My Guardian article on Fat Panic and Fat Activism

The Guardian has published my piece about the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges' report on obesity, which came out today with a slew of headless fatties plastered all over the media.

There's no need for this obesity epidemic hysteria

If you want to see more articles like this in the news, please consider writing to the editor and telling them how much you like my work, and how the paper should get on board with more critical work on obesity.

Edited to add: look, they put me on the front page, my whole name and all. I drew a ring around it because I can. How come Tim Lobstein gets to be called Dr and I don't?!

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.

Call for Papers: Special Issue of Fat Studies on Visual Representation

Special issue of Fat Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Body Weight and Society on Visual Representation, edited by Stefanie Snider, PhD

Visual representations of and/or by fat people are powerful tools of both oppression and empowerment. This special issue of Fat Studies seeks to explore the wide variety of ways in which visual representations have helped to give voice to and affirmed fat-positive cultures as well as fostered institutionalised fatphobia on local, national, and international levels. Further analysis of positive, negative, and neutral visual representations from a Fat Studies perspective can help to increase our cultural awareness of just how prevalent and important the visual world is to issues of social justice in our everyday lives.

Visual representations should be taken to include any and all forms of visual media, including, but not limited to: photography, the 'fine' arts, mass media imagery, film, live performance, museum installations, posters, and ephemera. Submissions do not need to be bound by historical timeline or cultural boundaries, but please be culturally- and historically-specific in your analyses. Fat Studies analyses do not need to be restricted to particular body sizes or shapes; Fat Studies approaches can examine numerous ways in which body weight, size, and shape might have particular social meaning – and in the case of this special issue of the journal, particular visual significance.

Potential topics might include, but are not limited to:

• The use of visual representations in teaching Fat Studies
• Intersections of body size, race, class, sexuality, gender, and other forms of cultural identification in television shows such as: Roseanne, The Gilmore Girls, Huge, Drop Dead Diva, Dollhouse, The Biggest Loser, Glee, Mike and Molly, etc.
• Nineteenth and twentieth century advertisements for fattening and/or dieting products
• The use of visual media to represent 'the obesity epidemic'
• Moving beyond the “rubenesque” in paintings of fat subjects

To submit a proposal for inclusion in this special issue of the journal, please send a 250-500 word summary of your article as well as a current CV to Stefanie Snider, at Snider.Stefanie@gmail.com by July 1, 2012. Any questions about the special issue can be directed to this email address as well.

Final submissions should be between 3,000 and 6,000 words, including all notes and references. If you wish to include reproductions of visual images with your essay, you will need to receive permission to do so from the artists/ copyright holders of the image(s). All authors will need to sign a form that transfers copyright of their article to the publisher, Taylor & Francis/ Routledge.

Fat Studies is the first academic journal in the field of scholarship that critically examines theory, research, practices, and programs related to body weight and appearance. Content includes original research and overviews exploring the intersection of gender, race/ethnicity, sexuality, age, ability, and socioeconomic status. Articles critically examine representations of fat in health and medical sciences, the Health at Every Size model, the pharmaceutical industry, psychology, sociology, cultural studies, legal issues, literature, pedagogy, art, theater, popular culture, media studies, and activism.

Fat Studies is an interdisciplinary, international field of scholarship that critically examines societal attitudes and practices about body weight and appearance. Fat Studies advocates equality for all people regardless of body size. It explores the way fat people are oppressed, the reasons why, who benefits from that oppression and how to liberate fat people from oppression. Fat Studies seeks to challenge and remove the negative associations that society has about fat and the fat body. It regards weight, like height, as a human characteristic that varies widely across any population. Fat Studies is similar to academic disciplines that focus on race, ethnicity, gender, or age.

Fat, Activism and the London 2012 Olympics

I'm really delighted to have been interviewed by the Games Monitor about fat and the Olympics, including some things about the Fattylympics.

