Fat People Bash Back

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here are a few more thoughts:

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

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

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

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

Fatphobia, the outdoors, and belonging

This is where we were walking

A few weeks ago I went for a walk in the Cumbrian countryside with my girlfriend. We were aiming for a place where you can swim when it's warm, a series of waterfalls and natural pools. It was too cold to get in, but I still wanted to see the water. The walk was short, less than a mile, and took us across a campsite, along a river, and up and over a rocky patch. It's very rainy in that part of the world, and there were some areas where we had to hop on rocks to get over a stream.

One stream hop was somewhat precarious, and we hooted and laughed as we scrambled over. A man and a woman were walking towards us as we teetered forwards over the water. The man wanted to be in on our fun, and he said as he walked past us, without missing a beat, and smiling: "You need more exercise."

There are a handful of reasons why this comment was a no-no, and I will explain some of them here.

Our bodies as fat women are public bodies, commentated bodies, dehumanised bodies too. We're not assumed to have the power to articulate our bodies for ourselves, but we are presumed available for others to describe, define and constrict. Without knowing a thing about us this (yes, white, older, normatively-sized, able-bodied, middle-class, appropriately-dressed, straight-looking) guy felt entitled to comment on what it is we are and need based on nothing more than momentarily seeing us teetering and giggling over a stream. This happens to fat people all the time.

If fatphobia was not part of how fat women's bodies are commented upon, "you need more exercise" would not be a tricky statement, but the man's comment came saturated with a discourse of judgment, hatred and morality. This discourse is so everyday and accepted that the guy didn't even appear to think that it was a problem, he was likely just stating a fact in a friendly way and was probably baffled by my angry response.

Whether or not we need more exercise is not his judgment to make. Maybe we could do with more, but here we were, walking to some ponds, just like him. This makes me think that we are getting enough exercise, that we are able to judge for ourselves the appropriate amount of exercise we need and want. We weren't fast or agile, but we were doing things in our own way, and this is allowed.

"You need more exercise" offended me for another reason. I live on streets, not by mountains. Walking out in the wild takes courage, when I am scrambling up some rocks or finding my way over unfamiliar ground I am vulnerable. A casual order such as "you need more exercise" is insensitive. A welcome to the hillside, and congratulations on having got that far would have been a much better bet.

As soon as the words were out of his mouth I replied: "No we don't" in the tone of a sullen teenager. It's not a great response, but I am glad this was my default, rather than something that communicated an apology for existing. Then I got angry and called him a judgmental prick. The woman scurried along behind him and I felt like shouting that I felt sorry for her, but I didn't.

I hate getting riled by strangers, I usually stay silent because shouting back rarely makes me feel good. So it was with this incident, it cast a pall over what had been a pleasant walk, and I worried afterwards when we stopped for a rest that we would see him and have a confrontation in the only pub for miles.

This is a bitty post, I think the main thing is about documenting fatphobia. It was a tiny (but big) thing said in an unlikely place, out in the wild, there really is no escaping people's hate.

The episode has made me think about what it is to put yourself out there in nature when you are fat. I can't speak for Kay but I know that I tend to feel like a fraud when I am walking in the countryside. I go slowly and carefully, I'm not one of those striders. I don't look the part. I wear boots I got from the Big Bum Jumble, but I don't have any special gear, mostly I just put on some jeans, a hoodie or a raincoat. Not that I could wear anything else, fancy walking gear doesn't come in my size. Outdoorsy marketing would suggest that the hills and lakes are the domain of wiry and muscly white people who run everywhere. Of the other people we saw whilst we were out and about in Cumbria, none really looked like us.

The fraudulent feeling is connected to a broader sense that I don't belong out in the world, that exploring wild terrain, or feeling a connection to nature is for other people, like the man we encountered, not me. (I know that some black and Asian people in the UK have written about not going to or feeling part of the countryside, with good reason, I too associate country politics and culture with intolerance). Anyway, this is a terrible feeling, not helped by that guy's thoughtless comment, or organisations like the Ramblers Association and their bullshit anti-obesity campaigning. I want to feel more able to enter wild places and feel that I belong there as a queer fat woman. Suggestions as to how to do this are welcome.

Edited to add: Sazz has ideas about this.

Being called disgusting, ugly, and unhealthy did not destroy me

A person made a mean and thoughtless comment about one of Substantia's Adipositivity portraits of me recently, I saw it just now. This is not front page news, I get trolled fairly often and I don't expect everybody to like what I do. Neither do I need reassurance that I'm nice, good, pretty enough as I am; whether or not I embody those things is irrelevant to me, I'm as complex as anybody else and I trust my sense of ethics.

