinary-looking dyke in my mid-40s. Neither my beauty nor my everydayness makes me safe. I find it grotesque when men grab me in the street when I am going about my business and not hooking them for attention, there's a disturbing mismatch between how I am and how they misread me. It feels as though they have picked me out and are trying to put me in my place by forcing me to see myself on their ugly terms. It reminds me of the ways in which my sexuality was treated as a joke in the past because I am fat and, although this is different, I find it humiliating. A fat dyke being sexually harassed, it almost feels like a joke in itself, who would anyone bother with me? How can it even be real? I must be secretly flattered and titilated that men still want me, that anyone is remotely interested.

Other people have written about the visibility and invisibility of fat people in public spaces, and it's no secret that street harassment is a daily reality. I think an understanding that harassment can be sexual tends to be missing. There are things to be said about the sexual harassment of fat people and, in my case and others, the interplay of gender, homophobia, racism, ableism and other types of oppressive behaviour on that harassment.

I would like more fat people to break the silence around this stuff, if they feel able to, and for people to develop stronger ways of addressing it. Whilst they don't ruin my day, these brief impositions upon me nevertheless raise many difficult feelings about fat, sexuality, being out on the streets, and claiming my space in the world.

Stereotyping Fat and Capitalism

2011-11-24T16:37:00.000Z

I went down to St Paul's last week to visit Occupy London. There are places where my politics and the general politics of Occupy diverge, but I'm glad it's there, hope it continues, and felt happy, inspired and moved by it.

One of my favourite things about Occupy London is the way that the street has been appropriated as a giant noticeboard. Pictures, letters, rants, conspiracy theories, stickers, were all taped up on the pillars at the side of the encampment. I enjoyed browsing, there was such a muddle of compelling stuff. Amongst everything were some posters advertising a new film, and a leaflet about the scummy business of carbon trading. Can you guess what drew me to them? Yes, that's right: their use of fat capitalist stereotyping.

I have written elsewhere about how the left has failed fat people, progressive, enlightened, anti-capitalist, pro-planet people and their fatphobia, and about political cartoonists' use of fatness to denote the greed and disgustingness of capitalism (alas top fatphobe cartoonist Martin Rowson never replied to my email about that). I'm becoming more and more interested in what I see as a contradiction: the left supports the underdog, yet fails to see fat people as oppressed, and instead reproduces us as visual stereotypes of the oppressors. Fat cat capitalist imagery is a travesty when you understand that the fattest social groups are also the poorest and most marginalised.

Similarly, I'm fascinated and annoyed at how fat activism is ignored, denied, belittled within apparently progressive leftist circles, even though it offers radical possibilities for understanding and challenging oppressive practices. This was brought home to me this week when my girlfriend got an email from a vegan anarchist café in London declining her proposal for a regular fat crafternoon-type event on the grounds that they were concerned about promoting obesity within the context of a global obesity epidemic.

In both cases people on the radical left are failing to see fat, that is, they are failing to understand fat as something with which they should be politically engaged in a critical manner. Instead, they rely on lazy thinking and stereotyping, refusing to acknowledge the radical work by fat activists that is going on right in front of them.

The Adipositivity Project Calendar - I'm March

2011-11-22T13:21:00.000Z

Back on a freezing day in January, Substantia Jones persuaded me to strip down to my skivvies and flash passers-by on a Lower East Side corner in Manhattan. Neither of us were arrested. It's funny how good times look.

Now it's November, I'm in London, wrapped in a blanket, staring down the end of the year and really delighted that one of the pictures from that session has ended up on the 2012 Adipositivity calendar. I'm March.

In the words of the creator: "The 2012 Adipositivity Calendar is here! And this year it's biggerbetterfastermore! 11x17 with 12 full-bleed square format pictures of plush, pulchritudinous plump, couple of which have not yet been seen. Snag your big-ass calendar of big asses here: http://www.cafepress.com/adipositivity.595211226 Hurry! Go!"

Dawn French and The Daily Mail

2011-11-11T13:53:00.004Z

Putting aside the fact that it's a Tory hate-rag, The Daily Mail is such a contradiction when it comes to reporting fat, which they do a lot, although ironically I think it's still a better bet than the supposedly liberal Guardian, which is all fat hate all the time and even has its own diet club. On the one hand The Mail promoted the Big Bum Jumble by publishing almost word for word the press release I wrote to publicise the event without any problem at all. They've done some good reporting on LighterLife, whilst pruriently speculating about who has and who hasn't been on that diet. Same with weight loss surgery. They publish a lot of articles that appear to adopt a voice of concern about fatphobia but just end up reinforcing it. And of course they publish many reports that are just all-out full of fat hatred. There's no rhyme or reason to it and I suspect the tone is all down to whichever particular editor is on duty the day that the article is published. I suppose what it illustrates is the messy and inconsistent ways in which people think and talk about fat anyway; fat hatred is bad, but who on earth would want to be fat if they could help it?

Dawn French has been the focus of The Daily Mail's fat department this week. Her relationship with Lenny Henry ended and she's lost a lot of weight. Her publicity machine is saying that it's because she's found a new lease of life and is very happy, just eating "more healthily" whatever that means, and doing exercise. Anyone who buys this is living in fantasyland, French looks like she's undergone a sudden crash weight loss in the photographs of her gurning at an awards ceremony that appeared in the paper and, according to her memoir, this is something she's done before. Why or how will probably come out at some point but for now there she is, there's no way of knowing unless you are a close personal friend or have her phone tapped.

What makes French's weight loss interesting for someone like me is the way that The Daily Mail have reported it, they're both celebratory and disapproving. The pictures of French on the red carpet have run and run this week, alongside a catty 'letter from a frenemy' article by Anne Diamond, aka the lady Alan Partridge, that is almost beyond belief. Diamond, who has apparently made a very good career out of being an utter tool, berates French for pro-fat statements she's made, speculates that French's weight loss is a result of secret obesity surgery, and states that anyone who says they are fat and happy is deluded. I come across this expression all the time: 'fat and happy.' It's such a reductive means of explaining fat embodiment that is not based on self-hatred or wanting to change. "Are you fat and happy?" is a question that demands a negative answer because a positive one sounds unbelievable and trite. I doubt anyone is ever happy all the time in this flat kind of way that expresses nothing of the complexities of living fat. Anyway, it's always about fat and happy and French is a big fat hypocrite because she could not be fat and happy in the way that everyone needed her to be, and therefore nobody can ever be fat and happy.

The reporting of French's weight loss adds to the unreality of fat embodiment where, as a number of scholars have pointed out, Hannele Harjunen in particular, fat is a temporary blip in the present on the way towards a glorious thin future. The idea of someone being permanently fat is difficult for people to get their heads around, as is the idea of embodiment shifting from time to time for whatever reason. In a context where fat activism or fat politics are so far off most people's radar that they are positively laughable, I find this sense of unreality and its denial of fatness perturbing. I think it's difficult for fat people to feel secure in developing more positive identities as we are, especially for those of us who are isolated from one another. There's this deep sense that what fat activists are doing is ridiculous and will never work. People desperately want an alternative to fat hatred but they actively want fat activism or self-acceptance to fail too so that their own projects of self hatred can be justified. The rug is pulled out from under fat activism again and again.

I know people really love her but French's weight loss underscores for me the limitations in looking to celebrities for reassurance as role models. Fat celebrities who get thin is an old story. French's public persona is clearly far removed from what she does in private, her image is about the smoke and mirrors of publicity, it is not trustworthy. This too is unstable ground on which to pitch some kind of self-acceptance or fat politics. It's better to build on firmer terrain, wherever that may be.

Looking back at Fat News, the newsletter of the Fat Women's Group, London, 93-96

2011-11-09T11:20:00.001Z

I've been looking at copies of Fat News. This is a newsletter that was produced by the second Fat Women's Group in London in the early 1990s. Both the newsletter and the second incarnation of the group were my idea, I think. The group caused me a lot of pain, I had no idea what I was doing and there were also tensions towards the end of my involvement that I still don’t understand. I ended up leaving, the group changed a bit and then, as far as I know, it stopped. Whilst it helps to think of burn-out and problems with group dynamics as common pitfalls of activism, these difficult memories have made it hard to reflect.

Fat News is the only tangible artefact I have of this period. 15 copies were published March 1993 – September 1996, though I don’t think I was involved with the last few. I remember seeing copies of Shocking Pink, which was this fantastic girl's zine produced in South London in the late 1980s, and loving how it was put together irreverently. I had no idea how I could have got involved in Shocking Pink, I think I probably thought that I wouldn’t be welcome there, I was so alienated from people at that time.

I stole some of Shocking Pink's production techniques for Fat News, which was that we would invite people to write content for it, and write some ourselves, and then everyone in the group would be responsible for cutting and pasting a page and decorating it with doodles and comments. Then someone would take it to the printer (we used the National Abortion Campaign's copier) and we'd get together to collate it and post it out to subscribers. Someone else in the group would be responsible for maintaining the subscriber's list and printing out address labels. I don’t think anyone else in the group had any involvement with small press, independent or zine publishing, and I remember it always took a lot of work encouraging people to draw or write on the pages they were pasting up.

I feel pretty sad when I look at Fat News but I'm sure other people don't feel the same way. We had some great feedback for it in the group, people loved it, and I remember how important it was to make something in which people who lived far away could participate. I remember recording audio versions of it too, it was exciting to be able to make accessible media.

The Women's Library in London have a partial set of Fat News, if you’re interested in British fat activism from twenty years ago – and why wouldn't you be?! Otherwise you can come over and have a look at my precious copies.

Talking attivisimo pro grasso/fat activism in Italy

2011-11-07T15:40:00.000Z

I've just come back from a trip to Italy courtesy of Soggettiva, a queer festival held in Bologna. Part of the festival was a seminar called Corpi eccentrici: bellezza, normatività e rappresentazione (Eccentric bodies: beauty, normativity and representation), where I gave a presentation.

The seminar was held in the great hall of Santa Cristina, a place which was once a convent and now houses the city's Women's Library, amongst other things. There's a separate queer library at Il Cassero, where the organisation that convenes Soggettiva and its sister festival Gender Bender, are based. Both spaces are incredibly beautiful old buildings (that's Santa Cristina in the picture, swoon eh?). I was really happy to see my book, Fat and Proud, displayed at the entrance to Santa Cristina, and glad that the seminar was fully documented and will be archived.

I spoke about queer and trans feminist fat activism, gave a few examples of things people have done, and showed some pictures. I thought it might be a bit of a surprise to see this stuff if people had never considered fat as a political identity, or thought about fat people as people with agency, community or culture. My new friend Dani, who performed a synchronous translation of my presentation into Italian, told me that fat activism is difficult to translate. There are two words that people use to talk about fat: cicci, which is the type of term of endearment that you might use if you were calling someone chubby; and grasso, which implies a more disgusting fatness. I suggested she use grasso as a reclamation of language and a defiant celebration of the presumed monstrousness of fatness, and she ended up translating fat activism as attivisimo pro grasso. It felt pretty amazing to be creating language and concepts like this, to be doing so collaboratively and, I hope, sensitively.

Dani said that feminism is a bit of a sneaky presence in Italian academia, and that there isn't a tradition of institutional support for Women's Studies, for example, even at Bologna, which is the oldest university in the world. I got the feeling that this gathering was an unusual event. My co-speakers Giorgia Aiello, Elisa Arfini, Alessia Muroni and Roberta Sassatelli were more clued-in than me about the context of the seminar, which was to consider representation of queer bodies. Their presentations looked at corporate branding, photo agencies, soap operas, lesbian art, and advertising.

My presentation was different to the others, and I didn’t spell out the crucial connection to the seminar, which is that queer and trans fat feminist activists often make their own representations. I wanted to show the everyday embeddedness of activism, how accessible it can be, how almost everyone has some kind of resource they can draw on, and how fat activism disrupts the idea that activism is always about standing in the street with a placard, or speaking rationally to power. Whilst I appreciated my co-presenters' papers, and whilst some speakers also referred to the act of making one's own imagery, what the seminar raised for me was a deep tension between a body of feminist work that is concerned with interpreting popular images and finding it lacking, and my hunger for action beyond critique. Perhaps this is a feature of academic work that is cut off from the lifeblood of activism, I don't think it is an Italian feminist approach, I see it elsewhere too, but this event in Bologna reminded me of it. Put bluntly: it's important to understand why something is shit, but the work cannot stop there, there must be creative thinking and action and change; without these qualities the work descends into pointless hand-wringing and simply reproduces the helplessness of its subjects.

Despite these reservations I feel grateful to have taken part in this work, it was exciting to be talking about queer and trans fat feminist activism in a place where English is not the first language, where people might take on these ideas and mutate them in their own way, and to encounter the work that other people are doing.

Call for DIY fat fatshion crafty zine contributions

2011-11-07T10:30:00.000Z

Kirsty is putting together a zine, it looks really good and you should contribute, if you can.

MAKE IT WORK: A DIY fatshion craft zine

She says:

"Make It Work" has been a mantra within fatshion communities since I can remember, and I'm interested in exploring it as a radical premise of fat positive politics. [...] I want this zine to be about sharing the resources, skills and knowledge that we've gained, and for it to provide strategies for people to move forward with.

Forthcoming Fat Studies events in London

2011-10-31T10:33:00.000Z

Two Fat Studies events are happening in London in November. Both are free to attend, but you'll need to contact the organisers so that they know who's coming. I'll be there, come and say hi.

HAES UK Fat Studies seminar
Contact Deb Viney, diversity@soas.ac.uk

Monday 7 November
10.30-16.00

Room B102
The School of Oriental & African Studies (SOAS)
University of London
Thornhaugh Street
London WC1H 0XG

Sam Murray at Westminster Uni
Contact Francis Ray White, f.r.white@westminster.ac.uk

Assent and its Aftermath: A Critical Autoethnography of Weight Loss Surgery

Monday 28 November 2011
17.00

Room 156
University of Westminster
309 Regent Street
London W1B 2UW

Faux Fat Activism, Faux Fat Studies, Abjection and Appropriation

2011-10-27T12:19:00.001+01:00

I've been rolling my eyes at Bias Busters, which Stacy Bias brought to my attention this week. Bias Busters is a new initiative by the Obesity Action Coalition, an anti-fat lobbying organisation based in the US. The nonsense rationale for Bias Busters is that stigma and discrimination against "the obese" aren't nice, so don't do it, but that doesn't mean that being fat is ok, far from it!

The eejits behind Bias Busters unhelpfully introduce the project with the cringe-inducing claim that "Weight bias is the last acceptable form of discrimination in today’s society." This is a statement that has been well picked-apart by fat activists for its lack of understanding of the ongoing dynamics of marginalisation, but its use exposes Bias Busters' alienation from any radical critique of fat oppression, or any other kind of oppression, come to think of it.

Bias Busters goes on to rail against fat suits, and takes credit for actions against PETA's fatphobia. This would be all well and good if the Obesity Action Coalition had some connection to the 40 year+ social movement called fat activism, but a peep at their Helpful Links page reveals that this set-up is a front for the weight loss industry.

Glancing down the Board of Directors' list, who are named without any references to their entirely likely links to weight loss businesses, I see one Rebecca Puhl. Puhl is Director of Research and Weight Stigma Initiatives at the Rudd Centre for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale University. Earlier this year Puhl gave an interview to a Canadian newspaper in which she appeared to take credit for my headless fatty concept, although she renamed them 'the headless stomach' – no need to use that horrible F-word, 'stomach' is much nicer and more polite, and of course it's always always about the belly!

I think there are several problems going on here.

1. Discrimination, stigma and bias cannot be the only basis upon which critical perspectives on fat are based. Whilst these topics are fundamental in many ways, focusing on them to the exclusion of other aspects of fat embodiment, fat culture for example, or fat people's agency and resistance, does not do enough to trouble the idea that being fat is always awful and that the remedy should be weight loss.

2. In the early 1970s The Fat Underground identified fat oppression as a product of the medical-industrial-complex, and allied fat oppression with other systems of oppression in the world, they showed that ending oppression entails ending systems of oppression. Bias Busters makes it look as though fat hatred has nothing at all to do with the weight loss industries that pay for the Obesity Action Coalition, and many similar obesity lobbying groups. These people and organisations are the problem they are claiming to eradicate.

3. Bias Busters, 'the headless stomach', and The Rudd Centre put me in mind of the old Big Fat Blog post Weight Watchers Co-Opts Our Language. I'm also thinking about a number of (normatively-embodied, yeah, this is a generalisation, but still, interesting) scholars I'm coming across who won't use Fat Studies to describe their work, they believe the F-word is alienating, yet they benefit greatly from Fat Studies networks. Appropriation is starting to be a big problem. Some people might be flattered by this, at long last They are taking notice of Us. But this is not so because They are the equivalent of the Borg; We threaten them with annihilation, so They want to disarm us before We blow them up, to use a handful of militaristic metaphors, this is the War on Obesity after all. People and organisations who appropriate and diminish radical fat ideas are the ones who have a lot to lose if those ideas are allowed to bloom. The arrogant appropriation of ideas exposes their flimsy grip on the power they will do anything to retain. This propagandist appropriation of fat activist and fat studies concepts by people who have no intention of dismantling fat oppression, and who profit from it, makes me wonder if the war on obesity is becoming a cold war.

Call for papers: Fat Representations

2011-10-24T10:37:00.000+01:00

Here's the blurb...

Special Journal Issue of Interdisciplinary Humanities: Fat Representations
Guest co-editors: Dr. Brenda Risch and Christoph Zepeda, M.A.

In this special issue of Interdisciplinary Humanities, we are seeking submissions of scholarly articles, non-fiction essays, and book reviews that explore representations and theories of fat, gender and eating.

Suggested topics include, but are not limited to:

Eating: Representations of eating in popular culture, literature, film, and art. How is eating positioned as an activity of significance/insignificance? How is eating gendered, raced, classed, sexed, etc? What are the links between eating and identity, and how are these connections theorised?

Fat Positive Representations: How do positive representations of fat articulate subjectivity? How is gender, race, class, sexuality, religion, age, physical ability woven into or expressed through fat positive view points? What theories of being rise out of positioning fat/plenitude/abundance as a positive attribute?

Fat Superheros: What makes a Hero or Heroine of size? What complexities and textures of superhero-hood become visible in a fat superhero? How is she/he translated in film, literature, paintings, action figures, comic books, graphic novels, ceramics, and music?

Additional topics include: Fat Sexualities; Fat Abroad; Global Perspectives on Fat/Size...

We ask that all essays be interdisciplinary in nature, double-spaced, numbered, with one-inch margins on all sides, and that they do not exceed 6,000 words.

Please include a 100 word abstract, c.v. and author biography of 200 words.

Please send inquiries and submissions to either Dr. Brenda Risch at brisch@utep.edu or Christoph Zepeda at czepeda@alliant.edu by May 1, 2013.

Interdisciplinary Humanities is a refereed, scholarly journal published by HERA, the
Humanities, Education, and Research Association.

Healthy Lives, Healthy People and the fat activism that really moves me

2011-10-17T13:25:00.000+01:00

I'm slow to respond to the Department of Heath's latest report on obesity, Healthy Lives, Healthy People: A call to action on obesity in England. It's difficult to distinguish this report from any of the other obesity policy documents produced by the British government since it got caught in the grip of fat panic, since its prime objective continues to be the elimination of stupid, burdensome, poor fat people.

Newspaper reports have focussed on the report's pathetic proposal that people eat fewer calories, but what interests me more is how this work is to be funded. The ConDem government wants to spend as little as possible on obesity, which sounds good initially because it means that the tax I pay can go towards more pressing things, like rescuing banks and funding weapons and wars. If they had any sense they would ditch projects like Change4Life, the anti-obesity initiative that will not die, but they realise that the country needs scapegoats and it makes them look good if they can be seen to be doing something about The Problem of Us. What worries me about the resurrection of Change4Life is that placing it in corporate hands makes it much less accountable and instead of seeing less of this type of nonsense, its profitability will likely make it more ubiquitous. Curse them!

Obesity policy is not the thing that inspires me to do fat activism. I understand that engaging with it is important, it's the type of thing that makes some people come alive and motivates them to do extraordinary things (Lynn McAfee and Sondra Solovay are two fat activists whose work springs to mind) but I do it reluctantly, it is a chore.

Over the past couple of years, as I've been researching fat activism in more depth, I've become more able to articulate what it is in particular that does excite me. In general terms it's work that is anti-assimilationist, queer, experimental, creative, imaginative, 'irrational.' I live for fat activism that embraces risk, wildness, playfulness, prankishness, and which does not require people to be on their best behaviour, though egalitarian doing-no-harm ethics count. The fat activism that touches me is the work that emphasises hope, agency, sparkiness. Banner-waving, petition-signing, rational debate and collective action are valuable kinds of activism, but I also like things that push the limits of what activism can be.

Here's an example. I went to the fantastic Sex Worker Open University (SWOU) this week. This is a grassroots project by and for sex workers and allies that engages with the complexities of sex work and its many related issues. The SWOU offered workshops, presentations, discussions and hang-outs. On Saturday night the organisers produced an absolutely fantastic programme of films and performance. It's hard to put into words what made it so good, I'm still working it out but it had a lot to do with people presenting ideas and experiences that are generally unallowed or unvoiced; glimpses of people, their unashamed embodiment and sexuality; a lot of strength and defiance presented with amazing smartness and good humour, friendliness, warmth. Such a tonic. The night ended with a performance that involved a sequence of spectacular arse-shaking and lots of wobbling flesh. My eyes are still on stalks. The performer had such confidence and moves, the whole thing was beautiful, nuanced, intelligent and deeply bawdy. It made my heart pound, I couldn't believe what I was seeing, it was a one of those visual treats that makes you feel so glad to be alive. I went to bed thinking about bodies, flesh, pleasure, sexuality, freedom, abstractions that somehow fill me with hope, which is an important function of activism. I found out later that the performer had fat politics of her own, and it showed in what she did. When I think about the fat activism that moves me, this is along the lines of what I'm thinking about. Healthy Lives, Healthy People can suck it.

