Graduating as Dr Fat

That orangey dot in the middle of the picture is me onstage being given my Doctorate at the University of Limerick in Ireland. The photo was taken yesterday. I am about to be 'capped,' that is, to have a fancy velvet hat put on my head, which marks my formal entry into the upper ranks of academia.

At the point that this picture is being taken, the Vice President is reading out the title of my thesis: 'Fat Activism: A Queer Autoethnography.' What you can't see is me beaming with delight that the words 'fat,' 'queer' and 'activism' are being treated with extreme gravitas to a large auditorium packed with people. I'm glad that these magic words were spoken and acknowledged in this really formal setting. Fat queer activism – not a joke!

It's Dr Charlotte, Dr Fat from now on

Just over four years ago, I got picked to be the recipient of one of a handful of fully funded PhDs at the University of Limerick, courtesy of the Irish Social Sciences Platform. The money that paid for this came from a fantastic initiative in Irish education to make research available and applicable beyond the academy, and to raise the profile of Irish research in a global setting. I got chosen because of my publishing history and my involvement with activism. Getting a PhD was a long-held ambition of mine, but I never thought I would have the resources to embark on such a thing. I don't know if anyone else in my family has one, very few of us have had the privilege of going to university at all. I'd heard that some PhDs were funded, but again, never thought that fat could be the focus of such work. I punched the air when I heard I'd got the scholarship, I knew it would change my life, and it has.

Just over a week ago, I went to Ireland to sit the final oral exam for the PhD. I passed. Today I went to get my thesis bound and sent it off to meet the deadline for the Winter Exam Board at Limerick. There are a couple of formalities to go, and a graduation ceremony in January, but from about now onwards people can start to think about calling me Dr Charlotte. Dr Fat will do too.

Over four years I have worked really hard. As well as producing a 100,000 word thesis, an original argument based in original research, I have published peer-reviewed journal articles, chapters in edited books, and lots of other kinds of articles. I have given many conference papers, a handful of keynotes, and was proud to talk about my work at a fantastic gathering in Toronto earlier this year. I've produced and guested at workshops, made films that have shown at film festivals around the world, organised events, done a couple of artist residencies and a visiting scholarship. I've collaborated on projects with people, been involved with academic publishing in various ways, been the subject of quite a bit of media coverage, and maintained this blog. I can't count the number of conversations and emails that have happened because of this research, and I have been amazingly supported by people who want to see it out there in the world.

By the way, the work that I have produced is, as far as I know, the first publicly-funded, community based, major research project into fat activism. I am proud of that.

I'm sure I'll write more about the study as time passes. I'm looking for a publisher at the moment too, and would appreciate leads relating to that, if you have them to share. I have some plans for the future as well, but I'm not ready to explain them yet.

Meanwhile, here's the abstract for the thesis, to give you more of an idea of what I've been up to.

Abstract
Fat Activism: A Queer Autoethnography
Charlotte Cooper

Over my 20 year involvement with the movement, I have come to notice that scant attention is paid to fat activism. Despite intensified interest in fat in 21st century Western culture, the richness of fat activism is not reflected in a somewhat meagre literature, and fat activists themselves have offered few reflective or analytic accounts that deal with the depth and breadth of what they do.

Fat activism offers tools with which marginalised people can adapt and develop agency, community and capital, and contribute to social change. It has the potential to transform obesity policy from that which further entrenches fat people's abjection expensively, to that which builds on resources more compassionately and dynamically. This research project, therefore, represents one such attempt to hasten its development and overturn the trend in which fat activism is routinely assumed, taken for granted, and dismissed by activists, researchers, and institutions.

I begin by situating the research within the existing literature and go on to clarify what fat activism is, to relate it to discourse, and to build on existing theoretical work. I argue against creating universal definitions of fat activism, and invite appreciation for its more ambiguous forms. I produce an assemblage of fat feminist origins and travels, arguing that as well as being an unlimited phenomenon, it is plural, hybrid and evolving, yet suffers from stagnation. I propose that, instead of reproducing collateral damage through discourse, queering fat activism includes many communities of interest, questions binaries, and welcomes multiple interventions.

I use a scavenged autoethnography, bringing myself and the communities of fat activists to which I belong, into this work. This methodology draws attention to standpoint in the construction of fat narratives, expresses my frustration at reproductions of fat people as lifeless and passive empirical subjects, and synthesises activism and research.

Research project: did you go to the Fattylympics?

The Fat Geography Massive (aka Bethan and Rachel) were the people organising the Gym Knicker Blinging stall. They are also researchers who do work on fat activism, and are doing some research on the Fattylympics, with Kay's and my support.

They are looking for people to give accounts of the event to help document the activism and community organisation that took place so that it can inform future fat activism and can help develop academic work on the creation of size acceptance spaces.

If you would be happy to be involved in this research, please email them on fatgeographymassive@gmail.com and they will send you more information - if you email them you can still decide not to take part after you've got the information, they promise they won't spam you.

I sincerely hope research justice will destroy the market for Bari-Suits

When I first started encountering fat activism in the US in the early 90s, accessible medical equipment was a big issue. People couldn't get hospital gowns or blood pressure cuffs that fitted. When you're unwell or disabled and needing assistance, being treated with dignity is an important part of how people should care for you. When you're fat, you can't count on this kind of care because medical fatphobia is so endemic.

The emergence and popularity of surgical weight loss technologies, and casualties from other forms of weight loss, also added to a population of fat people who needed accessible medical care around the time that activists were demanding accessible equipment. Medical supply companies soon realised that they were looking at a profitable niche market. Benmor Medical is one such company, it was established in 1996 and now sells a line of products such as larger-sized wheelchairs, wide walking-frames, big bedpans, and gadgets that help move you around safely and gently if you are fat and otherwise immobile, and which guard the safety of the people moving you too.

