Make it Your Resolution to Support NOLOSE in 2010

Don't give your money to a weight loss company this new year, send it to NOLOSE instead. Here's how and why:

NOLOSE is your community.

"Both times I've come to NOLOSE in 2006 and 2008, it was with the support of scholarships. As a student and working artist, I wouldn't have been able to afford the costs of full participation, but without NOLOSE, I would literally be lost throughout the year else. There's no other event in the country where I'm so heartily embraced for my fierce, fat, queer, femme coloured self, and that means so much to me!" said Naima Lowe, an exceptionally talented fat queer femme of colour activist, filmmaker, NOLOSE conference attendee, and scholarship recipient.

Every year, 100% of NOLOSE's scholarship funding comes from you. Community-led fundraisers like the Fat Girl Flea help us bring many activists from all over the world to the nation's only conference dedicated to building a space for fat, queer, and trans folks to analyse, mobilise, organise, and celebrate. As an organisation, NOLOSE is dedicated to building a movement, a voice, and a vibrant community of fierce fat folks and allies.

Scholarships are an integral part of ensuring that the most under-resourced in our community can take part in this beautiful, life-changing space.

This year, the NOLOSE board is committed to holding an even bigger (pun intended!) and more successful conference by providing an increased amount of financial aid to our attendees. We may be small in numbers, but you, the community, have shown again and again just how dedicated you are. We believe in you and we want to give you this opportunity to continue in your partnership with NOLOSE and the fat queer & trans movement.

"As a super-sized, dis/abled person I deeply appreciated NOLOSE recognising that I may be in a position to need extra financial help attending the conference. NOLOSE truly valued my presence as well as the contributions of other disproportionately affected peoples, and was willing to work to get us there," said another NOLOSE scholarship recipient.

Our scholarships prioritise funding for people who have historically been the most under-represented at NOLOSE and in the movement: people with financial need, trans and gender non-conforming folks, people with disabilities, people of color, people over 50, super fatties, and starting this year, international attendees (Charlotte: my emphasis!). NOLOSE's dedication to diversity isn't just lip service; we walk the talk and believe that our movements can only succeed when they are led by those most affected by social injustices.

We ask you to help support your friends and peers by giving to the NOLOSE Scholarship Fund. 100% of your gift will go towards the Scholarship Fund, which will resource even more brilliant gorgeous activists' attendance at the next conference, which promises to be the best one yet!

Even if $5 or $10 is all you can give, we urge you to consider making a tax-deductible contribution via our Facebook Cause page or our Network for Good page. And, $10 a month can turn into $120 via monthly giving, which is a great way to stretch your dollar and show your continued support. (Charlotte: you can donate in your local currency too if you have a credit card).

But whether or not you give (although we hope you will!), we on the NOLOSE board wanted to also take this opportunity to give thanks to all of you who make up the hearts, souls, brains, and bodies of the movement. We love you, and we can't wait to see you on the West Coast at the next conference!

Big fat love,
Cristy, Devra, Amanda, Geleni, Jen, Joe, Kim, Tara, Sondra, and Zoe

Hits and Shits of 2009

It's time to say goodbye to the last year of a decade in which the global obesity epidemicTM turned a lot of people who should know better into a bunch of fat panic-stricken Chicken Lickens. It's been a fabulously profitable time for those who benefit from fat hatred – motherfuckers! At this juncture it might be appropriate to be eaten up with helpless rage but...I...will...resist because, paraphrasing Newton, to every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. So whilst gastric band surgeons, government obesity tsars, academic researchers supported by weight loss corporations, obesity charities, and fatphobic media producers are currently on a merry groove, their actions have provided a rich seam of material for an emerging band of critics to rip apart. It's a great time to be involved with fat lib and the decade has been busy and productive for fat activists, Health At Every Size proponents, Fat Studies scholars, and everyone else who's sick of fat hatred.

Anyway, here's a purely personal and short-ish pick of the hits and shits of the past year.

