The latest issue of Fat Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Body Weight and Society has just been published.
It's a special issue on Visual Representations of Fat and Fatness, edited by Stefanie Snider, who has published some illuminating work on this subject herself.
I'm looking forwards to reading 'As Big as a House: Representations of the Extremely Fat Woman and the Home' by Caroline Narby and Katherine Phelps; and Lauren Gurrieri's piece about the Stocky Bodies image library, which combines art and activism.
The journal is indispensible for anyone interested in Fat Studies. Alas, like many academically-orientated journals, it hides behind a paywall. People with access via their educational institutions should be fine (ask your librarian to subscribe), but if you're struggling to get your hands on these papers, please get in touch and we can work something out.
http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/ufts20/current
No more stitch-ups! Media literacy for fat activists
Last week I was dismayed to hear of some fat activist friends who had been stitched-up by a television company after agreeing to do an interview. Sizeoftheocean has blogged about it at Fatuosity. Despite having plenty of experience between them, being smart women, trying to negotiate a situation in which they were fairly represented, the programme makers misled them about the content of the show until it was too late to back out. The women are being strong and brave in the face of this betrayal, but it feels like yet another slap in the face for fat community, and an opportunity to say powerful things about being fat to a large audience has been lost once again.
I feel angry about this story, but I also want to initiate a conversation about fat activism and media literacy. I have some comments to make about my own experience, and a survey to find out about other people's experiences and thoughts about how things could be different. I would like to make a broader project about this stuff, with the aim of developing ways in which fat people and fat activists might engage with media safely and productively. I have begun this with a survey: Talking Fat in the Media, to which you are invited to take part.
My experiences
An invitation to appear on a national TV show, or to have your picture in a magazine is very exciting and enticing if you have things you want to say about being fat. It can seem almost too good to be true if you have spent a chunk of your life being made to feel that you are not fully human, that your fat makes you ugly or disgusting. It can feel like a chance to set things straight at last, a dream of being respected! This has happened to me.
Sadly, this is a naïve position. Few people, and few fat activists, have a critical understanding of how media is made, and how they might work the system. What often happens is that we walk into a situation innocently, and get burned by programme-makers and journalists who have a different agenda. Media makers are bound by codes and ethics, but these do not necessarily extend to their representation of fat people or fat activism, which is often exploitative. Once the paper is published or the show broadcast, it is very difficult to get any redress, and retractions are rare.
Occasions when I have felt stitched-up (ie misled, misrepresented, cheated) by the media include:
Having been burned too many times, these days I only respond to media requests if:
It doesn't have to be like this
The effect of fat people being stitched-up in the media is that it is very difficult for fat activists to participate in public debate. You have to be extremely tough in order to handle this kind of treatment and, not surprisingly, most people are not up to it, and it's easy to get burned out very quickly. It means that media reproduce dominant thinking about fat with very little critical material. It also reproduces the idea that there is no other way of thinking or working around fat, and that critical approaches don't exist or have no power. People with powerful things to say about fat remain in the margins or dismissed as cranks, whilst the real cranks grab the limelight and cash-in.
It doesn't have to be like this. Its time to get together and form some community strategies for working with the media. What advice do we have for media makers who want to include fat people in their work? What demands can we make for fair treatment? What does fair treatment even look like? What advice do we have for each other? What strategies and knowledge can we share? How can we make our encounters with media as safe and productive as possible? How can we nix exploitative media without censorship or shaming fat people who choose to engage with it?
I have started the ball rolling with a survey about people's experiences with being stitched-up by the media when we talk about fat stuff. I would like to develop the survey responses into a bigger project, perhaps articles, workshops, zines, or something else. I want to be part of a big discussion about how we can take care of ourselves as well as develop public ideas about fat. I believe that both are possible.
The survey
Talking Fat in the Media Survey
Please pass this link along to everyone you know!
Edited to add: I've been overwhelmed with responses to the survey and I have now closed it. Analysis and comments coming soon. Giant thanks to everyone who took part.
I feel angry about this story, but I also want to initiate a conversation about fat activism and media literacy. I have some comments to make about my own experience, and a survey to find out about other people's experiences and thoughts about how things could be different. I would like to make a broader project about this stuff, with the aim of developing ways in which fat people and fat activists might engage with media safely and productively. I have begun this with a survey: Talking Fat in the Media, to which you are invited to take part.
