Back in August last year, I had a testy interaction with someone on Facebook about something they did that I thought reeked of fat hate.
The Real Art of Protest (TRAP) is a Facebook group dedicated to reposting protest images. Their About page states that they will ban users for racism, sexism, comments offensive to those who are LGBT, ableism, trolling, using personal insults and justifying the existence of fascist organisations. Very honourable. They're a popular page.
But in August I started to see them reposting an image. Of course now I can't find it! Perhaps they quietly took it down when no one was looking. Hmm, an apology would have gone a long way too. Anyway, the image included a fat kid, junk food, and the Olympic stadium. It was a visual comment trying to make a point about McDonald's corporate sponsorship of the Olympics, implying that one of the Games' legacies would be the production of more fat kids. I haven't been able to find the originator of this image, and TRAP doesn't always give out that information. I left a comment immediately saying why I thought this image was a mistake, and then I sent TRAP a message about it inviting dialogue about the picture. I also wanted to talk to them about their use of imagery relating to fat capitalists, but we never got that far. The full transcript of the exchange is below.
I've been wanting to make a blog post out of this exchange for a while but I couldn't get a handle on it. Mostly I was angry about having my careful comments dismissed in such a patronising and cavalier way. But there were other themes that bothered me, and which couldn't be contained in a neat narrative for a blog post. Instead of waiting for inspiration to strike, I thought I'd just go ahead and write a messy post all about it. Not everything can be neatly storyfied after all, life is messy.
One of the themes is about the continuing failure of the radical Left to consider other forms of liberation politics, especially things that could be thought of as fringe, including fat stuff. The use of headless fatties and the language of fat hate was not confined to the mainstream, particularly during the Olympics in London, where I live. It was also included in radical spaces. The Olympics brought with it a giant, overwhelming rhetoric of patriotic groupthink, it was like an invasion of the pod people. Critics of this moment were few and far between, or at least their voices were barely represented anywhere. To be a critic of the Olympics was to be politically radical, yet here were radicals capitalising on fatphobia.
It would be churlish to expect everyone to know about fat politics, but what shocked me was how I was shut down when I called them on their depiction of fatness. This was in a context where they had posted other images that supposedly supported embodied liberation, and where their About page specifically mentioned ableism, which has a lot to do with how embodied difference is culturally positioned in negative ways. It felt really hypocritical to me, that some forms of resistance are acceptable, and others not, and that TRAP were unwilling to adopt a critical view of this stuff.
Another theme was the insistence that fat has nothing to do with politics, it just is, and it should be eliminated. I'm still staggered by this! The denial that fat has a political dimension, by people interested in politics, just amazes me.
This makes me think about other fatphobes who have some radical politics and know that they can’t talk shit about fat. What they do is dismiss fat politics in other ways. X implies that fat activism isn’t queer or feminist. Y implies that it is a white person’s thing. Z describes it as a hipster fad that's out of touch with real people's experiences of health or embodiment. None of them have done their homework but they arrogantly assume that they don’t have to. Their voices are influential within their subcultures and the lie continues that fat activism is conservative, rigid, limited, not worth bothering with. Fat is always trivial, secondary, not real.
The exchange brought into light the difficulty of speaking about fat. I'm lucky in that people often want me to talk about this stuff, but it reminded me of what it's like to speak into a vacuum, to people who have no concept of your framework. Sometimes this can bring up funny and even fruitful mismatches in discourse; for example, I enjoy listening to the fatphobe who's really interested in what I'm saying but is bound to a way of thinking about fat that can't really encompass my perspective. How they struggle! But then there are exchanges like this, where I might as well be speaking Martian, and where what I am saying cannot be at all tolerated. The silencing is really chilling, as is the automatic assumption in the exchange by the other person that they must be right.
Anyway, here is the transcript from the exchange, for your reading pleasure. I think of it as a little example of fatphobic micro-aggression. If you're fat and you want to talk about it it's likely that you've experienced many occasions like these. It's also a reminder of how profoundly fat politics threatens people.
1 August 2012
08.30
Charlotte Cooper
Dear TRAP,
Stop using images of fat people to promote ideas of greed, laziness, ill-health, capitalism. This is fatphobia. Your About page says that you will not tolerate ableism, so why bash a demographic that is closely associated with the most impoverished people around (want stats about how fat people in the West are more likely to be poor, older women of colour? I can send them). Not only impoverished, but a group of people that are subjected to the most egregious daily discrimination and stigma (again, I can send you data if you want it), that images like the ones you have produced do nothing to address.
