Charlotte Cooper and Judy Freespirit in Conversation, June 2010

Charlotte Cooper and Judy Freespirit, June 2010,
in the art room at the Jewish Home for the
Aged, San Francisco,
photographed by Esther Rothblum

Three months before Judy Freespirit died, Esther Rothblum took me to visit and interview her at the Jewish Home for the Aged in San Francisco, where Judy had lived for the past three years. Judy was in poor health but none of us knew how little time she had left.

I have a lot to say about this meeting but I'll save it for a separate essay.

I'm posting the raw interview transcript here as a resource for people to cite and analyse. I consider Judy to be an important figure in the history of critical understandings of fat and it is my hope that her work becomes more central to the discourse. I've edited the transcript slightly to remove some references to other people.

I offer my deepest gratitude to Judy and Esther.

Please visit Remembering Judy Freespirit for more information.

Judy Freespirit Interview, 7 June 2010

Charlotte: Ok, so we're going, and I can hear me, so that means I can probably hear you. I'm just going to prop that right there.

So I guess, I told you a bit about how I became radicalised around fat, and the stuff that I was reading, and I was wondering how you got the idea that fat could be a political thing.

Judy: I think the first real bang in my head that said: "Oh my god! This is more than you've been thinking" was, I was a student at Cal State LA and there was going to be some kind of a big demonstration there because the administration was allowing prejudice against students of colour in the area of housing. And so I was a member of CORE, you know CORE?

Charlotte: Mm-hmm.

Judy: I don't know which organisations were...

Charlotte: CORE is a pretty famous organisation, so, yeah, yeah.

Judy: Ok. So I was a member of CORE before they threw all the white folks out and we decided to demonstrate against the administration and force them to start not allowing people to discriminate in student housing. So I was picketing the administration, and there were maybe ten of us picketing, and there would always be twenty or thirty people making fun of us and laughing and saying things, and it was on a hill and further up the hill there were men with hats, you know, obviously some kind of government agents, taking notes and...

Charlotte: Oh.

Judy: It was during, you know, the J. Edgar Hoover period. So that was my first real activism. And the funny thing that hit me was the things that people were shouting had to do with my being fat. I was picketing and it had nothing to do with fat, it had to do with the administration being wrong in their discrimination, and people would try to get me by making fat jokes.

Charlotte: Right, so you were in this very politicised situation.

Judy: So all of a sudden I realised: "They are so angry about my being fat, why are they so angry? I'm too heavy and big them." You know. I mean. But it's like: "Ah, this is the way we can get her, because this is the thing that nobody's gonna disagree is not ok." So that's sort of my first rememberence.

Charlotte: Wow. That's an amazing moment, a lightbulb moment.

Judy: Yeah, a lightbulb moment.

Infectobesity, Obesogenic, dying research traditions and made-up words

I'm glad that I'm living in a time and a place where I get to witness at close range the dying gasps of fat hatred through the desperate medium of scientific obesity research. The days are numbered for the people who produce this work because a bunch of us are on to them and we're not going to shut up about what we've found, for example:

• That their research gets funded by companies that benefit from fat hatred
• That they have non-existent or crapulous methodology
• That their interpretation of results flies in the face of all that is scientifically reasonable
• That their work is founded in prejudice and misinformation
• That despite access to resources, they exclude critical perspectives
• The complete absence of fat stakeholders within work which is supposed to be about us, which portrays fat people, or rather "the obese," as some kind of Othered subhuman lump of helplessness.

Et cetera.

Alternative ways of understanding fat are starting to emerge from Fat Studies and through activism and models such as Health At Every Size. These take a more sophisticated view of fat, and strive to recognise the humanity and agency of fat people.

So here I am, sitting in my deckchair in the garden of Fat Studies, flowers blooming, birdies tweeting, golden sunlight, and I'm watching obesity science implode over the other side of the fence where the ground is barren and the stinking dust chokes you. I'm thinking: "Burn, baby, burn."

Today's piece of obesity science schadenfreude, evidence of a dying empire, comes courtesy of the University of California, San Diego (also home to a group of amazing Fat Studies scholars, as it happens). Lead researcher Jeffrey Schwimmer's study confirms the concept 'infectobesity' which refers to a correlation between exposure to viruses or bacteria and being fat.

Whether or not Schwimmer's research offers any useful facts is not my interest here. What concerns me is that this study makes the concept of infectobesity concrete and real to people without any critical understanding of its social impact, or care that such a perspective is absent.

The same happened with Foresight's popularising of the concept obesogenic, meaning how environments supposedly cause people to become fat. Not long after that piece of work was published – and boy, was it ever a piece of work – you couldn't turn a page of The Guardian without coming across some posh twit using it to make themselves look knowledgeable, concerned and important.

