Fat People Bash Back

I went to a talk last week by a guy who edited an anthology about Bash Back and was on tour to promote his work. Bash Back is or was a movement based in the US, instigated by anti-assimilationist anarchist queers. It's not a fat thing, but like many aspects of identity politics, there are overlaps. Bash Back used a variety of tactics, including violent direct action against people and property. I understand it as a public statement by brutalised people of defiance, aggression, and refusing to take any more shit.

I did not warm to the guy who spoke. He was just getting into the stride of a self-aggrandising monologue after an hour and a half. I found him arrogant and patronising, a big baby, and wondered if he had any idea about political cultures in the UK, or thought that people here needed educating and inspiring by US activists. He made no mention of historical violent counter-cultural struggle in Europe, such as The Red Army Faction, The Angry Brigade, or radical groups like The Weather Underground or even The Symbionese Liberation Army in the US, which look like blueprints for Bash Back, and ended very badly for the protagonists. Not even a mention of the IRA.

Added to this, I was angry at his racist dismissal of non-violent resistance, his sneering mention of Ghandi, whom he equated with the passive and politically useless caricature of the candlelight vigil (my boyfriend remarked, later on, "Well, you know, that Ghandi stuff worked for India" ie, it had the power to destroy colonialism).

As if that wasn't enough, I was also appalled by his excitement about vigilante mob responses to violence, particularly an episode where Bash Back queers torched a lesbian business because they disagreed with their politics. He said a few times that violence by queer people against assimilationist gay people is as queer as it gets. He conceptualised queer as a hierarchy of radicalism, with him and his pals at the top. But distinctions between radical and assimilationist are not always straightforward; what about Angela Mason, who was associated with The Angry Brigade, and who went on to chair the UK's primo assimilationist lesbian and gay rights organisation for many years?

I could go on complaining about him, but I won't, suffice to say that it was tragic to see baby queers and people who should know better in the audience laughing and going along with him. I felt sorry for the person who was touring with him, who was waiting for their turn to show and tell, who must have to listen to this stuff night after night.

The guy's talk was a test of endurance, but it did prompt me to think more deeply about a few of my own attitudes to political violence in relation to fat activism and my queer anarchist background. These are not always as straightforward as being 'pro' or 'anti' violence. I admire The Black Panthers, for example, and have some understanding of the context in which they bore arms, but I am flatly, completely against gun ownership and believe there is no place for them in everyday life except at the shooting range.

Here are a few more thoughts:

Fantasising about violence is understandable, it's a rare person who hasn't daydreamed about mowing down their enemies, but it is not alright if it spills into non-consensual material reality.

Violence against people is never alright, attacking property where nobody is hurt is more complicated and depends on many factors. Defacing billboards does not strike me as particularly problematic, for example, especially if you can make something more thought provoking out of them, though it's probably annoying for the person that is responsible for putting them up. But burning down someone's house because they did something heinous, as the guy claimed Bash back did? Forget it!

Adding violence to an already violent situation does not end violence, it escalates it. The people who suffer most when violence is brought into the equation are those who are already at the bottom of the pile. Has violence ever made you anything but afraid, full of rage, helpless, devastated, vengeful? I think it's a fantasy too that people ever learn a good lesson through violence, that is, the lesson that the people behind the violence want you to learn. I once went to a school where children were punished by ritualised beatings dished out by the headmaster. If you're crass enough to think this is sexy, you don't deserve to be reading my blog. What this did was create and teach a totalitarian culture of terror and snitching, but it's also one of the things that made me an anarchist, and determined to use my power to abolish systems and cultures like those at that school.

Where people are brutalised and emotions run high, violence, and symbolic violence, appear to offer a simple way out. I see this in knee-jerk responses to fat hate, for example, which construct an enemy in order to dehumanise it. But freedom sought at someone else's expense is not freedom at all, and I am really sick of this kind of aggression in the movement. The problem is that peace-building is hard work. It is a long-term commitment to mind-bending struggle and slog, it requires vision and hope. Seeing your enemy as people like you is a tough call, as is building dialogue, understanding and compromise. This is the work that comes from valuing the equality and validity of all beings, of seeking an ethical use of power. It's a while since I've thought about peace in this way, and I'm surprised that I feel so strongly about it – maybe I haven't been brutalised enough! But in reflecting on power and identity politics, I feel redetermined to invest in more imaginative, complex, and altruistic responses to violence within fat activism.

