Showing posts with label abjection. Show all posts
Showing posts with label abjection. Show all posts
Headless fatties, the visual cliché that will not die
My friend Substantia Jones recently shared a link to an interview with Cleo Berry in the New York Times: Imagine His Shock. His Leg Had Vanished. Berry is an actor who posed for some pictures a while back. To his astonishment his image has just turned up with one of his legs Photoshopped off in a health promotion campaign about diabetes.
It's not just the cropping out of a leg that makes this story significant. The advert is clearly part of a headless fatty tradition in advertising. I imagine Berry has been presented in this way because of anonymity, the business conditions under which Berry's image can be used and licensed, wanting to give the figure in the advert universal appeal. Yet headlessness produces a distancing rather than identification when viewers look at a picture of a headless fat person, and this campaign relies on stereotypes, which are also dehumanising. It presents the holy trinity of fat, consumption and disease in an image that is pure abjection and, I suspect, does more for fat-shaming than it does for health promotion. It hardly paints a generous picture of disability either. I haven't come across any commentary yet about the way that race, gender and class are also significant parts of the image.
New York City's Department of Health and Mental Hygiene sidestepped the issue of representation in the New York Times article to say that the advert is purely about the impact of diabetes. They have little interest in engaging with how they use images of fat people. This is not very ethical, you'd think that an organisation invested in public health would care about this sort of thing. This response shows that the use of headless fatties is not restricted to the worst of the tabloid media, it's a damaging visual cliché used by public service organisations too.
The quote in the article from Howard Wolfson, about having disability represented by someone who is not disabled, is naïve, in my opinion. Disabled activists have long campaigned against having able-bodied people represent disabled people. Realness is important because it brings depth and humanity with it, and one of the reasons this image fails is because it lacks those things.
It's interesting to hear Berry talking about how the picture came to be, his attitude towards it, the depressing effects it might have on his career which, as a fat black actor looking for roles, is probably pretty tough as it is. He says a lot about fat and representation in a short interview, about money, power, the trade in images; his account is really rich.
I think that all fat people posing for photographs should try and be aware of how their images might be used, and make amendments to photo releases if they're concerned at all about being a future poster child for abjection. At the time the pictures were taken, Berry had no understanding of what it meant to have your image used for a stock photo company, or to sign a release agreeing that your image could be manipulated. I'm grateful that he's spoken up about what it's like to be depicted in this way. It reminds me of how powerful it is when people have opportunities to refuse dehumanisation, how speaking up can expose the systemic and seemingly overwhelming ways in which people are silenced. I wish that could happen more often.
It's not just the cropping out of a leg that makes this story significant. The advert is clearly part of a headless fatty tradition in advertising. I imagine Berry has been presented in this way because of anonymity, the business conditions under which Berry's image can be used and licensed, wanting to give the figure in the advert universal appeal. Yet headlessness produces a distancing rather than identification when viewers look at a picture of a headless fat person, and this campaign relies on stereotypes, which are also dehumanising. It presents the holy trinity of fat, consumption and disease in an image that is pure abjection and, I suspect, does more for fat-shaming than it does for health promotion. It hardly paints a generous picture of disability either. I haven't come across any commentary yet about the way that race, gender and class are also significant parts of the image.
New York City's Department of Health and Mental Hygiene sidestepped the issue of representation in the New York Times article to say that the advert is purely about the impact of diabetes. They have little interest in engaging with how they use images of fat people. This is not very ethical, you'd think that an organisation invested in public health would care about this sort of thing. This response shows that the use of headless fatties is not restricted to the worst of the tabloid media, it's a damaging visual cliché used by public service organisations too.
The quote in the article from Howard Wolfson, about having disability represented by someone who is not disabled, is naïve, in my opinion. Disabled activists have long campaigned against having able-bodied people represent disabled people. Realness is important because it brings depth and humanity with it, and one of the reasons this image fails is because it lacks those things.
It's interesting to hear Berry talking about how the picture came to be, his attitude towards it, the depressing effects it might have on his career which, as a fat black actor looking for roles, is probably pretty tough as it is. He says a lot about fat and representation in a short interview, about money, power, the trade in images; his account is really rich.
I think that all fat people posing for photographs should try and be aware of how their images might be used, and make amendments to photo releases if they're concerned at all about being a future poster child for abjection. At the time the pictures were taken, Berry had no understanding of what it meant to have your image used for a stock photo company, or to sign a release agreeing that your image could be manipulated. I'm grateful that he's spoken up about what it's like to be depicted in this way. It reminds me of how powerful it is when people have opportunities to refuse dehumanisation, how speaking up can expose the systemic and seemingly overwhelming ways in which people are silenced. I wish that could happen more often.
Dawn French and The Daily Mail
Putting aside the fact that it's a Tory hate-rag, The Daily Mail is such a contradiction when it comes to reporting fat, which they do a lot, although ironically I think it's still a better bet than the supposedly liberal Guardian, which is all fat hate all the time and even has its own diet club. On the one hand The Mail promoted the Big Bum Jumble by publishing almost word for word the press release I wrote to publicise the event without any problem at all. They've done some good reporting on LighterLife, whilst pruriently speculating about who has and who hasn't been on that diet. Same with weight loss surgery. They publish a lot of articles that appear to adopt a voice of concern about fatphobia but just end up reinforcing it. And of course they publish many reports that are just all-out full of fat hatred. There's no rhyme or reason to it and I suspect the tone is all down to whichever particular editor is on duty the day that the article is published. I suppose what it illustrates is the messy and inconsistent ways in which people think and talk about fat anyway; fat hatred is bad, but who on earth would want to be fat if they could help it?
Dawn French has been the focus of The Daily Mail's fat department this week. Her relationship with Lenny Henry ended and she's lost a lot of weight. Her publicity machine is saying that it's because she's found a new lease of life and is very happy, just eating "more healthily" whatever that means, and doing exercise. Anyone who buys this is living in fantasyland, French looks like she's undergone a sudden crash weight loss in the photographs of her gurning at an awards ceremony that appeared in the paper and, according to her memoir, this is something she's done before. Why or how will probably come out at some point but for now there she is, there's no way of knowing unless you are a close personal friend or have her phone tapped.
What makes French's weight loss interesting for someone like me is the way that The Daily Mail have reported it, they're both celebratory and disapproving. The pictures of French on the red carpet have run and run this week, alongside a catty 'letter from a frenemy' article by Anne Diamond, aka the lady Alan Partridge, that is almost beyond belief. Diamond, who has apparently made a very good career out of being an utter tool, berates French for pro-fat statements she's made, speculates that French's weight loss is a result of secret obesity surgery, and states that anyone who says they are fat and happy is deluded. I come across this expression all the time: 'fat and happy.' It's such a reductive means of explaining fat embodiment that is not based on self-hatred or wanting to change. "Are you fat and happy?" is a question that demands a negative answer because a positive one sounds unbelievable and trite. I doubt anyone is ever happy all the time in this flat kind of way that expresses nothing of the complexities of living fat. Anyway, it's always about fat and happy and French is a big fat hypocrite because she could not be fat and happy in the way that everyone needed her to be, and therefore nobody can ever be fat and happy.
The reporting of French's weight loss adds to the unreality of fat embodiment where, as a number of scholars have pointed out, Hannele Harjunen in particular, fat is a temporary blip in the present on the way towards a glorious thin future. The idea of someone being permanently fat is difficult for people to get their heads around, as is the idea of embodiment shifting from time to time for whatever reason. In a context where fat activism or fat politics are so far off most people's radar that they are positively laughable, I find this sense of unreality and its denial of fatness perturbing. I think it's difficult for fat people to feel secure in developing more positive identities as we are, especially for those of us who are isolated from one another. There's this deep sense that what fat activists are doing is ridiculous and will never work. People desperately want an alternative to fat hatred but they actively want fat activism or self-acceptance to fail too so that their own projects of self hatred can be justified. The rug is pulled out from under fat activism again and again.
I know people really love her but French's weight loss underscores for me the limitations in looking to celebrities for reassurance as role models. Fat celebrities who get thin is an old story. French's public persona is clearly far removed from what she does in private, her image is about the smoke and mirrors of publicity, it is not trustworthy. This too is unstable ground on which to pitch some kind of self-acceptance or fat politics. It's better to build on firmer terrain, wherever that may be.
Dawn French has been the focus of The Daily Mail's fat department this week. Her relationship with Lenny Henry ended and she's lost a lot of weight. Her publicity machine is saying that it's because she's found a new lease of life and is very happy, just eating "more healthily" whatever that means, and doing exercise. Anyone who buys this is living in fantasyland, French looks like she's undergone a sudden crash weight loss in the photographs of her gurning at an awards ceremony that appeared in the paper and, according to her memoir, this is something she's done before. Why or how will probably come out at some point but for now there she is, there's no way of knowing unless you are a close personal friend or have her phone tapped.
