Back in August last year, I had a testy interaction with someone on Facebook about something they did that I thought reeked of fat hate.
The Real Art of Protest (TRAP) is a Facebook group dedicated to reposting protest images. Their About page states that they will ban users for racism, sexism, comments offensive to those who are LGBT, ableism, trolling, using personal insults and justifying the existence of fascist organisations. Very honourable. They're a popular page.
But in August I started to see them reposting an image. Of course now I can't find it! Perhaps they quietly took it down when no one was looking. Hmm, an apology would have gone a long way too. Anyway, the image included a fat kid, junk food, and the Olympic stadium. It was a visual comment trying to make a point about McDonald's corporate sponsorship of the Olympics, implying that one of the Games' legacies would be the production of more fat kids. I haven't been able to find the originator of this image, and TRAP doesn't always give out that information. I left a comment immediately saying why I thought this image was a mistake, and then I sent TRAP a message about it inviting dialogue about the picture. I also wanted to talk to them about their use of imagery relating to fat capitalists, but we never got that far. The full transcript of the exchange is below.
I've been wanting to make a blog post out of this exchange for a while but I couldn't get a handle on it. Mostly I was angry about having my careful comments dismissed in such a patronising and cavalier way. But there were other themes that bothered me, and which couldn't be contained in a neat narrative for a blog post. Instead of waiting for inspiration to strike, I thought I'd just go ahead and write a messy post all about it. Not everything can be neatly storyfied after all, life is messy.
One of the themes is about the continuing failure of the radical Left to consider other forms of liberation politics, especially things that could be thought of as fringe, including fat stuff. The use of headless fatties and the language of fat hate was not confined to the mainstream, particularly during the Olympics in London, where I live. It was also included in radical spaces. The Olympics brought with it a giant, overwhelming rhetoric of patriotic groupthink, it was like an invasion of the pod people. Critics of this moment were few and far between, or at least their voices were barely represented anywhere. To be a critic of the Olympics was to be politically radical, yet here were radicals capitalising on fatphobia.
It would be churlish to expect everyone to know about fat politics, but what shocked me was how I was shut down when I called them on their depiction of fatness. This was in a context where they had posted other images that supposedly supported embodied liberation, and where their About page specifically mentioned ableism, which has a lot to do with how embodied difference is culturally positioned in negative ways. It felt really hypocritical to me, that some forms of resistance are acceptable, and others not, and that TRAP were unwilling to adopt a critical view of this stuff.
Another theme was the insistence that fat has nothing to do with politics, it just is, and it should be eliminated. I'm still staggered by this! The denial that fat has a political dimension, by people interested in politics, just amazes me.
This makes me think about other fatphobes who have some radical politics and know that they can’t talk shit about fat. What they do is dismiss fat politics in other ways. X implies that fat activism isn’t queer or feminist. Y implies that it is a white person’s thing. Z describes it as a hipster fad that's out of touch with real people's experiences of health or embodiment. None of them have done their homework but they arrogantly assume that they don’t have to. Their voices are influential within their subcultures and the lie continues that fat activism is conservative, rigid, limited, not worth bothering with. Fat is always trivial, secondary, not real.
The exchange brought into light the difficulty of speaking about fat. I'm lucky in that people often want me to talk about this stuff, but it reminded me of what it's like to speak into a vacuum, to people who have no concept of your framework. Sometimes this can bring up funny and even fruitful mismatches in discourse; for example, I enjoy listening to the fatphobe who's really interested in what I'm saying but is bound to a way of thinking about fat that can't really encompass my perspective. How they struggle! But then there are exchanges like this, where I might as well be speaking Martian, and where what I am saying cannot be at all tolerated. The silencing is really chilling, as is the automatic assumption in the exchange by the other person that they must be right.
Anyway, here is the transcript from the exchange, for your reading pleasure. I think of it as a little example of fatphobic micro-aggression. If you're fat and you want to talk about it it's likely that you've experienced many occasions like these. It's also a reminder of how profoundly fat politics threatens people.
1 August 2012
08.30
Charlotte Cooper
Dear TRAP,
Stop using images of fat people to promote ideas of greed, laziness, ill-health, capitalism. This is fatphobia. Your About page says that you will not tolerate ableism, so why bash a demographic that is closely associated with the most impoverished people around (want stats about how fat people in the West are more likely to be poor, older women of colour? I can send them). Not only impoverished, but a group of people that are subjected to the most egregious daily discrimination and stigma (again, I can send you data if you want it), that images like the ones you have produced do nothing to address.
The left, including the revolutionary left, has a dismal history of using the imagery of fat to denote corporate greed and the downfall of the world, and this has to change.
Here are some links that might help you understand a bit more why your headless fatty McDonalds picture is bullshit, and why you should apologise for it and get on board with radical fat activism.
http://obesitytimebomb.blogspot.co.uk/2011/11/stereotyping-fat-and-capitalism.html
http://obesitytimebomb.blogspot.co.uk/2011/05/how-left-failed-fat.html
http://obesitytimebomb.blogspot.co.uk/2011/10/progressive-enlightened-anti-capitalist.html
http://obesitytimebomb.blogspot.co.uk/2011/08/stereotyping-fat-in-visual-language-of.html
http://www.charlottecooper.net/docs/fat/headless_fatties.htm
You want radical images of fat that relate to the Olympics? I live in E15, in the shadow of the beast. Check out our community project, the Fattylympics:
http://fattylympics.blogspot.co.uk/
http://www.gamesmonitor.org.uk/node/1647
Charlotte
16:14
TRAP - The Real Art of Protest
the imagery is a dig at corporations and not people as is the only interpretation of that image taken as a whole with the text and the corporate logos of the olympics largest sponsors. The lead off from unhealthy food is obesity and therefore the image will not be removed or rendered. Sorry, but you are being hypersensitive.
