My fat activism and my zines

The inaugural Queer Zine Fest London was held on Saturday and it was really fantastic. Loads of people came, there was a great diversity of zine-making present, and Erica Smith, the first person to publish any of my work, gave a cracking talk about GirlFrenzy. The space hosted two excellent exhibitions alongside the event, Melanie Maddison's Shape & Situate, and Music & Liberation. It felt like a super-abundance of wonderful stuff and was seriously overwhelming.

I represented at the Fest in various ways: giving out copies of new zines; having work in the Shape & Situate exhibition and being featured as one of the "inspirational European women" in its roster (!); seeing many zines to which I have contributed, and reconnecting with folks I've met along my zine way. I also gave a little Show and Tell type talk about my life in zines.

My zine production is different to my fat activism, but they often overlap, so I talked about that a bit, and I though I'd share some if it here too.

Boyfriends and comics

I met my boyfriend Simon Murphy in 1990. He had been publishing a zine called, variously, Advenutures in Bereznik and Attack on Bereznik, since the mid-1980s. Mostly music-based, it incorporated odd articles and beautiful graphics. I had been reading similar music zines by guys for some years before meeting Simon, so we had a shared language of what constituted a zine.

In the early 1990s there was a thriving community of small press comics makers in the UK. Caption was instrumental in developing the scene, as was the Small Press Fair, and Peter Pavement's Slab-o-Concrete press in Brighton.

Bolstered by our shared interest in zines and small press comics, and the support of a community of makers, in 1992 Simon and I published a comic together called All Right. We made two issues, with me writing some of the scripts and Simon doing the lion's share of the work. All Right was a jumble of in-jokes, alter-egos, cuteness, and stuff that we found amusing. You can download .pdfs of it at the bottom of this page.

This is a long-winded way of saying that this was the first time that I was able to contribute to representations of myself as a young fat woman. Simon drew me as he saw me: as loveable, gorgeous, badass. My fat activism was in its early stages and it was really fun and exciting to see myself as a cartoon character. I know that other fat activists have used cartoon forms in various ways, Cindy Baker's rendition of herself as a mascot also springs to mind. For me, it was a way of playing with my fat identity and possibility for my fat self.

Contributing to zines

It took a long time until I had the confidence to make zines by myself. Instead, I contributed to other people's zines (I still do). This is how I started getting published. Two zines were really important in helping me build confidence in my fat activism, writing, and feeling that zines were the place for me.

GirlFrenzy was published by Erica Smith through six issues and a special one-off book-size Millennial. A small press comics magazine, GirlFrenzy was feminist but not like the other feminists I had known up until that point, it took more of a third wave, sex-positive and queer sensibility. Erica was an absolutely pivotal person in giving a huge hand-up to a community of British feminist small press comics makers, graphic artists and writers. So it was with me. GirlFrenzy was not purely focused on fat stuff, but Erica was open to discussion about it and broadly supportive. Hence number four was a special themed fat lib issue, to which I contributed.

The feminism that I encountered through GirlFrenzy orientated me to FaT GiRL, the legendary zine to which I also contributed pieces more or less throughout its lifespan. FaT GiRL was important to me in so many ways, not least that it gave me a way of understanding myself as a fat dyke, it melded fat with queer-feminist-punk ethics and aesthetics and early intersectional politics, and it introduced me to a community of people who are still very central to my life.

Living Large

This apa zine deserves a special mention because I don't know if such things exist any more. It really was of its time and place. I don't know if Living Large was typical of apa zines more generally but this is how it worked:

There was a membership group who contributed a small amount of money to get the thing printed and posted. Everyone was North American apart from me. Every month or so we'd write a little column and send it off. This usually took the form of an open letter to other members detailing our news, flyers and ephemera we'd come across, and direct comments to other people. Living Large was all about fat, so that was the focus of the things we'd write, sometimes it was about our opinions, but mostly it was about how fat impacted on our lives and the everyday activism we undertook around that. A central mailer would copy and collate the contributions and mail them out to everybody, stapled together as a zine.

