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.
