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.

NOLOSE 2013 Announced

Preliminary details for NOLOSE 2013 have just been released. NOLOSE is a unique gathering in the US that has emerged from the fat feminist movement. Historically a lesbian event, the conference is now open to people of all genders and retains a queer and trans sensibility.

NOLOSE 2013 will take place in Portland, Oregon, 19-21 July. Visit the NOLOSE website for more details. Registration opens on 1 March, and there are many opportunities for volunteering.

Survival of the Fattest is this year's theme. This is all about sharing skills and info, and also about: "passing the mic to superfat folks, who bear the burden of so many other NOLOSErs' fears and anxieties, and who so often get left behind when fatties try to prove we're 'just like everyone else.'"

NOLOSE is a pretty amazing experience. But getting to Portland in July is likely to be a bit of a trial for many. There are three Financial Assistance funds available, to which people can now apply. Of particular interest to readers of this blog might be the 12 scholarships covering registration costs to people from groups underrepresented at NOLOSE, including those from outside of the US and North America.

Fat Talks Back at WOW in London

A bunch of us are going to be on a panel about fat at the Women of the World Festival (aka WOW) in London on 10 March.

More details to come, but here's what we've got so far:

Fat Talks Back
Charlotte Cooper, Caroline Walters, Stacy Bias and maybe others to be confirmed, chaired by Corinna Tomrley.
Sunday 10 March, 12-1pm.
Women of the World Festival, 6-10 March 2013.

Edited to add:

For reasons I don't understand, this post has attracted more than the usual amount of hate mail and spam. This one is the best of the bunch: "Totally agree with all these. Unfortunately, I have met men who have had all of these traits. I am by nature a pleaser and love giving to my partner, but have learned to back off a bit and reserve that for the mn who is deserving and not selfish. When a man is really into pleasing me, it makes me want to please him even more, and it's a win-win for everyone!"

Good for you, sexy lover, are you coming to the WOW fat panel?!

Fat Feminist Archive: Stein and Freespirit

I've been thinking about pictures and archives a lot lately.

After Dad died in August, I became the custodian of an archive of family photographs. I've been interested in feminist theory of family albums for a while, and I'm finding this collection of pictures to be really rich and powerful in terms of making sense of my own life.

I encountered a different kind of family archive when I was gathering material for my PhD about fat activism. I spent quite a bit of time in various archives, looking at evidence of fat feminist activism in objects and papers that had been donated by fat activists over the years. Because fat activism is relatively poorly documented, the archive is the place to be if you want to find out anything. I found handling, looking at, and reading the things I found in the archive to be very moving and exciting. Here was evidence that I'm not making this stuff up! It felt powerful to see myself within a continuum of activists.

Some archives let you take pictures of what you find, and so I have a little archive of fat feminist archival material on my computer. I thought I'd share some of it here. Because it's impossible to pick out the best stuff, I've just dipped in randomly.

This first item is a flyer for a reading by Judith Stein and Judy Freespirit. The year isn't mentioned but I did a bit of digging and I think it's 1984. I'm intrigued that these two women are billed as Two Fat Jewish Dykes. I know that Jewish dykes at this time, including Stein and Freespirit, were at the heart of fat feminism in the US. There had been a Jewish Feminist Conference in San Francisco in 1982 where Stein, and probably others, had circulated a sheet about fat oppression for discussion. Fatness and Jewishness were present amidst a broader lesbian feminism at that time, I think of this as an early attempt to articulate intersectionality in identity politics.

Other aspects of the framing of this reading seem odd to me in 2012. Dyke, although a term I use for myself because of its politicised, queer and unapologetic undertones, seems somewhat archaic. I don't hear many women, trans included, refer to themselves as dykes any more. The references to oldness, Old Wives' Tales, Bobbeh Meisehs, which is a Yiddish term also meaning old wives' tales, also strike me as odd. Queerness has become associated with youth, I think, and ageism makes it hard to imagine younger or middle-aged people playing with ideas around being old.

I like the way the flyer is copied on yellow paper, very eye-catching. I love the 'All the way from Boston and Berkeley' joke. I can imagine seeing it on a noticeboard somewhere, actually probably somewhere that doesn't exist any more, like a feminist bookshop, or a lesbian café. Maybe somewhere like Old Wives' Tales, the venue for the reading that also no longer exists. This was a bookshop on Valencia Street in San Francisco. It closed its doors for the last time in 1995, after about 20 years in business. Stein and Freespirit's reading presumably took place during its heyday.

Here are some links about the venue that offer some context for the reading:

• Found SF: Carol Seajay, Old Wives Tales and the Feminist Bookstore Network
• Claire Schoen Media: Old Wives' Tales
• Lost Womyn's Space: Old Wives Tale(sic) Bookstore
• SFMOMA Open Space: We thought the world we built would be forever: An Interview with Lenn Keller
• Online Archive of California, GLBT Historical Society's archival holdings for Old Wives' Tales Bookstore

This flyer represents to me the friendship between Stein and Freespirit, one I find inspiring. This was a political friendship, a working friendship as well as a genial and sociable relationship, perhaps a romantic one at some point too. They lived on opposite sides of the United States, they wouldn't have had the internet to help them, and they managed to maintain their friendship regardless. They produced fat feminist activist interventions together, by themselves, and with other people.