The effect of obesogenic was that it legitimised judgmental middle class intrusion into working class people's lives in the UK through stereotyping of poor people's perceived lack of health knowledge, proposals for Healthy Towns and food labelling and taxation systems, as well as the increased surveillance over children through chubby fatphobe Jamie Oliver's school dinners campaign and the whole Change4Life fiasco. Good work!

Meanwhile, terms like obesogenic and infectobesity are problematic because they assume that fat is pathology rather than a part of the fabric of humanity (we think that biodiversity is a good thing, why doesn't this extend to people where fat is concerned?) and automatically conflate fatness with ill-health rather than address the structures which influence health, eg poverty, discrimination, stress. They seek reasons for explaining fatness so that it can ultimately be obliterated, a rationale that mirrors eugenicist social engineering, only this lot want to do it for profit. Infectobesity is worrying, too, because a viral explanation of fat is likely to lead to increased discrimination against and social exclusion of fat people.

Given the ferocity of these ideological attacks on fat people like you and I, it seems odd that one might feel pity for the world that this research represents. It's a strange reversal of the pity directed at fat folk through obesity science. But obesogenic and infectobesity represent ever more desperate attempts to explain fatness using the ever-dwindling touchstones of energy-balance and pathology. These concepts are being produced in the shadow of new scholarship that blows this narrow thinking out of the water and threatens the profitability of the businesses which fund such rubbish. These are the final gasps of a dying entity.

I thought I'd end this post with some ideas for alternative concepts upon which obesity scientists could base some studies. Feel free to suggest your own.

Fleabesity The belief that fatness is caused by bites from infected fleas.

Obesogreed A term which refers to the insatiable desire to cash-in on fat hatred through spurious scientific claims. Describes weight loss companies that fund research producing and endorsing obesity charities.

Meteobesity The belief that fatness is caused by changes in the weather, or meteors.

Obesignore The act of paying no attention to one's own research findings and instead reiterating the worthlessness of fat and the value of weight loss at any cost.

UFObesity The belief that fatness is caused by aliens.

Uselessblobesity The act of making fat people absent, abject and anonymous within obesity research.

Disobedieisty The belief that fatness is caused by bad thoughts.

Dinobesosaur The term by which old skool obesity scientists should now be understood.

Remembering Judy Freespirit

Max Airborne has created a memorial blog where people can share their memories and pictures of Judy. Take a look.

Remembering Judy Freespirit

Read recent fat stuff I've written and presented

I've put my notes, slides and an audio recording of my Fat Studies: A Critical Dialogue keynote online. Please drop me a line if you'd like links to download and read what I presented in Sydney. You could click through the slides and listen to the .mp3 and pretend you were there! The notes also contain nerdalicious references.

In a similar vein, The Scavenger published a piece I wrote last week about fat activism and feminism. Basically I'm saying that the focus has been on the wrong kind of feminism in the popular media and in academia. I argue that people should be looking to the feminism that brought The Fat Underground into being rather than supporting hagiographies of Susie Orbach. This is not news to anyone who knows me and my work, but it's nice to be supported by The Scavenger and bring this stuff to new readers.

Fat is a feminist issue, but whose feminism?

Over and out.

Debriefing Fat Studies: A Critical Dialogue

The Fat Studies: A Critical Dialogue conference has just wrapped in Sydney and I've got a few things to say about it.

Giving a keynote on the other side of the world to the place where you live, amongst people you barely know, at an event which has been highly anticipated for ages, where your past and your future are available for critique; well, it's amazing to be asked to do this but it's also stressful. Who knew?! I have nothing to add about this, just that, for me, it turned out to be a somewhat kinky mixture of deep pleasure and high anxiety, and I felt quite discombobulated as a result.

It was a joke at the conference that I dislike it when fannishness is directed towards me, but it's not really a joke to me. A fannish encounter is different to one where you approach each other as equal humans, because it's a bit strange and shallow and never goes anywhere. I think it makes divisions rather than builds alliances and I experience it as dehumanising and alienating, it's not the honour it's supposed to be. So I struggled with that aspect. Anything you say makes it worse, like "how sweet, she's being modest", and of course it's all tied up with ego and I hate that too, ugh! I love it when people want to talk to me about my work or activism, or whatever, but I can do without these awkward meetings. Man up, people! Cut it out!

Now that's out of the way, here are a bunch of things about the conference that I thought were very special, in no particular order:

1. I heard that Judy Freespirit had died on the morning that I was due to deliver my presentation. I met her in San Francisco this summer, interviewed her, and studied her powerful archives at the Gay and Lesbian Historical Society. She was a hero to me, one of the most persuasive voices when I first encountered fat politics. I am so lucky that I got to meet her and tell her what her work meant to me. Shortly before I left the UK to come to Australia, I wrote and told her that I was going to dedicate my keynote to her. Unfortunately this turned out to be a posthumous dedication, but I'm glad that she probably knew that her work had helped spark this other work so far away from home in time and space.