16:15
Charlotte Cooper
Did you read the links?
16:23
TRAP - The Real Art of Protest
If you knew anything about the page you would know we have CONSISTENTLY attacked corporations with regard to the olympics. The only individuals who we attack are politicians, corporate spokespersons and royalty i.e. the enemy.
16:26
Charlotte Cooper
Yes, I get that, and I applaud it, I am no supporter of the Olympics, I live close to the Olympic Park and am disgusted by it, the corporate intrusion into East London is deplorable. But did you read the links I posted? Perhaps we could have a discussion about the use of headless fatty imagery, for example.
Also, "The lead off from unhealthy food is obesity" actually, this is not necessarily true. Would you like to talk about this?
16:41
TRAP - The Real Art of Protest
Not really, we are already very mindful of the nuances of our posts and do not need educating on sensitive activism. We take your input seriously and can assure you we will access your links and review our own processes. Thanks for the links and thanks for your input - it is appreciated.
16:49
Charlotte Cooper
Actually, you have been anything but sensitive on this issue. You are out of touch on the fat stuff, and your use of fat bodies is insulting and problematic. This is not just me being 'hypersensitive'. I am offering you an opportunity to develop your understanding of fat politics, and to understand how it intersects with disability rights, queer politics, anti-capitalism, and to develop shit hot activism that takes this stuff into account. I am a world expert on this stuff, widely published and respected around the world. I'm not talking out of my arse. But you are giving me the brush-off. This does not look like appreciation to me, it looks like arrogance. You don't want free knowledge? Your loss. Continue producing images that crap all over a demographic of people who don't need your shit, continue alienating people who could otherwise be supporting you.
Showing posts with label stereotypes. Show all posts
Showing posts with label stereotypes. Show all posts
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.
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.
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
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
Stereotyping Fat and Capitalism
I went down to St Paul's last week to visit Occupy London. There are places where my politics and the general politics of Occupy diverge, but I'm glad it's there, hope it continues, and felt happy, inspired and moved by it.
One of my favourite things about Occupy London is the way that the street has been appropriated as a giant noticeboard. Pictures, letters, rants, conspiracy theories, stickers, were all taped up on the pillars at the side of the encampment. I enjoyed browsing, there was such a muddle of compelling stuff. Amongst everything were some posters advertising a new film, and a leaflet about the scummy business of carbon trading. Can you guess what drew me to them? Yes, that's right: their use of fat capitalist stereotyping.
I have written elsewhere about how the left has failed fat people, progressive, enlightened, anti-capitalist, pro-planet people and their fatphobia, and about political cartoonists' use of fatness to denote the greed and disgustingness of capitalism (alas top fatphobe cartoonist Martin Rowson never replied to my email about that). I'm becoming more and more interested in what I see as a contradiction: the left supports the underdog, yet fails to see fat people as oppressed, and instead reproduces us as visual stereotypes of the oppressors. Fat cat capitalist imagery is a travesty when you understand that the fattest social groups are also the poorest and most marginalised.
Similarly, I'm fascinated and annoyed at how fat activism is ignored, denied, belittled within apparently progressive leftist circles, even though it offers radical possibilities for understanding and challenging oppressive practices. This was brought home to me this week when my girlfriend got an email from a vegan anarchist café in London declining her proposal for a regular fat crafternoon-type event on the grounds that they were concerned about promoting obesity within the context of a global obesity epidemic.
In both cases people on the radical left are failing to see fat, that is, they are failing to understand fat as something with which they should be politically engaged in a critical manner. Instead, they rely on lazy thinking and stereotyping, refusing to acknowledge the radical work by fat activists that is going on right in front of them.
One of my favourite things about Occupy London is the way that the street has been appropriated as a giant noticeboard. Pictures, letters, rants, conspiracy theories, stickers, were all taped up on the pillars at the side of the encampment. I enjoyed browsing, there was such a muddle of compelling stuff. Amongst everything were some posters advertising a new film, and a leaflet about the scummy business of carbon trading. Can you guess what drew me to them? Yes, that's right: their use of fat capitalist stereotyping.
I have written elsewhere about how the left has failed fat people, progressive, enlightened, anti-capitalist, pro-planet people and their fatphobia, and about political cartoonists' use of fatness to denote the greed and disgustingness of capitalism (alas top fatphobe cartoonist Martin Rowson never replied to my email about that). I'm becoming more and more interested in what I see as a contradiction: the left supports the underdog, yet fails to see fat people as oppressed, and instead reproduces us as visual stereotypes of the oppressors. Fat cat capitalist imagery is a travesty when you understand that the fattest social groups are also the poorest and most marginalised.
Similarly, I'm fascinated and annoyed at how fat activism is ignored, denied, belittled within apparently progressive leftist circles, even though it offers radical possibilities for understanding and challenging oppressive practices. This was brought home to me this week when my girlfriend got an email from a vegan anarchist café in London declining her proposal for a regular fat crafternoon-type event on the grounds that they were concerned about promoting obesity within the context of a global obesity epidemic.
In both cases people on the radical left are failing to see fat, that is, they are failing to understand fat as something with which they should be politically engaged in a critical manner. Instead, they rely on lazy thinking and stereotyping, refusing to acknowledge the radical work by fat activists that is going on right in front of them.
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.
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.
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?
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| Double chin created without the jiggery-pokery of FatBooth! 100% non-digital! Hilarious! Exciting! |
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...
Fantasising about Lauren Berlant and her fatphobia
Dear Lauren Berlant,
I awoke this morning to a beautiful fantasy all about you, but before I can go into that I'd like to fill you in on the backsnark.
