Call for Papers: Special Issue of Fat Studies on Visual Representation

Special issue of Fat Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Body Weight and Society on Visual Representation, edited by Stefanie Snider, PhD

Visual representations of and/or by fat people are powerful tools of both oppression and empowerment. This special issue of Fat Studies seeks to explore the wide variety of ways in which visual representations have helped to give voice to and affirmed fat-positive cultures as well as fostered institutionalised fatphobia on local, national, and international levels. Further analysis of positive, negative, and neutral visual representations from a Fat Studies perspective can help to increase our cultural awareness of just how prevalent and important the visual world is to issues of social justice in our everyday lives.

Visual representations should be taken to include any and all forms of visual media, including, but not limited to: photography, the 'fine' arts, mass media imagery, film, live performance, museum installations, posters, and ephemera. Submissions do not need to be bound by historical timeline or cultural boundaries, but please be culturally- and historically-specific in your analyses. Fat Studies analyses do not need to be restricted to particular body sizes or shapes; Fat Studies approaches can examine numerous ways in which body weight, size, and shape might have particular social meaning – and in the case of this special issue of the journal, particular visual significance.

Potential topics might include, but are not limited to:

• The use of visual representations in teaching Fat Studies
• Intersections of body size, race, class, sexuality, gender, and other forms of cultural identification in television shows such as: Roseanne, The Gilmore Girls, Huge, Drop Dead Diva, Dollhouse, The Biggest Loser, Glee, Mike and Molly, etc.
• Nineteenth and twentieth century advertisements for fattening and/or dieting products
• The use of visual media to represent 'the obesity epidemic'
• Moving beyond the “rubenesque” in paintings of fat subjects

To submit a proposal for inclusion in this special issue of the journal, please send a 250-500 word summary of your article as well as a current CV to Stefanie Snider, at Snider.Stefanie@gmail.com by July 1, 2012. Any questions about the special issue can be directed to this email address as well.

Final submissions should be between 3,000 and 6,000 words, including all notes and references. If you wish to include reproductions of visual images with your essay, you will need to receive permission to do so from the artists/ copyright holders of the image(s). All authors will need to sign a form that transfers copyright of their article to the publisher, Taylor & Francis/ Routledge.

Fat Studies is the first academic journal in the field of scholarship that critically examines theory, research, practices, and programs related to body weight and appearance. Content includes original research and overviews exploring the intersection of gender, race/ethnicity, sexuality, age, ability, and socioeconomic status. Articles critically examine representations of fat in health and medical sciences, the Health at Every Size model, the pharmaceutical industry, psychology, sociology, cultural studies, legal issues, literature, pedagogy, art, theater, popular culture, media studies, and activism.

Fat Studies is an interdisciplinary, international field of scholarship that critically examines societal attitudes and practices about body weight and appearance. Fat Studies advocates equality for all people regardless of body size. It explores the way fat people are oppressed, the reasons why, who benefits from that oppression and how to liberate fat people from oppression. Fat Studies seeks to challenge and remove the negative associations that society has about fat and the fat body. It regards weight, like height, as a human characteristic that varies widely across any population. Fat Studies is similar to academic disciplines that focus on race, ethnicity, gender, or age.

Fat Panel Talk at National Portrait Gallery, London

I'm going to be taking part in a panel discussion at the National Portrait Gallery in London about fat representation. Come and join in!

In Conversation: In Praise of the Voluptuous
10 May 2012
19:00-20:00
Tickets: £5/£4

Ondaatje Wing Theatre
National Portrait Gallery
St Martin's Place
London WC2H 0HE

Overwhelmed by Burger Queen

My fat activist cake topper

Burger Queen is over for another year. It has been a totally overwhelming experience that will take me a long time to process, but here are some scraps for the meantime.

I took part in the competition this year because I loved it as a punter in 2011 and wanted to see it close-up and to immerse myself in the various fat discourses that circulate through it. I got to show off, got some applause, got to meet folks and, best of all, got to introduce the idea that a long-standing and diverse social movement of fat people exists. I didn't win the crown, and this didn't matter; although Burger Queen is framed as a competition, it is also a feast of fat embodiment and performance, it's a funny kind of competition, in a way, and it was a pleasure to see a superfat drag queen who really really wanted to win take the title. I know she will do it justice.

This is what I did for the final: for Trend I wore an outfit inspired by the Global Obesity EpidemicTM involving high-heeled trainers, hot-pants, lots of tits, arse and belly, wreaths of rainbow fat paper doll cut-outs, a light-up tiara spelling EPIDEMIC in blobby fat letters, and a multi-coloured staff topped with a model of a Big Boy. For Talent I introduced my film Lovely and Slim, showed it, and led a singalong. For Taste I made a triple-decker fat activist cake filled with cream, roasted strawberries and topped with a tiny scene of model fat activists protesting and being kettled by a fat policeman. People, I did my work. Although it was fun to take part and generally I feel very strong in myself, there were times when I felt quite vulnerable. It brought home that it’s a big deal for people who have marginalised bodies to put yourself out there and allow yourself to be judged in front of an audience. Fat or unfat, this is some people's worst nightmare, so it's pretty amazing that Burger Queen creates a place where this can happen relatively safely.

Back in work mode, Burger Queen was a rich experience for me as a sociology researcher interested in fat activism. I see the event as a great example of fat activism because it presents multiple and queer ways of experiencing fatness; although Scottee is the main performer, it is produced by a team of people some of whom are fat and some of whom are not, for a fairly diverse audience. I love how this is mixed, and how it shows that fat is a concept relevant to people of all sizes and backgrounds. It demonstrates that there isn't one single way of doing or being fat.

