In Toronto this weekend?

This weekend at Ladyfest!
Sunday November 29th
2:30-3:30

Join Chelsey Lichtawoman (formerly of The Fat Femme Mafia) on a short cityscape that will focus on fat bodies and (taking up) space. We will learn about what Fat Activism is, and the easiest ways to take part in it. The workshop will take place in stores and along Bloor St near Bay and will also examine where fat people can shop, how spaces are constructed to be inaccessible, and who is invited to be a part of retail culture and why. Meet at the Tranzac 15 min before workshop time.

Please contact Chelsey beforehand with mobility concerns/other questions at chelsey.lichtman@gmail.com
Limited to 15 people.

PLEASE FORWARD WIIIIDDDDEEELLLLYYYY

She flies like a bird in the skyyyyyy...

Me and Sime are recording some diet product jingles of yesteryear. They are really funny. We've done Nimble and a great Diet Pepsi ad from 1981. I'll post them when they're ready. Got any favourites you'd like us to tackle? Links if poss please.

Kate Moss: nothing tastes as foul as media stereotypes and diet industry lies

Dear Kate Moss,

Everyone's up in arms because of a news report that's doing the rounds. In this report you are supposed to have said: "Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels". Someone on my Facebook feed called you a cunt, but they've never met you, how would they know what you're like?

I think 'Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels' is an asinine expression, it's beyond moronic, but the anger being directed at you for allegedly saying it is misplaced. It's a well-known slogan that was popularised years ago by diet companies such as Weight Watchers. These companies turned into global multinationals that profit massively from instilling and maintaining body hatred, sometimes through slogans just like this. It is them that people should be enraged with, not you.

I think people should also get angrier with the media. There are, to my mind rather facile, arguments about 'negative images' or 'Size Zero' or 'media bombardment' but little concern about the extent to which the media propagates lies. Maybe no-one could believe that lying could take place on such a scale, or that what they believe to be true is actually nothing of the kind.

I know that the papers lie about you. You're there, a massive cultural icon, but you rarely say anything in public so they have to make up things about you to put in their paper, which your body and mythology helps sell for them. I saw this happen at the Evans launch last summer. What I saw was not what was reported, stupid things, like the song you sang and the people you sang with, were reported differently.

So there are lies, and there are also clichés and stereotypes. These are the bread and butter of the popular media. They are well-worn things that people can recognise easily. Many journalists use clichés and stereotypes as a basis for a story. There are many clichés about you, and about modelling and also about fashion, the worlds you know best. Sometimes there is some truth to a claim, but a cliché or a stereotype is not a truth at all. The papers try and force clichés on things that are much too complicated to be reduced in that way because they are unable to deal with human complexity or nuance, or subtlety.

One cliché that has attached itself to you over the years is that because you are skinny you must hate fatness. Skinny must hate fat. This is not true, it is a pernicious and destructive lie. The papers deal in clichés, but you are not a cliché, what you are perceived to represent is not what or who you are.

I know that you championed Beth D and helped get her a fashion deal, that is pro-fat, even though the press tried to pitch you against her as fat vs skinny enemies. You did donut hands with me at Beth's party and told me I looked amazing. That is pro-fat. You posed for pictures with my big fat mannish dyke of a girlfriend, you did Blue Steel with her! That is pro-fat, and beautiful. I know you don't hate fat people because I have seen you digging us and I have enough of a radar to know when people's tolerance of me and my kind is false. I met you in queer fat space and I know you loved it and were at home there. I don't know what was said and how it came to be reported as it did, but I know you do not hate fat people, I know you are a friend to us, and I know you can see coolness and amazingness in all kinds of body shapes.

Ten years ago, when my book Fat & Proud was published, a journalist asked me what I thought of you. They were trying to get me to agree with the popular line at the time that Heroin Chic was a bad deal and that it was evidence that you hated fat people and were therefore my enemy. But the thing is, I love those pictures! The journalist tried to make out that Dawn French, the only fat celebrity at the time, would be my preferred role model, but that wasn't true and I said I'd choose you over her if I had to. Fat people don't hate skinny people either.

