Fat in the news, it's the same old story

It's with trepidation that I propose that the worst of the New Year's blizzard of weight loss crap is over for now, nevertheless fat will most likely continue to be a rich source of media pap, it's a guaranteed news hit.

The World Health Organization's original fat panic report was published in 2000, but it hit a spot in the public psyche so perfectly that, 13 years later, agents if public health, media, and government, and everybody inbetween, are still running around like Henny Penny. Fat is a perpetual crisis about to break, but it's also an old story, and what strikes me about the New Year blizzard is the repetitive nature of the stories.

The Labour Party's latest proposal to introduce limits on food high in sugar, fat and salt is reminiscent of the fat tax trope that will not die. A tax on fat bodies, and foods presumed to cause people to be fat, was first suggested in the 1940s in the US, it has surfaced pretty much every decade since then and, since the Obesity EpidemicTM, more regularly still. Only Denmark has actually tried to implement this policy, with – surprise surprise – messy results. It's unviable but still mooted, and is only one of many repetitive news stories about fat that crop up time and time again.

I just spent a happy hour poking around the digital archives of British Pathé, the news service of yesteryear. There are quite a few of their vintage newsreels online depicting fat people and weight loss. What's amazing to me is how many of these clips resemble more recent media, and yet they were produced many years ago, in some cases nearly a hundred years ago. The appearance of the fat news story is as old as film news itself, perhaps it's as old as news.

I've rounded up a few clips to illustrate this point, with their Pathé descriptions. Sometimes the cataloguers comments are quite illuminating, they worry that the clips are exploitative, or not politically correct, which gives some indication of how the context has changed. Others point out how funny the clips are, which suggests that the idea of the fat body as innately hilarious is as alive and well as ever.

Click and watch, dear readers.

There's an insatiable hunger for depictions of fat people's bodies

Fat kids especially, but also very fat individuals, and better still when there's a fat person and a small or thin person together. These clips remind me of the preponderance of shockumentaries on TV that pruriently display fat bodies. The people in the films aren't really doing anything, just being shown as fat or, in the case of Strange Happenings, embodying a stereotype. Where there's a commentary it is generally patronising or dehumanising.

Little Lennie Mason (1919)


The Champion (1933)


A Ten Stone Baby! (1935)


Father! And Why Not! (1922)


8ft Woman! (1927)


Weight And See! (1932)


Strange Happenings (1933)


It's natural to show fat people doing weird things in order to get thin

There's no shortage of clips showing fat people trying all kinds of bizarre things to try and lose weight. Their bodies wobble and shake, they are the butt of the joke, which is that everybody knows these interventions are useless. Weight loss surgery programmes are the modern equivalent of these clips. Fat bodies are made available similarly for a prurient and curious gaze. The stupidity (today: grossness) of the treatment is a central part of the story, a cautionary tale?

Slimming The Weigh Away! (1929)


Overweight! (1933)


A Weighty Problem (1933)


Getting Down To It! (1940)


By the postwar period, normatively sized people also appear in these stories.

Wax Bath (1952)


Slim Suit (1954)


It's newsworthy when fat people do things that are presumed to be the domain of thin people

Can it be?! Fat people can be agile and feminine, patriotic, heroic and manly?! Apparently they can! Scoop! Scoop! The coverage of the Fattylympics last year is reminiscent of this, and I've also seen news reports about fat synchronised swimming groups, and fat dance troupes.

The Heavyweights (1933)


Beauty - In A Big Way! (1934)


The Super Toe Dancer (1933)


Heavy Warden Issue Title - Rolling Stones (1943)


Fat people can be agents of their own lives but only within restrictive activist contexts, usually relating to consumerism, normative beauty ideals and fashion

The postwar consumer boom in the UK inspired a slew of clips about the outsize fashion industry that foreshadow not only the glut of TV makeover shows, but also the newsworthiness of the fatshion movement as consumer activism. The clips are problematic, for sure, they retain their prurience, and the emphasis is on hiding fat women's bodies and making them socially acceptable. But the connection is there, I think.

