Lew Louderback, More People Should Be FAT, November 1967

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Queer and Trans Fat Activist Timeline zine is now available to buy!

I am absolutely delighted to announce that A Queer and Trans Fat Activist Timeline zine is now available to buy.

How to buy the zine.

The zine (a kind of homemade magazine) is a discussion of queer and trans fat activist histories, and about how people might undertake the crucial work of making, documenting and disseminating stories and accounts. People are profoundly separated from those who came before them if this work doesn't take place.

A Queer and Trans Fat Activist Timeline documents a workshop which produced an object which was then archived. The zine itself will also be lodged at a number of archives and libraries around the world, but there are some left over for people to have for themselves.

It's hard to know what to say about this project because I've been working with it closely for about a year, and because it has become much more than each individual part; it's no longer just a workshop, or just an object or just a zine. It's also a project that has taken me from California to Germany, I've presented the timeline to different people and there have been some wonderful discussions of it. It's been the focus of an artist's residency and has helped shift the way I think of my own work as a cultural producer. I've talked about it on the radio and it's become a donation to an archive in the hope that other people might make something of it in the future. I'm writing a paper about it. No doubt it will go on and morph into other things too, but for now here's the zine.

I have some secret hopes for the timeline now that it is a zine:

• People will become excited about queer trans fat activism – the timeline documents many accounts that have never been shared elsewhere
• People will become excited about the richness of fat activism as a movement with historical links that go back at least several decades and crosses international borders
• Queer and trans people will get on board with fat activism more
• Fat activists will get on board with queer and trans stuff more
• People will document their own activism
• People will consider things like place and time and context when they produce accounts of their own activism
• People will think about cultural imperialism when they construct and disseminate accounts of what they do
• That archivists and librarians will make more of an effort to make the ways that queer and trans and fat move through each other more explicit and available
• I hope that it will blow people's minds.

I'll stop talking about this for now, no doubt I'll come back to it later at some point.

How the Left failed fat

About a week ago my friend sent me a link to an article by Jennie Bristow that was published in Living Marxism when my book came out in 1998, you can read it below. My publisher at the time sent me a press packet of all the coverage my book generated, but this article wasn't in it so I never saw it. I'm glad that I didn't read it back then, the work had been a monumental struggle for me at a time when I was living a somewhat marginal life, and I would have been devastated.

I'm in a better position to talk about this stuff 13 years on. Bristow's vicious piece is callous in its response to Christina Corrigan's death, and disablist and racist to boot. Without ever having met me, she paints me as a miserable, whining wannabe victim intent on playing oppression olympics, when actually my book sets out the many ways in which fat activists resist and transform hatred, and why we do it. Bristow presents fat activism as dogmatic and American, which it certainly can be, but there's more to the picture than that. She posits the classic argument that fat is trivial compared to 'real' oppression, not least because fat is a choice. Weirdly, she demolishes me but agrees that fat hatred is real and has negative effects on people's lives – er, isn't that what I was saying? She also sets up a creepy and false bad fatty/good fatty division between me and the lovely Janice Bhend, who published my work in her magazine in the 90s. What would Bristow have made of the passages that my publisher refused to publish? The sections about fat and trans people, sex-positive feminism, SM? I imagine she would have blown a gasket. And what about my publisher's feminist censorship of those ideas? We'll never know what she would have made of that, if only she'd done her journalistic homework and spoken to me first. The best bit is where Bristow refers to "The Charlotte Coopers of this world," heheheh, yes, there are legions of us! All like me!

Bristow's article was not the first time that Living Marxism dismissed fat activism, in 1994 Ann Bradley went to town on Mary Evans Young's project of getting an anti-diet Early Day Motion read and supported in Parliament. I won't dwell on those pieces, or my book, both came out years ago and are done and done. Contexts have changed and I feel confident that Fat & Proud was a good piece of work because of the positive response I've had to it over the years.