My experiences
An invitation to appear on a national TV show, or to have your picture in a magazine is very exciting and enticing if you have things you want to say about being fat. It can seem almost too good to be true if you have spent a chunk of your life being made to feel that you are not fully human, that your fat makes you ugly or disgusting. It can feel like a chance to set things straight at last, a dream of being respected! This has happened to me.
Sadly, this is a naïve position. Few people, and few fat activists, have a critical understanding of how media is made, and how they might work the system. What often happens is that we walk into a situation innocently, and get burned by programme-makers and journalists who have a different agenda. Media makers are bound by codes and ethics, but these do not necessarily extend to their representation of fat people or fat activism, which is often exploitative. Once the paper is published or the show broadcast, it is very difficult to get any redress, and retractions are rare.
Occasions when I have felt stitched-up (ie misled, misrepresented, cheated) by the media include:
- An interview with a local newspaper. The story I gave them was about how many people had sponsored me to go to college to write about fat politics because they believed this was a worthwhile thing to do. It was about alternative means of fund-raising for education. The actual headline: "Charlotte Cooper Says 'Now You Can Indulge and Bulge'".
- Two very nice, posh women working in TV who used their charm to make me feel that they really understood me and were completely on my side. I fell for it and ended up on their late night freakshow with live callers telling me how much they wanted to have sex with me whilst the camera took a close-up of my face.
- Despite several emails clarifying my position when it was clear they did not understand me, the well-regarded academic who ignored almost everything I said about my own activism and went on not only to publish a paper about me, but to become the go-to expert about fat activism.
- The broadsheet that sent a photographer round to take my picture which, despite me smiling sweetly throughout the session, chose the only one in which my guard was momentarily dropped, making me look like an 'angry, strident feminist' stereotype.
- The tabloid journalists for a national newspaper who came to our community event undercover, took photos of people without their consent, and published a smarmy story about us.
- The national feminist radio show where I thought I was going to talk about my book but where I actually had to justify my reason for existing in a debate of which I had no prior knowledge. The person arguing me down was backed up by their professional identity, their upper-middle class identity, and the support of obesity discourse and the programme-makers. I was in my 20s and unemployed. As I write recently, it's not that I don't want debate, but these debates do not take place on a level playing field.
Having been burned too many times, these days I only respond to media requests if:
- They show some respect for my work and familiarity with it
- I have something I want to publicise, and if I know I can get something out of the encounter
- I know and trust the journalist or media outlet
- I have editorial control
- I get paid
- Occasionally I pass on media requests to other people who might want to make use of it, but not often because, frankly, the requests are usually exploitative.
It doesn't have to be like this
The effect of fat people being stitched-up in the media is that it is very difficult for fat activists to participate in public debate. You have to be extremely tough in order to handle this kind of treatment and, not surprisingly, most people are not up to it, and it's easy to get burned out very quickly. It means that media reproduce dominant thinking about fat with very little critical material. It also reproduces the idea that there is no other way of thinking or working around fat, and that critical approaches don't exist or have no power. People with powerful things to say about fat remain in the margins or dismissed as cranks, whilst the real cranks grab the limelight and cash-in.
It doesn't have to be like this. Its time to get together and form some community strategies for working with the media. What advice do we have for media makers who want to include fat people in their work? What demands can we make for fair treatment? What does fair treatment even look like? What advice do we have for each other? What strategies and knowledge can we share? How can we make our encounters with media as safe and productive as possible? How can we nix exploitative media without censorship or shaming fat people who choose to engage with it?
I have started the ball rolling with a survey about people's experiences with being stitched-up by the media when we talk about fat stuff. I would like to develop the survey responses into a bigger project, perhaps articles, workshops, zines, or something else. I want to be part of a big discussion about how we can take care of ourselves as well as develop public ideas about fat. I believe that both are possible.
The survey
Please pass this link along to everyone you know!
Edited to add: I've been overwhelmed with responses to the survey and I have now closed it. Analysis and comments coming soon. Giant thanks to everyone who took part.
Amy Lamé in Unhappy Birthday
Unhappy Birthday takes the form of Amy's birthday party; there are party poppers and little conical hats for everyone, a tray of snacks, a big present and a seat reserved for the guest of honour: Morrissey. We hear stories of Amy growing up, and her progression from unhinged Morrissey superfan to even more unhinged Morrissey superfan. Things soon start to unravel and by the end of the show our hostess has, variously, threatened, cajoled, sanctified, smooched and fed us.