Size W - Xx (1946)


Outsize Fashions (1951)


Linda Leigh Cruise (1952)


Outsize Fashions (1953)


Colours For Slimming (1955)


Fat animals are really cute

These two films are the Pathé newsreel equivalent of the YouTube clips of fat cats that you forwarded to all your friends.

Jonah (1932)


Eats For One (1934)


Before I finish, here's one from the archive that didn't fit in. Check out Eve! A complete anomaly from 1922. A fat woman as the star of this strange little film. Anyone want to try and explain this one?

Eve (1922)


In linking to all of these clips, I want to show that the news about fat that is taken as truth and internalised is merely a story, and an old one at that.

I want the news, and the media more generally, to reflect better stories about fat, to produce stories that engage with the complexities of fat identity, politics and culture. This stuff is fresh and interesting, there's no need to rehash the same old reductive nonsense again and again. Editors and journalists, citizen reporters and bloggers, please get to it. Oh, and PS, I am available for hire to tell these stories.

Thanks to British Pathé.

Constructing the fat kid in family photographs

I've been going through some of the family photographs that I inherited after my dad died a couple of months ago.

One of the things that has caught my eye has been how family photographs constructed me in the family as fat. What I mean by this is that I can remember when the pictures were taken, the kind of talk that went on about them in my family, and how these pictures in particular were supposedly evidence that I was fat, and therefore deficient.

There are fat people speckled across my family tree, but I don't think of it as being a fat family. I think I'm the fattest of the generations that I know. I've tended to think of myself as always having been fat. What's interesting to me in the family photographs is that I'm not fat in all of them. I'm quite thin in a bunch of them, and mostly pretty normatively-sized. I haven't always been fat.

I don't know what this means in terms of me constructing my own fat autobiography, I'm getting my head around that at the moment. I'm wary of thinking along the lines of trauma making me fat, or emotional problems, or that my fatness is evidence of pathology. I think it's more complicated than that. Mostly I don't care why I got fat because I'm pretty sure that I'm unlikely to get any thinner.

Between 1975-1977 I lived in Hong Kong, close to a beach. I spent a lot of time on the beach, and there was generally a camera about. Dad had bought a fancy camera, taking advantage of the availability of technological bargains on the island at that time for people who had access to money. So I was photographed quite a lot in my swimsuit, playing on the beach. The beach is the place where I also learned to swim. I realise now that I was under quite a bit of surveillance but at the time I was oblivious to it.

I want to share a handful of pictures from that period that represent the family lore about my presumed fatness. The way I'm talking about them is quite harsh, and may or may not represent what was actually said, but reflects the messages that I internalised about my body from the way it was represented in my family as I was growing up.

This is me sitting on a boat moored off a beach on one of the small islands surrounding Hong Kong. Dad knew someone who had access to a boat and we'd all pile on it on a summer weekend, a load of people, and go to a beach, swim ashore, then come home again. Idyllic!

My slightly slumpy posture on the seat, and the tiny bulge of my tummy was taken as evidence of my fatness. I remember this photo being talked about, my tummy being pointed out. I thought of it as an ugly picture, something shameful.

This picture was taken on a walk around an island. Mum and dad were part of an ex-pat community, and communal walks were a popular way of passing the time at the weekends. Here we'd stopped to eat. I had a plate of spaghetti, I remember it now all these years later, spaghetti Milanaise. I had trouble wrangling it from the plate into my mouth. I got cross and tangled up with it. This picture was regarded as evidence of my greed and clumsiness in the family, maybe because of the guy next to me, Andy, who's looking bemused. Looks like I'm giving him the stink-eye and refusing to be made the joke. I was an embarrassment because I couldn't eat in a ladylike manner.

These two pictures are of me playing on the beach with my friends Kacey and Julia. I'm wearing a really fantastic halterneck swimsuit. We're all more or less the same age, but my friends are smaller and more wirey than me. I'm podgy in comparison, a bit of a lummox. I was aware of this difference at the time, but couldn't articulate it. I just had a feeling that I wasn't quite right.

This is me on another beach in another country in 1977. By this time I had been dieted by my mum, the food restriction had begun, and family anxiety about the size of my body was now explicit. My tummy was always explained away as puppy fat, but it never went away, I always had it. It was never regarded as just the way I was built, it was always a problem.

