I was in Bradford recently, giving a talk about The Fattylympics for an academic/activist gathering called Just Do(ing) It, Again: The Politics of DIY and Self-Organised Culture.
It's getting close to being a year since The Fattylympics took place, and a good time to reflect on it. Although there were problems on the day, I think it offers a good example of how to make multi-layered activist events that appeal to many different kinds of people, don't cost very much, and which push the boundaries of what can be considered activism (a good thing, in my opinion, because it enables more people to engage with activism in their own ways). Not only that, but we produced this event in a context that was pretty repressive by first world standards. I think The Fattylympics is also significant because it was a joyous event, it showed that the work of social justice does not have to be a hand-wringing affair.
I made a slideshow of the audio of my talk and some images from The Fattylympics and have made it available on YouTube. There were some questions afterwards, but I did not include these as I thought it would be uncool to include people's voices without their consent. The whole thing lasts about 25 minutes. There's some swearing, beware, but also plenty of context and description about how and why we put the event together.
I want to add that the gathering where I spoke was a bit of a strange one. Although it took place in a well-respected (though inaccessible) autonomous space, it was very much an academic affair. What's more, I was really shocked by the sexism within the symposium. Two panels of white men, with tokenised women moderators, set the tone of the event. This was really alien to me! I come from a DIY community where feminism, queers, and increasingly people of colour, are central to the scene. Some of the men's work was very old, and two ethnographers, when pulled on their samples, admitted that they had very much marginalised women in their research. The feminist and queer speakers were put together at the end in a panel called 'Case Studies,' even though I mention some theory in my presentation, and even though some of the men's presentations could also have been called 'Case Studies'.
It really was vexing to witness this, and small moments, such as when one panellist got his fellow speakers a glass of beer, but not the queer woman moderator (presumably she is too ladylike to enjoy a drink?), spelled out how invisible and marginal many people's voices were on the day. I heard a lot of talk from the men about class struggle, but feminism or other theoretical frameworks, if mentioned at all, were very much added as an afterthought, or a touchstone to make the speaker appear right on.
I'm sure this kind of thing is familiar to people who have an academic interest in punk, or who spend time with straight men, but for me it was quite an unpleasant eye-opener. What's even more dismaying is that our panel of feminists and queers was the most well-attended and popular of the day. I wish what we brought had been more central to the event.
Cooper, C. (2013) Doing the Dance of Disrespect: The Fattylympics. Just Do(ing) It, Again: The Politics of DIY and Self-Organised Culture. Bradford: 1 in 12 Club/Bradford University. 11 May.
20 May 2013
01 May 2013
The Basics: What is a Fat Activist?
The Basics is a series of posts covering some of the ideas that underpin the way I approach fat. I tend to take these ideas for granted, but some people are new to them, and so they need a bit of an introduction.
A fat activist is a person who thinks about fat in ways that challenge, question and critique most mainstream thinking about fat. Fat activists seek social change and consider fatness a factor within already existing matrices of oppression and liberation. Fat activists generally regard fatness as valuable, and fat people as valuable people (also legitimate, agentic, cherished, worth as much human respect as anybody else). There are many debates within fat activism about choice, weight loss, culpability, and there is immense pressure on fat people to 'become normal,' but I think a general feeling in fat activism is that the world would be a poorer place without fat people. This is a key distinction between fat activism and a discourse upholding 'obesity' which is more likely to be concerned with eradicating fat, or failing to respect the humanity of fat people.
Fat activists come from every background and have diverse ideas about what constitutes 'challenging most mainstream thinking about fat'. Often fat activists disagree with each other about what that means, often we have incompatible ideas about social change, often these ideas are rooted in our social identities. Sometimes fat activists find allies in places beyond fat activism, but it's common for broader social movements to marginalise discussions about fat; this is particularly true in the radical Left.
