Fat Talks Back at WOW2013

Women of the World (aka WOW) is an annual festival at the South Bank in London. It's a mainstream feminist event and visiting it feels a bit like listening to an extended episode of Woman's Hour – not everyone's idea of heaven! But WOW is a big deal, it's hosted at the Royal Festival Hall, one of the jewels of London, and many people come. There are panels and presentations, activities and performances.

This year, WOW bit the bullet and invited a bunch of us to do a panel on fat. Corinna Tomrley chaired, and I participated, alongside Isha Reid and Caroline Walters. We called the panel Fat Talks Back because of the history in mainstream feminism of marginalising fat within broader discussions of 'body image,' 'beauty,' 'dieting' and so on. We thought of the space as an opportunity to speak for ourselves.

I know the hard-working organisers had no intention of pushing us to the back, and they made every effort to make space for us, but I also had a sneaky giggle to myself because the room was in quite an obscure place in the building, and I was reminded of how the fat clothes are always pushed to the back of the shop. This made it especially delightful that we packed out the room. I don't know the exact figures but I think over 100 came, and it was standing/squatting room only.

Corinna organised the panel so that the three of us gave prepared answers to three questions:

• What is fat activism for you or, how does your fat activism manifest itself for you?
• Mainstream discussions about fat and size tend to focus on the concept of ‘skinny’ vs the ‘average-sized UK woman’ (apparently size 14-16): what does this mean for fat activism? And women who are bigger than a size 16?
• How/does fatness and feminism intersect for you?

Our answers were pretty diverse and reflected our interests: Isha in fatshion and blogging; Caroline in teaching and academic life; me in fat feminism and activism, and psychotherapy. I was glad of this because I think there's a temptation to try and simplify the experience of being fat, or an activist, to single narratives, when actually there are many different ways of expressing this stuff.

After this, we answered some questions from the floor. If I had a penny for every time questions from the floor start with "Yes, but is it healthy?" I would be richer than Croesus. It's especially bewildering when health has not been a part of the previous discussion. It's as though talking about fat can only ever be a discussion about health and, even then, a discussion of how fat can't really be healthy, with the subtext that we must be deluding ourselves. Am I frustrated about this? Yes. There is a lot more to be said about fat and feminism than "Yes, but is it healthy?"

My favourite question came at the end; someone asked about the emphasis being put on thin privilege within fat activism. I answered that I thought this was a shame, that you often come across fat activism that focuses on how terrible it is being fat. I think being fat is often terrible, but that activism is about joy, power, strength, making lives liveable.

The session lasted an hour, and there was so much more that could have been said. From the quiet and respectful audience, the packed room, the comments and discussion afterwards, I really got a sense that people were hungry for this stuff and wanted to talk more, but perhaps didn't know where to start, such has been the overwhelming silencing effect of obesity epidemic rhetoric in the last ten years or so.

You can watch the session here, in the WOW YouTube channel. There are technical issues in the first minute or so, but the rest of it looks fine.



Meanwhile, check out some pics on the Fat Talks Back event page, read Isha's round-up, and visit the Storify. By the way, the image comes from the gorgeous drawn minutes of the festival, but I can't find any more information about this project.

New edition of the Fat Studies journal is out

Nerd alert: the latest edition of Fat Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Body Weight and Society is now available online. I serve on the board for this journal and I have to say that this edition is hot! I'm especially delighted by the review of Fat Studies in the UK, to which I contributed.

The journal is behind a paywall, as is common with academic publishing. Please contact me if there are things you would like to read but cannot access through an institution, or if you don't have the money to pay for them.

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.

New Fat Studies articles

The new issue of Fat Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Body Weight and Society is out!

Let me know if you have trouble accessing the articles.

The Somatechnics journal on fat bodily being has just been published

Issue 2.1 of Somatechnics has just been published, a special issue on 'fat bodily being' edited by Samantha Murray. It looks really good. I'm in it too.