What makes French's weight loss interesting for someone like me is the way that The Daily Mail have reported it, they're both celebratory and disapproving. The pictures of French on the red carpet have run and run this week, alongside a catty 'letter from a frenemy' article by Anne Diamond, aka the lady Alan Partridge, that is almost beyond belief. Diamond, who has apparently made a very good career out of being an utter tool, berates French for pro-fat statements she's made, speculates that French's weight loss is a result of secret obesity surgery, and states that anyone who says they are fat and happy is deluded. I come across this expression all the time: 'fat and happy.' It's such a reductive means of explaining fat embodiment that is not based on self-hatred or wanting to change. "Are you fat and happy?" is a question that demands a negative answer because a positive one sounds unbelievable and trite. I doubt anyone is ever happy all the time in this flat kind of way that expresses nothing of the complexities of living fat. Anyway, it's always about fat and happy and French is a big fat hypocrite because she could not be fat and happy in the way that everyone needed her to be, and therefore nobody can ever be fat and happy.
The reporting of French's weight loss adds to the unreality of fat embodiment where, as a number of scholars have pointed out, Hannele Harjunen in particular, fat is a temporary blip in the present on the way towards a glorious thin future. The idea of someone being permanently fat is difficult for people to get their heads around, as is the idea of embodiment shifting from time to time for whatever reason. In a context where fat activism or fat politics are so far off most people's radar that they are positively laughable, I find this sense of unreality and its denial of fatness perturbing. I think it's difficult for fat people to feel secure in developing more positive identities as we are, especially for those of us who are isolated from one another. There's this deep sense that what fat activists are doing is ridiculous and will never work. People desperately want an alternative to fat hatred but they actively want fat activism or self-acceptance to fail too so that their own projects of self hatred can be justified. The rug is pulled out from under fat activism again and again.
I know people really love her but French's weight loss underscores for me the limitations in looking to celebrities for reassurance as role models. Fat celebrities who get thin is an old story. French's public persona is clearly far removed from what she does in private, her image is about the smoke and mirrors of publicity, it is not trustworthy. This too is unstable ground on which to pitch some kind of self-acceptance or fat politics. It's better to build on firmer terrain, wherever that may be.
Progressive, enlightened, anti-capitalist, pro-planet people and their fatphobia
My Facebook news feed is the place where I generally encounter fatphobic memes. A couple have cropped up recently that make me want to say more about how the Left uses fatphobia in its visual rhetoric, which is an extension of how the Left has continued to fail fat by stereotyping fat and class.
I'm posting the images here in order to take them apart and expose the hatred within the supposedly progressive message. People may find them upsetting, they are upsetting, I'm sorry.
A couple of years ago I wrote to the London Cycling Campaign (LCC) to tell them to stop using anti-obesity rhetoric as a rationale for their work. I live in London, like to cycle, and want to ride my bike safely. Being fat on a bike can make you a target for street hate. I wanted support for my cycling, but the LCC was not up to it and could only understand me as an offensive and abstract stereotype. I wrote How to Ride a Bike: A Guide for Fat Cyclists for their magazine, but it made no difference, anti-obesity continues to be a fundament of their mission statement.
So this image has been popping up on my news feed:
Not everyone is going to be able to ride a bike, there's a certain assumed embodied privilege about the idea that everyone should and can ride a bike. People's bodies are different. Frail people are not going to ride a bike, many disabled people are not going to ride a bike. Adaptations for disabled people who do want to ride are rare and expensive. Some people just don't like cycling. Cycling to town when you live in a city like London is not necessarily feasible. It's fine if you're rich enough to live in the middle of things, but riding to central London for me would mean a thirteen-mile round trip that takes in a dual carriageway and a handful of treacherous junctions, and I'm only in Zone Three. The cycle lanes that exist are not safe. I know two people who been run over whilst riding, and London's streets have far too many ghost bike memorials, I'm not interested in risking my own life. These differences cannot be accommodated in this image. In addition, the logic of the picture represents fat as a substance whose only use is to be burned, there is no humanity in fat.
This is a long way of saying that bike culture located within social and environmental discourse, and typically seen as representing a progressive, Left-ist politics, has a big problem with fat people. Those cyclists really hate us, even when we too are on two wheels.
Here's the second picture, eurgh, where to start?
Maybe with the racism? The people in these images are stripped of agency and humanity, they are abstract symbols that enable viewers to feel as though they can claim moral high ground through their pity and disgust for the people in the picture. Both images invite the enlightened progressive viewer to rescue the subhumans depicted, they need you!
The images have no context, they are offered as plain fact, it is beyond obvious that the starving African and the greedy and out-of-control Asian* kids are both victims of a capitalism that favours some and not others, that a fair post-capitalist world would distribute resources evenly, where presumably everyone would have bodies that are neat, normatively-sized, the same. The meme presents itself as inarguable. Fat is greed, an obesity timebomb, a product of Western corruption, McDonalds, energy balance gone wrong, a racist terror of a voracious fat future dominating the world (ie the West, never mind that the West has its own history of colonial exploitation). Fat and thin are opposites. Forget that fat people might also be anti-capitalist. The slogan pulls it all together. You don't need to know anything else. Facebook tells me that this image has been liked by 10,000 people, shared by 7,000, and has enjoyed 4,000 comments (the 100 or so I looked at were uniformly praiseworthy). People on the internet really like cheap stereotypes, they help you feel good, as though you are doing something helpful for the betterment of humanity.
Here's what's not in the picture: Information about setserock and their motivation to create the meme, if indeed they created it, they may just have slapped their name on the corner at a later stage. Information about the people in the pictures, their accounts of being photographed, their thoughts about how their images have been used. Accounts by the photographers about how, when and why they took the photographs, how they were distributed, who got paid. A disclaimer about stereotyping. A comment on the implications of the presumed ethnicity of the people depicted? Thoughts about why the head of the person has been cropped out of the image (look familiar?). Engagement with the idea that fat is not pathology. And so on...
The picture comes undone when you stop seeing it as self-evident. Whilst setserock is enjoying hit after hit on their website as a result of this meme, I doubt the people in the images are enjoying any kind of material reward. How does that affect the statement? Who is benefiting from this image? Where is the power? How evenly is it spread? How exploitative is the image? How is this image a product of capitalism? How is setserock, and others who share it, implicated? Capitalism isn't working? No, it isn't, especially not here.
* Edited to add: I have read these kids as Asian though I am probably wrong. I don't know what their ethnicity is. I first came upon this image in a fat panic news story about kids in Asia, hence my reading, but it's likely that the people in the picture have nothing to do with Asia and were just picked from a photo agency's database to illustrate the story.
I'm posting the images here in order to take them apart and expose the hatred within the supposedly progressive message. People may find them upsetting, they are upsetting, I'm sorry.
A couple of years ago I wrote to the London Cycling Campaign (LCC) to tell them to stop using anti-obesity rhetoric as a rationale for their work. I live in London, like to cycle, and want to ride my bike safely. Being fat on a bike can make you a target for street hate. I wanted support for my cycling, but the LCC was not up to it and could only understand me as an offensive and abstract stereotype. I wrote How to Ride a Bike: A Guide for Fat Cyclists for their magazine, but it made no difference, anti-obesity continues to be a fundament of their mission statement.
So this image has been popping up on my news feed:
Not everyone is going to be able to ride a bike, there's a certain assumed embodied privilege about the idea that everyone should and can ride a bike. People's bodies are different. Frail people are not going to ride a bike, many disabled people are not going to ride a bike. Adaptations for disabled people who do want to ride are rare and expensive. Some people just don't like cycling. Cycling to town when you live in a city like London is not necessarily feasible. It's fine if you're rich enough to live in the middle of things, but riding to central London for me would mean a thirteen-mile round trip that takes in a dual carriageway and a handful of treacherous junctions, and I'm only in Zone Three. The cycle lanes that exist are not safe. I know two people who been run over whilst riding, and London's streets have far too many ghost bike memorials, I'm not interested in risking my own life. These differences cannot be accommodated in this image. In addition, the logic of the picture represents fat as a substance whose only use is to be burned, there is no humanity in fat.
This is a long way of saying that bike culture located within social and environmental discourse, and typically seen as representing a progressive, Left-ist politics, has a big problem with fat people. Those cyclists really hate us, even when we too are on two wheels.
Here's the second picture, eurgh, where to start?
Maybe with the racism? The people in these images are stripped of agency and humanity, they are abstract symbols that enable viewers to feel as though they can claim moral high ground through their pity and disgust for the people in the picture. Both images invite the enlightened progressive viewer to rescue the subhumans depicted, they need you!