Fat activists act on their thoughts about challenging mainstream thinking about fat in many different ways. Sometimes acting on those thoughts means having other thoughts, other times it means speaking with other people, putting things out in the world (a blog post, a book, a letter, something tangible or consumable), making a gesture. Sometimes these actions will be easily understood as 'activism' (a demonstration, a campaign); other times they will be very small and interpersonal (a conversation, a decision to wear one kind of thing and not another); and sometimes these actions are very ambiguous (an action that tries to show the value of fat people but relies on oppressive clichés, for example, or a company that uses fat activism purely to make money). Fat activism is not only a challenge, it is also a generative movement that is concerned with creating fat culture and community. Fat activists act by themselves and with other people, they use whatever resources they have to hand: 20,000 Twitter followers, crochet, imagination, a trust fund, etc.
Fat activists are not always fat, though who and what constitutes fat is complicated and should be the subject of a different post.
Fat activism is a social movement that emerged out of civil rights discourse in the US in the late 1960s, and has strong ideological links with feminism, queerness, and disability rights activism, though few fat activists are aware of its relatively long history, or theoretical underpinnings. This is because it is sketchily documented, and also because to most people the idea of fat activism, or a social movement concerned with fat, is little more than a joke. Meanwhile, the ramping-up of anti-obesity rhetoric in the West around the turn of the millennium, combined with accessible technology and social media has accelerated fat activism into a critical discourse with many supporters.
I have offered some ideas here about what constitutes a fat activist. These ideas are based on my own experience and perspectives, and research, and should not be assumed to be carved in stone. There are countless other definitions out there. I think fat activists should continue to offer their own ideas about what fat activism is or means. Let's forget about creating a universal or monodimensional definition, which will always leave someone out in the cold, and instead keep on making a movement of wild and beautiful diversity.
PS This is what a fat activist looks like.
A fat activist is a person who thinks about fat in ways that challenge, question and critique most mainstream thinking about fat. Fat activists seek social change and consider fatness a factor within already existing matrices of oppression and liberation. Fat activists generally regard fatness as valuable, and fat people as valuable people (also legitimate, agentic, cherished, worth as much human respect as anybody else). There are many debates within fat activism about choice, weight loss, culpability, and there is immense pressure on fat people to 'become normal,' but I think a general feeling in fat activism is that the world would be a poorer place without fat people. This is a key distinction between fat activism and a discourse upholding 'obesity' which is more likely to be concerned with eradicating fat, or failing to respect the humanity of fat people.
Fat activists come from every background and have diverse ideas about what constitutes 'challenging most mainstream thinking about fat'. Often fat activists disagree with each other about what that means, often we have incompatible ideas about social change, often these ideas are rooted in our social identities. Sometimes fat activists find allies in places beyond fat activism, but it's common for broader social movements to marginalise discussions about fat; this is particularly true in the radical Left.
Fat activists act on their thoughts about challenging mainstream thinking about fat in many different ways. Sometimes acting on those thoughts means having other thoughts, other times it means speaking with other people, putting things out in the world (a blog post, a book, a letter, something tangible or consumable), making a gesture. Sometimes these actions will be easily understood as 'activism' (a demonstration, a campaign); other times they will be very small and interpersonal (a conversation, a decision to wear one kind of thing and not another); and sometimes these actions are very ambiguous (an action that tries to show the value of fat people but relies on oppressive clichés, for example, or a company that uses fat activism purely to make money). Fat activism is not only a challenge, it is also a generative movement that is concerned with creating fat culture and community. Fat activists act by themselves and with other people, they use whatever resources they have to hand: 20,000 Twitter followers, crochet, imagination, a trust fund, etc.
Fat activists are not always fat, though who and what constitutes fat is complicated and should be the subject of a different post.