Under the radar: Fat activism and the London 2012 Olympics: An interview with Charlotte Cooper

My fat queer band gets a Spanish outing

Following their fat activism special, Una Buena Barba, the super-cool queer feminist online mag from Spain, asked me to write something for them, so I did. 'Homosexual Death Drive: Diario de una Bollera Gorda y Su Novia' has just been published in the new issue of the magazine, available for free online. It's a little diary about my band. Download and read it today.

PS. I'm strangely excited to see some of my lyrics in Spanish.

Primero te follamos
Luego te matamos
Luego te comemos
Luego te cagamos

Una Buena Barba 4

Original unedited English version (.pdf, 52kb)

Looking back at Fat News, the newsletter of the Fat Women's Group, London, 93-96

I've been looking at copies of Fat News. This is a newsletter that was produced by the second Fat Women's Group in London in the early 1990s. Both the newsletter and the second incarnation of the group were my idea, I think. The group caused me a lot of pain, I had no idea what I was doing and there were also tensions towards the end of my involvement that I still don’t understand. I ended up leaving, the group changed a bit and then, as far as I know, it stopped. Whilst it helps to think of burn-out and problems with group dynamics as common pitfalls of activism, these difficult memories have made it hard to reflect.

Fat News is the only tangible artefact I have of this period. 15 copies were published March 1993 – September 1996, though I don’t think I was involved with the last few. I remember seeing copies of Shocking Pink, which was this fantastic girl's zine produced in South London in the late 1980s, and loving how it was put together irreverently. I had no idea how I could have got involved in Shocking Pink, I think I probably thought that I wouldn’t be welcome there, I was so alienated from people at that time.

I stole some of Shocking Pink's production techniques for Fat News, which was that we would invite people to write content for it, and write some ourselves, and then everyone in the group would be responsible for cutting and pasting a page and decorating it with doodles and comments. Then someone would take it to the printer (we used the National Abortion Campaign's copier) and we'd get together to collate it and post it out to subscribers. Someone else in the group would be responsible for maintaining the subscriber's list and printing out address labels. I don’t think anyone else in the group had any involvement with small press, independent or zine publishing, and I remember it always took a lot of work encouraging people to draw or write on the pages they were pasting up.

I feel pretty sad when I look at Fat News but I'm sure other people don't feel the same way. We had some great feedback for it in the group, people loved it, and I remember how important it was to make something in which people who lived far away could participate. I remember recording audio versions of it too, it was exciting to be able to make accessible media.

The Women's Library in London have a partial set of Fat News, if you’re interested in British fat activism from twenty years ago – and why wouldn't you be?! Otherwise you can come over and have a look at my precious copies.

Call for DIY fat fatshion crafty zine contributions

Kirsty is putting together a zine, it looks really good and you should contribute, if you can.

MAKE IT WORK: A DIY fatshion craft zine

She says:

"Make It Work" has been a mantra within fatshion communities since I can remember, and I'm interested in exploring it as a radical premise of fat positive politics. [...] I want this zine to be about sharing the resources, skills and knowledge that we've gained, and for it to provide strategies for people to move forward with.

The Bad Art Collective and Irrational Fat Activism

I just spent the weekend making Bad Art at the Researching Feminist Futures conference in Edinburgh. For two days I sat at a table and made stuff with three other members of The Bad Art Collective, a group we formed earlier this year, and various delegates who dropped by during the event to make some Bad Art with us. We had paper, pens, glitter, felt-tips, macaroni, lentils, pastels, scraperboards, glue and other media too, plus a lot of Blu-Tak to stick everything we made to the wall.

People have different ideas about what constitutes Bad Art. The four of us have posted some interpretations of it on the Bad Art Collective blog. At the conference people variously related to our Bad Art table as a project of irony, or a relaxing retreat from workshops or presentations where the 'real' work takes place. That's not how I see it at all. Drawing, making things, talking, cackling, working collectively, that's the space where things happen. I loved the moments at the weekend when people started to get over their insistence that they can't draw or 'aren't artistic' and contributed to the larger project. Better still was when what they produced made them laugh and want to do more. A felt-tip becomes a weapon.