For this event they are both reading from small press publications. I'm not sure if Daddy's Girl was ever published, I think Freespirit had trouble finding a publisher and circulated some copies of it herself, but I can't be sure. I recall there is a manuscript in the GLBT Historical Society archive. Stein published Telling Bobbeh Meisehs: Notes on Identity and the Creation of Jewish Lesbian Culture, herself in Cambridge Massacusetts in 1982. This would have been before the explosion of popularity in feminist desk top publishing and zine-making in the early 1990s. It was more a scene of chapbooks and small-circulation journals.

Stein's shirt is quite something on this flyer/poster, I wish it was in full colour. Funny, too, to see her and Freespirit with dark hair when I know them as older grey-haired women. Freespirit's expression is intriguing, she looks like someone who can tell a story, which is true, she really could. When I think of her reading her account of abuse to an audience, I think of that everyday, taken-for-granted bravery of speaking that I was lucky enough to grow up with, but which nevertheless is remarkable and courageous. It makes me want to thank her, and other people like her, who continue to speak out.

The last few details of the object are about the conditions in which the reading took place. The venue is wheelchair accessible, calloo callay! Signed too! From my vantage point of London 2012, I can say that access for disabled people has dropped off the radar of radical queer life, not that venues are entirely forthcoming, and that this is depressing and needs to change. The sliding scale also rocks, though I have quite a lot of ambivalence about it being Women Only.

Remembering Judy Freespirit

Carrying my father's weight

My father died suddenly last week. He had been ill for some time, but it was still a surprise ending to his life, though not a painful or terrible death, as far as I know. I have been in the shock part of grief for a few days, and now this is shifting to a different set of feelings. To say we had a complicated relationship is the understatement of the century, so my grief, too, is complicated.

As a child I was told over and over again that I looked like my mum, but these days I see a lot more dad in me, and some of that is down to my fatness, my ginger colouring, and my sense of physical strength. I related to my dad as a fat man, but he was not always fat. This has implications for how I see my own body as a fat person; was I always fat too? What if I wasn't? Looking through old photographs, I can see that his body changed quite a bit, getting fatter and thinner at various times. In his thirties, he was sort of chunky, then the drinking took hold and he grew a belly and a double chin. Physical memories of my dad are about being a kid snuggled up to his big chest, invariably clothed in a rough, chunky jumper. I remember seeing him in hospital just over ten years ago and being shocked at how thin he had become with the cancer. But he had a strong body, he survived that cancer, he carried on, and although he was very ill when he died, he also drove a moped and gardened, and was relatively active up until the end.

When my mum died in 1987 I got scared that I would die if I didn't lose weight. I was 18 years old. I went on the last diet I would ever do, and because I was doing the cooking and cleaning and was basically keeping everything together, I also put dad on the same diet. On Monday, when I went to his place to pick up some photos and things, I saw that he'd got that same diet book on his bookshelf, he'd decided to do it again. He also had that creep Paul McKenna's I Can Make You Thin. My own book, Fat & Proud, wasn't there, he told me he'd ordered it when it came out in 1998, but that could have been a lie. In any case, we never really talked about it, or about fat, apart from in a video project I did for my Master's degree in 1994. To me it looks like my life's work passed him by.

Dad was cremated early on Tuesday morning. When the funeral director invited people to carry his coffin, I was one of those who stepped forward. I wasn't even sure that I was allowed, despite my feminism, and having attended many funerals, I've never seen a coffin carried by women. But no one stopped me, so I took my place and I helped carry my dad's body. It felt like a metaphor for the emotional carrying I've done in relation to him over the years. But it was also a very physical experience. He was heavy! I had to use all my strength to carry him, from my feet planted firmly on the ground, through my legs, arms and belly. As I carried him I thought: "I am a strong fat woman carrying my dad's body, I can feel the weight of him, this is a fat man's body, a body to which I am connected. I can do this, and I can see what I am doing." And then it was time to say goodbye.

Beth D looks up to me, and I look up to this lot

I'm working hard trying to wind up my PhD. I spend most days grimacing at my computer for hours on end. There aren't many laughs round here at the moment.

A little bit of sweetness came my way last night, however. I was doing the washing-up from dinner and my girlfriend came in, she had been online and had seen a link to a new interview in which superstar of the universe Beth Ditto name-checked me as one of the fat activists she looks up to.

I get love mail from readers from time to time, it started when I published my first book in 1998 and it's never really stopped, so I know that there are people in the world who appreciate my work. I see my book in libraries, dog-eared, underlined, well-read. Because my life is not very glamorous or well-paid, and because I know and have known abuse, these little messages are a great boost. Coming from Beth, though, well, that's really excellent. I have met some of my heroes and they are generally disappointing, but Beth is in another league; she has heart, humanity and politics, she makes you want to dance, and she lights the way. To think that I do things that she respects is really exciting. Despite my current gloom and angst, I have allowed myself to crack a tiny, sneaky, proud smile.