What makes me queasy about Benmor Medical is that its products are not the result of critical community consultation with fat people encountering medical systems. Instead it sells products that reflect the interests of medical discourse, and within this model fat people can only exist as 'patients', that is, bottom-dwellers in the hegemony of health professionals. So as well as marketing mobility aids, it also sells a range of scales because weighing fat people is extremely important in this particular framework. This kind of marketing reproduces fat people as little more than medicalised meat. Added to this, I noticed on their news page that they were proud to have had their products placed in an exploitative TV obeso-shockumentary. Benmor Medical's language is of care and concern, but fat people have an ambiguous and unsettling place in the company's values, our voices and images are strangely absent, far less important than the tantalising equipment.

I found out about Benmor Medical because a few weeks ago my friend Liz alerted me to one of their products, the Bari-Suit. This is a "Training & Education" product that was awarded Most Interesting New Product at the Moving and Handling Conference 2012. Interesting it is.

It's a fat suit.

Marisa Meltzer's piece from 2006 framing fat suits as blackface still rings strongly, but I have written before that on some rare occasions fat suits can be eye-opening. Unfortunately the Bari-Suit has none of the nuance of a performance at Burger Queen, it is simply dehumanising and offensive, and presumably extremely expensive and profitable. There's no price on the website, you have to endure the Benmor Medical sales patter if you want to see how much it costs to rent or buy and when something is missing a price tag it usually means that it costs a fortune. It comes 'naked,' or dressed in Benmor Medical-branded sweats. It is so plainly ludicrous and vile that I wish I were making it up.

Medical teams could be employing actual fat people as part of their training into care for fat people in medical situations. This would entail having to talk to fat people with respect and care, finding out about fat people's lives, having to listen and create care paths that reflect direct accounts of what fat people need and want. This could be a great way of sharing knowledge between service providers and service users. The fat person gets paid for their expertise too!

Instead, they spend a lot of money on Benmor Medical's stupid, ugly fat suit. They get a normatively-sized person to try it on, they heave them about, they learn nothing at all about fat embodiment or identity in healthcare. In addition, using a fat suit in place of an actual person reinforces normatively-sized people's fantasies and stereotypes about what it is to be fat. This is particularly powerful because they do this as a group and the beliefs remain unquestioned because either there are no fat people in the room to counter them, or the fat people in the room are silenced by this ridiculous charade. This is what Benmor Medical regard as a good result, it's from the promotional download for their Bari-Suit from the company's website:

"Maryke Gosliga, Manual Handling Co-ordinator at Kettering General Hospital [...] commented: 'Having rented the suit for a bariatric study day this January, I have to say that it was a decision I am glad to have made. Seeing one of their colleagues wearing the suit made others really think about the issues, especially as it made the person wearing it less independent, because of the mechanics involved. Getting the trousers on was difficult, as was moving about. Those who did wear the suit learnt a lot that day! Altogether it was a good experience for all of us on our study day.'"

I can barely bring myself to comment on this patronising rubbish and I am struggling not to be sarcastic about how this team really thought about the issues, the mechanics, and the difficulty of getting those horrible trousers on and off. Good work, Kettering General!

The Bari-Suit truly exemplifies the profound inability of medical professionals to see fat people as human or real in a context where this must surely be the baseline from which care is given. Instead, a nasty little outfit is seen as an adequate substitution for years of experience, complex relationships to embodiment, engagement with social exclusion, or the possibilities that fat people have community and culture and agency of far more depth than medical discourse can currently encompass. Benmor Medical are not the originators of this state of affairs, the rot is much more pervasive, it's a part of the culture from which they profit.

I want to add a brief coda. At the end of June I had the great good fortune to attend the Allied Media Conference in Detroit. This is a really fantastic event combining grassroots activism with DIY media technology, defined in the broadest of ways. Many different types of people attend. Look at the session lists and comments and archived videoed sessions to get a feel for the conference, save up and attend next year if you can, I can't recommend it highly enough and would love to return.

The conference has been going for some years and each year there are particular session threads devoted to certain areas of interest. This year Research Justice was one such theme. This refers to the practice of developing accountable, participatory and liberatory research methodologies, especially when directed towards marginalised people. These values should be at the heart of all research, of course, but this is not always the case, especially in terms of obesity research, where fat people are routinely made abject and absent.

At one of the Research Justice sessions, speakers talked about establishing and using community ethics boards as a means of making sure that research on those communities is accountable and inclusive. I thought this was an excellent and powerful idea. Imagine if every piece of obesity research had to pass a fat community ethics board in order to get funded or published, or to have any credibility in research communities. Imagine how that could help transform the current dismal situation for critical research into fat, and how that could alter the landscape for our encounters with medical science. It would mean no more Bari-Suits for sure.

Incidentally, I am intrigued by the popularisation of the term 'bariatric' and its diminutives. Are there any etymologists in the house who can illuminate its source and growth? It's one of those professional-expert-medic words that sounds so neutral but masks a world of problematic assumptions.

Meltzer, M. (2006) 'Are Fat Suits the New Blackface? Hollywood’s Big New Minstrel Show' in Jervis, L. and Zeisler, A., eds., Bitchfest: Ten Years of Cultural Criticism from the Pages of Bitch Magazine, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 267-269.

Toronto: The Queerness of Fat Activism with Charlotte Cooper

I always feel a bit strange about referring to myself in the third person, but I can't resist it here because I am over the moon to announce the final details for this talk that I'm giving in Toronto in a couple of weeks.