I'm intrigued by the comment, if anything. I think this is because I am writing this morning about my affective response to obesity discourse. I often write about obesity discourse and the fat hatred it engenders in abstract ways, but here it is, like dirty smoke manifesting from the ether, finding a vessel in this person. The comment represents the entitlement of the discourse, its arrogance towards and alienation from the subjects – fat people – with whom it is apparently concerned.

Other people might feel devastated by such a comment, but I don't. This is not because I'm not a thinking, feeling person myself, I often feel hurt by things. It's because its separation from anything that is meaningful to me about being a fat dyke, or a person in one of Substantia's pictures, means that it will make no difference to how I live my life. The comment feels as mystifying and alien as if an ant had tried to explain something to me in ant-language.

I decided to look at the comment more closely and pick it apart a little, there's so much going on in that short statement measuring the value of my presence in the world. It goes like this: "I'm sorry, but this will never be beautiful. It's disgusting, it's ugly, it's unhealthy."

It starts as an apology but is not an apology. Why say sorry? What apology are they making? Are they trying to gently divest people from their fantasy that the photograph of me is something that might help them feel as though they can live in the world?

They use the dehumanising words "this" and "it" when talking about me. Or is this about me? Perhaps it's about the picture, the outfit, the street or, more likely, the fat on my body as an entity that is separate to me.

They use the term "never". How can they know? Many people have expressed deep affection for this picture. As it was being taken, a guy on the street asked for my number (that's him in the foreground blur). On what authority can they make that claim of "never"? It's nonsense.

It's kind of amazing to be called disgusting! I wonder if the person feels like vomiting when they see me, if that feeling of disgustingness is about trying to eject me from their own being because I upset how they want things to be so intensely. I secretly hope so because, apart from someone shitting or dying at the sight of you, this is the ultimate punken reaction. I am glad to be so disruptive and uncomfortable a presence.

But being called disgusting and ugly doesn't make sense in the context of their Tumblr. There are lots of pictures of punks, how come they don't recognise how punk I am? There are images of fat people too, cartoons mostly, how come they're ok but I am not? Scrolling through, I can see images of someone gleefully pointing a gun at the viewer; a wave of blood; a chainsaw killer; a hanged yuppie with a plastic bag over his head; Charles Manson; a woman with a pretty punched mouth and another woman with a pretty black eye; a stitched wound; a potato shitting chips! I am uglier and more disgusting than those things in this person's universe, I think I'm supposed to mind, women are supposed to care about being called ugly, but I don't.

The commenter does not know me and does not appear to have any qualifications that would enable them to assess the state of my health, yet they feel entitled to judge me. Typically, this form of judgment brings with it none of the compassion that one might extend to someone who was unwell, not that I want to be concern-trolled.

I don't know how to end this. I think I'm astonished by some people's capacity for thoughtless meanness, perhaps I don't come across much of that in my everyday life. The experience has made me reflect on how profoundly the internet affects how I live, the things I can do and witness, a life without it is unimaginable. It's made me think about accountability online, how off-the-cuff comments are not necessarily throwaway. Mostly I feel strong, politically and intellectually engaged with what it is to be fat; I feel alright. It's a miracle, really - actually it's not a miracle, you're looking at what happens after 20+ years of work.

PS. I sent this: Hi there, I wrote a blog post inspired by your comment about my picture. Perhaps you'd like to respond? It would be good to generate some dialogue. Tumblr won't let me send a link but you can get to the piece by Googling 'Obesity Timebomb'. Charlotte

Fat, pain, power and the clinic

I have a touch of osteo-arthritis (OA) in my right knee. Sometimes I get a small amount of pain. I understand OA as a degenerative condition and that I will likely become increasingly disabled as times goes on. My doctor referred me to physiotherapy where I learned some tricks for strengthening my knee to hold off the degeneration, and for pain management, and I've been going to the OA gym, organised by the physiotherapy clinic near where I live, which runs a course for people coming to terms with the condition.

I'm writing about this here because I had been unaware that knee OA is one of those things that inspires a lot of fatphobia from health professionals. Whether or not being of a heavy weight exacerbates knee OA is up for debate, I think, because OA also occurs in non-weight-bearing joints, and weight loss, which is next to impossible to sustain in the long-term, does not necessarily ameliorate the pain. The other thing is that thin people get OA too. But 'lose weight' or 'maintain a healthy weight' are part of the mantra of knee OA. My doctor and physiotherapist have been fine and respectful, but the OA gym, also managed by the National Health Service, has been another story altogether.