A while ago I met this hot woman and told her that I was interested in fat and queer theory. She mentioned your name, so I went and read some of your work because I wanted to impress this woman enough so that she would have sex with me. Unfortunately, this is when things began to unravel.
I came across your paper Slow Death (Sovereignty, Obesity, Lateral Agency). Boy oh boy, did I ever feel like I was experiencing a slow death of my own whilst I was reading it. It's four years since this work was published, by you, and about two since I read it for the first time, and that feeling of metal atrophy I get when I think about it persists. I knew there were ideas in there, but I couldn't get to them because of the way you set them out on a page or a screen. Some people think that reading something so impenetrably academic is illuminating, but I just call it bad writing. I struggled on regardless, wondering if I was reading something of value, or the ramblings of someone who had lost their grip on things.
Your arguments about embodied sovreignity have been better expressed elsewhere, particularly in disability theory, which you don't mention. It is your thoughts on fat that really have me scratching my head. There is nothing in what you write that reflects any of my experience as a fat queer. I'm there going: "Does she really mean people like me?". I know I'll never get the time back that I've wasted in reading what you have to say but that hasn't stopped me going back and back again to try and make sense of what you've written. This work is well-cited, I reason, there must be something in it that I'm not getting. There comes a time when you just have to give up hoping.
It's not that you don't know about critical perspectives on obesity epidemiology, you cite the big men of the movement, Paul Campos and Eric Oliver, and you have a soft spot for Richard Klein's terrible book too, you just choose not to engage. If you bothered to think about the queerness of bodies, of what it is to have a body that isn't like yours, that is non-normative, you would have the opportunity to engage with a richness of material beyond your wildest dreams.
Instead, you choose to side with The Man. Slow Death reiterates the abjection of fatness. Fat is attrition, it is the pathological and literal representation of slow death. Your work reproduces fat people as Othered, anonymous, an abstraction; 'The Obese'. You fail to question the existence of fat people as anything but a crisis brought about by a mismanagement of energy balance and you see nothing of value in fatness other than as a symbol for your theorising. Given the paltriness of critical literature on fat and race, and the problem of racism within some fat activisms, it's especially dismaying to see you applying reductive obesity discourse to people of colour in this work. There is nothing radical here.
There are other queer feminist academics who have also failed to address their own fatphobia; Elspeth Probyn thinks that fat activism is a pathetic excuse and that obesity really is a terrible problem; Susie Orbach, well, the less said about her the better. I am not the first to point out the failings of those who theorise the body, including feminists, who conveniently ignore fat or reproduce the problematic terms of obesity discourse. It's painful to witness one's abjection in this work, again and again, especially by people who should know better, people like you who are paid to think and write, people who are lauded as intellectuals, tenured professors, those who enjoy tremendous intellectual freedom and privilege and cultural capital, people who are products of privilege misusing their power, circumscribing people who have less power. Surely you have the time and resources to dig a bit deeper, think a bit harder, be a bit more critical (your journal is called Critical Inquiry after all). What would happen if you spoke to some fat activists? It's not like you have to agree but at least engage for a moment.
I wonder if you think about fat people reading your work. Fat people are so abstracted in Slow Death as newspaper reports or policy objects that it's hard to imagine an actual fat person living a life, going about their business, thinking, or having any material presence or agency at all. Can you imagine a fat dyke throwing a brick through the window of a diet clinic? Fat lovers whipping and fisting? A fat genderqueer subverting death drive theory? It must be tragic to live in a context where these people, who are real and part of my life, don't exist.
It's time to return to my fantasy. So I woke up this morning and looked at my computer and saw that two of my favourite performers, David Hoyle and Bird la Bird are appearing on a panel with you at the Trashing Performance project here in London. It's on 26 October, which also happens to be my 43rd birthday. I drifted off into a reverie, imagining David and Bird turning on you in the panel and asking you pointed questions about the fatphobia in your work. I imagined you squirming. And then I thought of Scottee and Amy Lamé, who produced the sublime Burger Queen this year, who would surely be in the audience, and Vikki Chalklin, whose performance work considers femme fatness, and maybe there would be other rad fatties in the crowd too, and I imagined a bag of rotten tomatoes in there somewhere, and flesh, teeth, mess, and your disbelief of it all. And I imagined you picking up your bags and running to the airport to return to your little burrow in academia-land, shaken and aghast.
Sincerely,
Charlotte
PS The expression on the woman behind you in this picture makes me laugh a lot. It's the top result for your name in Google Images.
Selected References
Berlant, L. (2007) 'Slow Death (Sovereignty, Obesity, Lateral Agency)', Critical Inquiry, 33 754-780.
Probyn, E. (2008) 'Silences behind the Mantra: Critiquing Feminist Fat', Feminism & Psychology, 18:3, 401-404.
Performance Matters: Under- and Overwhelmed: Emotion and Performance
Please also see:
Kirkland, Anna (2011) 'The Environmental Account of Obesity: A Case for Feminist Skepticism,' Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 36:2, 411-436.
I awoke this morning to a beautiful fantasy all about you, but before I can go into that I'd like to fill you in on the backsnark.
A while ago I met this hot woman and told her that I was interested in fat and queer theory. She mentioned your name, so I went and read some of your work because I wanted to impress this woman enough so that she would have sex with me. Unfortunately, this is when things began to unravel.
I came across your paper Slow Death (Sovereignty, Obesity, Lateral Agency). Boy oh boy, did I ever feel like I was experiencing a slow death of my own whilst I was reading it. It's four years since this work was published, by you, and about two since I read it for the first time, and that feeling of metal atrophy I get when I think about it persists. I knew there were ideas in there, but I couldn't get to them because of the way you set them out on a page or a screen. Some people think that reading something so impenetrably academic is illuminating, but I just call it bad writing. I struggled on regardless, wondering if I was reading something of value, or the ramblings of someone who had lost their grip on things.