The images have no context, they are offered as plain fact, it is beyond obvious that the starving African and the greedy and out-of-control Asian* kids are both victims of a capitalism that favours some and not others, that a fair post-capitalist world would distribute resources evenly, where presumably everyone would have bodies that are neat, normatively-sized, the same. The meme presents itself as inarguable. Fat is greed, an obesity timebomb, a product of Western corruption, McDonalds, energy balance gone wrong, a racist terror of a voracious fat future dominating the world (ie the West, never mind that the West has its own history of colonial exploitation). Fat and thin are opposites. Forget that fat people might also be anti-capitalist. The slogan pulls it all together. You don't need to know anything else. Facebook tells me that this image has been liked by 10,000 people, shared by 7,000, and has enjoyed 4,000 comments (the 100 or so I looked at were uniformly praiseworthy). People on the internet really like cheap stereotypes, they help you feel good, as though you are doing something helpful for the betterment of humanity.
Here's what's not in the picture: Information about setserock and their motivation to create the meme, if indeed they created it, they may just have slapped their name on the corner at a later stage. Information about the people in the pictures, their accounts of being photographed, their thoughts about how their images have been used. Accounts by the photographers about how, when and why they took the photographs, how they were distributed, who got paid. A disclaimer about stereotyping. A comment on the implications of the presumed ethnicity of the people depicted? Thoughts about why the head of the person has been cropped out of the image (look familiar?). Engagement with the idea that fat is not pathology. And so on...
The picture comes undone when you stop seeing it as self-evident. Whilst setserock is enjoying hit after hit on their website as a result of this meme, I doubt the people in the images are enjoying any kind of material reward. How does that affect the statement? Who is benefiting from this image? Where is the power? How evenly is it spread? How exploitative is the image? How is this image a product of capitalism? How is setserock, and others who share it, implicated? Capitalism isn't working? No, it isn't, especially not here.
* Edited to add: I have read these kids as Asian though I am probably wrong. I don't know what their ethnicity is. I first came upon this image in a fat panic news story about kids in Asia, hence my reading, but it's likely that the people in the picture have nothing to do with Asia and were just picked from a photo agency's database to illustrate the story.
Fantasising about Lauren Berlant and her fatphobia
Dear Lauren Berlant,
I awoke this morning to a beautiful fantasy all about you, but before I can go into that I'd like to fill you in on the backsnark.
A while ago I met this hot woman and told her that I was interested in fat and queer theory. She mentioned your name, so I went and read some of your work because I wanted to impress this woman enough so that she would have sex with me. Unfortunately, this is when things began to unravel.
I came across your paper Slow Death (Sovereignty, Obesity, Lateral Agency). Boy oh boy, did I ever feel like I was experiencing a slow death of my own whilst I was reading it. It's four years since this work was published, by you, and about two since I read it for the first time, and that feeling of metal atrophy I get when I think about it persists. I knew there were ideas in there, but I couldn't get to them because of the way you set them out on a page or a screen. Some people think that reading something so impenetrably academic is illuminating, but I just call it bad writing. I struggled on regardless, wondering if I was reading something of value, or the ramblings of someone who had lost their grip on things.
Your arguments about embodied sovreignity have been better expressed elsewhere, particularly in disability theory, which you don't mention. It is your thoughts on fat that really have me scratching my head. There is nothing in what you write that reflects any of my experience as a fat queer. I'm there going: "Does she really mean people like me?". I know I'll never get the time back that I've wasted in reading what you have to say but that hasn't stopped me going back and back again to try and make sense of what you've written. This work is well-cited, I reason, there must be something in it that I'm not getting. There comes a time when you just have to give up hoping.
It's not that you don't know about critical perspectives on obesity epidemiology, you cite the big men of the movement, Paul Campos and Eric Oliver, and you have a soft spot for Richard Klein's terrible book too, you just choose not to engage. If you bothered to think about the queerness of bodies, of what it is to have a body that isn't like yours, that is non-normative, you would have the opportunity to engage with a richness of material beyond your wildest dreams.
Instead, you choose to side with The Man. Slow Death reiterates the abjection of fatness. Fat is attrition, it is the pathological and literal representation of slow death. Your work reproduces fat people as Othered, anonymous, an abstraction; 'The Obese'. You fail to question the existence of fat people as anything but a crisis brought about by a mismanagement of energy balance and you see nothing of value in fatness other than as a symbol for your theorising. Given the paltriness of critical literature on fat and race, and the problem of racism within some fat activisms, it's especially dismaying to see you applying reductive obesity discourse to people of colour in this work. There is nothing radical here.
There are other queer feminist academics who have also failed to address their own fatphobia; Elspeth Probyn thinks that fat activism is a pathetic excuse and that obesity really is a terrible problem; Susie Orbach, well, the less said about her the better. I am not the first to point out the failings of those who theorise the body, including feminists, who conveniently ignore fat or reproduce the problematic terms of obesity discourse. It's painful to witness one's abjection in this work, again and again, especially by people who should know better, people like you who are paid to think and write, people who are lauded as intellectuals, tenured professors, those who enjoy tremendous intellectual freedom and privilege and cultural capital, people who are products of privilege misusing their power, circumscribing people who have less power. Surely you have the time and resources to dig a bit deeper, think a bit harder, be a bit more critical (your journal is called Critical Inquiry after all). What would happen if you spoke to some fat activists? It's not like you have to agree but at least engage for a moment.
I wonder if you think about fat people reading your work. Fat people are so abstracted in Slow Death as newspaper reports or policy objects that it's hard to imagine an actual fat person living a life, going about their business, thinking, or having any material presence or agency at all. Can you imagine a fat dyke throwing a brick through the window of a diet clinic? Fat lovers whipping and fisting? A fat genderqueer subverting death drive theory? It must be tragic to live in a context where these people, who are real and part of my life, don't exist.
It's time to return to my fantasy. So I woke up this morning and looked at my computer and saw that two of my favourite performers, David Hoyle and Bird la Bird are appearing on a panel with you at the Trashing Performance project here in London. It's on 26 October, which also happens to be my 43rd birthday. I drifted off into a reverie, imagining David and Bird turning on you in the panel and asking you pointed questions about the fatphobia in your work. I imagined you squirming. And then I thought of Scottee and Amy Lamé, who produced the sublime Burger Queen this year, who would surely be in the audience, and Vikki Chalklin, whose performance work considers femme fatness, and maybe there would be other rad fatties in the crowd too, and I imagined a bag of rotten tomatoes in there somewhere, and flesh, teeth, mess, and your disbelief of it all. And I imagined you picking up your bags and running to the airport to return to your little burrow in academia-land, shaken and aghast.
Sincerely,
Charlotte
PS The expression on the woman behind you in this picture makes me laugh a lot. It's the top result for your name in Google Images.
Selected References
Berlant, L. (2007) 'Slow Death (Sovereignty, Obesity, Lateral Agency)', Critical Inquiry, 33 754-780.
Probyn, E. (2008) 'Silences behind the Mantra: Critiquing Feminist Fat', Feminism & Psychology, 18:3, 401-404.
Performance Matters: Under- and Overwhelmed: Emotion and Performance
Please also see:
Kirkland, Anna (2011) 'The Environmental Account of Obesity: A Case for Feminist Skepticism,' Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 36:2, 411-436.
I awoke this morning to a beautiful fantasy all about you, but before I can go into that I'd like to fill you in on the backsnark.
A while ago I met this hot woman and told her that I was interested in fat and queer theory. She mentioned your name, so I went and read some of your work because I wanted to impress this woman enough so that she would have sex with me. Unfortunately, this is when things began to unravel.
I came across your paper Slow Death (Sovereignty, Obesity, Lateral Agency). Boy oh boy, did I ever feel like I was experiencing a slow death of my own whilst I was reading it. It's four years since this work was published, by you, and about two since I read it for the first time, and that feeling of metal atrophy I get when I think about it persists. I knew there were ideas in there, but I couldn't get to them because of the way you set them out on a page or a screen. Some people think that reading something so impenetrably academic is illuminating, but I just call it bad writing. I struggled on regardless, wondering if I was reading something of value, or the ramblings of someone who had lost their grip on things.
Your arguments about embodied sovreignity have been better expressed elsewhere, particularly in disability theory, which you don't mention. It is your thoughts on fat that really have me scratching my head. There is nothing in what you write that reflects any of my experience as a fat queer. I'm there going: "Does she really mean people like me?". I know I'll never get the time back that I've wasted in reading what you have to say but that hasn't stopped me going back and back again to try and make sense of what you've written. This work is well-cited, I reason, there must be something in it that I'm not getting. There comes a time when you just have to give up hoping.
