How I got into fat

Me, 1978 or so, looking into the future.

It's been a little scrappy around here of late and I'm sorry about that. I'm preoccupied with finishing my thesis, organising the Fattylympics, and keeping going amidst some slight burn-out. It could be worse but I haven't been in the mood for writing much.

I've been working on an autoethnography for my PhD. Ethnography is a kind of qualitative research methodology that involves looking at people. With autoethnography you are also looking at yourself.  If you want to know more about autoethnography, you could read Carolyn Ellis and Jacqui Gingras on the subject.

Because I think that context matters, I think that all researchers should reflect on who they are to be doing research, even – especially – the kind of researchers who produce pages of numbers about BMI. So I've been reflecting a lot over the four years in which I've been working on my PhD, and thinking about how I came to be here. With this in mind, I thought I'd share a little about how I got into fat. It goes like this...

I have been fat all my life, meaning that I have always been fatter than most of my peers. My family is pretty fractured and it's hard to tell how fat features there. Certainly three of my immediate family have had what they would think of as 'weight problems' and have 'done something about it,' and I have distant relatives who have been fat at various stages of their lives. I think I might be the fattest but it's hard to tell amidst all this shape-changing and self-regulation. I'm certainly the most self-accepting fat person in my family.

When I was about six or seven years old, my mum decided that something needed to be done about my body. Mum was a nurse, she was working as an administrator at a clinic at that time, and very much part of a culture of medicalisation. I think her decision to monitor the food I ate may have coincided with her own body-projects, it was certainly a part of her work of trying to pass as middle class. My first diet came at a time when we were living in a colonial ex-pat community in Hong Kong that included a lot of upper-middle and upper class people. I think she felt that she had to fit in with them, and that my fat body betrayed what she felt was the shameful truth of our class.

Mum and I dieted on and off for the next few years. Sometimes we'd follow a sheet that she brought home from work but mostly it involved periodic disapproval of what I ate and voiced anxiety about the size of my body, especially when clothes didn't fit me. In spite of all this I was a very active kid, I was a synchronised swimmer, and always running around, riding my bike, doing things. This continues to this day. So whilst I had this idea that my body was a problem, I also had an image of myself as active, someone who could do things.

I had no idea about fat politics as a teenager in the early 1980s in London, though I now know that a fat feminist movement had been active for at least ten years by this stage in other parts of the world. However, I had access to some things that enabled me to develop a critical understanding of my fatness. These things weren't directly about fat but they helped pave the way later on.

The first thing was feminism. I got interested in feminism as a young girl. In my family sex was never spoken about, and I was quite anxious by the time I reached puberty, I wanted information. I didn't know about libraries so I went to bookshops and read the sex education books there. Books on feminism were stacked nearby so when I'd read all the stuff about 'a man and a lady loving each other very much and making a baby' I moved on to much more interesting books about contraception, abortion, being lesbians, self-determination, and so on. I didn't know it but I was learning about speaking up, power, and possibilities for naming and exploring my own experience.

The next thing was a sort of queer punk. Whilst I was at school I got a Saturday job that introduced me to lots of people who were really happy to be freaks and who sneered at the straight world. Queer was not a term that had much currency at the time, but this group of people, including the heterosexuals, were very queer indeed. Some were performers, most were much older than me and everyone had lived exciting lives of one kind or another. People did things, they didn't wait for someone else to do it for them. Although everybody lived on the margins in some way, people lived creatively amidst rich communities of friends. There was always something to do, bands and clubs, I started going out and I never really stopped. At the same time I was reading subcultural literature, writers like Kathy Acker, David Wojnarowicz, William Burroughs, and this too gave me an idea that things could be different and that being different was no bad thing at all.

I left school and did A Levels and got into student politics. At the time this took the form of anti-fascist and anti-racist organising, I remember quite a bit of feminism in the mix too. The National Union of Students was still a radical body back then. We went on demonstrations and took part in discussions and conferences. Alongside this I was travelling on and off with my oldest brother who was what would now be called a new age traveller. So I had experiences of very marginal politics too, living on the road, trying to avoid arrest, a kind of practical anarchism.

Throughout all this my fatness was still seen as a problem, not only by me but by the people around me. I longed to be thin and still made attempts to lose weight, although this never came to much. I think I knew it was bullshit but I didn't have a way of articulating it until I saw members of the London Fat Women's Group talking on Wogan, a very popular early evening television talk show. This would have been in 1989. They were organising a conference, and they also made a short documentary about fat politics that was also shown on TV. I watched it avidly.

It took a while, a couple of years, for the things that the London Fat Women's Group were saying to sink in. I think I was still recovering, not just from growing up in a context of everyday fatphobia, but also other kinds of trauma. The last straw was being dumped by a boyfriend who wanted me to be thinner. I'd really had enough. But the appearance of those British fat feminists in my life showed that there were other ways of being, and my experiences as a girl and as a teenager enabled me to adopt it eventually. Given my context, it made total sense to me that fat could be a social and political identity and that there was incredible potential for the development of fat culture, collective action and intellectual activity.