The left, including the revolutionary left, has a dismal history of using the imagery of fat to denote corporate greed and the downfall of the world, and this has to change.
Here are some links that might help you understand a bit more why your headless fatty McDonalds picture is bullshit, and why you should apologise for it and get on board with radical fat activism.
http://obesitytimebomb.blogspot.co.uk/2011/11/stereotyping-fat-and-capitalism.html
http://obesitytimebomb.blogspot.co.uk/2011/05/how-left-failed-fat.html
http://obesitytimebomb.blogspot.co.uk/2011/10/progressive-enlightened-anti-capitalist.html
http://obesitytimebomb.blogspot.co.uk/2011/08/stereotyping-fat-in-visual-language-of.html
http://www.charlottecooper.net/docs/fat/headless_fatties.htm
You want radical images of fat that relate to the Olympics? I live in E15, in the shadow of the beast. Check out our community project, the Fattylympics:
http://fattylympics.blogspot.co.uk/
http://www.gamesmonitor.org.uk/node/1647
Charlotte
16:14
TRAP - The Real Art of Protest
the imagery is a dig at corporations and not people as is the only interpretation of that image taken as a whole with the text and the corporate logos of the olympics largest sponsors. The lead off from unhealthy food is obesity and therefore the image will not be removed or rendered. Sorry, but you are being hypersensitive.
16:15
Charlotte Cooper
Did you read the links?
16:23
TRAP - The Real Art of Protest
If you knew anything about the page you would know we have CONSISTENTLY attacked corporations with regard to the olympics. The only individuals who we attack are politicians, corporate spokespersons and royalty i.e. the enemy.
16:26
Charlotte Cooper
Yes, I get that, and I applaud it, I am no supporter of the Olympics, I live close to the Olympic Park and am disgusted by it, the corporate intrusion into East London is deplorable. But did you read the links I posted? Perhaps we could have a discussion about the use of headless fatty imagery, for example.
Also, "The lead off from unhealthy food is obesity" actually, this is not necessarily true. Would you like to talk about this?
16:41
TRAP - The Real Art of Protest
Not really, we are already very mindful of the nuances of our posts and do not need educating on sensitive activism. We take your input seriously and can assure you we will access your links and review our own processes. Thanks for the links and thanks for your input - it is appreciated.
16:49
Charlotte Cooper
Actually, you have been anything but sensitive on this issue. You are out of touch on the fat stuff, and your use of fat bodies is insulting and problematic. This is not just me being 'hypersensitive'. I am offering you an opportunity to develop your understanding of fat politics, and to understand how it intersects with disability rights, queer politics, anti-capitalism, and to develop shit hot activism that takes this stuff into account. I am a world expert on this stuff, widely published and respected around the world. I'm not talking out of my arse. But you are giving me the brush-off. This does not look like appreciation to me, it looks like arrogance. You don't want free knowledge? Your loss. Continue producing images that crap all over a demographic of people who don't need your shit, continue alienating people who could otherwise be supporting you.
Showing posts with label Left. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Left. Show all posts
Stereotyping Fat and Capitalism
I went down to St Paul's last week to visit Occupy London. There are places where my politics and the general politics of Occupy diverge, but I'm glad it's there, hope it continues, and felt happy, inspired and moved by it.
One of my favourite things about Occupy London is the way that the street has been appropriated as a giant noticeboard. Pictures, letters, rants, conspiracy theories, stickers, were all taped up on the pillars at the side of the encampment. I enjoyed browsing, there was such a muddle of compelling stuff. Amongst everything were some posters advertising a new film, and a leaflet about the scummy business of carbon trading. Can you guess what drew me to them? Yes, that's right: their use of fat capitalist stereotyping.
I have written elsewhere about how the left has failed fat people, progressive, enlightened, anti-capitalist, pro-planet people and their fatphobia, and about political cartoonists' use of fatness to denote the greed and disgustingness of capitalism (alas top fatphobe cartoonist Martin Rowson never replied to my email about that). I'm becoming more and more interested in what I see as a contradiction: the left supports the underdog, yet fails to see fat people as oppressed, and instead reproduces us as visual stereotypes of the oppressors. Fat cat capitalist imagery is a travesty when you understand that the fattest social groups are also the poorest and most marginalised.