Progressive, enlightened, anti-capitalist, pro-planet people and their fatphobia

2011-10-17T11:53:00.002+01:00

My Facebook news feed is the place where I generally encounter fatphobic memes. A couple have cropped up recently that make me want to say more about how the Left uses fatphobia in its visual rhetoric, which is an extension of how the Left has continued to fail fat by stereotyping fat and class.

I'm posting the images here in order to take them apart and expose the hatred within the supposedly progressive message. People may find them upsetting, they are upsetting, I'm sorry.

A couple of years ago I wrote to the London Cycling Campaign (LCC) to tell them to stop using anti-obesity rhetoric as a rationale for their work. I live in London, like to cycle, and want to ride my bike safely. Being fat on a bike can make you a target for street hate. I wanted support for my cycling, but the LCC was not up to it and could only understand me as an offensive and abstract stereotype. I wrote How to Ride a Bike: A Guide for Fat Cyclists for their magazine, but it made no difference, anti-obesity continues to be a fundament of their mission statement.

So this image has been popping up on my news feed:

Not everyone is going to be able to ride a bike, there's a certain assumed embodied privilege about the idea that everyone should and can ride a bike. People's bodies are different. Frail people are not going to ride a bike, many disabled people are not going to ride a bike. Adaptations for disabled people who do want to ride are rare and expensive. Some people just don't like cycling. Cycling to town when you live in a city like London is not necessarily feasible. It's fine if you're rich enough to live in the middle of things, but riding to central London for me would mean a thirteen-mile round trip that takes in a dual carriageway and a handful of treacherous junctions, and I'm only in Zone Three. The cycle lanes that exist are not safe. I know two people who been run over whilst riding, and London's streets have far too many ghost bike memorials, I'm not interested in risking my own life. These differences cannot be accommodated in this image. In addition, the logic of the picture represents fat as a substance whose only use is to be burned, there is no humanity in fat.

This is a long way of saying that bike culture located within social and environmental discourse, and typically seen as representing a progressive, Left-ist politics, has a big problem with fat people. Those cyclists really hate us, even when we too are on two wheels.

Here's the second picture, eurgh, where to start?

Maybe with the racism? The people in these images are stripped of agency and humanity, they are abstract symbols that enable viewers to feel as though they can claim moral high ground through their pity and disgust for the people in the picture. Both images invite the enlightened progressive viewer to rescue the subhumans depicted, they need you!

The images have no context, they are offered as plain fact, it is beyond obvious that the starving African and the greedy and out-of-control Asian kids are both victims of a capitalism that favours some and not others, that a fair post-capitalist world would distribute resources evenly, where presumably everyone would have bodies that are neat, normatively-sized, the same. The meme presents itself as inarguable. Fat is greed, an obesity timebomb, a product of Western corruption, McDonalds, energy balance gone wrong, a racist terror of a voracious Asian fat future dominating the world (ie the West, never mind that the West has its own history of colonial exploitation). Fat and thin are opposites. Forget that fat people might also be anti-capitalist. The slogan pulls it all together. You don't need to know anything else. Facebook tells me that this image has been liked by 10,000 people, shared by 7,000, and has enjoyed 4,000 comments (the 100 or so I looked at were uniformly praiseworthy). People on the internet really like cheap stereotypes, they help you feel good, as though you are doing something helpful for the betterment of humanity.

Here's what's not in the picture: Information about setserock and their motivation to create the meme, if indeed they created it, they may just have slapped their name on the corner at a later stage. Information about the people in the pictures, their accounts of being photographed, their thoughts about how their images have been used. Accounts by the photographers about how, when and why they took the photographs, how they were distributed, who got paid. A disclaimer about stereotyping. A comment on the implications of the presumed ethnicity of the people depicted? Thoughts about why the head of the person has been cropped out of the image (look familiar?). Engagement with the idea that fat is not pathology. And so on...

The picture comes undone when you stop seeing it as self-evident. Whilst setserock is enjoying hit after hit on their website as a result of this meme, I doubt the people in the images are enjoying any kind of material reward. How does that affect the statement? Who is benefiting from this image? Where is the power? How evenly is it spread? How exploitative is the image? How is this image a product of capitalism? How is setserock, and others who share it, implicated? Capitalism isn't working? No, it isn't, especially not here.

Eccentric Bodies, Soggettiva, Gender Bender, Bologna

2011-10-11T13:42:00.000+01:00

I'm giving a little presentation called 'Queer Fat Feminist Activism in a Handful of Amazing Episodes' at Soggettiva, which is part of a festival called Gender Bender. The festival takes place in Bologna, 1-5 November 2011. Come along if you can!

Here's the official blurb:

Eccentric Bodies: Beauty, Normativity and Representations
3pm, Saturday 5 November
Aula Magna Santa Cristina, via del Piombo 5
Free entry

Which are the ways to resist actively the objectification of our bodies and our individualities, that is so much in vogue among our political class today? How can you stop pursuing the ideal of the perfect body dictated by the media? How to redefine the concept of beauty that threatens to crush many of us, since this ideal is more and more distant from the inclusion of real women, lesbian or straight? And it happens especially when our own desires are not in conformity to the mainstream.

Together with Giorgia Aiello, Elisa Arfini, Charlotte Cooper, Alessia Muroni, Roberta Sassatelli we will try to reflect on these issues and give solutions certainly not exhaustive, but analysis tools that can be useful for everyone.

Gender Bender

Disrupting fat narratives through Synchronised Swimming

2011-10-11T12:52:00.000+01:00

A temporary change of pace...

I was into synchronised swimming when I was 11 or 12 or so. I really loved to swim anyway and used to spend hours at Hereford Baths with anyone who would go with me, and also by myself. I don't know how I met my friend Mary Anne but she was already part of the synchro group there and she encouraged me to come too.

The group was pretty small and we'd meet once a week or so in the diving pool at the Baths to practise figures and try and earn proficiency badges. The more skilled swimmers would practise their routines. Sometimes we'd all practise group routines, which we'd map out first on land in the Club Room, walking it through, using our arms to approximate leg movements. I remember a very dynamic sequence choreographed to the theme song from Hawaii-5-0, its exoticism was preposterous in the prosaic nature of our surroundings. We were encouraged to take part in competitions, I remember travelling to ancient swimming halls in cities near by, never really doing very well.

One year, possibly 1980 or 1981, the swimming pool decided to stage a water pantomime, Cinderella in fact. For those who don't know, a pantomime is a theatrical show produced in the Xmas holidays, typically featuring a set of conventions that can be traced back to Restoration theatre and Commedia dell'Arte. The Hereford Baths' water pantomime was just someone's weird idea. There was no scenery, the costumes were minimal, as was the plot, but there was a Dame, a Principle Boy and Girl, a bit of singing, some slapstick, and lots of swimming routines featuring the synchro club. I was in the chorus.

I'm right in the middle of the second row from the front

I'm remembering all this today because I've been thinking about how my identity as a fat person has developed over the years. By the time I was 11 or 12 years old my weight was already problematised in my family; I had been dieted sporadically from around seven or eight, called names, and had attention drawn to the size of my tummy. By the time I went through puberty my identity as a fat girl had solidified. My body was surveilled for fat during Physical Education sessions at school, I was being marked out as different by my schoolmates too, who also called me fat names. I was different, by this time I'd had many experiences that would make me different to my peers, but these invisible differences were less meaningful to others, instead my difference was coded through my chubby young body.

I could develop any number of these threads at this point, but I'll leave my puberty, family, school and classmates behind and come back to the swimming which is interesting to me not just because of its extreme kitsch, but also because it both supported and disrupted a gendered fat spoiled identity.

All the synchronised swimmers were girls, the oldest and best swimmers were about 16 years old. They were really powerful swimmers, very strong and athletic, and yet all I can remember about them are narratives about their perceived femininity. There was a lot of talk about make-up, tits, swimsuits, and their bodies were always there being watched and admired. They were the ones the younger swimmers aspired to, including me. I'm really struck by the whiteness of the people in the photograph above, and I'm reminded of how people in that world were generally lower class, and how synchro may have been an attempt to generate respectable feminine identities. Despite this, the leads in the water pantomime were played by two friends who interpreted Cinderella and the Prince through romanticised butch-femme synchro duets (jeez, no wonder I turned queer). I suppose what I'm getting at is that I can't dismiss this early experience of girl sport as entirely about feminine governmentality.

Synchro reinforced the problematic nature of my body. At the synchro club as well as elsewhere it was noted that I was too big, I didn't win medals, I was mediocre, I was not elegant. I compared myself to other swimmers and found myself lacking and I was frustrated by the many moves that I did not have the strength or flexibility to perform. At the same time I felt very free in the water. I loved swimming in the deep, chilly diving pool, all that deep blue liquid space around me, performing moves called Dolphin, Marlin, Swordfish, Tub, sculling this way and that. I still feel the lack and frustration of my body, but many of the physical skills I learned in the club have stayed with me, and to this day some of my greatest embodied pleasures involve swimming and water.

Perhaps most of all, these memories of doing synchro and becoming fat help me disrupt the narrative I've internalised of the fat and lazy kid. I was a very active kid, and I was still fat. The things They say I'm supposed to believe about myself just aren't true. This makes me want to disrupt and complicate those restrictive narratives even more, including the counter-narratives of perfect healthist fat poster children.

One last thing, it just occurred to me that these early experiences made it possible for things that came later, they helped me build a sense of my body's capabilities that developed into self-expression, survival, activism, sexuality, and which inform my politics and worldview somewhat profoundly. I can see a link between synchro and punk, synchro and feminism! It's so funny that the latter can feed off the former. It helps me understand how important those early embodied experiences are in terms of building confidence and agency. I'm pretty certain that Hereford's synchro team was not explicitly an incubator for the future fat activists of the UK, which is why I also doubt that those things can be taught. There's a danger of hammering it out of young people, it can't be taught by rote, that spark can't be institutionalised, they have to find embodied freedom and agency in their own way, and even then it won't be straightforward.

Call for Submissions: Fat Positive Anthology

2011-10-04T17:28:00.000+01:00

Deadline: November 15, 2011

Virgie says: I'm seeking personal essays of 1500-3000 words for a fat positive anthology to be released in 2012. I’m seeking essays that either (1) focus on a specific event/experience that was truly flabulous or (2) tell the story of how you became a fierce fatty. I encourage contributors to hone in on a particular theme—like romance, parenting, family, fatshion, dating, performance—to use as a lens through which to tell your story. Fierce, sassy, thoughtful, authentic, non-fiction, previously unpublished, autobiographical stories from fatties who identify as women are welcome. The vision for this anthology is one of fun, unapologetic fat celebration and love!

Envision the book you would have wanted to read when you started out on your journey to fat positivity. This will be that book for a lot of people. So, share what you know and what you’ve learned, the way you navigate the world, your experiences, and don’t leave out the juicy parts!

Some guiding questions that may help as you’re writing:
-how did you become a fierce fatty?
-how do you create positive spaces in your life?
-what was a pivotal moment or experience that led to fat positivity for you?
-how do you talk to friends/family about being a fatty/fat pos?
-how do you "do" fatshion?
-how does being a fatty impact dating, sexuality and romantic relationships for you?
-has performance (e.g., fat belly dance or fat burlesque) impacted your body love experience?
-what people/communities make you feel fabulous?
-what role does your fierce fatness play into your friendships or family relationships?

Don’t feel limited by this list of suggestions, please!

Please send electronic submissions only. Attach your submission in MS Word (.doc) format to fatposanthology@gmail.com. Please include a short bio and your contact information in the body of the e-mail. Please direct questions to the abovementioned email. Also, if you feel you have a great fat pos tale but maybe don't feel ready to take on writing your story, I'm doing a limited number of interviews.

Contributors of accepted submissions will be paid $50 and receive a writing credit in the book.

Please feel free to distribute this call.

xo,
Virgie Tovar
Author, fat activist/lifetime fat girl, and MA, Human Sexuality

www.VirgieTovar.weebly.com

Dream List: Fat Studies Research

2011-09-26T22:43:00.000+01:00

When I was a teenager I had a pen pal called Phil who sent me cassettes of things he liked and which I ended up liking too. One of these things was a home-taped copy of Jello Biafra's prankish spoken word album No More Cocoons. I haven't heard it in years but could probably still recite most of it by heart. In one of the sequences Biafra talks about collecting names for bands so, say you've got a great band but you can't think of a name, you can get one from Jello because he's got more than he can use. Perhaps there are bands out there somewhere that he named: Republican Buttocks, The Imperial Turdsicles, was there Facelift In A Jar too? Maybe I just imagined it.

In a similar vein, I seem to harbour more ideas for fat studies research than I could ever handle myself. I thought I'd offer a list of fantasy research projects that I'd love to see come to fruition. I'm thinking of stuff like...

A case study of Aardman Animations' involvement with Change4Life.
A critical review of weight loss corporations' appropriation of fat politics and Health At Every Size concepts and praxis.
A critical review of body image research methodology.
A qualitative study of normatively-sized researchers allied to Fat Studies who avoid using the word 'fat' in their work.
A quantitative study about why corporations fund weight loss industry research, with beautiful pie charts and scatterplots and other exciting infographics.
Discourse analysis that reveals what Reubens really thought of fat women.
An analysis of alarmist obesity news story infographics.
An ethnography of normatively-sized ethnographers who do ethnographies of fat people who go to slimming clubs.
An oral history of people who wear fat suits.
A case study of LighterLife's ethics.
An ethnography of normatively-sized ethnographers who do ethnographies of fat people who go to NAAFA conventions.
A quantitative study of all the places that have been described as 'The Fattest Country,' 'The Fattest City,' or 'The Fattest Place' on Earth.
A critical gender and race analysis of Two Tons of Fun and The Fat Boys.
Any kind of research whatsoever by non-Western fat studies scholars about anywhere that isn't the US, Canada, the UK, or Australia.
Any kind of research whatsoever by fat disabled people about fat and disability.
Discourse analysis of anonymous fat blob sculptures and other forms of obesity art.
Longitudinal studies on the effects of dieting on various groups of people across a number of variables and not just BMI, that take their social contexts into account, and which are not funded or researched by anyone with any connection whatsoever to commercial weight loss organisations.
A qualitative study of fat people and their tattoos.
Psychological profiles of Tam Fry, Susie Orbach, David Haslam, Jamie Oliver.
Qualitative research about fat activist community capitalism.
Research essays about the use of fatphobia in political cartoons, or an illustrated essay about heroic fat cartoon characters from the golden age of comics.

Wanna take one on? Be my guest and send me the results to cite. Got fantasy research projects of your own? Stick 'em in the comments please.

Thanks to Simon Murphy and Kay Hyatt for helping with this list.

Is FatBooth always fatphobic?

2011-09-19T12:17:00.004+01:00

Double chin created without the jiggery-pokery of FatBooth!
100% non-digital! Hilarious! Exciting!

FatBooth is an iPhone app that adds a digital double chin to a picture of your face and makes thin people look sort of fat.

I've avoided this phenomenon largely because I don't own an iPhone, and I already look fat because I am fat. Some of my thin online friends have been playing with it recently and posting their pictures on Facebook, so now it's suddenly become a lot more present to me.

I was offended when I first saw the pictures and the comments after them, all consisting of onomatopaeic laughing and what looked like people choking with mirth. The digital double chins remind me of fat suits, more specifically Marisa Meltzer's article comparing fat suits to blackface. It's also a weird reversal of the headless fatty, where fat people are just as absent from the discourse surrounding the image as with pictures where our heads are cropped away. I felt that FatBooth is an appropriation of ersatz fatness, of people like me, and that a digital double chin tells you nothing at all about what it's like to be fat, it just turns it into a joke.

I went on to wonder if my authenticity as a 'real' fat person mattered. I was once told in the past that I was not fat enough to have a stake in fat politics (by an author who lost weight, wrote about it and still maintains their own stake in the matter, ahem). Anyone can talk about fat, I don't have the last word on it, it's important that people of all sizes engage. What makes this tricky is that fat people are very often made silent by obesity discourse and that fat hatred has widespread negative material effects on the quality of people's lives. A group of thin friends making a joke of a pretend double chin will never replace my lived embodiment, you could argue that it's not supposed to, a joke is just a joke, but I think a joke says more than that.

Seeing people's FatBooth pictures was like witnessing thin people's prurient obsession with fat embodiment. I thought: "This is how they see us when they can't conceive that we would see them doing this, or feel implicated in their actions, they are so profoundly immune to our daily grind." Imagining flesh on your bones is a real thrill when you don't have much of your own. It's a dangerous thing to imagine.

Following this, I tried to think of FatBooth as a tool that people use in different ways. I never thought of my Facebook friends who used FatBooth as fatphobic, so I tried to think about how non-fatphobes might use it, or if it was possible to use FatBooth without being fatphobic. I wondered if FatBooth could be something that enables people to think about fat in radical or progressive ways. Could it inspire empathy? Could it enable thin people to imagine themselves fat with no moral connotations? Could it enlighten?

If people using FatBooth lived in social contexts where there was no war on obesity, or endemic hatred of fat, then these things might be possible. But FatBooth appears to me as entirely a product of fatphobia, the way it frames the act of imagining oneself fat is intimately tied to dominant obesity discourse. FatBooth presents fat as funny, pitiful, fearful and Other; fat is something pathologically added-on to authentic slenderness; fat people are not recognisable as humans with agency, thoughts and feelings of their own, let alone politics, community, creativity or rage. If there are radical applications for FatBooth, I want to hear about them – but I won't be holding my breath.

Meltzer, Marisa (2006) 'Are Fat Suits the New Blackface? Hollywood’s Big New Minstrel Show', in: Jervis, L. & Zeisler, A. (eds.) Bitchfest: Ten Years of Cultural Criticism from the Pages of Bitch Magazine. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 267-269.

PS. This post got some diet company spam which made me laugh because it missed the point of the post heroically. Here's the text: "Nowadays people who have normal weight seem unnatural and not normal! Obesity is considered almost as a normal condition! And this thing with the iphone is just not cool!" Keep going spam-drone...

Fantasising about Lauren Berlant and her fatphobia

2011-09-07T13:57:00.010+01:00

Dear Lauren Berlant,

I awoke this morning to a beautiful fantasy all about you, but before I can go into that I'd like to fill you in on the backsnark.

A while ago I met this hot woman and told her that I was interested in fat and queer theory. She mentioned your name, so I went and read some of your work because I wanted to impress this woman enough so that she would have sex with me. Unfortunately, this is when things began to unravel.

I came across your paper Slow Death (Sovereignty, Obesity, Lateral Agency). Boy oh boy, did I ever feel like I was experiencing a slow death of my own whilst I was reading it. It's four years since this work was published, by you, and about two since I read it for the first time, and that feeling of metal atrophy I get when I think about it persists. I knew there were ideas in there, but I couldn't get to them because of the way you set them out on a page or a screen. Some people think that reading something so impenetrably academic is illuminating, but I just call it bad writing. I struggled on regardless, wondering if I was reading something of value, or the ramblings of someone who had lost their grip on things.

Your arguments about embodied sovreignity have been better expressed elsewhere, particularly in disability theory, which you don't mention. It is your thoughts on fat that really have me scratching my head. There is nothing in what you write that reflects any of my experience as a fat queer. I'm there going: "Does she really mean people like me?". I know I'll never get the time back that I've wasted in reading what you have to say but that hasn't stopped me going back and back again to try and make sense of what you've written. This work is well-cited, I reason, there must be something in it that I'm not getting. There comes a time when you just have to give up hoping.

It's not that you don't know about critical perspectives on obesity epidemiology, you cite the big men of the movement, Paul Campos and Eric Oliver, and you have a soft spot for Richard Klein's terrible book too, you just choose not to engage. If you bothered to think about the queerness of bodies, of what it is to have a body that isn't like yours, that is non-normative, you would have the opportunity to engage with a richness of material beyond your wildest dreams.

Instead, you choose to side with The Man. Slow Death reiterates the abjection of fatness. Fat is attrition, it is the pathological and literal representation of slow death. Your work reproduces fat people as Othered, anonymous, an abstraction; 'The Obese'. You fail to question the existence of fat people as anything but a crisis brought about by a mismanagement of energy balance and you see nothing of value in fatness other than as a symbol for your theorising. Given the paltriness of critical literature on fat and race, and the problem of racism within some fat activisms, it's especially dismaying to see you applying reductive obesity discourse to people of colour in this work. There is nothing radical here.

There are other queer feminist academics who have also failed to address their own fatphobia; Elspeth Probyn thinks that fat activism is a pathetic excuse and that obesity really is a terrible problem; Susie Orbach, well, the less said about her the better. I am not the first to point out the failings of those who theorise the body, including feminists, who conveniently ignore fat or reproduce the problematic terms of obesity discourse. It's painful to witness one's abjection in this work, again and again, especially by people who should know better, people like you who are paid to think and write, people who are lauded as intellectuals, tenured professors, those who enjoy tremendous intellectual freedom and privilege and cultural capital, people who are products of privilege misusing their power, circumscribing people who have less power. Surely you have the time and resources to dig a bit deeper, think a bit harder, be a bit more critical (your journal is called Critical Inquiry after all). What would happen if you spoke to some fat activists? It's not like you have to agree but at least engage for a moment.

I wonder if you think about fat people reading your work. Fat people are so abstracted in Slow Death as newspaper reports or policy objects that it's hard to imagine an actual fat person living a life, going about their business, thinking, or having any material presence or agency at all. Can you imagine a fat dyke throwing a brick through the window of a diet clinic? Fat lovers whipping and fisting? A fat genderqueer subverting death drive theory? It must be tragic to live in a context where these people, who are real and part of my life, don't exist.

