Hamburger Queen is well underway and last night's show was electrifying.
As regular readers will know, this season I am honoured to serve as Hamburger Queen's in-house psychotherapist. I really honour the work that Scottee and Amy have done with these sessions. I think the complexity they bring to the question of fat identity, and their sheer realness about it, is very powerful. It makes space for other people in the world who can't live up to the nonsense poster queen myth of the perfect fat activist. I will be doing a bigger round-up sometime soon, but for now I want to talk about something that happened last night.
In Why Are You Fat? #2, both Scottee and Amy Lamé recount difficult and painful moments in their lives, which they think have a significant bearing on why they are fat.
Hamburger Queen is a riotous affair, people are drinking, and this video presented a dramatic change in mood. There are some good lines, but I don't think of this video as funny at all. The stories are about fear, panic, vulnerability, shame. What's funny about that? Not much, not anything. Yet a small clutch of people in the audience laughed, they laughed throughout, even at the most difficult disclosures.
Fat people experience hatred in many forms. Sometimes it's pity, other times prurience. It can be physical, it can take the form of name-calling or physical assaults. But mostly it's more subtle, like the systematic denial that we are even people that plays out in a thousand daily micro-aggressions. But laughter, that's a headfuck, to use the official terminology.
To be laughed at when you are disclosing deep trauma that has been compounded by shame is a particular kind of violence against the self that is profoundly disturbing. It says, to me, "everything you are is a joke, there is nothing of substance about you, your deepest pain is a triviality." It's the laughter of annihilation.
I found the laughter last night shocking, but not surprising, it's a depressingly familiar experience. Fat people are supposed to be funny. Being funny is a survival strategy for many of us, and a lot of famous fat people got that way because they had a knack for being hilarious. I suppose what we witnessed last night was a shadow side to this jolly stereotype.
But being able to turn the laughter around is a powerful weapon against hate. I try and do that with my own activism, and Hamburger Queen is a weekly masterclass in this tactic. Last night it was the fatsos not the laughers who called the shots. When you're in a room full of people – of all sizes too! – who love their fat friends, love fat spectacle, love being together, it makes it easier to see that the ones who are laughing inappropriately are probably doing so because their minds are being blown and they don't know how else to cope but gibber helplessly. When you're in a room of people who want to see fat people thrive, and are appalled by the people who laugh at us meanly, it makes it easier to call out a small group of thoughtless people. So we called them out and they stopped laughing.
Fat Talks Back at WOW2013
This year, WOW bit the bullet and invited a bunch of us to do a panel on fat. Corinna Tomrley chaired, and I participated, alongside Isha Reid and Caroline Walters. We called the panel Fat Talks Back because of the history in mainstream feminism of marginalising fat within broader discussions of 'body image,' 'beauty,' 'dieting' and so on. We thought of the space as an opportunity to speak for ourselves.
I know the hard-working organisers had no intention of pushing us to the back, and they made every effort to make space for us, but I also had a sneaky giggle to myself because the room was in quite an obscure place in the building, and I was reminded of how the fat clothes are always pushed to the back of the shop. This made it especially delightful that we packed out the room. I don't know the exact figures but I think over 100 came, and it was standing/squatting room only.
Corinna organised the panel so that the three of us gave prepared answers to three questions:
- What is fat activism for you or, how does your fat activism manifest itself for you?
- Mainstream discussions about fat and size tend to focus on the concept of ‘skinny’ vs the ‘average-sized UK woman’ (apparently size 14-16): what does this mean for fat activism? And women who are bigger than a size 16?
- How/does fatness and feminism intersect for you?
Our answers were pretty diverse and reflected our interests: Isha in fatshion and blogging; Caroline in teaching and academic life; me in fat feminism and activism, and psychotherapy. I was glad of this because I think there's a temptation to try and simplify the experience of being fat, or an activist, to single narratives, when actually there are many different ways of expressing this stuff.
After this, we answered some questions from the floor. If I had a penny for every time questions from the floor start with "Yes, but is it healthy?" I would be richer than Croesus. It's especially bewildering when health has not been a part of the previous discussion. It's as though talking about fat can only ever be a discussion about health and, even then, a discussion of how fat can't really be healthy, with the subtext that we must be deluding ourselves. Am I frustrated about this? Yes. There is a lot more to be said about fat and feminism than "Yes, but is it healthy?"
My favourite question came at the end; someone asked about the emphasis being put on thin privilege within fat activism. I answered that I thought this was a shame, that you often come across fat activism that focuses on how terrible it is being fat. I think being fat is often terrible, but that activism is about joy, power, strength, making lives liveable.
The session lasted an hour, and there was so much more that could have been said. From the quiet and respectful audience, the packed room, the comments and discussion afterwards, I really got a sense that people were hungry for this stuff and wanted to talk more, but perhaps didn't know where to start, such has been the overwhelming silencing effect of obesity epidemic rhetoric in the last ten years or so.
You can watch the session here, in the WOW YouTube channel. There are technical issues in the first minute or so, but the rest of it looks fine.
Meanwhile, check out some pics on the Fat Talks Back event page, read Isha's round-up, and visit the Storify. By the way, the image comes from the gorgeous drawn minutes of the festival, but I can't find any more information about this project.
Watch a talk about fat, feminism, activism and research
A bunch of us were invited by Dr Geneva Murray, the Director of the Women's Center at the University of Wisconsin in Oshkosh, to talk about feminism, research and activism for International Women's Day. We did this via a Google Hangout, it was really exciting to meet, talk and present like this, despite the technical challenges.
You can watch the event here: International Women's Day Hangout.
You can watch the event here: International Women's Day Hangout.
Hamburger Queen: Why Are You Fat? #1
Last night was the first of this year's Hamburger Queen happenings, and it was bloody brilliant.
As previously announced, I am serving as the Hamburger Queen in-house psychotherapist in 2013. This involved a couple of sessions with Scottee and Amy Lamé where they spilled their guts and we filmed the results.
The first of the four Hamburger Queen 2013 therapy videos is now online and it's all about childhood and food. That's me in the therapist's chair.
Why Are You Fat? #1
As previously announced, I am serving as the Hamburger Queen in-house psychotherapist in 2013. This involved a couple of sessions with Scottee and Amy Lamé where they spilled their guts and we filmed the results.
The first of the four Hamburger Queen 2013 therapy videos is now online and it's all about childhood and food. That's me in the therapist's chair.
Why Are You Fat? #1
Trademarking Health At Every Size
The Journal of Critical Dietetics has just published an article I co-authored with Jacqui Gingras called 'Down the Rabbit Hole: A Critique of the ® in HAES®'.The article came about through discussions of what it meant that the Association for Size Diversity and Health (ASDAH) had trademarked the concepts Health At Every Size, and HAES.
As activists and scholars, we wanted to raise difficult and impertinent questions about who owns the movement, and about who watches the watchers. We have offered this paper as a means of creating dialogue about the trademarking. I think it also has relevance for discussions about professionalisation within grassroots social justice movements.
Critical Dietetics is an open access journal. This means that you don't have to pay to read the articles, although you do need to register on the site to access them (the other articles in this issue are really good too!). Go to the journal page to register and download the article (link at the beginning of this post). There is also space to comment on the Critical Dietetics blog.
Gingras, J. and Cooper, C. (2013) 'Down the Rabbit Hole: A Critique of the ® in HAES®', Journal of Critical Dietetics, 1(3), 2-5.
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