Somatechnics home page at Edinburgh University Press

Here's the table of contents:

'Fat Bodily Being' Editorial
Samantha Murray

Fat, Queer, Dead: 'Obesity' and the Death Drive
Francis Ray White

Big Girls Having Fun: Reflections on a 'fat accepting space'
Rachel Colls

Control Top Underpants
Samantha Murray

Live to Tell: Coming Out as Fat
Cat Pausé

DANGER, Curves Ahead
Cleo Gardiner

'I saw a knock-out': Fatness, (In)visibility, and Desire in Shallow Hal
Jackie Wykes

Not Just a Type: Diabetes, Fat and Fear
Jennifer Lee

Native American Indian Women, Fat Studies and Feminism
Jennifer A. Boisvert

Fox's More to Love: Pseudo-Fat Acceptance in Reality Television
MacKenzie Peltier and Lauren Mizock

'I'd kill anyone who tried to take my band away': Obesity Surgery, Critical Fat Politics and the 'problem' of Patient Demand
Karen Throsby

Fat Activist Community: A Conversation Piece
Charlotte Cooper and Samantha Murray

If you don't have access to university libraries and want to read this stuff, you can buy a single issue, which costs between £16-$32 depending on where you live. If this sort of money is beyond you and you still want to read the pieces, please get in touch.

Fat Studies articles free downloads!

You can download and read a selection of articles (including mine) from Fat Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Body Weight and Society for FREE until 30 June.

Get in there!

http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/ufts20/current

Fat Studies in Wellington and Oakland calls for papers

Calls for papers have just been announced for two Fat Studies gatherings that are taking place this year.

Fat Studies: Reflective Intersections
Massey University, Wellington, New Zealand
12-13 July 2012

This conference is being organised by Cat Pausé and Samantha Murray is delivering the keynote.

Key areas of interest for abstract submissions include, but are not limited to:

• Intersections between Fat Studies and other academic disciplines
• Interdisciplinary work on fat, fat identity, and fat embodiment
• Fat activism as intersection
• Useful methodologies for intersectionality in Fat Studies teaching and research
• Theoretical frameworks related to Fat Studies intersectionality and interdisciplinary work
• Critical reflections on intersectionality within Fat Studies

The abstract submission deadline is 31 March.

More information: Fat Studies: Reflective Intersections

Fat Studies Interest Group
The National Women's Studies Association (NWSA)
Oakland, California, USA
8-11 November

Papers on any topic at the intersection of women's studies/feminism/womanism/gender/sexuality and fat studies will be considered.

At minimum, your submission should fall under one of the following themes for NWSA 2012:

• Revolutionary Futures
• Traveling Theory
• Social Networks, Power, and Change
• Decolonising Knowledge
• Creative Awakenings

While this is an open call, topic suggestions from last year's meeting include:

Fat intersections (including race, nationality, disability, sexuality, appearance/beauty)
Fatopias/Fat utopias
Transnational fat bodies (immigration, globalisation)
Teaching Fat Studies (professorial bodies, student bodies, resistance)
Knowledge-sharing/de-colonising
Fat feminist research methods (including role of the researcher body)
Fat feminists theorising the body
Fat performance/performing fatness/fat icons
Fat activism and feminism/Fatosphere

13 February is the submission deadline. Send the following to Michaela A. Null and Candice Buss.

• Name, institutional affiliation, address, email, phone
• NWSA Theme your paper fits under (and fat studies topic area/s if yours fits any of the above)
• Title for your talk, a one-page, double-spaced abstract in which you lay out your topic and its relevance to this session
• AND a 100 word truncated abstract

Papers should last 15 minutes, and there will be questions afterwards.

NB. In order to present you need to register for the conference and be a member of the NWSA - it all costs money, baby!

NWSA

Fat Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Body Weight and Society

I'm absolutely delighted to announce that the first edition of Fat Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Body Weight and Society has been published. I am a member of the editorial board for this journal, and my article about queering fat activism through my Queer and Trans Fat Activist Timeline project is published in the first issue.

Fat Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Body Weight and Society is, in academic-speak, a peer-reviewed interdisciplinary journal. Peer-review is the gold standard of academic publishing, it means that each article has been through a rigorous process of review by other people who work in the field so that it represents high quality work, basically the cutting edge.

Unfortunately, like most academic journals, you can't go and buy this at a shop. It's available to students and scholars through academic and major libraries, part of a wider process of keeping ideas away from the plebs, or at least away from people who can't afford tuition fees. Non-students can buy articles or issues, but it can be pricey. If you want to read this journal and can't get access, drop me a line and I'll do my best to help.