What I do want to say is that both Bradley and Bristow's articles capture the British Left's failure to get on board with embodied liberation, including fat. This is also mirrored in some kinds of feminism (and it hasn't escaped me that both of these Living Marxism articles were authored by women). The legacy of the belittling of fat activism, and the feminist pathologising of fat within eating disorder paradigms is that the Left has a particularly muddled and weak relationship to this kind of political activity today. I see this as a wasted opportunity, a terrible shame. If the unions had supported Jane Meacham when she was sacked for being too fat in the late 1980s, we might very well have employment protection today. And how come it's left to the bloody Daily Mail to highlight dodgy goings on in the weight industry – notably a number of deaths of women who happened to be on the Lighterlife diet – whilst The Guardian continues to bleat on about the obesity epidemic long after anyone is interested?

Maybe Bristow has the answers. I wrote to her last week to see if she would like to re-engage with some of the things she said about my work in the light of how the world has since changed. As yet she hasn't responded.

Bradley, A. (1994). Fat's not a feminist issue. Living Marxism, 68, p.11

Bristow, J. (1998). The 'fat rights' lobby is out to lunch. Living Marxism, 109, p.30

PS. And I'm still pissed off that when Michael Moore solicited his TV audience for ideas, he never took up my suggestion that diet industries would be a good target for Crackers the Corporate Crime Fighting Chicken! What, hold a grudge? Me?

And while I'm at it, have a look at Depicting fat and class too.

Revisiting BBC Open Space: Fat Women Here To Stay

Although my awakening as a fat activist was spread out over a long period, and although I still feel that I am undergoing a continuous kind of awakening around it, I can pinpoint 1989 as the year when I started to wake up.

I was 20, at Uni in Aberystwyth, my mum and my brother had recently died and I was frozen with grief, and I had a horrible relationship with a guy who wanted me to lose weight. During this dismal time I got a copy of Shelley Bovey's Being Fat Is Not A Sin, I may well have come across Shadow On A Tightrope, I heard about the Fat Women's Conference and the group that organised it in London and saw them talk about it on Terry Wogan's chat show. It's possible I read the articles that Spare Rib published about this new British fat activism, and I watched the Open Space documentary Fat Women Here To Stay on BBC2.

Today, 22 years later, I watched that documentary again. There's a viewing copy at the British Film Institute so I went and paid the fee, a massive £3.60 including VAT, and a friendly technician set it up for me at a viewing station.

I don't know much about the BBC's Community Programming Unit or Open Space, although I appeared in a later Open Space documentary made by Mary Evans Young for her Dietbreakers project in the early 1990s. I think the idea was that there were a number of slots available for people in the community to make their own programmes and maintain editorial control. The programmes were then broadcast during prime time on BBC2.

Watching Fat Women Here To Stay this morning, I was struck by how much and how little had changed in two decades. I think fat activism is slightly less obscure than it was, and parts of the discourse presented by the documentary have muddled their way into more mainstream spaces. Fat people are a lot more visible too, not just as subjects of a moral panic, but also as subjects for a television industry that needs to churn out a mass of sensationalist and cheap programming. But Fat Women Here To Stay is a very different entity than, say, a fat-related shockumentary in 2011. Mainstream, prime-time programmes where fat activists, or any 'political extremists', have editorial control don't exist.

Back to the prog. It covers the ground you'd expect: reclaiming language, discrimination, clothes, health, relationships, media representations, that kind of thing. It upholds healthism in a way that would be seen as problematic today, and its critique of fashion and advertising is flimsy. It's very earnest and somewhat naive, which makes it unintentionally funny at times, though never in a mean way. The fatshion is striking, voluminous printed tops and dangly earrings are the look for fat feminism in 1989.