It's not that you don't know about critical perspectives on obesity epidemiology, you cite the big men of the movement, Paul Campos and Eric Oliver, and you have a soft spot for Richard Klein's terrible book too, you just choose not to engage. If you bothered to think about the queerness of bodies, of what it is to have a body that isn't like yours, that is non-normative, you would have the opportunity to engage with a richness of material beyond your wildest dreams.
Instead, you choose to side with The Man. Slow Death reiterates the abjection of fatness. Fat is attrition, it is the pathological and literal representation of slow death. Your work reproduces fat people as Othered, anonymous, an abstraction; 'The Obese'. You fail to question the existence of fat people as anything but a crisis brought about by a mismanagement of energy balance and you see nothing of value in fatness other than as a symbol for your theorising. Given the paltriness of critical literature on fat and race, and the problem of racism within some fat activisms, it's especially dismaying to see you applying reductive obesity discourse to people of colour in this work. There is nothing radical here.
There are other queer feminist academics who have also failed to address their own fatphobia; Elspeth Probyn thinks that fat activism is a pathetic excuse and that obesity really is a terrible problem; Susie Orbach, well, the less said about her the better. I am not the first to point out the failings of those who theorise the body, including feminists, who conveniently ignore fat or reproduce the problematic terms of obesity discourse. It's painful to witness one's abjection in this work, again and again, especially by people who should know better, people like you who are paid to think and write, people who are lauded as intellectuals, tenured professors, those who enjoy tremendous intellectual freedom and privilege and cultural capital, people who are products of privilege misusing their power, circumscribing people who have less power. Surely you have the time and resources to dig a bit deeper, think a bit harder, be a bit more critical (your journal is called Critical Inquiry after all). What would happen if you spoke to some fat activists? It's not like you have to agree but at least engage for a moment.
I wonder if you think about fat people reading your work. Fat people are so abstracted in Slow Death as newspaper reports or policy objects that it's hard to imagine an actual fat person living a life, going about their business, thinking, or having any material presence or agency at all. Can you imagine a fat dyke throwing a brick through the window of a diet clinic? Fat lovers whipping and fisting? A fat genderqueer subverting death drive theory? It must be tragic to live in a context where these people, who are real and part of my life, don't exist.
It's time to return to my fantasy. So I woke up this morning and looked at my computer and saw that two of my favourite performers, David Hoyle and Bird la Bird are appearing on a panel with you at the Trashing Performance project here in London. It's on 26 October, which also happens to be my 43rd birthday. I drifted off into a reverie, imagining David and Bird turning on you in the panel and asking you pointed questions about the fatphobia in your work. I imagined you squirming. And then I thought of Scottee and Amy Lamé, who produced the sublime Burger Queen this year, who would surely be in the audience, and Vikki Chalklin, whose performance work considers femme fatness, and maybe there would be other rad fatties in the crowd too, and I imagined a bag of rotten tomatoes in there somewhere, and flesh, teeth, mess, and your disbelief of it all. And I imagined you picking up your bags and running to the airport to return to your little burrow in academia-land, shaken and aghast.
Sincerely,
Charlotte
Selected References
Berlant, L. (2007) 'Slow Death (Sovereignty, Obesity, Lateral Agency)', Critical Inquiry, 33 754-780.
Probyn, E. (2008) 'Silences behind the Mantra: Critiquing Feminist Fat', Feminism & Psychology, 18:3, 401-404.
Performance Matters: Under- and Overwhelmed: Emotion and Performance
Please also see:
Kirkland, Anna (2011) 'The Environmental Account of Obesity: A Case for Feminist Skepticism,' Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 36:2, 411-436.
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.
Manufacturing hate
I was at Rotterdam The Hague Airport yesterday. Part of the checking-in area was being used to film a comedy show that's going to be broadcast on RTL Nederland in August. I didn't have my wits about me to catch the name of the show, but I watched the filming for a few minutes before I went through to the departure lounge.
The main character was a guy with unruly ginger hair dressed in a sort of a shell-suit, like a chav stereotype. At first I couldn't work out why his face looked so puffy and weird, and then I saw the plastic belly poking out from under his clothes and I realised he was wearing a fat suit. As I watched him act, his comedy character seemed to be modelled on someone with a learning disability.
I have no idea about the context for this character, whether or not this is a popular programme, what it's about. Maybe someone else reading this knows and can fill me in. What struck me was the casual way in which stereotypes are manufactured, and about who is invested in their creation. There were about 15 people making the programme, including producers, actors, technicians, and no doubt the airport was getting a location fee, all very workaday. And yet here is a character in a fat suit, complete with various other underclass signifiers, being presented as stupid and pathetic, the butt of the joke. Why do this?
I tried to take some pictures of the guy in the fat suit but, strangely enough, he wasn't keen. This is the best I could do, he's the one in the middle, you can just about see his plastic strap-on belly poking out of his clothes.
The main character was a guy with unruly ginger hair dressed in a sort of a shell-suit, like a chav stereotype. At first I couldn't work out why his face looked so puffy and weird, and then I saw the plastic belly poking out from under his clothes and I realised he was wearing a fat suit. As I watched him act, his comedy character seemed to be modelled on someone with a learning disability.
I have no idea about the context for this character, whether or not this is a popular programme, what it's about. Maybe someone else reading this knows and can fill me in. What struck me was the casual way in which stereotypes are manufactured, and about who is invested in their creation. There were about 15 people making the programme, including producers, actors, technicians, and no doubt the airport was getting a location fee, all very workaday. And yet here is a character in a fat suit, complete with various other underclass signifiers, being presented as stupid and pathetic, the butt of the joke. Why do this?
I tried to take some pictures of the guy in the fat suit but, strangely enough, he wasn't keen. This is the best I could do, he's the one in the middle, you can just about see his plastic strap-on belly poking out of his clothes.
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.
Fat, Sex Work, Rescue Industries
I'm very interested when other areas of critical engagement and struggle have crossovers with fat activism. I know this is controversial in terms of fat, which is seen by many as a choice and a triviality, but it fits with the earliest fat activist analyses of oppression (not that I think challenging oppression is all there is to fat activism). For example, Judith Stein's pithy two-page mimeographed introduction to fat activism places fat within a matrix of oppression and calls on fat activists to challenge other forms of oppression too. Sometimes this is lost, fat activism has been criticised for its racism, for example, but I think the idea that no one is free until everyone is free is good to bear in mind.
This week I had the pleasure of spending some time with Laura Agustìn. If you have never read Laura's book Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry, which she authored in 2007, you must hurry and get a copy now; likewise read her blog, The Naked Anthropologist.
Although Laura is part of a wider movement, for me her book was a paradigm-changer which enabled me to recognise more deeply the agency of people who migrate and sell sex, what selling sex looks like, and how this is thwarted by the rescue industry. Laura's work has helped me unpick hyperbolic rhetoric concerning trafficking discourse, and I am grateful for her rational approach to sex work, particularly in her methodology of sex work research. It also enabled me to reconsider my own personal relationship to sex work and to connect with fat sex workers.
I live in Stratford, close to where the 2012 Olympics will be held. There are discredited reports that major sporting events result in an increase in trafficking and that evening Laura had been invited to be an expert presenter at a meeting at Waltham Forest council which was concerned with this possibility. Waltham Forest is one of the five London boroughs that is connected to the Olympics, though I live in Newham. So on Wednesday I took her to have a look at the Olympic site, and also on a mini-tour of Stratford's more obvious brothels, its sex shop and red light area, active and present long before the Olympics were announced in 2005, and just another part of the area. Fun!
I won't go on too much about the council meeting, which took place in the very formal Chamber. I'm sure minutes will be available in due course if you want to find out more about what was said in detail. Briefly, two police officers working for the Met's anti-trafficking department stated their case, as did four people who work with sex workers and migrant people, including a nun, and two medics. Varying ideological positions on sex work were represented though all could be described as 'rescue industry'. Laura spoke, and people from the council recorded and questioned the speakers. The idea that the Olympics will result in an increase in trafficking was immediately dismissed as soon as evidence to the contrary was produced. So the meeting ended up being an arena for people to state their positions and argue for their own legitimacy. No conclusion was reached, the Chair resolved to have more meetings, though this may be in question because there are local government elections looming. As an observer, I think councillors were expecting one thing but ended up having their minds blown by having to consider alternative paradigms.
As an observer, I found the meeting really interesting in a dull, committee type way. What intrigued me were the crossovers in the way that fat is presented in policymaking. Obviously there were no out sex workers present to offer their expert testimony, just as there are never autonomous fat people present during similar meetings of obesity stakeholders, it's as though the concept Nothing about us without us never existed. These gatherings are about professional management of perceived problematic populations, where there is a moral and medicalised discourse concerning embodiment, and where 'helping' is a euphemism for 'control', and where people routinely rely on duff 'evidence.' In these contexts, sex workers/fat people are talked about, made pitiful, framed as service users, are absent and Othered. Even the language has parallels: 'prostitution' sounds a lot like 'obesity' to me, 'trafficking' is as much a neologism as 'bariatric,' and 'sex work' could be seen as analogous to 'fat'. Professionals pump themselves up as essential to the discourse, medics especially so, yet it's clear that the rescuers need their fodder more than sex workers or fat people need them, for example, what do you do with massively resourced anti-trafficking units when there are no trafficked people?