I entered the 2012 World Gurning Championships

This post isn't really about fat, but it is about beauty and ugliness. I tend to avoid writing about overlapping subjects that I think are often taken as proxies for fat, particularly within feminist theory, because I don't want to lose the centrality of fat to the things I'm working on or thinking about. But here I am making an exception because this experience was so extraordinary.

I don't know when I first encountered gurning. I think I was really young. Perhaps I found out about it from watching The Generation Game, or some local news snippet. The idea of gurning on mainstream TV is ludicrous today, but times were different then. As with life's greatest pleasures, gurning appealed and appalled in equal measure. I think it would be hard to find someone of my generation and demographic who isn't faintly obsessed by it.

Gurning, for people who don't know, is the act of pulling a really grotesque face. The idea is to rearrange your features in the most bizarre and dramatic way possible, without using your hands or any other devices. Its sheer muscle power and imagination. Gurning is about transforming your face. People who are very pretty, very ugly, old, or with supernatural facial control have an advantage as gurners, as do people with no teeth. People on certain rave drugs often find themselves gurning like crazy at 4am, but this is a different kind of gurning to that which I am talking about here.

Egremont, a small town in Cumbria, is the place to be if you are a gurner. Every September the town hosts The Egremont Crab Fair, a gathering that first took place in 1267. The Crab Fair includes a parade, an agricultural fair, a funfair, street entertainment, and The World Gurning Championships.

There are three competitions in the Championship: Junior, Ladies' and Men's. For 27 years the Ladies' competition had been dominated by Anne Woods, but age and frailty had brought about her retirement. In 2011 a younger woman took the trophy. My girlfriend Kay saw her picture in the paper one morning and thought "I could do better than that." This is how the pair of us ended up 300 miles from home, gurning for our lives in front of a packed Market Hall.

We arrived at Egremont too late to see the street parade, but in time to enjoy some of the goings-on in the field. My favourite things were the giant onions in the produce competition, the fancy pigeon competition, the ferret display, and Egremont Town Band. I wish I'd had a better view of the Cumberland and Westmoreland wrestling competition. I stroked an owl and Kay patted a horse. It was a grey day, but people weren't put off by that, or the mud, and there was a good turn-out.

We went off to get some dinner, and then returned to the Market Hall, arriving to a set by Don MacKay, a crooner who sang some karaoke pop hits to get everyone going. A pair of beautiful oil paintings of legendary gurners decorated each side of the stage, we'd come to the right place! In the build-up to the gurning competitions, we enjoyed a Junior Talent Contest, and other competitions for horn-blowing and, er, hunting songs, as well as some comedy and singing. The crowd got busier as the night went on, there was a great atmosphere.

Then it was gurning time. The compere brought on the judges: the Lord Mayor and Lady Mayoress of Copeland, the boss of Egremont and Area Regeneration Partnership, and a bigwig from Sellafield, the local nuclear power plant that employs many people in and around Egremont. They sat at a table at the side of the stage.

Anyone can sign up to take part in the Championship. You just have to go and put your name down on the list for each competition. You then get called up to the stage, the compere asks where you're from, and you go over to another guy called Kevin who puts the braffin round your neck. The braffin is a horse collar used to frame each gurner's face. You gurn, he guides you to the judges where you gurn at each of them in turn. Kevin then shuffles you to the middle of the stage, where you gurn wildly at the audience to the left, the centre and the right. Everyone gets a good look at your gurn and cheers or cringes appropriately. I didn't realise this before, but your stance is also part of the gurn, lots of people pulled a kind of ape-like, lumbering stance, most people are sort of crouch when they put on the braffin, like they're ready to spring at you. It is an assertive stance. After you've gurned, the braffin comes off, you leave the stage and watch the rest, hoping that you've given it your best.