The Bad Art Collective
Researching Feminist Futures, Edinburgh, 2-3 September 2011
Photograph by Evangeline Tsao

Our project was called Bombarded By Images and the idea was to critique the often-heard truism that women develop terrible body image because they are constantly bombarded by images in the media. We wanted to show that we are more than capable of making an abundance of our own images, and to think about and do activism that is creative, productive, full of agency and bad attitude.

Because of our theme, and because the four of us are grounded in fat activism and Fat Studies to a greater or lesser extent, a lot of what we produced was about fat, resistance, anger, fat culture, bad feminist art about bodies, being anti-social, inexpertise, enjoying stupidity. We developed a running joke about one particular theorist, whose work has done a lot of damage, and started to direct some of our work towards that, howling with laughter at what we produced and feeling really badass and full of ideas about it.

These moments were so beautiful! Two of the collective have really struggled with this particular theorist, trying to engage with their work and feeling so angry about the damage it's caused. Drawing stupid/not so stupid pictures was a true delight, it opened up a space that was beyond rational-critical dialogue, where we didn't have to play by the rules of politeness or propriety.

It's a couple of days later now and I've been thinking about that feeling. I love fat activism that is weird, grotesque, anti-social, and I feel sad that this kind of activism is sidelined or barely acknowledged or known compared to the 'real work' of changing laws, addressing inequality, righting wrongs. Those kinds of activisms are fine, I'm glad people do them, but they don't make my heart sing, and don't speak to my politics and cultural touchstones, which are of the punk, queer, anarchist variety. I think activists should consider ethics and do what they can not to support oppressive hegemonies, and I don't think you have to be po-faced about it; I like activism that makes me laugh a lot, that is prankish and evil.

Just now my friend sent me a link to Slavoj Žižek's rambling account of the London riots in August, stupidly titled Shoplifters of the World Unite. He's as windy as you'd expect an overly-lauded ageing white man academic to be, but I like his remarks about the irrationality of the riots as a form of protest. It made me think that, amongst its many qualities, Bad Art can also be thought of as a form of 'irrational' activism, fat or otherwise. The pictures and objects we made aren't waiting for anyone's approval, or official sanction by committee. Sometimes they make no sense to anyone else, or they grate, they don't behave or speak nicely, or engage politely with the other side. But they make sense to us and they make us happy, they're full of life and humour and intelligence, not to mention imaginative possibility and power. They resist and create simultaneously.

I feel excited by these ideas, and I expect I will come back to them. Full documentation of Bombarded By Images is coming as soon as I can make time to stick it on the Bad Art Collective blog – you'll just have to wait. Meanwhile, here's one of the things I made at the weekend, inspired by The Warriors, The Chubsters, The Ramones, and the Manson Family diorama that used to reside in the Chamber of Horrors at Madame Tussauds! Coloured pencils forever. You might also want to have a look at Corinna Tomrley's détournement of fat cartoon characters Bad Art + Fat Cartoons + Fat Activism = Life-Affirming Wonderousness.

badartcollective.blogspot.com
Facebook: Bad Art Collective

Lew Louderback, More People Should Be FAT, November 1967

In 1967 Llewellyn Louderback published an article in The Saturday Evening Post called 'More people should be FAT'. This was one of the first, if not the first, pieces of critical writing about fat in the popular media in the US. The article was read by Bill Fabrey, who contacted Louderback, and it helped spawn NAAFA and everything that followed.

The article is pretty compelling several decades later, I think. He makes a good case for abandoning fatphobia within a context where such claims would have been seen as pure oddball territory. It's pre-feminist, Ann Louderback gets mentioned but does not have a voice of her own in the piece. Given the influence of feminism on fat activism, it's strange to see its earlier focus on men. I like Lew's lively prose and would direct readers not only to his book Fat Power but also to his genre novels, which he wrote for a living, especially the lurid Operation Moon Rocket.

Louderback is still around, though sadly Ann died some years ago. I had the pleasure of meeting him in 2009, and we correspond from time to time.

The article is predictably obscure but, by magic, I have a copy of it. Here it is, hot off the scanner.