Your arguments about embodied sovreignity have been better expressed elsewhere, particularly in disability theory, which you don't mention. It is your thoughts on fat that really have me scratching my head. There is nothing in what you write that reflects any of my experience as a fat queer. I'm there going: "Does she really mean people like me?". I know I'll never get the time back that I've wasted in reading what you have to say but that hasn't stopped me going back and back again to try and make sense of what you've written. This work is well-cited, I reason, there must be something in it that I'm not getting. There comes a time when you just have to give up hoping.
It's not that you don't know about critical perspectives on obesity epidemiology, you cite the big men of the movement, Paul Campos and Eric Oliver, and you have a soft spot for Richard Klein's terrible book too, you just choose not to engage. If you bothered to think about the queerness of bodies, of what it is to have a body that isn't like yours, that is non-normative, you would have the opportunity to engage with a richness of material beyond your wildest dreams.
Instead, you choose to side with The Man. Slow Death reiterates the abjection of fatness. Fat is attrition, it is the pathological and literal representation of slow death. Your work reproduces fat people as Othered, anonymous, an abstraction; 'The Obese'. You fail to question the existence of fat people as anything but a crisis brought about by a mismanagement of energy balance and you see nothing of value in fatness other than as a symbol for your theorising. Given the paltriness of critical literature on fat and race, and the problem of racism within some fat activisms, it's especially dismaying to see you applying reductive obesity discourse to people of colour in this work. There is nothing radical here.
There are other queer feminist academics who have also failed to address their own fatphobia; Elspeth Probyn thinks that fat activism is a pathetic excuse and that obesity really is a terrible problem; Susie Orbach, well, the less said about her the better. I am not the first to point out the failings of those who theorise the body, including feminists, who conveniently ignore fat or reproduce the problematic terms of obesity discourse. It's painful to witness one's abjection in this work, again and again, especially by people who should know better, people like you who are paid to think and write, people who are lauded as intellectuals, tenured professors, those who enjoy tremendous intellectual freedom and privilege and cultural capital, people who are products of privilege misusing their power, circumscribing people who have less power. Surely you have the time and resources to dig a bit deeper, think a bit harder, be a bit more critical (your journal is called Critical Inquiry after all). What would happen if you spoke to some fat activists? It's not like you have to agree but at least engage for a moment.
I wonder if you think about fat people reading your work. Fat people are so abstracted in Slow Death as newspaper reports or policy objects that it's hard to imagine an actual fat person living a life, going about their business, thinking, or having any material presence or agency at all. Can you imagine a fat dyke throwing a brick through the window of a diet clinic? Fat lovers whipping and fisting? A fat genderqueer subverting death drive theory? It must be tragic to live in a context where these people, who are real and part of my life, don't exist.
It's time to return to my fantasy. So I woke up this morning and looked at my computer and saw that two of my favourite performers, David Hoyle and Bird la Bird are appearing on a panel with you at the Trashing Performance project here in London. It's on 26 October, which also happens to be my 43rd birthday. I drifted off into a reverie, imagining David and Bird turning on you in the panel and asking you pointed questions about the fatphobia in your work. I imagined you squirming. And then I thought of Scottee and Amy Lamé, who produced the sublime Burger Queen this year, who would surely be in the audience, and Vikki Chalklin, whose performance work considers femme fatness, and maybe there would be other rad fatties in the crowd too, and I imagined a bag of rotten tomatoes in there somewhere, and flesh, teeth, mess, and your disbelief of it all. And I imagined you picking up your bags and running to the airport to return to your little burrow in academia-land, shaken and aghast.
Sincerely,
Charlotte
Selected References
Berlant, L. (2007) 'Slow Death (Sovereignty, Obesity, Lateral Agency)', Critical Inquiry, 33 754-780.
Probyn, E. (2008) 'Silences behind the Mantra: Critiquing Feminist Fat', Feminism & Psychology, 18:3, 401-404.
Performance Matters: Under- and Overwhelmed: Emotion and Performance
Please also see:
Kirkland, Anna (2011) 'The Environmental Account of Obesity: A Case for Feminist Skepticism,' Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 36:2, 411-436.
Stereotyping fat in the visual language of the Left
I've written before about how sections of the Left have failed fat activism in the UK, and about how fat and class are depicted within this political visual rhetoric. It's truly depressing how opportunities to develop broad analyses of embodied oppression, as well as activist strategies and productive coalitions, are thwarted because fat is continually seen as laughable, trivial, and nothing to do with the real struggle.
Sometimes it is possible to take part in productive, if difficult, dialogue. Today, for example, I had an exchange with the usually fantastic Anarchist Media Project (AMP) over an image on their blog of a fat capitalist guzzling an innocent thin person in Children of Britain, Know Your Place: BORN POOR, DIE POOR. I left a comment and asked the project to stop using images of fatness to represent greed, capitalists and corruption and pointed out that fat people tended to be of low socioeconomic status. I said that stereotypes were hurtful and alienating, and I suggested some things that they could read to educate themselves about fat politics.
The good news is that the AMP said they would think about this stuff. They said that the image by saying it was from a famous vintage cartoon by a socialist artist called Robert Minor. I replied that I understood that there are historical precedents in the visual language of anarchism, and in the Left in general, of using fatness as a symbol of ruling class greed and corruption. However, the discourse around fatness has changed and is now part of a moral panic that also includes elements of classism, racism, fear and hatred of disability and difference. I said that it is not enough to use these vintage images without interrogating them or acknowledging that contexts have changed.