Of course there are differences between the way that fat and sex work is framed in contexts such as this meeting I went to with Laura. I think fat people are far less organised than sex workers – not that fat people and sex workers are necessarily mutually exclusive groups – partly because shame is much more present. Issues concerning criminalisation and migration are also different.
Despite these differences, acknowledging common ground can be very illuminating. I would love to see broader analyses of how helping industries further marginalise their apparent constituents, for example.
What was exciting about the meeting in Waltham Forest was the way that Laura's testimony was paradigm-shifting for many people in the room. I have experienced this when I start talking about fat with people, or at least in those situations where people are more able to move beyond clichés. It's clear that many people are hungry for more complex and human ways of thinking about things that have been overstated through moral panics, and that trite accounts of trafficked women or obesity epidemics are not enough, and that ethical, grassroots ways of understanding may be possible.
Agustìn, L.M. (2007) Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry. London: Zed Books.
This week I had the pleasure of spending some time with Laura Agustìn. If you have never read Laura's book Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry, which she authored in 2007, you must hurry and get a copy now; likewise read her blog, The Naked Anthropologist.
Although Laura is part of a wider movement, for me her book was a paradigm-changer which enabled me to recognise more deeply the agency of people who migrate and sell sex, what selling sex looks like, and how this is thwarted by the rescue industry. Laura's work has helped me unpick hyperbolic rhetoric concerning trafficking discourse, and I am grateful for her rational approach to sex work, particularly in her methodology of sex work research. It also enabled me to reconsider my own personal relationship to sex work and to connect with fat sex workers.
I live in Stratford, close to where the 2012 Olympics will be held. There are discredited reports that major sporting events result in an increase in trafficking and that evening Laura had been invited to be an expert presenter at a meeting at Waltham Forest council which was concerned with this possibility. Waltham Forest is one of the five London boroughs that is connected to the Olympics, though I live in Newham. So on Wednesday I took her to have a look at the Olympic site, and also on a mini-tour of Stratford's more obvious brothels, its sex shop and red light area, active and present long before the Olympics were announced in 2005, and just another part of the area. Fun!
I won't go on too much about the council meeting, which took place in the very formal Chamber. I'm sure minutes will be available in due course if you want to find out more about what was said in detail. Briefly, two police officers working for the Met's anti-trafficking department stated their case, as did four people who work with sex workers and migrant people, including a nun, and two medics. Varying ideological positions on sex work were represented though all could be described as 'rescue industry'. Laura spoke, and people from the council recorded and questioned the speakers. The idea that the Olympics will result in an increase in trafficking was immediately dismissed as soon as evidence to the contrary was produced. So the meeting ended up being an arena for people to state their positions and argue for their own legitimacy. No conclusion was reached, the Chair resolved to have more meetings, though this may be in question because there are local government elections looming. As an observer, I think councillors were expecting one thing but ended up having their minds blown by having to consider alternative paradigms.
As an observer, I found the meeting really interesting in a dull, committee type way. What intrigued me were the crossovers in the way that fat is presented in policymaking. Obviously there were no out sex workers present to offer their expert testimony, just as there are never autonomous fat people present during similar meetings of obesity stakeholders, it's as though the concept Nothing about us without us never existed. These gatherings are about professional management of perceived problematic populations, where there is a moral and medicalised discourse concerning embodiment, and where 'helping' is a euphemism for 'control', and where people routinely rely on duff 'evidence.' In these contexts, sex workers/fat people are talked about, made pitiful, framed as service users, are absent and Othered. Even the language has parallels: 'prostitution' sounds a lot like 'obesity' to me, 'trafficking' is as much a neologism as 'bariatric,' and 'sex work' could be seen as analogous to 'fat'. Professionals pump themselves up as essential to the discourse, medics especially so, yet it's clear that the rescuers need their fodder more than sex workers or fat people need them, for example, what do you do with massively resourced anti-trafficking units when there are no trafficked people?
Of course there are differences between the way that fat and sex work is framed in contexts such as this meeting I went to with Laura. I think fat people are far less organised than sex workers – not that fat people and sex workers are necessarily mutually exclusive groups – partly because shame is much more present. Issues concerning criminalisation and migration are also different.
Despite these differences, acknowledging common ground can be very illuminating. I would love to see broader analyses of how helping industries further marginalise their apparent constituents, for example.
What was exciting about the meeting in Waltham Forest was the way that Laura's testimony was paradigm-shifting for many people in the room. I have experienced this when I start talking about fat with people, or at least in those situations where people are more able to move beyond clichés. It's clear that many people are hungry for more complex and human ways of thinking about things that have been overstated through moral panics, and that trite accounts of trafficked women or obesity epidemics are not enough, and that ethical, grassroots ways of understanding may be possible.
Agustìn, L.M. (2007) Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry. London: Zed Books.
Some Benefits of Being Fat
I'm always especially bummed out when left-wing, feminist or otherwise progressive media fail to address fat in a way that is sufficiently critical for me. Jezebel used to be better but now reiterates tired weight loss rhetoric, The Guardian is openly fatphobic, and Sociological Images can never seem to quite go the full distance and critically engage with the fat, possibly because of its legions of fatphobic commenters. Some Benefits of Being Fat, a recent post, is a good example.
Here a fat woman is deemed to be non-sexual, and fat is a protective layer against unwanted abuse by men. These claims are nonsense. Just one peek at, say, The Adipositivity Project, disproves the former, and any fat woman could tell you stories of harassment, sexual or otherwise. It's like a Looking Glass version of the 'she was asking for it' discourse in relation to sexual violence and upholds the myth that only pretty girls get raped. This argument supports the idea that the authentic person, one's inner truth, is always thin, that fat is always extraneous and therefore disposable. It also buys into the notion that bodies are entities of choice, and that such choice is not part of discourses of fat hatred.
This pithy little post demonstrates the pernicious influence of a certain kind of feminist psychoanalytical thinking about fat, championed by Susie Orbach and her Women's Therapy Centre in the 1970s. It also demonstrates the lack of critical engagement with that discourse within sociology, feminism, and social science in general. By failing to locate this discourse the post retreats into unsubstantiated truth claims, a kind of 'but everybody knows it to be true' mentality, which is ironic given that sociology is supposedly about unpicking such allegations. I think the post also supports the idea of sociologist as unbiased observer, a mere vessel that articulates the facts - bunkum! It makes me wonder about the author's relationship to fat, whether or not they believe that fat actually protects women from harassment, whether they are fat, etc.
By suggesting a couple of shitty imagined benefits, the Sociological Images post is basically saying that there are no benefits to being fat. Thanks folks! But this is not a universal truth either. There are benefits to being fat, and these might be different for everyone. For me these benefits are not just about fat but also things like skill, luck, work, etc. Anyway, shall I name some of them?
Benefit! I like the way my body looks and feels, and other people like it too. The struggle of self-acceptance and self-esteem I underwent when I was younger has paid off in golden years of embodied happiness, with only occasional excursions into ambivalence.
Benefit! I did an MA about fat politics and got a distinction. The research for that project went on to become a book, which I published when I was 29. The book was and is taught in universities. People often tell me that it changed their life and, 13 years on, I still get fan-mail for it, and enjoy seeing battered and underlined copies of it in libraries.
Benefit! I've been invited round the world to speak about fat. As I write this, I'm sitting in the sunshine in a beautiful house in Hamburg where I have been Artist In Residence for a couple of weeks, in which I'm being supported to make a zine of the Queer and Trans Fat Activist Timeline that a bunch of people co-constructed in California last year.
Benefit! Not only am I doing a PhD about fat activism for free, I'm being paid to do it.
Benefit! I'm a part of many rad communities of fat people who are organised, politicised, and using every means necessary to create liveable lives for themselves, and for everyone.
Benefit! Fat gives me a way of understanding things, it's a kind of lens that I draw upon in conjunction with other theoretical frameworks. It has revolutionary potential.
Benefit! I get to see and participate in marvellous, eye-popping, life-affirming things that I would never have access to if I were thinner and had not lived a fat life.
What are other benefits of being fat? Silly, serious, share them here if you feel like it.