Louderback, L. (1967). More People Should Be FAT. Saturday Evening Post. Philadelphia, PA: The Curtis Publishing Company. November 4, issue 22. 10-12.

Louderback, L. [pseudonym Nick Carter]. (1968) Operation Moon Rocket, London: Tandem.

Louderback, L. (1970) Fat Power, New York: Hawthorn Books.

Queer Feminist Fat Activism Spanish Style

Hey look, Una Buena Barba has published a fat activism special, featuring interviews with me and Ruth from The Bop, plus the Fat Liberation Manifesto, and lots of eye candy. Queer feminist culture, free, unshaved and all in Spanish - hola!

Una Buena Barba

Original unedited English version (.pdf, 96kb)

Bombarded by Images

I'm going to be taking part in an artist's residency in Edinburgh, 2-3 September 2011 as a member of the Bad Art Collective. Our thing is called 'Bombarded by Images'. Come and join in if you can.

Uppity Fatty

Uppity Fatty, a sister-site to the fantastic Adipositivity Project, posted a picture of my girlfriend Kay and I.

I love how both websites generate mass archives of images of fat people, autonomous images that represent how we see ourselves. Taking self-representation into your own hands is so easy and so radical. These are images that sustain me.

Why don't you submit some pictures of yourselves?

A Queer and Trans Fat Activist Timeline zine - nearly sold out

I started out with 250 copies at the end of May and now have 20 copies remaining. That's all that's left in the photo. They've really flown out of the door. Update: They're gone now.

Some copies will be sold at Zinefest by Ricochet Ricochet, who have about ten for sale. In the US a small number of copies will be on sale at NOLOSE at the beginning of July, and there may be leftovers at Re/Dress NYC depending on how it goes at Fatlandia. In Toronto you can pick up copies via Plump It Up.

Otherwise, that's it unless anyone wants to take on the Creative Commons task of printing more of their own. There will be a download of the zine in time, but these are the last of the original beautiful paper zines, a gorgeous object to have and hold. I don't have any plans for a second edition.

I heart Becoming Chaz

I had the great good fortune to see the documentary Becoming Chaz at this year's 25th London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival.

Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato's film was a hit at Sundance and is going to have its TV premiere on the Oprah Winfrey Network. Becoming Chaz follows Chaz Bono as he negotiates his transition from female to male, including undergoing medical procedures and encounters with family, friends, activism and fame. A good chunk of the film is devoted to his relationship with Jennifer Elia, who is depicted as a fully-formed and multifaceted person in her own right. Cher also features, predictably, and the film-makers offer a compelling glimpse behind the Hollywood myth factory that she represents. Anyway, the film was a highlight of the festival for me, its warmth and complexity was unexpected and welcome. Chaz and Jenny rule.

Readers of this blog will know that I think Chaz Bono is a powerful fat and trans role model and all-round great guy. I've tried to make contact in the past and have been fully rebuffed! I still think this is a shame but, having seen this film, I understand why fame makes it impossible for Chaz to make any public comment about this stuff.

Anyway, given this, I was interested to see how Chaz' fatness was addressed in the film. It will come as no surprise that there was little in the way of any trad fat lib analysis, but Chaz appears very at home in his body. Post top surgery there were many shots of him splashing around in various swimming pools, apparently unfazed with public semi-nudity, hurray! Jennifer referred to his top surgery as conferring a minor weight loss, ie his body no longer has the weight of his breasts, but he seemed unconcerned. He talked about his role model being a stocky man, and he appeared not to buy into fatphobia at all, onscreen at least. Go Chaz!

As for me, it was a total pleasure to sit in a packed screening of 400 people and see a feature-length documentary about a fat trans guy, and to see his embodiment right there, bigger than life, on a huge screen, and to know that people were witnessing it sympathetically. People will, no doubt, critique its representation of trans identity, but for now it reminded me that a) I want to see more tales of transmasculine fat, b) Becoming Chaz adds a lot to the currently fairly minimal body of work on men and fat, and c) it's great to see unapologetically fat people on screen. Also, I wish RuPaul would come round for a playdate with me.