There are general problems in the space that relate to a kind of clinical arrogance. We 'patients', there are seven of us, are older, don't necessarily speak English fluently, look poor, struggle to communicate, have other health issues, and look like the bottom rungs of a social status chart. The two people teaching us are limber young jocks who appear to have no empathy, don't understand people who aren't jocks, and perhaps have never had an injury. They use their own bodies as models for what we should do, but their bodies are nothing like ours. They say things like: "I'm going to show you these exercises and if you don't do them at home every day you are wasting my time." One of them has made not-funny jokes about people who try and cheat the exercises, as a kind of warning for us not to cheat, the assumption being that we would cheat, and that cheating – or finding other ways to do things – when you are in pain is a bad thing.

It's the fat stuff that interests me. I am the fattest in the group and a lot of the fat talk is directed at me. For example, the physiotherapist asked the group if anyone had ever heard of BMI (Body Mass Index), and fixed me with a long stare as she asked it. I thought the question was ludicrous and stared back, gaining me the unspoken label of uppity fatty in the process. The same person complained about doctors who "are too frightened to tell their patients that they are obese. I'm not like that, I'll tell people when they need to lose weight." I wondered if she would ever tell me directly to lose weight, and what that conversation might look like. The other women in the class concede to the fatphobia, all agreeing that they should lose weight, regardless of how much they weigh, the men seem to ignore it all. One woman said that she had lost a lot of weight and that she still gets pain, but this was not explored.

There's ageism and disablism in the room too, with uproar when one of the physios suggested that a way of managing knee pain could be to get a walking stick. No! No! No! We are too young for that! We don't want to look like cripples! Me, I'll take the stick, I'm old enough, crip power.

It is hard to know what to do. Speaking up in a group where people are generally hostile to the idea of fat and where I may as well be speaking Martian is too risky, especially as I have already felt labelled as a troublemaker for not being compliant and self-hating. I have a packet of readings that I'm thinking of offering to the Physios, though I think this will be read as an aggressive action. I suppose I'm holding out for the opportunity for feedback. But even then my identity as an activist, or as a person with any intelligence or agency is invisible in the OA gym, the institutionalised fatphobia means that I am interpreted as a problem, no matter what I do. The others may be extraordinary people with fabulous skills, but you would never know it, we are collectively patronised and treated as people with nothing to offer. I don't know if my knee is benefiting in any way from this experience, but for me it has greatly illuminated some of the ways in which clinical power operates, and the misuses of that power.

Stereotyping Fat and Capitalism

I went down to St Paul's last week to visit Occupy London. There are places where my politics and the general politics of Occupy diverge, but I'm glad it's there, hope it continues, and felt happy, inspired and moved by it.

One of my favourite things about Occupy London is the way that the street has been appropriated as a giant noticeboard. Pictures, letters, rants, conspiracy theories, stickers, were all taped up on the pillars at the side of the encampment. I enjoyed browsing, there was such a muddle of compelling stuff. Amongst everything were some posters advertising a new film, and a leaflet about the scummy business of carbon trading. Can you guess what drew me to them? Yes, that's right: their use of fat capitalist stereotyping.

I have written elsewhere about how the left has failed fat people, progressive, enlightened, anti-capitalist, pro-planet people and their fatphobia, and about political cartoonists' use of fatness to denote the greed and disgustingness of capitalism (alas top fatphobe cartoonist Martin Rowson never replied to my email about that). I'm becoming more and more interested in what I see as a contradiction: the left supports the underdog, yet fails to see fat people as oppressed, and instead reproduces us as visual stereotypes of the oppressors. Fat cat capitalist imagery is a travesty when you understand that the fattest social groups are also the poorest and most marginalised.

Similarly, I'm fascinated and annoyed at how fat activism is ignored, denied, belittled within apparently progressive leftist circles, even though it offers radical possibilities for understanding and challenging oppressive practices. This was brought home to me this week when my girlfriend got an email from a vegan anarchist café in London declining her proposal for a regular fat crafternoon-type event on the grounds that they were concerned about promoting obesity within the context of a global obesity epidemic.

In both cases people on the radical left are failing to see fat, that is, they are failing to understand fat as something with which they should be politically engaged in a critical manner. Instead, they rely on lazy thinking and stereotyping, refusing to acknowledge the radical work by fat activists that is going on right in front of them.

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.

Is FatBooth always fatphobic?