Fat, diversity, inclusion and underwear

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.

I sincerely hope research justice will destroy the market for Bari-Suits

When I first started encountering fat activism in the US in the early 90s, accessible medical equipment was a big issue. People couldn't get hospital gowns or blood pressure cuffs that fitted. When you're unwell or disabled and needing assistance, being treated with dignity is an important part of how people should care for you. When you're fat, you can't count on this kind of care because medical fatphobia is so endemic.

The emergence and popularity of surgical weight loss technologies, and casualties from other forms of weight loss, also added to a population of fat people who needed accessible medical care around the time that activists were demanding accessible equipment. Medical supply companies soon realised that they were looking at a profitable niche market. Benmor Medical is one such company, it was established in 1996 and now sells a line of products such as larger-sized wheelchairs, wide walking-frames, big bedpans, and gadgets that help move you around safely and gently if you are fat and otherwise immobile, and which guard the safety of the people moving you too.

What makes me queasy about Benmor Medical is that its products are not the result of critical community consultation with fat people encountering medical systems. Instead it sells products that reflect the interests of medical discourse, and within this model fat people can only exist as 'patients', that is, bottom-dwellers in the hegemony of health professionals. So as well as marketing mobility aids, it also sells a range of scales because weighing fat people is extremely important in this particular framework. This kind of marketing reproduces fat people as little more than medicalised meat. Added to this, I noticed on their news page that they were proud to have had their products placed in an exploitative TV obeso-shockumentary. Benmor Medical's language is of care and concern, but fat people have an ambiguous and unsettling place in the company's values, our voices and images are strangely absent, far less important than the tantalising equipment.

I found out about Benmor Medical because a few weeks ago my friend Liz alerted me to one of their products, the Bari-Suit. This is a "Training & Education" product that was awarded Most Interesting New Product at the Moving and Handling Conference 2012. Interesting it is.

It's a fat suit.

Marisa Meltzer's piece from 2006 framing fat suits as blackface still rings strongly, but I have written before that on some rare occasions fat suits can be eye-opening. Unfortunately the Bari-Suit has none of the nuance of a performance at Burger Queen, it is simply dehumanising and offensive, and presumably extremely expensive and profitable. There's no price on the website, you have to endure the Benmor Medical sales patter if you want to see how much it costs to rent or buy and when something is missing a price tag it usually means that it costs a fortune. It comes 'naked,' or dressed in Benmor Medical-branded sweats. It is so plainly ludicrous and vile that I wish I were making it up.

Medical teams could be employing actual fat people as part of their training into care for fat people in medical situations. This would entail having to talk to fat people with respect and care, finding out about fat people's lives, having to listen and create care paths that reflect direct accounts of what fat people need and want. This could be a great way of sharing knowledge between service providers and service users. The fat person gets paid for their expertise too!

Instead, they spend a lot of money on Benmor Medical's stupid, ugly fat suit. They get a normatively-sized person to try it on, they heave them about, they learn nothing at all about fat embodiment or identity in healthcare. In addition, using a fat suit in place of an actual person reinforces normatively-sized people's fantasies and stereotypes about what it is to be fat. This is particularly powerful because they do this as a group and the beliefs remain unquestioned because either there are no fat people in the room to counter them, or the fat people in the room are silenced by this ridiculous charade. This is what Benmor Medical regard as a good result, it's from the promotional download for their Bari-Suit from the company's website:

"Maryke Gosliga, Manual Handling Co-ordinator at Kettering General Hospital [...] commented: 'Having rented the suit for a bariatric study day this January, I have to say that it was a decision I am glad to have made. Seeing one of their colleagues wearing the suit made others really think about the issues, especially as it made the person wearing it less independent, because of the mechanics involved. Getting the trousers on was difficult, as was moving about. Those who did wear the suit learnt a lot that day! Altogether it was a good experience for all of us on our study day.'"

I can barely bring myself to comment on this patronising rubbish and I am struggling not to be sarcastic about how this team really thought about the issues, the mechanics, and the difficulty of getting those horrible trousers on and off. Good work, Kettering General!