This morning I was thinking about the people I look up to in fat activism. Fandom has little interest for me because it is dehumanising, it's kind of flat. What I seek is deep and rich mutual engagement with people's work and ideas. In this way, I think of myself as standing on the shoulders of giants, and I hope that people will use my shoulders too (though credit me if you use my work please!), and that in time there will be towers of us, interlinked. In 21st century Western culture there's a faith in this figure of the lone leader but in fat activism I think this is a myth and I would advise scepticism of anyone who claims to have invented this stuff, or is looking to be the spokesperson for the movement, because there are so many fantastic activists who came before the current generation and I want to see them name-checked too! More than scepticism, I would advise people to visit an archive, ask around, and bone up on fat activist histories. My Queer and Trans Fat Activist Timeline project can help with this.

So I thought I'd name some names. There are many people in fat activism that I respect, but these people are the bomb:

Llewellyn Louderback left fat activism almost as soon as he started it, but not without publishing an article and a book that had a big influence on the movement. Over 40 years later, Fat Power is still amazingly relevant. He had a vision and the means to realise it; we should all be so lucky.

The fat feminists. These women, often lesbians, developed a political analysis of fat that included intersectionality, community and culture. Their feminism enabled fat women to locate the sources of oppression and liberation in everyday moments. Their work is often painfully obscure, but they are heroes in my world, the muthas of the movement, I am indebted to them beyond belief for their work, which has enabled me and many others to thrive. Sara Golda Bracha Fishman, also known as Vivian Mayer and Aldebaran, Judy Freespirit and Lynn McAfee are the key people who come to mind. They developed The Fat Underground into an organisation that defined fat activism, and still does to a great extent. Judy and Lynn went on to develop other significant fat activist projects, Sara helped develop fat activism on the East Coast of the USA, and produced this excellent article: Life In The Fat Underground. Elana Dykewomon and Judith Stein were also associated with these women. Elana published the most startling essays and poems documenting early fat feminism; Judith was an important mover and shaker in Boston, pioneering women's health, fat activism, and Jewish lesbian feminist politics.

Heather Smith used fat feminism from the US to develop a fat feminist community in the UK in the late 1980s. Other women were involved with the London Fat Women's Group, but it is Heather's articles and appearances in the British media at that time that turned me onto fat activism. One day I hope we can sit down together over a coffee.

And then there are the queers! Kathleen LeBesco's work championing the queerness of fat bodies and fat activism is visionary. Allyson Mitchell's activism and art blows my mind, the same goes for Scottee's use of fat in performance, and Substantia's abundance of fat photoactivism. The NOLOSE Board have navigated tricky waters around race and gender with imagination and integrity. There's FaT GiRL too.

I have friends and loves whose fat activism moves me very much: hello Amanda, Devra, Kay, and Simon. There are people, too, that I will never know, but whose images spur me onwards: Divine, Fran Fullenwider, Judith Clarke's photograph of Banshee that I found in the GLBT Historical Society archive in San Francisco.

I know there are many names I have missed out, the more I think of people, the more names and faces pop up. But this is where I will leave it for now. Perhaps you might like to share your own giants, perhaps here in comments, or in posts of your own.

I'm Presenting at Tate Modern on Friday

Kay Hyatt and I are presenting a little something at Tate Modern on Friday, as part of Allyson Mitchell and Deirdre Logue's Axe Grinding Workshop, part of the work they do as the Feminist Art Gallery in Toronto.

The ticketing is a bit weird, but do your best! Maybe give the Tate's box office a call?

Here's a link: Axe Grinding Workshop
East Room
Tate Modern, London
Friday 18 May 2012, 19.00 – 21.00

Psst: You can get tickets for £9 if you enter the promo code 'activist' on the booking page.

How I got into fat

Me, 1978 or so, looking into the future.

It's been a little scrappy around here of late and I'm sorry about that. I'm preoccupied with finishing my thesis, organising the Fattylympics, and keeping going amidst some slight burn-out. It could be worse but I haven't been in the mood for writing much.

I've been working on an autoethnography for my PhD. Ethnography is a kind of qualitative research methodology that involves looking at people. With autoethnography you are also looking at yourself.  If you want to know more about autoethnography, you could read Carolyn Ellis and Jacqui Gingras on the subject.

Because I think that context matters, I think that all researchers should reflect on who they are to be doing research, even – especially – the kind of researchers who produce pages of numbers about BMI. So I've been reflecting a lot over the four years in which I've been working on my PhD, and thinking about how I came to be here. With this in mind, I thought I'd share a little about how I got into fat. It goes like this...