Double chin created without the jiggery-pokery of FatBooth!
100% non-digital! Hilarious! Exciting!

FatBooth is an iPhone app that adds a digital double chin to a picture of your face and makes thin people look sort of fat.

I've avoided this phenomenon largely because I don't own an iPhone, and I already look fat because I am fat. Some of my thin online friends have been playing with it recently and posting their pictures on Facebook, so now it's suddenly become a lot more present to me.

I was offended when I first saw the pictures and the comments after them, all consisting of onomatopaeic laughing and what looked like people choking with mirth. The digital double chins remind me of fat suits, more specifically Marisa Meltzer's article comparing fat suits to blackface. It's also a weird reversal of the headless fatty, where fat people are just as absent from the discourse surrounding the image as with pictures where our heads are cropped away. I felt that FatBooth is an appropriation of ersatz fatness, of people like me, and that a digital double chin tells you nothing at all about what it's like to be fat, it just turns it into a joke.

I went on to wonder if my authenticity as a 'real' fat person mattered. I was once told in the past that I was not fat enough to have a stake in fat politics (by an author who lost weight, wrote about it and still maintains their own stake in the matter, ahem). Anyone can talk about fat, I don't have the last word on it, it's important that people of all sizes engage. What makes this tricky is that fat people are very often made silent by obesity discourse and that fat hatred has widespread negative material effects on the quality of people's lives. A group of thin friends making a joke of a pretend double chin will never replace my lived embodiment, you could argue that it's not supposed to, a joke is just a joke, but I think a joke says more than that.

Seeing people's FatBooth pictures was like witnessing thin people's prurient obsession with fat embodiment. I thought: "This is how they see us when they can't conceive that we would see them doing this, or feel implicated in their actions, they are so profoundly immune to our daily grind." Imagining flesh on your bones is a real thrill when you don't have much of your own. It's a dangerous thing to imagine.

Following this, I tried to think of FatBooth as a tool that people use in different ways. I never thought of my Facebook friends who used FatBooth as fatphobic, so I tried to think about how non-fatphobes might use it, or if it was possible to use FatBooth without being fatphobic. I wondered if FatBooth could be something that enables people to think about fat in radical or progressive ways. Could it inspire empathy? Could it enable thin people to imagine themselves fat with no moral connotations? Could it enlighten?

If people using FatBooth lived in social contexts where there was no war on obesity, or endemic hatred of fat, then these things might be possible. But FatBooth appears to me as entirely a product of fatphobia, the way it frames the act of imagining oneself fat is intimately tied to dominant obesity discourse. FatBooth presents fat as funny, pitiful, fearful and Other; fat is something pathologically added-on to authentic slenderness; fat people are not recognisable as humans with agency, thoughts and feelings of their own, let alone politics, community, creativity or rage. If there are radical applications for FatBooth, I want to hear about them – but I won't be holding my breath.

Meltzer, Marisa (2006) 'Are Fat Suits the New Blackface? Hollywood’s Big New Minstrel Show', in: Jervis, L. & Zeisler, A. (eds.) Bitchfest: Ten Years of Cultural Criticism from the Pages of Bitch Magazine. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 267-269.

PS. This post got some diet company spam which made me laugh because it missed the point of the post heroically. Here's the text: "Nowadays people who have normal weight seem unnatural and not normal! Obesity is considered almost as a normal condition! And this thing with the iphone is just not cool!" Keep going spam-drone...

Queer Hapas, fat activism and weight loss surgery

I've been reading Jackie Loneberry Wang's excellent zine Memoirs of a Queer Hapa #2, which takes a look at the author's queer-biracial identity. Hapa refers to people who are "mixed-race and of Asian descent". I especially like the author's Concluding Thoughts from an essay entitled The Emergence of Queer Hapa Identity in the United States, where she applies Queer Theory in a super-accessible way. Basically she talks about identities that transgress boundaries and expose the limitations of those boundaries. She says that Queer Hapa people confound others who ally themselves "to the notion of identity as fixed, immutable, and formed around a logic of separation and differentiation" (p14). Wang goes on to say that even though Queer Hapa is an uncontainable identity, naming and inhabiting it enables people to organise strategically and politically in ways that are anti-assimilationist and complex.

Wang's zine has helped me not only think about Queer Hapa identity, but also about another group of people, who may also include Queer Hapas. I think the ways in which Wang writes about identity is helpful in thinking about what tends to be the thorny relationship between fat activism and weight loss surgery.