Living Large was like the paper version of an email list or a messageboard. It meant that we had a little community of contributors in discussion with each other over months and years. Because it was a closed community, in as much as you had to contribute a little photocopying and postage money, the conversations were quite intimate and friendly.

I was a part of Living Large for a couple of years at least in the mid-1990s. I don't know what happened to my back issues, but it had been going for quite a while before me. I have number 44 on my desk. The internet meant that Living Large eventually became redundant, but in its prime it was a great way of keeping in touch with other fat activists across a wide geographical divide; many of us were otherwise pretty isolated.

One-offs

I've made many zines by myself and in collaboration, and some of my zines are part of a series whereas others, like these below, are one-offs that relate to fat in some way.

Fat Stuff
In 2006 the student services at the University of East London, where I was studying at the time, decided that it would be a good idea to host an Obesity Awareness Week, having swallowed fat panic rhetoric hook, line and sinker. Exasperated by all this, I made a tiny zine that offered a critique of Obesity Awareness Week, a list of fat activist resources available in the library, and a bunch of things people might want to do instead of participating in the uni's nonsense. I distributed them around the campus.

Things That Help Us Feel Good
In 2007 I devised and facilitated a fat activist workshop with a group of 13 and 14 year old girls for The Wellcome Institute. We made a zine together, drawing and writing a page each about what helps us feel good. I copied it and everyone got copies to keep and give away.

NOLOSE
The fat queer motherlode has supported a couple of zine projects in more recent years. In 2008 their small projects fund enabled a group of us to make a fat zine, called Big Bums, and distribute it for free.

In 2011 NOLOSE provided the impetus for my zine-based project, A Queer and Trans Fat Activist Timeline. Starting out as a fat-feminist-queer-trans community history workshop at the 2010 gathering, this morphed into an object that travelled and was discussed and archived, it became an artist's residency, from which a paper zine was produced, then an audio zine and a digital download. I also published an academic paper about the project and the way it shifted and changed.

Moving on

I've been reading and making zines for a long time, and have no plan to stop. Zines have brought me personal and professional delights. I still make my own, and write for other people's zines. I still try and work on the basis of making something for free, with low production values. What's changed over the years is that now I am more serious about distributing and archiving my work, and I'm considering longer-form digital publishing. Zines are the place where I am most myself, where I say what I really think, and where I'm least apologetic, including how I talk about fat.

If you want a copy of my most recent zine, Report, about the schools that I went to and how they tried to mould me, Paypal me €2/US CA AUS $2/ £1 for postage at beefergrrl@hotmail.com

Queer zine talk with added fat, London, Saturday

I'm giving a little show and tell talk about making and writing for zines, including FaT GiRL and other queer fat activist zines. It's in London on Saturday, part of the inaugural Queer Zine Fest. I have new zines to give away too.

Please come.

Charlotte Cooper's Queer Zine Show and Tell
Queer Zine Fest London
Space Station Sixty-Five
373 Kennington Road
London SE11 4PS

Saturday 8 December 2012
12.00 – 19.00 (I'm on at 14.30)

QZFL Facebook Event

Zines and fat activism

Heather McCormack has just published an article on Library Journal Reviews listing some fat activist zines, including A Queer and Trans Fat Activist Timeline. Alright!

Fat Activism and Body Positivity: Zines for Transforming the Status Quo

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

Allyson Mitchell's fat feminist art and me

I won't lie, xmas makes me feel mentally ill and if I smoked crack I would be huffing on a big fat pipe of it right now. In past years I've published a Hits and Shits list on this blog in an attempt to create some kind of temporal narrative about fat. This year I've given up.