It's time to return to my fantasy. So I woke up this morning and looked at my computer and saw that two of my favourite performers, David Hoyle and Bird la Bird are appearing on a panel with you at the Trashing Performance project here in London. It's on 26 October, which also happens to be my 43rd birthday. I drifted off into a reverie, imagining David and Bird turning on you in the panel and asking you pointed questions about the fatphobia in your work. I imagined you squirming. And then I thought of Scottee and Amy Lamé, who produced the sublime Burger Queen this year, who would surely be in the audience, and Vikki Chalklin, whose performance work considers femme fatness, and maybe there would be other rad fatties in the crowd too, and I imagined a bag of rotten tomatoes in there somewhere, and flesh, teeth, mess, and your disbelief of it all. And I imagined you picking up your bags and running to the airport to return to your little burrow in academia-land, shaken and aghast.

Sincerely,

Charlotte

PS The expression on the woman behind you in this picture makes me laugh a lot. It's the top result for your name in Google Images.

Selected References

Berlant, L. (2007) 'Slow Death (Sovereignty, Obesity, Lateral Agency)', Critical Inquiry, 33 754-780.

Probyn, E. (2008) 'Silences behind the Mantra: Critiquing Feminist Fat', Feminism & Psychology, 18:3, 401-404.

Performance Matters: Under- and Overwhelmed: Emotion and Performance

Please also see:

Kirkland, Anna (2011) 'The Environmental Account of Obesity: A Case for Feminist Skepticism,' Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 36:2, 411-436.

Call for papers - HAES UK Fat Studies seminar

2011-09-06T09:56:00.000+01:00

Call for papers - Health at Every Size UK [HAES UK] Fat Studies seminar
Monday 7 and Tuesday 8 November 2011

The School of Oriental & African Studies, University of London, is pleased to host a Fat Studies seminar on behalf of HAES UK.

Academics, clinicians and other practitioners or performers are invited to submit Abstracts to be considered for inclusion in the above seminar.

Deadline for submission of Abstracts: Wednesday 14 September 2011.

Abstracts should be a maximum of 300 words. Please add the name and contact details for the lead author and a brief biography for each author.

Submit abstracts to: diversity@soas.ac.uk Please include "HAES UK Abstract" in your email title.

The Bad Art Collective and Irrational Fat Activism

2011-09-05T15:07:00.004+01:00

I just spent the weekend making Bad Art at the Researching Feminist Futures conference in Edinburgh. For two days I sat at a table and made stuff with three other members of The Bad Art Collective, a group we formed earlier this year, and various delegates who dropped by during the event to make some Bad Art with us. We had paper, pens, glitter, felt-tips, macaroni, lentils, pastels, scraperboards, glue and other media too, plus a lot of Blu-Tak to stick everything we made to the wall.

People have different ideas about what constitutes Bad Art. The four of us have posted some interpretations of it on the Bad Art Collective blog. At the conference people variously related to our Bad Art table as a project of irony, or a relaxing retreat from workshops or presentations where the 'real' work takes place. That's not how I see it at all. Drawing, making things, talking, cackling, working collectively, that's the space where things happen. I loved the moments at the weekend when people started to get over their insistence that they can't draw or 'aren't artistic' and contributed to the larger project. Better still was when what they produced made them laugh and want to do more. A felt-tip becomes a weapon.

The Bad Art Collective
Researching Feminist Futures, Edinburgh, 2-3 September 2011
Photograph by Evangeline Tsao

Our project was called Bombarded By Images and the idea was to critique the often-heard truism that women develop terrible body image because they are constantly bombarded by images in the media. We wanted to show that we are more than capable of making an abundance of our own images, and to think about and do activism that is creative, productive, full of agency and bad attitude.

Because of our theme, and because the four of us are grounded in fat activism and Fat Studies to a greater or lesser extent, a lot of what we produced was about fat, resistance, anger, fat culture, bad feminist art about bodies, being anti-social, inexpertise, enjoying stupidity. We developed a running joke about one particular theorist, whose work has done a lot of damage, and started to direct some of our work towards that, howling with laughter at what we produced and feeling really badass and full of ideas about it.

These moments were so beautiful! Two of the collective have really struggled with this particular theorist, trying to engage with their work and feeling so angry about the damage it's caused. Drawing stupid/not so stupid pictures was a true delight, it opened up a space that was beyond rational-critical dialogue, where we didn't have to play by the rules of politeness or propriety.

It's a couple of days later now and I've been thinking about that feeling. I love fat activism that is weird, grotesque, anti-social, and I feel sad that this kind of activism is sidelined or barely acknowledged or known compared to the 'real work' of changing laws, addressing inequality, righting wrongs. Those kinds of activisms are fine, I'm glad people do them, but they don't make my heart sing, and don't speak to my politics and cultural touchstones, which are of the punk, queer, anarchist variety. I think activists should consider ethics and do what they can not to support oppressive hegemonies, and I don't think you have to be po-faced about it; I like activism that makes me laugh a lot, that is prankish and evil.

Just now my friend sent me a link to Slavoj Žižek's rambling account of the London riots in August, stupidly titled Shoplifters of the World Unite. He's as windy as you'd expect an overly-lauded ageing white man academic to be, but I like his remarks about the irrationality of the riots as a form of protest. It made me think that, amongst its many qualities, Bad Art can also be thought of as a form of 'irrational' activism, fat or otherwise. The pictures and objects we made aren't waiting for anyone's approval, or official sanction by committee. Sometimes they make no sense to anyone else, or they grate, they don't behave or speak nicely, or engage politely with the other side. But they make sense to us and they make us happy, they're full of life and humour and intelligence, not to mention imaginative possibility and power. They resist and create simultaneously.

I feel excited by these ideas, and I expect I will come back to them. Full documentation of Bombarded By Images is coming as soon as I can make time to stick it on the Bad Art Collective blog – you'll just have to wait.Meanwhile, here's one of the things I made at the weekend, inspired by The Warriors, The Chubsters, The Ramones, and the Manson Family diorama that used to reside in the Chamber of Horrors at Madame Tussauds! Coloured pencils forever. You might also want to have a look at Corinna Tomrley's détournement of fat cartoon characters Bad Art + Fat Cartoons + Fat Activism = Life-Affirming Wonderousness.

badartcollective.blogspot.com
Facebook: Bad Art Collective

Call for Papers: Queering Fat Embodiment

2011-08-15T10:08:00.000+01:00

Submit your work for inclusion in a proposed book that is being edited by Samantha Murray, Jackie Wykes and Cat Pausé, and be part of the exciting work that's emerging from Fat Studies in Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand.

Here are the details:

Against the backdrop of the ever-growing medicalisation and pathologisation of fatness, the field of Fat Studies has emerged in recent years to offer an interdisciplinary critical interrogation of the dominant medical models of health, to give voice to the lived experience of fat bodies, and to offer critical insights into, and investigations of, the ethico-political implications of the cultural meanings that have come to be attached to fat bodies. This focus on the regulation, discipline and representation of fat bodies make it critically invaluable to the advancement of scholarship on embodiment.

This edited collection seeks to publish recent scholarship that embraces 'queering' as a mode of critical engagement in examining fat embodiment. Queer is a heterogeneous and multidisciplinary practice aimed at ‘bringing forth’ and thus denaturalising the taken for granted, the invisible, the normalised. This collection seeks to challenge and destabilise existing ideas of fat and fat embodiment both outside of and within the emerging field of Fat Studies. This volume will bring together scholarship from various disciplines in order to examine the ways in which fat embodiment is lived, experienced, regulated and (re)produced across a range of cultural sites and contexts. In queering established ideas about fat bodies, and presenting challenging inquiries/inqueeries into these notions, this collection will represent an innovative and critically invaluable contribution to the advancement of scholarship on fatness, and indeed on embodiment more generally.

Topics may include but are not limited to:
• fat activism and embodiment
• fat mental and physical health
• queer(y)ing ‘hard data’ on fatness/obesity science
• queer(y)ing health policies related to fat
• cross-cultural or global constructions of fat bodies
• cultural, historical, or philosophical meanings of fat and fat bodies
• fat embodiment in literature, film, music, nonfiction, and the visual arts
• fat as queering sex, beauty, gender, and other embodied performances
• fat sexuality
• fat materialities
• fat and space
• fat and biopolitics
• fat and citizenship
• fat and neoliberalism
• fatness and consumption

Please note that we are already in the process of completing a proposal to submit to publishers, which we will complete based on the submissions we receive. We have had some preliminary interest from publishers, but as yet, we have not secured a contract.

Full paper submissions are due January 15, 2012. Articles should range between 15 and 20 double-spaced pages. Please send submissions, along with an abstract of your paper and a brief biographical sketch, directly to Samantha.murray@mq.edu.au.

Contacts:
Samantha Murray - Samantha.murray@mq.edu.au (Main contact)
Cat Pausé - c.pause@massey.ac.nz
Jackie Wykes - wykesj@unimelb.edu.au

Stereotyping fat in the visual language of the Left

2011-08-12T18:23:00.000+01:00

I've written before about how sections of the Left have failed fat activism in the UK, and about how fat and class are depicted within this political visual rhetoric. It's truly depressing how opportunities to develop broad analyses of embodied oppression, as well as activist strategies and productive coalitions, are thwarted because fat is continually seen as laughable, trivial, and nothing to do with the real struggle.

Sometimes it is possible to take part in productive, if difficult, dialogue. Today, for example, I had an exchange with the usually fantastic Anarchist Media Project (AMP) over an image on their blog of a fat capitalist guzzling an innocent thin person in Children of Britain, Know Your Place: BORN POOR, DIE POOR. I left a comment and asked the project to stop using images of fatness to represent greed, capitalists and corruption and pointed out that fat people tended to be of low socioeconomic status. I said that stereotypes were hurtful and alienating, and I suggested some things that they could read to educate themselves about fat politics.

The good news is that the AMP said they would think about this stuff. They said that the image by saying it was from a famous vintage cartoon by a socialist artist called Robert Minor. I replied that I understood that there are historical precedents in the visual language of anarchism, and in the Left in general, of using fatness as a symbol of ruling class greed and corruption. However, the discourse around fatness has changed and is now part of a moral panic that also includes elements of classism, racism, fear and hatred of disability and difference. I said that it is not enough to use these vintage images without interrogating them or acknowledging that contexts have changed.

The annoying part of the exchange, reiterated by a later comment, was that "In fact we saw the suit, and nothing but the suit." There's something really weasely about this, it has a whiff of denial about it. They're offering a kind of fat-blindness that could be interpreted as "we don't care if someone's fat or thin, we don't even notice it," but is more like: "we don't see people like you, you don't exist in any meaningful way to us." Another commenter made a mean little joke at my expense, which hardly helped.

On other occasions I just want to throw my hands up in the air. This brings me to Martin Rowson, the man who has done more than any other political cartoonist, even Steve Bell, to associate fatness with everything that is disgusting. Here are a few charmers from his oeuvre, returned just by Googling his name. Will somebody please have a word with him?

My tolerance for the fatphobia in these kinds of images has evaporated because I read them as an ongoing betrayal by people who might otherwise be comrades. I am not proposing that images be censored, and I don't want a visual language of fatness that is reduced to a happy-clappy set of 'positive images'. I want to be able to look at whatever I want as much as anybody else does, and I want to be challenged by what I see. With Rowson it's not even about being squeamish over grotesque pictures. What I would like is for progressive, freedom-loving people on the radical Left to think more about the complexities of representing fat and to stop selling out on people's bodies. Liberation cannot be built on stereotypes.

Riots in the UK and convenient scapegoats

2011-08-09T12:48:00.006+01:00

This morning my mind has drifted towards the popular third wave feminist slogan 'Riots Not Diets'. Whenever I think of this slogan I imagine a cheerful group of determined people going something like "Rah! Rah!" in the street, a kind of carnival atmosphere of resistance. It's always peaceful when I imagine it, destruction is cartoonish and unreal, like "Poof! There goes Weight Watchers", or the bomb and the "ka-boom!" at the top of this page. I think the use of riot metaphors and the archetypal anarchist bomb image are valid, though they bear little relation to riots and bombs in real life.

Over the past couple of days there have been riots in parts of London, where I live, and in other cities in the UK. I'm going to write about this here, even though it's not typical fat blog fare, because it's a big thing that's affecting me and the people I know right now. As with all these blog posts, this is about my opinion rather than an assertion of fact.

I think these riots came about initially because the police shot a man and spread lies about him to cover themselves, and because this was not an isolated incident. They refused to give the man's family an explanation at a peaceful protest, pushed people to breaking point by making them wait for hours, and responded heavily at the first provocation, which escalated things.

This event was set against a backdrop of everyday police racism and arrogance, a long history of police abuse, systemic racism, and a lack of justice. It has also happened within a political context where working class people of colour are suffering the removal of social safety nets and the possibility of escape through education by a probably corrupt government, where young working class black men are widely demonised, and where the rich are doing very nicely. I should add that the riots are not just about race, however, it would be wrong to paint it as white versus black.

After the initial explosion of rage in Tottenham, violence spread to other parts of the city: generally to areas where the police had been responsible for previous injustice, places where there have been recent influxes of affluent white people and where gentrification is underway, places where there is a high street and shops where working class people go. The wealthy areas of the city, and middle class residential areas, have been untouched so far. As I see it, the rioters are small-ish groups of young men.

At this stage there is little that is romantic about the riots. Bystanders have been mugged, people have been burned out of their homes, many people feel frightened, vulnerable people are made more so. No one is burning down Harrods or Buckingham Palace, or other symbols of capitalism and hegemony, the violence is opportunistic and, to me, astonishing in its lack of ambition. The media is typically contradictory though narratives of 'mindless thugs' are emerging, obscuring the context for the riots, and further demonising the rioters. People within communities where there have been attacks are divided, some see them as inevitable and others are fed-up, sympathy is wearing thin, and I've heard a lot of dismay about how the riots don't address systemic inequality. There's a backlash in progress and it's depressing to see who is capitalising, like the far-right racist and Islamophobic British National Party. It's likely that the riots will result in greater surveillance and repression of people of colour, working class people, young black men.

Apart from statistical correlations between fat and race and class, the relationship between fat and marginalised experience, fat pops up in a minor, tangential and unexpected way in this story. I was reading about Cynthia Jarrett, who died when police raided her home in Tottenham in 1985 in search of her son Floyd. The police used unreasonable force against her but lied about this and circulated a story that she had a heart attack because she was fat. Fat – always the convenient scapegoat! None of the officers involved were ever brought to justice, although three men were wrongfully imprisoned for the murder of a policeman in the ensuing riot, events which form part of the context for the current Tottenham riots and their spread elsewhere.

Edited to add:

I was thinking again about Cynthia Jarrett and about how incredible it was that people in Tottenham demanded an explanation for her death in 1985. I wonder if that would happen now in the context of Obesity EpidemicTM and fat panic rhetoric. I'm inclined to think that the scapegoating of her fatness would be more acceptable these days and that people would buy into the idea of her sudden death caused by being fat.

Dicke's European Workshop on Size Diversity

2011-08-04T11:46:00.000+01:00

Fat activists in Europe, come to this!

The German fat rights group Dicke have received a grant to produce a week-long residential workshop in Berlin in May 2012.

Participation is free to EU citizens, based on shared rooms, though you will need to find deposit money that will be refunded later.

I don't know if there have been other cross-Europe fat activist gatherings on this scale, and I think this could be a great place for expanding networks and ideas.

European Workshop on Size Diversity

Lew Louderback, More People Should Be FAT, November 1967

2011-07-22T16:04:00.001+01:00

In 1967 Llewellyn Louderback published an article in The Saturday Evening Post called 'More people should be FAT'. This was one of the first, if not the first, pieces of critical writing about fat in the popular media in the US. The article was read by Bill Fabrey, who contacted Louderback, and it helped spawn NAAFA and everything that followed.

The article is pretty compelling several decades later, I think. He makes a good case for abandoning fatphobia within a context where such claims would have been seen as pure oddball territory. It's pre-feminist, Ann Louderback gets mentioned but does not have a voice of her own in the piece. Given the influence of feminism on fat activism, it's strange to see its earlier focus on men. I like Lew's lively prose and would direct readers not only to his book Fat Power but also to his genre novels, which he wrote for a living, especially the lurid Operation Moon Rocket.

Louderback is still around, though sadly Ann died some years ago. I had the pleasure of meeting him in 2009, and we correspond from time to time.

The article is predictably obscure but, by magic, I have a copy of it. Here it is, hot off the scanner.

Louderback, L. (1967). More People Should Be FAT. Saturday Evening Post. Philadelphia, PA: The Curtis Publishing Company. November 4, issue 22. 10-12.

Louderback, L. [pseudonym Nick Carter]. (1968) Operation Moon Rocket, London: Tandem.

Louderback, L. (1970) Fat Power, New York: Hawthorn Books.

Queer Feminist Fat Activism Spanish Style

2011-07-18T11:55:00.001+01:00

Hey look, Una Buena Barba has published a fat activism special, featuring interviews with me and Ruth from The Bop, plus the Fat Liberation Manifesto, and lots of eye candy. Queer feminist culture, free, unshaved and all in Spanish - hola!

Una Buena Barba

Original unedited English version (.pdf, 96kb)

Bombarded by Images

2011-07-15T18:03:00.000+01:00

I'm going to be taking part in an artist's residency in Edinburgh, 2-3 September 2011 as a member of the Bad Art Collective. Our thing is called 'Bombarded by Images'. Come and join in if you can.

Fatty Animals: I do not mind fatty!!

2011-07-14T17:00:00.002+01:00

When I was a kid I lived in Hong Kong for a couple of years as part of what I have come to understand as a weird experiment in class and colonialism. I'll explain that in more depth in Chapter Three of my memoirs, whenever I come to write them, but for now I just want to say that Hong Kong in 1976 was when I first encountered Hello Kitty and, to a seven year old girl, that stuff was like crack. I've never been able to shake the habit and as a middle-aged woman I still go gaga for hyper-cute Asian graphics. I've been lucky enough to spend time in Japan in recent years, where I have pawed and prodded my way through the country's top stationery departments.

In London, where I live, Artbox is where I go for a fix. I was there yesterday, hyperventilating greedily over pencil-cases and plastic key covers. I bought this notebook. The cover has the picture of a rabbit or a bear with fat cheeks. The text says: "Fatty Animals: I do not mind fatty!!" and on the back there are more pictures of the fat rabbit eating a biscuit, a fat bear sitting and puffing, and more text: "We like to eat and hate to move. We are fatty animals". The paper inside the notebook is unadorned.

I did a little bit of peeping and checking this afternoon. Mind Wave sells character-based stationery and cute stuff in Japan and look like the originators of Fatty Animals. If they have Fatty Animals on their site, my Japanese is not good enough to find it, but there are other websites featuring Fatty Animals products, like pencils and pencil-cases, and other notebook styles.

I was so interested to see this stuff because I think it demonstrates a popular resistance to dominant obesity discourse in Japan, a place where Western fat activists might assume there is none, and where people in the West commonly assume there are no fat people. The reiteration of fat as being caused by eating biscuits ane being lazy is problematic, but the line: "I do not mind fatty!!" is pretty amazing, I think, as both tolerance and celebration of fatness. It ties in neatly with Fat Studies work about obesity rhetoric and pets (Cooper, 1997, Kulick, 2009). I like the way that this form of engagement with obesity discourse has travelled and messes with neat assumptions about who is making fat culture, where and how. What can I say? It's excellent to see this playing out through the medium of anthropomorphic animals and cute stationery.

Cooper, C. (1997) 'Would You Put Your Best Friend on a Diet?'. Yes! London. 4:23 June/July. 14-15.

Kulick, D. (2009) 'Fat Pets', in: Tomrley, C. & Kaloski Naylor, A. (eds.) Fat Studies in the UK. York: Raw Nerve Books, 35-50.

NOLOSE - exciting new directions in queer and trans fat activism

2011-07-11T12:12:00.000+01:00

NOLOSE has just announced a change in policy that feels very daring, radical and exciting in the context of how identity politics have shaped fat activism.

The policy change statement sets out who will now be welcome at NOLOSE, sets down a challenge to identity as an organising principle, and questions the notion of safe space. This last aspect is reminiscent of Queerfestival Copenhagen's No safer spaces this year, which itself may also be part of a new trend in queer organising.

How the change in policy will work in concrete terms is anybody's guess. I think there are people who will struggle and I hope that they find a way of coming to terms with these new developments. I feel very positive about the policy change, I think it's realistically considered in terms of gender and 'safety', and I like how it advocates for more multiple and intersectional fat activisms. It demonstrates shifts in genealogies of fat activism that has roots in radical lesbian feminism and shows that the work based in these histories, locations, and politics are thriving and evolving, they are really alive. Congratulations to NOLOSE for making the leap.

Here's the text of the policy change in full:

NOLOSE Policy Change: Inclusion and Moving from Identity to Intention
July 8, 2011

Gender and Who 'We' Are

NOLOSE is a volunteer-run organisation dedicated to ending the oppression of fat people and creating vibrant fat queer culture. That's been our mission since the early '90s. Since that time, our community has been defined by who 'we' are (by nature, an evolving definition).

NOLOSE started out as the National Organisation for Lesbians of SizE, firmly fixed in identity politics, as a community of fat dykes and bisexual women. As the years passed and the organisation grew, we changed our policy to include not only a broader community of queer women—dykes, lesbians and bisexual women, including trans women—but also transgender people overall. This was partially in response to the evolving gender identities of people already in our community who were marginalised under the old policy.

Since then, NOLOSE and the annual NOLOSE Conference have been explicitly trans-inclusive, inviting all fat queer women (regardless of assigned sex or gender at birth), and all fat trans and gender-variant folks and our allies of all sexual orientations, with the specific exclusion of cisgender men (men who were assigned male at birth and identify that way now).