I have been fat all my life, meaning that I have always been fatter than most of my peers. My family is pretty fractured and it's hard to tell how fat features there. Certainly three of my immediate family have had what they would think of as 'weight problems' and have 'done something about it,' and I have distant relatives who have been fat at various stages of their lives. I think I might be the fattest but it's hard to tell amidst all this shape-changing and self-regulation. I'm certainly the most self-accepting fat person in my family.

When I was about six or seven years old, my mum decided that something needed to be done about my body. Mum was a nurse, she was working as an administrator at a clinic at that time, and very much part of a culture of medicalisation. I think her decision to monitor the food I ate may have coincided with her own body-projects, it was certainly a part of her work of trying to pass as middle class. My first diet came at a time when we were living in a colonial ex-pat community in Hong Kong that included a lot of upper-middle and upper class people. I think she felt that she had to fit in with them, and that my fat body betrayed what she felt was the shameful truth of our class.

Mum and I dieted on and off for the next few years. Sometimes we'd follow a sheet that she brought home from work but mostly it involved periodic disapproval of what I ate and voiced anxiety about the size of my body, especially when clothes didn't fit me. In spite of all this I was a very active kid, I was a synchronised swimmer, and always running around, riding my bike, doing things. This continues to this day. So whilst I had this idea that my body was a problem, I also had an image of myself as active, someone who could do things.

I had no idea about fat politics as a teenager in the early 1980s in London, though I now know that a fat feminist movement had been active for at least ten years by this stage in other parts of the world. However, I had access to some things that enabled me to develop a critical understanding of my fatness. These things weren't directly about fat but they helped pave the way later on.

The first thing was feminism. I got interested in feminism as a young girl. In my family sex was never spoken about, and I was quite anxious by the time I reached puberty, I wanted information. I didn't know about libraries so I went to bookshops and read the sex education books there. Books on feminism were stacked nearby so when I'd read all the stuff about 'a man and a lady loving each other very much and making a baby' I moved on to much more interesting books about contraception, abortion, being lesbians, self-determination, and so on. I didn't know it but I was learning about speaking up, power, and possibilities for naming and exploring my own experience.

The next thing was a sort of queer punk. Whilst I was at school I got a Saturday job that introduced me to lots of people who were really happy to be freaks and who sneered at the straight world. Queer was not a term that had much currency at the time, but this group of people, including the heterosexuals, were very queer indeed. Some were performers, most were much older than me and everyone had lived exciting lives of one kind or another. People did things, they didn't wait for someone else to do it for them. Although everybody lived on the margins in some way, people lived creatively amidst rich communities of friends. There was always something to do, bands and clubs, I started going out and I never really stopped. At the same time I was reading subcultural literature, writers like Kathy Acker, David Wojnarowicz, William Burroughs, and this too gave me an idea that things could be different and that being different was no bad thing at all.

I left school and did A Levels and got into student politics. At the time this took the form of anti-fascist and anti-racist organising, I remember quite a bit of feminism in the mix too. The National Union of Students was still a radical body back then. We went on demonstrations and took part in discussions and conferences. Alongside this I was travelling on and off with my oldest brother who was what would now be called a new age traveller. So I had experiences of very marginal politics too, living on the road, trying to avoid arrest, a kind of practical anarchism.

Throughout all this my fatness was still seen as a problem, not only by me but by the people around me. I longed to be thin and still made attempts to lose weight, although this never came to much. I think I knew it was bullshit but I didn't have a way of articulating it until I saw members of the London Fat Women's Group talking on Wogan, a very popular early evening television talk show. This would have been in 1989. They were organising a conference, and they also made a short documentary about fat politics that was also shown on TV. I watched it avidly.

It took a while, a couple of years, for the things that the London Fat Women's Group were saying to sink in. I think I was still recovering, not just from growing up in a context of everyday fatphobia, but also other kinds of trauma. The last straw was being dumped by a boyfriend who wanted me to be thinner. I'd really had enough. But the appearance of those British fat feminists in my life showed that there were other ways of being, and my experiences as a girl and as a teenager enabled me to adopt it eventually. Given my context, it made total sense to me that fat could be a social and political identity and that there was incredible potential for the development of fat culture, collective action and intellectual activity.

I started to look out for other things. By my late teens and early 20s I had an experiential and theoretical framework for activism that made Shadow on a Tightrope and Being Fat is Not a Sin irresistible when I first came across them around 1990 or so. I started an ill-fated fat support group, did some postgraduate work about fat activism, started to meet people who were interested in similar things and who supported my fat identity, took part in a proto-fatshion modelling competition(!), wrote a book, and spent the advance on a trip to California to meet the dykes who put FaT GiRL together and attend the Dirty Bird queercore festival. Fat politics interested me initially as a solution to the years in which my body had been a battlefield, a place of restriction, blame, anxiety, but it soon became a much bigger project, something that could play off other life experiences. Fat as feminist, punk, queer, a place to which I could bring my politics, a way of understanding my life. There was no turning back.

References

Bovey, S. (1989) Being Fat is Not a Sin, London: Pandora.

