Trademarking Health At Every Size

The Journal of Critical Dietetics has just published an article I co-authored with Jacqui Gingras called 'Down the Rabbit Hole: A Critique of the ® in HAES®'.

The article came about through discussions of what it meant that the Association for Size Diversity and Health (ASDAH) had trademarked the concepts Health At Every Size, and HAES.

As activists and scholars, we wanted to raise difficult and impertinent questions about who owns the movement, and about who watches the watchers. We have offered this paper as a means of creating dialogue about the trademarking. I think it also has relevance for discussions about professionalisation within grassroots social justice movements.

Critical Dietetics is an open access journal. This means that you don't have to pay to read the articles, although you do need to register on the site to access them (the other articles in this issue are really good too!). Go to the journal page to register and download the article (link at the beginning of this post). There is also space to comment on the Critical Dietetics blog.

Gingras, J. and Cooper, C. (2013) 'Down the Rabbit Hole: A Critique of the ® in HAES®', Journal of Critical Dietetics, 1(3), 2-5.

Grit your teeth and get through the blizzard of new year weight loss crap

I've been farting around today and I made this stoopid thing as a gift to my fellow fat freaks who hate the onslaught of new year diet crap that spoils this time of year. Please circulate it far and wide. The oh-so-sensible voices of the lovely and slim brigade have started perniciously early this time around, with ads for vile Special K cereal diets on blimmin' Boxing Day, and endless bloody success stories doing the rounds already. Eurgh, I wish it would all sod off.

PS Thanks to Simon M, for telling me that Danger of Death and Falling Rocks are the funniest of the warning sign genre.

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

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

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

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

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

It's a fat suit.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The YMCA's Body Confidence campaign and the All Party Parliamentary Group on Body Image

The YMCA is campaigning on behalf of 'body confidence' in the UK and is supporting a number of meetings of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Body Image, which started in November and will continue through to the end of February. These meetings are open to the public and involve expert testimony from representatives of academia, mental health, youth and education services, media, fitness, fashion, health and cosmetic surgery industries.

Those not able to attend are invited to give written evidence to the All Party Parliamentary Group on Body Image via an online survey. I submitted my response to this yesterday and encourage others to do the same.

I support this campaign in vague and general terms, I'd rather it existed than not, but I have many misgivings about it. I'm offering this critique not because I think this work should go away, but because it could and should be very much stronger and more emancipatory. Here's a brief explanation of why I'm wary:

There will be no discussion with health professionals or representatives from the National Health Service other than psychiatrists and psychologists. The hectoring use of BMI charts, plans to encourage everyone from chiropodists to pharmacists to 'helpfully' enquire about your diet and exercise every time you pick up some medicine or get your bunions seen to, and the public-private partnerships being set up between the NHS and weight loss companies would suggest that this is a significant area that affects people's embodied self esteem.

I'm assuming that this group has been omitted because they don't represent the more faddish side of weight loss, but this sets up a false distinction between good and bad weight loss; some doctors advocate very low calorie diets for fat people, for example. The campaign's website talks about problematic 'quick fixes' for body image anxiety, including cosmetic surgery, steroids, and fad diets, but it does not attack weight loss in general as something that is likely to screw up your sense of body image. This echoes a previous attempt to use the British government to support an anti-diet agenda, which was tabled by Mary Evans Young in the early 1990s with the support of Alice Mahon MP. In that instance diets were attacked as detrimental to people's health and wellbeing, but weight loss was deemed acceptable for 'the obese'. Presumably dieting or poor body image is only a problem if you are normatively-sized, everyone else is fair game.

There's no mention in the campaign of alternative paradigms that are already well-established, including fat activism and Health At Every Size. No representatives of these models have been invited to speak, it is as though they don't exist when actually there's a wealth of material and expertise and experience to draw on. The lack of connection to a wider context for this sort of work makes the campaign appear superficial, ahistorical and self-aggrandising to me.

Similarly, the role of dominant ideologies are omitted. Capitalism and neoliberalism are prime reasons why so many of us do not feel at home in our bodies. Racism and oppression in general have a massive part to play in it too. Fatphobia is at the heart of why kids are measured and dieted before they've learned to tie their shoelaces. Governmentality and medicalisation are surely implicated. The broader picture is not being addressed in this campaign, instead there is a pathetic insistence that the red herrings of 'celebrity culture' or 'the media' (which is never defined, and around which we all become passive dupes rather than active consumers or producers, or involved in any other relationship to it - and yes, the bombarded by images cliché is invoked) are the problem.