Sam Murray, who organised the conference, opened the second day with an acknowledgement of Judy's death and a reading off The Fat Liberation Manifesto that Judy co-authored with Aldebaran. God, that work is powerful. A spooky thing happened: Judy's name was mentioned at the same time the computer being used for presentations switched on with, I don't know, whatever that start-up chime is. As an atheist I don't believe in such things, but it was sweet to imagine that the sound was announcing Judy's spiritual presence in the room, it was lovely.

2. Blessings upon Rachael Kendrick for daring to grapple with Foresight's Obesity Systems Map. She entered the Looking-Glass world of high level obesity policy theorists and lived to tell the tale. There were cackles from my side of the room.

3. I thought it was a great idea to have the art exhibition and performance evening, Bodies Abound. This kind of creative, cultural, community-based cross-pollination is the lifeblood of fat activism. Even better was that the event was rammed with people, there with gorgeous free food and wine too.

4. I nipped out of a presentation panel to go to the toilet and walked past all the seminar and meeting rooms. The doors were open and I could hear all these conversations happening at once, people listening and talking and – blub! – speaking truth to power, in their way. It was so beautiful and seemed to exemplify what the conference is about, that is, trying to create a dialogue across interdisciplinary boundaries.

5. I had my own taste of this a few times. It was really interesting to talk to people who had what I think of as unquestioned obesity scholarship. These people were a bit old school in terms of Fat Studies, and this is understandable because Fat Studies is not well known, and people are in the grip of rhetoric around obesity. In some cases people seemed unable to challenge what I might call fatphobic obesity discourse, yet they were also able to adopt new concepts. I think this ability to maintain two ways of thinking simultaneously is fascinating, it's a bit like Orwellian doublethink. It makes me wonder if they will relinquish older ways of thinking, or if they're more likely to create a synthesis of the two. Perhaps such allegedly polarised discourse will morph into something else.

6. I had the good luck to witness Maria Giannacopoulos' paper 'Disease and the Colony,' about colonialism in indigenous cultures in Australia. One of the themes on the paper was about how colonisers had forced nutritionally poor food on indigenous people and how this demographic were suffering as a result. Some of the conversation that followed was about how 'bad' food could be replaced with 'good' food. I knew that this was problematic from my point of view as someone who is part of a group for whom these decisions are being made at policy level. I decided to go with the interdisciplinary theme and speak up. I wasn't understood at first when I said that swapping bad food for good maintained colonialist surveillance practises, but an intervention by the skilful panel chair who spotted another theme in the paper enabled us to bridge the gap: we all understood that indigenous people are sovereign and thus should be able to make their own choices about what they eat. This was a small point, but it was a wonderful, powerful experience for us all to understand and respect each other across our diverse perspectives. Wowie!

7. What I loved about Cleo Gardiner's 'Borderline Sexy: Erotica, Sex and the Geography of a Fat Chick’s Body in Performance' was how she talked about her own body and sexuality. It gave me permission to speak about my own. I don't necessarily need permission to do this but, at a conference that's somewhat located within academia, it's great to be reminded that these are legitimate areas for discussion.

8. There were many newbies at the conference, by which I mean people who have just recently encountered critical fat perspectives. Some of the narratives aired were very familiar to me, I've heard them many times and I can be quite impatient with them. The conference reminded me of the power of these transformative ideas that are real and meaningful to those expressing them. I was moved by the tenderness with which people spoke, especially in the Fat Femme Front panel, and delighted by the ways in which they are integrating these concepts into other parts of theor personal and political lives.

9. Feeling confident in my own scholarship, feeling inspired by new ideas and glad to be part of an exciting social movement. I can't say much more about this now because I'm overwhelmed, but it'll probably percolate out over the next few months or so. Short version: what an experience! So good and so rich.

10. Sam Murray is amazing, has fucking great politics, is a perpetual delight to be around, looks good in a frock, can organise a conference and is as brainy as hell. Dynamite combo, dynamite gal. This conference is what Fat Studies can be, watch and learn.

I took no pictures, sorry about that, but they're bound to arise somehow and somewhere. Want more? Take a look at #sydfatconf on Twitter and FatDialogue.com

PS Drop me a line if you'd like to read my notes, look at my slides, or listen to an audio recording of the presentation.

Goodbye Judy Freespirit

Judy has died. Tears now but gratitude, too, for her life.

I heart Substantia Jones

She took my picture.

