I just read Cora Harrington's post, Diversity Is More Than a Bra Size: What It’s Like to Be a Woman of Color in the Lingerie Industry and I thought it was really great.
This is where I start in relation to the post: I don't know how representative of my life the lingerie industry is, or that I care about it very much. Some people care a lot, and that's fine by me. Ditto representation debates, which don't excite me very much in general and come back to these questions again and again: Do I need to see more mainstream representations of people like me in order to feel like a valid person? No. Do I want my image to be used to sell things? No. Do I think capitalism and mass media are a scourge? Yep. Do I want to see more fat people out in the world, living their lives? Yes. Do I love images of rad fat people? Yeah! It's mixed for me, but again, many people are really invested in mainstream representation and I'm happy for them to get on with it.
What I like a lot about this post is the questions Harrington raises about how she thinks fat is coming to represent diversity in her milieu. Her argument, as I see it, is that this means that other underrepresented groups, especially women of colour, older and disabled women, are not part of this rhetoric.
I think Harrington handles this issue with great sensitivity, generosity and no shaming or competitiveness. She just wants a greater conceptualisation of diversity to include, well, diverse people. I want that too.
My two thoughts:
1. It's amazing that fat has come to occupy a prominent position in Harrington's industry. (I know 'size' in a discussion about lingerie also refers to cup size, which doesn't necessarily correlate with fat, but I'm going to conveniently ignore that because it's the fat stuff that interests me). I suspect this is an effect of the pressure that fatshion activists and bloggers have been putting on manufacturers for some time now. I have mixed feelings about this again, fatshion as free market research for corporations strikes me as sadly conservative, I can't get excited about consumer citizenship. At the same time, fat is being positioned as something powerful, something that people want to get on board with, something valuable. Talk about resisting stigma and abjection.
2. It's clearly no good that fat should represent diversity when diverse people are excluded from the conversation. On reading Harrington's post I kept thinking about recent fights about racism in fat activism. I can't help feeling that she has been let down by a fat activism that has not always actively lobbied for the inclusion of every kind of person. The fat people that have achieved some recognition, in the lingerie industry for example, are white and not so diverse, and this is not ok. This is especially relevant given that fat activism is a social movement that has benefitted greatly from wider anti-oppressive struggles - without always examining its own shit in relation to race, disability, gender and so on. Although a large part of the fat activism around today has origins in civil rights protests and radical politics, the movement often suffers from a lack of political engagement with wider anti-oppressive practice.
Harrington has been extremely gracious in her approach to building inclusivity within the world of her blog. I now have some Words of Wisdom for everyone else. You may know this already but I'm going to reiterate it because I am a pompous windbag and it needs restating often: fat white bloggers, and people in general, please take note of Harrington's post. You don't have to care about lingerie but this is how it is done, this is how you engage with diverse people. As you work for power, access and representation you need to make sure that nobody else is left behind.
Showing posts with label race. Show all posts
Showing posts with label race. Show all posts
Behind the scenes at the European fat activist gathering in Berlin
I was going to write something polite and anodyne about the workshop, and let it go, because I have struggled to articulate an appropriate response to it and would rather not upset anyone if I can help it. I have been ill, which makes things harder to say. But I can't ignore the feeling of being unsettled as I see links related to the workshop being shared around Facebook, because there are some things that those pictures don't show that I think need to be raised. Now that I am feeling better, I have been able to ask myself who my silence serves, and I've concluded that it's better to say these difficult things than to remain quiet.
When I heard about the workshop I thought it would be a good opportunity to meet fat activists from Europe. I am isolated from activists closest to me because I do not have many language skills. I have tended to look west to the US and Canada for activist community, but now I am interested in developing links elsewhere. I've had good experiences in Germany, Italy and Spain, interesting conversations with people who already have politics and are interested in developing their understanding of fat. I want to know more about fat activist histories beyond the US and UK, and to think about fat activism in broad ways, and to do this within a critique of imperialism. The Berlin workshop was financially supported, which meant that I would be able to get and stay there cheaply.