Similarly, I'm fascinated and annoyed at how fat activism is ignored, denied, belittled within apparently progressive leftist circles, even though it offers radical possibilities for understanding and challenging oppressive practices. This was brought home to me this week when my girlfriend got an email from a vegan anarchist café in London declining her proposal for a regular fat crafternoon-type event on the grounds that they were concerned about promoting obesity within the context of a global obesity epidemic.
In both cases people on the radical left are failing to see fat, that is, they are failing to understand fat as something with which they should be politically engaged in a critical manner. Instead, they rely on lazy thinking and stereotyping, refusing to acknowledge the radical work by fat activists that is going on right in front of them.
One of my favourite things about Occupy London is the way that the street has been appropriated as a giant noticeboard. Pictures, letters, rants, conspiracy theories, stickers, were all taped up on the pillars at the side of the encampment. I enjoyed browsing, there was such a muddle of compelling stuff. Amongst everything were some posters advertising a new film, and a leaflet about the scummy business of carbon trading. Can you guess what drew me to them? Yes, that's right: their use of fat capitalist stereotyping.
I have written elsewhere about how the left has failed fat people, progressive, enlightened, anti-capitalist, pro-planet people and their fatphobia, and about political cartoonists' use of fatness to denote the greed and disgustingness of capitalism (alas top fatphobe cartoonist Martin Rowson never replied to my email about that). I'm becoming more and more interested in what I see as a contradiction: the left supports the underdog, yet fails to see fat people as oppressed, and instead reproduces us as visual stereotypes of the oppressors. Fat cat capitalist imagery is a travesty when you understand that the fattest social groups are also the poorest and most marginalised.
Similarly, I'm fascinated and annoyed at how fat activism is ignored, denied, belittled within apparently progressive leftist circles, even though it offers radical possibilities for understanding and challenging oppressive practices. This was brought home to me this week when my girlfriend got an email from a vegan anarchist café in London declining her proposal for a regular fat crafternoon-type event on the grounds that they were concerned about promoting obesity within the context of a global obesity epidemic.
In both cases people on the radical left are failing to see fat, that is, they are failing to understand fat as something with which they should be politically engaged in a critical manner. Instead, they rely on lazy thinking and stereotyping, refusing to acknowledge the radical work by fat activists that is going on right in front of them.
Stereotyping fat in the visual language of the Left
I've written before about how sections of the Left have failed fat activism in the UK, and about how fat and class are depicted within this political visual rhetoric. It's truly depressing how opportunities to develop broad analyses of embodied oppression, as well as activist strategies and productive coalitions, are thwarted because fat is continually seen as laughable, trivial, and nothing to do with the real struggle.
Sometimes it is possible to take part in productive, if difficult, dialogue. Today, for example, I had an exchange with the usually fantastic Anarchist Media Project (AMP) over an image on their blog of a fat capitalist guzzling an innocent thin person in Children of Britain, Know Your Place: BORN POOR, DIE POOR. I left a comment and asked the project to stop using images of fatness to represent greed, capitalists and corruption and pointed out that fat people tended to be of low socioeconomic status. I said that stereotypes were hurtful and alienating, and I suggested some things that they could read to educate themselves about fat politics.
The good news is that the AMP said they would think about this stuff. They said that the image by saying it was from a famous vintage cartoon by a socialist artist called Robert Minor. I replied that I understood that there are historical precedents in the visual language of anarchism, and in the Left in general, of using fatness as a symbol of ruling class greed and corruption. However, the discourse around fatness has changed and is now part of a moral panic that also includes elements of classism, racism, fear and hatred of disability and difference. I said that it is not enough to use these vintage images without interrogating them or acknowledging that contexts have changed.
The annoying part of the exchange, reiterated by a later comment, was that "In fact we saw the suit, and nothing but the suit." There's something really weasely about this, it has a whiff of denial about it. They're offering a kind of fat-blindness that could be interpreted as "we don't care if someone's fat or thin, we don't even notice it," but is more like: "we don't see people like you, you don't exist in any meaningful way to us." Another commenter made a mean little joke at my expense, which hardly helped.
On other occasions I just want to throw my hands up in the air. This brings me to Martin Rowson, the man who has done more than any other political cartoonist, even Steve Bell, to associate fatness with everything that is disgusting. Here are a few charmers from his oeuvre, returned just by Googling his name. Will somebody please have a word with him?
My tolerance for the fatphobia in these kinds of images has evaporated because I read them as an ongoing betrayal by people who might otherwise be comrades. I am not proposing that images be censored, and I don't want a visual language of fatness that is reduced to a happy-clappy set of 'positive images'. I want to be able to look at whatever I want as much as anybody else does, and I want to be challenged by what I see. With Rowson it's not even about being squeamish over grotesque pictures. What I would like is for progressive, freedom-loving people on the radical Left to think more about the complexities of representing fat and to stop selling out on people's bodies. Liberation cannot be built on stereotypes.