Ryerson University are hosting the event at the Gladstone Hotel. Following my talk there will be a panel discussion and then a party! ASL interpretation is provided and the venue is wheelchair accessible and supports attendant care. It's free.

Here's what I'm going to be talking about: having conducted an autoethnography of fat activism, I have found that this social movement is more complex than the literature and popular assumptions of it currently presume. In this presentation I will use 'queer' to theorise some of these complexities. I begin by acknowledging that there are many queers in my particular social networks of fat activism because of genealogies of radical lesbian fat feminism in the West. But queer can also be thought of as a series of qualities that expands fat activism. Sharing examples, I will show that a queered social movement is one where a common agenda is not necessary for social change; where being normal and nice is overrated; where sometimes the irrational is a productive course of action; and where it is possible to organise beyond the interests of dominant discourse. Queering fat activism matters because it increases access to social activism, enables people to develop liveable lives in the present, and adds to the well-being of people of all sizes.

The Queerness of Fat Activism with Charlotte Cooper
26 June 2012, Doors 6.45pm COME EARLY!
The Gladstone Hotel
1214 Queen Street West, Toronto

The Queerness of Fat Activism with Charlotte Cooper: Facebook Event
Afterparty: The Crush Project presents CHAFE

Come along if you can, and tell anyone you know who can get to Toronto. Here's what people are already saying about the event:

Charlotte Cooper will blow your mind. if you have the opportunity to see her band Homosexual Death Drive never ever ever miss it. It will do everything for you that you ever needed. I love Charlotte Cooper in ways and magnitudes that I can never express. (Allyson Mitchell)

NO REALLY I DON'T THINK PEOPLE EVEN UNDERSTAND HOW INCREDIBLE THIS IS GOING TO BE. (Chelsey Lichtawoman)

The other thing is, isn't the poster for the event fantastic! It's designed by Sam Abel, you can see more of her work at Saucy Nüdels. Would you like to see a copy of this poster on your wall, or on a noticeboard, or all over town? Download it right now!

The Queerness of Fat Activism with Charlotte Cooper – poster by Sam Abel (.pdf, 4mb)

Many thanks to the School of Disability Studies, the School of Social Work, the Department of Psychology and Critical Dietetics at Ryerson, as well as the Irish Social Sciences Platform for making this happen. Thanks also to the fat and queer activists of Toronto who have created a space in which an event like this can happen.

Also, earlier this week I made a list of introductory reading about fat and queer activism for anyone that's interested. It's a real mixture of things. No tests, no pressure, read or ignore at your leisure.

Cooper, C. (1996) 'Fitting' in Bernstein, R. and Clark Silberman, S., eds., Generation Q: gays, lesbians and bisexuals born around 1969's Stonewall riots tell their stories of growing up in the age of information, Los Angeles: Alyson, 59-64.

Cooper, C. (1998) Fat & Proud: The Politics of Size. London: The Women's Press.

Cooper, C. (2009) 'Fat Activism in Ten Astonishing, Beguiling, Inspiring and Beautiful Episodes' in Tomrley, C. and Kaloski Naylor, A., eds., Fat Studies In The UK, York: Raw Nerve Books, 19-31.

Cooper, C. (2010) 'Fat is a feminist issue, but whose feminism?', [online], available: http://www.thescavenger.net/feminism-a-pop-culture/fat-is-a-feminist-issue-but-whose-feminism-90645-428.html [accessed 11 June 2012]

Cooper, C. (2010) 'Charlotte Cooper and Judy Freespirit in Conversation, June 2010', Obesity Timebomb [online], available: http://obesitytimebomb.blogspot.com/2010/09/charlotte-cooper-and-judy-freespirit-in.html [accessed 11 June 2012]

Cooper, C. (2010) 'Olympics/Uhlympics: Living in the Shadow of the Beast', thirdspace, 9(2). [Online] Available: http://www.thirdspace.ca/journal/article/view/cooper [accessed: 11 June 2012].

Cooper, C. (2011) 'A Queer and Trans Fat Activist Timeline - zine download', Obesity Timebomb [online], available: http://obesitytimebomb.blogspot.com/p/queer-and-trans-fat-activist-timeline.html [accessed 11 June 2012]

Cooper, C. (2011) 'Queer Hapas, fat activism and weight loss surgery', Obesity Timebomb [online], available: http://obesitytimebomb.blogspot.com/2011/03/queer-hapas-fat-activism-and-weight.html [accessed 11 June 2012]

Cooper, C. (2012) 'A Queer and Trans Fat Activist Timeline: Queering Fat Activist Nationality and Cultural Imperialism', Fat Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Body Weight and Society, 1(1), 61-74.

Fontaine, G. (2008) 'Keynote Address: Nolose 2008 - More Than Just Fat: The Intersection of All of Our Identities', in NOLOSE, Northampton MA. [online] Available: http://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&rct=j&q&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CFUQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.nolose.org%2F08%2Fgeleni_fontaine08.pdfamp;ei=ohnWT627HvC10QXqps36Aw&usg=AFQjCNFdJNL4C4bcuUVt82f7o2gTA8dxAw [accessed 11 June 2012]

Freespirit, J. (1983) 'A Day In My Life' in Schoenfielder, L. & Wieser, B. , ed. Shadow On A Tightrope: Writings By Women on Fat Oppression, San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 118-120.

Freespirit, J. (2003) 'On Ward G' in Koppelman, S., ed. The Strange History of Suzanne LaFleshe (and other stories of women and fatness), New York: The Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 153-160.

Gingras, J. R. (2009) Longing for Recognition: The Joys, Complexities, and Contradictions of Practicing Dietetics, York: Raw Nerve.