I took some things for granted, based on my experiences of activism: the workshop's aims and objectives would be open for discussion, differences of opinion would be welcomed and explored in a supportive manner, there would be opportunities to share ideas. I did not know until late into the workshop that it was funded as an adult education initiative, and was being produced as a programme by one person. There were specific learning outcomes that the funders required. What this meant was that the programme was not open for discussion, the aims and objectives were unclear, decision-making was not a collective process, and differences of opinion – many of which were likely a result of cultural differences – were regarded as awkward obstacles. This is the context in which a particular set of incidents happened that perhaps could have been addressed in other circumstances.
In addition, devising, funding, delivering and managing a week long residential programme is a lot of work for one person. I think it's too much work for one person. It involves huge pressure and stress, and makes it hard to let go and divert from the script if that script is what's keeping it all together. I don't want to devalue the intense work that the organiser contributed but I believe that this model of organising an international activist get-together was flawed from the beginning, and think that it's no surprise things went awry. The workshop delivery model at Body & Peace would have been fine for a day's training, but was too controlling for a longer workshop. I ended up feeling that I was doing wrong if there were things I did not want to attend, I was confused about the aims and objectives of the workshop, I felt resentment, and a sense that dissent, collaboration and discussion could not really happen. Being led by one person feels disempowering, you lose sight of your own power especially when, like this, it takes place in an isolated, residential, institutionalised setting. This is not what embodied peace looks like to me. Even though the participants came from different countries and did not necessarily speak a common language or have shared activist histories or politics, there was a pressure within the group to overlook differences and 'just agree' with each other.
This was the context in which the events surrounding International No Diet Day (INDD) occurred. INDD became the central event of the workshop, as well as her commitments to producing the workshop, the organiser had invited German press to a banner-making session and to the protest itself, and was therefore run ragged answering phone-calls from journalists whilst trying to hold it all together. I have written elsewhere of my lack of enthusiasm for INDD but there were no opportunities to discuss this in the light of the Body & Peace INDD protest, where compliance was assumed. Similarly, although many fat activists regard courting mainstream media representation as essential, it is not where I wish to put my activist energy. At least three of us did not want to be interviewed or photographed by the press and this made participation difficult. I got the feeling that we were regarded as 'letting the side down,' we were killjoys in the face of exciting (yet inevitably problematic) media attention.
On INDD the group went to Alexanderplatz, an important central meeting place in Berlin. We set up a table, banners, food and leaflets. There was no discussion about what we would do there, other than that it would be a picnic (though, like the original INDD 'picnic' this turned out to be little more than a media photocall). At one point the organiser told everyone to hold banners for photographs and to cheer and look happy. What people were cheering is unclear! But these are the photographs that have since been circulating and which now represent European Fat Activism. I love a good protest but this was not for me, I stood around for a bit, trying to keep out of the way until it was time to go, basically being a body and not much else.
There were some things that you don't see in the pictures. On Alexanderplatz you will find Roma women begging. Two groups of two Roma women and two girls came up to the table and took some food. Other people, all white, had taken food too without picking up leaflets or engaging with INDD. As far as I am concerned it is fine to share food with strangers, and there was a lot of food there, enough for everyone who wanted something. The young Roma girls were polite and well-behaved and, like the white children associated with participants in the completely white Body & Peace workshop, helped themselves to some sweets, including some wafer bars that a workshop participant had brought from her country. The organiser snatched the wafers out of the girls' hands and made them take a not-so-nice sweet from a bowl instead. I took the wafers and gave them to the girls. After this, the organiser unwrapped the wafer bars so that no one could take a whole bar, they could only take a small piece. Later my girlfriend Kay saw the organiser put a lid over the hands of two Roma girls who were taking some sweets from a bowl, she shooed them away and said "No, that's finished now, that's not for you, it's closed". The white people were not policed like this.
These actions were racist and I was shocked and angry not just about that but also that these women and girls, who have hard lives, had been denied pleasure where it was offered to others on a day that is presumably about food and largesse, and which is allegedly feminist. I felt that the Roma women and girl's humanity was not recognised, they could not be allowed to be INDD participants, they would certainly not be invited to appear in the newspaper photographs. One of the workshop's activities, re-writing The Fat Liberation Manifesto, involved some reflection on broader anti-oppression work, but an understanding of that was absent here. I don't know if anyone else noticed the actions against the Roma women and girls, if they did no one said anything.
