Documenting anti-fat street harassment

When I talk to people who have no idea about fat politics, the thing that they most fixate on, after "but is it healthy?" is the fact of street harassment. They usually express a great deal of shock that fat people get stared at, spat at, shouted at, touched, followed, photographed, attacked, and laughed at by strangers in the street. This isn't some abstract fatty I'm conjuring here, these things have happened, and continue to happen, to me too.

Street harassment really touches a nerve. Never mind that many of us also experience harassment from our partners, families, friends, colleagues, people serving us in shops or restaurants – and that we also harass ourselves! You can almost see people's brain cogs whirring into action when you tell them about it: "Must.. not… get… fat… not just ugly and unhealthy… but… street… harassment… too."

Sometimes I get the feeling that the shock is a little overdone, it's hard to believe that they have so little clue about what it is to be hated, but there it is. The converation ususally ends with me being pitied. This is the point at which I realise that we have little left to discuss because, as disabled activists have shown, pity is not much better than hate, if you're trying to get someone to treat you as a proper living person.

Accounts of harassment in fat activism are as old as the movement itself but, apparently, they have made little impact on the world in general. NAAFA (National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance) was founded with a remit against harassment, and there are numerous accounts of it by the fat feminists of the 1970s and 1980s. My book, Fat & Proud, published 15 years ago, also documents the phenomenon extensively. Anecdotal evidence suggests that many fat people suffer with agoraphobia, which isn't much of a surprise in this context. It's not as if fat people are keeping this stuff to themselves, we are outraged about it.

Now a new wave of activists and artists are trying to show what it's like to be a fat person who leaves the house. Haley Morris-Cafiero is a photographer whose project Wait Watchers documents those oh-so-familiar stares that pass in a fleeting moment and are tricky to explain to people who are not on the receiving end of them. Kath from Fat Heffalump produced her own version of these photographs, demonstrating that Haley's experience is not unique. Substantia Jones, whose fat photo-activism with The Adipositivity Project is legendary, has recently launched Smile, Sizeist! The tagline goes: "Next time someone's a dick to you about your size, raise your most powerful weapons. Your voice and your camera." She presents sometimes harrowing photographic evidence of the violent effect of anti-obesity rhetoric in everyday lives.

These fat art and activism interventions bring to mind other projects concerned with transforming power in street harassment. The appalling case of the woman killed after being raped on a bus in Delhi has further mobilised groups of activists against the continuing assault of women and girls in public spaces, for example. Elsewhere, Hollaback! was founded in 2005 and now has numerous chapters around the world. It's mission is simple, to end street harassment. Originally a project about sexist harassment, Hollaback! now addresses other forms of harassment and is a ripe contender for collaborative work around anti-fat street abuse in the West, in my humble opinion.

When fat people seize the power inherent to our own gaze and turn it outwards, we repudiate the cruelty directed towards us, we refuse to be transformed into passive objects and we claim our humanity. Whether or not the normals will take any notice of this and move beyond a patronising pity of us into action that helps prevent harassment remains to be seen. I am concerned that those documenting harassment should tread carefully around revenge. I have written elsewhere of my reticence about Bash Back, for example, and I think fighting violence with violence only escalates matters. But it is crucial that we record and witness these incidents for ourselves at least, and remind each other that we are not alone. If we can do it collectively, with style, across intersections, then all the better.

Being called disgusting, ugly, and unhealthy did not destroy me

A person made a mean and thoughtless comment about one of Substantia's Adipositivity portraits of me recently, I saw it just now. This is not front page news, I get trolled fairly often and I don't expect everybody to like what I do. Neither do I need reassurance that I'm nice, good, pretty enough as I am; whether or not I embody those things is irrelevant to me, I'm as complex as anybody else and I trust my sense of ethics.

I'm intrigued by the comment, if anything. I think this is because I am writing this morning about my affective response to obesity discourse. I often write about obesity discourse and the fat hatred it engenders in abstract ways, but here it is, like dirty smoke manifesting from the ether, finding a vessel in this person. The comment represents the entitlement of the discourse, its arrogance towards and alienation from the subjects – fat people – with whom it is apparently concerned.

