Putting pictures of myself up on the internet is my small act of fat activism. When I upload my pictures, I always tag them with the words 'obesity epidemic' and '200lbs' because this is what the obesity epidemic looks like. It's not the huge, headless fatty that you see in the newspapers. This is it.
Can I just get a swoon for the headless fatty reference? It thrills me how this concept, which I am taking credit for (though let me know if you know otherwise), has become so popular.
Mini-gripes: I'd have liked to have seen Amanda Piasecki get her dues for starting the Fatshionista LiveJournal community back in the day. Remember her name! She is fantastic! Unlike Susie bloody Orbach, who pops up to offer very little, because, you know, she's got so much to say about fatshion.
I can only hope that this article marks a change for Kira Cochrane, the journalist who wrote the piece. Cochrane's previous claim to fame on the 'Timebomb was a depressing series of columns that stretched over a year (or maybe it just felt like a year) charting her desperate attempts to lose weight, which won her a place on the 2008 Shitlist. These columns typified the allegedly progressive, liberal, even feminist position of dieting 'for my health'. They were painful to read, not least because of Cochrane's normalised body hatred right there on the page, but also because they reinforced the moral imperative of dieting-as-self-improvement. What could have been an opportunity to debunk this kind of body project was frittered away. I wonder if she's regained what she lost and is now looking for other ways of contextualising her fatness. My hope is that The Guardian will stop publishing fat-pity fat panic articles. Unlikely. Today the front page boasted a headless fatty. Oh well, at least it's not just me that has a name for that shit.
PS. Hey, I've just seen this call for papers for the Fashion: Exploring Critical Issues conference at Oxford University in September. I hope the fatshionistas represent!
5 comments:
this was SO great to see. However, not so great was the horrendously fat phobic column by Alex James in the Observer Food Monthly. What a twat he is. Boo. Oh well, what he wrote was tired, stale, unoriginal and total bullshit (he said there are no old fat people... uh... what?). What was in the fatshionista piece will be brand new to loads of readers, inspiring, thought provoking, uplifting and mind blowing. Yip for the HF ref! I grin whenever I see that (and rad fatty) referenced too! Creating the language of resistance. Superb.
Thanks Corinna!
I don't know if I coined Rad Fatty, I might have or I might have picked it up in the ether. It's funny how language takes hold and I feel pathetic in many ways wanting recognition for headless fatty, but there you go.
Also, Alex James can fuck off and die.
FWIW, I make a point of saying Amanda's name a minimum of twice in every interview I do, and also offering to spell it. It's actually a built-in part of my "this is what I do" spiel. Few journalists seem to feel the need to print it, however. (Though in fairness the recent profile of me in the Boston Globe did, which made me very happy.)
Oh, I have no doubt that you do the right thing! Talking to the press is always a lottery.
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