Fat activism is a social movement that emerged out of civil rights discourse in the US in the late 1960s, and has strong ideological links with feminism, queerness, and disability rights activism, though few fat activists are aware of its relatively long history, or theoretical underpinnings. This is because it is sketchily documented, and also because to most people the idea of fat activism, or a social movement concerned with fat, is little more than a joke. Meanwhile, the ramping-up of anti-obesity rhetoric in the West around the turn of the millennium, combined with accessible technology and social media has accelerated fat activism into a critical discourse with many supporters.
I have offered some ideas here about what constitutes a fat activist. These ideas are based on my own experience and perspectives, and research, and should not be assumed to be carved in stone. There are countless other definitions out there. I think fat activists should continue to offer their own ideas about what fat activism is or means. Let's forget about creating a universal or monodimensional definition, which will always leave someone out in the cold, and instead keep on making a movement of wild and beautiful diversity.
PS This is what a fat activist looks like.
19 April 2013
Aquaporko is the future of fat public health
Aquaporko! is the latest episode in the story of how fat femmes are pioneering fat activism in Australia's metropolitan hubs through synchronised swimming. Fat activism has precedents in synchro: the Padded Lillies were active in The Bay Area in the US, and highly visible for some time, but not so much lately. This and my own history as a synchronised swimmer has led me to follow Aquaporko with interest over the last three years. I first heard of them through Facebook. Kelli Jean was starting out with the idea of doing a queer fat femme synchronised swimming performance at the wonderful Coogee Women's Pool in Sydney. I showed her some basic synchro moves in London via Skype and later took part in an Aquaporko workshop at NOLOSE. Members of the Sydney Aquaporko troupe talked about their experiences at Fat Studies: A Critical Dialogue, a conference at Macquarie University in Sydney in September. Later, a Melbourne chapter got underway and it is this group that forms the focus of the documentary.
The women of Aquaporko look like they're having the time of their lives in the film. We follow them as they practise and perform a series of routines, contextualised with more in-depth interviews with the participants. Aquaporkos describe how the group has helped transform their relationship to their bodies, and how they have found community by swimming together and supporting each other. In performing, we see how Aquaporko is also developing fat space and community beyond the group, involving people of all sizes. Fat representation is usually predicated upon the image of the sad and lonely fatty, but Aquaporko is joyous and shows fat women at the heart of things, supported and loved, and anything but alienated from each other. I was really excited to see swimmer-scholar-activist Jackie Wykes talking about synchro and fat studies, placing Aquaporko in a lineage of queer fat activism (with my own books on display in the shot – proudface!). It was great to see so many people referenced in the film's credits, to acknowledge that it is the product of a movement, as well as the work of a film-maker.
My one reservation about Aquaporko is about the limitations of its cute, kitsch and retro aesthetic. I understand this as central to a particular construction of femme identity, perhaps one that is popular and recognisable to audiences in Sydney and Melbourne. I think cuteness works as an entry point for swimmers who may feel self-conscious, or are new to fat activism, but it also feels quite limiting to me, as if swimmers are trying to protect (themselves? Their audiences?) from the 'ugliness' of fat bodies. I felt that there was a tension in using cuteness, perhaps something about trying to negotiate a space for fat synchro swimmers beyond a poster girl healthism that is common to manifestations of Health At Every Size. I tried to imagine an Aquaporko routine that brought in a more raw, punk or grotesque edge, for example, where the swimmers relinquished their sweetness. Kelli Jean's own body of photographic work is often quite challenging in its representation of fatness, and I wondered if more of her aesthetic could be incorporated into the synchro.
Aquaporko currently swim in roped off lanes at public pools, even when they are performing. This physical marginalisation is perplexing to me. I see no reason why synchronised swimming could not be the new rollerderby, or even bigger: a reclaimed femme-centric community physical activity for all bodies. I think Aquaporko represents a blueprint for public health and 'obesity'. It's screamingly obvious that doing synchro in this way is empowering, health-enhancing and socially-connected, and that swimmers benefit from it enormously. Not only that, but it is inexpensive, and relatively accessible as long as there is a swimming pool nearby. Compared to the cost and risk of anti-obesity policy, and its miserable failure rate, Aquaporko is where health authorities and research institutions should be splashing their cash. But I say this with one important caveat: health promotion professionals without a grounding in community will make a mess of this and endanger it. Aquaporko is gold, but developing it into a broader movement without destroying its central qualities requires sensitivity, and power and autonomy must remain with the fat swimmers themselves.