I started to look out for other things. By my late teens and early 20s I had an experiential and theoretical framework for activism that made Shadow on a Tightrope and Being Fat is Not a Sin irresistible when I first came across them around 1990 or so. I started an ill-fated fat support group, did some postgraduate work about fat activism, started to meet people who were interested in similar things and who supported my fat identity, took part in a proto-fatshion modelling competition(!), wrote a book, and spent the advance on a trip to California to meet the dykes who put FaT GiRL together and attend the Dirty Bird queercore festival. Fat politics interested me initially as a solution to the years in which my body had been a battlefield, a place of restriction, blame, anxiety, but it soon became a much bigger project, something that could play off other life experiences. Fat as feminist, punk, queer, a place to which I could bring my politics, a way of understanding my life. There was no turning back.

References

Bovey, S. (1989) Being Fat is Not a Sin, London: Pandora.

Ellis, C. (2004) The Ethnographic I: A Methodological Novel about Autoethnography, Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press.

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

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

The YMCA's Body Confidence campaign and the All Party Parliamentary Group on Body Image

The YMCA is campaigning on behalf of 'body confidence' in the UK and is supporting a number of meetings of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Body Image, which started in November and will continue through to the end of February. These meetings are open to the public and involve expert testimony from representatives of academia, mental health, youth and education services, media, fitness, fashion, health and cosmetic surgery industries.

Those not able to attend are invited to give written evidence to the All Party Parliamentary Group on Body Image via an online survey. I submitted my response to this yesterday and encourage others to do the same.

I support this campaign in vague and general terms, I'd rather it existed than not, but I have many misgivings about it. I'm offering this critique not because I think this work should go away, but because it could and should be very much stronger and more emancipatory. Here's a brief explanation of why I'm wary:

There will be no discussion with health professionals or representatives from the National Health Service other than psychiatrists and psychologists. The hectoring use of BMI charts, plans to encourage everyone from chiropodists to pharmacists to 'helpfully' enquire about your diet and exercise every time you pick up some medicine or get your bunions seen to, and the public-private partnerships being set up between the NHS and weight loss companies would suggest that this is a significant area that affects people's embodied self esteem.

I'm assuming that this group has been omitted because they don't represent the more faddish side of weight loss, but this sets up a false distinction between good and bad weight loss; some doctors advocate very low calorie diets for fat people, for example. The campaign's website talks about problematic 'quick fixes' for body image anxiety, including cosmetic surgery, steroids, and fad diets, but it does not attack weight loss in general as something that is likely to screw up your sense of body image. This echoes a previous attempt to use the British government to support an anti-diet agenda, which was tabled by Mary Evans Young in the early 1990s with the support of Alice Mahon MP. In that instance diets were attacked as detrimental to people's health and wellbeing, but weight loss was deemed acceptable for 'the obese'. Presumably dieting or poor body image is only a problem if you are normatively-sized, everyone else is fair game.

There's no mention in the campaign of alternative paradigms that are already well-established, including fat activism and Health At Every Size. No representatives of these models have been invited to speak, it is as though they don't exist when actually there's a wealth of material and expertise and experience to draw on. The lack of connection to a wider context for this sort of work makes the campaign appear superficial, ahistorical and self-aggrandising to me.

Similarly, the role of dominant ideologies are omitted. Capitalism and neoliberalism are prime reasons why so many of us do not feel at home in our bodies. Racism and oppression in general have a massive part to play in it too. Fatphobia is at the heart of why kids are measured and dieted before they've learned to tie their shoelaces. Governmentality and medicalisation are surely implicated. The broader picture is not being addressed in this campaign, instead there is a pathetic insistence that the red herrings of 'celebrity culture' or 'the media' (which is never defined, and around which we all become passive dupes rather than active consumers or producers, or involved in any other relationship to it - and yes, the bombarded by images cliché is invoked) are the problem.

The online survey through which stakeholders are invited to give written evidence to the All Party Parliamentary Group on Body Image is poorly designed and full of leading questions, sometimes you only get a line to answer a fantastically complicated question, for example, which hints at the campaign's lack of understanding of the issues involved. The language and assumptions behind some of the questions is fatphobic, for example "What are the links, if any, between obesity, eating disorders and poor body image?" implies that the three concepts are more than likely linked and stems from a particular popular discourse of fat as a product of compulsive eating, an immature coping mechanism. Because it's a government platform, and this particular government is all about a neoliberal reduction of state funding, there are many questions about the economic impact of negative body image, which can get quite wearing, as if that's the only kind of impact that matters.