The annoying part of the exchange, reiterated by a later comment, was that "In fact we saw the suit, and nothing but the suit." There's something really weasely about this, it has a whiff of denial about it. They're offering a kind of fat-blindness that could be interpreted as "we don't care if someone's fat or thin, we don't even notice it," but is more like: "we don't see people like you, you don't exist in any meaningful way to us." Another commenter made a mean little joke at my expense, which hardly helped.
On other occasions I just want to throw my hands up in the air. This brings me to Martin Rowson, the man who has done more than any other political cartoonist, even Steve Bell, to associate fatness with everything that is disgusting. Here are a few charmers from his oeuvre, returned just by Googling his name. Will somebody please have a word with him?
My tolerance for the fatphobia in these kinds of images has evaporated because I read them as an ongoing betrayal by people who might otherwise be comrades. I am not proposing that images be censored, and I don't want a visual language of fatness that is reduced to a happy-clappy set of 'positive images'. I want to be able to look at whatever I want as much as anybody else does, and I want to be challenged by what I see. With Rowson it's not even about being squeamish over grotesque pictures. What I would like is for progressive, freedom-loving people on the radical Left to think more about the complexities of representing fat and to stop selling out on people's bodies. Liberation cannot be built on stereotypes.
Sometimes it is possible to take part in productive, if difficult, dialogue. Today, for example, I had an exchange with the usually fantastic Anarchist Media Project (AMP) over an image on their blog of a fat capitalist guzzling an innocent thin person in Children of Britain, Know Your Place: BORN POOR, DIE POOR. I left a comment and asked the project to stop using images of fatness to represent greed, capitalists and corruption and pointed out that fat people tended to be of low socioeconomic status. I said that stereotypes were hurtful and alienating, and I suggested some things that they could read to educate themselves about fat politics.
The good news is that the AMP said they would think about this stuff. They said that the image by saying it was from a famous vintage cartoon by a socialist artist called Robert Minor. I replied that I understood that there are historical precedents in the visual language of anarchism, and in the Left in general, of using fatness as a symbol of ruling class greed and corruption. However, the discourse around fatness has changed and is now part of a moral panic that also includes elements of classism, racism, fear and hatred of disability and difference. I said that it is not enough to use these vintage images without interrogating them or acknowledging that contexts have changed.
The annoying part of the exchange, reiterated by a later comment, was that "In fact we saw the suit, and nothing but the suit." There's something really weasely about this, it has a whiff of denial about it. They're offering a kind of fat-blindness that could be interpreted as "we don't care if someone's fat or thin, we don't even notice it," but is more like: "we don't see people like you, you don't exist in any meaningful way to us." Another commenter made a mean little joke at my expense, which hardly helped.
On other occasions I just want to throw my hands up in the air. This brings me to Martin Rowson, the man who has done more than any other political cartoonist, even Steve Bell, to associate fatness with everything that is disgusting. Here are a few charmers from his oeuvre, returned just by Googling his name. Will somebody please have a word with him?
My tolerance for the fatphobia in these kinds of images has evaporated because I read them as an ongoing betrayal by people who might otherwise be comrades. I am not proposing that images be censored, and I don't want a visual language of fatness that is reduced to a happy-clappy set of 'positive images'. I want to be able to look at whatever I want as much as anybody else does, and I want to be challenged by what I see. With Rowson it's not even about being squeamish over grotesque pictures. What I would like is for progressive, freedom-loving people on the radical Left to think more about the complexities of representing fat and to stop selling out on people's bodies. Liberation cannot be built on stereotypes.
Fatty Animals: I do not mind fatty!!
When I was a kid I lived in Hong Kong for a couple of years as part of what I have come to understand as a weird experiment in class and colonialism. I'll explain that in more depth in Chapter Three of my memoirs, whenever I come to write them, but for now I just want to say that Hong Kong in 1976 was when I first encountered Hello Kitty and, to a seven year old girl, that stuff was like crack. I've never been able to shake the habit and as a middle-aged woman I still go gaga for hyper-cute Asian graphics. I've been lucky enough to spend time in Japan in recent years, where I have pawed and prodded my way through the country's top stationery departments.
In London, where I live, Artbox is where I go for a fix. I was there yesterday, hyperventilating greedily over pencil-cases and plastic key covers. I bought this notebook. The cover has the picture of a rabbit or a bear with fat cheeks. The text says: "Fatty Animals: I do not mind fatty!!" and on the back there are more pictures of the fat rabbit eating a biscuit, a fat bear sitting and puffing, and more text: "We like to eat and hate to move. We are fatty animals". The paper inside the notebook is unadorned.
I did a little bit of peeping and checking this afternoon. Mind Wave sells character-based stationery and cute stuff in Japan and look like the originators of Fatty Animals. If they have Fatty Animals on their site, my Japanese is not good enough to find it, but there are other websites featuring Fatty Animals products, like pencils and pencil-cases, and other notebook styles.
I was so interested to see this stuff because I think it demonstrates a popular resistance to dominant obesity discourse in Japan, a place where Western fat activists might assume there is none, and where people in the West commonly assume there are no fat people. The reiteration of fat as being caused by eating biscuits ane being lazy is problematic, but the line: "I do not mind fatty!!" is pretty amazing, I think, as both tolerance and celebration of fatness. It ties in neatly with Fat Studies work about obesity rhetoric and pets (Cooper, 1997, Kulick, 2009). I like the way that this form of engagement with obesity discourse has travelled and messes with neat assumptions about who is making fat culture, where and how. What can I say? It's excellent to see this playing out through the medium of anthropomorphic animals and cute stationery.
Cooper, C. (1997) 'Would You Put Your Best Friend on a Diet?'. Yes! London. 4:23 June/July. 14-15.