You work in an industry that hates a lot of things, including fatness, and ageing, which you yourself are now feeling the brunt of even though you're young. I hope your friend Anita Pallenberg, an amazing role model for getting older, is coaching you through this, and I hope Beth is on the phone to you too.

Yours,

Charlotte

Maya Angelou is a fatphobe?!

No! No! Say it ain't so!

At other times she sounds like the kind of elderly relative who has outlived the need for social convention. Arguing for honesty at every level of human contact, she writes: "When people ask, 'How are you?' have the nerve sometimes to answer truthfully. You must know, however, that people will start avoiding you..." Sure enough, halfway through the interview she tells me I'm fat and suggests I pay more attention to the size of my portions. "You are going to have to lose that weight. You're too young and too handsome. Don't do it to yourself."

Gary Younge patches up the damage pretty admirably here, I think, even as she slurs him.

Maya Angelou: 'I'm fine as wine in the summertime'

The Fat Studies Reader is out!

It's been a long time coming but The Fat Studies Reader, edited by Esther Rothblum and Sondra Solovay, is now available from all good bookshops.

If you're anywhere near San Francisco, you might want to consider attending The Fat Studies Reader Reading and Release Party where you can hear brilliant Reader contributors tease you with short, tantalizing, provocative excerpts from their groundbreaking chapters.

When? 3 PM on November 21, 2009

Where? Modern Times Bookstore in San Francisco at 888 Valencia Street
San Francisco, CA 94110. (Between 19th and 20th streets.)

Who? The lineup includes: Esther Rothblum, Sondra Solovay, Marilyn Wann, Elana Dykewomon, Lacy Asbill, Matilda St. John, Natalie Boero, Deb Burgard, Nat Pyle, Michael Loewy, Dana Schuster, Lisa Tealer, Elena Escalera, Dylan Vade, Beth Bernstein and Pat Lyons.

Plus! Make a day of it. Flabulous! - An Evening of Performance By and For People of Size & Their Allies is happening after the reading. This history making show is going to amaze, inspire and excite you. It features some of the most influential and inspiring performers of size from the west coast. There are two shows (7 and 9 PM on November 21st.) Tix are $15 and the show is at SomArts - 934 Brannan St., SF.

Questions?
For questions about the Release Party, email Esther at ERothblu@sdsu.edu or Sondra at Sondra@SolovayLaw.com
Flabulous! Facebook Event

Geek Alert: New Fat Studies Papers

A new batch of papers has been published that may be of interest to Fat Studies scholars. Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography 41(5) looks at critical geographies of fat/bigness/corpulence.

Academics can get the online version of the journal through their institutions, civilians can probably get inter-library loans. Drop me a line if you want to read this stuff and are having trouble accessing it.

Introduction: Questioning Obesity Politics
Rachel Colls and Bethan Evans

What to do with the 'Tubby Hubby'?'Obesity,' the Crisis of Masculinity, and the Nuclear Family in Early Cold War Canada
Deborah McPhail

Measuring Fatness, Governing Bodies: The Spatialities of the Body Mass Index (BMI) in Anti-Obesity Politics
Bethan Evans and Rachel Colls

Choosing Health? Exploring Children's Eating Practices at Home and at School
Emma Rawlins

Teaching the Politics of Obesity: Insights into Neoliberal Embodiment and Contemporary Biopolitics
Julie Guthman

Intersecting Trans and Fat: Similarities, Differences and All the Rest

I've been going through some old documents recently and I found some discussions exploring the links between fat and trans people. I've cobbled them together as a blog post because I think this stuff needs saying.

Some of the ideas below were proposed by people who took part in a LiveJournal discussion, on 25 April 2007, which is friends-locked. I remain thankful and grateful to Stacy Bias, Grant Denkinson, Fflo, Zoe Meleo-Erwin, Nine and Leah Strock for their contributions to this discussion. I've also edited in a passage from an email concerning parallels between weight loss surgery (WLS) and gender surgery because that seems to fit here too.

There's been a recent thread on the Fat Studies list about the intersections between fat and trans stuff. One fat activist said that he didn't see that there was any connection, he got jumped on by lots of people who think that there is.