Some things worth remarking upon:
- Unhappy Birthday is the latest product from the house of Amy Lamé and Scottee, who directed the show. If you liked Hamburger Queen, you'll love this. Little touches like sequins, jokes about performance art, shimmer curtains, dressing up, smeared lipstick are like hallmarks of this beautiful, collaborative, creative work-friendship and are a pleasure to witness.
- It's not a play about fat, but fat is in there or, rather, morbid obesity. In a climate where academics are calling for policy to pressure media into producing positive images of fat people, Unhappy Birthday reminds me of the delights of mucking about in the gutter. As a person in the public eye, it's really amazing and brilliant to see Amy embrace the grotesque, the un-pretty, the demented, the 'ugly-fat'. She deconstructs her own celebrity, really goes there fearlessly and it's beautiful.
- Bevin Branlandingham sometimes talks about being called Too Much. The Amy of the show is gleefully Too Much: big, in your face, wild eyes, out of control, running around, yelling "I've been on the TV!" This is the image that anyone who ever gets told they should be quiet, be polite and take up less space in the world should hold in their head.
- The production design is gorgeous. You get a little zine as a programme, the lighting and projections are pretty, props are revealed from beautiful boxes, there's mess. It's minimalist and maximalist all at once.
Some people I know elsewhere have been raving about Samuel D. Hunter's play The Whale. But performance that's engaged with fat to a greater or lesser extent does not have to be limited to a skinny guy blobbing around a stage in a fatsuit, offering a mawkish rendering of what it is to be fat, in venues that are likely inaccessible to actual superfat people who might want to set folks straight. I see Unhappy Birthday within a scene that includes people like Glenn Marla and Hana Malia, the duo formerly known as Fat Femme Mafia, Emma Corbett-Ashby/Goldie Dartmouth, Rebel Cupcake's roster of performers, Shazzam, even Beth Ditto, who bring their lived understanding of queer fat to performance in diverse, dazzling ways. This is the stuff that makes you feel witnessed, validated, entertained and glad to be alive.
Ok, that's all, go and see it.
Weight Stigma Conference Talk on YouTube
I was invited to give a presentation at the first Weight Stigma conference last week. The conference was organised by Angela Meadows, a PhD student at Birmingham University. I spoke about Research Justice.
Research Justice is a concept emerging from activist communities in the US, and has roots in disability activism. It proposes that research subjects should have a voice in the research undertaken about them; it also treats research as a tool to support social change.
Research Justice really excites me because it adds a practical dimension to the discussion about the failings of obesity research, and proposes measures for building research projects that have more direct benefit to fat people.
In the presentation I explained what is meant by Research Justice; why it's important that people get on board with it in relation to fat and stigma; and I showed what it might look like in real-life settings by making some mock-ups of a series of web pages.
I recorded my talk and have added it to my slides. You can watch and listen to it here on YouTube. There were some questions afterwards but, since I do not have people's consent to include them, I have cut them out.
When Angela invited me to talk, some months ago, I knew that I wanted to present something about Research Justice, because this had a powerful effect on the way I approached my own research. I didn't realise how prescient the subject would be on the day.
I appreciate the work undertaken by Angela and the other organisers and volunteers, it was very clear that people worked extremely hard to get the conference off the ground and are deeply committed to the work. I also mourn the fact that there are so few spaces that engage with any critical voices on obesity at all. Our ESRC Fat Studies seminars ended in 2011, and since then Fat Studies in the UK has become fairly quiet, and has also become subsumed into the rhetoric of Health At Every Size. Not that anyone has gone away; there were many speakers at the Weight Stigma conference, and opportunities for debate across fat and obesity frameworks. There's still so much to say, and a lot of work to be done. Another Weight Stigma conference has been set for next year, and I hope that other gatherings spin off from it too.
The conference raised many questions for me about who gets to talk about fat. I think, but I'm not sure, that I was the only speaker out of 17 who identified explicitly as fat and brought that identity to the work I was presenting. I wonder whether or not this will continue in subsequent conferences. I don't think that fat people are the only people allowed to talk about fat, fat stuff is a subject for everybody, but I think it's perplexing that the people who research and theorise fat, or at least those academics who are visible in that work, are generally normatively-sized. This is not necessarily to criticise their work (some of it's great, some not) but there are conversations about thin privilege and its effects on the work that are not yet happening within this milieu and which, I think, need to be expressed. Additionally, there are plenty of Fat Studies scholars, and activists too, who are fat, who include the knowledge they have as fat people into their work, and who would be great speakers at conferences about fat and stigma.