It also follows the relatively undocumented fat activist tradition of cultural production and community-building. Burger Queen is truly eye-popping and immersive: from the glitter curtains, the design, to the team's uniforms, from the badges to the burgers themselves, you feel as though you've entered a different and better world when you're there. I find it very freeing to see such a great array of fat bodies in performance; sometimes this is in a big in-your-face way, such as when Scottee does his show, but it is also there in the supporting cast, from Sami behind the desk, to Rebecca at the door. To talk about shared identity might be a step too far because it's a diverse group, but what Burger Queen does is make fat visible and both extraordinary and normal.

Burger Queen is fat activism because it addresses the easy as well as the difficult. It presents basic ideas such as self-love but doesn't stop there. Here are three things I have found particularly thought-provoking:

a) In the final, Scottee asked if it's possible to be a fat activist and also be engaged with controlled eating. The answer is, of course you can, but these ambiguities tend to be sidelined in fat activist rhetoric, and have historical connections to the essentialism of Second Wave feminism from which this form of fat activism has developed. It's great to question fat activist orthodoxies and to do so in a playful and thoughtful way.

b) This year has seen Burger Queen overlap with mainstream media as Scottee and Amy Lamé have made various appearances. This has resulted in a lot of fatphobic hate towards them, from the comments from this Guardian article, to hate-filled Tweets about Amy's appearance on TV. What to do with this stuff? Perform live deconstructions to your audience is what you do, which strips them of their power to hurt. Fucking amazing. Similarly, the public performance and ridicule of Rebecca's syrupy-yet-controlling Tweets from her former Weight Watchers's leader have had me howling with laughter. Sublime is the word I'm looking for.

c) At Burger Queen people play with fat identity without much previous engagement with fat activism. There have been fatsuits. In fat lib there's a general consensus that fatsuits are a bad idea and to a large extent I agree with this. Watching people who have made fortunes on the back of their ability to conform to beauty ideals fatting up in a suit to show what life is really like for fat people is nauseating. It demeans the authenticity of fat people's voices, and adds to the stereotypes about fat bodies. But I wasn't offended by the fatsuits at Burger Queen because they were performed without malice. I really love it when people do things that are rude and irreverent, when they say the unspeakable. I imagined that fatsuit performances would be an absolute no-no in some fat activist spaces, many of them actually. But one of the things I love about Burger Queen is that nobody knows the rules, nobody's stuck, there are no party lines to toe. Everyone's having a go at articulating fat, sexuality and gender in their own way. I don't agree with everything that people present at Burger Queen but it's a wild queer ride on fat, it's breaking new ground.

Ok, that's all for now.

Confessions of a Burger Queen
Ten Reasons to Love Burger Queen

Photographs
Burger Queen
Burger Queen 2011
Burger Queen 2012 Episode One
Burger Queen 2012 Episode Two
Burger Queen 2012 Episode Three
Burger Queen 2012 Episode Four
Burger Queen 2012 Final

Zines and fat activism

Heather McCormack has just published an article on Library Journal Reviews listing some fat activist zines, including A Queer and Trans Fat Activist Timeline. Alright!

Fat Activism and Body Positivity: Zines for Transforming the Status Quo

Thinking about 'a response to white fat activism from People of Color in the fat justice movement'

A group of people of colour (POC) in the US affiliated with NOLOSE released a statement this week demanding that white people in fat activism take responsibility to make the movement more inclusive and diverse. Their comments are made in the light of problems with the activist response in the US to the Georgia billboard anti-obesity campaign. It includes the following section, but please go and read the whole thing.

a response to white fat activism from People of Color in the fat justice movement

Flying by the seat of your pants, when it comes to addressing the real concerns and questions around diversity and inclusion of POC in fat activist spaces or campaigns, will no longer be good enough.

• POC in the fat justice movement deserve thoughtful and clear discussions around not just the intention of diversity and inclusion in the work you wish to do, but also the actual impact of the work within communities of color.
• POC in the fat justice movement demand and deserve that white fat activists build authentic collaborations with communities of color and work as allies.
• POC in the fat justice movement demand and deserve allies showing up to the table of our campaigns and work, rather than constantly being told they have made a place for us at theirs.
• POC in the fat justice movement clarify that our allies will practice doing the work of learning about the histories and impacts of colonization and oppression on POC, seek other allies to learn from and with, be open to dialogue, taking feedback, and allowing people's firsthand experiences of racism to be the final and authoritative voice on the subject of impact to communities of color.
• POC in the fat justice movement offer that through the work of authentic inclusivity, singular vision will become shared vision. Coalition will happen. Bridges will be mended and built.

We are looking forward to a stronger, more representational expression of fat community in which POC and poor people's voices are heard, their experiences are respected, and their work to strengthen their individual communities is supported just as they work to support others.

I support wholeheartedly the baseline value of not being a racist arse, and of working fat activism through inclusively, critically, reflexively, consciously and ethically. I appreciate that this statement has been produced constructively and with hope that this can happen.

In addition, I have two small reservations about the statement. There appears to be a universalising of identity by people who are diverse in some ways but not others, for example in terms of nationality, it is common for people in the US to speak for the whole world, and this is problematic. Perhaps a stronger statement would include alliances with people in other places. I also think that it would be helpful to bear in mind that the 'fat justice movement' is multiple and often ambiguous, rather than a fixed entity; there are many movements, and broad demands will need to be contextualised each time. For example, bringing a critical and anti-racist consciousness to the activism that involves a conversation with a friend in one time and place is going to be different to that which entails mobilising communities for a specific goal in another.

The NOLOSE statement isn't the first time that fat and queer people of colour have offered critiques of the movement, Tara Shuai's A Different Kind of Fat Rant: People of Color and the Fat Acceptance Movement from 2008 named areas of fat activism where there is endemic racism. I hope that in speaking up, NOLOSE and Shuai will encourage people to adopt more critical and conscious approaches to fat activism. I fear that it might be a long time until many fat activists, especially white people, are able to do that. I am afraid that people of colour will be forced to continue to do the hard work of consciousness raising, which is clearly unacceptable.