Here's the cheesy Oprah Winfrey Network trailer for Becoming Chaz:

I've been interviewed for a Finnish mag with Beth Ditto on the cover

Hannele Harjunen interviewed me for top Finnish queer rag NHL NormiHomoLehti, and it's just about to be published. Hurray!

Wanna read the unedited and raw English version? Here you go... (.pdf 88kb)

Posing for Substantia Jones

I've been in the US for a bit, visiting archives and finishing the last of the data collection for my PhD. I've also been doing what might be referred to technically within sociology as 'entering the field' in terms of fat activism, but I draw no distinction between my real life and the things I am studying, so thus can neither enter nor leave the field because I'm always already there. The lay version is that I've been talking with a lot of rad fatties, seeing a lot of fat activism, and taking part in some of it myself.

One of the people I spent some time with is Substantia Jones, the photographer behind The Adipositivity Project. If you are unfamiliar with Adipositivity, go to the site right now and feast your eyes on the amazing variety of fat flesh. This is one of my go-to places if ever I am having a bad fat day – and when I'm feeling perfectly fine too.

Substantia took my photograph in 2009, I'm Adiposer 303, 379 and 413, and just last week she did it again. Here's the pic that appeared on the site today, number 442, and outtakes of me with Mickey, and a snowman in Chinatown. By the way, yep, it was very cold, I got undressed in a restaurant toilet and dressed again out on the pavement, they're real streets in Chinatown in Manhattan, there were comments from passers-by (the guy in the main pic wanted my number – no chance!), it's as true as you see it.

When we were talking beforehand, Substantia asked me what it was like to pose for Adipositivity. I gave a jumbled up response, so I thought I'd try and give a more considered answer here.

I love the Adipositivity aesthetic, which is totally at home with femme and queer identity, often full of delicious colour, witty, sexy, imaginative, and stuffed with personality and style. Substantia has great visual ideas an collaborative skills, she makes the shoot fun, an adventure. When Substantia takes your photograph, you enter this world too and you get to see yourself within this frame, literally. It's a gift considering that many of the people who are photographed grew up with body shame and self-hatred.

When you appear on the site it's a measure of how far you've come in refuting fatphobia. It's not only about having your picture taken and allowing others to see it, it's also about being able to look at your own image without terror or disgust. Being there is a way of showing that having a fat body is alright, it gives permission to be visible and unafraid. There you are, part of humanity, not the fattest, not the thinnest, not the prettiest, or any other category that is supposed to be important, just there, doing your thing.

You could say that Adipositivity is a means of creating a new kind of beauty, or appreciating beauty. I don't think that beauty is the only thing going on in the pictures, they are also about flaunting fat, sometimes quietly and shyly, sometimes not. I love that the photographs are 'positive' but that they are never trite or monodimensional, 'positive role models' is an expression that makes me want to burn and rob, and I never get that feeling looking at these images. Instead they suggest another way of being, a richer way of considering fat embodiment. There is nothing apologetic or placatory about them and I think that this is because they are not necessarily created by and for 'them', but by and for 'us'. Whenever I come across the photographs they make me want to climb inside the frame and inhabit the world in which they were taken, I've been lucky enough for this to actually happen to me.

I come from punk and I appreciate that although Subsantia's photographs have high production values, they also strongly support a DIY ethic. Adipositivity is put together on next to nothing, it uses available resources, easily accessible web technology, for example, and also manages to have a really powerful impact. It is created without the pressure of advertisers, completely on Substantia's own terms.

It sounds cheesy but I'm really proud to be part of this project, grateful to have an opportunity to pose, and glad of Substantia's friendship. Although I live far away from New York, being an Adiposer makes me part of a community that wants to see images like these and is ready to help make them happen. I love seeing myself within this context and am delighted to be able to offer it my embodied support.

PS This still seems inadequate. Oh well, I'll write more next time, hopefully there will be a next time.

Fat Feminism in Austria

German-speakers ahoy! There's a bunch of stuff about fat feminism, including an interview with me, in the super-duper Austrian magazine an.schläge.