Johnston, J. and Taylor, J. (2008) 'Feminist Consumerism and Fat Activists: A Comparative Study of Grassroots Activism and the Dove Real Beauty Campaign', Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 33(4), 941-966.

LeBesco, K. (2001) 'Queering Fat Bodies/Politics' in Braziel, J. E. and LeBesco, K., eds., Bodies Out of Bounds: Fatness and Transgression, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 74-87.

LeBesco, K. (2004) Revolting Bodies: The Struggle to Redefine Fat Identity, Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press.

Mitchell, A. (2005) 'Pissed Off' in Kulick, D. and Meneley, A., eds., Fat: The Anthropology of an Obsession, London: Penguin, 211-225.

Moon, M. and Kosofsky Sedgwick, E. (1994) 'Divinity: A Dossier, A Performance Piece, A Little-Understood Emotion' in Kosofsky Sedgwick, E., ed. Tendencies, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 211-246.

Rensenbrink, G. (2010) 'Fat's no Four-letter Word: Fat Feminism and identity Politics in the 1970s and 1980s' in Levy-Navarro, E., ed. Historicizing Fat in Anglo-American Culture, Columbus OH: The Ohio State University Press, 213-243.

Rothblum, E. and Solovay, S. (2009) The Fat Studies Reader, New York: New York University Press.

Schoenfielder, L. and Wieser, B. (1983) Shadow On A Tightrope: Writings By Women on Fat Oppression, San Francisco: Aunt Lute.

Shuai, T., Mozee, G., Paulus, K., Rachel, Fontaine, G., Weintraub, A., Herrington, J., Joe, Sondra and Zoe (2011) 'NOLOSE Policy Change: Inclusion and Moving from Identity to Intention', [online], available: http://www.nolose.org/11/genderpolicy.php [accessed 11 June 2012]

Snider, S. (2009) 'Fat Girls and Size Queens: Alternative Publications and the Visualizing of Fat and Queer Eroto-politics in Contemporary American Culture' in Rothblum, E. and Solovay, S., eds., The Fat Studies Reader, New York: New York University Press, 223-230.

Stinson, S. (2004) Venus of Chalk, Ann Arbor, MI: Firebrand Books.

Tomrley, C. and Kaloski Naylor, A. (2009) Fat Studies In The UK, York: Raw Nerve Books.

White, F. R. (2012) 'Fat, Queer, Dead: 'Obesity' and the Death Drive', Somatechnics, 2(1), 1-17.

The Somatechnics journal on fat bodily being has just been published

Issue 2.1 of Somatechnics has just been published, a special issue on 'fat bodily being' edited by Samantha Murray. It looks really good. I'm in it too.

Somatechnics home page at Edinburgh University Press

Here's the table of contents:

'Fat Bodily Being' Editorial
Samantha Murray

Fat, Queer, Dead: 'Obesity' and the Death Drive
Francis Ray White

Big Girls Having Fun: Reflections on a 'fat accepting space'
Rachel Colls

Control Top Underpants
Samantha Murray

Live to Tell: Coming Out as Fat
Cat Pausé

DANGER, Curves Ahead
Cleo Gardiner

'I saw a knock-out': Fatness, (In)visibility, and Desire in Shallow Hal
Jackie Wykes

Not Just a Type: Diabetes, Fat and Fear
Jennifer Lee

Native American Indian Women, Fat Studies and Feminism
Jennifer A. Boisvert

Fox's More to Love: Pseudo-Fat Acceptance in Reality Television
MacKenzie Peltier and Lauren Mizock

'I'd kill anyone who tried to take my band away': Obesity Surgery, Critical Fat Politics and the 'problem' of Patient Demand
Karen Throsby

Fat Activist Community: A Conversation Piece
Charlotte Cooper and Samantha Murray

If you don't have access to university libraries and want to read this stuff, you can buy a single issue, which costs between £16-$32 depending on where you live. If this sort of money is beyond you and you still want to read the pieces, please get in touch.

Fat Studies in Wellington and Oakland calls for papers

Calls for papers have just been announced for two Fat Studies gatherings that are taking place this year.

Fat Studies: Reflective Intersections
Massey University, Wellington, New Zealand
12-13 July 2012

This conference is being organised by Cat Pausé and Samantha Murray is delivering the keynote.

Key areas of interest for abstract submissions include, but are not limited to:

• Intersections between Fat Studies and other academic disciplines
• Interdisciplinary work on fat, fat identity, and fat embodiment
• Fat activism as intersection
• Useful methodologies for intersectionality in Fat Studies teaching and research
• Theoretical frameworks related to Fat Studies intersectionality and interdisciplinary work
• Critical reflections on intersectionality within Fat Studies

The abstract submission deadline is 31 March.

More information: Fat Studies: Reflective Intersections

Fat Studies Interest Group
The National Women's Studies Association (NWSA)
Oakland, California, USA
8-11 November

Papers on any topic at the intersection of women's studies/feminism/womanism/gender/sexuality and fat studies will be considered.

At minimum, your submission should fall under one of the following themes for NWSA 2012:

• Revolutionary Futures
• Traveling Theory
• Social Networks, Power, and Change
• Decolonising Knowledge
• Creative Awakenings

While this is an open call, topic suggestions from last year's meeting include:

Fat intersections (including race, nationality, disability, sexuality, appearance/beauty)
Fatopias/Fat utopias
Transnational fat bodies (immigration, globalisation)
Teaching Fat Studies (professorial bodies, student bodies, resistance)
Knowledge-sharing/de-colonising
Fat feminist research methods (including role of the researcher body)
Fat feminists theorising the body
Fat performance/performing fatness/fat icons
Fat activism and feminism/Fatosphere

13 February is the submission deadline. Send the following to Michaela A. Null and Candice Buss.

• Name, institutional affiliation, address, email, phone
• NWSA Theme your paper fits under (and fat studies topic area/s if yours fits any of the above)
• Title for your talk, a one-page, double-spaced abstract in which you lay out your topic and its relevance to this session
• AND a 100 word truncated abstract

Papers should last 15 minutes, and there will be questions afterwards.