Kulick, D. (2009) 'Fat Pets', in: Tomrley, C. & Kaloski Naylor, A. (eds.) Fat Studies in the UK. York: Raw Nerve Books, 35-50.
In London, where I live, Artbox is where I go for a fix. I was there yesterday, hyperventilating greedily over pencil-cases and plastic key covers. I bought this notebook. The cover has the picture of a rabbit or a bear with fat cheeks. The text says: "Fatty Animals: I do not mind fatty!!" and on the back there are more pictures of the fat rabbit eating a biscuit, a fat bear sitting and puffing, and more text: "We like to eat and hate to move. We are fatty animals". The paper inside the notebook is unadorned.
I did a little bit of peeping and checking this afternoon. Mind Wave sells character-based stationery and cute stuff in Japan and look like the originators of Fatty Animals. If they have Fatty Animals on their site, my Japanese is not good enough to find it, but there are other websites featuring Fatty Animals products, like pencils and pencil-cases, and other notebook styles.
I was so interested to see this stuff because I think it demonstrates a popular resistance to dominant obesity discourse in Japan, a place where Western fat activists might assume there is none, and where people in the West commonly assume there are no fat people. The reiteration of fat as being caused by eating biscuits ane being lazy is problematic, but the line: "I do not mind fatty!!" is pretty amazing, I think, as both tolerance and celebration of fatness. It ties in neatly with Fat Studies work about obesity rhetoric and pets (Cooper, 1997, Kulick, 2009). I like the way that this form of engagement with obesity discourse has travelled and messes with neat assumptions about who is making fat culture, where and how. What can I say? It's excellent to see this playing out through the medium of anthropomorphic animals and cute stationery.
Cooper, C. (1997) 'Would You Put Your Best Friend on a Diet?'. Yes! London. 4:23 June/July. 14-15.
Kulick, D. (2009) 'Fat Pets', in: Tomrley, C. & Kaloski Naylor, A. (eds.) Fat Studies in the UK. York: Raw Nerve Books, 35-50.
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.
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.
What would it be like to wake up thin?
One of the questions that I was asked last week at King's College London was about how I might handle waking up thin one day (my answer: "That's never going to happen").
I gave a quick answer but this question deserves deeper thought because I think it is a product of various ideas about fatness, including:
It won't come as a surprise, but I don't subscribe to these ideas in relation to my own body. However, I do fantasise a lot about things. Often these are impossible supernatural things, like waking up and all the dead people I love are alive again; or about a more prosaic sadness, like waking up to find that I am adored and worshipped by someone who plainly doesn't adore or worship me in real life. Sometimes I dream about things that appear impossible but become more feasible when I pick them apart; waking up with unimaginable wealth is actually the desire to be able to do what I want with my life, to be able to help other people whenever I like, and not having to worry about paying for something, rather than sitting on a yacht with a bunch of supermodels. I think dreaming and imagining are crucial for anyone with an interest in social change; fantasy and desire, an imagining of something different, they are the first unformed, free-flowing steps to taking action.
Occasionally I harbour fantasies of having a different kind of body. Having a tail, a penis, the ability to project my thoughts out of my eyeballs like a film, or type anything just by tapping my fingers on a surface, being able to fly, to breathe underwater, to teleport, to grow or miniaturise myself, this is what I think about. I also wonder what it might feel like to have different impairments like some of the people I know. The fantasy of waking up thin is not really there, it's too boring, I just don't value slenderness in that way.
When I return to the original question I think I am being asked about the circumstances under which I would want to be thin. It boils down to this: it would be interesting to take advantage of the capital and privilege that comes with being normatively embodied for a couple of days, though I think this would enrage me to a level where I would struggle to function. I think Linda Bacon's 2009 NAAFA keynote, Reflections on Fat Acceptance: Lessons Learned from Privilege (.pdf, 128kb) is really central to the reasons why fat people might fantasise about becoming thin, it's about acessing power and privilege. This explains why people would risk the drastic and uncertain steps to realise normatively thin embodiment, and why this is problematic for anyone who cares about embodied diversity and the unequal distribution of power.
The question about waking up thin comes from a series of common values and beliefs that have become very alien to me and it's fun to take them apart and answer the question from my current standpoint. I'm intrigued, for example, by the way that very thin people can scooch up into tiny spaces, so I'd like to try that for, I dunno, 20 minutes or so before I returned home to my own body. It's a funny reversal of the fantasy, being thin is the temporary state in my mind's eye because when I think about it, who would I be without my body and my own history of fat embodiment? There's no way I would ever want to deny that precious stuff.
I gave a quick answer but this question deserves deeper thought because I think it is a product of various ideas about fatness, including:
- Fat people would rather be thin because obviously it's better to be thin
- There is nothing of value in being fat
- Bodies are choices therefore transformation is desirable and possible
- The fantasy of transformation from an unbearable present to a beautiful future is preferable to the struggle to make the present liveable now
- Disbelief that embodied self-acceptance is possible
It won't come as a surprise, but I don't subscribe to these ideas in relation to my own body. However, I do fantasise a lot about things. Often these are impossible supernatural things, like waking up and all the dead people I love are alive again; or about a more prosaic sadness, like waking up to find that I am adored and worshipped by someone who plainly doesn't adore or worship me in real life. Sometimes I dream about things that appear impossible but become more feasible when I pick them apart; waking up with unimaginable wealth is actually the desire to be able to do what I want with my life, to be able to help other people whenever I like, and not having to worry about paying for something, rather than sitting on a yacht with a bunch of supermodels. I think dreaming and imagining are crucial for anyone with an interest in social change; fantasy and desire, an imagining of something different, they are the first unformed, free-flowing steps to taking action.