We decided to leave but before we went Kay spoke about what had happened to the organiser, who did not see her racist food policing as a problem. She was worried that if beggars were allowed to take food as they pleased then more would come and the food would be gone before the media came. There hadn't been lots of beggars, just a few people. It turned out that the press didn't take any pictures of the food at all, and even if the food had gone, it would still make a good story (I'd read 'Beggars Scoff Food – Organisers Say INDD Is For Everyone' wouldn't you?). Kay offered to buy more food if it ran out but the organiser said no. She said that they could or would give out the food after the press had been, but this turned out not to be true because she brought the leftovers to the farewell party the next day where, instead of lining the tummies of sweets-loving people, Roma or otherwise, they remained uneaten.
The Berlin workshop has given me a lot to reflect on in terms of my own activism within a broader context of anti-oppression and, yet again, the efforts that some people are making to address the problem of racism in fat activism have been useful to keep in mind. No doubt there is another discussion of European attitudes to Roma beggars that I am not addressing in any detail here, I'm not sure how helpful it would be to go there, I suspect it would derail the conversation here which is more about racism and activism. What would have made the workshop stronger? Perhaps a greater commitment to working collectively and sharing work; open discussions and opportunities to speak; freedom to come and go without fear of sanction; space to consider what anti-oppression means in practise, if you're going to organise behind that; reminders that differences can be good and productive if respectful dialogue is allowed to flourish; a workshop location steeped in community rather than institution. Could this happen under the terms of the funding for this workshop? I don't know. The problems that I have described are easier to see in retrospect, and may have arisen because people didn't have the capacity to act differently. An international workshop for fat activists is a rare thing, how would anyone know better? Mistakes are a part of learning and that is what I hope for here. Although my account is hard and I am anticipating being positioned as disloyal and ungrateful, I am hoping that it will contribute to a consideration of how things could be for fat activists; perhaps less painful and more peaceful.
Grateful thanks to Kay, Tünya, Kori, Simon, and Charlotte for talking about this and helping me think it through. Thanks also to Emma and everyone at Rebel Bellies.
Thinking about 'a response to white fat activism from People of Color in the fat justice movement'
A group of people of colour (POC) in the US affiliated with NOLOSE released a statement this week demanding that white people in fat activism take responsibility to make the movement more inclusive and diverse. Their comments are made in the light of problems with the activist response in the US to the Georgia billboard anti-obesity campaign. It includes the following section, but please go and read the whole thing.
a response to white fat activism from People of Color in the fat justice movement
Flying by the seat of your pants, when it comes to addressing the real concerns and questions around diversity and inclusion of POC in fat activist spaces or campaigns, will no longer be good enough.
I support wholeheartedly the baseline value of not being a racist arse, and of working fat activism through inclusively, critically, reflexively, consciously and ethically. I appreciate that this statement has been produced constructively and with hope that this can happen.
In addition, I have two small reservations about the statement. There appears to be a universalising of identity by people who are diverse in some ways but not others, for example in terms of nationality, it is common for people in the US to speak for the whole world, and this is problematic. Perhaps a stronger statement would include alliances with people in other places. I also think that it would be helpful to bear in mind that the 'fat justice movement' is multiple and often ambiguous, rather than a fixed entity; there are many movements, and broad demands will need to be contextualised each time. For example, bringing a critical and anti-racist consciousness to the activism that involves a conversation with a friend in one time and place is going to be different to that which entails mobilising communities for a specific goal in another.
The NOLOSE statement isn't the first time that fat and queer people of colour have offered critiques of the movement, Tara Shuai's A Different Kind of Fat Rant: People of Color and the Fat Acceptance Movement from 2008 named areas of fat activism where there is endemic racism. I hope that in speaking up, NOLOSE and Shuai will encourage people to adopt more critical and conscious approaches to fat activism. I fear that it might be a long time until many fat activists, especially white people, are able to do that. I am afraid that people of colour will be forced to continue to do the hard work of consciousness raising, which is clearly unacceptable.