NB. In order to present you need to register for the conference and be a member of the NWSA - it all costs money, baby!

NWSA

Fat Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Body Weight and Society

I'm absolutely delighted to announce that the first edition of Fat Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Body Weight and Society has been published. I am a member of the editorial board for this journal, and my article about queering fat activism through my Queer and Trans Fat Activist Timeline project is published in the first issue.

Fat Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Body Weight and Society is, in academic-speak, a peer-reviewed interdisciplinary journal. Peer-review is the gold standard of academic publishing, it means that each article has been through a rigorous process of review by other people who work in the field so that it represents high quality work, basically the cutting edge.

Unfortunately, like most academic journals, you can't go and buy this at a shop. It's available to students and scholars through academic and major libraries, part of a wider process of keeping ideas away from the plebs, or at least away from people who can't afford tuition fees. Non-students can buy articles or issues, but it can be pricey. If you want to read this journal and can't get access, drop me a line and I'll do my best to help.

Fat Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Body Weight and Society is not the first journal to explore more radical views of fatness. Let's not forget the important work by Frances Berg and the Healthy Weight Journal, and later Jon Robison with Health At Every Size. But what Fat Studies does is shift critical and scholarly discussions of fatness out of health or 'Obesity Epidemic' and into a much broader arena where things like culture, community, rights, embodiment can be addressed. This new publication is an important moment in developing ideas about what it is to be fat and, unlike the odd conference or course, it's ongoing and international.

Let's hear loud applause for Esther Rothblum, the journal's editor, and also the co-editor of The Fat Studies Reader. Her commitment to generating new dialogue about fatness is second-to-none. If you're not excited about this journal then you probably don't even know you're born!

Talking attivisimo pro grasso/fat activism in Italy

I've just come back from a trip to Italy courtesy of Soggettiva, a queer festival held in Bologna. Part of the festival was a seminar called Corpi eccentrici: bellezza, normatività e rappresentazione (Eccentric bodies: beauty, normativity and representation), where I gave a presentation.

The seminar was held in the great hall of Santa Cristina, a place which was once a convent and now houses the city's Women's Library, amongst other things. There's a separate queer library at Il Cassero, where the organisation that convenes Soggettiva and its sister festival Gender Bender, are based. Both spaces are incredibly beautiful old buildings (that's Santa Cristina in the picture, swoon eh?). I was really happy to see my book, Fat and Proud, displayed at the entrance to Santa Cristina, and glad that the seminar was fully documented and will be archived.

I spoke about queer and trans feminist fat activism, gave a few examples of things people have done, and showed some pictures. I thought it might be a bit of a surprise to see this stuff if people had never considered fat as a political identity, or thought about fat people as people with agency, community or culture. My new friend Dani, who performed a synchronous translation of my presentation into Italian, told me that fat activism is difficult to translate. There are two words that people use to talk about fat: cicci, which is the type of term of endearment that you might use if you were calling someone chubby; and grasso, which implies a more disgusting fatness. I suggested she use grasso as a reclamation of language and a defiant celebration of the presumed monstrousness of fatness, and she ended up translating fat activism as attivisimo pro grasso. It felt pretty amazing to be creating language and concepts like this, to be doing so collaboratively and, I hope, sensitively.

Dani said that feminism is a bit of a sneaky presence in Italian academia, and that there isn't a tradition of institutional support for Women's Studies, for example, even at Bologna, which is the oldest university in the world. I got the feeling that this gathering was an unusual event. My co-speakers Giorgia Aiello, Elisa Arfini, Alessia Muroni and Roberta Sassatelli were more clued-in than me about the context of the seminar, which was to consider representation of queer bodies. Their presentations looked at corporate branding, photo agencies, soap operas, lesbian art, and advertising.

My presentation was different to the others, and I didn’t spell out the crucial connection to the seminar, which is that queer and trans fat feminist activists often make their own representations. I wanted to show the everyday embeddedness of activism, how accessible it can be, how almost everyone has some kind of resource they can draw on, and how fat activism disrupts the idea that activism is always about standing in the street with a placard, or speaking rationally to power. Whilst I appreciated my co-presenters' papers, and whilst some speakers also referred to the act of making one's own imagery, what the seminar raised for me was a deep tension between a body of feminist work that is concerned with interpreting popular images and finding it lacking, and my hunger for action beyond critique. Perhaps this is a feature of academic work that is cut off from the lifeblood of activism, I don't think it is an Italian feminist approach, I see it elsewhere too, but this event in Bologna reminded me of it. Put bluntly: it's important to understand why something is shit, but the work cannot stop there, there must be creative thinking and action and change; without these qualities the work descends into pointless hand-wringing and simply reproduces the helplessness of its subjects.

Despite these reservations I feel grateful to have taken part in this work, it was exciting to be talking about queer and trans fat feminist activism in a place where English is not the first language, where people might take on these ideas and mutate them in their own way, and to encounter the work that other people are doing.

Dream List: Fat Studies Research

When I was a teenager I had a pen pal called Phil who sent me cassettes of things he liked and which I ended up liking too. One of these things was a home-taped copy of Jello Biafra's prankish spoken word album No More Cocoons. I haven't heard it in years but could probably still recite most of it by heart. In one of the sequences Biafra talks about collecting names for bands so, say you've got a great band but you can't think of a name, you can get one from Jello because he's got more than he can use. Perhaps there are bands out there somewhere that he named: Republican Buttocks, The Imperial Turdsicles, was there Facelift In A Jar too? Maybe I just imagined it.