Sometimes it is possible to take part in productive, if difficult, dialogue. Today, for example, I had an exchange with the usually fantastic Anarchist Media Project (AMP) over an image on their blog of a fat capitalist guzzling an innocent thin person in Children of Britain, Know Your Place: BORN POOR, DIE POOR. I left a comment and asked the project to stop using images of fatness to represent greed, capitalists and corruption and pointed out that fat people tended to be of low socioeconomic status. I said that stereotypes were hurtful and alienating, and I suggested some things that they could read to educate themselves about fat politics.
The good news is that the AMP said they would think about this stuff. They said that the image by saying it was from a famous vintage cartoon by a socialist artist called Robert Minor. I replied that I understood that there are historical precedents in the visual language of anarchism, and in the Left in general, of using fatness as a symbol of ruling class greed and corruption. However, the discourse around fatness has changed and is now part of a moral panic that also includes elements of classism, racism, fear and hatred of disability and difference. I said that it is not enough to use these vintage images without interrogating them or acknowledging that contexts have changed.
The annoying part of the exchange, reiterated by a later comment, was that "In fact we saw the suit, and nothing but the suit." There's something really weasely about this, it has a whiff of denial about it. They're offering a kind of fat-blindness that could be interpreted as "we don't care if someone's fat or thin, we don't even notice it," but is more like: "we don't see people like you, you don't exist in any meaningful way to us." Another commenter made a mean little joke at my expense, which hardly helped.
On other occasions I just want to throw my hands up in the air. This brings me to Martin Rowson, the man who has done more than any other political cartoonist, even Steve Bell, to associate fatness with everything that is disgusting. Here are a few charmers from his oeuvre, returned just by Googling his name. Will somebody please have a word with him?
My tolerance for the fatphobia in these kinds of images has evaporated because I read them as an ongoing betrayal by people who might otherwise be comrades. I am not proposing that images be censored, and I don't want a visual language of fatness that is reduced to a happy-clappy set of 'positive images'. I want to be able to look at whatever I want as much as anybody else does, and I want to be challenged by what I see. With Rowson it's not even about being squeamish over grotesque pictures. What I would like is for progressive, freedom-loving people on the radical Left to think more about the complexities of representing fat and to stop selling out on people's bodies. Liberation cannot be built on stereotypes.
How the Left failed fat
About a week ago my friend sent me a link to an article by Jennie Bristow that was published in Living Marxism when my book came out in 1998, you can read it below. My publisher at the time sent me a press packet of all the coverage my book generated, but this article wasn't in it so I never saw it. I'm glad that I didn't read it back then, the work had been a monumental struggle for me at a time when I was living a somewhat marginal life, and I would have been devastated.
I'm in a better position to talk about this stuff 13 years on. Bristow's vicious piece is callous in its response to Christina Corrigan's death, and disablist and racist to boot. Without ever having met me, she paints me as a miserable, whining wannabe victim intent on playing oppression olympics, when actually my book sets out the many ways in which fat activists resist and transform hatred, and why we do it. Bristow presents fat activism as dogmatic and American, which it certainly can be, but there's more to the picture than that. She posits the classic argument that fat is trivial compared to 'real' oppression, not least because fat is a choice. Weirdly, she demolishes me but agrees that fat hatred is real and has negative effects on people's lives – er, isn't that what I was saying? She also sets up a creepy and false bad fatty/good fatty division between me and the lovely Janice Bhend, who published my work in her magazine in the 90s. What would Bristow have made of the passages that my publisher refused to publish? The sections about fat and trans people, sex-positive feminism, SM? I imagine she would have blown a gasket. And what about my publisher's feminist censorship of those ideas? We'll never know what she would have made of that, if only she'd done her journalistic homework and spoken to me first. The best bit is where Bristow refers to "The Charlotte Coopers of this world," heheheh, yes, there are legions of us! All like me!
Bristow's article was not the first time that Living Marxism dismissed fat activism, in 1994 Ann Bradley went to town on Mary Evans Young's project of getting an anti-diet Early Day Motion read and supported in Parliament. I won't dwell on those pieces, or my book, both came out years ago and are done and done. Contexts have changed and I feel confident that Fat & Proud was a good piece of work because of the positive response I've had to it over the years.