The YMCA is synonymous with gym culture, are they really the best organisation to advise on developing stronger strategies around health and self-image? Gok Wan endorses the campaign, truly a turn-off for me given his own weight maintenance regime. The YMCA's interest in the campaign is to "reduce body image as a barrier to participation" which suggests that they are looking at a business case as a rationale for this work. But I don't want good body image to be a means of transforming me into a more eager consumer of gym memberships, that's not why I do the work I do, my activism is anti-capitalist! Likewise, although I see fat activism as a broad endeavour where many kinds of activities can be sustained, including All Party Parliamentary Groups, I am an anarchist and government lobbying is not my preferred location for social change.

And what does body image mean anyway? The campaign's website defines it as "our idea of how our body looks and is perceived by others" but this is so vague, faux-apolitical and unrooted as to be meaningless.

Finally, you know what? There's not a single fat person in the promotional imagery. Bah.

The Fat Bloc

A coalition of around half a million people took to London's streets on Saturday to protest various things. Sister-demonstrations took place in other British cities. The protest was one of the biggest that has ever taken place in the UK, half a million in a population of about 60,000 is a significant number.

This article from the Guardian covers many of the people involved in the demonstration: Anti-cuts march: the protesters. You might also want to have a look at Freedom Press' Action Map March 26th Demo for an idea of the more radical groups involved.

Why did I go? I maintain anarchism as a beautiful dream, but I'm also a pragmatist and I think the state should support vulnerable groups directly, I don't see this as the role of 'Big Society', charities or private businesses. Britain is a rich country and can afford to do this. I'm appalled by the current round of cuts in services, which will devastate marginalised people and undermine the welfare state.

I didn't think the demonstration's explicit goals will be realised. The government's cuts are based on capitalist and neoliberal ideologies which have a global sweep and are bigger than the Con-Dem government in the UK. But I do think that the demonstration achieved other important things:

• It was a gigantic peaceful gathering for most people
• It was life-affirming to see so many different people together on the streets
• When you see a sight like this, you feel less isolated, you feel visible and in solidarity with other people
• It gives a sense of hope and encouragement in otherwise extremely grim times
• It is part of the current radicalisation of otherwise disenfranchised people, especially young 'uns

I also enjoyed the raw news footage of people kicking in bank windows, attacking the Olympic countdown clock, mooning the press, and chasing the police, and I hope that the people paid to clean up the damage got double time (the mess must surely be less than the trash that will litter the streets after the forthcoming and totally hateful royal wedding).

I decided to march a while ago but I couldn't decide who to march with. I knew I didn't want to get kettled or involved in any trouble, I didn't want to get arrested. This meant avoiding some groups with whom I have political sympathies. To cut a long story short, my girlfriend Kay and I decided to make our own banner late on Friday night. We played around with joke slogans, my favourites: 'Camelegg – No, Cameltoe – yes!' and the evergreen 'Die Tory Scum' but in the end we just wrote Fat Bloc, with an anarchist symbol in the word fat. It was my idea, I thought of it as a serious joke; if other groups could have their own bloc, then why not us? We made the banner with felt-tips and glitter, DIY forever!

For most of the demo the Fat Bloc consisted of me, Kay and my boyfriend Simon. The most miniscule Bloc ever! It was very cute. Clearly the three of us can handle the possibility of ridicule. People responded to us in many ways ranging from embarrassment and confusion, which only encouraged us more, to many thumbs-up, smiles of recognition and appreciation, verbal support, people wanting their pictures taken with us, many other cameras on us, and no negative snark that I heard in four hours of marching. None!

The best things were when a guy from a migrant workers' group came to stand with us, yay for coalition-building; when someone who may have been popstar of yore Holly Johnson took our picture; and when we got high-fived. I loved sneaking up behind unsuspecting protestors so that they became unwitting members of the Fat Bloc, teehee.

Inevitably, there were a few people with banners condemning 'fat cats' and 'fat pigs' and demanding the government 'cuts the flab'. We yelled them down! We said "Working class people are fat too!" "Don't stereotype fat people!" "We love fat cats!" "Keep the flab!" Lord only knows if they understood but I like to think there were a few sheepish faces and that they'll think twice before using fat stereotypes again.

Friends came and went as we demonstrated, others said they were looking out for us, and later on we met up with a bigger group of pals. People admired our glittery sign. It was great to stand together, such fun, and a really happy memory for me was seeing my friends Bill and Tammy coming towards us from out of the crowd. It's amazing to have fat community.

I had a great time being part of the Fat Bloc and would do it again in a heartbeat, and encourage others to form their own Fat Blocs. It is good to be visible on the streets as peaceful, friendly, and radical fat people, to show that we are part of social justice movements too and that no-one should give us shit. I loved the way that our placard was ambiguous enough for people to read into it what they wanted, and also that it meant something good and useful for people of all kinds.