During the wonderful kids' competition I started to see a bit more of what gurning is about, or at least what I think it's about. The rules say that you are judged on your ability to transform your face. Before the competition, I wondered if gurning drew on people's fear and hatred of disabled faces, or underclass faces. When I was a kid it was common to do disablist renditions of 'flid' or 'spazz' in the playground, indicating stupidity. I wondered, too, if the gurn was connected to racist caricatures of the primitive savage, especially given people's animalistic stances. I'm not sure, but I don't think so. Gurning looked much more to me like an embodied discourse of disrespect using the pleasures of being really grotesque. This is very queer, I think. You gurn to a panel of the great and the good, in front of an audience of people over whom they have power. I couldn't help but think that this was a great subversion of their power, and a reclaiming of power for the people. "You think you're so great? Here's what I think of you, and you can't touch me," is the sentiment I felt in the competition. It reminded me of sticking your tongue out, or pulling a face behind one's back, forms of resistance that anyone can do. Although you're gurning at the judges, you're gurning for the audience, from which you come and to which you return. Generations of gurning families take part in the Championships every year. I love that passing-on of gurning know-how.

I hadn't planned on entering myself into the gurning, but I enjoyed seeing the kids pull faces at the Lord and Lady Mayor so much that I thought, "Why not?". Who wouldn't want the chance to pull a terrible face at a manager of a nuclear power plant in front of people he hires, fires and bosses around? Kay didn't mind and didn't think I'd be stealing her thunder. I practised a face quickly, downturned mouth, crinkly chin, cross-eyes, and surprised eyebrows. That would do.

Suddenly it was the Ladies' competition and I was called up first. My legs were shaking as I got on the stage. I went and gurned as hard as I could. I couldn't really see anything because my eyes were crossed, but I made out the kindly and interested judges' expressions as I pulled the most insolent face at them I could muster. As Kevin shuffled me to the middle of the stage, I felt that I had to do something with my arms, so I pretended to be an angry bearcat and clawed at the air with my fingers. Here's a tiny video clip (.mov, 3mb). Kevin took the braffin off me and I nipped down the stairs to watch Kay take her turn. She was brilliant.

Kay's secret weapon in the competition was her fat neck, a feature that she had already put to good use in various fancy dress scenarios, and in group or formal photographs where she wishes to convey disrespect. I have a photo of her doing 'fat neck' on the jumbotron at the Aquatic Centre in the Olympic Park, for example, as well as another of her standing with a pair of armed police. I would like to get a picture of her doing fat neck with a royal, or one of the Camerons. I didn't think fat neck was enough to get her through the competition, so she pulled a variety of faces and in the weeks before the competition I coached her through a gurn that drew on the best elements. This included fat neck, protuberant wet lips, one big bulging glaring eye, one small, and some forehead wrinkles. Killer!

I feel compelled to talk about gender and gurning. The women's – or rather, ladies' – competition is secondary to the men's. I don't know how long there has been a women's competition, they aren't included on the Crab Fair's Gurning Hall of Fame, although there are notes that women entered the main competition for the first time in 1966, and 1974 was the only time a woman in that competition reached the top three. The women's prizes are smaller, there are fewer entrants, and far less fanfair, although 2012 marked the first time the Anne Woods prize, a special prize, was awarded to the women's winner.

I think it's terrible that women are secondary, though it reflects a common and wider marginalisation of women in sport in general. It might also echo the social positioning of women in northern working class communities such as Egremont, most of the entrants were from much further away whereas the men's competition is more local. But gurning is far risker for a woman than for a man. Women are supposed to be pretty and nice, and compliant. Gurning is a fantastic refusal of those social constrictions, it is a really brave thing for a woman, a lady no less, to make herself publicly and gloriously ugly, or to flaunt her age or toothlessness, and to seek reward for it. I think the guts of women who dare to gurn should be acknowledged.

There was a short break and then it was the men's competition. About twenty men took part, give or take a few. Up they popped, one after the other. Most were forgettable, but some were really amazing. How do they get their faces to do that? It was no surprise that Tommy Mattinson scooped the title for the fourteenth(?) time. In everyday life he looks like a distant cousin of George Michael, but that braffin transforms him into something eye-popping and inexplicable. I can't even describe it, let alone think about how he manages to do it. His gurn is terrifying and awesome. The runners up also did things with their faces too weird to understand.