In the years since making this change, we've become aware that the altered policy continues to marginalise transgender people by requiring that they negate parts of their identities in order to be welcomed into the conference. For example, at this time trans men who attend can do so on the basis of having been formerly identified or socialised as female, but not on the basis of being men. At best, they can attend on the basis of being trans-men, which assumes a natural divide between cisgender men and trans men. This division can be dehumanising.

While trans men are welcomed regardless of the degree to which they have undergone hormone treatment or gender confirmation surgeries, we understand that the current gender policy may not feel as welcoming to trans women who have either not yet undergone hormone treatment and surgical transition, cannot afford to, or choose not to. While our previous policies seemed to make sense for the organisation at the time, NOLOSE does not wish to police the bodies, gender identities and gender expressions of our community. Instead, we'd like create a place that welcomes people on the basis of their desire to help build fat-positive and anti-oppressive community.

Challenging Identity as a Focus

Identity politics have their use and appeal, but they've also been constricting for us and many social justice movements. Because we defined our conference as being for and by a particular group, we opened thorny questions about legitimacy, and who had the right to be present and heard. Had we not begun to challenge that definition, we would likely have had to deal with border disputes between people arguing about 'how much' of some identity one must have in order to belong. This is a common challenge in groups and movements organising for change around identity.

There are also complexities regarding representation—if we're all in the same identity category, questions will invariably arise regarding what we say we want and how we should represent ourselves—often centred on the experience of assimilation/anti-assimilation. This can easily become a politics of shame, wherein those least able or least wanting to assimilate to some normative category get left behind. This perpetuates oppression and exclusion, drawing lines through the bodies of people.

We think there's a better way for us. Rather than trying to agree about 'who we are,' we want to come together around what is desired – what kind of ethics/politics we hold, and what kind of world we want to create. In the process, we remain cognisant of the fact that because we are differently impacted by relations of oppression and privilege, we also have different imperatives and investments in making change. Rather than try to bang out an ironclad code of conduct for what that means, we ask that everyone come willing to do the necessarily messy work of trying to figure out how to do anti-oppression politics and bring about social change and justice.

Because previous definitions of who belongs and who doesn't haven't worked for us, and because we believe that our NOLOSE community is shaped by the consciousness, ideological intent, and action of our participants rather than by identity, we've decided to change the criteria for conference attendance from an identity-based one to one that's ideologically-based. This means that anyone aiming to help create a queer, fat positive, anti-racist, anti-ableist, anti-ageist, anti-classist, anti-colonialist, feminist space will be welcome at NOLOSE. In effect, this means that all people interested in building fat-positive, queer, anti-oppressive community, including cisgender men, will be welcome at NOLOSE. Nobody will be excluded on the basis of identity. This change will be implemented by the time of our next conference.

It's been a long process that brought us to this decision. We began by having several in-person discussions more than a year ago, then created a forum (held at the 2010 conference) that helped us, as a community, identify people's hopes and fears regarding opening the conference up to cisgender men. That input was the basis of several discussions to follow, including a consultation with LGBT social worker Katy Bishop (a counsellor with expertise in helping communities navigate issues of inclusion and exclusion). It was in a meeting facilitated by Katy that we outlined this new policy.

Challenging the Concept of Safety

One concern in regards to this policy that we want to specifically address is the fear of losing of what's long been called 'safe space.' This conference has often been more comfortable for white people, those with temporary physical ability, and mid-size folks, while others of us have had to field assumptions and been forced to educate those with more privilege in order to keep from becoming invisible. This isn't our idea of safety.

While we respect people's yearning for spaces that feel secure, we want to recognise that there is a distinction between being 'safe' and being 'comfortable.' In our policy considerations, we define 'safe space' as space free from physical, verbal, and emotional violence; 'comfort,' by contrast, often has more to do with lack of challenge around our preconceived beliefs, and may also be informed by individual privilege. In that sense, discomfort can be what allows us to challenge oppression and build more inclusive community. We challenge the idea that truly comfortable space is possible or even desirable.

We want a conference that lives up to social justice principles in regards to anti-violence, body size and ability, race and ethnicity, sex, gender, sexual orientation, age, and class background. We want it to be a space that's less 'comfortable' and more radical and conscious about the kind of world we all want to live in and work toward. This means sharing space that may be challenging for all of us, and in which we're accountable to each other in order to meet those challenges with compassion and strength. This means taking risks, asking questions, being willing to learn and listen, and being responsible for our own learning as well.

Moving Forward Together

We want your input on how to actualise this policy. We, the board of NOLOSE, welcome suggestions and input from you all on how to make this policy and focus change work. Since all board members are working throughout the whole conference, our availability is limited, but you may be able to check in if you want to speak one-on-one with one of us. We will also be available from 12:00-1:00 on Saturday at lunch (at a specified table, TBD), and during the Saturday 3pm workshop slot in the 'Pig' room for community members to gather and discuss the policy change with members of the NOLOSE Board of Directors. We encourage you to add your ideas, concerns, and questions to our suggestion box located at the registration table. We'll also be asking for your input on our evaluation form at the end of the conference, so be on the lookout for that.

Here's what we would especially like to hear about:

Suggestions for things to include in the conference mission.
What do you, as a community member, need to help you through this policy and focus transition?
Are there structural ways that the conference can respond to your needs in regards to the new policy?

We welcome you to join in this space with us. It's an ongoing adventure that'll bring its own perils, wisdom, and love with it. Thanks for sharing it with us.

The NOLOSE Board of Directors

Tara Shuai, Co-President
Galadriel Mozee, Co-President
Kim Paulus, Vice President
Rachel, Treasurer
Geleni Fontaine, Secretary
Abby Weintraub
Jen Herrington
Joe
Sondra
Zoe

ESRC Fat Studies and Health At Every Size Seminars - resources now available

2011-07-01T15:32:00.000+01:00

Audiovisual material relating to the first three seminars is now up on the ESRC Fat Studies and Health At Every Size Seminars website. This means that if you missed the series, or want to refresh your memory about who said what when, you can go and download audio files, PowerPoint slides and video too. The files for the fourth seminar are on their way.

ESRC Fat Studies and Health At Every Size Seminars

These seminars were the first large-scale government funded events for Fat Studies in the UK.

Dr Bethan Evans, the principle organiser for the seminar series, says: "This is potentially quite a good resource for people to access and we'd be really interested to know if/how people are using the site (and if there are any problems with it - we are limited in terms of technology but will try and improve things where possible). Please point students/friends to the resource if you think they'd be interested."

She adds: "If anyone came to the seminars and has any feedback on the series as a whole this would also be really useful for us to pass this back to the ESRC who funded us."

Look a fat dyke in the eye

2011-07-01T14:37:00.001+01:00

I was given a copy of a flyer for an exhibition by Zoe Mosko that took place in 1982. I love the text on the flyer, which shows how rich the fat dyke scene was in the Bay Area in the 1980s, and the centrality of cultural production to fat activism. But the best thing is obviously the image, what a winner! Don't those women look fantastic? The outfits and the eye contact! Wowie! I'm going to cover a hat with some badges now.

The Liberated Fat Person

2011-07-01T14:04:00.000+01:00

Dianne Rubinstein wrote a Fat Consciousness Raising Outline in 1981 and, I believe, circulated it via NAAFA. In the guide, Rubinstein offers a rationale for consciousness raising, which was one of the key organising and politicising methods of Western feminism from the 1960s to the early 1980s, broadly speaking. She offers a format for going about fat consciousness raising, which includes lists of questions and instructions on how to listen and respond. I've never been a part of a consciousness raising group, I'm a bit too young for that, so it is fascinating to see its process spelled out in such detail.

I was interested in the last set of questions Rubinstein asks, titled The Liberated Fat Person. Firstly, the language jumped out at me, especially the use of the definite article, and the past tense for 'Liberated' which imply that liberation is a fixed state that can be attained, maybe an ideal state. This contrasts current alternative thinking about fat activism or fat acceptance which is that they are ongoing, open.

Secondly, the list of questions offers an idea of what fat liberation looked like at that point in time, within a US context of feminism and rights-based organising. Some of these ideas endure, suggesting the slow moving ideology of fat politics. Again, the concepts are fairly fixed, there's not much room for ambiguity, the use of 'our' and the undefined categorisation of people as fat and thin are problematic. The language of 'Fat Liberation', presumably rooted in Women's Liberation, looks very dated now, and has been largely taken over by the term 'fat acceptance' or 'size acceptance' which I think are politically much weaker, or 'fat activism', which often implies something else.

Thirdly, it strikes me how rare it still is to come across work which is written from the standpoint of a fat libber, or fat activist. I'm talking about work which directly references these concepts and which illustrates the values and worldviews of people engaged with these pursuits.

Lastly, I like that the questions might elicit different responses over time and place. It might be fun to have a consciousness raising session in 2011, to have a go at answering them together.

The Liberated Fat Person

1. What strengths do fat people have?
2. What is a liberated fat person?
3. What are some of the problems/pressures of the liberated fat person?
4. What is the best way to deal with a fat person who is antagonistic to the fat liberation movement?
5. How do you deal with a thin person who is antagonistic to the fat liberation movement?
6. Can a fat person with 'a raised consciousness' still relate to thin people?
7. What is equality? Is that our goal?
8. What are the goals of the fat liberation movement?
9. What are the goals of your group?
10. Is c/r a political action? Is it enough?
11. What is 'closet fat'? To what extent are you?
12. What is 'closet f.a.'?
13. What have you gotten from this group? Is it what you expected?

Rubinstein, D. (1981). Fat Consciousness Raising Outline. Bellerose, NY: NAAFA.

Manufacturing hate

2011-07-01T12:24:00.000+01:00

I was at Rotterdam The Hague Airport yesterday. Part of the checking-in area was being used to film a comedy show that's going to be broadcast on RTL Nederland in August. I didn't have my wits about me to catch the name of the show, but I watched the filming for a few minutes before I went through to the departure lounge.

The main character was a guy with unruly ginger hair dressed in a sort of a shell-suit, like a chav stereotype. At first I couldn't work out why his face looked so puffy and weird, and then I saw the plastic belly poking out from under his clothes and I realised he was wearing a fat suit. As I watched him act, his comedy character seemed to be modelled on someone with a learning disability.

I have no idea about the context for this character, whether or not this is a popular programme, what it's about. Maybe someone else reading this knows and can fill me in. What struck me was the casual way in which stereotypes are manufactured, and about who is invested in their creation. There were about 15 people making the programme, including producers, actors, technicians, and no doubt the airport was getting a location fee, all very workaday. And yet here is a character in a fat suit, complete with various other underclass signifiers, being presented as stupid and pathetic, the butt of the joke. Why do this?

I tried to take some pictures of the guy in the fat suit but, strangely enough, he wasn't keen. This is the best I could do, he's the one in the middle, you can just about see his plastic strap-on belly poking out of his clothes.

Ten Reasons to Love Burger Queen

2011-06-23T11:03:00.005+01:00

I was cautiously optimistic when I first wrote about Burger Queen and now, having attended three out of the four events, I admit I was wrong to be so circumspect and can whole-heartedly say that it was absolutely brilliant in every way. Here are ten reasons why:

1. I've never seen anything like it in my life (and I've seen a lot)
Burger Queen went beyond any preconceptions I had about that stale irony-format, the beauty contest. Instead, it was like being immersed in a total environment where the focus was always shifting between performance, activism, weirdness, joy, anger, precious moments, and where real and fake were redundant terms. The Duckie performance influence is undeniable, I think, but it has its own distinct flavour (and smell, chips!), and I've never before seen performance of this kind applied to fat in such a skilful way.

2. Woah, activism
Looking at Burger Queen as a piece of fat activism, which it is but is also much more, makes me feel really excited about fat culture, especially that which is now happening right on my doorstep. There are so many ways in which it could develop, it doesn't have to follow the work I've seen, especially in the US, which is trad-burlesque heavy, or speaks to a lowest common denominator. Burger Queen is didactic but doesn't treat the audience like morons, offers a non-preachy pomposity-free polemic, is experimental and accessible, and it turns high concepts into a beautiful shared experience where rough and smooth all mix in together. This is what happens when people who get it use their talent and imagination to create something unique and wild.

3. The details that mattered
It's the little things that count, like the fact that you could buy a burger meal with your ticket, the Burger Queen staff uniforms, the fat-centric soundtrack, the being-on-TV jokes, the morbidly obese woman singing at the end of the night, the weekly diet, and the graphic design, to name but a few of them. It was a complete experience created by a team of enablers. It made me feel that I was in one of Scottee's demented fantasies, which is not a bad place to be.

4. Timberlina
I enjoyed all the Burger Queen performances but Timberlina's ukulele-assault on the cult of LighterLife was unforgettable.

5. It was messy
There were no tidy, nice, clean, respectable fat people at Burger Queen. No wannabe good productive citizens in sight. It was all about sweat, tears, being out of puff, having physical limitations, being in a strop, showers of chips and glitter, wobbling flesh, dirty cakeholes, genderfuckery, hairy bellies, sexuality, foul mouths, and low life (which of course is high life). Hallelujah for queered-up non-assimilationist fat people, there are few things more beautiful.

6. Fat is a politic
The idea that fat is a politic rather than a dress size was put forward in Burger Queen. I'll add the caveat that I think that fat is also about particular kinds of embodiment but luckily queer theory means that I don't have to reject one in favour of another, it can be both and more. Anyway, fat is a politic is a radical suggestion because it engages people of all sizes, it shows that everyone is implicated in fat and it incites people to do something about it. And this being uttered not at some exclusive academic conference, but at a pub in Vauxhall. I love that it supports multiple ways of being fat, and doesn’t offer these false binary divisions of fat/thin, or fat activist/fat ally. I have a similar thing with The Chubsters, which is a fat queer girl gang that you don’t have to be fat, queer, a girl, or remotely aggressive to be a part of. Hurray!

7. The people
The contestants, the judges, Jude Bean, the crowd. I wanted to be best friends with everyone and it gave me a bunch of new crushes to obsess over. Favourite contestant moment: being forced to wave my hands in the air by that out-of-control queen and dodging the sweets that she pulled from her face and hurled at people angrily.

8. Being a punter
If I want to be involved with fat activism usually what happens is that I have to either travel thousands of miles, or do it myself, or by myself. Burger Queen was the first time that I could just get on the tube and enjoy being in the audience. I could see that everyone was working like crazy, the stress of putting on something like this is major, but there was none of that on my part, just eye-popping fun and an event that felt as though it was made just for me. Bliss.

9. Queer-Disability-Fat
I did an MA in the early 90s and published a book in 1998 that applied disability theory to fat activism. I also wrote about queerness in that book but the feminist publishers believed that queer was the devil's work and wouldn't print that stuff. What delights me 13-20 years later is that Burger Queen comes along, crowns the gorgeous Nina Neon, and it's clear in the loveliest way that queer and disability and fat have a lot to say to each other and can interact with each other in fantastic ways. Burger Queen is theory that I helped develop reflected in reality, and done in a way that anyone can understand, with humour and style and humanity.

10. There's going to be another one next year
Yes, yes oh yes.

Burger Queen

Timeline paper zines all gone, free digital download is here

2011-06-13T15:33:00.000+01:00

The original paper version of A Queer and Trans Fat Activist Timeline has sold out. 250 copies were distributed by my tender hands in less than three weeks. It's so exciting to me that people want this stuff!

You're out of luck if you want one of the originals now, unless you can snaffle up one of the few remaining that will be sold at Zinefest in London by Ricochet Ricochet; at NOLOSE at the beginning of July; perhaps leftovers at Re/Dress NYC, and at Plump It Up in Toronto.

But don't cry if you missed out. Copies have been circulated at around 60 zine libraries, archives and autonomous spaces worldwide where you can visit and, in some cases, borrow a copy. It's also been released under a Creative Commons licence, which means that anyone can reprint copies. On top of that, I've written a fancypants essay about it which will hopefully be published later this year. The timeline lives! If you're around northern Germany, you might want to consider a trip to Bildwechsel to see the original timeline.

That's not all! I've saved the best until last. There's now a digital download of the zine available for free and for sharing. Go to it! Treat yourself to the audio download as well, whilst you're at it, you don't have to have a visual impairment or autism to enjoy it (but it helps).

Vintage weight loss kitsch: Fight the Flab with Terry Wogan

2011-06-10T23:12:00.001+01:00

My boyfriend has been digging around in the secondary vinyl collection and brought this up from the basement for a spin. It's as terrible as you'd imagine, and proof that loveable Terry Wogan is a tool of The Man as well as being a fan of the firm control ladies undergarment. Anyway, here it is for your listening pleasure, it seems to go on for ages. Extra points to those who want to video themselves doing these exercises in an 18 hour bra, girdle or corselette.

Fight the Flab with Terry Wogan (.mp3, 3.1mb)

Uppity Fatty

2011-06-09T15:48:00.001+01:00

Uppity Fatty, a sister-site to the fantastic Adipositivity Project, posted a picture of my girlfriend Kay and I.

I love how both websites generate mass archives of images of fat people, autonomous images that represent how we see ourselves. Taking self-representation into your own hands is so easy and so radical. These are images that sustain me.

Why don't you submit some pictures of yourselves?

Diet Songs: Special K

2011-06-09T11:27:00.001+01:00

Special K is more monotonous to eat than Grape Nuts, but not quite as bad as All Bran, which gives it the distinction of not even being the worst cereal, more like the second or third worst. I associate the brand with everything that I scorn about diet culture, it is assimilationist, apologetic, boring, self-hating, sanctimonious, unfeminist, mediocre, passionless. Anti-life.

The current crop of adverts feature women dancing around their kitchens with different bingey flavours of Special K, ersatz food, where what is being sold cannot match the marketing hyperbole. Those women are desperately hungry, I imagine, because The Special K crash diet plan involves eating only one meal a day and replacing the rest with stingy bowls of cereal. Poor cows.

Anyway, this is the last Diet Song in the series and it's one of my favourites because it was really fun to record. It's the classic 'Can you pinch more than an inch?' campaign, which is iconic in advertising history, and the source of much anxiety and disbelief in my playground when I was a kid.

If you can pinch more than an inch of chub on your side, you need to lose weight by eating Special K. I've generally been able to grab about a good handful of flesh in that spot, and at least a foot or two of fat on my belly, not quite a yard. But that hardly matters, everyone can pinch an inch, including thin people, which is why the slogan is marketing gold in terms of creating a rush of fearful consumers.

Pinching an inch inhabits the same body anxiety genealogy as other home tests of freakhood, such as the pencil test. This involves putting a pencil under your tits, if it stays there, your tits are all wrong. By my mid-teens I could keep a whole pack of felt-tips under my breasts and these days I treat them as an extra pair of hands from time to time, they can keep a towel or a bottle of shampoo handy whilst I'm doing something else.

Pinching as well, can we talk about that? It's so mean! Pinching your body, policing other people's bodies by pinching them. Ow ow ow! The person who thought this up was obviously not very nice.

Here's our version. I do all the voices and Simon had fun making the pinchy sounds on his homemade effects boxes.

Diet Songs: Special K by Charlotte Cooper + Simon Murphy (.mp3, 540kb)

Diet Songs
New Project: Diet Songs
Nimble
Slim-Fast
Tab
Diet Pepsi
Nutrasweet
Diet Coke
Ryvita
Ayds
Special K

A Queer and Trans Fat Activist Timeline zine - nearly sold out

2011-06-08T12:55:00.005+01:00

I started out with 250 copies at the end of May and now have ~~20 copies remaining. That's all that's left in the photo. They've really flown out of the door~~. Update: They're gone now.

Some copies will be sold at Zinefest by Ricochet Ricochet, who have about ten for sale. In the US a small number of copies will be on sale at NOLOSE at the beginning of July, and there may be leftovers at Re/Dress NYC depending on how it goes at Fatlandia. In Toronto you can pick up copies via Plump It Up.

Otherwise, that's it unless anyone wants to take on the Creative Commons task of printing more of their own. There will be a download of the zine in time, but these are the last of the original beautiful paper zines, a gorgeous object to have and hold. I don't have any plans for a second edition.

Diet Songs: Ayds

2011-06-08T11:00:00.004+01:00

It's a box of sweets with added magic lovely and slim ingredient X. This turns out to be an anaesthetic, later replaced with a mild kind of speed of a type that was later withdrawn from over-the-counter products because it raises the risk of stroke in the young women who eat this stuff.

I'm stuck on the name, I can't get past the name. A weight loss product called Ayds which, when you say it aloud, sounds like AIDS. I associate dieting so strongly with drawn-looking emptied out bodies that when I hear Ayds I think of the wasting suffered by people with AIDS, and that famous photograph of David Kirby dying amidst his devastated folks. This is probably not the association that the makers of Ayds wanted to promote in the product's heyday, but it's certainly the association that led to Ayds' demise.

Just saying the name invokes a handful of feelings: schadenfreude, a longing for other similar diet crap to bite the dust, sadness and rage about HIV/AIDS, bemusement. Ayds is so exposed by its name and obvious quackery, if it can happen to that product, why not Slim Fast, LighterLife and the rest of them? Why must it fall to an unfortunate coincidence?

Would Ayds be a viable brand nowadays? I'm inclined to think that it would. I think the obesity epidemicTM has made many people more desperate than ever to try and lose weight. Associations with illness don't seem to matter, I know someone who was congratulated on her weight loss after a couple of months suffering amoebic dysentery. How does the stigma of AIDS or terminal illness compare to fat stigma? Would people be willing to be associated with one in place of the other? I really don't know.

We recorded this pretty straight because, really, what else are you going to do with gold like this? Simon's spidery track sounds like a virus in your blood.

Diet Songs: Ayds by Charlotte Cooper + Simon Murphy (.mp3, 840kb)

Diet Songs
New Project: Diet Songs
Nimble
Slim-Fast
Tab
Diet Pepsi
Nutrasweet
Diet Coke
Ryvita
Ayds
Special K

Submit to the new Fat Studies journal

2011-06-07T19:49:00.000+01:00

Here's how.