I did no jumping, but I've long had a mini-list stewing in my brain about the things that fat and trans people have in common, and don't. I've resisted posting about it because I worry that I'm too worthy and precious about this stuff, too serious. But it is serious. I also get pretty bored when people obsess about identity and begin an announcement with something like "As a _______ ________ ________, who is ______ and ______, I think...". Just because you have a label for yourself doesn't mean that you speak for everyone else who shares those labels. Hopefully this won't invite too much of that.

This isn't a comprehensive list, it's just my preliminary thoughts, and in notes. I continue to welcome additions, comments and suggestions.

Similarities between trans and fat people and communities

• A lot of fat people have never heard of transgender and a lot of transgender people have never heard of fat activism
• Being fat and being trans are not mutually exclusive identities, you can be both, more, or neither
• Fat and trans people are often categorised as a spectrum of types and bodies
• Both groups are about being the impossible, embodying what a lot of people can barely imagine
• Both groups of people are blamed for not trying hard enough to be normal, both are presumed to be culpable
• Both have been regarded as comic stereotypes
• Both have some funny kind of magical power, but only sometimes and only in particular settings; think about the magical power that drag queens have in a room full of straight people, or the magical power of The Cool Fatty
• Both identities can involve some kind of coming out to oneself, or self-acceptance
• Capitalism banks on fatphobia and transphobia to sell product
• Clichés: inside a fat person there's supposedly a thin one waiting to escape; similarly, some trans people talk about growing up as one gender and knowing that they were really its opposite inside
• Growing politicisation, community, social justice, legal rights
• It's all about the body, its secrets and possibilities
• It's sort of about repositioning ourselves as valid and worthy in the face of oppression and/or self-hatred, also about developing positive self-images and feeling confident about taking up space in the world
• Medicalisation is a big part of our daily lives
• Our very existence forces people to question basic beliefs about big ideas, including: health, gender, the body, normality, difference
• People have funny theories about how we got this way and some of these theories have a lot of currency, even though they are really weird
• Scapegoating, discrimination and prejudice are also part of our lives and leave their imprint upon us
• Shame and denial are familiar things
• Some people like to fetishise us
• Surgery does and does not necessarily make us what we hope to be
• Television programme makers like us a lot and always want us to be on their crappy shows
• Trans and fat people are in the midst of developing our own aesthetics and norms regarding how we look and behave, we are developing our own cultures
• We both experience varying degrees of being visible to the wider culture, with all the prurience, pain and pleasure that entails.
• You can also be a fatphobic transperson, or a transphobic fat person. Hurrah!
• Both trans and fat people can always find work at a circus freakshow

Some crossovers but a lot of differences

• Medical intervention. Some trans people and fat people welcome all medical interventions and see doctors as their allies. There's a strong assimilationist streak in both groups, which can be validated to a certain extent through medical interventions. There are also fat and trans people who are very critical of the power held by health professionals and medical gatekeepers. There are probably more who are ambivalent. A lot of trans and fat people rely on drugs and medical equipment to get by in life. Both groups have had to learn a lot of self-advocacy skills in order to negotiate health provision.
• There are differences are in the way that medical intervention is regarded as elective for some trans people and mandatory for the fatties, though this isn't always the case
• Trans people are categorised as psychologically disordered in the DSM-IV as gender identity disorder, transvestic fetishism, or other types of paraphilia. Fat people are often lumped in together with people who have eating disorders, but fat doesn't appear in the DSM-IV as an official psychiatric disorder - yet.
• I suppose the medicalised categories that are used to demarcate different types of trans people don't really exist for fat people so much; overweight, obese and morbidly obese don't really match the whole host of acronyms and categorisations that trans people have.
• I think trans people's surgery is also relevant to the notion of finding some kind of fat lib accommodation of WLS. Some, in my view, anti-trans feminists have argued that gender reassignment surgery is mutilation, but the people that have it themselves think of it as life-saving.
• In various dyke communities I've heard nasty comments about "all the butches disappearing and becoming men," which to me is congruent with the line that WLS turns formerly fat lib activists into skinny pod people who are no longer of use or relevance to fat activist communities. In more progressive queer and feminist spaces there have been attempts to understand and incorporate trans people as a presence that is enriching to the community.
• I am critical of the way that trans bodies are often medicalised bodies, or the way that gender surgery is often presented as the only way of being authentic, trans, or gendered. Yet although I would not want that surgery myself, and do not recognise myself as being on the part of a gender spectrum where I might look for it, it's not as emotive to me as WLS. Perhaps this is because of my own identity and history.