The Bari-Suit truly exemplifies the profound inability of medical professionals to see fat people as human or real in a context where this must surely be the baseline from which care is given. Instead, a nasty little outfit is seen as an adequate substitution for years of experience, complex relationships to embodiment, engagement with social exclusion, or the possibilities that fat people have community and culture and agency of far more depth than medical discourse can currently encompass. Benmor Medical are not the originators of this state of affairs, the rot is much more pervasive, it's a part of the culture from which they profit.

I want to add a brief coda. At the end of June I had the great good fortune to attend the Allied Media Conference in Detroit. This is a really fantastic event combining grassroots activism with DIY media technology, defined in the broadest of ways. Many different types of people attend. Look at the session lists and comments and archived videoed sessions to get a feel for the conference, save up and attend next year if you can, I can't recommend it highly enough and would love to return.

The conference has been going for some years and each year there are particular session threads devoted to certain areas of interest. This year Research Justice was one such theme. This refers to the practice of developing accountable, participatory and liberatory research methodologies, especially when directed towards marginalised people. These values should be at the heart of all research, of course, but this is not always the case, especially in terms of obesity research, where fat people are routinely made abject and absent.

At one of the Research Justice sessions, speakers talked about establishing and using community ethics boards as a means of making sure that research on those communities is accountable and inclusive. I thought this was an excellent and powerful idea. Imagine if every piece of obesity research had to pass a fat community ethics board in order to get funded or published, or to have any credibility in research communities. Imagine how that could help transform the current dismal situation for critical research into fat, and how that could alter the landscape for our encounters with medical science. It would mean no more Bari-Suits for sure.

Incidentally, I am intrigued by the popularisation of the term 'bariatric' and its diminutives. Are there any etymologists in the house who can illuminate its source and growth? It's one of those professional-expert-medic words that sounds so neutral but masks a world of problematic assumptions.

Meltzer, M. (2006) 'Are Fat Suits the New Blackface? Hollywood’s Big New Minstrel Show' in Jervis, L. and Zeisler, A., eds., Bitchfest: Ten Years of Cultural Criticism from the Pages of Bitch Magazine, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 267-269.

Fat Panel Talk at National Portrait Gallery, London

I'm going to be taking part in a panel discussion at the National Portrait Gallery in London about fat representation. Come and join in!

In Conversation: In Praise of the Voluptuous
10 May 2012
19:00-20:00
Tickets: £5/£4

Ondaatje Wing Theatre
National Portrait Gallery
St Martin's Place
London WC2H 0HE

Herbie Popnecker: the Little Fat Nothing that saved the world (regularly)

A while back my boyfriend, Simon Murphy, brought home a comic for us to look at. I can't remember who did it or what it was about, possibly it was something by Art Spiegelman. But I do remember a little row of drawings of fat cartoon characters at the top of the page. One of them stood out: Fat Fury! I wanted to know more about him. Simon did some research and ordered some copies of the comics featuring Fat Fury, and he wrote a little piece about it for a zine that never came to be published. I liked the piece a lot, Simon agreed to me publishing it here, so have a read. PS. I'm wearing my Fat Fury t-shirt as I write this.

Herbie Popnecker: the Little Fat Nothing that saved the world (regularly)
by Simon Murphy

The comic character Herbie Popnecker first saw the light in 1958, and after several well-received appearances in the mystery comic Forbidden Worlds, he got his own title in 1962. Written by Richard Hughes under a variety of pseudonyms, and drawn by Ogden Whitney, he was very popular for a few years as the flagship title of the American Comics Group.

Herbie is not your typical comics protagonist. He is a dorky-looking boy of about 13, short and fat with glasses and apparently no friends. He seems bored most of the time, almost sleepy, and doesn’t talk much. And yet he lives a secret parallel life as one of the most famous and powerful beings in the universe, known and loved by all. He’s everybody’s favourite fatty, popular with the ladies (in whom he has no interest), but doesn’t let it go to his head.