Cyril and Corinne

Two people who shaped my fat consciousness died this week and I want to reflect on this for a moment or two.

Cyril Smith was probably the only superfat person I ever encountered on TV when I was a kid. The fattest of the fat are still pretty much absent from mainstream media, unless they are portrayed as abject and abstracted headless fatties, or tragic 'Befores' in prurient reality shows.

What was it like seeing this guy on the telly? Along with Hattie Jacques he was one of my first fat icons. I remember him as embodying many stereotypes about fat people: he was always jolly, often on well-publicised diets, often physically positioned in relation to his fatness, for example I remember a clip of him squeezing through a too-small turnstile. There was an additional narrative going on in that he was a working class northerner, this was patronised by TV producers who were inevitably middle class southerners.

I also read him as a successful man, intelligent, dynamic, complicated. I think it must have occurred to me that fat people could be these things, I remember enjoying his presence on TV, liking the fat talk. I’m not his political ally, his support for the death penalty was troubling, and allegations about his private life were worrying. But there he is. Was.

Corinne Day has also died. I liked her photographs very much, especially her book Diary, which includes photographs of Tara Wales, pictures which are loaded with compassion for female friendship.

Day is credited in helping to launch Kate Moss' career, and popularising Heroin Chic. It’s funny looking back at those images, nowadays commercial photography is in another league thanks to the power of retouching, Day’s photographs look almost quaint in comparison. But it was all the rage amongst feminists to decry this fashion phenomenon when my first book was published, and I was often called upon to denounce it. I never could because I like that look, I consume fashion magazines happily with no apparent ill-effects, I have nothing against skinny people who look like junkies appearing as fashion, and I wish Kate Moss all the luck in the world.

The feminist tut-tutting that accompanied day’s photographs of that period infuriated me because it was offered by people who didn’t know fashion, had little understanding of how media is produced, had no appreciation of the genre (see Larry Clark's Tulsa for the foundational work of this type), had no connection to the people Day was photographing – young, fucked-up freaks – yet felt entirely entitled to judge.

This kind of hand-wringing, often accompanied by the urge to censor or burn the offending image or idea in order to protect some imagined victim, continues to bother me when I encounter it among people who are supposedly on my side, fatwise. So let me state this clearly: I live for complex, challenging imagery, in fashion and anywhere else it appears. Thanks for the pictures Corinne, I’m sorry you died so young.

Fat Dialogue, the new kid on the block

Sorry and sad that you can’t make it to Sydney of the Fat Studies: A Critical Dialogue conference this weekend? Never fear, Sam Murray has just launched Fat Dialogue, which aims to develop some of the themes that have arisen as the conference has taken shape. Got an internet connection? Why not join in the discussion?

More hate-filled crap from Britain’s leading obesity charity

I tend to tune out weight loss news stories, I figure that if you’ve seen one then you’ve seen ‘em all. But this juicy little number caught my eye this morning.

More obesity surgery 'could save millions of pounds'

Those rogues at the National Obesity Forum are behind this idiotic piece of research. I hesitate even to call it research because it’s of no value whatsoever and serves only to bolster this particular organisation’s eugenicist campaign of measuring and containing/annihilating fat people’s dangerous bodies. The tables look nicely formatted on the BBC website, I’ll give them that, but the numbers are meaningless without context or an explanation of the methodology.

This story is another salvo in favour of the argument that fat people are worthless lumps who are a terrible financial burden on society. Our poor health costs the economy countless millions. Lucky, then, that surgery is a magical fix, transforming these abstracted blobs of lard (ie you and I) into fully functioning members of society. What the research fails to take into account is the cost to the NHS of follow-up care for people whose health has been ruined by surgery, or of reduced life-expectancy relating to weight loss surgery. I wonder what kind of a dent that might make on this ridiculous cost-benefit analysis. Bodies here are machines to be tinkered with, and society is also a machine, where every tiny cog must play its part. Does this sound as bit fascist to you as it does to me?

At least the BBC mentioned that the research was funded by NOF chums, "two firms involved in making equipment used in obesity surgery". So they’d have no vested interest in increasing the numbers of people being recommended for weight loss surgery then, oh no. The NOF is for “Healthcare professionals who take an interest in the treatment and management of obesity” – one presumes so that they can cash in on it. Honestly, this whole report is so worthless that it beggars belief why it’s been published (I'm into the fat thermographs used to illustrate the piece though, ooh, hot hands, cold arse).

I would like to be part of a group that spits out press releases and refashions obesity research. If fatphobe numbskulls at the NOF can have this level of success in getting their hateful propaganda out in the world, it’s surely no stretch to start getting messages of a different kind out there. Anyone wanna start an obesity charity with me? I’ve got a mate who can design us some official-looking letterheads.

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.