Fat Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Body Weight and Society is not the first journal to explore more radical views of fatness. Let's not forget the important work by Frances Berg and the Healthy Weight Journal, and later Jon Robison with Health At Every Size. But what Fat Studies does is shift critical and scholarly discussions of fatness out of health or 'Obesity Epidemic' and into a much broader arena where things like culture, community, rights, embodiment can be addressed. This new publication is an important moment in developing ideas about what it is to be fat and, unlike the odd conference or course, it's ongoing and international.

Let's hear loud applause for Esther Rothblum, the journal's editor, and also the co-editor of The Fat Studies Reader. Her commitment to generating new dialogue about fatness is second-to-none. If you're not excited about this journal then you probably don't even know you're born!

Dawn French and The Daily Mail

Putting aside the fact that it's a Tory hate-rag, The Daily Mail is such a contradiction when it comes to reporting fat, which they do a lot, although ironically I think it's still a better bet than the supposedly liberal Guardian, which is all fat hate all the time and even has its own diet club. On the one hand The Mail promoted the Big Bum Jumble by publishing almost word for word the press release I wrote to publicise the event without any problem at all. They've done some good reporting on LighterLife, whilst pruriently speculating about who has and who hasn't been on that diet. Same with weight loss surgery. They publish a lot of articles that appear to adopt a voice of concern about fatphobia but just end up reinforcing it. And of course they publish many reports that are just all-out full of fat hatred. There's no rhyme or reason to it and I suspect the tone is all down to whichever particular editor is on duty the day that the article is published. I suppose what it illustrates is the messy and inconsistent ways in which people think and talk about fat anyway; fat hatred is bad, but who on earth would want to be fat if they could help it?

Dawn French has been the focus of The Daily Mail's fat department this week. Her relationship with Lenny Henry ended and she's lost a lot of weight. Her publicity machine is saying that it's because she's found a new lease of life and is very happy, just eating "more healthily" whatever that means, and doing exercise. Anyone who buys this is living in fantasyland, French looks like she's undergone a sudden crash weight loss in the photographs of her gurning at an awards ceremony that appeared in the paper and, according to her memoir, this is something she's done before. Why or how will probably come out at some point but for now there she is, there's no way of knowing unless you are a close personal friend or have her phone tapped.

What makes French's weight loss interesting for someone like me is the way that The Daily Mail have reported it, they're both celebratory and disapproving. The pictures of French on the red carpet have run and run this week, alongside a catty 'letter from a frenemy' article by Anne Diamond, aka the lady Alan Partridge, that is almost beyond belief. Diamond, who has apparently made a very good career out of being an utter tool, berates French for pro-fat statements she's made, speculates that French's weight loss is a result of secret obesity surgery, and states that anyone who says they are fat and happy is deluded. I come across this expression all the time: 'fat and happy.' It's such a reductive means of explaining fat embodiment that is not based on self-hatred or wanting to change. "Are you fat and happy?" is a question that demands a negative answer because a positive one sounds unbelievable and trite. I doubt anyone is ever happy all the time in this flat kind of way that expresses nothing of the complexities of living fat. Anyway, it's always about fat and happy and French is a big fat hypocrite because she could not be fat and happy in the way that everyone needed her to be, and therefore nobody can ever be fat and happy.

The reporting of French's weight loss adds to the unreality of fat embodiment where, as a number of scholars have pointed out, Hannele Harjunen in particular, fat is a temporary blip in the present on the way towards a glorious thin future. The idea of someone being permanently fat is difficult for people to get their heads around, as is the idea of embodiment shifting from time to time for whatever reason. In a context where fat activism or fat politics are so far off most people's radar that they are positively laughable, I find this sense of unreality and its denial of fatness perturbing. I think it's difficult for fat people to feel secure in developing more positive identities as we are, especially for those of us who are isolated from one another. There's this deep sense that what fat activists are doing is ridiculous and will never work. People desperately want an alternative to fat hatred but they actively want fat activism or self-acceptance to fail too so that their own projects of self hatred can be justified. The rug is pulled out from under fat activism again and again.

I know people really love her but French's weight loss underscores for me the limitations in looking to celebrities for reassurance as role models. Fat celebrities who get thin is an old story. French's public persona is clearly far removed from what she does in private, her image is about the smoke and mirrors of publicity, it is not trustworthy. This too is unstable ground on which to pitch some kind of self-acceptance or fat politics. It's better to build on firmer terrain, wherever that may be.