Differences

• Do fat activists have any allies?! I think we are much more alone than trans activists
• Gatekeeping processes for surgery; it is common for trans people to have to construct an 'appropriate' narrative in order to access services, whereas WLS is more accessible for fat people, especially superfat people, it's almost mandatory.
• In some circumstances it's possible to pass as 'normal' if you are trans. Fat people can't pass as not fat. Passing or not passing is, of course, a complicated thing that is not necessarily useful, helpful or wanted. I also think there are trans people who couldn't pass even if they wanted to, and fat people that have other signifiers that enable them to sort of pass.
• I've noticed some episodes of unquestioned body fascism in trans communities, I think it's a bit more acceptable to be a body fascist there than it is in fat communities, though there are plenty of exceptions to this too
• Some - to my mind, discredited - theorists have suggested that the fat body is intrinsically gendered, but there's no consensus as to what that means, and I don't know of any theories that use the T word when this stuff is discussed. They say that fat = extreme femininity, that fat women are very manly or fat men are like women, that fat correlates with butch and femme. There's no similar theory that relates to trans people and fat.
• Trans people have a relationship with LGB communities and fat people don't so much, though this relationship is problematic as well as useful

Rad Fatty: Max Airborne

As one of the founding collective members of FaT GiRL, the zine for fat dykes and the women who want them, which came out of the Bay Area's queer SM punk scene in the mid-90s, Max Airborne's influence on a generation of fat people, including me, is beyond my ability to articulate. She's also a musician, a mover, shaker, artist, thinker and pickler. None of these descriptors come close to explaining what it's like to spend time with her, but hopefully this little interview will give you a clue. There's a tribe of us for whom Max is a keystone, I can't imagine my life without her.

You seem so at home in your freakhood, you never seem to care what the straight world thinks, you really "make your own kind of music and sing your own special song," as Mama Cass would say. Is this true? If so, how do you do it?

Thank you for the fabulous theme song!

I often forget what the straight world thinks, because I've built up a life that's so far outside of it. I'm so deeply immersed in a community of queer, fat and freaky people. A lot of my art and activism has been about building a culture in which we are the norm, rather than bothering to try and make space for ourselves in the straight world. It's an alternative society in which we can start healing from the pain, fear and oppression of growing up not fitting into the mould. It’s a world where we can learn to value and love ourselves as we are, we can blossom and thrive. It’s partly made possible by living in a metropolis that's a hub for queers, fat activists, and a variety of other freaky people, but I feel like it isn’t bound by location – it has members all over the world.

Over time I have come to appreciate that this kind of separatist approach has different sides. It can give us the space to blossom in ways we never could otherwise. And in some ways it makes us more vulnerable when we do have to be in the straight world – we're not prepared, we've forgotten how to repress ourselves in order to stay safe. Also, we’ve ceased to benefit from the good parts of cross-cultural exchange, like staying open to folks who are different from us and seeing the ways in which we are all human, with hearts and pains that maybe aren’t so different after all. There's a balance that needs to happen – ultimately I feel like society really needs a diversity that includes us, so while I'd like us to nurture ourselves in our alternative society, I still hope that we will somehow share our freakiness with the larger culture. I don't want us to close our hearts to people who are different from us. I think real, lasting, liberating change is made by people with open hearts. Working consciously to love ourselves puts us in a position to model that love to others.

And following on from that question, who influences and supports you?

My heroes are explorers who keep asking questions, who are doing their own inner work and trying to integrate it with their activism. My heroes are the artists whose lives are their medium. I am supported every day by many people, both in my life and in the world, who don’t stop trying to walk their talk. I have a wonderful family who keeps loving me through the hard stuff.

What were FaT GiRL's greatest achievements?