Instead I'm going to mark the end of the year by sharing a drawing that one of my favourite artists, Allyson Mitchell, has produced. Allyson is one of the founders of the now defunct fat activist group Pretty, Porky and Pissed Off, who reclaimed the streets of Toronto a while back. She's also an assistant Professor in the School of Women's Studies at York University. Oh yeah, and she co-owns the Feminist Art Gallery (FAG) and is an accomplished artist in her own right. I've added that last but actually it should go first.

So, picture the scene, I'm sitting at my computer, contemplating xmas-related suicide, and up pops an email from Allyson. She's attached a drawing that features me. The email says that I am in the middle and the image comes from a photo shoot I did for FaT GiRL in 1996. It goes on to say that the other figures are also based on women in FaT GiRL and that I was the inspiration for the piece.

The drawing is part of a project started by Ulrike Müller, who I don't know and have never met, that Allyson has worked on. Allyson wrote in her email: "Ulrike took the titles of images that are archived in the Lesbian Herstory Archives in Brooklyn. Artists were asked to draw an image that represents the title in some way without seeing the actual image. I randomly got the title 'A Group of Naked Women...Very Curvy' – what luck!!!!"

It's now a few days later and I'm still trying to work it out. I feel very happy and proud that something I did a long time ago can be part of something really excellent today, it makes me reflect on the importance not just of developing fat queer cultural production, but also the value of using our bodies within the things we make. I love Allyson's art and am absolutely delighted to feature in it. Thinking about this drawing makes me feel as though I'm swirling around in a whirlpool of beautiful things that mean a great deal to me: queer archives and especially the Lesbian Herstory Archives, fat dykes, activism, Allyson's art, FaT GiRL, wooooo! The picture reminds me of an incredible time in my life when I kind of bloomed into my queer-fat self after a long time of feeling frozen. Playing naked on a Californian beach exemplifies that period so well. It's also amazing to see my nudey fat body there, I'm feeling a lot of self-love about that, and that's a precious feeling for people like me. Not only that, but it's amongst the other bodies too; I know that I couldn't have inhabited that emotional-embodied-social-political space without the others. It feels really fantastic to see myself acknowledged as part of this amazing fat feminist movement, in ways that I relate to, by someone who knows and who is also implicated in it herself. I love the luck and randomness of how the image came about. It gives me chills of happiness to think about other people seeing this work as it becomes circulated in new spaces that Ulrike is developing, and it becoming part of other people's consciousness.

Woah, head explodes.

Image courtesy of Allyson Mitchell

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.

Timeline paper zines all gone, free digital download is here

The original paper version of A Queer and Trans Fat Activist Timeline has sold out. 250 copies were distributed by my tender hands in less than three weeks. It's so exciting to me that people want this stuff!

You're out of luck if you want one of the originals now, unless you can snaffle up one of the few remaining that will be sold at Zinefest in London by Ricochet Ricochet; at NOLOSE at the beginning of July; perhaps leftovers at Re/Dress NYC, and at Plump It Up in Toronto.

But don't cry if you missed out. Copies have been circulated at around 60 zine libraries, archives and autonomous spaces worldwide where you can visit and, in some cases, borrow a copy. It's also been released under a Creative Commons licence, which means that anyone can reprint copies. On top of that, I've written a fancypants essay about it which will hopefully be published later this year. The timeline lives! If you're around northern Germany, you might want to consider a trip to Bildwechsel to see the original timeline.

That's not all! I've saved the best until last. There's now a digital download of the zine available for free and for sharing. Go to it! Treat yourself to the audio download as well, whilst you're at it, you don't have to have a visual impairment or autism to enjoy it (but it helps).

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.

A Queer and Trans Fat Activist Timeline - audio zine is here!

It's like Listen With Mutha

Download and listen to the audio version of my zine, A Queer and Trans Fat Activist Timeline.