Other people might feel devastated by such a comment, but I don't. This is not because I'm not a thinking, feeling person myself, I often feel hurt by things. It's because its separation from anything that is meaningful to me about being a fat dyke, or a person in one of Substantia's pictures, means that it will make no difference to how I live my life. The comment feels as mystifying and alien as if an ant had tried to explain something to me in ant-language.

I decided to look at the comment more closely and pick it apart a little, there's so much going on in that short statement measuring the value of my presence in the world. It goes like this: "I'm sorry, but this will never be beautiful. It's disgusting, it's ugly, it's unhealthy."

It starts as an apology but is not an apology. Why say sorry? What apology are they making? Are they trying to gently divest people from their fantasy that the photograph of me is something that might help them feel as though they can live in the world?

They use the dehumanising words "this" and "it" when talking about me. Or is this about me? Perhaps it's about the picture, the outfit, the street or, more likely, the fat on my body as an entity that is separate to me.

They use the term "never". How can they know? Many people have expressed deep affection for this picture. As it was being taken, a guy on the street asked for my number (that's him in the foreground blur). On what authority can they make that claim of "never"? It's nonsense.

It's kind of amazing to be called disgusting! I wonder if the person feels like vomiting when they see me, if that feeling of disgustingness is about trying to eject me from their own being because I upset how they want things to be so intensely. I secretly hope so because, apart from someone shitting or dying at the sight of you, this is the ultimate punken reaction. I am glad to be so disruptive and uncomfortable a presence.

But being called disgusting and ugly doesn't make sense in the context of their Tumblr. There are lots of pictures of punks, how come they don't recognise how punk I am? There are images of fat people too, cartoons mostly, how come they're ok but I am not? Scrolling through, I can see images of someone gleefully pointing a gun at the viewer; a wave of blood; a chainsaw killer; a hanged yuppie with a plastic bag over his head; Charles Manson; a woman with a pretty punched mouth and another woman with a pretty black eye; a stitched wound; a potato shitting chips! I am uglier and more disgusting than those things in this person's universe, I think I'm supposed to mind, women are supposed to care about being called ugly, but I don't.

The commenter does not know me and does not appear to have any qualifications that would enable them to assess the state of my health, yet they feel entitled to judge me. Typically, this form of judgment brings with it none of the compassion that one might extend to someone who was unwell, not that I want to be concern-trolled.

I don't know how to end this. I think I'm astonished by some people's capacity for thoughtless meanness, perhaps I don't come across much of that in my everyday life. The experience has made me reflect on how profoundly the internet affects how I live, the things I can do and witness, a life without it is unimaginable. It's made me think about accountability online, how off-the-cuff comments are not necessarily throwaway. Mostly I feel strong, politically and intellectually engaged with what it is to be fat; I feel alright. It's a miracle, really - actually it's not a miracle, you're looking at what happens after 20+ years of work.

PS. I sent this: Hi there, I wrote a blog post inspired by your comment about my picture. Perhaps you'd like to respond? It would be good to generate some dialogue. Tumblr won't let me send a link but you can get to the piece by Googling 'Obesity Timebomb'. Charlotte

The Adipositivity Project Calendar - I'm March

Back on a freezing day in January, Substantia Jones persuaded me to strip down to my skivvies and flash passers-by on a Lower East Side corner in Manhattan. Neither of us were arrested. It's funny how good times look.

Now it's November, I'm in London, wrapped in a blanket, staring down the end of the year and really delighted that one of the pictures from that session has ended up on the 2012 Adipositivity calendar. I'm March.

In the words of the creator: "The 2012 Adipositivity Calendar is here! And this year it's biggerbetterfastermore! 11x17 with 12 full-bleed square format pictures of plush, pulchritudinous plump, couple of which have not yet been seen. Snag your big-ass calendar of big asses here: http://www.cafepress.com/adipositivity.595211226 Hurry! Go!"