My Guardian article on Fat Panic and Fat Activism

The Guardian has published my piece about the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges' report on obesity, which came out today with a slew of headless fatties plastered all over the media.

There's no need for this obesity epidemic hysteria

If you want to see more articles like this in the news, please consider writing to the editor and telling them how much you like my work, and how the paper should get on board with more critical work on obesity.

Edited to add: look, they put me on the front page, my whole name and all. I drew a ring around it because I can. How come Tim Lobstein gets to be called Dr and I don't?!

I got fat-papped* for the Daily Mail

Mike Lawn's picture of us

I co-produced an event at the weekend called The Fattylympics. I've given an account of what this work entailed elsewhere.

Unfortunately, despite our best efforts to keep them out, the event took place in an open space and was gate-crashed by some journalists who refused to respect our clearly-stated request that they stay away. This is ordinary behaviour in the UK, where unethical practise is endemic within the profession. One of the journalists was a photographer called Mike Lawn (possibly a pseudonym, the URL has the name Graham and files attributed to that name), who provides work for the Daily Mail, a right-wing tabloid. Lawn sneaked around all day, failing to disclose that he was a professional photographer, he took pictures of people without their consent and sold them for publication to a newspaper that probably everyone featured in it hates. I was one of the people, someone else was featured and mis-named as me (maybe because inter-departmental communication at the Mail is terrible, maybe because all fatties look the same to the normals, or could it even have been a strategy for covering their arses legally if they didn't actually name us correctly in the photographs?!).

I'm interested in the idea of fat people as objects of fascination. We are objects of fascination in medicine, and in research. I hadn't been able to articulate it until now but we are also photographic objects of fascination. Headless fatties make this clear. And being an object of fascination brings with it forms of symbolic violence; we are dehumanised and belittled in that gaze. Perhaps the quality of the fascination in each field varies, but it's a fascination nevertheless, people really want to look at us, especially when they are sure that we won't stare back or look at them. No one looked back at Mike Lawn, he's as forgettable as they come, but he was looking at all of us keenly on Saturday.

It is ludicrous to think of myself as a pappable object, an object of fascination. At the moment I spend most days at home, working on my thesis. I lead a fairly quiet life, with moments of exuberance like the Fattylympics dotted around it. I live on a small amount of money, I don't pursue fame or draw attention to myself through my appearance, although I am opinionated and like to share my thoughts where I can. I am mostly very obscure and unknown. It's unbelievable that my picture would help to sell newspapers, especially all red-faced at the end of a sweaty day, with my hair all dishevelled, and topped with a preposterous Fattylympics towelling headband. I was wearing Birkenstocks too.

I remember the moment it happened. Kay and I went to fetch the Fattylympics medals from the back of the car. This was the first time we had been alone together since the event started, and it was the last push before it was time to end. We were chatting intimately as we walked with the pole full of medals towards the venue. A guy hopped out from nowhere and took pictures of us without asking. I remember his weird, hunched over stance which I now understand was the stance of a photographer. He didn't have a showy camera. I foolishly assumed that because we were having a private moment we were immune to any intrusion. I thought it was weird he'd want to take our picture in that moment and asked him to send us his pictures. "I will," he said. Reader, he didn't. The reason he didn't is that the pictures he took are worth money to him and won't be thrown away on Facebook, or given to anyone. Maybe he'll sell them, and others he took, elsewhere.

Going through the photographs that other people shared, I see Mike Lawn more clearly. It's chilling to see him appear in other people's pictures, seeing him getting in there, taking pictures of trusting, unsuspecting people. This may be legal but it is abusive. Mike, you are probably reading this, what do you say? How much money did you earn from taking our pictures? How are you going to make this better?

I have regrets about how this played out on Saturday. We could not stop the media from gate-crashing, we confronted some people and did the best we could to keep an eye open for intrusive and unwanted behaviour, but these people are sneaky liars and they did their job under those terms. On the other hand, we could have been clearer about warning people that photographers and journalists may have been present. Because of these experiences I will probably never again produce a fat activist event in an open space. Thanks Mike.