A Queer and Trans Fat Activist Timeline - audio version (.mp3, approx 52 mins, 24mb)

Audio version? Yep, that's me reading and describing the zine. It's an attempt to make a paper zine available to people in different formats, to make it more accessible. I was inspired to have a go at making an audio version by Judy Freespirit, who worked for a while recording audio books for people with visual impairments. This is the first time I've done this, feedback is welcome.

You can download the audio version of the zine for free and listen to it by itself, it takes about 50 minutes, or use the recording to augment your reading of the paper zine. You don't have to be visually impaired to listen to it.

You can still buy the paper zine too! Here's how.

Feel free to share the .mp3 and thanks to Simon Murphy for helping me.

The audio version of A Queer and Trans Fat Activist Timeline by Charlotte Cooper is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. This means people can copy, download and share this zine with others as long as they credit me, Charlotte Cooper, but they can’t change the zine in any way or use it commercially. Permissions beyond the scope of this license, for example translations, may be available at http://www.obesitytimebomb.blogspot.com. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California 94105, USA.

A Queer and Trans Fat Activist Timeline zine is now available to buy!

I am absolutely delighted to announce that A Queer and Trans Fat Activist Timeline zine is now available to buy.

How to buy the zine.

The zine (a kind of homemade magazine) is a discussion of queer and trans fat activist histories, and about how people might undertake the crucial work of making, documenting and disseminating stories and accounts. People are profoundly separated from those who came before them if this work doesn't take place.

A Queer and Trans Fat Activist Timeline documents a workshop which produced an object which was then archived. The zine itself will also be lodged at a number of archives and libraries around the world, but there are some left over for people to have for themselves.

It's hard to know what to say about this project because I've been working with it closely for about a year, and because it has become much more than each individual part; it's no longer just a workshop, or just an object or just a zine. It's also a project that has taken me from California to Germany, I've presented the timeline to different people and there have been some wonderful discussions of it. It's been the focus of an artist's residency and has helped shift the way I think of my own work as a cultural producer. I've talked about it on the radio and it's become a donation to an archive in the hope that other people might make something of it in the future. I'm writing a paper about it. No doubt it will go on and morph into other things too, but for now here's the zine.

I have some secret hopes for the timeline now that it is a zine:

• People will become excited about queer trans fat activism – the timeline documents many accounts that have never been shared elsewhere
• People will become excited about the richness of fat activism as a movement with historical links that go back at least several decades and crosses international borders
• Queer and trans people will get on board with fat activism more
• Fat activists will get on board with queer and trans stuff more
• People will document their own activism
• People will consider things like place and time and context when they produce accounts of their own activism
• People will think about cultural imperialism when they construct and disseminate accounts of what they do
• That archivists and librarians will make more of an effort to make the ways that queer and trans and fat move through each other more explicit and available
• I hope that it will blow people's minds.

I'll stop talking about this for now, no doubt I'll come back to it later at some point.

Dear Hamburg, I am coming to town, let's hang out

From 8-24 April I will be Artist in Residence at Villa Magdalena K in Hamburg. I'll be working on a project initiated about a year ago, A Queer and Trans Fat Activist Timeline. This started out as a workshop at Nolose 2010, the Timeline has been shown at other gatherings in the UK and Germany since then, and will soon be in its long-term resting place, archived at Bildwechsel Hamburg.

My task as Artist In Residence is to make a zine out of the Timeline which will then be sent to people who participated in the workshop, people who want a copy, and archives around the world. The plan is to document some fat activism and talk about what that documenting and archiving is about. There may be a website, but it depends on a few things. Please get in touch if you want to donate money to this project.

Anyway, so I'm going to be in Germany for a bit, with a fairly loose schedule, and I would like to meet and hang out with people whilst I'm there, especially those who might have an interest in fat, queer and trans activism. I can travel a bit too.

Hit me up! mail@charlottecooper.net

LDN XL GRRRLS Funzine now available to download

Meryl Trussler's beautiful LDN XL GRRRLS Funzine 2010 is now available as a download. Yippee!