In a similar vein, I seem to harbour more ideas for fat studies research than I could ever handle myself. I thought I'd offer a list of fantasy research projects that I'd love to see come to fruition. I'm thinking of stuff like...

• A case study of Aardman Animations' involvement with Change4Life.
• A critical review of weight loss corporations' appropriation of fat politics and Health At Every Size concepts and praxis.
• A critical review of body image research methodology.
• A qualitative study of normatively-sized researchers allied to Fat Studies who avoid using the word 'fat' in their work.
• A quantitative study about why corporations fund weight loss industry research, with beautiful pie charts and scatterplots and other exciting infographics.
• Discourse analysis that reveals what Reubens really thought of fat women.
• An analysis of alarmist obesity news story infographics.
• An ethnography of normatively-sized ethnographers who do ethnographies of fat people who go to slimming clubs.
• An oral history of people who wear fat suits.
• A case study of LighterLife's ethics.
• An ethnography of normatively-sized ethnographers who do ethnographies of fat people who go to NAAFA conventions.
• A quantitative study of all the places that have been described as 'The Fattest Country,' 'The Fattest City,' or 'The Fattest Place' on Earth.
• A critical gender and race analysis of Two Tons of Fun and The Fat Boys.
• Any kind of research whatsoever by non-Western fat studies scholars about anywhere that isn't the US, Canada, the UK, or Australia.
• Any kind of research whatsoever by fat disabled people about fat and disability.
• Discourse analysis of anonymous fat blob sculptures and other forms of obesity art.
• Longitudinal studies on the effects of dieting on various groups of people across a number of variables and not just BMI, that take their social contexts into account, and which are not funded or researched by anyone with any connection whatsoever to commercial weight loss organisations.
• A qualitative study of fat people and their tattoos.
• Psychological profiles of Tam Fry, Susie Orbach, David Haslam, Jamie Oliver.
• Qualitative research about fat activist community capitalism.
• Research essays about the use of fatphobia in political cartoons, or an illustrated essay about heroic fat cartoon characters from the golden age of comics.

Wanna take one on? Be my guest and send me the results to cite. Got fantasy research projects of your own? Stick 'em in the comments please.

Thanks to Simon Murphy and Kay Hyatt for helping with this list.

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.

Karen Throsby and Charlotte Cooper double whammy at King's College London

Here are more details. Come and see Karen Throsby and I talk next week. Anyone can come, it's free, and there's a wine reception (hic) afterwards.

Obesity and the Rejection of Body Normativity
Wednesday 18 May 2011
CMCI Work Room (formerly the Art Exhibition Room, on the ground floor of the South East Block), King’s College London, Strand Campus
17:30-19:00 followed by a wine reception

Following our successful launch in 2010, GenderMatters@King's, a research network of gender studies and feminist theories across King’s College London, is now organizing a series of seminars on the theme of “Gender and Mental Well Being: Inter-disciplinary Perspectives”, funded by King's Graduate School. Our first seminar will focus on exploring the subject of 'Obesity and the Rejection of Body Normativity', highlighting not only the gendered aspects of institutional interventions that attempt to govern bodies, but also the emancipatory potential of 'body shape diversity' discourses on fatness and fat identity, and their contestation against the weight-centred approach toward health.

"What do I eat, love?"
Obesity surgery and the reproduction of gender
Karen Throsby, The University of Warwick

Obesity surgery is conventionally understood through the lens of weight-related health discourses; it is the intervention of last resort for those whose bodies are deemed both medically and socially to be dangerously, intractably fat. Approximately 80% of all obesity surgery patients are women, but the gendering of obesity surgery as a practice extends far beyond the distribution of men and women among the patient population. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in an obesity surgery clinic, this presentation argues that the practice of obesity surgery, both within and outside of the clinic, not only leaves unaddressed troubling social and bodily gender norms, but actively reiterates and reproduces those norms. This presentation explores the gendering of obesity surgery, including patient candidacy, the everyday work of managing the post-surgical body, and the distribution of responsibility for treatment outcomes. I conclude by considering the implications of this for those working within critical fat politics.

"She was so viscerally happy in that moment"
Fat Activism for Well Being
Charlotte Cooper, The University of Limerick

Dominant obesity discourse in 21st century Western culture is steeped in the abjection of fat people, and that this impacts negatively on our health. A Social Model of fat activism remedies this problem by addressing systemic fat hatred and helping to create more livable lives for fat people (Cooper, 1998). Fat activism re-imagines fat embodiment and agency, collectively it spans continents and has historical links over four decades. Cooper will talk about her research into this social movement, and presents case studies which both support and reject body normativity.

Reporting back on the fourth and final ESRC Fat Studies and HAES Seminar

ESRC Seminar Series
Fat Studies and Health At Every Size: Bigness Beyond Obesity

Seminar Four: Researching Fat Studies and HAES: working with/as fat bodies
5-6 May 2011
Bath Royal Literary and Scientific Institution, UK

I spent a couple of days last week at the final ESRC (The Economic and Social Research Council) Fat Studies and Health At Every Size (HAES) gathering, which took place in Bath. There have been four seminars in all, stretching over about 18 months. These meetings have operated like mini conferences, and a warm and supportive community has grown up around them.

As with previous seminars, it's unfeasible to report on everything that happened, there is simply too much, so I'll just pick out a couple of the main themes.

