Tattoos Secret Meanings

For Books' Sake is a wonderful independent online phenomenon devoted to promoting books that champion women. They invited me to recommend some reading by and about fat activists and I was only too happy to oblige.

I wasn't able to list every book on fat that I've ever come across, there's quite a lot nowawdays, thanks to a little flurry of fat publishing over the last few years. Some of the more obvious titles are missing from the list, perhaps because they now feel overfamiliar to me. I picked the ones that still move me, that have an activist sensibility to them, and they are often much older and somewhat obscure. Part of my own activism involves bringing this literature out from the margins so that others can find power in it. The older works, apart from CM Donald's poems, are available for pennies on the devil's Amazon; you don't have to spend big bucks on academic publishing to find complex, radical literature about fat - not that the academy is necessarily the place to find radical ideas, sadly the opposite is often true.

I've listed books that really made a difference to me and helped me develop my thinking and activism around fat. There are some omissions: no zines, no journals, and nothing by men, which means that Fat Power, by Llewellyn Louderback, and Never Satisfied: A Cultural History of Diets, Fantasies and Fat, by Hillel Schwartz, are both missing yet still vital to me.

There's probably space for a separate reading list of books that greatly influenced my fat politics but which had nothing to do with fat. I'm thinking of the first edition of Pranks by V. Vale; poetry and literature from the High Risk imprint from Serpent's Tail; Semiotext(e)'s Native Agents series; Alternative London; Please Kill Me by Leggs McNeill; Bev Skeggs' Formations of Class and Gender; A Feminist Dictionary, and so on. I think my reading on fat can't really be separated from other kinds of things that move me, not just books but also broader slices of culture including snippets I read online, music, performance, places and people. It would be impossible to make a comprehensive list of that stuff.

Meanwhile, take a look at the article, feel free to share it and to add your own comments about the books that made a difference to your understanding of fat.

Cooper, C. (2013) 'A Quick and Dirty Intro to Fat Activism', [online], available: http://forbookssake.net/2013/07/03/a-quick-and-dirty-intro-to-fat-activism/ [accessed 3 July 2013].