I'm giving a little show and tell talk about making and writing for zines, including FaT GiRL and other queer fat activist zines. It's in London on Saturday, part of the inaugural Queer Zine Fest. I have new zines to give away too.
Please come.
Charlotte Cooper's Queer Zine Show and Tell
Queer Zine Fest London
Space Station Sixty-Five
373 Kennington Road
London SE11 4PS
Saturday 8 December 2012
12.00 – 19.00 (I'm on at 14.30)
QZFL Facebook Event
Showing posts with label FaT GiRL. Show all posts
Showing posts with label FaT GiRL. Show all posts
Beth D looks up to me, and I look up to this lot
I'm working hard trying to wind up my PhD. I spend most days grimacing at my computer for hours on end. There aren't many laughs round here at the moment.
A little bit of sweetness came my way last night, however. I was doing the washing-up from dinner and my girlfriend came in, she had been online and had seen a link to a new interview in which superstar of the universe Beth Ditto name-checked me as one of the fat activists she looks up to.
I get love mail from readers from time to time, it started when I published my first book in 1998 and it's never really stopped, so I know that there are people in the world who appreciate my work. I see my book in libraries, dog-eared, underlined, well-read. Because my life is not very glamorous or well-paid, and because I know and have known abuse, these little messages are a great boost. Coming from Beth, though, well, that's really excellent. I have met some of my heroes and they are generally disappointing, but Beth is in another league; she has heart, humanity and politics, she makes you want to dance, and she lights the way. To think that I do things that she respects is really exciting. Despite my current gloom and angst, I have allowed myself to crack a tiny, sneaky, proud smile.
This morning I was thinking about the people I look up to in fat activism. Fandom has little interest for me because it is dehumanising, it's kind of flat. What I seek is deep and rich mutual engagement with people's work and ideas. In this way, I think of myself as standing on the shoulders of giants, and I hope that people will use my shoulders too (though credit me if you use my work please!), and that in time there will be towers of us, interlinked. In 21st century Western culture there's a faith in this figure of the lone leader but in fat activism I think this is a myth and I would advise scepticism of anyone who claims to have invented this stuff, or is looking to be the spokesperson for the movement, because there are so many fantastic activists who came before the current generation and I want to see them name-checked too! More than scepticism, I would advise people to visit an archive, ask around, and bone up on fat activist histories. My Queer and Trans Fat Activist Timeline project can help with this.
So I thought I'd name some names. There are many people in fat activism that I respect, but these people are the bomb:
Llewellyn Louderback left fat activism almost as soon as he started it, but not without publishing an article and a book that had a big influence on the movement. Over 40 years later, Fat Power is still amazingly relevant. He had a vision and the means to realise it; we should all be so lucky.
The fat feminists. These women, often lesbians, developed a political analysis of fat that included intersectionality, community and culture. Their feminism enabled fat women to locate the sources of oppression and liberation in everyday moments. Their work is often painfully obscure, but they are heroes in my world, the muthas of the movement, I am indebted to them beyond belief for their work, which has enabled me and many others to thrive. Sara Golda Bracha Fishman, also known as Vivian Mayer and Aldebaran, Judy Freespirit and Lynn McAfee are the key people who come to mind. They developed The Fat Underground into an organisation that defined fat activism, and still does to a great extent. Judy and Lynn went on to develop other significant fat activist projects, Sara helped develop fat activism on the East Coast of the USA, and produced this excellent article: Life In The Fat Underground. Elana Dykewomon and Judith Stein were also associated with these women. Elana published the most startling essays and poems documenting early fat feminism; Judith was an important mover and shaker in Boston, pioneering women's health, fat activism, and Jewish lesbian feminist politics.
Heather Smith used fat feminism from the US to develop a fat feminist community in the UK in the late 1980s. Other women were involved with the London Fat Women's Group, but it is Heather's articles and appearances in the British media at that time that turned me onto fat activism. One day I hope we can sit down together over a coffee.
And then there are the queers! Kathleen LeBesco's work championing the queerness of fat bodies and fat activism is visionary. Allyson Mitchell's activism and art blows my mind, the same goes for Scottee's use of fat in performance, and Substantia's abundance of fat photoactivism. The NOLOSE Board have navigated tricky waters around race and gender with imagination and integrity. There's FaT GiRL too.
I have friends and loves whose fat activism moves me very much: hello Amanda, Devra, Kay, and Simon. There are people, too, that I will never know, but whose images spur me onwards: Divine, Fran Fullenwider, Judith Clarke's photograph of Banshee that I found in the GLBT Historical Society archive in San Francisco.
I know there are many names I have missed out, the more I think of people, the more names and faces pop up. But this is where I will leave it for now. Perhaps you might like to share your own giants, perhaps here in comments, or in posts of your own.
A little bit of sweetness came my way last night, however. I was doing the washing-up from dinner and my girlfriend came in, she had been online and had seen a link to a new interview in which superstar of the universe Beth Ditto name-checked me as one of the fat activists she looks up to.