Meanwhile, I am grateful for Shuai's rant, and the NOLOSE statement, I think they are brave things to do in a context where critical viewpoints within the movement are not always welcome or forthcoming. I don't know why so many fat activists seem resistant or unable to engage critically and reflexively with what they do, but I see this happening a lot. Why is anti-racist practice and critical reflexivity treated like an afterthought, if at all? Do people leave their brains and consciences behind when they do fat activism? It seems that way. How could it be different? Perhaps through disseminating work that demonstrates there are many different ways of doing fat activism, including methods that foreground self-reflexivity and anti-racism? Through engaging with critical awareness more generally? Let's talk about this.

Confessions of a Burger Queen

Burger Queen photo by Holly Revell
https://www.facebook.com/hollyrevellartist

I think of Burger Queen as a platform for queered fat performance framed as a beauty pageant that is currently taking place in London. This year there are four heats and a final adjudicated by an ever-changing line-up of subcultural celebrity judges. The finalists will compete for a chance to win some tasty prizes, including a heavily glittered Unhappy Meal. There are many things that I love about Burger Queen, not least that it's really tongue-in-cheek and also deadly serious.

Last Thursday I took part in the second heat of this year's Burger Queen. I entered because I really enjoyed being a spectator last year, wanted to support it, and basically had a moment of madness when I clicked 'submit' on the application. I think it takes a lot of guts to put on the event, I know it's hard to find people to take part because, sadly, there's a world of non-show-off self-hating fat people out there. It's also telling that a sponsor pulled out at the last minute because they did not want to be seen to be promoting obesity. So I support what Burger Queen is doing and I want to see it thrive because, as well as love sweet love, what the world needs now is a full-on parade of shameless fatties.

On Thursday I was one of three contestants, the other two being Ginger Johnson and Bella Fata, who brought style, action and sass in spades. We holed up in a tiny room above the Royal Vauxhall Tavern, put on our outfits and hung out, waiting to be called to the stage for the three rounds: Trend, Talent and Taste.

For Trend I decided to bring some fat feminist realness to the room, it being International Women's Day and all. I wore a lurid tie-dye kaftan, shortened to show my legs; a knitted garter that spells F-A-T; some home-made bangles; a copy of Shadow On A Tightrope around my neck; and a giant fat feminism symbol on my head. This is the symbol designed by Karen Stimson for the Largesse Fat Liberation Archive. I also carried my Fat Bloc sign. For Talent, I showed some pictures and told some stories about fat activism, and ranted the Fat Liberation Manifesto. For Taste I made an Obesity Timebomb: a lemon cake topped with whipped cream, little hand-drawn toppers of the Burger Queen team, and a sparkler. There were three sparklers but I lit them too early backstage and they burned out – whoops!

I had completely underestimated how much work and nerves would be a part of my Burger Queen experience. This stuff takes a lot of effort! I don't know how the Burger Queeners pull it out of the bag every week, it took me a day and a half to recover. Luckily for me the work paid off, the gods and the judges smiled kindly on me, I won the heat and will be part of the final on 29 March.

I think I'm going to need a bit of time to process this experience. I still feel as though I'm in the middle of it, which I am because I need to prepare for the final. It's hard to have perspective. I suppose one of the big things for me is about how Burger Queen has affected how I think about and do fat activism. I love playing with the symbols that have become a part of my research, and it feels really exciting to bring the ideas I've been working with away from the academy and into different kinds of places, I think it's great that people have been so receptive to that. Mainly though, it's been a lot of fun, a hoot in fact.

Burger Queen 2012 Heat 2: photographs by Holly Revell

Burger Queen

My fat queer band gets a Spanish outing

Following their fat activism special, Una Buena Barba, the super-cool queer feminist online mag from Spain, asked me to write something for them, so I did. 'Homosexual Death Drive: Diario de una Bollera Gorda y Su Novia' has just been published in the new issue of the magazine, available for free online. It's a little diary about my band. Download and read it today.

PS. I'm strangely excited to see some of my lyrics in Spanish.

Primero te follamos
Luego te matamos
Luego te comemos
Luego te cagamos

Una Buena Barba 4

Original unedited English version (.pdf, 52kb)

Herbie Popnecker: the Little Fat Nothing that saved the world (regularly)

A while back my boyfriend, Simon Murphy, brought home a comic for us to look at. I can't remember who did it or what it was about, possibly it was something by Art Spiegelman. But I do remember a little row of drawings of fat cartoon characters at the top of the page. One of them stood out: Fat Fury! I wanted to know more about him. Simon did some research and ordered some copies of the comics featuring Fat Fury, and he wrote a little piece about it for a zine that never came to be published. I liked the piece a lot, Simon agreed to me publishing it here, so have a read. PS. I'm wearing my Fat Fury t-shirt as I write this.

Herbie Popnecker: the Little Fat Nothing that saved the world (regularly)
by Simon Murphy

The comic character Herbie Popnecker first saw the light in 1958, and after several well-received appearances in the mystery comic Forbidden Worlds, he got his own title in 1962. Written by Richard Hughes under a variety of pseudonyms, and drawn by Ogden Whitney, he was very popular for a few years as the flagship title of the American Comics Group.

Herbie is not your typical comics protagonist. He is a dorky-looking boy of about 13, short and fat with glasses and apparently no friends. He seems bored most of the time, almost sleepy, and doesn’t talk much. And yet he lives a secret parallel life as one of the most famous and powerful beings in the universe, known and loved by all. He’s everybody’s favourite fatty, popular with the ladies (in whom he has no interest), but doesn’t let it go to his head.