My life has changed beyond anything I could have imagined for myself back then and the way I watched Fat Women Here To Stay today is very different to the way I originally viewed it. It's a credit to the programme that it can keep someone's interest beyond a Fat 101 stage. Here's what I really liked:

The presence of working class, angry, dykey feminists. Although the section on Jane Meacham's fatphobic sacking was heart-breaking, her defiance, and the support of her defiant family, is and was really inspiring, so many people would be crushed by the treatment she had to face. Mandy Mudd told it like it is, and I noticed that the women were very careful with pronouns when talking about partners and relationships!

The sequence in which the London Fat Women's Group calls up the long defunct City Limits magazine and berates them for publishing fatphobic lonely hearts adverts. The Advertising Manager on the other end of the line immediately derails the conversation by alluding that the group are sell-outs for working with the BBC, to which Heather Smith replies: "There's never been a programme on British TV which has been positive about fat people, and we just have to use it as any other oppressed group would use the media, even though as a whole it may produce some oppressive programmes." God, she is on it! There's another great sequence in which, along with Barbara Shores, she tells a representative from Jenny Craig that she is a tool of The Man and takes no prisoners.

The clips of mainstream comedy shows Allo Allo and Russ Abbott denigrating fat women are fascinating(ly awful) to see. Russ Abbott interests me because his show was a platform for fat comedian Bella Emburg, so he supported a fat woman's career whilst defaming fat women in general. I don't watch much mainstream TV comedy so couldn't tell you whether fat jokes have changed since then or disappeared, maybe they've become more subtle, or maybe the way fat women are depicted has shifted more towards disgust and pity.

On the other hand, the sequence where three members of the London Fat Women's Group enthusing about Baghdad Café having just been to see it at the Curzon Soho is delightful. This is a film I love too. If I have one big criticism of the programme it is that it could do less hand-wringing and more badassery to show how life-affirming and liberating fat activism can be, especially in terms of making and consuming our own cultural production. I have been criticised by other fat activists, including my early days heroine Shelley Bovey who has since somewhat disowned the movement, for paying insufficient attention to the dreadfulness of fat experience. It can be dreadful, this is true, but I cannot live a life that is solely focussed on oppression without also taking into consideration its resistance and the necessary pleasures of making our own liveable lives through creativity and community. This is an important means if survival, a way people can thrive. In this way I think the artist Rita Keegan's presence in the programme is crucial and I wish she'd been in it more.

Anyway, at least I got to enjoy Angela English's poetry and a group of women singing a very sweet fat liberation song at the end of the programme. It's sung to the tune of Que Sera and has the lines:

Now I know women can be strong
And we must struggle to set ourselves free
Fat women healthy, happy and proud
Fighting for liberty

Que sera sera
We know that our dreams can be
The future is ours you see
We can make things change

I have some ideas why the London Fat Women's Group and the second Fat Women's Group ended, which makes watching Fat Women Here To Stay a bittersweet experience. I would really love to meet the women who made this programme, especially Heather Smith, so far our paths have never really crossed. I'm so glad this programme was made, it’s still a remarkable piece of work, and an important part of my own radicalisation.

Dear Hamburg, I am coming to town, let's hang out

From 8-24 April I will be Artist in Residence at Villa Magdalena K in Hamburg. I'll be working on a project initiated about a year ago, A Queer and Trans Fat Activist Timeline. This started out as a workshop at Nolose 2010, the Timeline has been shown at other gatherings in the UK and Germany since then, and will soon be in its long-term resting place, archived at Bildwechsel Hamburg.

My task as Artist In Residence is to make a zine out of the Timeline which will then be sent to people who participated in the workshop, people who want a copy, and archives around the world. The plan is to document some fat activism and talk about what that documenting and archiving is about. There may be a website, but it depends on a few things. Please get in touch if you want to donate money to this project.

Anyway, so I'm going to be in Germany for a bit, with a fairly loose schedule, and I would like to meet and hang out with people whilst I'm there, especially those who might have an interest in fat, queer and trans activism. I can travel a bit too.

Hit me up! mail@charlottecooper.net