I get love mail from readers from time to time, it started when I published my first book in 1998 and it's never really stopped, so I know that there are people in the world who appreciate my work. I see my book in libraries, dog-eared, underlined, well-read. Because my life is not very glamorous or well-paid, and because I know and have known abuse, these little messages are a great boost. Coming from Beth, though, well, that's really excellent. I have met some of my heroes and they are generally disappointing, but Beth is in another league; she has heart, humanity and politics, she makes you want to dance, and she lights the way. To think that I do things that she respects is really exciting. Despite my current gloom and angst, I have allowed myself to crack a tiny, sneaky, proud smile.
This morning I was thinking about the people I look up to in fat activism. Fandom has little interest for me because it is dehumanising, it's kind of flat. What I seek is deep and rich mutual engagement with people's work and ideas. In this way, I think of myself as standing on the shoulders of giants, and I hope that people will use my shoulders too (though credit me if you use my work please!), and that in time there will be towers of us, interlinked. In 21st century Western culture there's a faith in this figure of the lone leader but in fat activism I think this is a myth and I would advise scepticism of anyone who claims to have invented this stuff, or is looking to be the spokesperson for the movement, because there are so many fantastic activists who came before the current generation and I want to see them name-checked too! More than scepticism, I would advise people to visit an archive, ask around, and bone up on fat activist histories. My Queer and Trans Fat Activist Timeline project can help with this.
So I thought I'd name some names. There are many people in fat activism that I respect, but these people are the bomb:
Llewellyn Louderback left fat activism almost as soon as he started it, but not without publishing an article and a book that had a big influence on the movement. Over 40 years later, Fat Power is still amazingly relevant. He had a vision and the means to realise it; we should all be so lucky.
The fat feminists. These women, often lesbians, developed a political analysis of fat that included intersectionality, community and culture. Their feminism enabled fat women to locate the sources of oppression and liberation in everyday moments. Their work is often painfully obscure, but they are heroes in my world, the muthas of the movement, I am indebted to them beyond belief for their work, which has enabled me and many others to thrive. Sara Golda Bracha Fishman, also known as Vivian Mayer and Aldebaran, Judy Freespirit and Lynn McAfee are the key people who come to mind. They developed The Fat Underground into an organisation that defined fat activism, and still does to a great extent. Judy and Lynn went on to develop other significant fat activist projects, Sara helped develop fat activism on the East Coast of the USA, and produced this excellent article: Life In The Fat Underground. Elana Dykewomon and Judith Stein were also associated with these women. Elana published the most startling essays and poems documenting early fat feminism; Judith was an important mover and shaker in Boston, pioneering women's health, fat activism, and Jewish lesbian feminist politics.
Heather Smith used fat feminism from the US to develop a fat feminist community in the UK in the late 1980s. Other women were involved with the London Fat Women's Group, but it is Heather's articles and appearances in the British media at that time that turned me onto fat activism. One day I hope we can sit down together over a coffee.
And then there are the queers! Kathleen LeBesco's work championing the queerness of fat bodies and fat activism is visionary. Allyson Mitchell's activism and art blows my mind, the same goes for Scottee's use of fat in performance, and Substantia's abundance of fat photoactivism. The NOLOSE Board have navigated tricky waters around race and gender with imagination and integrity. There's FaT GiRL too.
I have friends and loves whose fat activism moves me very much: hello Amanda, Devra, Kay, and Simon. There are people, too, that I will never know, but whose images spur me onwards: Divine, Fran Fullenwider, Judith Clarke's photograph of Banshee that I found in the GLBT Historical Society archive in San Francisco.
I know there are many names I have missed out, the more I think of people, the more names and faces pop up. But this is where I will leave it for now. Perhaps you might like to share your own giants, perhaps here in comments, or in posts of your own.
How I got into fat
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| Me, 1978 or so, looking into the future. |
I've been working on an autoethnography for my PhD. Ethnography is a kind of qualitative research methodology that involves looking at people. With autoethnography you are also looking at yourself. If you want to know more about autoethnography, you could read Carolyn Ellis and Jacqui Gingras on the subject.
Because I think that context matters, I think that all researchers should reflect on who they are to be doing research, even – especially – the kind of researchers who produce pages of numbers about BMI. So I've been reflecting a lot over the four years in which I've been working on my PhD, and thinking about how I came to be here. With this in mind, I thought I'd share a little about how I got into fat. It goes like this...
I have been fat all my life, meaning that I have always been fatter than most of my peers. My family is pretty fractured and it's hard to tell how fat features there. Certainly three of my immediate family have had what they would think of as 'weight problems' and have 'done something about it,' and I have distant relatives who have been fat at various stages of their lives. I think I might be the fattest but it's hard to tell amidst all this shape-changing and self-regulation. I'm certainly the most self-accepting fat person in my family.