16 April 2013
Transforming fat hatred one photo caption at a time
A sweet conversation has been evolving over on Facebook that has elements I'd like to share here.
Amanda Piasecki drew my attention to a vintage photo essay from Life magazine entitled Obesity in 1950s America: Early Days of a National Plague. As Amanda pointed out, the use of 'plague' is somewhat problematic! (though ripe for queer reclaiming). The essay is interesting because it troubles the idea that being fat was 'ok back then,' it shows that fat-shaming is not a post-millennial activity. The photographs are painful to look at because the captions are loaded with the abjection and pity that many of us experience viscerally and daily.
But vintage fatphobia is not the end of the story.
The Fattening saw the images and decided to re-caption them. In doing so, they have been completely transformed. Instead of abjection, the images reveal the potential for agency, humour, frustration, sisterhood, sexuality, badassery and sheer queer delight. When I read the captions I feel visible, acknowledged, vivid and real, not at all the pitiable object – barely even present as a human – that the original captions engender.
One might argue that these new captions aren't 'real' in the way that the originals are, they don't carry the authority of the original journalism. But in offering an alternative rendering of the photographs, they open up other possibilities for them which may or may not be taken on board by other people, including those who work captioning pictures of 'the obesity plague'.
This amazing and fairly tiny intervention has reminded me that we may be subjected to a thousand instances of fat hatred every day, and more, it runs through us like blood; but within that hatred there are opportunities for radical transformations that are simply done and amazingly effective. With their expansive activist imagination, The Fattening has done a great job in putting fat people into the picture and shown how essential it is that we tell our own stories. I can see this form of activism taking off in other directions.
Amanda Piasecki drew my attention to a vintage photo essay from Life magazine entitled Obesity in 1950s America: Early Days of a National Plague. As Amanda pointed out, the use of 'plague' is somewhat problematic! (though ripe for queer reclaiming). The essay is interesting because it troubles the idea that being fat was 'ok back then,' it shows that fat-shaming is not a post-millennial activity. The photographs are painful to look at because the captions are loaded with the abjection and pity that many of us experience viscerally and daily.
But vintage fatphobia is not the end of the story.
The Fattening saw the images and decided to re-caption them. In doing so, they have been completely transformed. Instead of abjection, the images reveal the potential for agency, humour, frustration, sisterhood, sexuality, badassery and sheer queer delight. When I read the captions I feel visible, acknowledged, vivid and real, not at all the pitiable object – barely even present as a human – that the original captions engender.
One might argue that these new captions aren't 'real' in the way that the originals are, they don't carry the authority of the original journalism. But in offering an alternative rendering of the photographs, they open up other possibilities for them which may or may not be taken on board by other people, including those who work captioning pictures of 'the obesity plague'.
This amazing and fairly tiny intervention has reminded me that we may be subjected to a thousand instances of fat hatred every day, and more, it runs through us like blood; but within that hatred there are opportunities for radical transformations that are simply done and amazingly effective. With their expansive activist imagination, The Fattening has done a great job in putting fat people into the picture and shown how essential it is that we tell our own stories. I can see this form of activism taking off in other directions.
05 April 2013
Fat Community Psychotherapy at Hamburger Queen
Hamburger Queen, formerly Burger Queen, is a really extraordinary and brilliant annual fat and queer performance event by Scottee, assisted by Amy Lamé, now into its third year in London. It's hard to explain, so go and watch Hamburger Queen episodes from the 2013 contest on YouTube to get some sense of it. Last year I was a contestant.