(By the way, during one of the breaks I asked a couple of people who enjoyed my talk, who wanted to know more, and who work for a fairly trad anti-obesity organisation why they thought people like me never get invited to speak at those £500-a-ticket obesity conferences. Answer: because my presence would completely undermine everything! I think I may have blown their minds with that one, whoops).
Where fat people are in the minority at an event about fatness, debate may be possible but this does not take place on a level playing field. Instead of an environment where open sharing of ideas is possible, only the very bravest and articulate – or furious! – are able to speak because the setting is risky. Few people have the security of a PhD in contributing to debate and it's easy for academics to shoot down comments made by people who don't share their privilege. It means that people with lived experience of fatness, or activists and allies, become marginalised where academic discourse is regarded as the gold standard. For example, one woman I spoke to at the conference, a fat woman new to activism, was talking to a thin academic, a presenter, and when he asked who she was and what she did – she's not an academic – patronised her by saying: "Oh! You're the general public!"
Another incident intrigued me on the day. An academic said some fatphobic things and this was down-played by two others. He'd dropped a bomb, stating that even if fat people present to him with 'healthy' (whatever that means) behaviours, he will remind them that their fat bodies are not acceptable and that they need to lose weight. When questioned on this, he shrugged and remarked: "It's just the truth." A fat woman tried to tear him a new one, and during the course of the day he was on the receiving end of some stink-eye from others. Stink-eye is what maligned people resort to when all else fails and they know they're not going to be heard. Yet another academic tried to force some kind of agreement and common ground with him, appealing to appealing to manners and polite debate. The fatphobic speaker was later praised as "brave" for having spoken; never mind that he's a privileged academic who does this kind of thing for a living and whose work is deeply embedded within a dominant discourse from which he benefits in terms of money and status. Later the audience was chastised by another speaker for being "mean" to him because, presumably, fat people and our allies are not allowed to be extremely angry when someone pulls this crap in a setting where we may have assumed folks will be advocating for us.
The day was pretty exhausting and I was left wondering where Weight Stigma might go, whether it will become another kind of obesity conference, whether it will build capacity in fat people within and beyond the academy to articulate our own lives, and about the role of the academy and the professionalisation of fat and obesity discourse within the conference.
I am really glad that I was invited to speak at Weight Stigma, and very happy that the conference offered financial assistance to people who could not otherwise afford to attend. Great, too, that they offered Continuing Professional Development accreditation to people. I'm thinking how capacity in non-academic participants could be extended, perhaps through pre-conference workshops, or some kind of orientation event. I hope very much that the people who continue Weight Stigma undertake the vital work of developing fat community links, and I am available to help facilitate that if they are interested.
Research Justice is a concept emerging from activist communities in the US, and has roots in disability activism. It proposes that research subjects should have a voice in the research undertaken about them; it also treats research as a tool to support social change.
Research Justice really excites me because it adds a practical dimension to the discussion about the failings of obesity research, and proposes measures for building research projects that have more direct benefit to fat people.
In the presentation I explained what is meant by Research Justice; why it's important that people get on board with it in relation to fat and stigma; and I showed what it might look like in real-life settings by making some mock-ups of a series of web pages.
I recorded my talk and have added it to my slides. You can watch and listen to it here on YouTube. There were some questions afterwards but, since I do not have people's consent to include them, I have cut them out.
When Angela invited me to talk, some months ago, I knew that I wanted to present something about Research Justice, because this had a powerful effect on the way I approached my own research. I didn't realise how prescient the subject would be on the day.
I appreciate the work undertaken by Angela and the other organisers and volunteers, it was very clear that people worked extremely hard to get the conference off the ground and are deeply committed to the work. I also mourn the fact that there are so few spaces that engage with any critical voices on obesity at all. Our ESRC Fat Studies seminars ended in 2011, and since then Fat Studies in the UK has become fairly quiet, and has also become subsumed into the rhetoric of Health At Every Size. Not that anyone has gone away; there were many speakers at the Weight Stigma conference, and opportunities for debate across fat and obesity frameworks. There's still so much to say, and a lot of work to be done. Another Weight Stigma conference has been set for next year, and I hope that other gatherings spin off from it too.
