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. 

Fat, Sex Work, Rescue Industries

I'm very interested when other areas of critical engagement and struggle have crossovers with fat activism. I know this is controversial in terms of fat, which is seen by many as a choice and a triviality, but it fits with the earliest fat activist analyses of oppression (not that I think challenging oppression is all there is to fat activism). For example, Judith Stein's pithy two-page mimeographed introduction to fat activism places fat within a matrix of oppression and calls on fat activists to challenge other forms of oppression too. Sometimes this is lost, fat activism has been criticised for its racism, for example, but I think the idea that no one is free until everyone is free is good to bear in mind.

This week I had the pleasure of spending some time with Laura Agustìn. If you have never read Laura's book Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry, which she authored in 2007, you must hurry and get a copy now; likewise read her blog, The Naked Anthropologist.

Although Laura is part of a wider movement, for me her book was a paradigm-changer which enabled me to recognise more deeply the agency of people who migrate and sell sex, what selling sex looks like, and how this is thwarted by the rescue industry. Laura's work has helped me unpick hyperbolic rhetoric concerning trafficking discourse, and I am grateful for her rational approach to sex work, particularly in her methodology of sex work research. It also enabled me to reconsider my own personal relationship to sex work and to connect with fat sex workers.

I live in Stratford, close to where the 2012 Olympics will be held. There are discredited reports that major sporting events result in an increase in trafficking and that evening Laura had been invited to be an expert presenter at a meeting at Waltham Forest council which was concerned with this possibility. Waltham Forest is one of the five London boroughs that is connected to the Olympics, though I live in Newham. So on Wednesday I took her to have a look at the Olympic site, and also on a mini-tour of Stratford's more obvious brothels, its sex shop and red light area, active and present long before the Olympics were announced in 2005, and just another part of the area. Fun!

I won't go on too much about the council meeting, which took place in the very formal Chamber. I'm sure minutes will be available in due course if you want to find out more about what was said in detail. Briefly, two police officers working for the Met's anti-trafficking department stated their case, as did four people who work with sex workers and migrant people, including a nun, and two medics. Varying ideological positions on sex work were represented though all could be described as 'rescue industry'. Laura spoke, and people from the council recorded and questioned the speakers. The idea that the Olympics will result in an increase in trafficking was immediately dismissed as soon as evidence to the contrary was produced. So the meeting ended up being an arena for people to state their positions and argue for their own legitimacy. No conclusion was reached, the Chair resolved to have more meetings, though this may be in question because there are local government elections looming. As an observer, I think councillors were expecting one thing but ended up having their minds blown by having to consider alternative paradigms.

As an observer, I found the meeting really interesting in a dull, committee type way. What intrigued me were the crossovers in the way that fat is presented in policymaking. Obviously there were no out sex workers present to offer their expert testimony, just as there are never autonomous fat people present during similar meetings of obesity stakeholders, it's as though the concept Nothing about us without us never existed. These gatherings are about professional management of perceived problematic populations, where there is a moral and medicalised discourse concerning embodiment, and where 'helping' is a euphemism for 'control', and where people routinely rely on duff 'evidence.' In these contexts, sex workers/fat people are talked about, made pitiful, framed as service users, are absent and Othered. Even the language has parallels: 'prostitution' sounds a lot like 'obesity' to me, 'trafficking' is as much a neologism as 'bariatric,' and 'sex work' could be seen as analogous to 'fat'. Professionals pump themselves up as essential to the discourse, medics especially so, yet it's clear that the rescuers need their fodder more than sex workers or fat people need them, for example, what do you do with massively resourced anti-trafficking units when there are no trafficked people?

Of course there are differences between the way that fat and sex work is framed in contexts such as this meeting I went to with Laura. I think fat people are far less organised than sex workers – not that fat people and sex workers are necessarily mutually exclusive groups – partly because shame is much more present. Issues concerning criminalisation and migration are also different.

Despite these differences, acknowledging common ground can be very illuminating. I would love to see broader analyses of how helping industries further marginalise their apparent constituents, for example.

What was exciting about the meeting in Waltham Forest was the way that Laura's testimony was paradigm-shifting for many people in the room. I have experienced this when I start talking about fat with people, or at least in those situations where people are more able to move beyond clichés. It's clear that many people are hungry for more complex and human ways of thinking about things that have been overstated through moral panics, and that trite accounts of trafficked women or obesity epidemics are not enough, and that ethical, grassroots ways of understanding may be possible.

Agustìn, L.M. (2007) Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry. London: Zed Books.

The Dodo Is My New Favourite Fat/Not Fat Animal

The other week I had to drive from Hartford, Connecticut, to Kennedy Airport in New York. As is my way I set off too early and ended up with some time to kill. I stopped off in New Haven to have a look at Yale (sites of preposterous privilege and power are so interesting, don't you think?), and I went to the university-affiliated Peabody Museum. I wasn't expecting much, I just wanted to stop driving for a bit and have a pee.

Museums of natural history don't tend to float my boat. You've seen one dusty taxidermied baboon, you've seen 'em all. I prefer nature to be explained to me in person, from behind a car's windshield, or on TV. No one could accuse The Peabody of being a cutting edge museum of 21st century best practise. Its centrepiece Black Holes exhibition looks like it was designed in 1987, and much of the collection has the reek of old skool natural science and colonial anthropology about it, the seamless segue between rocks, insects and animals, then mummies and 'primitive peoples' is especially problematic, for example.

However, in some areas of the museum, brave curators have drawn attention to these shortcomings. A notice points out that a giant model of a dinosaur, one of the museum's treasures, was put together wrongly by the 19th century scholar who supervised its assembly. He didn’t know any better and it was only when evidence surfaced years later that anybody realised the skull was a bit off, that there weren't enough vertebrae, and that the tail should have been in the air, not on the ground. I really enjoyed this admission because it exposed the myth that representations of natural science are pure and objective truths, it shows that they are as much a product of contemporary ideology as anything.

The exceptionally round Peabody Dodo

I don't know about you but I'm fascinated by Dodos and The Peabody has a little display devoted to these sweet and extinct creatures, featuring a skeleton and a model made of chicken and ostrich feathers. Again there is a note saying that more recent evidence suggests that the model is not an accurate representation of how a Dodo really looked.

This is where it gets interesting in terms of fat. The model Dodo is almost completely round, whereas the text display says that in real life they were probably leaner and "more athletic". The panel suggests that the Dodo was probably represented as being fat like this to emphasise the belief that it was stupid, helpless, basically a sitting target for hunters. This assertion is likely to represent present-day thinking on what fatness represents, rather than an objective truth.

I don't know when the model was built, or if this interpretation is what the model-makers intended but I'm really fascinated that the association between fat and abjection could be played out in the model of a Dodo. I think debates about the meaning of fat being transmitted by media, epidemics, fashion, or whatever, are commonplace, but using a Dodo to get the message across is jaw-dropping. The way fat people are typically represented within Obesity EpidemicTM rhetoric is also very Dodo-like; we herald extinction, we are useless beings, we are laughable, pointless and stupid. It's funny how the leaner interpretation of a Dodo is associated with more modern and enlightened thinking, the future is thin!

I don't have much with which to conclude other than that the reproduction of fat abjection moves in mysterious ways, and my interest in Dodos just got a lot geekier.

Bristol's very own fat Dodo

PS. I went to Bristol Museum and Art Gallery (in the UK) about a month after I wrote this post and I was excited to see they have a fat Dodo model there too, though with no explanatory text. Any more sightings?