Herbie manages this without his parents even showing the slightest glint of curiosity or suspicion. His eternally disappointed and resentful Dad sees only a "little fat nothing," even when faced with concrete evidence of his super strength or time-travelling abilities. But Herbie doesn’t suffer any of the angst of characters like Spiderman or The Thing, he just ignores his stupid parents and gets on with it. They think he is an ignorant fat lump, and their lack of interest and low expectations would be tragic in real life, but in Herbie’s world it just means he can do whatever he wants without them noticing. If they don’t love him at least they don’t cramp his style: ideal parents. Teachers and other authority figures are equally stupid, yet when transformed into costumed superhero Fat Fury he is required to put the world that rejects him in order, which he does pretty much effortlessly, with no reward or recognition. He exposes the absurdities of that world and invites you to identify with him, join him on the cool side of the generation gap and be in on the joke. In a world of nagging, pushy but out-of-touch adults, Herbie is a role model for thrill-seeking misfit kids and under-the-radar fat freaks – one of the first.

In a range of truly bizarre stories he fights crazy monsters and criminals of the past present and future, dropping worms into Chairman Mao’s mouth in one story and leading a strike of Satan’s imps in another, as well as hanging out with The Beatles, Liz Taylor, the Queen, President Johnson, Nikita Khrushchev and other real-world people. Ironically, he is less successful at fighting criminals like Hattaman, Pizzaman and Roderick Dump when disguised as Fat Fury, because Herbie is more famous than his superhero alter-ego, and he isn’t very good at the traditional hero stuff. It’s only really as Fat Fury that he is the butt of any jokes. His powers are many and varied but never really explained. Some, like walking in the sky and talking to animals, seem innate and possibly genetic. His fatness is itself the source of these powers (he loses them when a bite from a snake-beast makes him temporarily thin), while other powers are the result of sucking on a particular lollipop. He is never without a lollipop in his mouth, but his special secret power lollies are usually kept in a locked and labelled chest of drawers in his room, and occasionally on a kind of utility belt. There is one for every situation: time travel, invisibility, digging holes, super strength etc. He also has a knack for having just the right random object on him to foil the baddies and save the day.

In retrospect you can place him somewhere in the camp pop culture melting pot of the 1960s that produced the Batman and Monkees TV series, but the fact that readers identified so closely with him sets him aside I think; he is a ridiculous character, but powerful, with a message of quiet defiance for the geeks misfits and fatties who read him. He’s not exactly subversive, the comic has its fair share of the racism and sexism of the period, but 45 years after his disappearance you can still get Fat Fury t-shirts on eBay.

Simon Murphy's excellent zine about fuzz history and culture, Good Fuzzy Sounds, can be ordered via thesimonmurphy@yahoo.com Check out his occasional blog http://www.musical-den.blogspot.com

Homosexual Death Drive: Fat Queer Old Lady Punks

I'm in a band and, even though this is a little self-referential, I want to write about it, so I will.

My band is called Homosexual Death Drive and it consists of me, my girlfriend Kay Hyatt, and a couple of occasional collaborators. Although we have both performed in bands before, neither Kay nor I would think of ourselves as musicians; we make songs with the barest minimum of skill, often just singing, or making a song using instruments, pedals and home-made gadgets that are easy to play. We have a small repertoire, did our first performance in December 2010, and hope to release a 7-inch EP on vinyl some time this year. We've played a handful of shows and no one has booed us off yet. Soon there will be some videos and digital downloads. We don't have a website, just a little corner of Facebook for now.

Corinna Tomrley painted this picture of Homosexual Death Drive entitled 'Showbiz'.

I don't know about Kay but I think of Homosexual Death Drive as part of a queercore tradition in punk. Our name comes from a branch of queer theory that's preoccupied with anti-social sensibilities and is somewhat nihilistic – just like us! Our songs, mostly written by me, inhabit fairly traditional punk turf: revolution, riots, burning things down, but we also sing tenderly about being alone, regret, survival. I use Homosexual Death Drive as a place where I can express unspeakable things. We try and make our performances energetic and memorable, this sounds high-minded but I try to pass on the same feelings of freedom and openness that I've felt when seeing and being inspired by other people performing. It doesn't always work, performing can often feel quite humiliating but I still feel compelled to do it because there's something good about falling on your arse in public, being okay with being the buffoon, letting people take from that what they will.

Since I was a teenager punk has been this amazing force in my life. Punk means many things to different people but for me it has to do with queerness, belligerence, impertinence, politics, rawness, immediacy, anti-authoritarianism. These are great sensibilities for girls and women to draw on. But punk can be very conformist. When I was a girl I thought punks were always thin, I never saw a fat punk anywhere, I still struggle to name many, let alone fat queer punks beyond Nomy or Beth, certainly no one like me then or now. Being a real punk was the main thing that motivated me to want to be thin. Aged 15, 16, 17 I wanted to look like Iggy Pop on the cover of Raw Power, I thought that's how it would have to be if I wanted to be recognised as a punk (this would also have meant being a man and being a drooling drug addict). I never got thin, and always looked chubby and wholesome, even when I behaved otherwise.

With Homosexual Death Drive I feel like I'm carrying on the lifetime's work of reclaiming punk for myself. Fat used to be the thing that I thought was incompatible with being punk, but it turns out that it's central, it's an asset. Often people will never have met anyone like us, they have no idea about fat activism, they see us and perhaps expect us to be comic, or fulfil a stereotype. Then we turn out to be something else, something they never expected from a pair of fat old dykes. Our bodies are a rare spectacle of public fatness unmediated by hatred, fear or prurience. We invite people to look and listen and relate. The people we play to seem hungry for people like us, they are desperate for evidence, that until now has always been slightly out of reach, that disproves the inevitability of fatphobia. It feels good to be able to deliver this in some way.