Looking back at Fat News, the newsletter of the Fat Women's Group, London, 93-96

I've been looking at copies of Fat News. This is a newsletter that was produced by the second Fat Women's Group in London in the early 1990s. Both the newsletter and the second incarnation of the group were my idea, I think. The group caused me a lot of pain, I had no idea what I was doing and there were also tensions towards the end of my involvement that I still don’t understand. I ended up leaving, the group changed a bit and then, as far as I know, it stopped. Whilst it helps to think of burn-out and problems with group dynamics as common pitfalls of activism, these difficult memories have made it hard to reflect.

Fat News is the only tangible artefact I have of this period. 15 copies were published March 1993 – September 1996, though I don’t think I was involved with the last few. I remember seeing copies of Shocking Pink, which was this fantastic girl's zine produced in South London in the late 1980s, and loving how it was put together irreverently. I had no idea how I could have got involved in Shocking Pink, I think I probably thought that I wouldn’t be welcome there, I was so alienated from people at that time.

I stole some of Shocking Pink's production techniques for Fat News, which was that we would invite people to write content for it, and write some ourselves, and then everyone in the group would be responsible for cutting and pasting a page and decorating it with doodles and comments. Then someone would take it to the printer (we used the National Abortion Campaign's copier) and we'd get together to collate it and post it out to subscribers. Someone else in the group would be responsible for maintaining the subscriber's list and printing out address labels. I don’t think anyone else in the group had any involvement with small press, independent or zine publishing, and I remember it always took a lot of work encouraging people to draw or write on the pages they were pasting up.

I feel pretty sad when I look at Fat News but I'm sure other people don't feel the same way. We had some great feedback for it in the group, people loved it, and I remember how important it was to make something in which people who lived far away could participate. I remember recording audio versions of it too, it was exciting to be able to make accessible media.

The Women's Library in London have a partial set of Fat News, if you’re interested in British fat activism from twenty years ago – and why wouldn't you be?! Otherwise you can come over and have a look at my precious copies.

Talking attivisimo pro grasso/fat activism in Italy

I've just come back from a trip to Italy courtesy of Soggettiva, a queer festival held in Bologna. Part of the festival was a seminar called Corpi eccentrici: bellezza, normatività e rappresentazione (Eccentric bodies: beauty, normativity and representation), where I gave a presentation.

The seminar was held in the great hall of Santa Cristina, a place which was once a convent and now houses the city's Women's Library, amongst other things. There's a separate queer library at Il Cassero, where the organisation that convenes Soggettiva and its sister festival Gender Bender, are based. Both spaces are incredibly beautiful old buildings (that's Santa Cristina in the picture, swoon eh?). I was really happy to see my book, Fat and Proud, displayed at the entrance to Santa Cristina, and glad that the seminar was fully documented and will be archived.

I spoke about queer and trans feminist fat activism, gave a few examples of things people have done, and showed some pictures. I thought it might be a bit of a surprise to see this stuff if people had never considered fat as a political identity, or thought about fat people as people with agency, community or culture. My new friend Dani, who performed a synchronous translation of my presentation into Italian, told me that fat activism is difficult to translate. There are two words that people use to talk about fat: cicci, which is the type of term of endearment that you might use if you were calling someone chubby; and grasso, which implies a more disgusting fatness. I suggested she use grasso as a reclamation of language and a defiant celebration of the presumed monstrousness of fatness, and she ended up translating fat activism as attivisimo pro grasso. It felt pretty amazing to be creating language and concepts like this, to be doing so collaboratively and, I hope, sensitively.

Dani said that feminism is a bit of a sneaky presence in Italian academia, and that there isn't a tradition of institutional support for Women's Studies, for example, even at Bologna, which is the oldest university in the world. I got the feeling that this gathering was an unusual event. My co-speakers Giorgia Aiello, Elisa Arfini, Alessia Muroni and Roberta Sassatelli were more clued-in than me about the context of the seminar, which was to consider representation of queer bodies. Their presentations looked at corporate branding, photo agencies, soap operas, lesbian art, and advertising.