Hits

Beth Ditto
Not only did she work the paparazzi and the most prominent and fatphobic fashionistas in the world, she did it with humour, style, intelligence and talent. She created the most bizarre intersection of fat activism and pop culture that I have ever witnessed at the launch for her clothes range in July (karaoke and Chubster donut hands with Kate Moss, Simon Cowell glowering over the scene, various z-listers too, wha'?!) She broke all the rules. Oh yeah, and she's still an amazing singer. Keep doing what you're doing Beth, keep going up, up, up.

Philly Flesh Mob
Funny, wild, zany, daft, culminating in a shoddily-executed human pyramid on Philadelphia's Rocky Steps. Life-affirming wonderfulness indeed.

ESRC Fat Studies and Health At Every Size seminars
Thanks to official funding from the UK government's academic research department, Fat Studies and Health At Every Size are about to get some righteous and rigorous attention with a series of low-cost, one-day seminars in the UK. Not only will this expand possibilities for these fields, not only will it help develop new alliances between activists, academics and other parties, but it's happening outside the US (though, yeah, the western English-speaking stranglehold on critical fat work is still strong, despite new developments in Asia and Europe, and I hope that shifts in the new decade).

The Fat of the Land: A Queer Chub Harvest Festival
Was a lot of hard work, and also a hoot. Read the queerchub blog.

Fat Studies
You wait for ages and then it all arrives at once. Two landmark books got published this year, Fat Studies in the UK, and The Fat Studies Reader. The Pop Culture Association's Fat Studies panels in New Orleans were beautifully expansive and intellectually exciting. More please!

The Chubsters
This year this girl gang metamorphosed into something really weird and thrilling. Somehow we became a platform for stonemasonry and home made electric games, we made friends with supermodels and the people of Hamburg, made people cry with joy at the British Film Institute, became the object of academic attention, and embarked on a mysterious trajectory that will end god knows where. The future looks bright for misfit fat freaks.

Late inclusion: The Wellcome Library
Yes, yes, o yes!

And now, the Shits!

LighterLife
Another woman died this year who had been following the LighterLife diet but her death, and the others, had nothing whatsoever to do with the company, ok? Meanwhile LighterLife's impressive PR campaign continues apace with sponsorship of at least one well-regarded obesity research association and saturation advertising on cable TV.

Size Matters?
The organisers of this academic conference could have used their power for good but they chose the dark side of the force instead. Shame, shame, shame.

Obesity Cost Calculator
How much do fat people cost the US economy? Now you can find out with this methodologically execrable online calculator, paid for with the few leftover tax dollars that haven't been spent on aggressive American military interventions overseas, I suspect. Guaranteed to scapegoat and stigmatise people.

Stupid Media
It's stating the obvious and this year's bullshit was pretty similar to any other year's, only with added Emine Saner at the always-ready-to-hand-wring-over-the-obesity-epidemic-Guardian, climate change, and general crapulousness. I wish I could enjoy this stuff in an evil way but I haven't evolved that far yet.

Susie Orbach
It's beyond me how she manages to maintain any credibility. Her turn at ASDAH this year was an embarrassment, she should never have been invited onto that platform; she talks absolute rubbish, she's a fatphobe, and yet she remains a hot property, courted and revered. She pops up with such irritating regularity, like a pernicious case of haemorrhoids, that I've given her her own tag.

Bullying in the Fatosphere
Shutting people up, closing down discussions because you don't like them, playing favourites and creating enemies, bunker mentalities, petty self-righteousness, arbitrary rules, US cultural imperialism. I've seen it all happen in 2009 and I'm not into it, it's not my idea of liberation and I'm not joining in. Buck up, people, I know you've got better in you.

Fat Studies and HAES UK - Do Not Miss!

ESRC Seminar Series: Fat Studies and Health At Every Size - Bigness Beyond Obesity

Seminar 1: Abject embodiment: Uneven targets of fat discrimination

14-15 January 2010, Durham University

This is the first in a series of four seminars taking place over the course of 2010-2012, funded by the ESRC.

In recent years there has been significant concern about the impact of fatness on the UK's health. Numerous policy interventions have attempted to tackle the so-called 'obesity epidemic' in ways which treat or prevent the incidence of such fat bodies. However, within the inter-disciplinary field of Fat Studies and the Health at Every Size (HAES) movement, researchers, practitioners and activists are challenging the limited and problematic ways in which dominant obesity knowledges produce and problematise the fat body.