The band is still new and tentative and I don't know how it will develop. I'm happy with the way it's going and the way we mix fat, queer and punk together. That's all I'm going to say for now.

Homosexual Death Drive are playing R I O T S N O T D I E T S #5 along with Halo Halo, Bellies, and Town Bike, plus a screening of But I'm A Cheerleader from 6pm onwards, Saturday, 11 February 2012 at West Hill Hall, Compton Ave, Brighton, United Kingdom. It costs £6. Please come.


http://tinyurl.com/homodeathdrive

Judith Stein and Meridith Lawrence: Fat Feminists Share Historic Activist Recordings

Meridith Lawrence and Judith Stein

Last year I had the great good fortune to spend a bit of time with Judith Stein and Meridith Lawrence at their beautiful home in Massachusetts.

Stein and Lawrence are partners who pioneered fat activism in and around Boston in the early 1980s through support groups and gatherings called, variously, Boston Fat Liberation, Boston Area Fat Liberation, Boston Area Fat Feminist Liberation, and Boston Area Fat Lesbians. Stein was responsible for a slew of publications about fat, lesbian feminism and Jewish identity, and her New Haggadah is included in the collection at the National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia. She was also instrumental in politicising the Boston Women's Health Book Collective around fat, which led to the inclusion of fat feminism in Our Bodies Ourselves. Stein introduced many dykes to fat feminism through their presence at the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival, and through collaborations with other fat activists in the US.

During my visit, the pair shared with me recordings of a couple of radio shows they made with other contributors in 1984 and 1985 called 'Plain Talk About Fat' and '30 Big Minutes With Fat Liberation' respectively. These shows were produced for International Women's Day by a radio station at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Stein and Lawrence permitted me to make digital versions of the show for people to download and listen to.

Plain Talk About Fat - 1984 (.mp3 9.3mb)

30 Big Minutes With Fat Liberation - 1985 (.mp3 13mb)

I don't know about you but I find these shows beautiful, moving, funny, right-on, and a sheer pleasure to listen to. The team's creative use of radio is gorgeous, I like the non-professional nature of it, it feels very proto-DIY culture, the rough edges are what makes these recordings so special, and the lively atmosphere is delightfully contagious.

I think many fat activists today are alienated from historical fat activisms, especially pieces of work that were produced by radical lesbian feminists, and which formed the backbone of the movement for years. These recordings give a great idea of what fat feminist culture sounded like at the time, and offer hints about the forms that fat activist cultural production might take.

I'm very grateful to the lesbian feminists, many of whom were also Jewish, who helped develop and shape fat activism in its earlier incarnations. I offer deep gratitude too to Stein and Lawrence, not just for their hospitality towards me, but also for helping to build a movement that has had such a great influence on my life.

Selected publications

Stein, J. (1981) 'Fat Liberation: No Losers Here', Sojourner, 6:9, 8.

Stein, J., Sears, R., Mitchell, P., Newmark, R. & Purnell, J. (1981) 'The Political History of Fat Liberation: An Interview', The Second Wave, 3: 32-37.

Stein, J. (1982) Telling Bobbeh Meisehs: Notes on Identity and the Creation of Jewish Lesbian Culture, Cambridge, MA: Bobbeh Meisehs Press.

Stein, J. (1983) 'On Getting Strong: Notes From a Fat Woman, in Two Parts', in: Schoenfielder, L. & Wieser, B. (eds.) Shadow on a Tightrope: Writings by Women on Fat Oppression. Iowa City: Aunt Lute, 106-110.

Stein, J. (1984) A New Haggadah: A Jewish Lesbian Seder. Cambridge MA: Bobbeh Meisehs Press.

Stein, J. (1986). Get Your Foot Off My Neck: Fat Liberation. Gay Community News, 28 June 1986.

Stein, J. (1997) 'Making A Big Splash: The Pleasures of Water Aerobics' [Online]. Berkeley, CA: Radiance. Available: http://www.radiancemagazine.com/issues/1997/spring97_jstein.html [Accessed 23 January 2012].

Plain Talk About Fat and 30 Big Minutes With Fat Liberation by Judith Stein, Meridith Lawrence et al is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://obesitytimebomb.blogspot.com. This means you can share these recordings as long as you credit them, but you can't change them or profit from them. If you want to talk about licencing issues, contact Charlotte Cooper at this blog and she will put you in touch with the people who made the original recordings.

Thanks to Simon Murphy for help with digitising the audio.

Body Love Revolutionaries Telesummits 2012

I'm taking part in a series of telesummits called Body Love Revolutionaries, about fat culture and community, organised by Golda Poretsky, which runs more or less weekly from 31 January to 28 February 2012.

On 23 February I'm going to be talking about fat and queer and, more than likely, femme with gorgeous gussies Bevin Branlandingham and Jessica Jarchow. We'll be online at 7pm GMT (use a Time Zone Converter to find out what that means for you).

What's a telesummit? I've never participated in one before but I think it's like a conference phone call where anybody can ring in but where there are invited guests who will say their piece and who will be available for questions and discussion. This particular series of telesummits is accessible via Skype, and possibly other free internet telephony applications, which means that people participating internationally and long-distance needn't rack-up huge phone bills. The downside for people outside North America, where the telesummits are being organised, is that the time difference can be quite brutal. Recordings of the telesummits will be available free for 24 hours after they take place, as long as you register, and then for a fee on a sliding scale.

Register for access details at http://www.bodyloverevolution.com

Here's the schedule for the rest of the telesummits, with a whole mess of links. All of the times are in Eastern Standard Time, use the Time Zone Converter link above for local times.

Tuesday 31 January, 8pm EST
Activism
Peggy Howell, Amanda Levitt and Marilyn Wann.

Thursday 2 February, 7pm EST
Health
Linda Bacon and Ragen Chastain.