What I do want to say is that both Bradley and Bristow's articles capture the British Left's failure to get on board with embodied liberation, including fat. This is also mirrored in some kinds of feminism (and it hasn't escaped me that both of these Living Marxism articles were authored by women). The legacy of the belittling of fat activism, and the feminist pathologising of fat within eating disorder paradigms is that the Left has a particularly muddled and weak relationship to this kind of political activity today. I see this as a wasted opportunity, a terrible shame. If the unions had supported Jane Meacham when she was sacked for being too fat in the late 1980s, we might very well have employment protection today. And how come it's left to the bloody Daily Mail to highlight dodgy goings on in the weight industry – notably a number of deaths of women who happened to be on the Lighterlife diet – whilst The Guardian continues to bleat on about the obesity epidemic long after anyone is interested?
Maybe Bristow has the answers. I wrote to her last week to see if she would like to re-engage with some of the things she said about my work in the light of how the world has since changed. As yet she hasn't responded.
Bradley, A. (1994). Fat's not a feminist issue. Living Marxism, 68, p.11
Bristow, J. (1998). The 'fat rights' lobby is out to lunch. Living Marxism, 109, p.30
PS. And I'm still pissed off that when Michael Moore solicited his TV audience for ideas, he never took up my suggestion that diet industries would be a good target for Crackers the Corporate Crime Fighting Chicken! What, hold a grudge? Me?
And while I'm at it, have a look at Depicting fat and class too.
I'm in a better position to talk about this stuff 13 years on. Bristow's vicious piece is callous in its response to Christina Corrigan's death, and disablist and racist to boot. Without ever having met me, she paints me as a miserable, whining wannabe victim intent on playing oppression olympics, when actually my book sets out the many ways in which fat activists resist and transform hatred, and why we do it. Bristow presents fat activism as dogmatic and American, which it certainly can be, but there's more to the picture than that. She posits the classic argument that fat is trivial compared to 'real' oppression, not least because fat is a choice. Weirdly, she demolishes me but agrees that fat hatred is real and has negative effects on people's lives – er, isn't that what I was saying? She also sets up a creepy and false bad fatty/good fatty division between me and the lovely Janice Bhend, who published my work in her magazine in the 90s. What would Bristow have made of the passages that my publisher refused to publish? The sections about fat and trans people, sex-positive feminism, SM? I imagine she would have blown a gasket. And what about my publisher's feminist censorship of those ideas? We'll never know what she would have made of that, if only she'd done her journalistic homework and spoken to me first. The best bit is where Bristow refers to "The Charlotte Coopers of this world," heheheh, yes, there are legions of us! All like me!
Bristow's article was not the first time that Living Marxism dismissed fat activism, in 1994 Ann Bradley went to town on Mary Evans Young's project of getting an anti-diet Early Day Motion read and supported in Parliament. I won't dwell on those pieces, or my book, both came out years ago and are done and done. Contexts have changed and I feel confident that Fat & Proud was a good piece of work because of the positive response I've had to it over the years.
What I do want to say is that both Bradley and Bristow's articles capture the British Left's failure to get on board with embodied liberation, including fat. This is also mirrored in some kinds of feminism (and it hasn't escaped me that both of these Living Marxism articles were authored by women). The legacy of the belittling of fat activism, and the feminist pathologising of fat within eating disorder paradigms is that the Left has a particularly muddled and weak relationship to this kind of political activity today. I see this as a wasted opportunity, a terrible shame. If the unions had supported Jane Meacham when she was sacked for being too fat in the late 1980s, we might very well have employment protection today. And how come it's left to the bloody Daily Mail to highlight dodgy goings on in the weight industry – notably a number of deaths of women who happened to be on the Lighterlife diet – whilst The Guardian continues to bleat on about the obesity epidemic long after anyone is interested?
Maybe Bristow has the answers. I wrote to her last week to see if she would like to re-engage with some of the things she said about my work in the light of how the world has since changed. As yet she hasn't responded.
Bradley, A. (1994). Fat's not a feminist issue. Living Marxism, 68, p.11
Bristow, J. (1998). The 'fat rights' lobby is out to lunch. Living Marxism, 109, p.30
PS. And I'm still pissed off that when Michael Moore solicited his TV audience for ideas, he never took up my suggestion that diet industries would be a good target for Crackers the Corporate Crime Fighting Chicken! What, hold a grudge? Me?
And while I'm at it, have a look at Depicting fat and class too.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