The online survey through which stakeholders are invited to give written evidence to the All Party Parliamentary Group on Body Image is poorly designed and full of leading questions, sometimes you only get a line to answer a fantastically complicated question, for example, which hints at the campaign's lack of understanding of the issues involved. The language and assumptions behind some of the questions is fatphobic, for example "What are the links, if any, between obesity, eating disorders and poor body image?" implies that the three concepts are more than likely linked and stems from a particular popular discourse of fat as a product of compulsive eating, an immature coping mechanism. Because it's a government platform, and this particular government is all about a neoliberal reduction of state funding, there are many questions about the economic impact of negative body image, which can get quite wearing, as if that's the only kind of impact that matters.

The YMCA is synonymous with gym culture, are they really the best organisation to advise on developing stronger strategies around health and self-image? Gok Wan endorses the campaign, truly a turn-off for me given his own weight maintenance regime. The YMCA's interest in the campaign is to "reduce body image as a barrier to participation" which suggests that they are looking at a business case as a rationale for this work. But I don't want good body image to be a means of transforming me into a more eager consumer of gym memberships, that's not why I do the work I do, my activism is anti-capitalist! Likewise, although I see fat activism as a broad endeavour where many kinds of activities can be sustained, including All Party Parliamentary Groups, I am an anarchist and government lobbying is not my preferred location for social change.

And what does body image mean anyway? The campaign's website defines it as "our idea of how our body looks and is perceived by others" but this is so vague, faux-apolitical and unrooted as to be meaningless.

Finally, you know what? There's not a single fat person in the promotional imagery. Bah.

Vintage weight loss kitsch: Fight the Flab with Terry Wogan

My boyfriend has been digging around in the secondary vinyl collection and brought this up from the basement for a spin. It's as terrible as you'd imagine, and proof that loveable Terry Wogan is a tool of The Man as well as being a fan of the firm control ladies undergarment. Anyway, here it is for your listening pleasure, it seems to go on for ages. Extra points to those who want to video themselves doing these exercises in an 18 hour bra, girdle or corselette.

Fight the Flab with Terry Wogan (.mp3, 3.1mb)

Diet Songs: Special K

Special K is more monotonous to eat than Grape Nuts, but not quite as bad as All Bran, which gives it the distinction of not even being the worst cereal, more like the second or third worst. I associate the brand with everything that I scorn about diet culture, it is assimilationist, apologetic, boring, self-hating, sanctimonious, unfeminist, mediocre, passionless. Anti-life.

The current crop of adverts feature women dancing around their kitchens with different bingey flavours of Special K, ersatz food, where what is being sold cannot match the marketing hyperbole. Those women are desperately hungry, I imagine, because The Special K crash diet plan involves eating only one meal a day and replacing the rest with stingy bowls of cereal. Poor cows.

Anyway, this is the last Diet Song in the series and it's one of my favourites because it was really fun to record. It's the classic 'Can you pinch more than an inch?' campaign, which is iconic in advertising history, and the source of much anxiety and disbelief in my playground when I was a kid.

If you can pinch more than an inch of chub on your side, you need to lose weight by eating Special K. I've generally been able to grab about a good handful of flesh in that spot, and at least a foot or two of fat on my belly, not quite a yard. But that hardly matters, everyone can pinch an inch, including thin people, which is why the slogan is marketing gold in terms of creating a rush of fearful consumers.

Pinching an inch inhabits the same body anxiety genealogy as other home tests of freakhood, such as the pencil test. This involves putting a pencil under your tits, if it stays there, your tits are all wrong. By my mid-teens I could keep a whole pack of felt-tips under my breasts and these days I treat them as an extra pair of hands from time to time, they can keep a towel or a bottle of shampoo handy whilst I'm doing something else.

Pinching as well, can we talk about that? It's so mean! Pinching your body, policing other people's bodies by pinching them. Ow ow ow! The person who thought this up was obviously not very nice.

Here's our version. I do all the voices and Simon had fun making the pinchy sounds on his homemade effects boxes.