Until fat people stop being dehumanised objects of fascination, we will continue to be money-makers for exploitative journalists and photographers. This means that fat activists, especially those in the UK, or any place where the media is feral, might think about building media strategies that protect participants, especially during public actions. This is a big job. It entails building media literacy, building enough self-esteem in people to be able to say no to all forms of exploitative journalism, to develop practical strategies for keeping people safe from media intrusion.

There are small consolations from the experience. A picture of two fat dykes carrying a pole of home-made medals appeared in a high-circulation newspaper. Hello, we exist. And Kay was wearing a t-shirt that I got her at the Allied Media Conference, for a fantastic project called All of Us or None, which fights discrimination against prisoners and supports prisoner rights. I am glad the image of a golden fist and the slogan All of Us or None got reproduced far and wide. It would have been better had we given our consent, however.

*papped = to have your picture taken by a paparazzo. Fat-papped = to have your picture taken and sold without your consent because you are fat.

Why do the same headless fatties keep popping up?

Very briefly, I've noticed how the same headless fatties turn up again and again in fat panic news stories.

I see these two pictures all the time: golddigga and big-arse-small-chair. Today golddigga accompanied a story about The Food and Drug Administration's approval of a new diet drug, Belviq, in the US. I've seen that picture illustrate other obesity epidemicTM stories too.

I'm interested in what makes them so alluring to picture editors. My gut reaction is that big-arse-small-chair freaks the normals out because, faced with a big bum, all they can do is identify with the chair. Golddigga isn't particularly fat, in my opinion, but it’s the intersection of implied unrepentant chavviness and single motherdom that makes the use of the image so full of hate. I appreciate it's also about how pictures get sold and used in news media, for example there is probably a pool of images available to editors, and this is based on the deals that news providers have with picture agencies.

Thoughts? Share 'em!

Headless fatties, the visual cliché that will not die

My friend Substantia Jones recently shared a link to an interview with Cleo Berry in the New York Times: Imagine His Shock. His Leg Had Vanished. Berry is an actor who posed for some pictures a while back. To his astonishment his image has just turned up with one of his legs Photoshopped off in a health promotion campaign about diabetes.

It's not just the cropping out of a leg that makes this story significant. The advert is clearly part of a headless fatty tradition in advertising. I imagine Berry has been presented in this way because of anonymity, the business conditions under which Berry's image can be used and licensed, wanting to give the figure in the advert universal appeal. Yet headlessness produces a distancing rather than identification when viewers look at a picture of a headless fat person, and this campaign relies on stereotypes, which are also dehumanising. It presents the holy trinity of fat, consumption and disease in an image that is pure abjection and, I suspect, does more for fat-shaming than it does for health promotion. It hardly paints a generous picture of disability either. I haven't come across any commentary yet about the way that race, gender and class are also significant parts of the image.

New York City's Department of Health and Mental Hygiene sidestepped the issue of representation in the New York Times article to say that the advert is purely about the impact of diabetes. They have little interest in engaging with how they use images of fat people. This is not very ethical, you'd think that an organisation invested in public health would care about this sort of thing. This response shows that the use of headless fatties is not restricted to the worst of the tabloid media, it's a damaging visual cliché used by public service organisations too.

The quote in the article from Howard Wolfson, about having disability represented by someone who is not disabled, is naïve, in my opinion. Disabled activists have long campaigned against having able-bodied people represent disabled people. Realness is important because it brings depth and humanity with it, and one of the reasons this image fails is because it lacks those things.

It's interesting to hear Berry talking about how the picture came to be, his attitude towards it, the depressing effects it might have on his career which, as a fat black actor looking for roles, is probably pretty tough as it is. He says a lot about fat and representation in a short interview, about money, power, the trade in images; his account is really rich.

I think that all fat people posing for photographs should try and be aware of how their images might be used, and make amendments to photo releases if they're concerned at all about being a future poster child for abjection. At the time the pictures were taken, Berry had no understanding of what it meant to have your image used for a stock photo company, or to sign a release agreeing that your image could be manipulated. I'm grateful that he's spoken up about what it's like to be depicted in this way. It reminds me of how powerful it is when people have opportunities to refuse dehumanisation, how speaking up can expose the systemic and seemingly overwhelming ways in which people are silenced. I wish that could happen more often.

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...