Occasionally I harbour fantasies of having a different kind of body. Having a tail, a penis, the ability to project my thoughts out of my eyeballs like a film, or type anything just by tapping my fingers on a surface, being able to fly, to breathe underwater, to teleport, to grow or miniaturise myself, this is what I think about. I also wonder what it might feel like to have different impairments like some of the people I know. The fantasy of waking up thin is not really there, it's too boring, I just don't value slenderness in that way.
When I return to the original question I think I am being asked about the circumstances under which I would want to be thin. It boils down to this: it would be interesting to take advantage of the capital and privilege that comes with being normatively embodied for a couple of days, though I think this would enrage me to a level where I would struggle to function. I think Linda Bacon's 2009 NAAFA keynote, Reflections on Fat Acceptance: Lessons Learned from Privilege (.pdf, 128kb) is really central to the reasons why fat people might fantasise about becoming thin, it's about acessing power and privilege. This explains why people would risk the drastic and uncertain steps to realise normatively thin embodiment, and why this is problematic for anyone who cares about embodied diversity and the unequal distribution of power.
The question about waking up thin comes from a series of common values and beliefs that have become very alien to me and it's fun to take them apart and answer the question from my current standpoint. I'm intrigued, for example, by the way that very thin people can scooch up into tiny spaces, so I'd like to try that for, I dunno, 20 minutes or so before I returned home to my own body. It's a funny reversal of the fantasy, being thin is the temporary state in my mind's eye because when I think about it, who would I be without my body and my own history of fat embodiment? There's no way I would ever want to deny that precious stuff.
How the Left failed fat
About a week ago my friend sent me a link to an article by Jennie Bristow that was published in Living Marxism when my book came out in 1998, you can read it below. My publisher at the time sent me a press packet of all the coverage my book generated, but this article wasn't in it so I never saw it. I'm glad that I didn't read it back then, the work had been a monumental struggle for me at a time when I was living a somewhat marginal life, and I would have been devastated.
I'm in a better position to talk about this stuff 13 years on. Bristow's vicious piece is callous in its response to Christina Corrigan's death, and disablist and racist to boot. Without ever having met me, she paints me as a miserable, whining wannabe victim intent on playing oppression olympics, when actually my book sets out the many ways in which fat activists resist and transform hatred, and why we do it. Bristow presents fat activism as dogmatic and American, which it certainly can be, but there's more to the picture than that. She posits the classic argument that fat is trivial compared to 'real' oppression, not least because fat is a choice. Weirdly, she demolishes me but agrees that fat hatred is real and has negative effects on people's lives – er, isn't that what I was saying? She also sets up a creepy and false bad fatty/good fatty division between me and the lovely Janice Bhend, who published my work in her magazine in the 90s. What would Bristow have made of the passages that my publisher refused to publish? The sections about fat and trans people, sex-positive feminism, SM? I imagine she would have blown a gasket. And what about my publisher's feminist censorship of those ideas? We'll never know what she would have made of that, if only she'd done her journalistic homework and spoken to me first. The best bit is where Bristow refers to "The Charlotte Coopers of this world," heheheh, yes, there are legions of us! All like me!
Bristow's article was not the first time that Living Marxism dismissed fat activism, in 1994 Ann Bradley went to town on Mary Evans Young's project of getting an anti-diet Early Day Motion read and supported in Parliament. I won't dwell on those pieces, or my book, both came out years ago and are done and done. Contexts have changed and I feel confident that Fat & Proud was a good piece of work because of the positive response I've had to it over the years.
What I do want to say is that both Bradley and Bristow's articles capture the British Left's failure to get on board with embodied liberation, including fat. This is also mirrored in some kinds of feminism (and it hasn't escaped me that both of these Living Marxism articles were authored by women). The legacy of the belittling of fat activism, and the feminist pathologising of fat within eating disorder paradigms is that the Left has a particularly muddled and weak relationship to this kind of political activity today. I see this as a wasted opportunity, a terrible shame. If the unions had supported Jane Meacham when she was sacked for being too fat in the late 1980s, we might very well have employment protection today. And how come it's left to the bloody Daily Mail to highlight dodgy goings on in the weight industry – notably a number of deaths of women who happened to be on the Lighterlife diet – whilst The Guardian continues to bleat on about the obesity epidemic long after anyone is interested?
Maybe Bristow has the answers. I wrote to her last week to see if she would like to re-engage with some of the things she said about my work in the light of how the world has since changed. As yet she hasn't responded.
Bradley, A. (1994). Fat's not a feminist issue. Living Marxism, 68, p.11
Bristow, J. (1998). The 'fat rights' lobby is out to lunch. Living Marxism, 109, p.30
PS. And I'm still pissed off that when Michael Moore solicited his TV audience for ideas, he never took up my suggestion that diet industries would be a good target for Crackers the Corporate Crime Fighting Chicken! What, hold a grudge? Me?
And while I'm at it, have a look at Depicting fat and class too.
I'm in a better position to talk about this stuff 13 years on. Bristow's vicious piece is callous in its response to Christina Corrigan's death, and disablist and racist to boot. Without ever having met me, she paints me as a miserable, whining wannabe victim intent on playing oppression olympics, when actually my book sets out the many ways in which fat activists resist and transform hatred, and why we do it. Bristow presents fat activism as dogmatic and American, which it certainly can be, but there's more to the picture than that. She posits the classic argument that fat is trivial compared to 'real' oppression, not least because fat is a choice. Weirdly, she demolishes me but agrees that fat hatred is real and has negative effects on people's lives – er, isn't that what I was saying? She also sets up a creepy and false bad fatty/good fatty division between me and the lovely Janice Bhend, who published my work in her magazine in the 90s. What would Bristow have made of the passages that my publisher refused to publish? The sections about fat and trans people, sex-positive feminism, SM? I imagine she would have blown a gasket. And what about my publisher's feminist censorship of those ideas? We'll never know what she would have made of that, if only she'd done her journalistic homework and spoken to me first. The best bit is where Bristow refers to "The Charlotte Coopers of this world," heheheh, yes, there are legions of us! All like me!