Tuesday 7 February, 8pm EST
Fatshion
Marie Denee, Rachel Kacenjar and Yuliya Raquel.

Thursday 9 February, 8pm EST
Sex
Hanne Blank and Virgie Tovar.

Thursday 16 February, 8pm EST
Blogging
Marianne Kirby, Margitte Leah Kristjansson, and Brian Stuart.

Tuesday 21 February, 8pm EST
Fitness
Jeanette DePatie and Anna Guest-Jelley.

Thursday 23 February, 3pm EST
Fatness/Queerness
Bevin Branlandingham, Jessica Jarchow and me.

Tuesday 28 February, 8pm EST
Politics/History
Paul Campos and Amy Erdman Farrell.

You can add yourself to the Facebook Event and tell all your friends, and Tweet about it with the hashtag #blrev if you're so inclined. Golda's got it all covered.

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!"

Healthy Lives, Healthy People and the fat activism that really moves me

I'm slow to respond to the Department of Heath's latest report on obesity, Healthy Lives, Healthy People: A call to action on obesity in England. It's difficult to distinguish this report from any of the other obesity policy documents produced by the British government since it got caught in the grip of fat panic, since its prime objective continues to be the elimination of stupid, burdensome, poor fat people.

Newspaper reports have focussed on the report's pathetic proposal that people eat fewer calories, but what interests me more is how this work is to be funded. The ConDem government wants to spend as little as possible on obesity, which sounds good initially because it means that the tax I pay can go towards more pressing things, like rescuing banks and funding weapons and wars. If they had any sense they would ditch projects like Change4Life, the anti-obesity initiative that will not die, but they realise that the country needs scapegoats and it makes them look good if they can be seen to be doing something about The Problem of Us. What worries me about the resurrection of Change4Life is that placing it in corporate hands makes it much less accountable and instead of seeing less of this type of nonsense, its profitability will likely make it more ubiquitous. Curse them!

Obesity policy is not the thing that inspires me to do fat activism. I understand that engaging with it is important, it's the type of thing that makes some people come alive and motivates them to do extraordinary things (Lynn McAfee and Sondra Solovay are two fat activists whose work springs to mind) but I do it reluctantly, it is a chore.

Over the past couple of years, as I've been researching fat activism in more depth, I've become more able to articulate what it is in particular that does excite me. In general terms it's work that is anti-assimilationist, queer, experimental, creative, imaginative, 'irrational.' I live for fat activism that embraces risk, wildness, playfulness, prankishness, and which does not require people to be on their best behaviour, though egalitarian doing-no-harm ethics count. The fat activism that touches me is the work that emphasises hope, agency, sparkiness. Banner-waving, petition-signing, rational debate and collective action are valuable kinds of activism, but I also like things that push the limits of what activism can be.

Here's an example. I went to the fantastic Sex Worker Open University (SWOU) this week. This is a grassroots project by and for sex workers and allies that engages with the complexities of sex work and its many related issues. The SWOU offered workshops, presentations, discussions and hang-outs. On Saturday night the organisers produced an absolutely fantastic programme of films and performance. It's hard to put into words what made it so good, I'm still working it out but it had a lot to do with people presenting ideas and experiences that are generally unallowed or unvoiced; glimpses of people, their unashamed embodiment and sexuality; a lot of strength and defiance presented with amazing smartness and good humour, friendliness, warmth. Such a tonic. The night ended with a performance that involved a sequence of spectacular arse-shaking and lots of wobbling flesh. My eyes are still on stalks. The performer had such confidence and moves, the whole thing was beautiful, nuanced, intelligent and deeply bawdy. It made my heart pound, I couldn't believe what I was seeing, it was a one of those visual treats that makes you feel so glad to be alive. I went to bed thinking about bodies, flesh, pleasure, sexuality, freedom, abstractions that somehow fill me with hope, which is an important function of activism. I found out later that the performer had fat politics of her own, and it showed in what she did. When I think about the fat activism that moves me, this is along the lines of what I'm thinking about. Healthy Lives, Healthy People can suck it.

Disrupting fat narratives through Synchronised Swimming

A temporary change of pace...

I was into synchronised swimming when I was 11 or 12 or so. I really loved to swim anyway and used to spend hours at Hereford Baths with anyone who would go with me, and also by myself. I don't know how I met my friend Mary Anne but she was already part of the synchro group there and she encouraged me to come too.

The group was pretty small and we'd meet once a week or so in the diving pool at the Baths to practise figures and try and earn proficiency badges. The more skilled swimmers would practise their routines. Sometimes we'd all practise group routines, which we'd map out first on land in the Club Room, walking it through, using our arms to approximate leg movements. I remember a very dynamic sequence choreographed to the theme song from Hawaii-5-0, its exoticism was preposterous in the prosaic nature of our surroundings. We were encouraged to take part in competitions, I remember travelling to ancient swimming halls in cities near by, never really doing very well.

One year, possibly 1980 or 1981, the swimming pool decided to stage a water pantomime, Cinderella in fact. For those who don't know, a pantomime is a theatrical show produced in the Xmas holidays, typically featuring a set of conventions that can be traced back to Restoration theatre and Commedia dell'Arte. The Hereford Baths' water pantomime was just someone's weird idea. There was no scenery, the costumes were minimal, as was the plot, but there was a Dame, a Principle Boy and Girl, a bit of singing, some slapstick, and lots of swimming routines featuring the synchro club. I was in the chorus.

I'm right in the middle of the second row from the front

I'm remembering all this today because I've been thinking about how my identity as a fat person has developed over the years. By the time I was 11 or 12 years old my weight was already problematised in my family; I had been dieted sporadically from around seven or eight, called names, and had attention drawn to the size of my tummy. By the time I went through puberty my identity as a fat girl had solidified. My body was surveilled for fat during Physical Education sessions at school, I was being marked out as different by my schoolmates too, who also called me fat names. I was different, by this time I'd had many experiences that would make me different to my peers, but these invisible differences were less meaningful to others, instead my difference was coded through my chubby young body.