Diet Songs: Ryvita

2011-06-07T11:59:00.002+01:00

Next week I will pay £110 and submit myself to the indignity of the dentist, having cracked a tooth on a seed embedded in a piece of particularly hard German crisp-bread. It's unlikely that I will renounce my crisp-bread habit, despite this setback, I simply won't be without the cardboard-like texture of this fart-producing foodstuff. Spread with butter and jam is my favourite way of ingesting a sheet of crude roughage.

I eschew diet products in general, including joyless self-punishment food marketed mainly to women as a slimming aid (cottage cheese, I'm looking at you). I enjoy plain food, which is where Ryvita comes in and fucks with my stupid food rules. I can handle a rice cake too. I think I accept Ryvita into my cupboard and my tummy because I associate its brand with an earlier era of marketing, it reminds me of products of yesteryear like Bile Beans, which promise 'vim and vigour', or the mysterious 'pep'. Even though the company never had a manufacturing base in Sweden, I also associate Ryvita with 1970 blonde Scandinavian women and therefore porn. Yeah, I don't know why either. It's only when those rotten Fern Britton ads come on the telly that I realise I am eating diet food. Bah, they got me!

Ryvita marks the point where Diet Songs takes a turn for the weird. Lord knows what was going on when we recorded this one. My disjointed vocal track is the least of it, for me it evokes the imaginary sound of a slice of Ryvita making its way through your alimentary canal. Enjoy.

Diet Songs: Ryvita by Charlotte Cooper + Simon Murphy (.mp3, 568kb)

Diet Songs
New Project: Diet Songs
Nimble
Slim-Fast
Tab
Diet Pepsi
Nutrasweet
Diet Coke
Ryvita
Ayds
Special K

Diet Songs: Diet Coke

2011-06-06T12:13:00.004+01:00

The peculiar chemical aftertaste in Diet Coke makes me feel like throwing up. My lived experience of drinking this product couldn't be further away from the images used to promote it: fun-loving skinny people larking around on the beach, in the case of this vintage jingle. Come to think of it, I can't recall a Diet Coke advertising campaign that hasn't been wholly gross, I have to look away every time those Sex and The City style office girl marionettes are on the box, for example. Ugh, puppets and their tippity-tappity little feet. Nightmare.

I tried to sing this Diet Song with passion, like Diet Pepsi, and Tab, the originals are a crescendo of mass hysteria. I wonder if anyone fainted when it was recorded. Unfortunately it's hard to replicate that sound in my front room in rainy East London, my range is, frankly, limited, and Simon lacks the technical resources to make us sound like a chorus of Diet Coke junkies screaming for our lives. So we've just plodded and muddled our way through, which is a lot like how it feels to drink a revoltingly nausea-inducing Diet Coke.

Diet Songs: Diet Coke by Charlotte Cooper + Simon Murphy (.mp3, 896kb)

Diet Songs
New Project: Diet Songs
Nimble
Slim-Fast
Tab
Diet Pepsi
Nutrasweet
Diet Coke
Ryvita
Ayds
Special K

What would it be like to wake up thin?

2011-05-26T15:47:00.007+01:00

One of the questions that I was asked last week at King's College London was about how I might handle waking up thin one day (my answer: "That's never going to happen").

I gave a quick answer but this question deserves deeper thought because I think it is a product of various ideas about fatness, including:

Fat people would rather be thin because obviously it's better to be thin
There is nothing of value in being fat
Bodies are choices therefore transformation is desirable and possible
The fantasy of transformation from an unbearable present to a beautiful future is preferable to the struggle to make the present liveable now
Disbelief that embodied self-acceptance is possible

These ideas bring with them a lot of heartache, frustration, stigma, discrimination and hatred. They support the concept that Hannele Harjunen writes about so well, of fat liminality, the idea that fat people's lives are in this holding space, a purgatory, until they become thinner/normative and can properly enter into human life.

It won't come as a surprise, but I don't subscribe to these ideas in relation to my own body. However, I do fantasise a lot about things. Often these are impossible supernatural things, like waking up and all the dead people I love are alive again; or about a more prosaic sadness, like waking up to find that I am adored and worshipped by someone who plainly doesn't adore or worship me in real life. Sometimes I dream about things that appear impossible but become more feasible when I pick them apart; waking up with unimaginable wealth is actually the desire to be able to do what I want with my life, to be able to help other people whenever I like, and not having to worry about paying for something, rather than sitting on a yacht with a bunch of supermodels. I think dreaming and imagining are crucial for anyone with an interest in social change; fantasy and desire, an imagining of something different, they are the first unformed, free-flowing steps to taking action.

Occasionally I harbour fantasies of having a different kind of body. Having a tail, a penis, the ability to project my thoughts out of my eyeballs like a film, or type anything just by tapping my fingers on a surface, being able to fly, to breathe underwater, to teleport, to grow or miniaturise myself, this is what I think about. I also wonder what it might feel like to have different impairments like some of the people I know. The fantasy of waking up thin is not really there, it's too boring, I just don't value slenderness in that way.

When I return to the original question I think I am being asked about the circumstances under which I would want to be thin. It boils down to this: it would be interesting to take advantage of the capital and privilege that comes with being normatively embodied for a couple of days, though I think this would enrage me to a level where I would struggle to function. I think Linda Bacon's 2009 NAAFA keynote, Reflections on Fat Acceptance: Lessons Learned from Privilege (.pdf, 128kb) is really central to the reasons why fat people might fantasise about becoming thin, it's about acessing power and privilege. This explains why people would risk the drastic and uncertain steps to realise normatively thin embodiment, and why this is problematic for anyone who cares about embodied diversity and the unequal distribution of power.

The question about waking up thin comes from a series of common values and beliefs that have become very alien to me and it's fun to take them apart and answer the question from my current standpoint. I'm intrigued, for example, by the way that very thin people can scooch up into tiny spaces, so I'd like to try that for, I dunno, 20 minutes or so before I returned home to my own body. It's a funny reversal of the fantasy, being thin is the temporary state in my mind's eye because when I think about it, who would I be without my body and my own history of fat embodiment? There's no way I would ever want to deny that precious stuff.

A Queer and Trans Fat Activist Timeline - audio zine is here!

2011-05-25T22:45:00.002+01:00

It's like Listen With Mutha

Download and listen to the audio version of my zine, A Queer and Trans Fat Activist Timeline.

A Queer and Trans Fat Activist Timeline - audio version (.mp3, approx 52 mins, 24mb)

Audio version? Yep, that's me reading and describing the zine. It's an attempt to make a paper zine available to people in different formats, to make it more accessible. I was inspired to have a go at making an audio version by Judy Freespirit, who worked for a while recording audio books for people with visual impairments. This is the first time I've done this, feedback is welcome.

You can download the audio version of the zine for free and listen to it by itself, it takes about 50 minutes, or use the recording to augment your reading of the paper zine. You don't have to be visually impaired to listen to it.

You can still buy the paper zine too! Here's how.

Feel free to share the .mp3 and thanks to Simon Murphy for helping me.

The audio version of A Queer and Trans Fat Activist Timeline by Charlotte Cooper is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. This means people can copy, download and share this zine with others as long as they credit me, Charlotte Cooper, but they can’t change the zine in any way or use it commercially. Permissions beyond the scope of this license, for example translations, may be available at http://www.obesitytimebomb.blogspot.com. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California 94105, USA.

A Queer and Trans Fat Activist Timeline zine is now available to buy!

2011-05-23T17:39:00.002+01:00

I am absolutely delighted to announce that A Queer and Trans Fat Activist Timeline zine is now available to buy.

How to buy the zine.

The zine (a kind of homemade magazine) is a discussion of queer and trans fat activist histories, and about how people might undertake the crucial work of making, documenting and disseminating stories and accounts. People are profoundly separated from those who came before them if this work doesn't take place.

A Queer and Trans Fat Activist Timeline documents a workshop which produced an object which was then archived. The zine itself will also be lodged at a number of archives and libraries around the world, but there are some left over for people to have for themselves.

It's hard to know what to say about this project because I've been working with it closely for about a year, and because it has become much more than each individual part; it's no longer just a workshop, or just an object or just a zine. It's also a project that has taken me from California to Germany, I've presented the timeline to different people and there have been some wonderful discussions of it. It's been the focus of an artist's residency and has helped shift the way I think of my own work as a cultural producer. I've talked about it on the radio and it's become a donation to an archive in the hope that other people might make something of it in the future. I'm writing a paper about it. No doubt it will go on and morph into other things too, but for now here's the zine.

I have some secret hopes for the timeline now that it is a zine:

People will become excited about queer trans fat activism – the timeline documents many accounts that have never been shared elsewhere
People will become excited about the richness of fat activism as a movement with historical links that go back at least several decades and crosses international borders
Queer and trans people will get on board with fat activism more
Fat activists will get on board with queer and trans stuff more
People will document their own activism
People will consider things like place and time and context when they produce accounts of their own activism
People will think about cultural imperialism when they construct and disseminate accounts of what they do
That archivists and librarians will make more of an effort to make the ways that queer and trans and fat move through each other more explicit and available
I hope that it will blow people's minds.

I'll stop talking about this for now, no doubt I'll come back to it later at some point.

Look at this excellent fat sculpture

2011-05-19T11:15:00.002+01:00

I don't have much of any substance to say today, mainly because I am still buzzing from the talk at King's College London last night. Thanks to everyone who contributed to that.

What I do have, however, is this amazing picture!

It's from the cover of the May 2011 issue of Museums Journal, the magazine of the Museums Association. It's there to illustrate an article about how science museums should get more hip and goes to show that a picture of a fat person or object perks up any old thing.

It turns out that the object is a sculpture that was exhibited in the Museum for the History of Science's Steampunk exhibition. I'm not much of a Steampunk aficionado so I haven't dug very deeply into the site and haven't been able to find much information about it other than that its title is Cosmonaute and it was made by Stéphane Halleux. There are more pictures on Stéphane's site.

The magazine image is accompanied by the headline 'Brave New World,' which I like because it subverts the notion that obesity heralds the end of the world. I've documented previous artistic explorations of fat that I think have failed dismally, but this object is different. I love it, from its tiny and cute three-digit hands to its truncated feet and blank/wonderous expression. Its apparent inflatedness reminds me of the lovely Horniman Walrus, which is no bad thing. I like the way it appears to hover lightly, as though gravity is no longer relevant.

The sculpture's shape recalls friends and acquaintances who look a bit like this. It makes me think that fat activists should have tool belts, gauges, dials and protective headgear as we navigate and explore the outer reaches of culture and embodiment.

How the Left failed fat

2011-05-16T12:27:00.005+01:00

About a week ago my friend sent me a link to an article by Jennie Bristow that was published in Living Marxism when my book came out in 1998, you can read it below. My publisher at the time sent me a press packet of all the coverage my book generated, but this article wasn't in it so I never saw it. I'm glad that I didn't read it back then, the work had been a monumental struggle for me at a time when I was living a somewhat marginal life, and I would have been devastated.

I'm in a better position to talk about this stuff 13 years on. Bristow's vicious piece is callous in its response to Christina Corrigan's death, and disablist and racist to boot. Without ever having met me, she paints me as a miserable, whining wannabe victim intent on playing oppression olympics, when actually my book sets out the many ways in which fat activists resist and transform hatred, and why we do it. Bristow presents fat activism as dogmatic and American, which it certainly can be, but there's more to the picture than that. She posits the classic argument that fat is trivial compared to 'real' oppression, not least because fat is a choice. Weirdly, she demolishes me but agrees that fat hatred is real and has negative effects on people's lives – er, isn't that what I was saying? She also sets up a creepy and false bad fatty/good fatty division between me and the lovely Janice Bhend, who published my work in her magazine in the 90s. What would Bristow have made of the passages that my publisher refused to publish? The sections about fat and trans people, sex-positive feminism, SM? I imagine she would have blown a gasket. And what about my publisher's feminist censorship of those ideas? We'll never know what she would have made of that, if only she'd done her journalistic homework and spoken to me first. The best bit is where Bristow refers to "The Charlotte Coopers of this world," heheheh, yes, there are legions of us! All like me!

Bristow's article was not the first time that Living Marxism dismissed fat activism, in 1994 Ann Bradley went to town on Mary Evans Young's project of getting an anti-diet Early Day Motion read and supported in Parliament. I won't dwell on those pieces, or my book, both came out years ago and are done and done. Contexts have changed and I feel confident that Fat & Proud was a good piece of work because of the positive response I've had to it over the years.

What I do want to say is that both Bradley and Bristow's articles capture the British Left's failure to get on board with embodied liberation, including fat. This is also mirrored in some kinds of feminism (and it hasn't escaped me that both of these Living Marxism articles were authored by women). The legacy of the belittling of fat activism, and the feminist pathologising of fat within eating disorder paradigms is that the Left has a particularly muddled and weak relationship to this kind of political activity today. I see this as a wasted opportunity, a terrible shame. If the unions had supported Jane Meacham when she was sacked for being too fat in the late 1980s, we might very well have employment protection today. And how come it's left to the bloody Daily Mail to highlight dodgy goings on in the weight industry – notably a number of deaths of women who happened to be on the Lighterlife diet – whilst The Guardian continues to bleat on about the obesity epidemic long after anyone is interested?

Maybe Bristow has the answers. I wrote to her last week to see if she would like to re-engage with some of the things she said about my work in the light of how the world has since changed. As yet she hasn't responded.

Bradley, A. (1994). Fat's not a feminist issue. Living Marxism, 68, p.11

Bristow, J. (1998). The 'fat rights' lobby is out to lunch. Living Marxism, 109, p.30

PS. And I'm still pissed off that when Michael Moore solicited his TV audience for ideas, he never took up my suggestion that diet industries would be a good target for Crackers the Corporate Crime Fighting Chicken! What, hold a grudge? Me?

And while I'm at it, have a look at Depicting fat and class too.

Revisiting BBC Open Space: Fat Women Here To Stay

2011-05-11T22:46:00.003+01:00

Although my awakening as a fat activist was spread out over a long period, and although I still feel that I am undergoing a continuous kind of awakening around it, I can pinpoint 1989 as the year when I started to wake up.

I was 20, at Uni in Aberystwyth, my mum and my brother had recently died and I was frozen with grief, and I had a horrible relationship with a guy who wanted me to lose weight. During this dismal time I got a copy of Shelley Bovey's Being Fat Is Not A Sin, I may well have come across Shadow On A Tightrope, I heard about the Fat Women's Conference and the group that organised it in London and saw them talk about it on Terry Wogan's chat show. It's possible I read the articles that Spare Rib published about this new British fat activism, and I watched the Open Space documentary Fat Women Here To Stay on BBC2.

Today, 22 years later, I watched that documentary again. There's a viewing copy at the British Film Institute so I went and paid the fee, a massive £3.60 including VAT, and a friendly technician set it up for me at a viewing station.

I don't know much about the BBC's Community Programming Unit or Open Space, although I appeared in a later Open Space documentary made by Mary Evans Young for her Dietbreakers project in the early 1990s. I think the idea was that there were a number of slots available for people in the community to make their own programmes and maintain editorial control. The programmes were then broadcast during prime time on BBC2.

Watching Fat Women Here To Stay this morning, I was struck by how much and how little had changed in two decades. I think fat activism is slightly less obscure than it was, and parts of the discourse presented by the documentary have muddled their way into more mainstream spaces. Fat people are a lot more visible too, not just as subjects of a moral panic, but also as subjects for a television industry that needs to churn out a mass of sensationalist and cheap programming. But Fat Women Here To Stay is a very different entity than, say, a fat-related shockumentary in 2011. Mainstream, prime-time programmes where fat activists, or any 'political extremists', have editorial control don't exist.

Back to the prog. It covers the ground you'd expect: reclaiming language, discrimination, clothes, health, relationships, media representations, that kind of thing. It upholds healthism in a way that would be seen as problematic today, and its critique of fashion and advertising is flimsy. It's very earnest and somewhat naive, which makes it unintentionally funny at times, though never in a mean way. The fatshion is striking, voluminous printed tops and dangly earrings are the look for fat feminism in 1989.

My life has changed beyond anything I could have imagined for myself back then and the way I watched Fat Women Here To Stay today is very different to the way I originally viewed it. It's a credit to the programme that it can keep someone's interest beyond a Fat 101 stage. Here's what I really liked:

The presence of working class, angry, dykey feminists. Although the section on Jane Meacham's fatphobic sacking was heart-breaking, her defiance, and the support of her defiant family, is and was really inspiring, so many people would be crushed by the treatment she had to face. Mandy Mudd told it like it is, and I noticed that the women were very careful with pronouns when talking about partners and relationships!

The sequence in which the London Fat Women's Group calls up the long defunct City Limits magazine and berates them for publishing fatphobic lonely hearts adverts. The Advertising Manager on the other end of the line immediately derails the conversation by alluding that the group are sell-outs for working with the BBC, to which Heather Smith replies: "There's never been a programme on British TV which has been positive about fat people, and we just have to use it as any other oppressed group would use the media, even though as a whole it may produce some oppressive programmes." God, she is on it! There's another great sequence in which, along with Barbara Shores, she tells a representative from Jenny Craig that she is a tool of The Man and takes no prisoners.

The clips of mainstream comedy shows Allo Allo and Russ Abbott denigrating fat women are fascinating(ly awful) to see. Russ Abbott interests me because his show was a platform for fat comedian Bella Emburg, so he supported a fat woman's career whilst defaming fat women in general. I don't watch much mainstream TV comedy so couldn't tell you whether fat jokes have changed since then or disappeared, maybe they've become more subtle, or maybe the way fat women are depicted has shifted more towards disgust and pity.

On the other hand, the sequence where three members of the London Fat Women's Group enthusing about Baghdad Café having just been to see it at the Curzon Soho is delightful. This is a film I love too. If I have one big criticism of the programme it is that it could do less hand-wringing and more badassery to show how life-affirming and liberating fat activism can be, especially in terms of making and consuming our own cultural production. I have been criticised by other fat activists, including my early days heroine Shelley Bovey who has since somewhat disowned the movement, for paying insufficient attention to the dreadfulness of fat experience. It can be dreadful, this is true, but I cannot live a life that is solely focussed on oppression without also taking into consideration its resistance and the necessary pleasures of making our own liveable lives through creativity and community. This is an important means if survival, a way people can thrive. In this way I think the artist Rita Keegan's presence in the programme is crucial and I wish she'd been in it more.

Anyway, at least I got to enjoy Angela English's poetry and a group of women singing a very sweet fat liberation song at the end of the programme. It's sung to the tune of Que Sera and has the lines:

Now I know women can be strong
And we must struggle to set ourselves free
Fat women healthy, happy and proud
Fighting for liberty

Que sera sera
We know that our dreams can be
The future is ours you see
We can make things change

I have some ideas why the London Fat Women's Group and the second Fat Women's Group ended, which makes watching Fat Women Here To Stay a bittersweet experience. I would really love to meet the women who made this programme, especially Heather Smith, so far our paths have never really crossed. I'm so glad this programme was made, it’s still a remarkable piece of work, and an important part of my own radicalisation.

Karen Throsby and Charlotte Cooper double whammy at King's College London

2011-05-09T20:13:00.001+01:00

Here are more details. Come and see Karen Throsby and I talk next week. Anyone can come, it's free, and there's a wine reception (hic) afterwards.

Obesity and the Rejection of Body Normativity
Wednesday 18 May 2011
CMCI Work Room (formerly the Art Exhibition Room, on the ground floor of the South East Block), King’s College London, Strand Campus
17:30-19:00 followed by a wine reception

Following our successful launch in 2010, GenderMatters@King's, a research network of gender studies and feminist theories across King’s College London, is now organizing a series of seminars on the theme of “Gender and Mental Well Being: Inter-disciplinary Perspectives”, funded by King's Graduate School. Our first seminar will focus on exploring the subject of 'Obesity and the Rejection of Body Normativity', highlighting not only the gendered aspects of institutional interventions that attempt to govern bodies, but also the emancipatory potential of 'body shape diversity' discourses on fatness and fat identity, and their contestation against the weight-centred approach toward health.

"What do I eat, love?"
Obesity surgery and the reproduction of gender
Karen Throsby, The University of Warwick

Obesity surgery is conventionally understood through the lens of weight-related health discourses; it is the intervention of last resort for those whose bodies are deemed both medically and socially to be dangerously, intractably fat. Approximately 80% of all obesity surgery patients are women, but the gendering of obesity surgery as a practice extends far beyond the distribution of men and women among the patient population. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in an obesity surgery clinic, this presentation argues that the practice of obesity surgery, both within and outside of the clinic, not only leaves unaddressed troubling social and bodily gender norms, but actively reiterates and reproduces those norms. This presentation explores the gendering of obesity surgery, including patient candidacy, the everyday work of managing the post-surgical body, and the distribution of responsibility for treatment outcomes. I conclude by considering the implications of this for those working within critical fat politics.

"She was so viscerally happy in that moment"
Fat Activism for Well Being
Charlotte Cooper, The University of Limerick

Dominant obesity discourse in 21st century Western culture is steeped in the abjection of fat people, and that this impacts negatively on our health. A Social Model of fat activism remedies this problem by addressing systemic fat hatred and helping to create more livable lives for fat people (Cooper, 1998). Fat activism re-imagines fat embodiment and agency, collectively it spans continents and has historical links over four decades. Cooper will talk about her research into this social movement, and presents case studies which both support and reject body normativity.

One of the most extraordinary experiences of fat embodiment in my life

2011-05-09T14:13:00.004+01:00

The Hot Bath, where I had my treatment

I had one of the most extraordinary experiences of fat embodiment in my life on Saturday afternoon.