Meanwhile, I am grateful for Shuai's rant, and the NOLOSE statement, I think they are brave things to do in a context where critical viewpoints within the movement are not always welcome or forthcoming. I don't know why so many fat activists seem resistant or unable to engage critically and reflexively with what they do, but I see this happening a lot. Why is anti-racist practice and critical reflexivity treated like an afterthought, if at all? Do people leave their brains and consciences behind when they do fat activism? It seems that way. How could it be different? Perhaps through disseminating work that demonstrates there are many different ways of doing fat activism, including methods that foreground self-reflexivity and anti-racism? Through engaging with critical awareness more generally? Let's talk about this.
a response to white fat activism from People of Color in the fat justice movement
Flying by the seat of your pants, when it comes to addressing the real concerns and questions around diversity and inclusion of POC in fat activist spaces or campaigns, will no longer be good enough.
- POC in the fat justice movement deserve thoughtful and clear discussions around not just the intention of diversity and inclusion in the work you wish to do, but also the actual impact of the work within communities of color.
- POC in the fat justice movement demand and deserve that white fat activists build authentic collaborations with communities of color and work as allies.
- POC in the fat justice movement demand and deserve allies showing up to the table of our campaigns and work, rather than constantly being told they have made a place for us at theirs.
- POC in the fat justice movement clarify that our allies will practice doing the work of learning about the histories and impacts of colonization and oppression on POC, seek other allies to learn from and with, be open to dialogue, taking feedback, and allowing people's firsthand experiences of racism to be the final and authoritative voice on the subject of impact to communities of color.
- POC in the fat justice movement offer that through the work of authentic inclusivity, singular vision will become shared vision. Coalition will happen. Bridges will be mended and built.
I support wholeheartedly the baseline value of not being a racist arse, and of working fat activism through inclusively, critically, reflexively, consciously and ethically. I appreciate that this statement has been produced constructively and with hope that this can happen.
In addition, I have two small reservations about the statement. There appears to be a universalising of identity by people who are diverse in some ways but not others, for example in terms of nationality, it is common for people in the US to speak for the whole world, and this is problematic. Perhaps a stronger statement would include alliances with people in other places. I also think that it would be helpful to bear in mind that the 'fat justice movement' is multiple and often ambiguous, rather than a fixed entity; there are many movements, and broad demands will need to be contextualised each time. For example, bringing a critical and anti-racist consciousness to the activism that involves a conversation with a friend in one time and place is going to be different to that which entails mobilising communities for a specific goal in another.
The NOLOSE statement isn't the first time that fat and queer people of colour have offered critiques of the movement, Tara Shuai's A Different Kind of Fat Rant: People of Color and the Fat Acceptance Movement from 2008 named areas of fat activism where there is endemic racism. I hope that in speaking up, NOLOSE and Shuai will encourage people to adopt more critical and conscious approaches to fat activism. I fear that it might be a long time until many fat activists, especially white people, are able to do that. I am afraid that people of colour will be forced to continue to do the hard work of consciousness raising, which is clearly unacceptable.
Meanwhile, I am grateful for Shuai's rant, and the NOLOSE statement, I think they are brave things to do in a context where critical viewpoints within the movement are not always welcome or forthcoming. I don't know why so many fat activists seem resistant or unable to engage critically and reflexively with what they do, but I see this happening a lot. Why is anti-racist practice and critical reflexivity treated like an afterthought, if at all? Do people leave their brains and consciences behind when they do fat activism? It seems that way. How could it be different? Perhaps through disseminating work that demonstrates there are many different ways of doing fat activism, including methods that foreground self-reflexivity and anti-racism? Through engaging with critical awareness more generally? Let's talk about this.
Progressive, enlightened, anti-capitalist, pro-planet people and their fatphobia
My Facebook news feed is the place where I generally encounter fatphobic memes. A couple have cropped up recently that make me want to say more about how the Left uses fatphobia in its visual rhetoric, which is an extension of how the Left has continued to fail fat by stereotyping fat and class.
I'm posting the images here in order to take them apart and expose the hatred within the supposedly progressive message. People may find them upsetting, they are upsetting, I'm sorry.
A couple of years ago I wrote to the London Cycling Campaign (LCC) to tell them to stop using anti-obesity rhetoric as a rationale for their work. I live in London, like to cycle, and want to ride my bike safely. Being fat on a bike can make you a target for street hate. I wanted support for my cycling, but the LCC was not up to it and could only understand me as an offensive and abstract stereotype. I wrote How to Ride a Bike: A Guide for Fat Cyclists for their magazine, but it made no difference, anti-obesity continues to be a fundament of their mission statement.
