Fat, Sydney, Scholarship, Hope

It's been quiet round here of late because I am in Sydney, not my usual stamping ground, and I've been getting acclimatised to my first trip to the southern hemisphere. I'm enjoying the privileged position of Visiting Scholar at Macquarie University. In practise this means that I have library access, a workstation, and I get to pick the brains of a bunch of smart people, and let them into my own thought processes too. This is all courtesy of Sam Murray, or Dr Samantha Murray of The Somatechnics Research Centre, who is author of The 'Fat' Female Body, amongst other works, and an all-round great gal (Murray, 2004, Murray, 2005a, Murray, 2005b, Murray, 2008, Murray, 2009). Next weekend I will deliver one of two keynotes for Fat Studies: A Critical Dialogue. This is the life, eh?

For me, this has been a very rich period of time. I feel as though I've been given an amazing gift of political and intellectual comradeship. Over the past week or so I have often remembered myself as a young fat woman, I don't think many fat people forget those early struggles, me included. It would be unthinkable to my younger self that the rewards I'm enjoying now would come to me because of my work on fat. I'm in a different place now but I'm still amazed that people are interested in my cranky ideas about fatness, and that they develop their own ideas and spin off from what I do. I should perhaps get over this at some point and just accept that it happens. So I've been wandering around Sydney in a state of gratitude and wonder, yeah yeah, pass the sick bag.

Today I was lucky enough to attend a couple of lectures at the uni. In two hours, Sam and Dr Nicole Matthews offered a double whammy of fat and disability scholarship. It was great to revisit some of the writers, thinkers and activists who sparked my interest in disability in the early 90s when I was doing my Master's degree. I forget how powerful that work is – David Hevey, I'm looking at you (Hevey, 1992). Sam talked about the social construction of fat and drew upon historical readings of fat bodies, the way that measurement and bodily surveillance construct fatness, classed and gendered readings, and the way that images of fat people construct a notion of fatness. Hot stuff.

I still think it is very brave to stand up in front of a crowd of people and offer thinking and scholarship on fat that is critical of dominant obesity discourse, and seeks to develop alternative ways of knowing fat, ways that draw upon direct experience, which are infused by feminism and political consciousness. I continue to expect rotten tomatoes and jeers when somebody does this because for many of us seeking these new ways of understanding, we have had to do it by stealth, or under suspicion; we are often required to justify ourselves to ridiculous lengths.

It was really amazing to sit in a giant lecture hall hearing this stuff. I got chills as I saw people writing and working, I peeked over someone's shoulder and saw them making notes about radical fat concepts. The students looked engaged. No one laughed Sam out of the room for daring to speak, people were interested and respectful. As Nicole took to the podium, she also offered some thoughts on the lecture Sam had just given.

It makes me feel very hopeful for the development of a more nuanced set of fat discourses. A discussion that took place in a car journey this week included an acknowledgement of how desperate I feel for complex, critical thinking on fat, discussions that reflect my lived experience and which push and challenge me to develop my own thinking further, instead of encountering the same old same old. I can hardy believe it but, judging by the work happening in Sydney, I think those days of exciting new fat scholarship and activism are coming.

Hevey, D. (1992) The Creatures Time Forgot: Photography and Disability Imagery, London: Routledge.

Murray, S. (2004) 'Locating Aesthetics: Sexing the Fat Woman', Social Semiotics, 14: 3, 237-247.
— (2005a) 'Doing Politics or Selling Out? Living the Fat Body', Women's Studies International Forum, 34: 3-4, 265-277.
— (2005b) '(Un/Be)Coming Out? Rethinking Fat Politics', Social Semiotics, 15: 2, 153-163.
— (2008) The 'Fat' Female Body, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
— (2009) ''Banded Bodies': The Somatechnics of Gastric Banding', in: Sullivan, N. & Murray, S. (eds.) Somatechnics: Queering the Technologisation of Bodies. London: Ashgate.