I went to Thermae Bath. This is the thermal baths complex in Bath, in Somerset. I'll try and explain this without being too confusing. Bath is a town. There are remains of Roman baths there, you can visit them to look but you cannot bathe in them. For a long time you could bathe in other baths in Bath, but then they closed. A new bathing complex was opened a few years ago. This complex comprises an inside pool, an outside rooftop pool, some steam rooms, and a hot bath where treatments are given. There is a separate building with a smaller bath. The baths are the only place in the UK where you can bathe in water heated by geothermal activity. Bath is also Britain's most well-known spa town, but that's another story.

(Quick and grumpy aside: If you are fat, the robes at Thermae Bath will not fit you, but the receptionist will insist "You'll be okay" without listening to you when you ask what size they come in. Although people of many sizes come and bathe at the baths, the robes only come in one standard size that does not cover someone of my size. This is extremely annoying, especially given that the complex has otherwise really good access for disabled people. I don’t know why they don't have some larger robes available. I have been to bath houses in Japan, a country where people tend to be much smaller than me, and I have been adequately clothed there, but not at Bath. Tip for fat people: bring your own.)

Thermae Bath at peak visiting time is not relaxing in the way that the brochure pictures promise. It is heaving with people who do not know about spa etiquette. So there is a lot of loud chatter, dashing around, and people seem unable to switch off and just experience the heat, the water, the ambiance. My girlfriend and I let go of our fantasies of having the place to ourselves and bobbed around in the warm water with everyone else. It was not a holy experience, but it was fun and relaxing in its own way.

The baths are a great place to witness yourself amongst a spectrum of bodies, to see the myth of bodily normativity at first hand, and to treat your own body with gentle kindness. Bobbing, floating, sweating, napping, all feel good. Going to the baths is not the only way in which I have learned to feel okay in my own skin, but it's part of the story. I would love to see a fat activist reclamation of David Walliams and Matt Lucas' hate-filled Little Britain stereotype Bubbles DeVere. I resent that mean appropriation of my fat, naked, spa-loving self!

The hot bath from outside

I also find the idea of spa treatments interesting because they inhabit a quasi-medical, or para-medical space. Often practitioners will have a professional qualification and will wear a uniform. Sometimes the division between acting medical and being medical is blurred, especially with treatments like colonic irrigation and botox (no thanks), and spa treatments can look very much like possibly-discredited treatments of yesteryear, electrified and radon baths spring to mind here. Negotiating medicalised space when you're fat is generally a complex and fraught experience, and sometimes the space of the para-medical spa treatment is anxiety-provoking in similar ways. Will the gown fit? Will the equipment fit? How will my body be evaluated? But spa-space can also be a much more free space because the authority of the practitioner is not as powerful as a common or garden health professional, here there is room for negotiation, their status can be more easily questioned, and this can embolden one to refute passivity more easily when dealing with real doctors and medics. Anyway, I think messing around with your body is a way of claiming your body.

So I had a treatment whilst I was at Thermae Bath. I'm almost embarrassed to say it because the name of the treatment – Watsu – sounds like so much orientalist mumbo-jumbo. I've since found out that it's a portmanteau of water and Shiatsu, a type of massage that emphasises pressure points. The evidence that Shiatsu is effective treatment for disease is unconvincing, but it feels really good. Watsu was invented by who else but a California hippy called Harold Dull in 1980, fact fans. Few people offer it in the UK because there aren't many pools appropriate for it. It can be very pricey and my session was no different, though I didn’t pay for it, it was a belated xmas present. I chose to have a Watsu session not because I am diseased, but because I wanted to be swished around in the water for an hour and can just about handle its inherent bourgie woo. I knew that Watsu would feel nice and relaxing but I wasn't expecting the experience to be as intense and strange as it was.

My session took place in the Hot Bath, a stunning pool at the centre of the building. I've included pictures of it here. When I looked up I could see clouds and sky through the glass roof. There was some music playing in the distance, and gurgles and pops made by the water, but the setting was incredibly serene, almost like a virtual reality environment.

My therapist was called C. It was just us in the pool. She told me what she was going to do and tied some floats to my legs. Two didn’t fit but there was no fuss and I am plenty buoyant anyway.

We did some breathing together, our bodies rose and fell in the water as our lungs filled and emptied with air. C invited me to lean back into her arms when I was ready. She took my head and swished me around, pulling and turning me. I looked up at the sky and then closed my eyes for the rest of the session.

What I saw when I looked up

I felt like a tadpole, something evolving from the primordial soup. Sometimes I was bobbed up and down and tilted out of the water. I was in constant motion, feeling the water swoosh past my limbs. I concentrated on my breathing and letting go of tension in my body, and of the sensation of the water around me, and of C's hands. She advised me earlier to be like a piece of seaweed, so I tried to do that. As the session went on, C incorporated stretches that would be impossible for me to do on land. She used her hands and feet, her whole body. I don't know how she did it, perhaps she grew some extra limbs. It felt amazing. At one point she stuck my head in a floating bonnet type thing (I still had my eyes closed so have no idea what this looked like) and pressed pressure points in my feet, hands and shoulders. At the end of the session she placed me upright against a wall in the pool and massaged my face. She gave me some time to come round. I said goodbye to the pool and stepped into a fluffy towel and had a rest on a recliner, under a blanket.

The whole session felt extremely intimate and special. I felt changed by it. I don't know if this was because I had been able to relax and trust that I would be okay, I think it may have something to do with surrendering to vulnerability in the water and allowing myself to be cared for. I have various histories of abuse to my name, which I have been thinking about a lot lately, and it felt mind-blowing to be held physically in this way. There is something about the way this takes place in warm water, too, which feels very elemental, and is somewhere I feel at home.

I was aware of how close our bodies were during the treatment and this could be disturbing if you didn't trust the person doing it. C's head was close to mine, I was in her arms almost all of the time, and my hand brushed past her breast and her armpit at various stages. There was intense eye contact. I was aware that my magical moment was work to her, and I thought about the treatment as being on a spectrum of embodied work that includes other kinds of massage and sex work. I felt like a John of sorts, but perhaps this is the only way I can rationalise this kind of gendered, paid-for, embodied experience.

I felt very moved that C was able to handle me. There's something really amazing when young and pretties (my girlfriend's term for normatively embodied people, perhaps those who have never encountered non-normative embodiment, or fear or deride it) are able to treat people with bodies like mine with respect. Being old, unruly, hairy-legged, ungroomed, fat, scarred, wobbly, messy, and all the rest of it does not always send people running for the hills – who knew?! It is absolutely brilliant when people who may not be in the firing line themselves step up and show that they have done their work. C looked after me and modelled ways in which I might care for myself. Thank you!

I thought of the journey I've taken with my body, how many fat people, people, would not be able to do what I did, and not just because of financial or other practical access reasons either. It was almost too enormous to think about, and I still feel that I could become a big blubbering mess if I thought about it deeply, so maybe I'll come back to that in a while, or take my time in picking it apart.

How did this all end? I walked back to the pool to see Kay, grinning, full of wonder, and with a profound sense that I'm alright, really.

Reporting back on the fourth and final ESRC Fat Studies and HAES Seminar

2011-05-09T12:12:00.000+01:00

ESRC Seminar Series
Fat Studies and Health At Every Size: Bigness Beyond Obesity

Seminar Four: Researching Fat Studies and HAES: working with/as fat bodies
5-6 May 2011
Bath Royal Literary and Scientific Institution, UK

I spent a couple of days last week at the final ESRC (The Economic and Social Research Council) Fat Studies and Health At Every Size (HAES) gathering, which took place in Bath. There have been four seminars in all, stretching over about 18 months. These meetings have operated like mini conferences, and a warm and supportive community has grown up around them.

As with previous seminars, it's unfeasible to report on everything that happened, there is simply too much, so I'll just pick out a couple of the main themes.

Many of the speakers talked about autoethnography and reflexive research. Such methodologies contrast strongly with dominant research paradigms in 'obesity'. Where the latter draws upon notions of universal scientific truth and objectivity, the former disrupts such ideas by bringing the researchers themselves to the centre, by offering context, emotion, ambiguity and paradox. I particularly enjoyed Karen Throsby's presentation about her experiences researching cross-Channel swimming, which raised questions about researcher roles. Jacqui Gingras, Rachel Colls and Bethan Evans also talked about roles and ethics concerning research with and on fat people.

It is hard to imagine similar conversations happening at, say, amongst stakeholders at an obesity conference where fat people are made absent, abject, and anonymous, and where fat is automatically framed as pathology in need of professional intervention. What is remarkable about these conversations is that they took place at an interdisciplinary level and were points of contact across considerable academic difference, where tensions were able to be contained and addressed to some extent. Even better, these seminars have been open to non-academics, you know, normal people, and although some academic jargon was unavoidable, discussions emerged between people with very different experiences of and approaches to fat. Best of all, people of all sizes instigate the conversations. More mainstream obesity stakeholders would do well to stop what they're doing and listen to this dialogue.

Another seminar strand was devoted to alternative ways of presenting and conceptualising research and fat. Emma Rich, the main organiser of this seminar, invited a number of local artists and performers to showcase their work. Although few were working principally around fat or Health At Every Size, and were concerned more generally with the body, it was clear that there are exciting possibilities for fat and HAES praxis. Perhaps Vikki Chalklin came closest to this with her performance that included material from research interviews.

For me, these seminars have been much more than a series of presentations and discussions. I have experienced them as very freeing, as places of collective intellectual and political engagement, and of a scholarship that feels full of life, community and exciting potential. In 21st century Western academia these are really precious moments! My colleague and friend Bill Savage/Dr R. White has said that the ESRC Fat Studies and Health At Every Size seminars have forever spoiled us, and that other academic gatherings might be good, but they would never be as welcoming and stimulating as the ESRC experience! These seminars have been places where participants can see how things might be if we could talk about fat without having always to start at a 101-level defensive justification to hostile spectators. Having the freedom to think, speak, take risks and be heard in a gentle atmosphere has been wonderful, one of the best experiences of my academic career.

It's sad that this round of seminars has ended, although there will be some post-seminar projects, which are currently being discussed, and there may well be other Fat Studies conferences and seminars in the UK, as well as online activites. Keep your fingers crossed.

Meanwhile, deep thanks to Bethan Evans, the principle investigator, who had the idea of the seminar series and who wrote the successful funding application. Thanks also to my colleagues who organised the seminars, and to everyone who participated and supported them. And thanks to Lucy Aphramor, who closed the final seminar with an impromptu rendition of a beautifully vulnerable, funny and wavery-voiced verse from a HAES song. It really was the perfect ending.

Further information about the seminars

Government Support for Fat Studies and HAES in the UK

Reporting back on the first ESRC Fat Studies and HAES Seminar

Reporting back on the second ESRC Fat Studies and HAES Seminar

Reporting back on the third ESRC Fat Studies and HAES Seminar

ESRC Fat Studies and Health At Every Size

Final ESRC Fat Studies and HAES Seminar - full programme

2011-05-02T17:40:00.000+01:00

Here's the full programme for the final ESRC Fat Studies and Health At Every Size seminar: ESRC Seminar Series: Fat Studies and HAES: Bigness Beyond Obesity. Looks great!

A few places are still available, anyone can come, and it's free. Get in touch with E.Rich@bath.ac.uk if you're interested.

Fat, Sex Work, Rescue Industries

2011-04-29T13:09:00.001+01:00

I'm very interested when other areas of critical engagement and struggle have crossovers with fat activism. I know this is controversial in terms of fat, which is seen by many as a choice and a triviality, but it fits with the earliest fat activist analyses of oppression (not that I think challenging oppression is all there is to fat activism). For example, Judith Stein's pithy two-page mimeographed introduction to fat activism places fat within a matrix of oppression and calls on fat activists to challenge other forms of oppression too. Sometimes this is lost, fat activism has been criticised for its racism, for example, but I think the idea that no one is free until everyone is free is good to bear in mind.

This week I had the pleasure of spending some time with Laura Agustìn. If you have never read Laura's book Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry, which she authored in 2007, you must hurry and get a copy now; likewise read her blog, The Naked Anthropologist.

Although Laura is part of a wider movement, for me her book was a paradigm-changer which enabled me to recognise more deeply the agency of people who migrate and sell sex, what selling sex looks like, and how this is thwarted by the rescue industry. Laura's work has helped me unpick hyperbolic rhetoric concerning trafficking discourse, and I am grateful for her rational approach to sex work, particularly in her methodology of sex work research. It also enabled me to reconsider my own personal relationship to sex work and to connect with fat sex workers.

I live in Stratford, close to where the 2012 Olympics will be held. There are discredited reports that major sporting events result in an increase in trafficking and that evening Laura had been invited to be an expert presenter at a meeting at Waltham Forest council which was concerned with this possibility. Waltham Forest is one of the five London boroughs that is connected to the Olympics, though I live in Newham. So on Wednesday I took her to have a look at the Olympic site, and also on a mini-tour of Stratford's more obvious brothels, its sex shop and red light area, active and present long before the Olympics were announced in 2005, and just another part of the area. Fun!

I won't go on too much about the council meeting, which took place in the very formal Chamber. I'm sure minutes will be available in due course if you want to find out more about what was said in detail. Briefly, two police officers working for the Met's anti-trafficking department stated their case, as did four people who work with sex workers and migrant people, including a nun, and two medics. Varying ideological positions on sex work were represented though all could be described as 'rescue industry'. Laura spoke, and people from the council recorded and questioned the speakers. The idea that the Olympics will result in an increase in trafficking was immediately dismissed as soon as evidence to the contrary was produced. So the meeting ended up being an arena for people to state their positions and argue for their own legitimacy. No conclusion was reached, the Chair resolved to have more meetings, though this may be in question because there are local government elections looming. As an observer, I think councillors were expecting one thing but ended up having their minds blown by having to consider alternative paradigms.

As an observer, I found the meeting really interesting in a dull, committee type way. What intrigued me were the crossovers in the way that fat is presented in policymaking. Obviously there were no out sex workers present to offer their expert testimony, just as there are never autonomous fat people present during similar meetings of obesity stakeholders, it's as though the concept Nothing about us without us never existed. These gatherings are about professional management of perceived problematic populations, where there is a moral and medicalised discourse concerning embodiment, and where 'helping' is a euphemism for 'control', and where people routinely rely on duff 'evidence.' In these contexts, sex workers/fat people are talked about, made pitiful, framed as service users, are absent and Othered. Even the language has parallels: 'prostitution' sounds a lot like 'obesity' to me, 'trafficking' is as much a neologism as 'bariatric,' and 'sex work' could be seen as analogous to 'fat'. Professionals pump themselves up as essential to the discourse, medics especially so, yet it's clear that the rescuers need their fodder more than sex workers or fat people need them, for example, what do you do with massively resourced anti-trafficking units when there are no trafficked people?

Of course there are differences between the way that fat and sex work is framed in contexts such as this meeting I went to with Laura. I think fat people are far less organised than sex workers – not that fat people and sex workers are necessarily mutually exclusive groups – partly because shame is much more present. Issues concerning criminalisation and migration are also different.

Despite these differences, acknowledging common ground can be very illuminating. I would love to see broader analyses of how helping industries further marginalise their apparent constituents, for example.

What was exciting about the meeting in Waltham Forest was the way that Laura's testimony was paradigm-shifting for many people in the room. I have experienced this when I start talking about fat with people, or at least in those situations where people are more able to move beyond clichés. It's clear that many people are hungry for more complex and human ways of thinking about things that have been overstated through moral panics, and that trite accounts of trafficked women or obesity epidemics are not enough, and that ethical, grassroots ways of understanding may be possible.

Agustìn, L.M. (2007) Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry. London: Zed Books.

Listen to me talking and singing

2011-04-28T12:52:00.000+01:00

1. I've just finished a residency in Hamburg. More about that later, but for now maybe listen in to a long radio interview I did with some lovely German queers who put together a show for FSK. The whole thing will be streamed but, as far as I know, not archived, so you'll have to listen in. Here are the details.

die nacht mit fairies + cyborgs
Friday 29 April 2011 - that's tomorrow, fuck the royal wedding
22:00 - 01:00 Central European Summer Time

livestream: www.fsk-hh.org/livestream

We talked with Emma Ca and Charlotte Cooper about fat activism; cooked a fantastique vegan dinner. sushi, wasabi coated peas, mango salat, pumpkin soup, vegan ice cream cake.

Das Dinner! Die Cyborg-Feen rollen Sushi, knabbern Wasabi-Erbsen, schichten vegane Eisbombe und ertrinken in Erdnusspaste. Dabei nehmen sie mit vollem Mund Lookism-Konzepte auseinander - sprechen über Körpernormierungen, die auch in radikalen Szenen wirksam sind und über queere Schönheitspraktiken.

Kritisch, trashig und strahlend.

Don't read German? Google Translate is your friend

2. My nonsense band, Homosexual Death Drive, is playing a rare show at Scumbag.

Scumbag
21 May 2011
20:30 – late
The Birds Nest
32 Deptford Church Street
London, SE8 4RZ

Free!

Scumbag on Facebook

Amy's friend tackles the Screaming C

2011-04-27T13:35:00.000+01:00

The Screaming C is one of the key Chubster symbols. It was designed by Chubsters Yeti and Big Blu at a Nolose in New Jersey in 2004. It's a letter C with blood dripping teeth, a wild eye, and a mouth full of attack.

It gives me a funny feeling inside when people go crafty with Chubster imagery. Tom O'Tottenham's Chubster stonemasonry often springs to mind, as does Chanko Nabe's needlework. Anyway, look what Amy Onigiri's friend made (the friend who must surely have a name only I don't know it yet).

Amy says:

My friend made me this great Chubster hoodie so I wanted to send you a picture but I couldn't get the camera on my new phone to work so I had to wait for hers. Anyway, somehow this hoodie is really badasss. Like I see people reading it and they start to say something and they stop like "Naaah, I better not." It's kind of hilarious. It makes me feel totally gangster even though I am, obviously, not. I cant figure out if it's the hoodie or the Chubster part of it or the combo. I love it.

Fat Accessibility on São Paulo's Metro

2011-04-22T13:23:00.001+01:00

My friend Jenni has been visiting Brazil and told me about fat seats on the São Paulo Metro. I'd never heard of this until now. A quick search has revealed that the seats were installed in 2009 as a means of encouraging more fat people to use public transport. There are bigger bucket-style seats on the train platforms, and a wider armless seat in the first carriage of each train. Both are accompanied by a sign that says 'Priority seating for obese people' where 'obese' is defined as having a BMI of 40+.

Jenni has generously allowed me to use some of the commentary she gave on her LiveJournal. She says:

I was interested that the São Paulo Metro is so inclusive in ways that the London Underground mostly isn't – we've benefited from the enhanced accessibility ourselves, as the 'special needs' I meant include people with babies, people with luggage, older folks, pregnant women, and a range of others as well as wheelchair users. I'm not entirely sure whether the seats in question are intended as part of this accessibility (which might mean that the authorities are problematically treating fatness as a disability) or as part of some other initiative which might be being done in a more pro-different sizes way, but I was interested to see it precisely because of your fat activism writing, which makes me think about that sort of question. Brazil is in some ways a very body-fascist place – the breakfast in the hotel included calorie counts for all the foodstuffs, and the women are supposed to look chic and be skinny, to the extent that I once failed to buy some beach shorts because I couldn't get the supposedly large size any higher than my knees. At the same time though you see an amazing variety of body shapes on the street, on the telly, and on the beach, so I don't know how those pressures actually work out in everyday life, and I wonder about it.

Jenni goes on to say:

The seats are weird and interesting. The state law in question is specifically to combat obesity and is part of 'Lighter São Paulo' (São Paulo Mais Leve) but I don't see how the seats work out as any sort of countermeasure. They fit into the same category as seats for elderly or pregnant people or those carrying children, in that the seat is not supposed to be used by people who aren't in that situation unless there is no-one around whom has a better right to it. There are fewer specific seats for fat folks than for old folks but otherwise it's supposed to work in the same sort of way as for categories of people who no-one would deny a right to preferential treatment, so arguably preferential treatment is here being given where it is normally withheld. There is a seat on the platform and a matching seat in the carriage that stops at that bit of platform – that's a carriage that also has space for bicycles, wheelchair users, and pregnant/old/baby-carrying folk (though the latter have lots of specific seats and not just in this carriage).

On our various Metro trips in SP far, we have seen one fattish chap sat in one of the seats on the train – clearly he didn't mind sitting there whether or not he would officially 'count,' I mean he mustn't have been embarrassed by it or anything. On the seats on the platform we only saw a canoodling couple using it as a love seat (neither of them were skinny but they weren't fatties either – again they didn't seem embarrassed to be sat there so I suppose they weren't sensitive about their weight or anything) and a mother and young son, aged maybe 10 or so, just using it as an extra-wide seat.

Jenni posted some pictures on her Flickr and also pointed out this article São Paulo um cidade Chubby friendly*?. Here, too, is a news report in Portuguese 'Banco dos gordinhos' do metrô agrada também os magros.

I really love the contradiction that Jenni points out between anti-obesity initiatives, which tend to be about eradicating fat people, and these seats, which support the lives of fat people as we are. Installing seats across a large transport network is a public investment in fatness and suggests that fat people aren't going away any time soon. Where the seats are framed as some kind of response to 'obesogenic environments', ie getting fat people out and about and doing things, the rationale may be fatphobic but the outcome is about creating inclusive space.

Newspaper reports typically state that fat people are too stigmatised to use the seats, but the seats make me feel excited at the idea of confident fat people using them, which must surely happen. It would be amazing to see that.

I also like the way that the seats ally fatness, disability and accessibility. Firstly it shows that accessibility is more than disability, and secondly, although the relationship between fat and disability can be filled with tension (see my paper from 1997 Can A Fat Woman Call Herself Disabled?) I see them as very much intertwined.