Here a fat woman is deemed to be non-sexual, and fat is a protective layer against unwanted abuse by men. These claims are nonsense. Just one peek at, say, The Adipositivity Project, disproves the former, and any fat woman could tell you stories of harassment, sexual or otherwise. It's like a Looking Glass version of the 'she was asking for it' discourse in relation to sexual violence and upholds the myth that only pretty girls get raped. This argument supports the idea that the authentic person, one's inner truth, is always thin, that fat is always extraneous and therefore disposable. It also buys into the notion that bodies are entities of choice, and that such choice is not part of discourses of fat hatred.
This pithy little post demonstrates the pernicious influence of a certain kind of feminist psychoanalytical thinking about fat, championed by Susie Orbach and her Women's Therapy Centre in the 1970s. It also demonstrates the lack of critical engagement with that discourse within sociology, feminism, and social science in general. By failing to locate this discourse the post retreats into unsubstantiated truth claims, a kind of 'but everybody knows it to be true' mentality, which is ironic given that sociology is supposedly about unpicking such allegations. I think the post also supports the idea of sociologist as unbiased observer, a mere vessel that articulates the facts - bunkum! It makes me wonder about the author's relationship to fat, whether or not they believe that fat actually protects women from harassment, whether they are fat, etc.
By suggesting a couple of shitty imagined benefits, the Sociological Images post is basically saying that there are no benefits to being fat. Thanks folks! But this is not a universal truth either. There are benefits to being fat, and these might be different for everyone. For me these benefits are not just about fat but also things like skill, luck, work, etc. Anyway, shall I name some of them?
Benefit! I like the way my body looks and feels, and other people like it too. The struggle of self-acceptance and self-esteem I underwent when I was younger has paid off in golden years of embodied happiness, with only occasional excursions into ambivalence.
Benefit! I did an MA about fat politics and got a distinction. The research for that project went on to become a book, which I published when I was 29. The book was and is taught in universities. People often tell me that it changed their life and, 13 years on, I still get fan-mail for it, and enjoy seeing battered and underlined copies of it in libraries.
Benefit! I've been invited round the world to speak about fat. As I write this, I'm sitting in the sunshine in a beautiful house in Hamburg where I have been Artist In Residence for a couple of weeks, in which I'm being supported to make a zine of the Queer and Trans Fat Activist Timeline that a bunch of people co-constructed in California last year.
Benefit! Not only am I doing a PhD about fat activism for free, I'm being paid to do it.
Benefit! I'm a part of many rad communities of fat people who are organised, politicised, and using every means necessary to create liveable lives for themselves, and for everyone.
Benefit! Fat gives me a way of understanding things, it's a kind of lens that I draw upon in conjunction with other theoretical frameworks. It has revolutionary potential.
Benefit! I get to see and participate in marvellous, eye-popping, life-affirming things that I would never have access to if I were thinner and had not lived a fat life.
What are other benefits of being fat? Silly, serious, share them here if you feel like it.
Queer Hapas, fat activism and weight loss surgery
I've been reading Jackie Loneberry Wang's excellent zine Memoirs of a Queer Hapa #2, which takes a look at the author's queer-biracial identity. Hapa refers to people who are "mixed-race and of Asian descent". I especially like the author's Concluding Thoughts from an essay entitled The Emergence of Queer Hapa Identity in the United States, where she applies Queer Theory in a super-accessible way. Basically she talks about identities that transgress boundaries and expose the limitations of those boundaries. She says that Queer Hapa people confound others who ally themselves "to the notion of identity as fixed, immutable, and formed around a logic of separation and differentiation" (p14). Wang goes on to say that even though Queer Hapa is an uncontainable identity, naming and inhabiting it enables people to organise strategically and politically in ways that are anti-assimilationist and complex.
Wang's zine has helped me not only think about Queer Hapa identity, but also about another group of people, who may also include Queer Hapas. I think the ways in which Wang writes about identity is helpful in thinking about what tends to be the thorny relationship between fat activism and weight loss surgery.
Apparently, as someone smart told me recently, the situation is changing and people who have had weight loss surgery are no longer drummed out of fat activist community. But my experience is that weight loss surgery continues to represent considerable anxiety in terms of how to address it in fat activism, and that bullying, shaming and shunning are still everyday tactics. Even where people have moved on from using these strategies to police the boundaries of fat activism and critique weight loss surgery, their previous use continues to hurt and has not been resolved.
I am not an advocate for weight loss surgery, I would never choose it for myself, and I discourage people from choosing it where I can. I think it is more likely to deplete than enhance health, I mourn the deaths of people who have died as a consequence of surgery, and its marketing rhetoric is invariably fatphobic, full of lies, and profoundly problematic. But neither am I an advocate for boundary policing or bullying. I am looking for helpful and human ways of thinking about this stuff that goes beyond a condescending 'love the sinner hate the sin' tolerance within the movement for people who have had surgery or are contemplating it. I would prefer a world where weight loss industries did not exist, but I do not live in that world, and am unlikely to as long as capitalism exists. Instead I am part of communities of people where some have chosen this, including a number of excellent fat activists who I love and respect.
Anyway, so Wang's work has helped me think about this and my tentative thoughts are about fat activists who have had weight loss surgery also inhabiting a space that transgresses and exposes the limitations of certain boundaries and classifications. For example, that to be a fat activist always involves resisting weight loss, or that there are sides to be chosen where you are either for or against weight loss. Fat activists who have had weight loss surgery, especially unrepentant people for whom it was a positive long-term choice, inhabit a space that shows there are other ways of being, that fat activism doesn't have to be an either/or proposition, and that it can be really diverse. I'm mindful of the postcolonial concept of hybridity, you can be a mixture of things, even things that are supposed to be incompatible, and you don't have to make a choice between one state of being or another, you can be all of them.
Going back to Wang and thinking about the possibilities for organising around fluid and complex identities, I feel excited for the potential opportunities for fat activists and weight loss surgery in challenging dogmatism and pioneering new forms of fat activist embodiment. It gives me hope that people who are currently shamefully denigrated within the movement might no longer have to skulk around in the shadows like a dirty little secret, waiting in vain for an invitation to come and sit at the table, it could be that they've already got their own thing going on and that everybody else should take note.
Jackie's response: Zines, queer hapas, fat activism
Wang, Jackie Loneberry (2009) Memoirs of a Queer Hapa #2
Wang's zine has helped me not only think about Queer Hapa identity, but also about another group of people, who may also include Queer Hapas. I think the ways in which Wang writes about identity is helpful in thinking about what tends to be the thorny relationship between fat activism and weight loss surgery.
Apparently, as someone smart told me recently, the situation is changing and people who have had weight loss surgery are no longer drummed out of fat activist community. But my experience is that weight loss surgery continues to represent considerable anxiety in terms of how to address it in fat activism, and that bullying, shaming and shunning are still everyday tactics. Even where people have moved on from using these strategies to police the boundaries of fat activism and critique weight loss surgery, their previous use continues to hurt and has not been resolved.
I am not an advocate for weight loss surgery, I would never choose it for myself, and I discourage people from choosing it where I can. I think it is more likely to deplete than enhance health, I mourn the deaths of people who have died as a consequence of surgery, and its marketing rhetoric is invariably fatphobic, full of lies, and profoundly problematic. But neither am I an advocate for boundary policing or bullying. I am looking for helpful and human ways of thinking about this stuff that goes beyond a condescending 'love the sinner hate the sin' tolerance within the movement for people who have had surgery or are contemplating it. I would prefer a world where weight loss industries did not exist, but I do not live in that world, and am unlikely to as long as capitalism exists. Instead I am part of communities of people where some have chosen this, including a number of excellent fat activists who I love and respect.
Anyway, so Wang's work has helped me think about this and my tentative thoughts are about fat activists who have had weight loss surgery also inhabiting a space that transgresses and exposes the limitations of certain boundaries and classifications. For example, that to be a fat activist always involves resisting weight loss, or that there are sides to be chosen where you are either for or against weight loss. Fat activists who have had weight loss surgery, especially unrepentant people for whom it was a positive long-term choice, inhabit a space that shows there are other ways of being, that fat activism doesn't have to be an either/or proposition, and that it can be really diverse. I'm mindful of the postcolonial concept of hybridity, you can be a mixture of things, even things that are supposed to be incompatible, and you don't have to make a choice between one state of being or another, you can be all of them.
Going back to Wang and thinking about the possibilities for organising around fluid and complex identities, I feel excited for the potential opportunities for fat activists and weight loss surgery in challenging dogmatism and pioneering new forms of fat activist embodiment. It gives me hope that people who are currently shamefully denigrated within the movement might no longer have to skulk around in the shadows like a dirty little secret, waiting in vain for an invitation to come and sit at the table, it could be that they've already got their own thing going on and that everybody else should take note.
Jackie's response: Zines, queer hapas, fat activism
Wang, Jackie Loneberry (2009) Memoirs of a Queer Hapa #2
Sander Gilman review is now published
My review of Sander Gilman's Fat: A Cultural History of Obesity has been published in Sociology journal. I wrote it 18 months ago!