I could develop any number of these threads at this point, but I'll leave my puberty, family, school and classmates behind and come back to the swimming which is interesting to me not just because of its extreme kitsch, but also because it both supported and disrupted a gendered fat spoiled identity.

All the synchronised swimmers were girls, the oldest and best swimmers were about 16 years old. They were really powerful swimmers, very strong and athletic, and yet all I can remember about them are narratives about their perceived femininity. There was a lot of talk about make-up, tits, swimsuits, and their bodies were always there being watched and admired. They were the ones the younger swimmers aspired to, including me. I'm really struck by the whiteness of the people in the photograph above, and I'm reminded of how people in that world were generally lower class, and how synchro may have been an attempt to generate respectable feminine identities. Despite this, the leads in the water pantomime were played by two friends who interpreted Cinderella and the Prince through romanticised butch-femme synchro duets (jeez, no wonder I turned queer). I suppose what I'm getting at is that I can't dismiss this early experience of girl sport as entirely about feminine governmentality.

Synchro reinforced the problematic nature of my body. At the synchro club as well as elsewhere it was noted that I was too big, I didn't win medals, I was mediocre, I was not elegant. I compared myself to other swimmers and found myself lacking and I was frustrated by the many moves that I did not have the strength or flexibility to perform. At the same time I felt very free in the water. I loved swimming in the deep, chilly diving pool, all that deep blue liquid space around me, performing moves called Dolphin, Marlin, Swordfish, Tub, sculling this way and that. I still feel the lack and frustration of my body, but many of the physical skills I learned in the club have stayed with me, and to this day some of my greatest embodied pleasures involve swimming and water.

Perhaps most of all, these memories of doing synchro and becoming fat help me disrupt the narrative I've internalised of the fat and lazy kid. I was a very active kid, and I was still fat. The things They say I'm supposed to believe about myself just aren't true. This makes me want to disrupt and complicate those restrictive narratives even more, including the counter-narratives of perfect healthist fat poster children.

One last thing, it just occurred to me that these early experiences made it possible for things that came later, they helped me build a sense of my body's capabilities that developed into self-expression, survival, activism, sexuality, and which inform my politics and worldview somewhat profoundly. I can see a link between synchro and punk, synchro and feminism! It's so funny that the latter can feed off the former. It helps me understand how important those early embodied experiences are in terms of building confidence and agency. I'm pretty certain that Hereford's synchro team was not explicitly an incubator for the future fat activists of the UK, which is why I also doubt that those things can be taught. There's a danger of hammering it out of young people, it can't be taught by rote, that spark can't be institutionalised, they have to find embodied freedom and agency in their own way, and even then it won't be straightforward.

Call for Submissions: Fat Positive Anthology

Deadline: November 15, 2011

Virgie says: I'm seeking personal essays of 1500-3000 words for a fat positive anthology to be released in 2012. I’m seeking essays that either (1) focus on a specific event/experience that was truly flabulous or (2) tell the story of how you became a fierce fatty. I encourage contributors to hone in on a particular theme—like romance, parenting, family, fatshion, dating, performance—to use as a lens through which to tell your story. Fierce, sassy, thoughtful, authentic, non-fiction, previously unpublished, autobiographical stories from fatties who identify as women are welcome. The vision for this anthology is one of fun, unapologetic fat celebration and love!

Envision the book you would have wanted to read when you started out on your journey to fat positivity. This will be that book for a lot of people. So, share what you know and what you’ve learned, the way you navigate the world, your experiences, and don’t leave out the juicy parts!

Some guiding questions that may help as you’re writing:
-how did you become a fierce fatty?
-how do you create positive spaces in your life?
-what was a pivotal moment or experience that led to fat positivity for you?
-how do you talk to friends/family about being a fatty/fat pos?
-how do you "do" fatshion?
-how does being a fatty impact dating, sexuality and romantic relationships for you?
-has performance (e.g., fat belly dance or fat burlesque) impacted your body love experience?
-what people/communities make you feel fabulous?
-what role does your fierce fatness play into your friendships or family relationships?

Don’t feel limited by this list of suggestions, please!

Please send electronic submissions only. Attach your submission in MS Word (.doc) format to fatposanthology@gmail.com. Please include a short bio and your contact information in the body of the e-mail. Please direct questions to the abovementioned email. Also, if you feel you have a great fat pos tale but maybe don't feel ready to take on writing your story, I'm doing a limited number of interviews.

Contributors of accepted submissions will be paid $50 and receive a writing credit in the book.

Please feel free to distribute this call.

xo,
Virgie Tovar
Author, fat activist/lifetime fat girl, and MA, Human Sexuality

www.VirgieTovar.weebly.com

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

Stereotyping fat in the visual language of the Left

I've written before about how sections of the Left have failed fat activism in the UK, and about how fat and class are depicted within this political visual rhetoric. It's truly depressing how opportunities to develop broad analyses of embodied oppression, as well as activist strategies and productive coalitions, are thwarted because fat is continually seen as laughable, trivial, and nothing to do with the real struggle.

Sometimes it is possible to take part in productive, if difficult, dialogue. Today, for example, I had an exchange with the usually fantastic Anarchist Media Project (AMP) over an image on their blog of a fat capitalist guzzling an innocent thin person in Children of Britain, Know Your Place: BORN POOR, DIE POOR. I left a comment and asked the project to stop using images of fatness to represent greed, capitalists and corruption and pointed out that fat people tended to be of low socioeconomic status. I said that stereotypes were hurtful and alienating, and I suggested some things that they could read to educate themselves about fat politics.