The conference raised many questions for me about who gets to talk about fat. I think, but I'm not sure, that I was the only speaker out of 17 who identified explicitly as fat and brought that identity to the work I was presenting. I wonder whether or not this will continue in subsequent conferences. I don't think that fat people are the only people allowed to talk about fat, fat stuff is a subject for everybody, but I think it's perplexing that the people who research and theorise fat, or at least those academics who are visible in that work, are generally normatively-sized. This is not necessarily to criticise their work (some of it's great, some not) but there are conversations about thin privilege and its effects on the work that are not yet happening within this milieu and which, I think, need to be expressed. Additionally, there are plenty of Fat Studies scholars, and activists too, who are fat, who include the knowledge they have as fat people into their work, and who would be great speakers at conferences about fat and stigma.
(By the way, during one of the breaks I asked a couple of people who enjoyed my talk, who wanted to know more, and who work for a fairly trad anti-obesity organisation why they thought people like me never get invited to speak at those £500-a-ticket obesity conferences. Answer: because my presence would completely undermine everything! I think I may have blown their minds with that one, whoops).
Where fat people are in the minority at an event about fatness, debate may be possible but this does not take place on a level playing field. Instead of an environment where open sharing of ideas is possible, only the very bravest and articulate – or furious! – are able to speak because the setting is risky. Few people have the security of a PhD in contributing to debate and it's easy for academics to shoot down comments made by people who don't share their privilege. It means that people with lived experience of fatness, or activists and allies, become marginalised where academic discourse is regarded as the gold standard. For example, one woman I spoke to at the conference, a fat woman new to activism, was talking to a thin academic, a presenter, and when he asked who she was and what she did – she's not an academic – patronised her by saying: "Oh! You're the general public!"
Another incident intrigued me on the day. An academic said some fatphobic things and this was down-played by two others. He'd dropped a bomb, stating that even if fat people present to him with 'healthy' (whatever that means) behaviours, he will remind them that their fat bodies are not acceptable and that they need to lose weight. When questioned on this, he shrugged and remarked: "It's just the truth." A fat woman tried to tear him a new one, and during the course of the day he was on the receiving end of some stink-eye from others. Stink-eye is what maligned people resort to when all else fails and they know they're not going to be heard. Yet another academic tried to force some kind of agreement and common ground with him, appealing to appealing to manners and polite debate. The fatphobic speaker was later praised as "brave" for having spoken; never mind that he's a privileged academic who does this kind of thing for a living and whose work is deeply embedded within a dominant discourse from which he benefits in terms of money and status. Later the audience was chastised by another speaker for being "mean" to him because, presumably, fat people and our allies are not allowed to be extremely angry when someone pulls this crap in a setting where we may have assumed folks will be advocating for us.
The day was pretty exhausting and I was left wondering where Weight Stigma might go, whether it will become another kind of obesity conference, whether it will build capacity in fat people within and beyond the academy to articulate our own lives, and about the role of the academy and the professionalisation of fat and obesity discourse within the conference.
I am really glad that I was invited to speak at Weight Stigma, and very happy that the conference offered financial assistance to people who could not otherwise afford to attend. Great, too, that they offered Continuing Professional Development accreditation to people. I'm thinking how capacity in non-academic participants could be extended, perhaps through pre-conference workshops, or some kind of orientation event. I hope very much that the people who continue Weight Stigma undertake the vital work of developing fat community links, and I am available to help facilitate that if they are interested.
Fattylympics Talk on YouTube
I was in Bradford recently, giving a talk about The Fattylympics for an academic/activist gathering called Just Do(ing) It, Again: The Politics of DIY and Self-Organised Culture.
It's getting close to being a year since The Fattylympics took place, and a good time to reflect on it. Although there were problems on the day, I think it offers a good example of how to make multi-layered activist events that appeal to many different kinds of people, don't cost very much, and which push the boundaries of what can be considered activism (a good thing, in my opinion, because it enables more people to engage with activism in their own ways). Not only that, but we produced this event in a context that was pretty repressive by first world standards. I think The Fattylympics is also significant because it was a joyous event, it showed that the work of social justice does not have to be a hand-wringing affair.
I made a slideshow of the audio of my talk and some images from The Fattylympics and have made it available on YouTube. There were some questions afterwards, but I did not include these as I thought it would be uncool to include people's voices without their consent. The whole thing lasts about 25 minutes. There's some swearing, beware, but also plenty of context and description about how and why we put the event together.