Neither Kay nor I won the women's title, alas. But Kay came second! She won a rosette, a plaque and £20. We were elated! I think Kay's gurn must have been really good for the judges to award a southerner a prize. Helen Irving was truly deserving of the winning spot, delivering a gurn in which she, um, inflated her face. As we left the Market Hall, we saw her sitting with Anne Woods, hopefully swapping tips and notes. Gurn on, sisters.

The Bad Art Collective and Irrational Fat Activism

I just spent the weekend making Bad Art at the Researching Feminist Futures conference in Edinburgh. For two days I sat at a table and made stuff with three other members of The Bad Art Collective, a group we formed earlier this year, and various delegates who dropped by during the event to make some Bad Art with us. We had paper, pens, glitter, felt-tips, macaroni, lentils, pastels, scraperboards, glue and other media too, plus a lot of Blu-Tak to stick everything we made to the wall.

People have different ideas about what constitutes Bad Art. The four of us have posted some interpretations of it on the Bad Art Collective blog. At the conference people variously related to our Bad Art table as a project of irony, or a relaxing retreat from workshops or presentations where the 'real' work takes place. That's not how I see it at all. Drawing, making things, talking, cackling, working collectively, that's the space where things happen. I loved the moments at the weekend when people started to get over their insistence that they can't draw or 'aren't artistic' and contributed to the larger project. Better still was when what they produced made them laugh and want to do more. A felt-tip becomes a weapon.

The Bad Art Collective
Researching Feminist Futures, Edinburgh, 2-3 September 2011
Photograph by Evangeline Tsao

Our project was called Bombarded By Images and the idea was to critique the often-heard truism that women develop terrible body image because they are constantly bombarded by images in the media. We wanted to show that we are more than capable of making an abundance of our own images, and to think about and do activism that is creative, productive, full of agency and bad attitude.

Because of our theme, and because the four of us are grounded in fat activism and Fat Studies to a greater or lesser extent, a lot of what we produced was about fat, resistance, anger, fat culture, bad feminist art about bodies, being anti-social, inexpertise, enjoying stupidity. We developed a running joke about one particular theorist, whose work has done a lot of damage, and started to direct some of our work towards that, howling with laughter at what we produced and feeling really badass and full of ideas about it.

These moments were so beautiful! Two of the collective have really struggled with this particular theorist, trying to engage with their work and feeling so angry about the damage it's caused. Drawing stupid/not so stupid pictures was a true delight, it opened up a space that was beyond rational-critical dialogue, where we didn't have to play by the rules of politeness or propriety.

It's a couple of days later now and I've been thinking about that feeling. I love fat activism that is weird, grotesque, anti-social, and I feel sad that this kind of activism is sidelined or barely acknowledged or known compared to the 'real work' of changing laws, addressing inequality, righting wrongs. Those kinds of activisms are fine, I'm glad people do them, but they don't make my heart sing, and don't speak to my politics and cultural touchstones, which are of the punk, queer, anarchist variety. I think activists should consider ethics and do what they can not to support oppressive hegemonies, and I don't think you have to be po-faced about it; I like activism that makes me laugh a lot, that is prankish and evil.

Just now my friend sent me a link to Slavoj Žižek's rambling account of the London riots in August, stupidly titled Shoplifters of the World Unite. He's as windy as you'd expect an overly-lauded ageing white man academic to be, but I like his remarks about the irrationality of the riots as a form of protest. It made me think that, amongst its many qualities, Bad Art can also be thought of as a form of 'irrational' activism, fat or otherwise. The pictures and objects we made aren't waiting for anyone's approval, or official sanction by committee. Sometimes they make no sense to anyone else, or they grate, they don't behave or speak nicely, or engage politely with the other side. But they make sense to us and they make us happy, they're full of life and humour and intelligence, not to mention imaginative possibility and power. They resist and create simultaneously.

I feel excited by these ideas, and I expect I will come back to them. Full documentation of Bombarded By Images is coming as soon as I can make time to stick it on the Bad Art Collective blog – you'll just have to wait. Meanwhile, here's one of the things I made at the weekend, inspired by The Warriors, The Chubsters, The Ramones, and the Manson Family diorama that used to reside in the Chamber of Horrors at Madame Tussauds! Coloured pencils forever. You might also want to have a look at Corinna Tomrley's détournement of fat cartoon characters Bad Art + Fat Cartoons + Fat Activism = Life-Affirming Wonderousness.

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