These seats have blown my mind in all kinds of ways, which means I have questions that may not have answers: why have seating that delineates a body size at all? Why not go for bench-style seating in public space? Are thinner people required to relinquish a fat seat for someone fatter? What if there's more than one fat person, how is who uses the seat negotiated? What if fat seats are still too small for you? Have you used one of these seats?

Thanks Jenni!

Some Benefits of Being Fat

2011-04-18T11:52:00.002+01:00

I'm always especially bummed out when left-wing, feminist or otherwise progressive media fail to address fat in a way that is sufficiently critical for me. Jezebel used to be better but now reiterates tired weight loss rhetoric, The Guardian is openly fatphobic, and Sociological Images can never seem to quite go the full distance and critically engage with the fat, possibly because of its legions of fatphobic commenters. Some Benefits of Being Fat, a recent post, is a good example.

Here a fat woman is deemed to be non-sexual, and fat is a protective layer against unwanted abuse by men. These claims are nonsense. Just one peek at, say, The Adipositivity Project, disproves the former, and any fat woman could tell you stories of harassment, sexual or otherwise. It's like a Looking Glass version of the 'she was asking for it' discourse in relation to sexual violence and upholds the myth that only pretty girls get raped. This argument supports the idea that the authentic person, one's inner truth, is always thin, that fat is always extraneous and therefore disposable. It also buys into the notion that bodies are entities of choice, and that such choice is not part of discourses of fat hatred.

This pithy little post demonstrates the pernicious influence of a certain kind of feminist psychoanalytical thinking about fat, championed by Susie Orbach and her Women's Therapy Centre in the 1970s. It also demonstrates the lack of critical engagement with that discourse within sociology, feminism, and social science in general. By failing to locate this discourse the post retreats into unsubstantiated truth claims, a kind of 'but everybody knows it to be true' mentality, which is ironic given that sociology is supposedly about unpicking such allegations. I think the post also supports the idea of sociologist as unbiased observer, a mere vessel that articulates the facts - bunkum! It makes me wonder about the author's relationship to fat, whether or not they believe that fat actually protects women from harassment, whether they are fat, etc.

By suggesting a couple of shitty imagined benefits, the Sociological Images post is basically saying that there are no benefits to being fat. Thanks folks! But this is not a universal truth either. There are benefits to being fat, and these might be different for everyone. For me these benefits are not just about fat but also things like skill, luck, work, etc. Anyway, shall I name some of them?

Benefit! I like the way my body looks and feels, and other people like it too. The struggle of self-acceptance and self-esteem I underwent when I was younger has paid off in golden years of embodied happiness, with only occasional excursions into ambivalence.

Benefit! I did an MA about fat politics and got a distinction. The research for that project went on to become a book, which I published when I was 29. The book was and is taught in universities. People often tell me that it changed their life and, 13 years on, I still get fan-mail for it, and enjoy seeing battered and underlined copies of it in libraries.

Benefit! I've been invited round the world to speak about fat. As I write this, I'm sitting in the sunshine in a beautiful house in Hamburg where I have been Artist In Residence for a couple of weeks, in which I'm being supported to make a zine of the Queer and Trans Fat Activist Timeline that a bunch of people co-constructed in California last year.

Benefit! Not only am I doing a PhD about fat activism for free, I'm being paid to do it.

Benefit! I'm a part of many rad communities of fat people who are organised, politicised, and using every means necessary to create liveable lives for themselves, and for everyone.

Benefit! Fat gives me a way of understanding things, it's a kind of lens that I draw upon in conjunction with other theoretical frameworks. It has revolutionary potential.

Benefit! I get to see and participate in marvellous, eye-popping, life-affirming things that I would never have access to if I were thinner and had not lived a fat life.

What are other benefits of being fat? Silly, serious, share them here if you feel like it.

Register for the final ESRC Fat Studies and HAES Seminar - FREE

2011-04-17T20:17:00.000+01:00

ESRC seminar series: Fat Studies and HAES: Bigness Beyond Obesity
Seminar 4: Researching Fat Studies and HAES: working with/as fat bodies

5-6 May 2011, Bath Royal Literary and Scientific Institution (Elwin Room)

To register to attend the seminar please follow this link: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/KKWV6R3

This seminar will address the ethical and methodological issues involved in researching Fat Studies and Health at Every Size and will explore possibilities for the engagement of public, activist, policy and practitioner communities in Fat Studies and HAES research.

There will be a combination of presentations, workshop activities and performance art.

The following speakers are confirmed (more to be announced asap. See the seminar series website for more details):

Keynote: Jacqui Gingras, Assistant Professor, Ryerson University.
Rachel Colls, Durham University
Bethan Evans, Durham University
Jacqueline O’Toole, Institute of Technology, Sligo
Vicky Chalkin, Goldsmiths University of London

The seminar will run from 1pm-6pm on Thursday 5 May and 9am-3pm on Friday 6 May.

The seminar is free to attend, including tea/coffee on Thursday 5 May and lunch on Friday 6 May, but participants must meet their own accommodation and transport costs. Directions to the venue can be found here: http://www.brlsi.org/about.html There is plenty of hotel accommodation available in the centre of Bath. A list of recommended hotels is available from E.Rich@bath.ac.uk

There will be an optional dinner on Thursday 5th May (costs not covered). Please indicate whether you wish to attend this on the registration form.

There are a limited number of bursaries available to contribute to travel/accommodation costs for students/unwaged participants. To request a bursary, please complete the relevant section on the registration form.

More details on the seminar series are available online here: http://www.dur.ac.uk/geography/research/researchprojects/fat_studies_and_health_at_every_size/

Any questions, please contact Emma Rich (E.Rich@bath.ac.uk), Lee Monaghan (Lee.Monaghan@ul.ie) or Bethan Evans (bethan.evans@durham.ac.uk)

Queering Fat Activism: Burger Queen

2011-04-09T12:15:00.000+01:00

Scottee is a wunderkind of London's queer performance art scene, and also someone who makes his fat body central to his work. Take a look at his new project, Burger Queen.

What are fat activists to make of this beauty contest which revels in fast food, excess and carefree attitude? It seems a far cry from what Katie LeBesco identifies as the will to innocence in fat activism, ie the assertion that fat people are not responsible for getting fat, don't choose to be fat, and can't change. It also seems far away from healthism in fat activism, exemplified by images of beaming salad-loving, yoga-doing fat folk. It doesn't really fit more common-or-garden forms of fat activism, such as refuting health claims made against obesity, fashion consumerism, or placard-waving protests.

Burger Queen takes on the appearance of fat lib – 'fat is a politic' – but also revels in themes that would upset orthodox fat activists. I'm talking about greed, love of grease, grotesqueness, nihilism. It breaks the rules, not least because of its resident judge, Amy Lamé, who is both a great supporter of fat activism in the UK, and also appeared on Celebrity Fit Club. Intentional weight loss is a big no-no in many fat activist quarters, and weight loss reality shows have often come under fire for whatever it is they're seen to be promoting.

So what is this politic? For me there is a flimsiness about Burger Queen as a political statement. Revelling in burgers and chips as a refutation of healthism is too neat a mirror-image flip, it maintains a relationship with dominant ideas about "the obese" when it could be going off on a much weirder and wilder tangent that has nothing to do with obesity rhetoric and everything to do with creating autonomous fat culture. So for me it doesn't quite go far enough.

I'm interested in new forms of fat activism that have or don't have a relationship to feminist fat activism of the past. It's fascinating how ideas mutate and fall back on themselves. I think it's great that Scottee is not bound by what has become fat activist orthodoxy, and neither can he be neatly compartmentalised as a Bear – the only other option available to fat queer men at the moment, apparently. But I also wonder if he knows about this great movement, and if he is incorporating it into his work. For example, when Scottee raised a few eyebrows at The Fat of The Land: A Queer Chub Harvest Festival, with his apparently sincere poem about a tragic fat girl did he know that he was rubbing people (who were looking for 'positive images' of fatness) up the wrong way? Was he being ironic and confrontational? Was it something else? On the other hand, Burger Queen is absolutely coming from fat activist tradition, in which people use the forms of activism most available to them, in Scottee's case it's queer performance art. The beauty contest, too, although well-worn, has been a site for fat activism in the past.

What Burger Queen reinforces for me is my disillusionment with what I thought were the certainties of fat activism. When I started my research into the movement I was pretty sure I had a handle on what was and what was not fat activism. A couple of years on those ideas have been erased only to be replaced with a growing discontent with the side-effects of certainty: boundary-policing, intolerance, a prudishness about the down and dirty ways in which some people talk about fat or embody fat, the divisions between good fat activists and bad fat activists. So I'm keeping an open mind about Burger Queen, I'm looking forwards to seeing how it turns out, and I'm hopeful that it will be part of a queer turn in fat activism, work that messes up fat, makes it unruly and complicated, not nice, safe, or easily knowable.

I heart Becoming Chaz

2011-04-08T13:44:00.000+01:00

I had the great good fortune to see the documentary Becoming Chaz at this year's 25th London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival.

Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato's film was a hit at Sundance and is going to have its TV premiere on the Oprah Winfrey Network. Becoming Chaz follows Chaz Bono as he negotiates his transition from female to male, including undergoing medical procedures and encounters with family, friends, activism and fame. A good chunk of the film is devoted to his relationship with Jennifer Elia, who is depicted as a fully-formed and multifaceted person in her own right. Cher also features, predictably, and the film-makers offer a compelling glimpse behind the Hollywood myth factory that she represents. Anyway, the film was a highlight of the festival for me, its warmth and complexity was unexpected and welcome. Chaz and Jenny rule.

Readers of this blog will know that I think Chaz Bono is a powerful fat and trans role model and all-round great guy. I've tried to make contact in the past and have been fully rebuffed! I still think this is a shame but, having seen this film, I understand why fame makes it impossible for Chaz to make any public comment about this stuff.

Anyway, given this, I was interested to see how Chaz' fatness was addressed in the film. It will come as no surprise that there was little in the way of any trad fat lib analysis, but Chaz appears very at home in his body. Post top surgery there were many shots of him splashing around in various swimming pools, apparently unfazed with public semi-nudity, hurray! Jennifer referred to his top surgery as conferring a minor weight loss, ie his body no longer has the weight of his breasts, but he seemed unconcerned. He talked about his role model being a stocky man, and he appeared not to buy into fatphobia at all, onscreen at least. Go Chaz!

As for me, it was a total pleasure to sit in a packed screening of 400 people and see a feature-length documentary about a fat trans guy, and to see his embodiment right there, bigger than life, on a huge screen, and to know that people were witnessing it sympathetically. People will, no doubt, critique its representation of trans identity, but for now it reminded me that a) I want to see more tales of transmasculine fat, b) Becoming Chaz adds a lot to the currently fairly minimal body of work on men and fat, and c) it's great to see unapologetically fat people on screen. Also, I wish RuPaul would come round for a playdate with me.

Here's the cheesy Oprah Winfrey Network trailer for Becoming Chaz:

The Fat Bloc

2011-03-28T17:44:00.005+01:00

A coalition of around half a million people took to London's streets on Saturday to protest various things. Sister-demonstrations took place in other British cities. The protest was one of the biggest that has ever taken place in the UK, half a million in a population of about 60,000 is a significant number.

This article from the Guardian covers many of the people involved in the demonstration: Anti-cuts march: the protesters. You might also want to have a look at Freedom Press' Action Map March 26th Demo for an idea of the more radical groups involved.

Why did I go? I maintain anarchism as a beautiful dream, but I'm also a pragmatist and I think the state should support vulnerable groups directly, I don't see this as the role of 'Big Society', charities or private businesses. Britain is a rich country and can afford to do this. I'm appalled by the current round of cuts in services, which will devastate marginalised people and undermine the welfare state.

I didn't think the demonstration's explicit goals will be realised. The government's cuts are based on capitalist and neoliberal ideologies which have a global sweep and are bigger than the Con-Dem government in the UK. But I do think that the demonstration achieved other important things:

It was a gigantic peaceful gathering for most people
It was life-affirming to see so many different people together on the streets
When you see a sight like this, you feel less isolated, you feel visible and in solidarity with other people
It gives a sense of hope and encouragement in otherwise extremely grim times
It is part of the current radicalisation of otherwise disenfranchised people, especially young 'uns

I also enjoyed the raw news footage of people kicking in bank windows, attacking the Olympic countdown clock, mooning the press, and chasing the police, and I hope that the people paid to clean up the damage got double time (the mess must surely be less than the trash that will litter the streets after the forthcoming and totally hateful royal wedding).

I decided to march a while ago but I couldn't decide who to march with. I knew I didn't want to get kettled or involved in any trouble, I didn't want to get arrested. This meant avoiding some groups with whom I have political sympathies. To cut a long story short, my girlfriend Kay and I decided to make our own banner late on Friday night. We played around with joke slogans, my favourites: 'Camelegg – No, Cameltoe – yes!' and the evergreen 'Die Tory Scum' but in the end we just wrote Fat Bloc, with an anarchist symbol in the word fat. It was my idea, I thought of it as a serious joke; if other groups could have their own bloc, then why not us? We made the banner with felt-tips and glitter, DIY forever!

For most of the demo the Fat Bloc consisted of me, Kay and my boyfriend Simon. The most miniscule Bloc ever! It was very cute. Clearly the three of us can handle the possibility of ridicule. People responded to us in many ways ranging from embarrassment and confusion, which only encouraged us more, to many thumbs-up, smiles of recognition and appreciation, verbal support, people wanting their pictures taken with us, many other cameras on us, and no negative snark that I heard in four hours of marching. None!

The best things were when a guy from a migrant workers' group came to stand with us, yay for coalition-building; when someone who may have been popstar of yore Holly Johnson took our picture; and when we got high-fived. I loved sneaking up behind unsuspecting protestors so that they became unwitting members of the Fat Bloc, teehee.

Inevitably, there were a few people with banners condemning 'fat cats' and 'fat pigs' and demanding the government 'cuts the flab'. We yelled them down! We said "Working class people are fat too!" "Don't stereotype fat people!" "We love fat cats!" "Keep the flab!" Lord only knows if they understood but I like to think there were a few sheepish faces and that they'll think twice before using fat stereotypes again.

Friends came and went as we demonstrated, others said they were looking out for us, and later on we met up with a bigger group of pals. People admired our glittery sign. It was great to stand together, such fun, and a really happy memory for me was seeing my friends Bill and Tammy coming towards us from out of the crowd. It's amazing to have fat community.

I had a great time being part of the Fat Bloc and would do it again in a heartbeat, and encourage others to form their own Fat Blocs. It is good to be visible on the streets as peaceful, friendly, and radical fat people, to show that we are part of social justice movements too and that no-one should give us shit. I loved the way that our placard was ambiguous enough for people to read into it what they wanted, and also that it meant something good and useful for people of all kinds.

Dear Hamburg, I am coming to town, let's hang out

2011-03-22T12:59:00.001Z

From 8-24 April I will be Artist in Residence at Villa Magdalena K in Hamburg. I'll be working on a project initiated about a year ago, A Queer and Trans Fat Activist Timeline. This started out as a workshop at Nolose 2010, the Timeline has been shown at other gatherings in the UK and Germany since then, and will soon be in its long-term resting place, archived at Bildwechsel Hamburg.

My task as Artist In Residence is to make a zine out of the Timeline which will then be sent to people who participated in the workshop, people who want a copy, and archives around the world. The plan is to document some fat activism and talk about what that documenting and archiving is about. There may be a website, but it depends on a few things. Please get in touch if you want to donate money to this project.

Anyway, so I'm going to be in Germany for a bit, with a fairly loose schedule, and I would like to meet and hang out with people whilst I'm there, especially those who might have an interest in fat, queer and trans activism. I can travel a bit too.

Hit me up! mail@charlottecooper.net

I'm giving a talk in London, please come

2011-03-18T15:20:00.001Z

I'm giving a presentation at King's College on the Strand in London on 18 May. It is the first in the Gender Matters seminar series 'Gender and Mental Well Being: Inter-disciplinary Perspectives'. Gender Matters is a research group based at King's.

The organisers have given this talk the title of 'Obesity and the Rejection of Body Normativity' and I'll be talking about fat activism and mental health. I'll use accessible language and hopefully make it interesting. The seminar is open to members of the public, so please come. It's free and there's a wine reception afterwards - crikey.

Obesity and the Rejection of Body Normativity
Gender and Mental Well Being: Inter-disciplinary Perspectives
King's College, Strand campus
18 May 2011
17.30

"She was so viscerally happy in that moment" - Fat Activism for Well Being
Charlotte Cooper

Abstract

In this presentation I assert that dominant obesity discourse in 21st century Western culture is steeped in the abjection of fat people, and that this impacts negatively on our health. As I have argued previously, a Social Model of fat activism remedies this problem by addressing systemic fat hatred and helping to create more liveable lives for fat people (Cooper, 1998). Fat activism re-imagines fat embodiment and agency, collectively it spans continents and has historical links over four decades. I will talk about my research into this social movement, and present case studies which both support and reject body normativity.

Cooper, C. (1998) Fat & Proud: The Politics of Size, London: The Women's Press.

Queer Hapas, fat activism and weight loss surgery

2011-03-16T16:29:00.001Z

I've been reading Jackie Loneberry Wang's excellent zine Memoirs of a Queer Hapa #2, which takes a look at the author's queer-biracial identity. Hapa refers to people who are "mixed-race and of Asian descent". I especially like the author's Concluding Thoughts from an essay entitled The Emergence of Queer Hapa Identity in the United States, where she applies Queer Theory in a super-accessible way. Basically she talks about identities that transgress boundaries and expose the limitations of those boundaries. She says that Queer Hapa people confound others who ally themselves "to the notion of identity as fixed, immutable, and formed around a logic of separation and differentiation" (p14). Wang goes on to say that even though Queer Hapa is an uncontainable identity, naming and inhabiting it enables people to organise strategically and politically in ways that are anti-assimilationist and complex.

Wang's zine has helped me not only think about Queer Hapa identity, but also about another group of people, who may also include Queer Hapas. I think the ways in which Wang writes about identity is helpful in thinking about what tends to be the thorny relationship between fat activism and weight loss surgery.

Apparently, as someone smart told me recently, the situation is changing and people who have had weight loss surgery are no longer drummed out of fat activist community. But my experience is that weight loss surgery continues to represent considerable anxiety in terms of how to address it in fat activism, and that bullying, shaming and shunning are still everyday tactics. Even where people have moved on from using these strategies to police the boundaries of fat activism and critique weight loss surgery, their previous use continues to hurt and has not been resolved.

I am not an advocate for weight loss surgery, I would never choose it for myself, and I discourage people from choosing it where I can. I think it is more likely to deplete than enhance health, I mourn the deaths of people who have died as a consequence of surgery, and its marketing rhetoric is invariably fatphobic, full of lies, and profoundly problematic. But neither am I an advocate for boundary policing or bullying. I am looking for helpful and human ways of thinking about this stuff that goes beyond a condescending 'love the sinner hate the sin' tolerance within the movement for people who have had surgery or are contemplating it. I would prefer a world where weight loss industries did not exist, but I do not live in that world, and am unlikely to as long as capitalism exists. Instead I am part of communities of people where some have chosen this, including a number of excellent fat activists who I love and respect.

Anyway, so Wang's work has helped me think about this and my tentative thoughts are about fat activists who have had weight loss surgery also inhabiting a space that transgresses and exposes the limitations of certain boundaries and classifications. For example, that to be a fat activist always involves resisting weight loss, or that there are sides to be chosen where you are either for or against weight loss. Fat activists who have had weight loss surgery, especially unrepentant people for whom it was a positive long-term choice, inhabit a space that shows there are other ways of being, that fat activism doesn't have to be an either/or proposition, and that it can be really diverse. I'm mindful of the postcolonial concept of hybridity, you can be a mixture of things, even things that are supposed to be incompatible, and you don't have to make a choice between one state of being or another, you can be all of them.

Going back to Wang and thinking about the possibilities for organising around fluid and complex identities, I feel excited for the potential opportunities for fat activists and weight loss surgery in challenging dogmatism and pioneering new forms of fat activist embodiment. It gives me hope that people who are currently shamefully denigrated within the movement might no longer have to skulk around in the shadows like a dirty little secret, waiting in vain for an invitation to come and sit at the table, it could be that they've already got their own thing going on and that everybody else should take note.

Jackie's response: Zines, queer hapas, fat activism

Wang, Jackie Loneberry (2009) Memoirs of a Queer Hapa #2

LDN XL GRRRLS Funzine now available to download

2011-03-14T13:32:00.000Z

Meryl Trussler's beautiful LDN XL GRRRLS Funzine 2010 is now available as a download. Yippee!

Chubsters, Muir Beach California, June 2010

2011-03-09T13:56:00.000Z

Fat Studies Films for Students

2011-03-09T12:46:00.000Z

Jenna Brady is looking for films to show her students. Got any suggestions? Please save them from Thank You From Heaven, hehe!

Jenna says: "I have been trying to locate a film on critical obesity/fat studies. This is for a group of undergrad health studies/kinesiology students. I know about Thank you from Heaven, but I was wondering if you know of any others. I haven't been able to find anything else."

Defiling BMI at The Carnival of Feminist Cultural Activism

2011-03-08T20:28:00.005Z

The Carnival of Feminist Cultural Activism has just taken place at York University. It involved three days of presentations, panels, discussions, performance, workshops, films and a whole lot of talking and hanging out. The event was a lot of fun, as well as being challenging and thought-provoking. The organisers did a great job in creating a space where many different kinds of feminists could come together. I was there for four things: to participate in a bunch of presentations; to chair a couple of sessions; to see my friends and meet new folks; and to present the final plenary: Fightin' Dirty With The Chubsters.

I had an hour, so I showed my Chubsters short film, had a stab at introducing the concept, and got people to take part in some Chubsters skill-sharing. I thought that few would turn up to this final plenary, but I was wrong, it was busy, and I was worried that a feminist and largely academic crowd would be a little starchy, I was wrong about that too.