A dozen years later, people still write to me to say that FaT GiRL saved their lives. I have literally received hundreds of these messages, and every time it makes me cry. Saving a life is a tall order! We really helped somebody! And these are people who are making amazing contributions to life, to art and activism. Is it possible to be both proud and humbled? That's kind of how it feels to me. FaT GiRL became so much bigger than us, and its reverberations were/are magnificent for such a small thing!

FaT GiRL spread the word among a certain generation of freaky fatties that we can have an alternative society where we are valued, we can have community, sexuality, joy, and full lives as fat queers – without dieting or assimilation or apology. I think we had some influence on fat awareness and acceptance in the larger queer culture, and possibly elsewhere too, but that's hard to measure. FaT GiRL was unique, but it was also part of a movement that included the lives and work of Nomy Lamm, Marilyn Wann, Charlotte Cooper (that's you!), Allyson Mitchell and so many others.

What does fat activism feel like?

That's a hard question!

Lately I've been doing the kind of fat activism where I am the only fat person among thin people who've never heard of fat activism. It can be really draining! It's in the context of a social justice organisation I'm really committed to, and the people want to be fat allies, and are more open to it than most, so I press on, but sometimes I really need a break!

There's also a kind of fat activism that takes place amongst fat people, in the process of connecting and becoming allies, and then maintaining the relationships. Sometimes fat people are really scared of other fat people – they look at you and see what they don't want to be: FAT. Sometimes a fat person who's been a proud fat activist for years will get scared about getting older and more disabled, and their fears get pinned on being fat, so the fat activism gets chucked out the window. People will trade fatness (via surgery and other extreme measures) for horrible, painful health problems. It's really challenging to know how to keep being good to ourselves and each other through that stuff. It's painful for the whole fat activist community, really.

I feel like the struggles we have as a community call upon us to do our own internal fat activism. We need to be deeply aware of all our beliefs and fears. We need to let it all come out and look at it, and decide what parts of ourselves we want to nurture and what parts we don't. It's got to be a conscious effort. If I'm harbouring fears and rejections of parts of myself, and not letting myself see or admit them, those are going to come out later in my behaviour. I must not hide from myself. This is part of fat activism for me – full acceptance of my body and my experience, and making very conscious decisions about how I want to treat myself. It's a constant process, and not easy. But without it I'd be dead, pure and simple. It's the constant questioning of both the external world and the internal world that has kept me from jumping ship on life. Society lies to us, and the internal critic – the bit of society that lives within us – lies to us too. We need to question all the external and internal messages we hear, open our hearts and decide for ourselves what is true.

Could you say a bit about your journey into meditation?

Several years ago I noticed myself getting increasingly bitter about life. I was miserable – hating just about everything and everyone. I was truly scared about who I was becoming. I felt like I had become dead – totally shut down to life. It was clear to me that I needed to do something to change the direction of my life. I ended up at a local meditation centre taking a class that involved cultivating qualities like generosity and gratitude. Definitely an antidote to bitterness! I went every week to that class and cried and cried as I started uncovering my heart. The class was only six weeks long, but it really helped me begin to redirect my approach to life. After that I started going to a weekly queer meditation group, and going on occasional day- or week-long silent meditation retreats.

I try to keep a schedule that gives me space to sit in silence for 45 minutes almost every day, just trying to be fully present in the moment with myself. It’s a vital component of being fully alive for me. It’s easier for me to go through my daily life and see what state of mind I’m in at a given moment, and make better choices about how I want to act or what I want to say. It’s easier for me to handle the bumps in the road of life. It increases my ability to have compassion for myself and others in the face of shame, bitterness, anger, and all the other hard stuff.

My main practice happens at East Bay Meditation Center in Oakland, the city where I live. I have a very special love for EBMC because their whole mission is rooted in aligning the forces of mindfulness practice and social justice. I'm very active there, not just meditating, but also organising and other work that helps keep the centre going. It's a great opportunity to bring my meditation practice into the other work I feel passionate about, and it's such incredible teaching for me to be doing active work with folks who have been doing meditation for decades. They really bring it with them into the work, and inspire me to pay attention and bring patience and compassion into all aspects of life.