This seminar series is grounded in the ethos and politics of size acceptance. Each of the seminars will critically question the ways in which fatness is constructed and experienced as a ‘problem’ whilst also exploring alternative understandings, theorisations and experiences of fatness. The series aims to provide a supportive space for interdisciplinary researchers, activists, practitioners and interested others to question the politics surrounding fatness and health, away from the limitations of the medical model.

Further details on the seminar series aims and background to the series

The seminar will combine formal presentations with informal discussion groups.

Keynote

Charlotte Cooper, University of Limerick: ‘Rad Fatties and 'The Obese': Activism, Fat Studies and Paradigm Shifts in the UK’

Confirmed speakers

- Emma Rich and John Evans, Loughborough University: Young people, class, schooling cultures and anti-obesity education
- Corinna Tomrley, University of York: 'Feelings of envy mixed with disgust'; 'I respect her confidence but I wouldn't be the same' - Abject bodies, ambivalence and aspiration
- Lee Monaghan, University of Limerick: Targeting White Coats in the War on Obesity: A Qualitative Analysis of an Online Debate About Clinicians' Weight
- Jo Pike, University of Hull: ‘Junk Food Mums: Class, Gender and the Battle of Rawmarsh’
- Emma Rawlins, Medical Research Council: Family ties: understanding the intergenerational nature of eating and physical activity practices
- Peter Hopkins, Newcastle University: Socio-spatial inequalities and emotional landscapes of body size
- Kirsty Fife, University of Leeds: The Invisibility of the Fat Subject in Contemporary Visual Culture

The seminar will run from 1pm on Thursday 14 January until 2.30pm on Friday 15 January 2010 in the Earth Sciences Building at Durham University, number 43 on this map

Registering

The seminar is free to attend (including refreshments and lunch on 15 January) but participants must meet their own travel/accommodation costs. There will be an optional seminar dinner (cost not covered) on the evening of Thursday 14 January.

If you are interested in attending, please send an email to both Rachel Colls (rachel.colls@durham.ac.uk) and Bethan Evans (mmu.bevans@gmail.com) to register. If you have any dietary requirements please let us know and we will do our best to cater for you. Please also indicate whether you are interested in attending the seminar dinner.

Low income participants

There are a limited number of bursaries available to contribute to travel/accommodation costs for students/unwaged participants. To request a bursary, please contact Rachel Colls (rachel.colls@durham.ac.uk) and Bethan Evans (mmu.bevans@gmail.com) and briefly explain why you need a bursary (i.e. unwaged/student etc).

Travel and accommodation

Some college accommodation may be available – this is searchable via the University accommodation site.

Alternatively there are numerous hotels and B&Bs available in Durham.

Getting to Durham University.

Medical history, obesity, pathology and the rad fatties of the past

The Wellcome Library is one of my favourite places in London. Interested in vintage accounts of sexual deviation framed as medical concern? Or illuminated medieval manuscripts of nuns being bled? Or recipes for Laudanum? Sure you are! The Wellcome, a repository for all things medical, including the social history and social construction of health, is the place to find this stuff. It's magical.

Part of the Wellcome Library's online presence includes wellcome images, an image library that features a load of creative commons material, which means that you can download digital versions for free. I like to mooch around the image library from time to time, it's a visual delight. Have a click and waste some time there.

Of course the search keywords that interest me the most are: 'obesity,' 'obese' and 'fat'. The contemporary results are a mish-mash of stock images, which are fascinating in the way that they code fatness. So we get photographs of tape measures, 'unhealthy' food, fat cells; measured bodies, energy balance, abstracted fatness. I often wonder what it's like to be a fat model posing for these kinds of images eating junk food, standing on scales, prodding at their bodies. I wonder what they get paid, how they feel about reiterating stereotypes.

But the historical images are where it's really at.

Pictures of remarkable-looking fat people make up the majority of these images. Can we get a round of applause for Tom Ton, Miss Rosie and Ruby Westwood, William Ball, Paul Butterbrodt and the amazing Mr Campbell? Or Edward Bright of Maldon, who now has a street named after him? Or Daniel Lambert, another famously fat man? Thank you for existing, fat ancestors.

