My fat activism and my zines

The inaugural Queer Zine Fest London was held on Saturday and it was really fantastic. Loads of people came, there was a great diversity of zine-making present, and Erica Smith, the first person to publish any of my work, gave a cracking talk about GirlFrenzy. The space hosted two excellent exhibitions alongside the event, Melanie Maddison's Shape & Situate, and Music & Liberation. It felt like a super-abundance of wonderful stuff and was seriously overwhelming.

I represented at the Fest in various ways: giving out copies of new zines; having work in the Shape & Situate exhibition and being featured as one of the "inspirational European women" in its roster (!); seeing many zines to which I have contributed, and reconnecting with folks I've met along my zine way. I also gave a little Show and Tell type talk about my life in zines.

My zine production is different to my fat activism, but they often overlap, so I talked about that a bit, and I though I'd share some if it here too.

Boyfriends and comics

I met my boyfriend Simon Murphy in 1990. He had been publishing a zine called, variously, Advenutures in Bereznik and Attack on Bereznik, since the mid-1980s. Mostly music-based, it incorporated odd articles and beautiful graphics. I had been reading similar music zines by guys for some years before meeting Simon, so we had a shared language of what constituted a zine.

In the early 1990s there was a thriving community of small press comics makers in the UK. Caption was instrumental in developing the scene, as was the Small Press Fair, and Peter Pavement's Slab-o-Concrete press in Brighton.

Bolstered by our shared interest in zines and small press comics, and the support of a community of makers, in 1992 Simon and I published a comic together called All Right. We made two issues, with me writing some of the scripts and Simon doing the lion's share of the work. All Right was a jumble of in-jokes, alter-egos, cuteness, and stuff that we found amusing. You can download .pdfs of it at the bottom of this page.

This is a long-winded way of saying that this was the first time that I was able to contribute to representations of myself as a young fat woman. Simon drew me as he saw me: as loveable, gorgeous, badass. My fat activism was in its early stages and it was really fun and exciting to see myself as a cartoon character. I know that other fat activists have used cartoon forms in various ways, Cindy Baker's rendition of herself as a mascot also springs to mind. For me, it was a way of playing with my fat identity and possibility for my fat self.

Contributing to zines

It took a long time until I had the confidence to make zines by myself. Instead, I contributed to other people's zines (I still do). This is how I started getting published. Two zines were really important in helping me build confidence in my fat activism, writing, and feeling that zines were the place for me.

GirlFrenzy was published by Erica Smith through six issues and a special one-off book-size Millennial. A small press comics magazine, GirlFrenzy was feminist but not like the other feminists I had known up until that point, it took more of a third wave, sex-positive and queer sensibility. Erica was an absolutely pivotal person in giving a huge hand-up to a community of British feminist small press comics makers, graphic artists and writers. So it was with me. GirlFrenzy was not purely focused on fat stuff, but Erica was open to discussion about it and broadly supportive. Hence number four was a special themed fat lib issue, to which I contributed.

The feminism that I encountered through GirlFrenzy orientated me to FaT GiRL, the legendary zine to which I also contributed pieces more or less throughout its lifespan. FaT GiRL was important to me in so many ways, not least that it gave me a way of understanding myself as a fat dyke, it melded fat with queer-feminist-punk ethics and aesthetics and early intersectional politics, and it introduced me to a community of people who are still very central to my life.

Living Large

This apa zine deserves a special mention because I don't know if such things exist any more. It really was of its time and place. I don't know if Living Large was typical of apa zines more generally but this is how it worked:

There was a membership group who contributed a small amount of money to get the thing printed and posted. Everyone was North American apart from me. Every month or so we'd write a little column and send it off. This usually took the form of an open letter to other members detailing our news, flyers and ephemera we'd come across, and direct comments to other people. Living Large was all about fat, so that was the focus of the things we'd write, sometimes it was about our opinions, but mostly it was about how fat impacted on our lives and the everyday activism we undertook around that. A central mailer would copy and collate the contributions and mail them out to everybody, stapled together as a zine.

Living Large was like the paper version of an email list or a messageboard. It meant that we had a little community of contributors in discussion with each other over months and years. Because it was a closed community, in as much as you had to contribute a little photocopying and postage money, the conversations were quite intimate and friendly.

I was a part of Living Large for a couple of years at least in the mid-1990s. I don't know what happened to my back issues, but it had been going for quite a while before me. I have number 44 on my desk. The internet meant that Living Large eventually became redundant, but in its prime it was a great way of keeping in touch with other fat activists across a wide geographical divide; many of us were otherwise pretty isolated.

One-offs

I've made many zines by myself and in collaboration, and some of my zines are part of a series whereas others, like these below, are one-offs that relate to fat in some way.

Fat Stuff
In 2006 the student services at the University of East London, where I was studying at the time, decided that it would be a good idea to host an Obesity Awareness Week, having swallowed fat panic rhetoric hook, line and sinker. Exasperated by all this, I made a tiny zine that offered a critique of Obesity Awareness Week, a list of fat activist resources available in the library, and a bunch of things people might want to do instead of participating in the uni's nonsense. I distributed them around the campus.