You seem to be someone who's often at the centre of things, others have noted how great you are at creating community, yet you are so laid back, sometimes even quite shy it seems. I often think all the activity is because you're really good at asking questions, but what do you think is going on?

I think there actually might be a genetic component, which sounds a little ridiculous, but my sister and parents also tend to be at the hub of things, too.

One thing that comes to mind is that I’m very enthusiastic when it comes to starting projects that feel important to me, and when I’m in that state, I tend to get very focused and driven, so I initially work really hard to get a project together, and in a way it becomes part of my identity. It’s a mixed blessing, because after a while I just can’t sustain that amount of energy output, and it gets harder to keep following through. It’s true that I’m a bit shy – a lot of being so public and social produces a certain amount of anxiety for me and at some point I need to withdraw and recover a bit, which is also more difficult when a project becomes part of your identity. It's challenging, and something I'm working on.

Please tell me about your household's pickling projects.

A few years ago I started developing an interest in making my own sauerkraut. I’m interested in learning something about the culture of my ancestors. As a European-American whose grandparents and great grandparents came to America and assimilated into the generic privileged construct of Whiteness, I was raised with absolutely no clue about my ethnic heritage, even though, for example, my dad was the first generation on his dad’s side (from Friesland) to be born in America. One of the aspects of culture that’s easiest to access is food. I love pickled foods, and they’re common among several of my ancestral cultures, hence the interest in sauerkraut.

My housemates were sceptical when I first broached the subject, and they begged me not to do it in the house because they imagined rotting cabbage would stink up the place. I thought maybe I’d set it up in the garage, but that seemed like a pain, so my drive was thwarted.

Then I got my hands on a book about pickling called Wild Fermentation, which happened to be written by a freaky queer guy named Sandor Katz, and even included a discussion of gender pronoun choices. My interest was renewed, and so I started pushing the issue again with my housemates. Around that time my housemates and I went to a party where someone happened to have brought their very own homemade sauerkraut. It tasted incredibly good, and we spent quite a long time grilling the maker with questions about it. Satisfied that it would not make our kitchen smell like a port-a-potty, my housemates gave me the go-ahead. That was over a year ago now, and pickling has become a constant activity in our kitchen. We’ve pickled cabbage, garlic, carrots, celery, ginger, squash, cucumbers, peaches, green beans, beets, radishes, onions, lemons, limes, turnips, cauliflower, peppers, and probably a dozen other things I’m forgetting. And of course pickling is common to many cultures around the world, so while it is a delicious and fun way to eat what my ancestors ate, it’s also become a geekiness unto itself to discover what different cultures do with pickling. And my girlfriend, who is a total dynamo in the kitchen, is at least as into pickling as I am, perhaps even more so. I call her 'Kraut Papa.'

What else would you like to say?

Well, I’d really like to take this opportunity to say how much I appreciate you, Charlotte. I am hugely grateful for you, how alive you are, how you strive to be awake and honest, asking hard questions, generating lots of fun and laughter and freedom along the way. You help me remember who I want to be in this life. (Charlotte: blub! I love you Maxie!)

Max's Comics
FaT GiRL back issues for sale
East Bay Meditation Center

Talking at the Weekend

I'm speaking on a panel this Sunday with Sharon Curtis and Kathryn Szrodecki. It's being convened by Lucy Aphramor. There's going to be a screening of a DVD from The Body Positive, a Health At Every Size project from the US, and then a discussion.

Come along eh? It's in Coventry, city of The Specials, and host to the annual Peace Festival, which is currently running. Right on!

Sunday 8 November
12.30-3pm
The Herbert
Jordan Well, Coventry, CV1 5QP

Shapewear

Shapewear
Charlotte Cooper and Kay Hyatt
1 November 2009
10 mins 11 secs

Shapewear is what happens when two badass fat dykes take over the changing room at a shopping centre.

When the only clothes available for a fat mannish lady are made for girly-girls, Kay Hyatt decides to try and feminise her body using body-sculpting underwear, with eye-popping results. Her girlfriend, Charlotte Cooper, lends a not-so helping hand.

Filmed guerrilla-style on Charlotte's mobile phone, this film features shameless nudity and a big belly.

Watch Shapewear.