Ellis, C. (2004) The Ethnographic I: A Methodological Novel about Autoethnography, Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press.

Gingras, J. R. (2009) Longing for Recognition: The Joys, Complexities, and Contradictions of Practicing Dietetics, York: Raw Nerve.

Schoenfielder, L. and Wieser, B. (1983) Shadow On A Tightrope: Writings By Women on Fat Oppression, San Francisco: Aunt Lute.

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)

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.

Allyson Mitchell's fat feminist art and me

I won't lie, xmas makes me feel mentally ill and if I smoked crack I would be huffing on a big fat pipe of it right now. In past years I've published a Hits and Shits list on this blog in an attempt to create some kind of temporal narrative about fat. This year I've given up.

Instead I'm going to mark the end of the year by sharing a drawing that one of my favourite artists, Allyson Mitchell, has produced. Allyson is one of the founders of the now defunct fat activist group Pretty, Porky and Pissed Off, who reclaimed the streets of Toronto a while back. She's also an assistant Professor in the School of Women's Studies at York University. Oh yeah, and she co-owns the Feminist Art Gallery (FAG) and is an accomplished artist in her own right. I've added that last but actually it should go first.

So, picture the scene, I'm sitting at my computer, contemplating xmas-related suicide, and up pops an email from Allyson. She's attached a drawing that features me. The email says that I am in the middle and the image comes from a photo shoot I did for FaT GiRL in 1996. It goes on to say that the other figures are also based on women in FaT GiRL and that I was the inspiration for the piece.

The drawing is part of a project started by Ulrike Müller, who I don't know and have never met, that Allyson has worked on. Allyson wrote in her email: "Ulrike took the titles of images that are archived in the Lesbian Herstory Archives in Brooklyn. Artists were asked to draw an image that represents the title in some way without seeing the actual image. I randomly got the title 'A Group of Naked Women...Very Curvy' – what luck!!!!"

It's now a few days later and I'm still trying to work it out. I feel very happy and proud that something I did a long time ago can be part of something really excellent today, it makes me reflect on the importance not just of developing fat queer cultural production, but also the value of using our bodies within the things we make. I love Allyson's art and am absolutely delighted to feature in it. Thinking about this drawing makes me feel as though I'm swirling around in a whirlpool of beautiful things that mean a great deal to me: queer archives and especially the Lesbian Herstory Archives, fat dykes, activism, Allyson's art, FaT GiRL, wooooo! The picture reminds me of an incredible time in my life when I kind of bloomed into my queer-fat self after a long time of feeling frozen. Playing naked on a Californian beach exemplifies that period so well. It's also amazing to see my nudey fat body there, I'm feeling a lot of self-love about that, and that's a precious feeling for people like me. Not only that, but it's amongst the other bodies too; I know that I couldn't have inhabited that emotional-embodied-social-political space without the others. It feels really fantastic to see myself acknowledged as part of this amazing fat feminist movement, in ways that I relate to, by someone who knows and who is also implicated in it herself. I love the luck and randomness of how the image came about. It gives me chills of happiness to think about other people seeing this work as it becomes circulated in new spaces that Ulrike is developing, and it becoming part of other people's consciousness.

Woah, head explodes.

Image courtesy of Allyson Mitchell

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.

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.

Fantasising about Lauren Berlant and her fatphobia

Dear Lauren Berlant,

I awoke this morning to a beautiful fantasy all about you, but before I can go into that I'd like to fill you in on the backsnark.

A while ago I met this hot woman and told her that I was interested in fat and queer theory. She mentioned your name, so I went and read some of your work because I wanted to impress this woman enough so that she would have sex with me. Unfortunately, this is when things began to unravel.

I came across your paper Slow Death (Sovereignty, Obesity, Lateral Agency). Boy oh boy, did I ever feel like I was experiencing a slow death of my own whilst I was reading it. It's four years since this work was published, by you, and about two since I read it for the first time, and that feeling of metal atrophy I get when I think about it persists. I knew there were ideas in there, but I couldn't get to them because of the way you set them out on a page or a screen. Some people think that reading something so impenetrably academic is illuminating, but I just call it bad writing. I struggled on regardless, wondering if I was reading something of value, or the ramblings of someone who had lost their grip on things.

Your arguments about embodied sovreignity have been better expressed elsewhere, particularly in disability theory, which you don't mention. It is your thoughts on fat that really have me scratching my head. There is nothing in what you write that reflects any of my experience as a fat queer. I'm there going: "Does she really mean people like me?". I know I'll never get the time back that I've wasted in reading what you have to say but that hasn't stopped me going back and back again to try and make sense of what you've written. This work is well-cited, I reason, there must be something in it that I'm not getting. There comes a time when you just have to give up hoping.

It's not that you don't know about critical perspectives on obesity epidemiology, you cite the big men of the movement, Paul Campos and Eric Oliver, and you have a soft spot for Richard Klein's terrible book too, you just choose not to engage. If you bothered to think about the queerness of bodies, of what it is to have a body that isn't like yours, that is non-normative, you would have the opportunity to engage with a richness of material beyond your wildest dreams.