My presentation was different to the others, and I didn’t spell out the crucial connection to the seminar, which is that queer and trans fat feminist activists often make their own representations. I wanted to show the everyday embeddedness of activism, how accessible it can be, how almost everyone has some kind of resource they can draw on, and how fat activism disrupts the idea that activism is always about standing in the street with a placard, or speaking rationally to power. Whilst I appreciated my co-presenters' papers, and whilst some speakers also referred to the act of making one's own imagery, what the seminar raised for me was a deep tension between a body of feminist work that is concerned with interpreting popular images and finding it lacking, and my hunger for action beyond critique. Perhaps this is a feature of academic work that is cut off from the lifeblood of activism, I don't think it is an Italian feminist approach, I see it elsewhere too, but this event in Bologna reminded me of it. Put bluntly: it's important to understand why something is shit, but the work cannot stop there, there must be creative thinking and action and change; without these qualities the work descends into pointless hand-wringing and simply reproduces the helplessness of its subjects.

Despite these reservations I feel grateful to have taken part in this work, it was exciting to be talking about queer and trans fat feminist activism in a place where English is not the first language, where people might take on these ideas and mutate them in their own way, and to encounter the work that other people are doing.

Progressive, enlightened, anti-capitalist, pro-planet people and their fatphobia

My Facebook news feed is the place where I generally encounter fatphobic memes. A couple have cropped up recently that make me want to say more about how the Left uses fatphobia in its visual rhetoric, which is an extension of how the Left has continued to fail fat by stereotyping fat and class.

I'm posting the images here in order to take them apart and expose the hatred within the supposedly progressive message. People may find them upsetting, they are upsetting, I'm sorry.

A couple of years ago I wrote to the London Cycling Campaign (LCC) to tell them to stop using anti-obesity rhetoric as a rationale for their work. I live in London, like to cycle, and want to ride my bike safely. Being fat on a bike can make you a target for street hate. I wanted support for my cycling, but the LCC was not up to it and could only understand me as an offensive and abstract stereotype. I wrote How to Ride a Bike: A Guide for Fat Cyclists for their magazine, but it made no difference, anti-obesity continues to be a fundament of their mission statement.

So this image has been popping up on my news feed:

Not everyone is going to be able to ride a bike, there's a certain assumed embodied privilege about the idea that everyone should and can ride a bike. People's bodies are different. Frail people are not going to ride a bike, many disabled people are not going to ride a bike. Adaptations for disabled people who do want to ride are rare and expensive. Some people just don't like cycling. Cycling to town when you live in a city like London is not necessarily feasible. It's fine if you're rich enough to live in the middle of things, but riding to central London for me would mean a thirteen-mile round trip that takes in a dual carriageway and a handful of treacherous junctions, and I'm only in Zone Three. The cycle lanes that exist are not safe. I know two people who been run over whilst riding, and London's streets have far too many ghost bike memorials, I'm not interested in risking my own life. These differences cannot be accommodated in this image. In addition, the logic of the picture represents fat as a substance whose only use is to be burned, there is no humanity in fat.

This is a long way of saying that bike culture located within social and environmental discourse, and typically seen as representing a progressive, Left-ist politics, has a big problem with fat people. Those cyclists really hate us, even when we too are on two wheels.

Here's the second picture, eurgh, where to start?

Maybe with the racism? The people in these images are stripped of agency and humanity, they are abstract symbols that enable viewers to feel as though they can claim moral high ground through their pity and disgust for the people in the picture. Both images invite the enlightened progressive viewer to rescue the subhumans depicted, they need you!

The images have no context, they are offered as plain fact, it is beyond obvious that the starving African and the greedy and out-of-control Asian* kids are both victims of a capitalism that favours some and not others, that a fair post-capitalist world would distribute resources evenly, where presumably everyone would have bodies that are neat, normatively-sized, the same. The meme presents itself as inarguable. Fat is greed, an obesity timebomb, a product of Western corruption, McDonalds, energy balance gone wrong, a racist terror of a voracious fat future dominating the world (ie the West, never mind that the West has its own history of colonial exploitation). Fat and thin are opposites. Forget that fat people might also be anti-capitalist. The slogan pulls it all together. You don't need to know anything else. Facebook tells me that this image has been liked by 10,000 people, shared by 7,000, and has enjoyed 4,000 comments (the 100 or so I looked at were uniformly praiseworthy). People on the internet really like cheap stereotypes, they help you feel good, as though you are doing something helpful for the betterment of humanity.

