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.

badartcollective.blogspot.com
Facebook: Bad Art Collective

Ten Reasons to Love Burger Queen

I was cautiously optimistic when I first wrote about Burger Queen and now, having attended three out of the four events, I admit I was wrong to be so circumspect and can whole-heartedly say that it was absolutely brilliant in every way. Here are ten reasons why:

1. I've never seen anything like it in my life (and I've seen a lot)
Burger Queen went beyond any preconceptions I had about that stale irony-format, the beauty contest. Instead, it was like being immersed in a total environment where the focus was always shifting between performance, activism, weirdness, joy, anger, precious moments, and where real and fake were redundant terms. The Duckie performance influence is undeniable, I think, but it has its own distinct flavour (and smell, chips!), and I've never before seen performance of this kind applied to fat in such a skilful way.

2. Woah, activism
Looking at Burger Queen as a piece of fat activism, which it is but is also much more, makes me feel really excited about fat culture, especially that which is now happening right on my doorstep. There are so many ways in which it could develop, it doesn't have to follow the work I've seen, especially in the US, which is trad-burlesque heavy, or speaks to a lowest common denominator. Burger Queen is didactic but doesn't treat the audience like morons, offers a non-preachy pomposity-free polemic, is experimental and accessible, and it turns high concepts into a beautiful shared experience where rough and smooth all mix in together. This is what happens when people who get it use their talent and imagination to create something unique and wild.

3. The details that mattered
It's the little things that count, like the fact that you could buy a burger meal with your ticket, the Burger Queen staff uniforms, the fat-centric soundtrack, the being-on-TV jokes, the morbidly obese woman singing at the end of the night, the weekly diet, and the graphic design, to name but a few of them. It was a complete experience created by a team of enablers. It made me feel that I was in one of Scottee's demented fantasies, which is not a bad place to be.

4. Timberlina
I enjoyed all the Burger Queen performances but Timberlina's ukulele-assault on the cult of LighterLife was unforgettable.

5. It was messy
There were no tidy, nice, clean, respectable fat people at Burger Queen. No wannabe good productive citizens in sight. It was all about sweat, tears, being out of puff, having physical limitations, being in a strop, showers of chips and glitter, wobbling flesh, dirty cakeholes, genderfuckery, hairy bellies, sexuality, foul mouths, and low life (which of course is high life). Hallelujah for queered-up non-assimilationist fat people, there are few things more beautiful.

6. Fat is a politic
The idea that fat is a politic rather than a dress size was put forward in Burger Queen. I'll add the caveat that I think that fat is also about particular kinds of embodiment but luckily queer theory means that I don't have to reject one in favour of another, it can be both and more. Anyway, fat is a politic is a radical suggestion because it engages people of all sizes, it shows that everyone is implicated in fat and it incites people to do something about it. And this being uttered not at some exclusive academic conference, but at a pub in Vauxhall. I love that it supports multiple ways of being fat, and doesn’t offer these false binary divisions of fat/thin, or fat activist/fat ally. I have a similar thing with The Chubsters, which is a fat queer girl gang that you don’t have to be fat, queer, a girl, or remotely aggressive to be a part of. Hurray!

7. The people
The contestants, the judges, Jude Bean, the crowd. I wanted to be best friends with everyone and it gave me a bunch of new crushes to obsess over. Favourite contestant moment: being forced to wave my hands in the air by that out-of-control queen and dodging the sweets that she pulled from her face and hurled at people angrily.

8. Being a punter
If I want to be involved with fat activism usually what happens is that I have to either travel thousands of miles, or do it myself, or by myself. Burger Queen was the first time that I could just get on the tube and enjoy being in the audience. I could see that everyone was working like crazy, the stress of putting on something like this is major, but there was none of that on my part, just eye-popping fun and an event that felt as though it was made just for me. Bliss.

9. Queer-Disability-Fat
I did an MA in the early 90s and published a book in 1998 that applied disability theory to fat activism. I also wrote about queerness in that book but the feminist publishers believed that queer was the devil's work and wouldn't print that stuff. What delights me 13-20 years later is that Burger Queen comes along, crowns the gorgeous Nina Neon, and it's clear in the loveliest way that queer and disability and fat have a lot to say to each other and can interact with each other in fantastic ways. Burger Queen is theory that I helped develop reflected in reality, and done in a way that anyone can understand, with humour and style and humanity.

10. There's going to be another one next year
Yes, yes oh yes.

Burger Queen

Amy's friend tackles the Screaming C

The Screaming C is one of the key Chubster symbols. It was designed by Chubsters Yeti and Big Blu at a Nolose in New Jersey in 2004. It's a letter C with blood dripping teeth, a wild eye, and a mouth full of attack.

It gives me a funny feeling inside when people go crafty with Chubster imagery. Tom O'Tottenham's Chubster stonemasonry often springs to mind, as does Chanko Nabe's needlework. Anyway, look what Amy Onigiri's friend made (the friend who must surely have a name only I don't know it yet).

Amy says:

My friend made me this great Chubster hoodie so I wanted to send you a picture but I couldn't get the camera on my new phone to work so I had to wait for hers. Anyway, somehow this hoodie is really badasss. Like I see people reading it and they start to say something and they stop like "Naaah, I better not." It's kind of hilarious. It makes me feel totally gangster even though I am, obviously, not. I cant figure out if it's the hoodie or the Chubster part of it or the combo. I love it.

Chubsters, Muir Beach California, June 2010

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.

Fat Feminism in Austria

German-speakers ahoy! There's a bunch of stuff about fat feminism, including an interview with me, in the super-duper Austrian magazine an.schläge.