Diet Songs: Special K by Charlotte Cooper + Simon Murphy (.mp3, 540kb)

Diet Songs
New Project: Diet Songs
Nimble
Slim-Fast
Tab
Diet Pepsi
Nutrasweet
Diet Coke
Ryvita
Ayds
Special K

Diet Songs: Ayds

It's a box of sweets with added magic lovely and slim ingredient X. This turns out to be an anaesthetic, later replaced with a mild kind of speed of a type that was later withdrawn from over-the-counter products because it raises the risk of stroke in the young women who eat this stuff.

I'm stuck on the name, I can't get past the name. A weight loss product called Ayds which, when you say it aloud, sounds like AIDS. I associate dieting so strongly with drawn-looking emptied out bodies that when I hear Ayds I think of the wasting suffered by people with AIDS, and that famous photograph of David Kirby dying amidst his devastated folks. This is probably not the association that the makers of Ayds wanted to promote in the product's heyday, but it's certainly the association that led to Ayds' demise.

Just saying the name invokes a handful of feelings: schadenfreude, a longing for other similar diet crap to bite the dust, sadness and rage about HIV/AIDS, bemusement. Ayds is so exposed by its name and obvious quackery, if it can happen to that product, why not Slim Fast, LighterLife and the rest of them? Why must it fall to an unfortunate coincidence?

Would Ayds be a viable brand nowadays? I'm inclined to think that it would. I think the obesity epidemicTM has made many people more desperate than ever to try and lose weight. Associations with illness don't seem to matter, I know someone who was congratulated on her weight loss after a couple of months suffering amoebic dysentery. How does the stigma of AIDS or terminal illness compare to fat stigma? Would people be willing to be associated with one in place of the other? I really don't know.

We recorded this pretty straight because, really, what else are you going to do with gold like this? Simon's spidery track sounds like a virus in your blood.

Diet Songs: Ayds by Charlotte Cooper + Simon Murphy (.mp3, 840kb)

Diet Songs
New Project: Diet Songs
Nimble
Slim-Fast
Tab
Diet Pepsi
Nutrasweet
Diet Coke
Ryvita
Ayds
Special K

Diet Songs: Ryvita

Next week I will pay £110 and submit myself to the indignity of the dentist, having cracked a tooth on a seed embedded in a piece of particularly hard German crisp-bread. It's unlikely that I will renounce my crisp-bread habit, despite this setback, I simply won't be without the cardboard-like texture of this fart-producing foodstuff. Spread with butter and jam is my favourite way of ingesting a sheet of crude roughage.

I eschew diet products in general, including joyless self-punishment food marketed mainly to women as a slimming aid (cottage cheese, I'm looking at you). I enjoy plain food, which is where Ryvita comes in and fucks with my stupid food rules. I can handle a rice cake too. I think I accept Ryvita into my cupboard and my tummy because I associate its brand with an earlier era of marketing, it reminds me of products of yesteryear like Bile Beans, which promise 'vim and vigour', or the mysterious 'pep'. Even though the company never had a manufacturing base in Sweden, I also associate Ryvita with 1970 blonde Scandinavian women and therefore porn. Yeah, I don't know why either. It's only when those rotten Fern Britton ads come on the telly that I realise I am eating diet food. Bah, they got me!

Ryvita marks the point where Diet Songs takes a turn for the weird. Lord knows what was going on when we recorded this one. My disjointed vocal track is the least of it, for me it evokes the imaginary sound of a slice of Ryvita making its way through your alimentary canal. Enjoy.

Diet Songs: Ryvita by Charlotte Cooper + Simon Murphy (.mp3, 568kb)

Diet Songs
New Project: Diet Songs
Nimble
Slim-Fast
Tab
Diet Pepsi
Nutrasweet
Diet Coke
Ryvita
Ayds
Special K

Diet Songs: Diet Coke

The peculiar chemical aftertaste in Diet Coke makes me feel like throwing up. My lived experience of drinking this product couldn't be further away from the images used to promote it: fun-loving skinny people larking around on the beach, in the case of this vintage jingle. Come to think of it, I can't recall a Diet Coke advertising campaign that hasn't been wholly gross, I have to look away every time those Sex and The City style office girl marionettes are on the box, for example. Ugh, puppets and their tippity-tappity little feet. Nightmare.