Instead, you choose to side with The Man. Slow Death reiterates the abjection of fatness. Fat is attrition, it is the pathological and literal representation of slow death. Your work reproduces fat people as Othered, anonymous, an abstraction; 'The Obese'. You fail to question the existence of fat people as anything but a crisis brought about by a mismanagement of energy balance and you see nothing of value in fatness other than as a symbol for your theorising. Given the paltriness of critical literature on fat and race, and the problem of racism within some fat activisms, it's especially dismaying to see you applying reductive obesity discourse to people of colour in this work. There is nothing radical here.

There are other queer feminist academics who have also failed to address their own fatphobia; Elspeth Probyn thinks that fat activism is a pathetic excuse and that obesity really is a terrible problem; Susie Orbach, well, the less said about her the better. I am not the first to point out the failings of those who theorise the body, including feminists, who conveniently ignore fat or reproduce the problematic terms of obesity discourse. It's painful to witness one's abjection in this work, again and again, especially by people who should know better, people like you who are paid to think and write, people who are lauded as intellectuals, tenured professors, those who enjoy tremendous intellectual freedom and privilege and cultural capital, people who are products of privilege misusing their power, circumscribing people who have less power. Surely you have the time and resources to dig a bit deeper, think a bit harder, be a bit more critical (your journal is called Critical Inquiry after all). What would happen if you spoke to some fat activists? It's not like you have to agree but at least engage for a moment.

I wonder if you think about fat people reading your work. Fat people are so abstracted in Slow Death as newspaper reports or policy objects that it's hard to imagine an actual fat person living a life, going about their business, thinking, or having any material presence or agency at all. Can you imagine a fat dyke throwing a brick through the window of a diet clinic? Fat lovers whipping and fisting? A fat genderqueer subverting death drive theory? It must be tragic to live in a context where these people, who are real and part of my life, don't exist.

It's time to return to my fantasy. So I woke up this morning and looked at my computer and saw that two of my favourite performers, David Hoyle and Bird la Bird are appearing on a panel with you at the Trashing Performance project here in London. It's on 26 October, which also happens to be my 43rd birthday. I drifted off into a reverie, imagining David and Bird turning on you in the panel and asking you pointed questions about the fatphobia in your work. I imagined you squirming. And then I thought of Scottee and Amy Lamé, who produced the sublime Burger Queen this year, who would surely be in the audience, and Vikki Chalklin, whose performance work considers femme fatness, and maybe there would be other rad fatties in the crowd too, and I imagined a bag of rotten tomatoes in there somewhere, and flesh, teeth, mess, and your disbelief of it all. And I imagined you picking up your bags and running to the airport to return to your little burrow in academia-land, shaken and aghast.

Sincerely,

Charlotte

PS The expression on the woman behind you in this picture makes me laugh a lot. It's the top result for your name in Google Images.

Selected References

Berlant, L. (2007) 'Slow Death (Sovereignty, Obesity, Lateral Agency)', Critical Inquiry, 33 754-780.

Probyn, E. (2008) 'Silences behind the Mantra: Critiquing Feminist Fat', Feminism & Psychology, 18:3, 401-404.

Performance Matters: Under- and Overwhelmed: Emotion and Performance

Please also see:

Kirkland, Anna (2011) 'The Environmental Account of Obesity: A Case for Feminist Skepticism,' Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 36:2, 411-436.

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

Queer Feminist Fat Activism Spanish Style

Hey look, Una Buena Barba has published a fat activism special, featuring interviews with me and Ruth from The Bop, plus the Fat Liberation Manifesto, and lots of eye candy. Queer feminist culture, free, unshaved and all in Spanish - hola!

Una Buena Barba

Original unedited English version (.pdf, 96kb)

NOLOSE - exciting new directions in queer and trans fat activism

NOLOSE has just announced a change in policy that feels very daring, radical and exciting in the context of how identity politics have shaped fat activism.

The policy change statement sets out who will now be welcome at NOLOSE, sets down a challenge to identity as an organising principle, and questions the notion of safe space. This last aspect is reminiscent of Queerfestival Copenhagen's No safer spaces this year, which itself may also be part of a new trend in queer organising.

How the change in policy will work in concrete terms is anybody's guess. I think there are people who will struggle and I hope that they find a way of coming to terms with these new developments. I feel very positive about the policy change, I think it's realistically considered in terms of gender and 'safety', and I like how it advocates for more multiple and intersectional fat activisms. It demonstrates shifts in genealogies of fat activism that has roots in radical lesbian feminism and shows that the work based in these histories, locations, and politics are thriving and evolving, they are really alive. Congratulations to NOLOSE for making the leap.

Here's the text of the policy change in full:

NOLOSE Policy Change: Inclusion and Moving from Identity to Intention
July 8, 2011

Gender and Who 'We' Are

NOLOSE is a volunteer-run organisation dedicated to ending the oppression of fat people and creating vibrant fat queer culture. That's been our mission since the early '90s. Since that time, our community has been defined by who 'we' are (by nature, an evolving definition).