It's interesting to see incredible/gruesome late medieval woodcuts of fat men apparently being treated for their obesity with leeches, though I wonder if this is a more contemporary interpretation of what is going on in the images. There are a number of etchings, too, of various 'obese gouty men'! So fat people turn up as patients quite early on, but they are also presented in the collection as as caricatures, and as health professionals too. I really like the image of the fat midwife heading off to work.

The images show some of the ways in which fatness has become medicalised. The photograph of a fat man with "infantilism and thyroid disorder" interests me, not least because this poor fellow is utterly dehumanised in the photograph, but because infantilism and thyroid disorders were some of the earlier ways that fatness was pathologised. 'Race' and fatness are also medicalised and pathologised in colonialist images of 'a female Hottentot with steatopygy.'

One set of images disturbs me in similar ways to the racist 'Hottentot' imagery. It's a series of photographs from the late 1880s by Eadweard Muybridge. He's the photographer-scientist who pioneered the use of photographs to capture motion. You might be familiar with his images of people jumping, or horses running. The Wellcome has a series of photographs of a fat woman walking and 'getting up off the ground.' She's described as 'gargantuan' in the catalogue, and one of the accompanying keywords is 'huge'. Again, I wonder who she is, what it was like for her to be photographed naked. I'm searching for the scraps of her humanity that have been obliterated by the way she has been classified by whoever catalogued these photographs of her. I'm appalled, though not surprised, by her Othering in the eyes of the anonymous picture librarian who labelled her, and that this way of seeing her is constructed here as neutral, scholarly, scientific fact.

Quantified Selves and fat-friendly DIY guerilla data gathering

I've been reading about an emerging trend from, where else, the Bay Area which h+ magazine is calling, variously, life logging, life blogging, and Quantified Self. There's an article about it on pages 56-58 of the Winter 2009 issue (.pdf, 14.2mb). By the way, this is the first time I've come across this mag, it boasts that it "covers technological, scientific, and cultural trends that are changing – and will change – human beings in fundamental ways." Love that certainty!

The basic idea involves creating personalised data sets, charting one's body through time. You can pick any variable that appeals to you, do collaborative data gathering, and play with the resultant datasets to your heart's content.

Gathering personal data is not a new idea, it's sort of common. I'm currently logging my peak flow because I'm being tested for asthma, for example, and dieters log their weights at weekly weigh-ins. What makes this trend different is the sheer volume and variety of data being collected, the number of variables offered, the emergence of software to support this endeavour, the hobbyist nature of the activity, and the desire amongst life loggers to present the data in ways that pushes the boundaries about what is known about our bodies and habits.

So of course I'm wondering what Quantified Self could mean for the fatties. Could this herald a new age of methodologically strong DIY data gathering? I'm imagining low cost research into aspects of fat experience that would never be funded on a larger scale in the current war on obesity. There could be quantitative research that ditches traditional weight loss paradigms, or which builds an evidence base for Health At Every Size, for example. Not only could this challenge duff obesity science, it could provide a basis for information about fatness that recognises the nuances of our lives, and the impact of social factors. Swoon. And that's only the beginning.

Unfortunately, I suspect this is somewhat rose-tinted thinking. The samples offered by groups such as Quantified Self are currently ridiculously skewed. Although they are generating masses of data, they are unable to manipulate it usefully. I mean, I love the colours of Mimi Chun's dinners, the way she presents her data is pretty, but what are its further applications?

The cohort of life bloggers presented in h+ magazine take an individualistic view of health, it can be generated through a series of rote activities, with an uncritical acceptance of energy balance. I think for guerrilla data gathering to be truly radical or socially useful, it is necessary to have some kind of understanding about the limits of positivism, 'scientific knowledge,' or 'objective scientific truth'. I don't really see that in this one, brief article, though of course it may exist.

And yeah, there's the obvious question too: aren't we more than a set of numbers?

Background Fatties

I went to see Der Blaue Engel last night. It's a great film, eh? Marlene Dietrich, Joseph von Sternberg, Emil Jannings, obsession and madness, creepy clowns, show people, sex, gutter life; it has it all.