The good news is that the AMP said they would think about this stuff. They said that the image by saying it was from a famous vintage cartoon by a socialist artist called Robert Minor. I replied that I understood that there are historical precedents in the visual language of anarchism, and in the Left in general, of using fatness as a symbol of ruling class greed and corruption. However, the discourse around fatness has changed and is now part of a moral panic that also includes elements of classism, racism, fear and hatred of disability and difference. I said that it is not enough to use these vintage images without interrogating them or acknowledging that contexts have changed.

The annoying part of the exchange, reiterated by a later comment, was that "In fact we saw the suit, and nothing but the suit." There's something really weasely about this, it has a whiff of denial about it. They're offering a kind of fat-blindness that could be interpreted as "we don't care if someone's fat or thin, we don't even notice it," but is more like: "we don't see people like you, you don't exist in any meaningful way to us." Another commenter made a mean little joke at my expense, which hardly helped.

On other occasions I just want to throw my hands up in the air. This brings me to Martin Rowson, the man who has done more than any other political cartoonist, even Steve Bell, to associate fatness with everything that is disgusting. Here are a few charmers from his oeuvre, returned just by Googling his name. Will somebody please have a word with him?

My tolerance for the fatphobia in these kinds of images has evaporated because I read them as an ongoing betrayal by people who might otherwise be comrades. I am not proposing that images be censored, and I don't want a visual language of fatness that is reduced to a happy-clappy set of 'positive images'. I want to be able to look at whatever I want as much as anybody else does, and I want to be challenged by what I see. With Rowson it's not even about being squeamish over grotesque pictures. What I would like is for progressive, freedom-loving people on the radical Left to think more about the complexities of representing fat and to stop selling out on people's bodies. Liberation cannot be built on stereotypes.

Lew Louderback, More People Should Be FAT, November 1967

In 1967 Llewellyn Louderback published an article in The Saturday Evening Post called 'More people should be FAT'. This was one of the first, if not the first, pieces of critical writing about fat in the popular media in the US. The article was read by Bill Fabrey, who contacted Louderback, and it helped spawn NAAFA and everything that followed.

The article is pretty compelling several decades later, I think. He makes a good case for abandoning fatphobia within a context where such claims would have been seen as pure oddball territory. It's pre-feminist, Ann Louderback gets mentioned but does not have a voice of her own in the piece. Given the influence of feminism on fat activism, it's strange to see its earlier focus on men. I like Lew's lively prose and would direct readers not only to his book Fat Power but also to his genre novels, which he wrote for a living, especially the lurid Operation Moon Rocket.

Louderback is still around, though sadly Ann died some years ago. I had the pleasure of meeting him in 2009, and we correspond from time to time.

The article is predictably obscure but, by magic, I have a copy of it. Here it is, hot off the scanner.

Louderback, L. (1967). More People Should Be FAT. Saturday Evening Post. Philadelphia, PA: The Curtis Publishing Company. November 4, issue 22. 10-12.

Louderback, L. [pseudonym Nick Carter]. (1968) Operation Moon Rocket, London: Tandem.

Louderback, L. (1970) Fat Power, New York: Hawthorn Books.

Bombarded by Images

I'm going to be taking part in an artist's residency in Edinburgh, 2-3 September 2011 as a member of the Bad Art Collective. Our thing is called 'Bombarded by Images'. Come and join in if you can.

Fatty Animals: I do not mind fatty!!

When I was a kid I lived in Hong Kong for a couple of years as part of what I have come to understand as a weird experiment in class and colonialism. I'll explain that in more depth in Chapter Three of my memoirs, whenever I come to write them, but for now I just want to say that Hong Kong in 1976 was when I first encountered Hello Kitty and, to a seven year old girl, that stuff was like crack. I've never been able to shake the habit and as a middle-aged woman I still go gaga for hyper-cute Asian graphics. I've been lucky enough to spend time in Japan in recent years, where I have pawed and prodded my way through the country's top stationery departments.

In London, where I live, Artbox is where I go for a fix. I was there yesterday, hyperventilating greedily over pencil-cases and plastic key covers. I bought this notebook. The cover has the picture of a rabbit or a bear with fat cheeks. The text says: "Fatty Animals: I do not mind fatty!!" and on the back there are more pictures of the fat rabbit eating a biscuit, a fat bear sitting and puffing, and more text: "We like to eat and hate to move. We are fatty animals". The paper inside the notebook is unadorned.

I did a little bit of peeping and checking this afternoon. Mind Wave sells character-based stationery and cute stuff in Japan and look like the originators of Fatty Animals. If they have Fatty Animals on their site, my Japanese is not good enough to find it, but there are other websites featuring Fatty Animals products, like pencils and pencil-cases, and other notebook styles.

I was so interested to see this stuff because I think it demonstrates a popular resistance to dominant obesity discourse in Japan, a place where Western fat activists might assume there is none, and where people in the West commonly assume there are no fat people. The reiteration of fat as being caused by eating biscuits ane being lazy is problematic, but the line: "I do not mind fatty!!" is pretty amazing, I think, as both tolerance and celebration of fatness. It ties in neatly with Fat Studies work about obesity rhetoric and pets (Cooper, 1997, Kulick, 2009). I like the way that this form of engagement with obesity discourse has travelled and messes with neat assumptions about who is making fat culture, where and how. What can I say? It's excellent to see this playing out through the medium of anthropomorphic animals and cute stationery.

Cooper, C. (1997) 'Would You Put Your Best Friend on a Diet?'. Yes! London. 4:23 June/July. 14-15.

Kulick, D. (2009) 'Fat Pets', in: Tomrley, C. & Kaloski Naylor, A. (eds.) Fat Studies in the UK. York: Raw Nerve Books, 35-50.