So this image has been popping up on my news feed:
Not everyone is going to be able to ride a bike, there's a certain assumed embodied privilege about the idea that everyone should and can ride a bike. People's bodies are different. Frail people are not going to ride a bike, many disabled people are not going to ride a bike. Adaptations for disabled people who do want to ride are rare and expensive. Some people just don't like cycling. Cycling to town when you live in a city like London is not necessarily feasible. It's fine if you're rich enough to live in the middle of things, but riding to central London for me would mean a thirteen-mile round trip that takes in a dual carriageway and a handful of treacherous junctions, and I'm only in Zone Three. The cycle lanes that exist are not safe. I know two people who been run over whilst riding, and London's streets have far too many ghost bike memorials, I'm not interested in risking my own life. These differences cannot be accommodated in this image. In addition, the logic of the picture represents fat as a substance whose only use is to be burned, there is no humanity in fat.
This is a long way of saying that bike culture located within social and environmental discourse, and typically seen as representing a progressive, Left-ist politics, has a big problem with fat people. Those cyclists really hate us, even when we too are on two wheels.
Here's the second picture, eurgh, where to start?
Maybe with the racism? The people in these images are stripped of agency and humanity, they are abstract symbols that enable viewers to feel as though they can claim moral high ground through their pity and disgust for the people in the picture. Both images invite the enlightened progressive viewer to rescue the subhumans depicted, they need you!
The images have no context, they are offered as plain fact, it is beyond obvious that the starving African and the greedy and out-of-control Asian* kids are both victims of a capitalism that favours some and not others, that a fair post-capitalist world would distribute resources evenly, where presumably everyone would have bodies that are neat, normatively-sized, the same. The meme presents itself as inarguable. Fat is greed, an obesity timebomb, a product of Western corruption, McDonalds, energy balance gone wrong, a racist terror of a voracious fat future dominating the world (ie the West, never mind that the West has its own history of colonial exploitation). Fat and thin are opposites. Forget that fat people might also be anti-capitalist. The slogan pulls it all together. You don't need to know anything else. Facebook tells me that this image has been liked by 10,000 people, shared by 7,000, and has enjoyed 4,000 comments (the 100 or so I looked at were uniformly praiseworthy). People on the internet really like cheap stereotypes, they help you feel good, as though you are doing something helpful for the betterment of humanity.
Here's what's not in the picture: Information about setserock and their motivation to create the meme, if indeed they created it, they may just have slapped their name on the corner at a later stage. Information about the people in the pictures, their accounts of being photographed, their thoughts about how their images have been used. Accounts by the photographers about how, when and why they took the photographs, how they were distributed, who got paid. A disclaimer about stereotyping. A comment on the implications of the presumed ethnicity of the people depicted? Thoughts about why the head of the person has been cropped out of the image (look familiar?). Engagement with the idea that fat is not pathology. And so on...
The picture comes undone when you stop seeing it as self-evident. Whilst setserock is enjoying hit after hit on their website as a result of this meme, I doubt the people in the images are enjoying any kind of material reward. How does that affect the statement? Who is benefiting from this image? Where is the power? How evenly is it spread? How exploitative is the image? How is this image a product of capitalism? How is setserock, and others who share it, implicated? Capitalism isn't working? No, it isn't, especially not here.
* Edited to add: I have read these kids as Asian though I am probably wrong. I don't know what their ethnicity is. I first came upon this image in a fat panic news story about kids in Asia, hence my reading, but it's likely that the people in the picture have nothing to do with Asia and were just picked from a photo agency's database to illustrate the story.
I'm posting the images here in order to take them apart and expose the hatred within the supposedly progressive message. People may find them upsetting, they are upsetting, I'm sorry.
A couple of years ago I wrote to the London Cycling Campaign (LCC) to tell them to stop using anti-obesity rhetoric as a rationale for their work. I live in London, like to cycle, and want to ride my bike safely. Being fat on a bike can make you a target for street hate. I wanted support for my cycling, but the LCC was not up to it and could only understand me as an offensive and abstract stereotype. I wrote How to Ride a Bike: A Guide for Fat Cyclists for their magazine, but it made no difference, anti-obesity continues to be a fundament of their mission statement.