I offered four skill-sharing options:

Glaring
Participants were invited to use eyes, mouth, expression, hair and brains to attack with their faces. I nipped back into the room at one point, after being outside taking part in one of the other activities, to witness the glaring group standing in a neat circle practising their glaring at each other in silent aggressive rage.

Shooting
I drew some cans of Slim-Fast on a piece of card and invited people to do some target practise with the Chubsters' weapon of choice - spud guns. This was by far the most popular group. Social justice activists take note: people really like a spud gun.

Spitting
This was what I was most excited about, and daunted. I've wanted to be good at spitting ever since I saw Patti Smith accurately shoot a jet of saliva out of her mouth onstage and hit a spot to her side. I imagined that it would be great to see or be a Chubster spitting insolently at something. But spitting really is disgusting, and offensive to many, especially when done by women and I wondered if I was pushing people too far, though I also saw my role in the plenary as goading a group of over-tired, conferenced-out people into antisocial pleasure and risk-taking. Anyway, I drew a picture of a BMI (Body Mass Index) Chart because I thought that it would make a good target. I was delighted that people went for it. None of us had Patti Smith's technique, but we made up for it with gusto. My favourites involved the running spit, the up-close and phlegmy spit, and the crab spit, where a woman bent backwards into a crab and spat in a graceful arc onto the BMI Chart.

Freestyle
This was an anything goes option for people who didn't fancy any of the others. From what I gather it involved a lot of arm-wrestling and actual, down on the floor wrestling. It made my heart sing to see a pair of very serious feminist intellectual heavyweights rolling around on the floor of the lecture theatre in a leg grip.

Some people combined different skills, advanced Chubsterdom! Later we welcomed some new Chubsters into the gang, check out their names: Awesome Jonnie, Backwoods Bettie, Biscuits, Cat-Face, Chaos Flower, Count Fatula, Crab, Faye Bentos, Gorrilay, Grrrran, Grummel Pott, Hell's Granny, Junk, Myxt, Pinkie, Piseog Dubh, Rabid Fox, Raptor, Robin Hood, Rough, Round Robin, Rump-Shaker, Skiff, Southern Fried Chubbin', Stink-Eye, The Fixer, Thunder Domes, Toxic Pink Stuff, T-Rex, Twisted Stitch, and Von Vixen.

By the time I got the train home from York I was pretty exhausted and had that brain-buzzing feeling that I often get after some Chubsters action, or a really good Fat Studies event. I'm really grateful that the Carnival organisers enabled me to create this weird space for people to play in, and that people got it and were engaged.

There are more pics of the whole event in Evangeline Tsao's Facebook Album.

I kept coming back to the BMI Chart covered in spit, dripping with it. This chart is so oppressive, it's today's equivalent of phrenology and about as much use. Kate Harding's fantastic Illustrated BMI Project was one way of transforming it and reducing its power, I've seen others address it as activists too, and I saw the spit-fest as a extension of this approach. I felt so happy to see it defiled with the collective spit of a group of feminists! It perfectly captured my (our?) contempt for it. I thought about how great it was to have been able to facilitate the creation of this real life mental image, and I wondered if other people might remember it dripping with spit the next time they come across it in a doctor's office, or are being lectured about it, or whatver. It felt like I was spitting it out of myself and removing its power over my body. Maybe the next time people see a load of Slim-Fast for sale in a shop they might imagine having a pop at it with a spud gun.

It's made me think more about how, in my experience, The Chubsters is often a vehicle for creating unlikely yet enriching moments of real-life wildness, peculiar tableaux that stick with you later. These become like mental touchstones that stay with me and comfort, amuse, captivate, inspire me when I draw upon them. I'm sure a spit-covered drawing of a BMI Chart is not what many people would consider a treasured memory, but it is for me.

Full disclosure: some of my friends chose to withdraw from the Carnival last December, stating their position on Red Chidgey's blog Feminist Memory: Open letter of withdrawal from the Carnival of Feminist Cultural Activism (2011). Then as now my feelings about Raw Nerve are different to my friends', as is my understanding of what happened. I am mentioning this here because I don't want to pretend that this issue was not also a part of my Carnival experience.

Nolose dates announced

2011-03-01T10:38:00.000Z

NOLOSE 2011 will be held the weekend of July 8-10, at the Econolodge in Oakland, California. More details soon.

I've been interviewed for a Finnish mag with Beth Ditto on the cover

2011-02-18T17:06:00.001Z

Hannele Harjunen interviewed me for top Finnish queer rag NHL NormiHomoLehti, and it's just about to be published. Hurray!

Wanna read the unedited and raw English version? Here you go... (.pdf 88kb)

Sander Gilman review is now published

2011-02-16T13:20:00.000Z

My review of Sander Gilman's Fat: A Cultural History of Obesity has been published in Sociology journal. I wrote it 18 months ago!

Give me a shout if you don't have access to academic libraries and would like to read it.

Cooper, C. (2011) 'Review: Sander Gilman: Fat: A Cultural History of Obesity', Sociology, 45: 1, 181-183.

Yale's Plagiarism of Headless Fatties

2011-02-08T12:27:00.003Z

In 2007 I published a piece of writing on my website (yes, pre-blog) in which I identified and described the phenomenon of the headless fatty. I was the first person to do this.

This concept hit a nerve and took off, much to my pleasure, it felt as though I had given people a way of describing one of the ways in which media makes fat people abject, and also a way of critiquing and laughing at that stereotype, thus reducing its power to hurt. References to headless fatties turned up all over the place.

It was rare that I was ever credited for this invention. For the most part I wouldn't expect to be, headless fatty has become part of fat activism's language and theoretical framework, it's just a thing that some people know about now. Ideas come from somewhere, but it would be exhausting to have to cite and reference every single thing that we know and believe in everyday conversation, for example.

In addition, I do not want to turn headless fatty into a commodity in order to force recognition for myself. I am against the copyrighting of the terms of fat activism, The Association for Size Diversity and Health claimed 'Health At Every Size' as a Registered Trademark last year. To me this is both a neoliberal act that regards activism as a market, and a colonial act where ownership of a formerly free-floating concept now lies within the US. ASDAH took this step to prevent weight loss corporations from appropriating the term, but asserted themselves undemocratically as the rightful owners, and themselves transformed the concept into a commodity by claiming it.

Because I can prove I invented the term 'headless fatty' I am not concerned with anyone buying or selling it, nobody can take this intellectual property from me. Or so I thought!

This week I was very interested to read a news story in which Dr Rebecca Puhl talks about certain kinds of media images of fat people. Shaming the obese - with photos like these - isn’t working appeared in The Globe and Mail, a national Canadian newspaper, and was syndicated widely, including by many fat activists who really should know better. In the article, Puhl says that she describes images where fat people's heads are cut out of the frame as "the headless stomach." The article goes on to say that such images shame "the obese" and finishes with the claim: "We need to fight obesity, not obese individuals." Yeah, yeah, I know.

Puhl is Director of Research and Weight Stigma Initiatives at the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale University. She is also a Research Scientist. This means that, in a formal presentation such as, for example, an interview with a national newspaper, she would know that ideas come from somewhere and she would also have the skills to search for and cite or reference those ideas. A simple Google search would reveal that I originated 'headless fatty', for example. Perhaps, like many people in the US, she thought that because I live in a different country I either wouldn't know that she had done this, or that it somehow didn't count.

Whether or not Puhl searched for its origins is moot. Instead, what she did, in conjunction with the newspaper's reporter and editors, was take my concept and imply it was she who thought of it without any fact-checking. As well as demonstrating arrogance, this is plagiarism and, as Puhl will know, within academia it is a very serious offence. By substituting the neutral-sounding 'scientific' term 'stomach', she made the concept more palatable for an assumed audience of people, perhaps including herself, who get the vapours when the words 'fat' or 'fatty' are used.

You could argue that language is not important here, what matters is the article's message of non-shaming. But the reclamation of the words 'fat,' and more recently 'fatty,' are a fundament of fat liberation. It is really important that they are able to be uttered without shame. Ironically, in seeking to reduce shame against fat people, this article adds to it, and don't get me started on the assertion that obesity needs fighting.

It feels risky speaking truth to power in this way, bang goes any remote possibility of a nice, cosy, well-paid postdoctoral research fellowship in New Haven! But I feel angry about Puhl's plagiarism of my idea, and it is not up to her who, judging by online photographs, is not a fat woman, to decide what language is and is not appropriate to describe fat experience.

The Rudd Center consistently takes a conservative view of fat politics. I am not the first to have spoken out about their problematic approach. Disability rights activists would recognise the organisation as a typical example of a charitable approach that:

Diminishes the unruly voices and lived experiences of the constituency it has nominated itself to serve in favour of its own appropriated version of that reality – which is inevitably really weird
Benefits from high status and impressive financial rewards
Appears to be the neutral propagator of knowledge about its constituency, removed from power politics
Trades on dehumanising pity for its constituents
Is an organisation 'for' rather than 'by' or 'of', and likes to retain that power
Needs its constituency of fat/disabled people more than they need it

I am for a pluralistic, multifaceted movement that supports the rights and autonomy of all people everywhere, including fat people. There is room in the movement for all kinds of fat activisms. Yet I've had enough of The Rudd Center's 'kindly' version of fat politics, which actively undermines the acceptability of fat activism. In their world those of us at grassroots level are too abrasive and hotheaded to be allowed access to high level descision-making, we must be protected from it in some way, though not removed so far away that they can't appropriate a juicy concept whenever they choose. This is an issue of power and its misuse. Instead they should be doing their own work, defining their own concepts, not riding on the back of fat activists like me, who are very far removed from Yale's privileged corridors.

Picard, A. (2011) 'Shaming the obese - with photos like these - isn’t working ' [Online]. Toronto: Globe and Mail. Available: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/health/andre-picard/shaming-the-obese---with-photos-like-these---isnt-working/article1883947/ [Accessed 8 February 2011].

Response to The Guardian 'What I'm really thinking'

2011-02-06T12:59:00.013Z

I saw this sorry pile of crap in the paper yesterday and, instead of screaming the house down with frustration at The Guardian's continual abjection of 'the obese', I felt inspired to write my own piece. Ooh look, two paradigms of fat embodiment illustrated right here in front of your very eyes! Which one will you choose? What else is out there?

What I'm really thinking

~~THE~~ A FAT ACTIVIST

I'm wondering if you're going to say something offensive, banal or ignorant about me and people like me that will put me in a position where I will have no choice but to fuck you up.

If you are normatively-embodied, I'm checking you out for signs of a terror of ever becoming or being anything like me. I can see this in you no matter how much you try to hide it. I also read every patronising thought that crosses your brain, your attempts to deny them, and your belief that you are a better person than me because your clothes are smaller than mine. I see your classism, sexism, homophobia, racism and anxiety about age, embodiment and disability too, and wonder why you invest in these hateful ways of seeing the world. Do you think I'm pitiful and deluded? You are more so, you twat.

If you are not normatively-embodied, I'm thinking about how we might be friends and allies to each other. And if, by a miracle, you turn out not to be a fatphobe, I'll be considering inviting you out to play.

Most of the time I'll be thinking about freedom, how to live a good life, how to attack oppressive systems, including the fear and hatred of fat people and the way that that intersects with other ways of being. I'll be wrestling with ethical questions about peace and violence. I will be thinking about how I can disrupt and diminish people and organisations that have financial and ideological stakeholdings in fatphobia, including the abject medicalisation of 'the obese', and desire to control and prevent obesity. I'll be thinking about mobilising collectives, about the resources upon which I can draw, and about possibilities for collaborations and coalitions.

I'm thinking about fun, love, sex, money, death, survival, work, beauty, in more or less that order. I'm thinking about the impact of oppression and activism on my life, my body. I'm feeling glad of my flesh and unique embodiment. I'm taking strength and inspiration from the fat activists who came before me, especially the dykes, the brilliant communities to which I currently belong, and those to whom I am passing on the flame.

In the words of state murdered Black Panther and revolutionary Fred Hampton, as a fat activist what I'm really thinking is: "Up against the wall, motherfucker! I have come for what is ours."

The Dodo Is My New Favourite Fat/Not Fat Animal

2011-01-30T18:58:00.002Z

The other week I had to drive from Hartford, Connecticut, to Kennedy Airport in New York. As is my way I set off too early and ended up with some time to kill. I stopped off in New Haven to have a look at Yale (sites of preposterous privilege and power are so interesting, don't you think?), and I went to the university-affiliated Peabody Museum. I wasn't expecting much, I just wanted to stop driving for a bit and have a pee.

Museums of natural history don't tend to float my boat. You've seen one dusty taxidermied baboon, you've seen 'em all. I prefer nature to be explained to me in person, from behind a car's windshield, or on TV. No one could accuse The Peabody of being a cutting edge museum of 21st century best practise. Its centrepiece Black Holes exhibition looks like it was designed in 1987, and much of the collection has the reek of old skool natural science and colonial anthropology about it, the seamless segue between rocks, insects and animals, then mummies and 'primitive peoples' is especially problematic, for example.

However, in some areas of the museum, brave curators have drawn attention to these shortcomings. A notice points out that a giant model of a dinosaur, one of the museum's treasures, was put together wrongly by the 19th century scholar who supervised its assembly. He didn’t know any better and it was only when evidence surfaced years later that anybody realised the skull was a bit off, that there weren't enough vertebrae, and that the tail should have been in the air, not on the ground. I really enjoyed this admission because it exposed the myth that representations of natural science are pure and objective truths, it shows that they are as much a product of contemporary ideology as anything.

The exceptionally round Peabody Dodo

I don't know about you but I'm fascinated by Dodos and The Peabody has a little display devoted to these sweet and extinct creatures, featuring a skeleton and a model made of chicken and ostrich feathers. Again there is a note saying that more recent evidence suggests that the model is not an accurate representation of how a Dodo really looked.

This is where it gets interesting in terms of fat. The model Dodo is almost completely round, whereas the text display says that in real life they were probably leaner and "more athletic". The panel suggests that the Dodo was probably represented as being fat like this to emphasise the belief that it was stupid, helpless, basically a sitting target for hunters. This assertion is likely to represent present-day thinking on what fatness represents, rather than an objective truth.

I don't know when the model was built, or if this interpretation is what the model-makers intended but I'm really fascinated that the association between fat and abjection could be played out in the model of a Dodo. I think debates about the meaning of fat being transmitted by media, epidemics, fashion, or whatever, are commonplace, but using a Dodo to get the message across is jaw-dropping. The way fat people are typically represented within Obesity EpidemicTM rhetoric is also very Dodo-like; we herald extinction, we are useless beings, we are laughable, pointless and stupid. It's funny how the leaner interpretation of a Dodo is associated with more modern and enlightened thinking, the future is thin!

I don't have much with which to conclude other than that the reproduction of fat abjection moves in mysterious ways, and my interest in Dodos just got a lot geekier.

Bristol's very own fat Dodo

PS. I went to Bristol Museum and Art Gallery (in the UK) about a month after I wrote this post and I was excited to see they have a fat Dodo model there too, though with no explanatory text. Any more sightings?

Posing for Substantia Jones

2011-01-19T00:04:00.004Z

I've been in the US for a bit, visiting archives and finishing the last of the data collection for my PhD. I've also been doing what might be referred to technically within sociology as 'entering the field' in terms of fat activism, but I draw no distinction between my real life and the things I am studying, so thus can neither enter nor leave the field because I'm always already there. The lay version is that I've been talking with a lot of rad fatties, seeing a lot of fat activism, and taking part in some of it myself.

One of the people I spent some time with is Substantia Jones, the photographer behind The Adipositivity Project. If you are unfamiliar with Adipositivity, go to the site right now and feast your eyes on the amazing variety of fat flesh. This is one of my go-to places if ever I am having a bad fat day – and when I'm feeling perfectly fine too.

Substantia took my photograph in 2009, I'm Adiposer 303, 379 and 413, and just last week she did it again. Here's the pic that appeared on the site today, number 442, and outtakes of me with Mickey, and a snowman in Chinatown. By the way, yep, it was very cold, I got undressed in a restaurant toilet and dressed again out on the pavement, they're real streets in Chinatown in Manhattan, there were comments from passers-by (the guy in the main pic wanted my number – no chance!), it's as true as you see it.

When we were talking beforehand, Substantia asked me what it was like to pose for Adipositivity. I gave a jumbled up response, so I thought I'd try and give a more considered answer here.

I love the Adipositivity aesthetic, which is totally at home with femme and queer identity, often full of delicious colour, witty, sexy, imaginative, and stuffed with personality and style. Substantia has great visual ideas an collaborative skills, she makes the shoot fun, an adventure. When Substantia takes your photograph, you enter this world too and you get to see yourself within this frame, literally. It's a gift considering that many of the people who are photographed grew up with body shame and self-hatred.

When you appear on the site it's a measure of how far you've come in refuting fatphobia. It's not only about having your picture taken and allowing others to see it, it's also about being able to look at your own image without terror or disgust. Being there is a way of showing that having a fat body is alright, it gives permission to be visible and unafraid. There you are, part of humanity, not the fattest, not the thinnest, not the prettiest, or any other category that is supposed to be important, just there, doing your thing.

You could say that Adipositivity is a means of creating a new kind of beauty, or appreciating beauty. I don't think that beauty is the only thing going on in the pictures, they are also about flaunting fat, sometimes quietly and shyly, sometimes not. I love that the photographs are 'positive' but that they are never trite or monodimensional, 'positive role models' is an expression that makes me want to burn and rob, and I never get that feeling looking at these images. Instead they suggest another way of being, a richer way of considering fat embodiment. There is nothing apologetic or placatory about them and I think that this is because they are not necessarily created by and for 'them', but by and for 'us'. Whenever I come across the photographs they make me want to climb inside the frame and inhabit the world in which they were taken, I've been lucky enough for this to actually happen to me.

I come from punk and I appreciate that although Subsantia's photographs have high production values, they also strongly support a DIY ethic. Adipositivity is put together on next to nothing, it uses available resources, easily accessible web technology, for example, and also manages to have a really powerful impact. It is created without the pressure of advertisers, completely on Substantia's own terms.

It sounds cheesy but I'm really proud to be part of this project, grateful to have an opportunity to pose, and glad of Substantia's friendship. Although I live far away from New York, being an Adiposer makes me part of a community that wants to see images like these and is ready to help make them happen. I love seeing myself within this context and am delighted to be able to offer it my embodied support.

PS This still seems inadequate. Oh well, I'll write more next time, hopefully there will be a next time.

Dear Mum, what do you think of what I've become?

2010-12-30T15:49:00.000Z

Mary Cooper, also known as Rosemary.

Dear Mum,

I don't know where the idea came from to write you a letter, it's nearly 25 years since you died, there's plenty of time in which I could have written. Anyway, here I am.

I think about you every day, mostly just a glancing, passing thought, sometimes prompted by the photographs of you that I have on my desk. As times goes on you are increasingly a collection of memories to me, like a skeleton in a way. I still feel a fuzzy grief. I don't get to talk about you much, most of the people in my life today never met you, and on the rare occasions people ask about 'my parents' and I mention that you are dead, the conversation doesn't continue. But here you are, this quiet part of my life, always with me.

When you died I was 18, on the cusp of adulthood, and you were 48, not so much older than I am now. We never got the chance to talk together as grown women, I think we would have been great friends. This is the thing that I regret the most, and it's a strange thing to miss since I'm looking back on a future that never happened. Within the context of this vacuum I long to know what you would have made of me if you had lived and were now in your early 70s, facing old age. Mum, what do you think of what I've become? I would be different if you'd survived the cancer, what do you make of how I turned out without you? I so miss that impossible conversation, there's so much we never got to say. I'm realising maybe that's why I'm writing to you, to give voice to those things. Ok, now I understand. Let's go.

I imagine that it would be astonishing to you how much I have capitalised on things you considered shameful and wrong when you were alive. I remember your casual homophobia and I wonder if you would have changed with the times regarding my queerness, or the ways in which I choose to live. I'm sure you would have. I know you were a feminist even if you never used that word to describe yourself. You valued friendships with other women, you understood and supported women as autonomous beings, you were interested in women's empowerment and you instilled those values in me. I can imagine you coming into your own so powerfully in your 50s.

The fat stuff might be much more perplexing. The pressure to lose weight when I was growing up came mostly from you, and I can't say for sure if you would ever have been able to acknowledge that this was a damaging thing to do to me. I understand that you were desperate to pass as middle class, and you understood fatness as a lower class embodiment which would hold us all back. It must be weird to you that I'm proud of our heritage and don't want to become middle class, as if I could. I note your nursing training, based in scientific positivist rationalism long before Health At Every Size became a possibility within that tradition, and the postwar authoritarianism within which you grew up and worked, where your betters knew best. I think this underpinned your belief that fatness indicated pathology, must always be rectified by weight loss, and that you were an agent for such an intervention. We couldn't be more different! Feminism may have enabled you to challenge these beliefs but I wouldn't count on it. I imagine we would have argued about this stuff.

How would you understand me? I seem to have disregarded or surpassed the plans that you had for me. I remember you saying that when I went to college to do A Levels I would probably lose weight and find a nice boyfriend. Everyone says stupid things from time to time but the naïve limitations of this promise still make me cackle quite bitterly. I'm sorry I'm taking the piss, you didn't know any better, you might have known you were dying when you said it, maybe it was a self-soothing fantasy. I think you had children because this is what women of your generation were supposed to do, I also think that people have children with the hope that they will push further than they have been able to push. I've gone so much further than you were able to imagine, and this is a great achievement. I'm sorry that I can't reach back and pull you up with me.

Dear Mum, if we were sitting here talking today, I've no doubt that there would be areas of our lives that would always be a puzzle to each other. But some things aren't. I treasure your grit, work, intelligence, ability to recognise beauty, and your blatant, enduring love for me, which I've known all my life.

Your very own,

Charlotte x