Apparently, as someone smart told me recently, the situation is changing and people who have had weight loss surgery are no longer drummed out of fat activist community. But my experience is that weight loss surgery continues to represent considerable anxiety in terms of how to address it in fat activism, and that bullying, shaming and shunning are still everyday tactics. Even where people have moved on from using these strategies to police the boundaries of fat activism and critique weight loss surgery, their previous use continues to hurt and has not been resolved.

I am not an advocate for weight loss surgery, I would never choose it for myself, and I discourage people from choosing it where I can. I think it is more likely to deplete than enhance health, I mourn the deaths of people who have died as a consequence of surgery, and its marketing rhetoric is invariably fatphobic, full of lies, and profoundly problematic. But neither am I an advocate for boundary policing or bullying. I am looking for helpful and human ways of thinking about this stuff that goes beyond a condescending 'love the sinner hate the sin' tolerance within the movement for people who have had surgery or are contemplating it. I would prefer a world where weight loss industries did not exist, but I do not live in that world, and am unlikely to as long as capitalism exists. Instead I am part of communities of people where some have chosen this, including a number of excellent fat activists who I love and respect.

Anyway, so Wang's work has helped me think about this and my tentative thoughts are about fat activists who have had weight loss surgery also inhabiting a space that transgresses and exposes the limitations of certain boundaries and classifications. For example, that to be a fat activist always involves resisting weight loss, or that there are sides to be chosen where you are either for or against weight loss. Fat activists who have had weight loss surgery, especially unrepentant people for whom it was a positive long-term choice, inhabit a space that shows there are other ways of being, that fat activism doesn't have to be an either/or proposition, and that it can be really diverse. I'm mindful of the postcolonial concept of hybridity, you can be a mixture of things, even things that are supposed to be incompatible, and you don't have to make a choice between one state of being or another, you can be all of them.

Going back to Wang and thinking about the possibilities for organising around fluid and complex identities, I feel excited for the potential opportunities for fat activists and weight loss surgery in challenging dogmatism and pioneering new forms of fat activist embodiment. It gives me hope that people who are currently shamefully denigrated within the movement might no longer have to skulk around in the shadows like a dirty little secret, waiting in vain for an invitation to come and sit at the table, it could be that they've already got their own thing going on and that everybody else should take note.

Jackie's response: Zines, queer hapas, fat activism

Wang, Jackie Loneberry (2009) Memoirs of a Queer Hapa #2

Response to The Guardian 'What I'm really thinking'

I saw this sorry pile of crap in the paper yesterday and, instead of screaming the house down with frustration at The Guardian's continual abjection of 'the obese', I felt inspired to write my own piece. Ooh look, two paradigms of fat embodiment illustrated right here in front of your very eyes! Which one will you choose? What else is out there?

What I'm really thinking

THE A FAT ACTIVIST

I'm wondering if you're going to say something offensive, banal or ignorant about me and people like me that will put me in a position where I will have no choice but to fuck you up.

If you are normatively-embodied, I'm checking you out for signs of a terror of ever becoming or being anything like me. I can see this in you no matter how much you try to hide it. I also read every patronising thought that crosses your brain, your attempts to deny them, and your belief that you are a better person than me because your clothes are smaller than mine. I see your classism, sexism, homophobia, racism and anxiety about age, embodiment and disability too, and wonder why you invest in these hateful ways of seeing the world. Do you think I'm pitiful and deluded? You are more so, you twat.

If you are not normatively-embodied, I'm thinking about how we might be friends and allies to each other. And if, by a miracle, you turn out not to be a fatphobe, I'll be considering inviting you out to play.

Most of the time I'll be thinking about freedom, how to live a good life, how to attack oppressive systems, including the fear and hatred of fat people and the way that that intersects with other ways of being. I'll be wrestling with ethical questions about peace and violence. I will be thinking about how I can disrupt and diminish people and organisations that have financial and ideological stakeholdings in fatphobia, including the abject medicalisation of 'the obese', and desire to control and prevent obesity. I'll be thinking about mobilising collectives, about the resources upon which I can draw, and about possibilities for collaborations and coalitions.

I'm thinking about fun, love, sex, money, death, survival, work, beauty, in more or less that order. I'm thinking about the impact of oppression and activism on my life, my body. I'm feeling glad of my flesh and unique embodiment. I'm taking strength and inspiration from the fat activists who came before me, especially the dykes, the brilliant communities to which I currently belong, and those to whom I am passing on the flame.

In the words of state murdered Black Panther and revolutionary Fred Hampton, as a fat activist what I'm really thinking is: "Up against the wall, motherfucker! I have come for what is ours."