Herbie manages this without his parents even showing the slightest glint of curiosity or suspicion. His eternally disappointed and resentful Dad sees only a "little fat nothing," even when faced with concrete evidence of his super strength or time-travelling abilities. But Herbie doesn’t suffer any of the angst of characters like Spiderman or The Thing, he just ignores his stupid parents and gets on with it. They think he is an ignorant fat lump, and their lack of interest and low expectations would be tragic in real life, but in Herbie’s world it just means he can do whatever he wants without them noticing. If they don’t love him at least they don’t cramp his style: ideal parents. Teachers and other authority figures are equally stupid, yet when transformed into costumed superhero Fat Fury he is required to put the world that rejects him in order, which he does pretty much effortlessly, with no reward or recognition. He exposes the absurdities of that world and invites you to identify with him, join him on the cool side of the generation gap and be in on the joke. In a world of nagging, pushy but out-of-touch adults, Herbie is a role model for thrill-seeking misfit kids and under-the-radar fat freaks – one of the first.

In a range of truly bizarre stories he fights crazy monsters and criminals of the past present and future, dropping worms into Chairman Mao’s mouth in one story and leading a strike of Satan’s imps in another, as well as hanging out with The Beatles, Liz Taylor, the Queen, President Johnson, Nikita Khrushchev and other real-world people. Ironically, he is less successful at fighting criminals like Hattaman, Pizzaman and Roderick Dump when disguised as Fat Fury, because Herbie is more famous than his superhero alter-ego, and he isn’t very good at the traditional hero stuff. It’s only really as Fat Fury that he is the butt of any jokes. His powers are many and varied but never really explained. Some, like walking in the sky and talking to animals, seem innate and possibly genetic. His fatness is itself the source of these powers (he loses them when a bite from a snake-beast makes him temporarily thin), while other powers are the result of sucking on a particular lollipop. He is never without a lollipop in his mouth, but his special secret power lollies are usually kept in a locked and labelled chest of drawers in his room, and occasionally on a kind of utility belt. There is one for every situation: time travel, invisibility, digging holes, super strength etc. He also has a knack for having just the right random object on him to foil the baddies and save the day.

In retrospect you can place him somewhere in the camp pop culture melting pot of the 1960s that produced the Batman and Monkees TV series, but the fact that readers identified so closely with him sets him aside I think; he is a ridiculous character, but powerful, with a message of quiet defiance for the geeks misfits and fatties who read him. He’s not exactly subversive, the comic has its fair share of the racism and sexism of the period, but 45 years after his disappearance you can still get Fat Fury t-shirts on eBay.

Simon Murphy's excellent zine about fuzz history and culture, Good Fuzzy Sounds, can be ordered via thesimonmurphy@yahoo.com Check out his occasional blog http://www.musical-den.blogspot.com

Headless fatties, the visual cliché that will not die

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dawn French and The Daily Mail

Putting aside the fact that it's a Tory hate-rag, The Daily Mail is such a contradiction when it comes to reporting fat, which they do a lot, although ironically I think it's still a better bet than the supposedly liberal Guardian, which is all fat hate all the time and even has its own diet club. On the one hand The Mail promoted the Big Bum Jumble by publishing almost word for word the press release I wrote to publicise the event without any problem at all. They've done some good reporting on LighterLife, whilst pruriently speculating about who has and who hasn't been on that diet. Same with weight loss surgery. They publish a lot of articles that appear to adopt a voice of concern about fatphobia but just end up reinforcing it. And of course they publish many reports that are just all-out full of fat hatred. There's no rhyme or reason to it and I suspect the tone is all down to whichever particular editor is on duty the day that the article is published. I suppose what it illustrates is the messy and inconsistent ways in which people think and talk about fat anyway; fat hatred is bad, but who on earth would want to be fat if they could help it?

Dawn French has been the focus of The Daily Mail's fat department this week. Her relationship with Lenny Henry ended and she's lost a lot of weight. Her publicity machine is saying that it's because she's found a new lease of life and is very happy, just eating "more healthily" whatever that means, and doing exercise. Anyone who buys this is living in fantasyland, French looks like she's undergone a sudden crash weight loss in the photographs of her gurning at an awards ceremony that appeared in the paper and, according to her memoir, this is something she's done before. Why or how will probably come out at some point but for now there she is, there's no way of knowing unless you are a close personal friend or have her phone tapped.