NOLOSE started out as the National Organisation for Lesbians of SizE, firmly fixed in identity politics, as a community of fat dykes and bisexual women. As the years passed and the organisation grew, we changed our policy to include not only a broader community of queer women—dykes, lesbians and bisexual women, including trans women—but also transgender people overall. This was partially in response to the evolving gender identities of people already in our community who were marginalised under the old policy.

Since then, NOLOSE and the annual NOLOSE Conference have been explicitly trans-inclusive, inviting all fat queer women (regardless of assigned sex or gender at birth), and all fat trans and gender-variant folks and our allies of all sexual orientations, with the specific exclusion of cisgender men (men who were assigned male at birth and identify that way now).

In the years since making this change, we've become aware that the altered policy continues to marginalise transgender people by requiring that they negate parts of their identities in order to be welcomed into the conference. For example, at this time trans men who attend can do so on the basis of having been formerly identified or socialised as female, but not on the basis of being men. At best, they can attend on the basis of being trans-men, which assumes a natural divide between cisgender men and trans men. This division can be dehumanising.

While trans men are welcomed regardless of the degree to which they have undergone hormone treatment or gender confirmation surgeries, we understand that the current gender policy may not feel as welcoming to trans women who have either not yet undergone hormone treatment and surgical transition, cannot afford to, or choose not to. While our previous policies seemed to make sense for the organisation at the time, NOLOSE does not wish to police the bodies, gender identities and gender expressions of our community. Instead, we'd like create a place that welcomes people on the basis of their desire to help build fat-positive and anti-oppressive community.

Challenging Identity as a Focus

Identity politics have their use and appeal, but they've also been constricting for us and many social justice movements. Because we defined our conference as being for and by a particular group, we opened thorny questions about legitimacy, and who had the right to be present and heard. Had we not begun to challenge that definition, we would likely have had to deal with border disputes between people arguing about 'how much' of some identity one must have in order to belong. This is a common challenge in groups and movements organising for change around identity.

There are also complexities regarding representation—if we're all in the same identity category, questions will invariably arise regarding what we say we want and how we should represent ourselves—often centred on the experience of assimilation/anti-assimilation. This can easily become a politics of shame, wherein those least able or least wanting to assimilate to some normative category get left behind. This perpetuates oppression and exclusion, drawing lines through the bodies of people.

We think there's a better way for us. Rather than trying to agree about 'who we are,' we want to come together around what is desired – what kind of ethics/politics we hold, and what kind of world we want to create. In the process, we remain cognisant of the fact that because we are differently impacted by relations of oppression and privilege, we also have different imperatives and investments in making change. Rather than try to bang out an ironclad code of conduct for what that means, we ask that everyone come willing to do the necessarily messy work of trying to figure out how to do anti-oppression politics and bring about social change and justice.

Because previous definitions of who belongs and who doesn't haven't worked for us, and because we believe that our NOLOSE community is shaped by the consciousness, ideological intent, and action of our participants rather than by identity, we've decided to change the criteria for conference attendance from an identity-based one to one that's ideologically-based. This means that anyone aiming to help create a queer, fat positive, anti-racist, anti-ableist, anti-ageist, anti-classist, anti-colonialist, feminist space will be welcome at NOLOSE. In effect, this means that all people interested in building fat-positive, queer, anti-oppressive community, including cisgender men, will be welcome at NOLOSE. Nobody will be excluded on the basis of identity. This change will be implemented by the time of our next conference.

It's been a long process that brought us to this decision. We began by having several in-person discussions more than a year ago, then created a forum (held at the 2010 conference) that helped us, as a community, identify people's hopes and fears regarding opening the conference up to cisgender men. That input was the basis of several discussions to follow, including a consultation with LGBT social worker Katy Bishop (a counsellor with expertise in helping communities navigate issues of inclusion and exclusion). It was in a meeting facilitated by Katy that we outlined this new policy.

Challenging the Concept of Safety

One concern in regards to this policy that we want to specifically address is the fear of losing of what's long been called 'safe space.' This conference has often been more comfortable for white people, those with temporary physical ability, and mid-size folks, while others of us have had to field assumptions and been forced to educate those with more privilege in order to keep from becoming invisible. This isn't our idea of safety.

While we respect people's yearning for spaces that feel secure, we want to recognise that there is a distinction between being 'safe' and being 'comfortable.' In our policy considerations, we define 'safe space' as space free from physical, verbal, and emotional violence; 'comfort,' by contrast, often has more to do with lack of challenge around our preconceived beliefs, and may also be informed by individual privilege. In that sense, discomfort can be what allows us to challenge oppression and build more inclusive community. We challenge the idea that truly comfortable space is possible or even desirable.