Give me a shout if you don't have access to academic libraries and would like to read it.
Cooper, C. (2011) 'Review: Sander Gilman: Fat: A Cultural History of Obesity', Sociology, 45: 1, 181-183.
Give me a shout if you don't have access to academic libraries and would like to read it.
Cooper, C. (2011) 'Review: Sander Gilman: Fat: A Cultural History of Obesity', Sociology, 45: 1, 181-183.
Yale's Plagiarism of Headless Fatties
In 2007 I published a piece of writing on my website (yes, pre-blog) in which I identified and described the phenomenon of the headless fatty. I was the first person to do this.
This concept hit a nerve and took off, much to my pleasure, it felt as though I had given people a way of describing one of the ways in which media makes fat people abject, and also a way of critiquing and laughing at that stereotype, thus reducing its power to hurt. References to headless fatties turned up all over the place.
It was rare that I was ever credited for this invention. For the most part I wouldn't expect to be, headless fatty has become part of fat activism's language and theoretical framework, it's just a thing that some people know about now. Ideas come from somewhere, but it would be exhausting to have to cite and reference every single thing that we know and believe in everyday conversation, for example.
In addition, I do not want to turn headless fatty into a commodity in order to force recognition for myself. I am against the copyrighting of the terms of fat activism, The Association for Size Diversity and Health claimed 'Health At Every Size' as a Registered Trademark last year. To me this is both a neoliberal act that regards activism as a market, and a colonial act where ownership of a formerly free-floating concept now lies within the US. ASDAH took this step to prevent weight loss corporations from appropriating the term, but asserted themselves undemocratically as the rightful owners, and themselves transformed the concept into a commodity by claiming it.
Because I can prove I invented the term 'headless fatty' I am not concerned with anyone buying or selling it, nobody can take this intellectual property from me. Or so I thought!
This week I was very interested to read a news story in which Dr Rebecca Puhl talks about certain kinds of media images of fat people. Shaming the obese - with photos like these - isn’t working appeared in The Globe and Mail, a national Canadian newspaper, and was syndicated widely, including by many fat activists who really should know better. In the article, Puhl says that she describes images where fat people's heads are cut out of the frame as "the headless stomach." The article goes on to say that such images shame "the obese" and finishes with the claim: "We need to fight obesity, not obese individuals." Yeah, yeah, I know.
Puhl is Director of Research and Weight Stigma Initiatives at the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale University. She is also a Research Scientist. This means that, in a formal presentation such as, for example, an interview with a national newspaper, she would know that ideas come from somewhere and she would also have the skills to search for and cite or reference those ideas. A simple Google search would reveal that I originated 'headless fatty', for example. Perhaps, like many people in the US, she thought that because I live in a different country I either wouldn't know that she had done this, or that it somehow didn't count.
Whether or not Puhl searched for its origins is moot. Instead, what she did, in conjunction with the newspaper's reporter and editors, was take my concept and imply it was she who thought of it without any fact-checking. As well as demonstrating arrogance, this is plagiarism and, as Puhl will know, within academia it is a very serious offence. By substituting the neutral-sounding 'scientific' term 'stomach', she made the concept more palatable for an assumed audience of people, perhaps including herself, who get the vapours when the words 'fat' or 'fatty' are used.
You could argue that language is not important here, what matters is the article's message of non-shaming. But the reclamation of the words 'fat,' and more recently 'fatty,' are a fundament of fat liberation. It is really important that they are able to be uttered without shame. Ironically, in seeking to reduce shame against fat people, this article adds to it, and don't get me started on the assertion that obesity needs fighting.
It feels risky speaking truth to power in this way, bang goes any remote possibility of a nice, cosy, well-paid postdoctoral research fellowship in New Haven! But I feel angry about Puhl's plagiarism of my idea, and it is not up to her who, judging by online photographs, is not a fat woman, to decide what language is and is not appropriate to describe fat experience.
The Rudd Center consistently takes a conservative view of fat politics. I am not the first to have spoken out about their problematic approach. Disability rights activists would recognise the organisation as a typical example of a charitable approach that:
Picard, A. (2011) 'Shaming the obese - with photos like these - isn’t working ' [Online]. Toronto: Globe and Mail. Available: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/health/andre-picard/shaming-the-obese---with-photos-like-these---isnt-working/article1883947/ [Accessed 8 February 2011].
This concept hit a nerve and took off, much to my pleasure, it felt as though I had given people a way of describing one of the ways in which media makes fat people abject, and also a way of critiquing and laughing at that stereotype, thus reducing its power to hurt. References to headless fatties turned up all over the place.
It was rare that I was ever credited for this invention. For the most part I wouldn't expect to be, headless fatty has become part of fat activism's language and theoretical framework, it's just a thing that some people know about now. Ideas come from somewhere, but it would be exhausting to have to cite and reference every single thing that we know and believe in everyday conversation, for example.
In addition, I do not want to turn headless fatty into a commodity in order to force recognition for myself. I am against the copyrighting of the terms of fat activism, The Association for Size Diversity and Health claimed 'Health At Every Size' as a Registered Trademark last year. To me this is both a neoliberal act that regards activism as a market, and a colonial act where ownership of a formerly free-floating concept now lies within the US. ASDAH took this step to prevent weight loss corporations from appropriating the term, but asserted themselves undemocratically as the rightful owners, and themselves transformed the concept into a commodity by claiming it.
Because I can prove I invented the term 'headless fatty' I am not concerned with anyone buying or selling it, nobody can take this intellectual property from me. Or so I thought!
This week I was very interested to read a news story in which Dr Rebecca Puhl talks about certain kinds of media images of fat people. Shaming the obese - with photos like these - isn’t working appeared in The Globe and Mail, a national Canadian newspaper, and was syndicated widely, including by many fat activists who really should know better. In the article, Puhl says that she describes images where fat people's heads are cut out of the frame as "the headless stomach." The article goes on to say that such images shame "the obese" and finishes with the claim: "We need to fight obesity, not obese individuals." Yeah, yeah, I know.
Puhl is Director of Research and Weight Stigma Initiatives at the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale University. She is also a Research Scientist. This means that, in a formal presentation such as, for example, an interview with a national newspaper, she would know that ideas come from somewhere and she would also have the skills to search for and cite or reference those ideas. A simple Google search would reveal that I originated 'headless fatty', for example. Perhaps, like many people in the US, she thought that because I live in a different country I either wouldn't know that she had done this, or that it somehow didn't count.
Whether or not Puhl searched for its origins is moot. Instead, what she did, in conjunction with the newspaper's reporter and editors, was take my concept and imply it was she who thought of it without any fact-checking. As well as demonstrating arrogance, this is plagiarism and, as Puhl will know, within academia it is a very serious offence. By substituting the neutral-sounding 'scientific' term 'stomach', she made the concept more palatable for an assumed audience of people, perhaps including herself, who get the vapours when the words 'fat' or 'fatty' are used.
You could argue that language is not important here, what matters is the article's message of non-shaming. But the reclamation of the words 'fat,' and more recently 'fatty,' are a fundament of fat liberation. It is really important that they are able to be uttered without shame. Ironically, in seeking to reduce shame against fat people, this article adds to it, and don't get me started on the assertion that obesity needs fighting.
It feels risky speaking truth to power in this way, bang goes any remote possibility of a nice, cosy, well-paid postdoctoral research fellowship in New Haven! But I feel angry about Puhl's plagiarism of my idea, and it is not up to her who, judging by online photographs, is not a fat woman, to decide what language is and is not appropriate to describe fat experience.
The Rudd Center consistently takes a conservative view of fat politics. I am not the first to have spoken out about their problematic approach. Disability rights activists would recognise the organisation as a typical example of a charitable approach that:
- Diminishes the unruly voices and lived experiences of the constituency it has nominated itself to serve in favour of its own appropriated version of that reality – which is inevitably really weird
- Benefits from high status and impressive financial rewards
- Appears to be the neutral propagator of knowledge about its constituency, removed from power politics
- Trades on dehumanising pity for its constituents
- Is an organisation 'for' rather than 'by' or 'of', and likes to retain that power
- Needs its constituency of fat/disabled people more than they need it
Picard, A. (2011) 'Shaming the obese - with photos like these - isn’t working ' [Online]. Toronto: Globe and Mail. Available: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/health/andre-picard/shaming-the-obese---with-photos-like-these---isnt-working/article1883947/ [Accessed 8 February 2011].
Response to The Guardian 'What I'm really thinking'
I saw this sorry pile of crap in the paper yesterday and, instead of screaming the house down with frustration at The Guardian's continual abjection of 'the obese', I felt inspired to write my own piece. Ooh look, two paradigms of fat embodiment illustrated right here in front of your very eyes! Which one will you choose? What else is out there?