So this image has been popping up on my news feed:
Not everyone is going to be able to ride a bike, there's a certain assumed embodied privilege about the idea that everyone should and can ride a bike. People's bodies are different. Frail people are not going to ride a bike, many disabled people are not going to ride a bike. Adaptations for disabled people who do want to ride are rare and expensive. Some people just don't like cycling. Cycling to town when you live in a city like London is not necessarily feasible. It's fine if you're rich enough to live in the middle of things, but riding to central London for me would mean a thirteen-mile round trip that takes in a dual carriageway and a handful of treacherous junctions, and I'm only in Zone Three. The cycle lanes that exist are not safe. I know two people who been run over whilst riding, and London's streets have far too many ghost bike memorials, I'm not interested in risking my own life. These differences cannot be accommodated in this image. In addition, the logic of the picture represents fat as a substance whose only use is to be burned, there is no humanity in fat.
This is a long way of saying that bike culture located within social and environmental discourse, and typically seen as representing a progressive, Left-ist politics, has a big problem with fat people. Those cyclists really hate us, even when we too are on two wheels.
Here's the second picture, eurgh, where to start?
Maybe with the racism? The people in these images are stripped of agency and humanity, they are abstract symbols that enable viewers to feel as though they can claim moral high ground through their pity and disgust for the people in the picture. Both images invite the enlightened progressive viewer to rescue the subhumans depicted, they need you!
The images have no context, they are offered as plain fact, it is beyond obvious that the starving African and the greedy and out-of-control Asian* kids are both victims of a capitalism that favours some and not others, that a fair post-capitalist world would distribute resources evenly, where presumably everyone would have bodies that are neat, normatively-sized, the same. The meme presents itself as inarguable. Fat is greed, an obesity timebomb, a product of Western corruption, McDonalds, energy balance gone wrong, a racist terror of a voracious fat future dominating the world (ie the West, never mind that the West has its own history of colonial exploitation). Fat and thin are opposites. Forget that fat people might also be anti-capitalist. The slogan pulls it all together. You don't need to know anything else. Facebook tells me that this image has been liked by 10,000 people, shared by 7,000, and has enjoyed 4,000 comments (the 100 or so I looked at were uniformly praiseworthy). People on the internet really like cheap stereotypes, they help you feel good, as though you are doing something helpful for the betterment of humanity.
Here's what's not in the picture: Information about setserock and their motivation to create the meme, if indeed they created it, they may just have slapped their name on the corner at a later stage. Information about the people in the pictures, their accounts of being photographed, their thoughts about how their images have been used. Accounts by the photographers about how, when and why they took the photographs, how they were distributed, who got paid. A disclaimer about stereotyping. A comment on the implications of the presumed ethnicity of the people depicted? Thoughts about why the head of the person has been cropped out of the image (look familiar?). Engagement with the idea that fat is not pathology. And so on...
The picture comes undone when you stop seeing it as self-evident. Whilst setserock is enjoying hit after hit on their website as a result of this meme, I doubt the people in the images are enjoying any kind of material reward. How does that affect the statement? Who is benefiting from this image? Where is the power? How evenly is it spread? How exploitative is the image? How is this image a product of capitalism? How is setserock, and others who share it, implicated? Capitalism isn't working? No, it isn't, especially not here.
* Edited to add: I have read these kids as Asian though I am probably wrong. I don't know what their ethnicity is. I first came upon this image in a fat panic news story about kids in Asia, hence my reading, but it's likely that the people in the picture have nothing to do with Asia and were just picked from a photo agency's database to illustrate the story.
Riots in the UK and convenient scapegoats
Over the past couple of days there have been riots in parts of London, where I live, and in other cities in the UK. I'm going to write about this here, even though it's not typical fat blog fare, because it's a big thing that's affecting me and the people I know right now. As with all these blog posts, this is about my opinion rather than an assertion of fact.
I think these riots came about initially because the police shot a man and spread lies about him to cover themselves, and because this was not an isolated incident. They refused to give the man's family an explanation at a peaceful protest, pushed people to breaking point by making them wait for hours, and responded heavily at the first provocation, which escalated things.