I tried to sing this Diet Song with passion, like Diet Pepsi, and Tab, the originals are a crescendo of mass hysteria. I wonder if anyone fainted when it was recorded. Unfortunately it's hard to replicate that sound in my front room in rainy East London, my range is, frankly, limited, and Simon lacks the technical resources to make us sound like a chorus of Diet Coke junkies screaming for our lives. So we've just plodded and muddled our way through, which is a lot like how it feels to drink a revoltingly nausea-inducing Diet Coke.

Diet Songs: Diet Coke by Charlotte Cooper + Simon Murphy (.mp3, 896kb)

Diet Songs
New Project: Diet Songs
Nimble
Slim-Fast
Tab
Diet Pepsi
Nutrasweet
Diet Coke
Ryvita
Ayds
Special K

Queer Hapas, fat activism and weight loss surgery

I've been reading Jackie Loneberry Wang's excellent zine Memoirs of a Queer Hapa #2, which takes a look at the author's queer-biracial identity. Hapa refers to people who are "mixed-race and of Asian descent". I especially like the author's Concluding Thoughts from an essay entitled The Emergence of Queer Hapa Identity in the United States, where she applies Queer Theory in a super-accessible way. Basically she talks about identities that transgress boundaries and expose the limitations of those boundaries. She says that Queer Hapa people confound others who ally themselves "to the notion of identity as fixed, immutable, and formed around a logic of separation and differentiation" (p14). Wang goes on to say that even though Queer Hapa is an uncontainable identity, naming and inhabiting it enables people to organise strategically and politically in ways that are anti-assimilationist and complex.

Wang's zine has helped me not only think about Queer Hapa identity, but also about another group of people, who may also include Queer Hapas. I think the ways in which Wang writes about identity is helpful in thinking about what tends to be the thorny relationship between fat activism and weight loss surgery.

Apparently, as someone smart told me recently, the situation is changing and people who have had weight loss surgery are no longer drummed out of fat activist community. But my experience is that weight loss surgery continues to represent considerable anxiety in terms of how to address it in fat activism, and that bullying, shaming and shunning are still everyday tactics. Even where people have moved on from using these strategies to police the boundaries of fat activism and critique weight loss surgery, their previous use continues to hurt and has not been resolved.

I am not an advocate for weight loss surgery, I would never choose it for myself, and I discourage people from choosing it where I can. I think it is more likely to deplete than enhance health, I mourn the deaths of people who have died as a consequence of surgery, and its marketing rhetoric is invariably fatphobic, full of lies, and profoundly problematic. But neither am I an advocate for boundary policing or bullying. I am looking for helpful and human ways of thinking about this stuff that goes beyond a condescending 'love the sinner hate the sin' tolerance within the movement for people who have had surgery or are contemplating it. I would prefer a world where weight loss industries did not exist, but I do not live in that world, and am unlikely to as long as capitalism exists. Instead I am part of communities of people where some have chosen this, including a number of excellent fat activists who I love and respect.

Anyway, so Wang's work has helped me think about this and my tentative thoughts are about fat activists who have had weight loss surgery also inhabiting a space that transgresses and exposes the limitations of certain boundaries and classifications. For example, that to be a fat activist always involves resisting weight loss, or that there are sides to be chosen where you are either for or against weight loss. Fat activists who have had weight loss surgery, especially unrepentant people for whom it was a positive long-term choice, inhabit a space that shows there are other ways of being, that fat activism doesn't have to be an either/or proposition, and that it can be really diverse. I'm mindful of the postcolonial concept of hybridity, you can be a mixture of things, even things that are supposed to be incompatible, and you don't have to make a choice between one state of being or another, you can be all of them.

Going back to Wang and thinking about the possibilities for organising around fluid and complex identities, I feel excited for the potential opportunities for fat activists and weight loss surgery in challenging dogmatism and pioneering new forms of fat activist embodiment. It gives me hope that people who are currently shamefully denigrated within the movement might no longer have to skulk around in the shadows like a dirty little secret, waiting in vain for an invitation to come and sit at the table, it could be that they've already got their own thing going on and that everybody else should take note.

Jackie's response: Zines, queer hapas, fat activism

Wang, Jackie Loneberry (2009) Memoirs of a Queer Hapa #2