I want to add that the gathering where I spoke was a bit of a strange one. Although it took place in a well-respected (though inaccessible) autonomous space, it was very much an academic affair. What's more, I was really shocked by the sexism within the symposium. Two panels of white men, with tokenised women moderators, set the tone of the event. This was really alien to me! I come from a DIY community where feminism, queers, and increasingly people of colour, are central to the scene. Some of the men's work was very old, and two ethnographers, when pulled on their samples, admitted that they had very much marginalised women in their research. The feminist and queer speakers were put together at the end in a panel called 'Case Studies,' even though I mention some theory in my presentation, and even though some of the men's presentations could also have been called 'Case Studies'.
It really was vexing to witness this, and small moments, such as when one panellist got his fellow speakers a glass of beer, but not the queer woman moderator (presumably she is too ladylike to enjoy a drink?), spelled out how invisible and marginal many people's voices were on the day. I heard a lot of talk from the men about class struggle, but feminism or other theoretical frameworks, if mentioned at all, were very much added as an afterthought, or a touchstone to make the speaker appear right on.
I'm sure this kind of thing is familiar to people who have an academic interest in punk, or who spend time with straight men, but for me it was quite an unpleasant eye-opener. What's even more dismaying is that our panel of feminists and queers was the most well-attended and popular of the day. I wish what we brought had been more central to the event.
Cooper, C. (2013) Doing the Dance of Disrespect: The Fattylympics. Just Do(ing) It, Again: The Politics of DIY and Self-Organised Culture. Bradford: 1 in 12 Club/Bradford University. 11 May.
It's getting close to being a year since The Fattylympics took place, and a good time to reflect on it. Although there were problems on the day, I think it offers a good example of how to make multi-layered activist events that appeal to many different kinds of people, don't cost very much, and which push the boundaries of what can be considered activism (a good thing, in my opinion, because it enables more people to engage with activism in their own ways). Not only that, but we produced this event in a context that was pretty repressive by first world standards. I think The Fattylympics is also significant because it was a joyous event, it showed that the work of social justice does not have to be a hand-wringing affair.
I made a slideshow of the audio of my talk and some images from The Fattylympics and have made it available on YouTube. There were some questions afterwards, but I did not include these as I thought it would be uncool to include people's voices without their consent. The whole thing lasts about 25 minutes. There's some swearing, beware, but also plenty of context and description about how and why we put the event together.
I want to add that the gathering where I spoke was a bit of a strange one. Although it took place in a well-respected (though inaccessible) autonomous space, it was very much an academic affair. What's more, I was really shocked by the sexism within the symposium. Two panels of white men, with tokenised women moderators, set the tone of the event. This was really alien to me! I come from a DIY community where feminism, queers, and increasingly people of colour, are central to the scene. Some of the men's work was very old, and two ethnographers, when pulled on their samples, admitted that they had very much marginalised women in their research. The feminist and queer speakers were put together at the end in a panel called 'Case Studies,' even though I mention some theory in my presentation, and even though some of the men's presentations could also have been called 'Case Studies'.
It really was vexing to witness this, and small moments, such as when one panellist got his fellow speakers a glass of beer, but not the queer woman moderator (presumably she is too ladylike to enjoy a drink?), spelled out how invisible and marginal many people's voices were on the day. I heard a lot of talk from the men about class struggle, but feminism or other theoretical frameworks, if mentioned at all, were very much added as an afterthought, or a touchstone to make the speaker appear right on.
I'm sure this kind of thing is familiar to people who have an academic interest in punk, or who spend time with straight men, but for me it was quite an unpleasant eye-opener. What's even more dismaying is that our panel of feminists and queers was the most well-attended and popular of the day. I wish what we brought had been more central to the event.
Cooper, C. (2013) Doing the Dance of Disrespect: The Fattylympics. Just Do(ing) It, Again: The Politics of DIY and Self-Organised Culture. Bradford: 1 in 12 Club/Bradford University. 11 May.
Japanese TATTOO Horimitsu Style A customer from Sweden!!!!
Thank you for coming always! see you again soon.