Things That Help Us Feel Good
In 2007 I devised and facilitated a fat activist workshop with a group of 13 and 14 year old girls for The Wellcome Institute. We made a zine together, drawing and writing a page each about what helps us feel good. I copied it and everyone got copies to keep and give away.

NOLOSE
The fat queer motherlode has supported a couple of zine projects in more recent years. In 2008 their small projects fund enabled a group of us to make a fat zine, called Big Bums, and distribute it for free.

In 2011 NOLOSE provided the impetus for my zine-based project, A Queer and Trans Fat Activist Timeline. Starting out as a fat-feminist-queer-trans community history workshop at the 2010 gathering, this morphed into an object that travelled and was discussed and archived, it became an artist's residency, from which a paper zine was produced, then an audio zine and a digital download. I also published an academic paper about the project and the way it shifted and changed.

Moving on

I've been reading and making zines for a long time, and have no plan to stop. Zines have brought me personal and professional delights. I still make my own, and write for other people's zines. I still try and work on the basis of making something for free, with low production values. What's changed over the years is that now I am more serious about distributing and archiving my work, and I'm considering longer-form digital publishing. Zines are the place where I am most myself, where I say what I really think, and where I'm least apologetic, including how I talk about fat.

If you want a copy of my most recent zine, Report, about the schools that I went to and how they tried to mould me, Paypal me €2/US CA AUS $2/ £1 for postage at beefergrrl@hotmail.com

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.

Homosexual Death Drive: Fat Queer Old Lady Punks

I'm in a band and, even though this is a little self-referential, I want to write about it, so I will.

My band is called Homosexual Death Drive and it consists of me, my girlfriend Kay Hyatt, and a couple of occasional collaborators. Although we have both performed in bands before, neither Kay nor I would think of ourselves as musicians; we make songs with the barest minimum of skill, often just singing, or making a song using instruments, pedals and home-made gadgets that are easy to play. We have a small repertoire, did our first performance in December 2010, and hope to release a 7-inch EP on vinyl some time this year. We've played a handful of shows and no one has booed us off yet. Soon there will be some videos and digital downloads. We don't have a website, just a little corner of Facebook for now.

Corinna Tomrley painted this picture of Homosexual Death Drive entitled 'Showbiz'.

I don't know about Kay but I think of Homosexual Death Drive as part of a queercore tradition in punk. Our name comes from a branch of queer theory that's preoccupied with anti-social sensibilities and is somewhat nihilistic – just like us! Our songs, mostly written by me, inhabit fairly traditional punk turf: revolution, riots, burning things down, but we also sing tenderly about being alone, regret, survival. I use Homosexual Death Drive as a place where I can express unspeakable things. We try and make our performances energetic and memorable, this sounds high-minded but I try to pass on the same feelings of freedom and openness that I've felt when seeing and being inspired by other people performing. It doesn't always work, performing can often feel quite humiliating but I still feel compelled to do it because there's something good about falling on your arse in public, being okay with being the buffoon, letting people take from that what they will.

Since I was a teenager punk has been this amazing force in my life. Punk means many things to different people but for me it has to do with queerness, belligerence, impertinence, politics, rawness, immediacy, anti-authoritarianism. These are great sensibilities for girls and women to draw on. But punk can be very conformist. When I was a girl I thought punks were always thin, I never saw a fat punk anywhere, I still struggle to name many, let alone fat queer punks beyond Nomy or Beth, certainly no one like me then or now. Being a real punk was the main thing that motivated me to want to be thin. Aged 15, 16, 17 I wanted to look like Iggy Pop on the cover of Raw Power, I thought that's how it would have to be if I wanted to be recognised as a punk (this would also have meant being a man and being a drooling drug addict). I never got thin, and always looked chubby and wholesome, even when I behaved otherwise.

With Homosexual Death Drive I feel like I'm carrying on the lifetime's work of reclaiming punk for myself. Fat used to be the thing that I thought was incompatible with being punk, but it turns out that it's central, it's an asset. Often people will never have met anyone like us, they have no idea about fat activism, they see us and perhaps expect us to be comic, or fulfil a stereotype. Then we turn out to be something else, something they never expected from a pair of fat old dykes. Our bodies are a rare spectacle of public fatness unmediated by hatred, fear or prurience. We invite people to look and listen and relate. The people we play to seem hungry for people like us, they are desperate for evidence, that until now has always been slightly out of reach, that disproves the inevitability of fatphobia. It feels good to be able to deliver this in some way.

The band is still new and tentative and I don't know how it will develop. I'm happy with the way it's going and the way we mix fat, queer and punk together. That's all I'm going to say for now.

Homosexual Death Drive are playing R I O T S N O T D I E T S #5 along with Halo Halo, Bellies, and Town Bike, plus a screening of But I'm A Cheerleader from 6pm onwards, Saturday, 11 February 2012 at West Hill Hall, Compton Ave, Brighton, United Kingdom. It costs £6. Please come.


http://tinyurl.com/homodeathdrive

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.