What makes French's weight loss interesting for someone like me is the way that The Daily Mail have reported it, they're both celebratory and disapproving. The pictures of French on the red carpet have run and run this week, alongside a catty 'letter from a frenemy' article by Anne Diamond, aka the lady Alan Partridge, that is almost beyond belief. Diamond, who has apparently made a very good career out of being an utter tool, berates French for pro-fat statements she's made, speculates that French's weight loss is a result of secret obesity surgery, and states that anyone who says they are fat and happy is deluded. I come across this expression all the time: 'fat and happy.' It's such a reductive means of explaining fat embodiment that is not based on self-hatred or wanting to change. "Are you fat and happy?" is a question that demands a negative answer because a positive one sounds unbelievable and trite. I doubt anyone is ever happy all the time in this flat kind of way that expresses nothing of the complexities of living fat. Anyway, it's always about fat and happy and French is a big fat hypocrite because she could not be fat and happy in the way that everyone needed her to be, and therefore nobody can ever be fat and happy.

The reporting of French's weight loss adds to the unreality of fat embodiment where, as a number of scholars have pointed out, Hannele Harjunen in particular, fat is a temporary blip in the present on the way towards a glorious thin future. The idea of someone being permanently fat is difficult for people to get their heads around, as is the idea of embodiment shifting from time to time for whatever reason. In a context where fat activism or fat politics are so far off most people's radar that they are positively laughable, I find this sense of unreality and its denial of fatness perturbing. I think it's difficult for fat people to feel secure in developing more positive identities as we are, especially for those of us who are isolated from one another. There's this deep sense that what fat activists are doing is ridiculous and will never work. People desperately want an alternative to fat hatred but they actively want fat activism or self-acceptance to fail too so that their own projects of self hatred can be justified. The rug is pulled out from under fat activism again and again.

I know people really love her but French's weight loss underscores for me the limitations in looking to celebrities for reassurance as role models. Fat celebrities who get thin is an old story. French's public persona is clearly far removed from what she does in private, her image is about the smoke and mirrors of publicity, it is not trustworthy. This too is unstable ground on which to pitch some kind of self-acceptance or fat politics. It's better to build on firmer terrain, wherever that may be.

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. 

Is FatBooth always fatphobic?

Double chin created without the jiggery-pokery of FatBooth!
100% non-digital! Hilarious! Exciting!

FatBooth is an iPhone app that adds a digital double chin to a picture of your face and makes thin people look sort of fat.

I've avoided this phenomenon largely because I don't own an iPhone, and I already look fat because I am fat. Some of my thin online friends have been playing with it recently and posting their pictures on Facebook, so now it's suddenly become a lot more present to me.

I was offended when I first saw the pictures and the comments after them, all consisting of onomatopaeic laughing and what looked like people choking with mirth. The digital double chins remind me of fat suits, more specifically Marisa Meltzer's article comparing fat suits to blackface. It's also a weird reversal of the headless fatty, where fat people are just as absent from the discourse surrounding the image as with pictures where our heads are cropped away. I felt that FatBooth is an appropriation of ersatz fatness, of people like me, and that a digital double chin tells you nothing at all about what it's like to be fat, it just turns it into a joke.

I went on to wonder if my authenticity as a 'real' fat person mattered. I was once told in the past that I was not fat enough to have a stake in fat politics (by an author who lost weight, wrote about it and still maintains their own stake in the matter, ahem). Anyone can talk about fat, I don't have the last word on it, it's important that people of all sizes engage. What makes this tricky is that fat people are very often made silent by obesity discourse and that fat hatred has widespread negative material effects on the quality of people's lives. A group of thin friends making a joke of a pretend double chin will never replace my lived embodiment, you could argue that it's not supposed to, a joke is just a joke, but I think a joke says more than that.

Seeing people's FatBooth pictures was like witnessing thin people's prurient obsession with fat embodiment. I thought: "This is how they see us when they can't conceive that we would see them doing this, or feel implicated in their actions, they are so profoundly immune to our daily grind." Imagining flesh on your bones is a real thrill when you don't have much of your own. It's a dangerous thing to imagine.