This event was set against a backdrop of everyday police racism and arrogance, a long history of police abuse, systemic racism, and a lack of justice. It has also happened within a political context where working class people of colour are suffering the removal of social safety nets and the possibility of escape through education by a probably corrupt government, where young working class black men are widely demonised, and where the rich are doing very nicely. I should add that the riots are not just about race, however, it would be wrong to paint it as white versus black.
After the initial explosion of rage in Tottenham, violence spread to other parts of the city: generally to areas where the police had been responsible for previous injustice, places where there have been recent influxes of affluent white people and where gentrification is underway, places where there is a high street and shops where working class people go. The wealthy areas of the city, and middle class residential areas, have been untouched so far. As I see it, the rioters are small-ish groups of young men.
At this stage there is little that is romantic about the riots. Bystanders have been mugged, people have been burned out of their homes, many people feel frightened, vulnerable people are made more so. No one is burning down Harrods or Buckingham Palace, or other symbols of capitalism and hegemony, the violence is opportunistic and, to me, astonishing in its lack of ambition. The media is typically contradictory though narratives of 'mindless thugs' are emerging, obscuring the context for the riots, and further demonising the rioters. People within communities where there have been attacks are divided, some see them as inevitable and others are fed-up, sympathy is wearing thin, and I've heard a lot of dismay about how the riots don't address systemic inequality. There's a backlash in progress and it's depressing to see who is capitalising, like the far-right racist and Islamophobic British National Party. It's likely that the riots will result in greater surveillance and repression of people of colour, working class people, young black men.
Apart from statistical correlations between fat and race and class, the relationship between fat and marginalised experience, fat pops up in a minor, tangential and unexpected way in this story. I was reading about Cynthia Jarrett, who died when police raided her home in Tottenham in 1985 in search of her son Floyd. The police used unreasonable force against her but lied about this and circulated a story that she had a heart attack because she was fat. Fat – always the convenient scapegoat! None of the officers involved were ever brought to justice, although three men were wrongfully imprisoned for the murder of a policeman in the ensuing riot, events which form part of the context for the current Tottenham riots and their spread elsewhere.
Edited to add:
I was thinking again about Cynthia Jarrett and about how incredible it was that people in Tottenham demanded an explanation for her death in 1985. I wonder if that would happen now in the context of Obesity EpidemicTM and fat panic rhetoric. I'm inclined to think that the scapegoating of her fatness would be more acceptable these days and that people would buy into the idea of her sudden death caused by being fat.
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:
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
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?
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
Queer Hapas, fat activism and weight loss surgery
I've been reading Jackie Loneberry Wang's excellent zine Memoirs of a Queer Hapa #2, which takes a look at the author's queer-biracial identity. Hapa refers to people who are "mixed-race and of Asian descent". I especially like the author's Concluding Thoughts from an essay entitled The Emergence of Queer Hapa Identity in the United States, where she applies Queer Theory in a super-accessible way. Basically she talks about identities that transgress boundaries and expose the limitations of those boundaries. She says that Queer Hapa people confound others who ally themselves "to the notion of identity as fixed, immutable, and formed around a logic of separation and differentiation" (p14). Wang goes on to say that even though Queer Hapa is an uncontainable identity, naming and inhabiting it enables people to organise strategically and politically in ways that are anti-assimilationist and complex.
Wang's zine has helped me not only think about Queer Hapa identity, but also about another group of people, who may also include Queer Hapas. I think the ways in which Wang writes about identity is helpful in thinking about what tends to be the thorny relationship between fat activism and weight loss surgery.
Apparently, as someone smart told me recently, the situation is changing and people who have had weight loss surgery are no longer drummed out of fat activist community. But my experience is that weight loss surgery continues to represent considerable anxiety in terms of how to address it in fat activism, and that bullying, shaming and shunning are still everyday tactics. Even where people have moved on from using these strategies to police the boundaries of fat activism and critique weight loss surgery, their previous use continues to hurt and has not been resolved.
I am not an advocate for weight loss surgery, I would never choose it for myself, and I discourage people from choosing it where I can. I think it is more likely to deplete than enhance health, I mourn the deaths of people who have died as a consequence of surgery, and its marketing rhetoric is invariably fatphobic, full of lies, and profoundly problematic. But neither am I an advocate for boundary policing or bullying. I am looking for helpful and human ways of thinking about this stuff that goes beyond a condescending 'love the sinner hate the sin' tolerance within the movement for people who have had surgery or are contemplating it. I would prefer a world where weight loss industries did not exist, but I do not live in that world, and am unlikely to as long as capitalism exists. Instead I am part of communities of people where some have chosen this, including a number of excellent fat activists who I love and respect.