This year I was Hamburger Queen's in-house psychotherapist. What does that mean? In previous years, Scottee entertainingly underwent a series of weight loss challenges. His final diet made him so ill that he decided that another tactic was needed. Instead of focusing on his body, he wanted to think about why he had become fat and made a call-out for psychotherapists to help him answer that question. I'm a qualified, registered, experienced psychotherapist/counsellor and, ahem, have a few ideas about what it is to be fat and queer. I got the gig.
How we did it
In January Scottee, Amy and I did two hour-long sessions in my therapy room in East London. Holly Revell filmed them and Scottee edited them into four little films that were screened each week at Hamburger Queen, and then archived online.
One session with someone can be very transformative but, generally speaking, therapy is about a longer relationship that entails building trust and working things out. Scottee and Amy came to the sessions with pretty clear ideas about what they wanted to say, and I think my role was in facilitating that, having some idea of the contexts that they were talking about, and keeping the discussion tight. For me, it was an odd mix of therapy and performance, with some pedagogy thrown in; we all knew that the work would be made public, and we were somewhat invested in saying certain things.
One of the things that I wanted to show was that psychotherapy can be a really good place to explore this stuff. Few therapists are aware of the complexities of these kinds of issues, certainly not in the UK, where therapy about fat is usually based on an assumption of weight loss and normativity. I also wanted to show what therapy sort of looks like since, in the UK, it's a fairly mystified activity, and often confused with the stigma of mental health treatment. I think psychotherapy is for everyone, whether or not you have problems; it can be bliss to be listened to and understood, to reflect on your life in a supportive place. In addition, I think there is a place for therapy in public, community settings, and Hamburger Queen was an experiment in making that happen. Feedback about the sessions supported this, people who spoke about it said that they found the films very thought-provoking and rich.
Perhaps I barely need to say that this is not usually the way I work. Confidentiality is the bedrock of the service I offer, and cameras or recording devices of any kind, let alone screenings of sessions, or any kind of public discussions, are strictly off-limits. It's been discombobulating to speak so publicly about this work.
Also, I didn't get to see the videos before each week's event, or really prepare anything in advance. I watched them for the first time along with everybody else at the venue. It was difficult to absorb what was going on in a session that had taken place two months previously, say something sound-bitey, not too grim, and coherent about it that made sense to the (somewhat drunk and rowdy) audience, and handle my nerves. My professionalism was at stake too. Talk about pressure!
Broad themes
The presenting issue, and title of the series, was: Why are you fat? Scottee, and presumably Amy, felt that exploring origin stories about their fatness and struggles would lead to further understanding of themselves. For me, the question of why someone is fat is something to question in itself. It's my belief that fat is part of the fabric of humanity and that it doesn't require explaining. Indeed, I suspect that explaining it makes it not normal, or positions it as problematic in relation to thin normativity. Extrapolating this further, problematising fat makes fat people vulnerable to unnecessary normatising interventions. I have written critiques elsewhere of popular feminist accounts of fat origin psychology based on the work of Susie Orbach, Kim Chernin, and others. This is what I think, but I also think that fat people are diverse, and that others will think differently. With this in mind, I was game for exploring this question with Scottee and Amy, I could see that it was important to them.
I think one of the most productive themes in Hamburger Queen is about the messiness of fat identity, and of rejecting orthodoxies around being 'good fatties'. By good fatty I mean the pressure that fat people often feel to refute stereotypes about fatness and to present ourselves as idealised citizens. Some fat activism perpetuates this, and many feel that they cannot live up to such standards and become disillusioned by the movement. So here, in these sessions, the aim was to be authentic to ourselves, to acknowledge both the things that are great about being queer-fat and the more complicated and difficult aspects of it.