We want a conference that lives up to social justice principles in regards to anti-violence, body size and ability, race and ethnicity, sex, gender, sexual orientation, age, and class background. We want it to be a space that's less 'comfortable' and more radical and conscious about the kind of world we all want to live in and work toward. This means sharing space that may be challenging for all of us, and in which we're accountable to each other in order to meet those challenges with compassion and strength. This means taking risks, asking questions, being willing to learn and listen, and being responsible for our own learning as well.

Moving Forward Together

We want your input on how to actualise this policy. We, the board of NOLOSE, welcome suggestions and input from you all on how to make this policy and focus change work. Since all board members are working throughout the whole conference, our availability is limited, but you may be able to check in if you want to speak one-on-one with one of us. We will also be available from 12:00-1:00 on Saturday at lunch (at a specified table, TBD), and during the Saturday 3pm workshop slot in the 'Pig' room for community members to gather and discuss the policy change with members of the NOLOSE Board of Directors. We encourage you to add your ideas, concerns, and questions to our suggestion box located at the registration table. We'll also be asking for your input on our evaluation form at the end of the conference, so be on the lookout for that.

Here's what we would especially like to hear about:

• Suggestions for things to include in the conference mission.
• What do you, as a community member, need to help you through this policy and focus transition?
• Are there structural ways that the conference can respond to your needs in regards to the new policy?

We welcome you to join in this space with us. It's an ongoing adventure that'll bring its own perils, wisdom, and love with it. Thanks for sharing it with us.

The NOLOSE Board of Directors

Tara Shuai, Co-President
Galadriel Mozee, Co-President
Kim Paulus, Vice President
Rachel, Treasurer
Geleni Fontaine, Secretary
Abby Weintraub
Jen Herrington
Joe
Sondra
Zoe

Look a fat dyke in the eye

I was given a copy of a flyer for an exhibition by Zoe Mosko that took place in 1982. I love the text on the flyer, which shows how rich the fat dyke scene was in the Bay Area in the 1980s, and the centrality of cultural production to fat activism. But the best thing is obviously the image, what a winner! Don't those women look fantastic? The outfits and the eye contact! Wowie! I'm going to cover a hat with some badges now.

The Liberated Fat Person

Dianne Rubinstein wrote a Fat Consciousness Raising Outline in 1981 and, I believe, circulated it via NAAFA. In the guide, Rubinstein offers a rationale for consciousness raising, which was one of the key organising and politicising methods of Western feminism from the 1960s to the early 1980s, broadly speaking. She offers a format for going about fat consciousness raising, which includes lists of questions and instructions on how to listen and respond. I've never been a part of a consciousness raising group, I'm a bit too young for that, so it is fascinating to see its process spelled out in such detail.

I was interested in the last set of questions Rubinstein asks, titled The Liberated Fat Person. Firstly, the language jumped out at me, especially the use of the definite article, and the past tense for 'Liberated' which imply that liberation is a fixed state that can be attained, maybe an ideal state. This contrasts current alternative thinking about fat activism or fat acceptance which is that they are ongoing, open.

Secondly, the list of questions offers an idea of what fat liberation looked like at that point in time, within a US context of feminism and rights-based organising. Some of these ideas endure, suggesting the slow moving ideology of fat politics. Again, the concepts are fairly fixed, there's not much room for ambiguity, the use of 'our' and the undefined categorisation of people as fat and thin are problematic. The language of 'Fat Liberation', presumably rooted in Women's Liberation, looks very dated now, and has been largely taken over by the term 'fat acceptance' or 'size acceptance' which I think are politically much weaker, or 'fat activism', which often implies something else.

Thirdly, it strikes me how rare it still is to come across work which is written from the standpoint of a fat libber, or fat activist. I'm talking about work which directly references these concepts and which illustrates the values and worldviews of people engaged with these pursuits.

Lastly, I like that the questions might elicit different responses over time and place. It might be fun to have a consciousness raising session in 2011, to have a go at answering them together.

The Liberated Fat Person

1. What strengths do fat people have?
2. What is a liberated fat person?
3. What are some of the problems/pressures of the liberated fat person?
4. What is the best way to deal with a fat person who is antagonistic to the fat liberation movement?
5. How do you deal with a thin person who is antagonistic to the fat liberation movement?
6. Can a fat person with 'a raised consciousness' still relate to thin people?
7. What is equality? Is that our goal?
8. What are the goals of the fat liberation movement?
9. What are the goals of your group?
10. Is c/r a political action? Is it enough?
11. What is 'closet fat'? To what extent are you?
12. What is 'closet f.a.'?
13. What have you gotten from this group? Is it what you expected?

Rubinstein, D. (1981). Fat Consciousness Raising Outline. Bellerose, NY: NAAFA.

Uppity Fatty

Uppity Fatty, a sister-site to the fantastic Adipositivity Project, posted a picture of my girlfriend Kay and I.

I love how both websites generate mass archives of images of fat people, autonomous images that represent how we see ourselves. Taking self-representation into your own hands is so easy and so radical. These are images that sustain me.

Why don't you submit some pictures of yourselves?