Many of the speakers talked about autoethnography and reflexive research. Such methodologies contrast strongly with dominant research paradigms in 'obesity'. Where the latter draws upon notions of universal scientific truth and objectivity, the former disrupts such ideas by bringing the researchers themselves to the centre, by offering context, emotion, ambiguity and paradox. I particularly enjoyed Karen Throsby's presentation about her experiences researching cross-Channel swimming, which raised questions about researcher roles. Jacqui Gingras, Rachel Colls and Bethan Evans also talked about roles and ethics concerning research with and on fat people.

It is hard to imagine similar conversations happening at, say, amongst stakeholders at an obesity conference where fat people are made absent, abject, and anonymous, and where fat is automatically framed as pathology in need of professional intervention. What is remarkable about these conversations is that they took place at an interdisciplinary level and were points of contact across considerable academic difference, where tensions were able to be contained and addressed to some extent. Even better, these seminars have been open to non-academics, you know, normal people, and although some academic jargon was unavoidable, discussions emerged between people with very different experiences of and approaches to fat. Best of all, people of all sizes instigate the conversations. More mainstream obesity stakeholders would do well to stop what they're doing and listen to this dialogue.

Another seminar strand was devoted to alternative ways of presenting and conceptualising research and fat. Emma Rich, the main organiser of this seminar, invited a number of local artists and performers to showcase their work. Although few were working principally around fat or Health At Every Size, and were concerned more generally with the body, it was clear that there are exciting possibilities for fat and HAES praxis. Perhaps Vikki Chalklin came closest to this with her performance that included material from research interviews.

For me, these seminars have been much more than a series of presentations and discussions. I have experienced them as very freeing, as places of collective intellectual and political engagement, and of a scholarship that feels full of life, community and exciting potential. In 21st century Western academia these are really precious moments! My colleague and friend Bill Savage/Dr R. White has said that the ESRC Fat Studies and Health At Every Size seminars have forever spoiled us, and that other academic gatherings might be good, but they would never be as welcoming and stimulating as the ESRC experience! These seminars have been places where participants can see how things might be if we could talk about fat without having always to start at a 101-level defensive justification to hostile spectators. Having the freedom to think, speak, take risks and be heard in a gentle atmosphere has been wonderful, one of the best experiences of my academic career.

It's sad that this round of seminars has ended, although there will be some post-seminar projects, which are currently being discussed, and there may well be other Fat Studies conferences and seminars in the UK, as well as online activites. Keep your fingers crossed.

Meanwhile, deep thanks to Bethan Evans, the principle investigator, who had the idea of the seminar series and who wrote the successful funding application. Thanks also to my colleagues who organised the seminars, and to everyone who participated and supported them. And thanks to Lucy Aphramor, who closed the final seminar with an impromptu rendition of a beautifully vulnerable, funny and wavery-voiced verse from a HAES song. It really was the perfect ending.

Further information about the seminars

Government Support for Fat Studies and HAES in the UK

Reporting back on the first ESRC Fat Studies and HAES Seminar

Reporting back on the second ESRC Fat Studies and HAES Seminar

Reporting back on the third ESRC Fat Studies and HAES Seminar

ESRC Fat Studies and Health At Every Size

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.

Register for the final ESRC Fat Studies and HAES Seminar - FREE

ESRC seminar series: Fat Studies and HAES: Bigness Beyond Obesity
Seminar 4: Researching Fat Studies and HAES: working with/as fat bodies

5-6 May 2011, Bath Royal Literary and Scientific Institution (Elwin Room)

To register to attend the seminar please follow this link: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/KKWV6R3

This seminar will address the ethical and methodological issues involved in researching Fat Studies and Health at Every Size and will explore possibilities for the engagement of public, activist, policy and practitioner communities in Fat Studies and HAES research.

There will be a combination of presentations, workshop activities and performance art.

The following speakers are confirmed (more to be announced asap. See the seminar series website for more details):

Keynote: Jacqui Gingras, Assistant Professor, Ryerson University.
Rachel Colls, Durham University
Bethan Evans, Durham University
Jacqueline O’Toole, Institute of Technology, Sligo
Vicky Chalkin, Goldsmiths University of London

The seminar will run from 1pm-6pm on Thursday 5 May and 9am-3pm on Friday 6 May.

The seminar is free to attend, including tea/coffee on Thursday 5 May and lunch on Friday 6 May, but participants must meet their own accommodation and transport costs. Directions to the venue can be found here: http://www.brlsi.org/about.html There is plenty of hotel accommodation available in the centre of Bath. A list of recommended hotels is available from E.Rich@bath.ac.uk

There will be an optional dinner on Thursday 5th May (costs not covered). Please indicate whether you wish to attend this on the registration form.

There are a limited number of bursaries available to contribute to travel/accommodation costs for students/unwaged participants. To request a bursary, please complete the relevant section on the registration form.

More details on the seminar series are available online here: http://www.dur.ac.uk/geography/research/researchprojects/fat_studies_and_health_at_every_size/

Any questions, please contact Emma Rich (E.Rich@bath.ac.uk), Lee Monaghan (Lee.Monaghan@ul.ie) or Bethan Evans (bethan.evans@durham.ac.uk)

I'm giving a talk in London, please come

I'm giving a presentation at King's College on the Strand in London on 18 May. It is the first in the Gender Matters seminar series 'Gender and Mental Well Being: Inter-disciplinary Perspectives'. Gender Matters is a research group based at King's.

The organisers have given this talk the title of 'Obesity and the Rejection of Body Normativity' and I'll be talking about fat activism and mental health. I'll use accessible language and hopefully make it interesting. The seminar is open to members of the public, so please come. It's free and there's a wine reception afterwards - crikey.