Body painting photo of LaToya Woods Miss Miss Trinidad & Tobago
Body painting photo of Miss Albania & Miss Ireland
Body painting photo of Rima Fakih Miss USA
Body-painting photo of Miss Guatemala & Miss Mexico
Nadine Thomas Miss Universe MalaysiaHot Girls Body Paint
The origin of body painting is unknown, but its use has been widespread - sometimes as an art form, sometimes as a part of tradition, and the other times, as a necessity. The evidence of body painting is found in ancient practices across various cultures and remains a popular fashion statement in the present times. There is no set style or technique for body painting. It can be a localized design or a fuller one, covering the entire body in some cases. The color pigments used can be natural or synthetic. Similarly, it can be a work of an expert or an amateurish hand of a novice. However, unlike permanent tattoos, body paints are temporary or semi-permanent in nature.
Painting the body was prevalent in ancient Egyptian civilization, where Pharaohs and high-class individuals painted their faces in red ochre & white pigments, and eyes in kohl. The Himba group of Namibia also generously uses red ochre. These people paint their entire bodies in the uniform pigment, as a traditional practice. In India, body painting is an elaborate work of expertise, which requires training and a lot of experience. One of the best examples of this art is the make-up of Kathakali dancers that involves the use of white, red, black, and yellow colors against a base of bottle green color, on face.
The use of 'henna,' a natural plant extract, is very popular among the Indian women across the country and is again, done by trained experts. Henna is used for decorating the hands and feet in beautiful, complex designs. Native Americans use streaks, concentric circles, and other patterns of colors, which include red, white, yellow, blue, and black. The indigenous Yolngu people of Australia use detailed and painstaking technique to embellish their bodies. It is an inspiration for many other art forms and a job that only the experts can do.
Painted faces have been a trademark of comedians and mimics, throughout the history of performing arts. Body painting has found as much use in military operations, as in local communities. Facial colors, particularly in nature tones are heavily employed as camouflage by almost all armies in the world. Now days, this art has become a fad, especially among the youth and is treated more as an avant-garde fashion accessory, rather than as a religious belief. Across the US and Europe, body painting is used in theatre, cinema, fashion, carnivals, and body painting festivals. Despite facing criticism and rejection from various corners, this art continued to grow and is still evolving!
Hot Body Paint
Hot Body Paint
Hot Body Paint
Hot Body Paint
Hot Body Paint
Hot Body Paint
Hot Body Paint
Hot Body Paint
Hot Body Paint
Hot Body Paint
Red Net Stone Work Saree 2013
You will get this beautiful red color half net, half georgette saree in the best price in Kalzaone. The designer contrasting green silk border has sequence work embroidered over it. The net pallu is designed with heave sequence, zari and resham work. This saree will give you a distinct look on any festival.
Traditional Lehanga
Net fabric kundan zerkan stone digital photo single
pannel heavy digital kundan stone brocade patch
stitch blouse kathan border short pallu
pannel heavy digital kundan stone brocade patch
stitch blouse kathan border short pallu
Indian Nice Salwar Kameez 2013-14
Calibrate your style with this cotton salwar suit in
darkest shade of green with abstract design on centre
panel and bright blue drops on daman. It comes with
leherya beige churidar and printed chiffon dupatta.
darkest shade of green with abstract design on centre
panel and bright blue drops on daman. It comes with
leherya beige churidar and printed chiffon dupatta.
COTTON PRINTS CHIFFON DUPATTA 2013
This alluring black cotton salwar suit has abstract
design on the top with printed roses on the daman
with same front and back portions. The salwar suit is
accompanied by tomato red and black printed chiffon
dupatta and red churidar.
Blow your charm everywhere in this lavender cotton dress with printed lotuses on the daman.
design on the top with printed roses on the daman
with same front and back portions. The salwar suit is
accompanied by tomato red and black printed chiffon
dupatta and red churidar.
Blow your charm everywhere in this lavender cotton dress with printed lotuses on the daman.
COTTON PRINTS CHIFFON DUPATTA
Show your chirpy self in this brown and black cotton
salwar suit with bandhej printed designs. It comes
with printed chiffon dupatta and olive green dotted
lower.
salwar suit with bandhej printed designs. It comes
with printed chiffon dupatta and olive green dotted
lower.
Dote on this light blue outfit from kalazone with double colored chiffon dupatta and chrome colored churidar. The top is made of self printed cotton with life sized printed roses on the daman.
Show your carefree style in this wine berry pink cotton salwar suit with sunflower print on front side and leher on the back. It comes with pine green churidar and printed chiffon dupatta.
Functions & Marriages
With the efforts of our professionals, we are able to
manufacture superior quality Simple Sarees. These
Simple Sarees are made from high quality of raw
material which ensure durability at its user end.
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