When I was about six or seven years old, my mum decided that something needed to be done about my body. Mum was a nurse, she was working as an administrator at a clinic at that time, and very much part of a culture of medicalisation. I think her decision to monitor the food I ate may have coincided with her own body-projects, it was certainly a part of her work of trying to pass as middle class. My first diet came at a time when we were living in a colonial ex-pat community in Hong Kong that included a lot of upper-middle and upper class people. I think she felt that she had to fit in with them, and that my fat body betrayed what she felt was the shameful truth of our class.
Mum and I dieted on and off for the next few years. Sometimes we'd follow a sheet that she brought home from work but mostly it involved periodic disapproval of what I ate and voiced anxiety about the size of my body, especially when clothes didn't fit me. In spite of all this I was a very active kid, I was a synchronised swimmer, and always running around, riding my bike, doing things. This continues to this day. So whilst I had this idea that my body was a problem, I also had an image of myself as active, someone who could do things.
I had no idea about fat politics as a teenager in the early 1980s in London, though I now know that a fat feminist movement had been active for at least ten years by this stage in other parts of the world. However, I had access to some things that enabled me to develop a critical understanding of my fatness. These things weren't directly about fat but they helped pave the way later on.
The first thing was feminism. I got interested in feminism as a young girl. In my family sex was never spoken about, and I was quite anxious by the time I reached puberty, I wanted information. I didn't know about libraries so I went to bookshops and read the sex education books there. Books on feminism were stacked nearby so when I'd read all the stuff about 'a man and a lady loving each other very much and making a baby' I moved on to much more interesting books about contraception, abortion, being lesbians, self-determination, and so on. I didn't know it but I was learning about speaking up, power, and possibilities for naming and exploring my own experience.
The next thing was a sort of queer punk. Whilst I was at school I got a Saturday job that introduced me to lots of people who were really happy to be freaks and who sneered at the straight world. Queer was not a term that had much currency at the time, but this group of people, including the heterosexuals, were very queer indeed. Some were performers, most were much older than me and everyone had lived exciting lives of one kind or another. People did things, they didn't wait for someone else to do it for them. Although everybody lived on the margins in some way, people lived creatively amidst rich communities of friends. There was always something to do, bands and clubs, I started going out and I never really stopped. At the same time I was reading subcultural literature, writers like Kathy Acker, David Wojnarowicz, William Burroughs, and this too gave me an idea that things could be different and that being different was no bad thing at all.
I left school and did A Levels and got into student politics. At the time this took the form of anti-fascist and anti-racist organising, I remember quite a bit of feminism in the mix too. The National Union of Students was still a radical body back then. We went on demonstrations and took part in discussions and conferences. Alongside this I was travelling on and off with my oldest brother who was what would now be called a new age traveller. So I had experiences of very marginal politics too, living on the road, trying to avoid arrest, a kind of practical anarchism.
Throughout all this my fatness was still seen as a problem, not only by me but by the people around me. I longed to be thin and still made attempts to lose weight, although this never came to much. I think I knew it was bullshit but I didn't have a way of articulating it until I saw members of the London Fat Women's Group talking on Wogan, a very popular early evening television talk show. This would have been in 1989. They were organising a conference, and they also made a short documentary about fat politics that was also shown on TV. I watched it avidly.
It took a while, a couple of years, for the things that the London Fat Women's Group were saying to sink in. I think I was still recovering, not just from growing up in a context of everyday fatphobia, but also other kinds of trauma. The last straw was being dumped by a boyfriend who wanted me to be thinner. I'd really had enough. But the appearance of those British fat feminists in my life showed that there were other ways of being, and my experiences as a girl and as a teenager enabled me to adopt it eventually. Given my context, it made total sense to me that fat could be a social and political identity and that there was incredible potential for the development of fat culture, collective action and intellectual activity.
I started to look out for other things. By my late teens and early 20s I had an experiential and theoretical framework for activism that made Shadow on a Tightrope and Being Fat is Not a Sin irresistible when I first came across them around 1990 or so. I started an ill-fated fat support group, did some postgraduate work about fat activism, started to meet people who were interested in similar things and who supported my fat identity, took part in a proto-fatshion modelling competition(!), wrote a book, and spent the advance on a trip to California to meet the dykes who put FaT GiRL together and attend the Dirty Bird queercore festival. Fat politics interested me initially as a solution to the years in which my body had been a battlefield, a place of restriction, blame, anxiety, but it soon became a much bigger project, something that could play off other life experiences. Fat as feminist, punk, queer, a place to which I could bring my politics, a way of understanding my life. There was no turning back.
References
Bovey, S. (1989) Being Fat is Not a Sin, London: Pandora.
Ellis, C. (2004) The Ethnographic I: A Methodological Novel about Autoethnography, Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press.
Gingras, J. R. (2009) Longing for Recognition: The Joys, Complexities, and Contradictions of Practicing Dietetics, York: Raw Nerve.
Schoenfielder, L. and Wieser, B. (1983) Shadow On A Tightrope: Writings By Women on Fat Oppression, San Francisco: Aunt Lute.
Allyson Mitchell's fat feminist art and me
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.
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.
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| Image courtesy of Allyson Mitchell |
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