Why Are You Fat #1
The first video focussed on childhood, about food, early experiences around dieting, and families. These will be familiar narratives to many of us. Class, sexuality, and gender are part of Scottee and Amy's stories too. Thinking about them as kids in these milieus, I felt that there was quite a bit of confusion and distress at that time, but I was also listening out for evidence of their resilience because I thought that that would offer clues to link the past and the present, and help them find strength in their experiences.
Why Are You Fat #2
Two very different traumatic events were presented in the second video, and together we explored their impact. Both stories are upsetting and there was quite a bit of risk in sharing them publicly, I admire Scottee and Amy for their strength in doing that. I felt that my role was to listen and reflect, and to try and make sense of the underlying feelings around the trauma. When this film was screened at Hamburger Queen, a small number of people laughed, as though it was funny. I called them out on it afterwards, and wrote about that experience: Why do you laugh at the fat people?
Why Are You Fat #3
The themes in this film feel slightly more nebulous but I think they are about Scottee and Amy's resources. Both use the resources that are available to them, for Scottee this is in a sacred self-belief that he is beautiful (he is!), and Amy's resources for feeling more fully embodied came via her celebrity. They talk about on-going struggles with eating and well-being, and had we had more sessions I would have explored some cognitive techniques for helping to manage that stuff, though it's possible that it might always be hard to handle because it is deep set and socially sanctioned in many ways.
My favourite part of this video is when I suggest that Scottee could address his eating problems and let his fatness take care of itself, rather than think about his fat body, which he loves, as problematic evidence of his pathology. In response to this, Scottee asks me "Is it ok for them to be separate?" to which I reply: "I dunno! I'm not the boss of it! I presume so!" This exchange reminds me of the trust and authority that people invest in therapists, which is not necessarily a good thing. I hope my response reminded Scottee that he is the authority of his body, even though that authority is frequently undermined in society in general.
Why Are You Fat #4
I think of this as the fuck you film, the culmination of struggling and questioning and valuing authenticity. The through line has to be "I don't want it to be plus size, I want it to be morbidly obese," which I take to be a very queer rendering of fat, ie one that is anti-social, ambiguous, punk, fucked-up, non-normative, messy, lawless, real and free. Amen!
By the way, can I just say how well these films are edited?! We only had a session each, yet Scottee has created a psychological journey in the four short films. At the screening I tried to bring the session threads together, acknowledging how the past influences the present, how there are tips and tricks you can do to make life easier, but that fat and queer people live in difficult social contexts that have a significant psychological impact. Coming full circle, I urged Scottee and Amy to reflect on their resilience and power again, to look at what they had made. The word 'magnificent' kept coming back to me when I thought about how they put themselves out in the world, about their art, the dialogue they create through their thoughtful, powerful work. I invited them to look around at the sold out house, packed with supporters, and to see that their work is transformative.
Final reflections
These two sessions, the short videos and the screenings at Hamburger Queen were fairly fleeting moments, but they represent a lot of work. It was an amazing privilege to be able to witness Scottee and Amy's journeys, and to facilitate moments of illumination and disclosure. It is incredible to me that we are able to talk about fat and queer life together in this way, that we even have language for these profound life experiences, and that we're able to share them and understand each other, and care for each other too. This didn't happen magically, it's the result of our work. We matter. On top of this, it's not just something that took place in the therapy room triad of Scottee, Amy and I (and Holly, who filmed it) but was an experience we brought to a packed venue over the course of a month, and to broader audiences online. The depth of discussion that these films represent is intense and I found the work very powerful and rewarding. I feel some grief that it's over! This is the work I want to do.
Do you like the look of this? Please get in touch if you are interested in working with me around fat stuff in a therapeutic way, or for more generic counselling/psychotherapy. I have some face-to-face slots available, and a Skype service coming soon, sign up for my newsletter to find out when. Likewise, if you would like to explore with me how psychotherapy might enhance your community event or performance, drop me a line.