Here's what's not in the picture: Information about setserock and their motivation to create the meme, if indeed they created it, they may just have slapped their name on the corner at a later stage. Information about the people in the pictures, their accounts of being photographed, their thoughts about how their images have been used. Accounts by the photographers about how, when and why they took the photographs, how they were distributed, who got paid. A disclaimer about stereotyping. A comment on the implications of the presumed ethnicity of the people depicted? Thoughts about why the head of the person has been cropped out of the image (look familiar?). Engagement with the idea that fat is not pathology. And so on...

The picture comes undone when you stop seeing it as self-evident. Whilst setserock is enjoying hit after hit on their website as a result of this meme, I doubt the people in the images are enjoying any kind of material reward. How does that affect the statement? Who is benefiting from this image? Where is the power? How evenly is it spread? How exploitative is the image? How is this image a product of capitalism? How is setserock, and others who share it, implicated? Capitalism isn't working? No, it isn't, especially not here.

* Edited to add: I have read these kids as Asian though I am probably wrong. I don't know what their ethnicity is. I first came upon this image in a fat panic news story about kids in Asia, hence my reading, but it's likely that the people in the picture have nothing to do with Asia and were just picked from a photo agency's database to illustrate the story. 

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.

Dream List: Fat Studies Research

When I was a teenager I had a pen pal called Phil who sent me cassettes of things he liked and which I ended up liking too. One of these things was a home-taped copy of Jello Biafra's prankish spoken word album No More Cocoons. I haven't heard it in years but could probably still recite most of it by heart. In one of the sequences Biafra talks about collecting names for bands so, say you've got a great band but you can't think of a name, you can get one from Jello because he's got more than he can use. Perhaps there are bands out there somewhere that he named: Republican Buttocks, The Imperial Turdsicles, was there Facelift In A Jar too? Maybe I just imagined it.

In a similar vein, I seem to harbour more ideas for fat studies research than I could ever handle myself. I thought I'd offer a list of fantasy research projects that I'd love to see come to fruition. I'm thinking of stuff like...

• A case study of Aardman Animations' involvement with Change4Life.
• A critical review of weight loss corporations' appropriation of fat politics and Health At Every Size concepts and praxis.
• A critical review of body image research methodology.
• A qualitative study of normatively-sized researchers allied to Fat Studies who avoid using the word 'fat' in their work.
• A quantitative study about why corporations fund weight loss industry research, with beautiful pie charts and scatterplots and other exciting infographics.
• Discourse analysis that reveals what Reubens really thought of fat women.
• An analysis of alarmist obesity news story infographics.
• An ethnography of normatively-sized ethnographers who do ethnographies of fat people who go to slimming clubs.
• An oral history of people who wear fat suits.
• A case study of LighterLife's ethics.
• An ethnography of normatively-sized ethnographers who do ethnographies of fat people who go to NAAFA conventions.
• A quantitative study of all the places that have been described as 'The Fattest Country,' 'The Fattest City,' or 'The Fattest Place' on Earth.
• A critical gender and race analysis of Two Tons of Fun and The Fat Boys.
• Any kind of research whatsoever by non-Western fat studies scholars about anywhere that isn't the US, Canada, the UK, or Australia.
• Any kind of research whatsoever by fat disabled people about fat and disability.
• Discourse analysis of anonymous fat blob sculptures and other forms of obesity art.
• Longitudinal studies on the effects of dieting on various groups of people across a number of variables and not just BMI, that take their social contexts into account, and which are not funded or researched by anyone with any connection whatsoever to commercial weight loss organisations.
• A qualitative study of fat people and their tattoos.
• Psychological profiles of Tam Fry, Susie Orbach, David Haslam, Jamie Oliver.
• Qualitative research about fat activist community capitalism.
• Research essays about the use of fatphobia in political cartoons, or an illustrated essay about heroic fat cartoon characters from the golden age of comics.

Wanna take one on? Be my guest and send me the results to cite. Got fantasy research projects of your own? Stick 'em in the comments please.

Thanks to Simon Murphy and Kay Hyatt for helping with this list.