Anyway, so Wang's work has helped me think about this and my tentative thoughts are about fat activists who have had weight loss surgery also inhabiting a space that transgresses and exposes the limitations of certain boundaries and classifications. For example, that to be a fat activist always involves resisting weight loss, or that there are sides to be chosen where you are either for or against weight loss. Fat activists who have had weight loss surgery, especially unrepentant people for whom it was a positive long-term choice, inhabit a space that shows there are other ways of being, that fat activism doesn't have to be an either/or proposition, and that it can be really diverse. I'm mindful of the postcolonial concept of hybridity, you can be a mixture of things, even things that are supposed to be incompatible, and you don't have to make a choice between one state of being or another, you can be all of them.
Going back to Wang and thinking about the possibilities for organising around fluid and complex identities, I feel excited for the potential opportunities for fat activists and weight loss surgery in challenging dogmatism and pioneering new forms of fat activist embodiment. It gives me hope that people who are currently shamefully denigrated within the movement might no longer have to skulk around in the shadows like a dirty little secret, waiting in vain for an invitation to come and sit at the table, it could be that they've already got their own thing going on and that everybody else should take note.
Jackie's response: Zines, queer hapas, fat activism
Wang, Jackie Loneberry (2009) Memoirs of a Queer Hapa #2
Wang's zine has helped me not only think about Queer Hapa identity, but also about another group of people, who may also include Queer Hapas. I think the ways in which Wang writes about identity is helpful in thinking about what tends to be the thorny relationship between fat activism and weight loss surgery.
Apparently, as someone smart told me recently, the situation is changing and people who have had weight loss surgery are no longer drummed out of fat activist community. But my experience is that weight loss surgery continues to represent considerable anxiety in terms of how to address it in fat activism, and that bullying, shaming and shunning are still everyday tactics. Even where people have moved on from using these strategies to police the boundaries of fat activism and critique weight loss surgery, their previous use continues to hurt and has not been resolved.
I am not an advocate for weight loss surgery, I would never choose it for myself, and I discourage people from choosing it where I can. I think it is more likely to deplete than enhance health, I mourn the deaths of people who have died as a consequence of surgery, and its marketing rhetoric is invariably fatphobic, full of lies, and profoundly problematic. But neither am I an advocate for boundary policing or bullying. I am looking for helpful and human ways of thinking about this stuff that goes beyond a condescending 'love the sinner hate the sin' tolerance within the movement for people who have had surgery or are contemplating it. I would prefer a world where weight loss industries did not exist, but I do not live in that world, and am unlikely to as long as capitalism exists. Instead I am part of communities of people where some have chosen this, including a number of excellent fat activists who I love and respect.
Anyway, so Wang's work has helped me think about this and my tentative thoughts are about fat activists who have had weight loss surgery also inhabiting a space that transgresses and exposes the limitations of certain boundaries and classifications. For example, that to be a fat activist always involves resisting weight loss, or that there are sides to be chosen where you are either for or against weight loss. Fat activists who have had weight loss surgery, especially unrepentant people for whom it was a positive long-term choice, inhabit a space that shows there are other ways of being, that fat activism doesn't have to be an either/or proposition, and that it can be really diverse. I'm mindful of the postcolonial concept of hybridity, you can be a mixture of things, even things that are supposed to be incompatible, and you don't have to make a choice between one state of being or another, you can be all of them.
Going back to Wang and thinking about the possibilities for organising around fluid and complex identities, I feel excited for the potential opportunities for fat activists and weight loss surgery in challenging dogmatism and pioneering new forms of fat activist embodiment. It gives me hope that people who are currently shamefully denigrated within the movement might no longer have to skulk around in the shadows like a dirty little secret, waiting in vain for an invitation to come and sit at the table, it could be that they've already got their own thing going on and that everybody else should take note.
Jackie's response: Zines, queer hapas, fat activism
Wang, Jackie Loneberry (2009) Memoirs of a Queer Hapa #2
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