Obesity and the Rejection of Body Normativity
Gender and Mental Well Being: Inter-disciplinary Perspectives
King's College, Strand campus
18 May 2011
17.30

"She was so viscerally happy in that moment" - Fat Activism for Well Being
Charlotte Cooper

Abstract

In this presentation I assert that dominant obesity discourse in 21st century Western culture is steeped in the abjection of fat people, and that this impacts negatively on our health. As I have argued previously, a Social Model of fat activism remedies this problem by addressing systemic fat hatred and helping to create more liveable lives for fat people (Cooper, 1998). Fat activism re-imagines fat embodiment and agency, collectively it spans continents and has historical links over four decades. I will talk about my research into this social movement, and present case studies which both support and reject body normativity.

Cooper, C. (1998) Fat & Proud: The Politics of Size, London: The Women's Press.

Defiling BMI at The Carnival of Feminist Cultural Activism

The Carnival of Feminist Cultural Activism has just taken place at York University. It involved three days of presentations, panels, discussions, performance, workshops, films and a whole lot of talking and hanging out. The event was a lot of fun, as well as being challenging and thought-provoking. The organisers did a great job in creating a space where many different kinds of feminists could come together. I was there for four things: to participate in a bunch of presentations; to chair a couple of sessions; to see my friends and meet new folks; and to present the final plenary: Fightin' Dirty With The Chubsters.

I had an hour, so I showed my Chubsters short film, had a stab at introducing the concept, and got people to take part in some Chubsters skill-sharing. I thought that few would turn up to this final plenary, but I was wrong, it was busy, and I was worried that a feminist and largely academic crowd would be a little starchy, I was wrong about that too.

I offered four skill-sharing options:

Glaring
Participants were invited to use eyes, mouth, expression, hair and brains to attack with their faces. I nipped back into the room at one point, after being outside taking part in one of the other activities, to witness the glaring group standing in a neat circle practising their glaring at each other in silent aggressive rage.

Shooting
I drew some cans of Slim-Fast on a piece of card and invited people to do some target practise with the Chubsters' weapon of choice - spud guns. This was by far the most popular group. Social justice activists take note: people really like a spud gun.

Spitting
This was what I was most excited about, and daunted. I've wanted to be good at spitting ever since I saw Patti Smith accurately shoot a jet of saliva out of her mouth onstage and hit a spot to her side. I imagined that it would be great to see or be a Chubster spitting insolently at something. But spitting really is disgusting, and offensive to many, especially when done by women and I wondered if I was pushing people too far, though I also saw my role in the plenary as goading a group of over-tired, conferenced-out people into antisocial pleasure and risk-taking. Anyway, I drew a picture of a BMI (Body Mass Index) Chart because I thought that it would make a good target. I was delighted that people went for it. None of us had Patti Smith's technique, but we made up for it with gusto. My favourites involved the running spit, the up-close and phlegmy spit, and the crab spit, where a woman bent backwards into a crab and spat in a graceful arc onto the BMI Chart.

Freestyle
This was an anything goes option for people who didn't fancy any of the others. From what I gather it involved a lot of arm-wrestling and actual, down on the floor wrestling. It made my heart sing to see a pair of very serious feminist intellectual heavyweights rolling around on the floor of the lecture theatre in a leg grip.

Some people combined different skills, advanced Chubsterdom! Later we welcomed some new Chubsters into the gang, check out their names: Awesome Jonnie, Backwoods Bettie, Biscuits, Cat-Face, Chaos Flower, Count Fatula, Crab, Faye Bentos, Gorrilay, Grrrran, Grummel Pott, Hell's Granny, Junk, Myxt, Pinkie, Piseog Dubh, Rabid Fox, Raptor, Robin Hood, Rough, Round Robin, Rump-Shaker, Skiff, Southern Fried Chubbin', Stink-Eye, The Fixer, Thunder Domes, Toxic Pink Stuff, T-Rex, Twisted Stitch, and Von Vixen.

By the time I got the train home from York I was pretty exhausted and had that brain-buzzing feeling that I often get after some Chubsters action, or a really good Fat Studies event. I'm really grateful that the Carnival organisers enabled me to create this weird space for people to play in, and that people got it and were engaged.

There are more pics of the whole event in Evangeline Tsao's Facebook Album.

I kept coming back to the BMI Chart covered in spit, dripping with it. This chart is so oppressive, it's today's equivalent of phrenology and about as much use. Kate Harding's fantastic Illustrated BMI Project was one way of transforming it and reducing its power, I've seen others address it as activists too, and I saw the spit-fest as a extension of this approach. I felt so happy to see it defiled with the collective spit of a group of feminists! It perfectly captured my (our?) contempt for it. I thought about how great it was to have been able to facilitate the creation of this real life mental image, and I wondered if other people might remember it dripping with spit the next time they come across it in a doctor's office, or are being lectured about it, or whatver. It felt like I was spitting it out of myself and removing its power over my body. Maybe the next time people see a load of Slim-Fast for sale in a shop they might imagine having a pop at it with a spud gun.

It's made me think more about how, in my experience, The Chubsters is often a vehicle for creating unlikely yet enriching moments of real-life wildness, peculiar tableaux that stick with you later. These become like mental touchstones that stay with me and comfort, amuse, captivate, inspire me when I draw upon them. I'm sure a spit-covered drawing of a BMI Chart is not what many people would consider a treasured memory, but it is for me.

Full disclosure: some of my friends chose to withdraw from the Carnival last December, stating their position on Red Chidgey's blog Feminist Memory: Open letter of withdrawal from the Carnival of Feminist Cultural Activism (2011). Then as now my feelings about Raw Nerve are different to my friends', as is my understanding of what happened. I am mentioning this here because I don't want to pretend that this issue was not also a part of my Carnival experience.