Call for papers - HAES UK Fat Studies seminar

Call for papers - Health at Every Size UK [HAES UK] Fat Studies seminar
Monday 7 and Tuesday 8 November 2011

The School of Oriental & African Studies, University of London, is pleased to host a Fat Studies seminar on behalf of HAES UK.

Academics, clinicians and other practitioners or performers are invited to submit Abstracts to be considered for inclusion in the above seminar.

Deadline for submission of Abstracts: Wednesday 14 September 2011.

Abstracts should be a maximum of 300 words. Please add the name and contact details for the lead author and a brief biography for each author.

Submit abstracts to: diversity@soas.ac.uk Please include "HAES UK Abstract" in your email title.

Call for Papers: Queering Fat Embodiment

Submit your work for inclusion in a proposed book that is being edited by Samantha Murray, Jackie Wykes and Cat Pausé, and be part of the exciting work that's emerging from Fat Studies in Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand.

Here are the details:

Against the backdrop of the ever-growing medicalisation and pathologisation of fatness, the field of Fat Studies has emerged in recent years to offer an interdisciplinary critical interrogation of the dominant medical models of health, to give voice to the lived experience of fat bodies, and to offer critical insights into, and investigations of, the ethico-political implications of the cultural meanings that have come to be attached to fat bodies. This focus on the regulation, discipline and representation of fat bodies make it critically invaluable to the advancement of scholarship on embodiment.

This edited collection seeks to publish recent scholarship that embraces 'queering' as a mode of critical engagement in examining fat embodiment. Queer is a heterogeneous and multidisciplinary practice aimed at ‘bringing forth’ and thus denaturalising the taken for granted, the invisible, the normalised. This collection seeks to challenge and destabilise existing ideas of fat and fat embodiment both outside of and within the emerging field of Fat Studies. This volume will bring together scholarship from various disciplines in order to examine the ways in which fat embodiment is lived, experienced, regulated and (re)produced across a range of cultural sites and contexts. In queering established ideas about fat bodies, and presenting challenging inquiries/inqueeries into these notions, this collection will represent an innovative and critically invaluable contribution to the advancement of scholarship on fatness, and indeed on embodiment more generally.

Topics may include but are not limited to:
• fat activism and embodiment
• fat mental and physical health
• queer(y)ing ‘hard data’ on fatness/obesity science
• queer(y)ing health policies related to fat
• cross-cultural or global constructions of fat bodies
• cultural, historical, or philosophical meanings of fat and fat bodies
• fat embodiment in literature, film, music, nonfiction, and the visual arts
• fat as queering sex, beauty, gender, and other embodied performances
• fat sexuality
• fat materialities
• fat and space
• fat and biopolitics
• fat and citizenship
• fat and neoliberalism
• fatness and consumption

Please note that we are already in the process of completing a proposal to submit to publishers, which we will complete based on the submissions we receive. We have had some preliminary interest from publishers, but as yet, we have not secured a contract.

Full paper submissions are due January 15, 2012. Articles should range between 15 and 20 double-spaced pages. Please send submissions, along with an abstract of your paper and a brief biographical sketch, directly to Samantha.murray@mq.edu.au.

Contacts:
Samantha Murray - Samantha.murray@mq.edu.au (Main contact)
Cat Pausé - c.pause@massey.ac.nz
Jackie Wykes - wykesj@unimelb.edu.au

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.

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.

ESRC Fat Studies and Health At Every Size Seminars - resources now available

Audiovisual material relating to the first three seminars is now up on the ESRC Fat Studies and Health At Every Size Seminars website. This means that if you missed the series, or want to refresh your memory about who said what when, you can go and download audio files, PowerPoint slides and video too. The files for the fourth seminar are on their way.

ESRC Fat Studies and Health At Every Size Seminars

These seminars were the first large-scale government funded events for Fat Studies in the UK.

Dr Bethan Evans, the principle organiser for the seminar series, says: "This is potentially quite a good resource for people to access and we'd be really interested to know if/how people are using the site (and if there are any problems with it - we are limited in terms of technology but will try and improve things where possible). Please point students/friends to the resource if you think they'd be interested."

She adds: "If anyone came to the seminars and has any feedback on the series as a whole this would also be really useful for us to pass this back to the ESRC who funded us."

Submit to the new Fat Studies journal

Here's how.