Following this, I tried to think of FatBooth as a tool that people use in different ways. I never thought of my Facebook friends who used FatBooth as fatphobic, so I tried to think about how non-fatphobes might use it, or if it was possible to use FatBooth without being fatphobic. I wondered if FatBooth could be something that enables people to think about fat in radical or progressive ways. Could it inspire empathy? Could it enable thin people to imagine themselves fat with no moral connotations? Could it enlighten?

If people using FatBooth lived in social contexts where there was no war on obesity, or endemic hatred of fat, then these things might be possible. But FatBooth appears to me as entirely a product of fatphobia, the way it frames the act of imagining oneself fat is intimately tied to dominant obesity discourse. FatBooth presents fat as funny, pitiful, fearful and Other; fat is something pathologically added-on to authentic slenderness; fat people are not recognisable as humans with agency, thoughts and feelings of their own, let alone politics, community, creativity or rage. If there are radical applications for FatBooth, I want to hear about them – but I won't be holding my breath.

Meltzer, Marisa (2006) 'Are Fat Suits the New Blackface? Hollywood’s Big New Minstrel Show', in: Jervis, L. & Zeisler, A. (eds.) Bitchfest: Ten Years of Cultural Criticism from the Pages of Bitch Magazine. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 267-269.

PS. This post got some diet company spam which made me laugh because it missed the point of the post heroically. Here's the text: "Nowadays people who have normal weight seem unnatural and not normal! Obesity is considered almost as a normal condition! And this thing with the iphone is just not cool!" Keep going spam-drone...

Manufacturing hate

I was at Rotterdam The Hague Airport yesterday. Part of the checking-in area was being used to film a comedy show that's going to be broadcast on RTL Nederland in August. I didn't have my wits about me to catch the name of the show, but I watched the filming for a few minutes before I went through to the departure lounge.

The main character was a guy with unruly ginger hair dressed in a sort of a shell-suit, like a chav stereotype. At first I couldn't work out why his face looked so puffy and weird, and then I saw the plastic belly poking out from under his clothes and I realised he was wearing a fat suit. As I watched him act, his comedy character seemed to be modelled on someone with a learning disability.

I have no idea about the context for this character, whether or not this is a popular programme, what it's about. Maybe someone else reading this knows and can fill me in. What struck me was the casual way in which stereotypes are manufactured, and about who is invested in their creation. There were about 15 people making the programme, including producers, actors, technicians, and no doubt the airport was getting a location fee, all very workaday. And yet here is a character in a fat suit, complete with various other underclass signifiers, being presented as stupid and pathetic, the butt of the joke. Why do this?

I tried to take some pictures of the guy in the fat suit but, strangely enough, he wasn't keen. This is the best I could do, he's the one in the middle, you can just about see his plastic strap-on belly poking out of his clothes.

Look at this excellent fat sculpture

I don't have much of any substance to say today, mainly because I am still buzzing from the talk at King's College London last night. Thanks to everyone who contributed to that.

What I do have, however, is this amazing picture!

It's from the cover of the May 2011 issue of Museums Journal, the magazine of the Museums Association. It's there to illustrate an article about how science museums should get more hip and goes to show that a picture of a fat person or object perks up any old thing.

It turns out that the object is a sculpture that was exhibited in the Museum for the History of Science's Steampunk exhibition. I'm not much of a Steampunk aficionado so I haven't dug very deeply into the site and haven't been able to find much information about it other than that its title is Cosmonaute and it was made by Stéphane Halleux. There are more pictures on Stéphane's site.

The magazine image is accompanied by the headline 'Brave New World,' which I like because it subverts the notion that obesity heralds the end of the world. I've documented previous artistic explorations of fat that I think have failed dismally, but this object is different. I love it, from its tiny and cute three-digit hands to its truncated feet and blank/wonderous expression. Its apparent inflatedness reminds me of the lovely Horniman Walrus, which is no bad thing. I like the way it appears to hover lightly, as though gravity is no longer relevant.

The sculpture's shape recalls friends and acquaintances who look a bit like this. It makes me think that fat activists should have tool belts, gauges, dials and protective headgear as we navigate and explore the outer reaches of culture and embodiment.