What I'm really thinking
THE A FAT ACTIVIST
I'm wondering if you're going to say something offensive, banal or ignorant about me and people like me that will put me in a position where I will have no choice but to fuck you up.
If you are normatively-embodied, I'm checking you out for signs of a terror of ever becoming or being anything like me. I can see this in you no matter how much you try to hide it. I also read every patronising thought that crosses your brain, your attempts to deny them, and your belief that you are a better person than me because your clothes are smaller than mine. I see your classism, sexism, homophobia, racism and anxiety about age, embodiment and disability too, and wonder why you invest in these hateful ways of seeing the world. Do you think I'm pitiful and deluded? You are more so, you twat.
If you are not normatively-embodied, I'm thinking about how we might be friends and allies to each other. And if, by a miracle, you turn out not to be a fatphobe, I'll be considering inviting you out to play.
Most of the time I'll be thinking about freedom, how to live a good life, how to attack oppressive systems, including the fear and hatred of fat people and the way that that intersects with other ways of being. I'll be wrestling with ethical questions about peace and violence. I will be thinking about how I can disrupt and diminish people and organisations that have financial and ideological stakeholdings in fatphobia, including the abject medicalisation of 'the obese', and desire to control and prevent obesity. I'll be thinking about mobilising collectives, about the resources upon which I can draw, and about possibilities for collaborations and coalitions.
I'm thinking about fun, love, sex, money, death, survival, work, beauty, in more or less that order. I'm thinking about the impact of oppression and activism on my life, my body. I'm feeling glad of my flesh and unique embodiment. I'm taking strength and inspiration from the fat activists who came before me, especially the dykes, the brilliant communities to which I currently belong, and those to whom I am passing on the flame.
In the words of state murdered Black Panther and revolutionary Fred Hampton, as a fat activist what I'm really thinking is: "Up against the wall, motherfucker! I have come for what is ours."
I'm wondering if you're going to say something offensive, banal or ignorant about me and people like me that will put me in a position where I will have no choice but to fuck you up.
If you are normatively-embodied, I'm checking you out for signs of a terror of ever becoming or being anything like me. I can see this in you no matter how much you try to hide it. I also read every patronising thought that crosses your brain, your attempts to deny them, and your belief that you are a better person than me because your clothes are smaller than mine. I see your classism, sexism, homophobia, racism and anxiety about age, embodiment and disability too, and wonder why you invest in these hateful ways of seeing the world. Do you think I'm pitiful and deluded? You are more so, you twat.
If you are not normatively-embodied, I'm thinking about how we might be friends and allies to each other. And if, by a miracle, you turn out not to be a fatphobe, I'll be considering inviting you out to play.
Most of the time I'll be thinking about freedom, how to live a good life, how to attack oppressive systems, including the fear and hatred of fat people and the way that that intersects with other ways of being. I'll be wrestling with ethical questions about peace and violence. I will be thinking about how I can disrupt and diminish people and organisations that have financial and ideological stakeholdings in fatphobia, including the abject medicalisation of 'the obese', and desire to control and prevent obesity. I'll be thinking about mobilising collectives, about the resources upon which I can draw, and about possibilities for collaborations and coalitions.
I'm thinking about fun, love, sex, money, death, survival, work, beauty, in more or less that order. I'm thinking about the impact of oppression and activism on my life, my body. I'm feeling glad of my flesh and unique embodiment. I'm taking strength and inspiration from the fat activists who came before me, especially the dykes, the brilliant communities to which I currently belong, and those to whom I am passing on the flame.
In the words of state murdered Black Panther and revolutionary Fred Hampton, as a fat activist what I'm really thinking is: "Up against the wall, motherfucker! I have come for what is ours."
The Dodo Is My New Favourite Fat/Not Fat Animal
The other week I had to drive from Hartford, Connecticut, to Kennedy Airport in New York. As is my way I set off too early and ended up with some time to kill. I stopped off in New Haven to have a look at Yale (sites of preposterous privilege and power are so interesting, don't you think?), and I went to the university-affiliated Peabody Museum. I wasn't expecting much, I just wanted to stop driving for a bit and have a pee.
Museums of natural history don't tend to float my boat. You've seen one dusty taxidermied baboon, you've seen 'em all. I prefer nature to be explained to me in person, from behind a car's windshield, or on TV. No one could accuse The Peabody of being a cutting edge museum of 21st century best practise. Its centrepiece Black Holes exhibition looks like it was designed in 1987, and much of the collection has the reek of old skool natural science and colonial anthropology about it, the seamless segue between rocks, insects and animals, then mummies and 'primitive peoples' is especially problematic, for example.
However, in some areas of the museum, brave curators have drawn attention to these shortcomings. A notice points out that a giant model of a dinosaur, one of the museum's treasures, was put together wrongly by the 19th century scholar who supervised its assembly. He didn’t know any better and it was only when evidence surfaced years later that anybody realised the skull was a bit off, that there weren't enough vertebrae, and that the tail should have been in the air, not on the ground. I really enjoyed this admission because it exposed the myth that representations of natural science are pure and objective truths, it shows that they are as much a product of contemporary ideology as anything.
I don't know about you but I'm fascinated by Dodos and The Peabody has a little display devoted to these sweet and extinct creatures, featuring a skeleton and a model made of chicken and ostrich feathers. Again there is a note saying that more recent evidence suggests that the model is not an accurate representation of how a Dodo really looked.
This is where it gets interesting in terms of fat. The model Dodo is almost completely round, whereas the text display says that in real life they were probably leaner and "more athletic". The panel suggests that the Dodo was probably represented as being fat like this to emphasise the belief that it was stupid, helpless, basically a sitting target for hunters. This assertion is likely to represent present-day thinking on what fatness represents, rather than an objective truth.
I don't know when the model was built, or if this interpretation is what the model-makers intended but I'm really fascinated that the association between fat and abjection could be played out in the model of a Dodo. I think debates about the meaning of fat being transmitted by media, epidemics, fashion, or whatever, are commonplace, but using a Dodo to get the message across is jaw-dropping. The way fat people are typically represented within Obesity EpidemicTM rhetoric is also very Dodo-like; we herald extinction, we are useless beings, we are laughable, pointless and stupid. It's funny how the leaner interpretation of a Dodo is associated with more modern and enlightened thinking, the future is thin!
I don't have much with which to conclude other than that the reproduction of fat abjection moves in mysterious ways, and my interest in Dodos just got a lot geekier.
PS. I went to Bristol Museum and Art Gallery (in the UK) about a month after I wrote this post and I was excited to see they have a fat Dodo model there too, though with no explanatory text. Any more sightings?
Museums of natural history don't tend to float my boat. You've seen one dusty taxidermied baboon, you've seen 'em all. I prefer nature to be explained to me in person, from behind a car's windshield, or on TV. No one could accuse The Peabody of being a cutting edge museum of 21st century best practise. Its centrepiece Black Holes exhibition looks like it was designed in 1987, and much of the collection has the reek of old skool natural science and colonial anthropology about it, the seamless segue between rocks, insects and animals, then mummies and 'primitive peoples' is especially problematic, for example.
However, in some areas of the museum, brave curators have drawn attention to these shortcomings. A notice points out that a giant model of a dinosaur, one of the museum's treasures, was put together wrongly by the 19th century scholar who supervised its assembly. He didn’t know any better and it was only when evidence surfaced years later that anybody realised the skull was a bit off, that there weren't enough vertebrae, and that the tail should have been in the air, not on the ground. I really enjoyed this admission because it exposed the myth that representations of natural science are pure and objective truths, it shows that they are as much a product of contemporary ideology as anything.
 |
| The exceptionally round Peabody Dodo |
This is where it gets interesting in terms of fat. The model Dodo is almost completely round, whereas the text display says that in real life they were probably leaner and "more athletic". The panel suggests that the Dodo was probably represented as being fat like this to emphasise the belief that it was stupid, helpless, basically a sitting target for hunters. This assertion is likely to represent present-day thinking on what fatness represents, rather than an objective truth.
I don't know when the model was built, or if this interpretation is what the model-makers intended but I'm really fascinated that the association between fat and abjection could be played out in the model of a Dodo. I think debates about the meaning of fat being transmitted by media, epidemics, fashion, or whatever, are commonplace, but using a Dodo to get the message across is jaw-dropping. The way fat people are typically represented within Obesity EpidemicTM rhetoric is also very Dodo-like; we herald extinction, we are useless beings, we are laughable, pointless and stupid. It's funny how the leaner interpretation of a Dodo is associated with more modern and enlightened thinking, the future is thin!
I don't have much with which to conclude other than that the reproduction of fat abjection moves in mysterious ways, and my interest in Dodos just got a lot geekier.
 |
| Bristol's very own fat Dodo |
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