There's something else it has too: a cast of fat actors. Dietrich herself is pretty chunky in the earlier part of the film, much fatter than a leading lady would be allowed to be nowadays, though still normal-sized. What I'm talking about is the protagonist, Professor Immanuel Rath, who is a very stout fellow, not to mention Kurt Gerron, who plays Kiepert the conjuror, and the actor who plays the owner of The Blue Angel. These guys really fill up the screen.

It's not just the men either, Rosa Valetti, who plays Guste, corrals a group of fat women performers who share the stage with Dietrich. They are clearly background, they don't have names, but they are unforgettable. It's possible that their fatness is an allusion to their low rent status as performers and maybe sex workers, or to their general degeneracy. These women are not curvy, they're barrel-shaped fatties and they wear skimpy clothes and sit on the stage drinking beer after beer, some of them are old. They get in the way, they sulk, and one of them has an act that involves something saucy that is kept well out of the frame, all we ever see is her rolling her eyes suggestively. These are the kind of gals that I dream of hanging out with.

I'm developing a fascination with fat characters in film, not the stars, the ones who appear in the background, the secondary or tertiary characters. I want to know more about them. I wonder if being background means that film makers can get away with more, in a cultural climate that denigrates fatness, than if such fat characters were placed in the foreground. Their presence is so fleeting yet they stay with me.

I think this phenomenon has roots in the work that Vito Russo did with The Celluloid Closet. Russo identified queer characters in films, the sort of characters and actors whom you might pass over unless you knew the signals, codes and stereotypes that outed them. If you have The Eyes, that is, a certain queer sensibility, you can see these characters, Russo used this way of seeing to shine a spotlight on them.

Being in the margins of film, and culture, is a depressing reminder of fat people's secondary status in general. Looking out for fat people in the background is like begging for crumbs of recognition from an uncaring culture. But Russo showed us that these crumbs can add up and become something more substantial, and that in some circumstances the margins can eclipse the action centrestage.

Here are three publicity stills from the same scene. Don't look at Dietrich, check out the women behind her!

Big bellies, transforming advertisements and creating a politicised fat gaze

I've spotted this advert around town lately and here's how I think it's supposed to be read: the guy's wearing a horrible jumper that's too small for him, his belly is exposed and he looks fed up. The implication is that he'll have to wear this humiliatingly small jumper in order to please some relative who clearly barely knows him. The relative should have given him money instead, and should have sent it via this company for happy xmas smiles all round.

How I read it: hot, surly, belly-bustin' dude in trendy retro knitwear. Hubba hubba, do me, do me!

Thinking about this ad, I wonder if it exemplifies the mismatch between what advertisers aim for and how their advertisements are consumed, especially where fatness and fat bodies are concerned.

I've seen this before with the manatee postcard and the obesity monster, these images are supposed to scare us straight/thin but they underestimate the power of a politicised fat gaze. Not only is this gaze critical, for example in its ability to deconstruct headless fatty images, but it has the power to transform and remake fatphobic imagery into something else entirely; for example a cute wittle monster, or a fantasy of frolicking carelessly with benevolent fat animals, or of eroticising what is presented as abject.

This ad has inspired a second stream of thought, which is about exposed bellies. At Size Matters? there was a ripple of concern about a powerpoint slide that presented an illustration of a fat child playing with normative-sized kids. The concern was because the child's belly was poking out of his clothes a tiny bit, indeed, this is how his fatness was coded. People thought that this was unfair in some way, that there were connotations of slovenliness, and that the illustration should have shown him in clothes that fit.

My feeling was that the delegates at Size Matters? were uncomfortable at the sight of exposed belly, especially that of a child. The conference was problematic and, in my opinion, fostered a large amount of fatphobia. In this context, a fat belly was considered obscene and shocking. Bellies must be hidden by respectable clothing (never mind how difficult it is to get such clothing). This is also a tenet of much of the fat fashion industry in the UK.

Me, I like bellies of all kinds, and I especially love a big, unruly belly, sticking out without shame. I like people wearing clothes that they feel and look good in, regardless of how 'appropriate' those clothes are deemed, and maybe that includes clothes that are 'too small' or which fail to cover you in the way that you should be covered. To me that's a lot better than your auntie wiring you some cash.