Bristow's article was not the first time that Living Marxism dismissed fat activism, in 1994 Ann Bradley went to town on Mary Evans Young's project of getting an anti-diet Early Day Motion read and supported in Parliament. I won't dwell on those pieces, or my book, both came out years ago and are done and done. Contexts have changed and I feel confident that Fat & Proud was a good piece of work because of the positive response I've had to it over the years.
What I do want to say is that both Bradley and Bristow's articles capture the British Left's failure to get on board with embodied liberation, including fat. This is also mirrored in some kinds of feminism (and it hasn't escaped me that both of these Living Marxism articles were authored by women). The legacy of the belittling of fat activism, and the feminist pathologising of fat within eating disorder paradigms is that the Left has a particularly muddled and weak relationship to this kind of political activity today. I see this as a wasted opportunity, a terrible shame. If the unions had supported Jane Meacham when she was sacked for being too fat in the late 1980s, we might very well have employment protection today. And how come it's left to the bloody Daily Mail to highlight dodgy goings on in the weight industry – notably a number of deaths of women who happened to be on the Lighterlife diet – whilst The Guardian continues to bleat on about the obesity epidemic long after anyone is interested?
Maybe Bristow has the answers. I wrote to her last week to see if she would like to re-engage with some of the things she said about my work in the light of how the world has since changed. As yet she hasn't responded.
Bradley, A. (1994). Fat's not a feminist issue. Living Marxism, 68, p.11
Bristow, J. (1998). The 'fat rights' lobby is out to lunch. Living Marxism, 109, p.30
PS. And I'm still pissed off that when Michael Moore solicited his TV audience for ideas, he never took up my suggestion that diet industries would be a good target for Crackers the Corporate Crime Fighting Chicken! What, hold a grudge? Me?
And while I'm at it, have a look at Depicting fat and class too.
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.
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 Fat Bloc
This article from the Guardian covers many of the people involved in the demonstration: Anti-cuts march: the protesters. You might also want to have a look at Freedom Press' Action Map March 26th Demo for an idea of the more radical groups involved.
Why did I go? I maintain anarchism as a beautiful dream, but I'm also a pragmatist and I think the state should support vulnerable groups directly, I don't see this as the role of 'Big Society', charities or private businesses. Britain is a rich country and can afford to do this. I'm appalled by the current round of cuts in services, which will devastate marginalised people and undermine the welfare state.
I didn't think the demonstration's explicit goals will be realised. The government's cuts are based on capitalist and neoliberal ideologies which have a global sweep and are bigger than the Con-Dem government in the UK. But I do think that the demonstration achieved other important things:
- It was a gigantic peaceful gathering for most people
- It was life-affirming to see so many different people together on the streets
- When you see a sight like this, you feel less isolated, you feel visible and in solidarity with other people
- It gives a sense of hope and encouragement in otherwise extremely grim times
- It is part of the current radicalisation of otherwise disenfranchised people, especially young 'uns
I decided to march a while ago but I couldn't decide who to march with. I knew I didn't want to get kettled or involved in any trouble, I didn't want to get arrested. This meant avoiding some groups with whom I have political sympathies. To cut a long story short, my girlfriend Kay and I decided to make our own banner late on Friday night. We played around with joke slogans, my favourites: 'Camelegg – No, Cameltoe – yes!' and the evergreen 'Die Tory Scum' but in the end we just wrote Fat Bloc, with an anarchist symbol in the word fat. It was my idea, I thought of it as a serious joke; if other groups could have their own bloc, then why not us? We made the banner with felt-tips and glitter, DIY forever!
For most of the demo the Fat Bloc consisted of me, Kay and my boyfriend Simon. The most miniscule Bloc ever! It was very cute. Clearly the three of us can handle the possibility of ridicule. People responded to us in many ways ranging from embarrassment and confusion, which only encouraged us more, to many thumbs-up, smiles of recognition and appreciation, verbal support, people wanting their pictures taken with us, many other cameras on us, and no negative snark that I heard in four hours of marching. None!
The best things were when a guy from a migrant workers' group came to stand with us, yay for coalition-building; when someone who may have been popstar of yore Holly Johnson took our picture; and when we got high-fived. I loved sneaking up behind unsuspecting protestors so that they became unwitting members of the Fat Bloc, teehee.
Inevitably, there were a few people with banners condemning 'fat cats' and 'fat pigs' and demanding the government 'cuts the flab'. We yelled them down! We said "Working class people are fat too!" "Don't stereotype fat people!" "We love fat cats!" "Keep the flab!" Lord only knows if they understood but I like to think there were a few sheepish faces and that they'll think twice before using fat stereotypes again.
Friends came and went as we demonstrated, others said they were looking out for us, and later on we met up with a bigger group of pals. People admired our glittery sign. It was great to stand together, such fun, and a really happy memory for me was seeing my friends Bill and Tammy coming towards us from out of the crowd. It's amazing to have fat community.
I had a great time being part of the Fat Bloc and would do it again in a heartbeat, and encourage others to form their own Fat Blocs. It is good to be visible on the streets as peaceful, friendly, and radical fat people, to show that we are part of social justice movements too and that no-one should give us shit. I loved the way that our placard was ambiguous enough for people to read into it what they wanted, and also that it meant something good and useful for people of all kinds.
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