This year I was Hamburger Queen's in-house psychotherapist. What does that mean? In previous years, Scottee entertainingly underwent a series of weight loss challenges. His final diet made him so ill that he decided that another tactic was needed. Instead of focusing on his body, he wanted to think about why he had become fat and made a call-out for psychotherapists to help him answer that question. I'm a qualified, registered, experienced psychotherapist/counsellor and, ahem, have a few ideas about what it is to be fat and queer. I got the gig.
How we did it
In January Scottee, Amy and I did two hour-long sessions in my therapy room in East London. Holly Revell filmed them and Scottee edited them into four little films that were screened each week at Hamburger Queen, and then archived online.
One session with someone can be very transformative but, generally speaking, therapy is about a longer relationship that entails building trust and working things out. Scottee and Amy came to the sessions with pretty clear ideas about what they wanted to say, and I think my role was in facilitating that, having some idea of the contexts that they were talking about, and keeping the discussion tight. For me, it was an odd mix of therapy and performance, with some pedagogy thrown in; we all knew that the work would be made public, and we were somewhat invested in saying certain things.
One of the things that I wanted to show was that psychotherapy can be a really good place to explore this stuff. Few therapists are aware of the complexities of these kinds of issues, certainly not in the UK, where therapy about fat is usually based on an assumption of weight loss and normativity. I also wanted to show what therapy sort of looks like since, in the UK, it's a fairly mystified activity, and often confused with the stigma of mental health treatment. I think psychotherapy is for everyone, whether or not you have problems; it can be bliss to be listened to and understood, to reflect on your life in a supportive place. In addition, I think there is a place for therapy in public, community settings, and Hamburger Queen was an experiment in making that happen. Feedback about the sessions supported this, people who spoke about it said that they found the films very thought-provoking and rich.
Perhaps I barely need to say that this is not usually the way I work. Confidentiality is the bedrock of the service I offer, and cameras or recording devices of any kind, let alone screenings of sessions, or any kind of public discussions, are strictly off-limits. It's been discombobulating to speak so publicly about this work.
Also, I didn't get to see the videos before each week's event, or really prepare anything in advance. I watched them for the first time along with everybody else at the venue. It was difficult to absorb what was going on in a session that had taken place two months previously, say something sound-bitey, not too grim, and coherent about it that made sense to the (somewhat drunk and rowdy) audience, and handle my nerves. My professionalism was at stake too. Talk about pressure!
Broad themes
The presenting issue, and title of the series, was: Why are you fat? Scottee, and presumably Amy, felt that exploring origin stories about their fatness and struggles would lead to further understanding of themselves. For me, the question of why someone is fat is something to question in itself. It's my belief that fat is part of the fabric of humanity and that it doesn't require explaining. Indeed, I suspect that explaining it makes it not normal, or positions it as problematic in relation to thin normativity. Extrapolating this further, problematising fat makes fat people vulnerable to unnecessary normatising interventions. I have written critiques elsewhere of popular feminist accounts of fat origin psychology based on the work of Susie Orbach, Kim Chernin, and others. This is what I think, but I also think that fat people are diverse, and that others will think differently. With this in mind, I was game for exploring this question with Scottee and Amy, I could see that it was important to them.
I think one of the most productive themes in Hamburger Queen is about the messiness of fat identity, and of rejecting orthodoxies around being 'good fatties'. By good fatty I mean the pressure that fat people often feel to refute stereotypes about fatness and to present ourselves as idealised citizens. Some fat activism perpetuates this, and many feel that they cannot live up to such standards and become disillusioned by the movement. So here, in these sessions, the aim was to be authentic to ourselves, to acknowledge both the things that are great about being queer-fat and the more complicated and difficult aspects of it.
Why Are You Fat #1
The first video focussed on childhood, about food, early experiences around dieting, and families. These will be familiar narratives to many of us. Class, sexuality, and gender are part of Scottee and Amy's stories too. Thinking about them as kids in these milieus, I felt that there was quite a bit of confusion and distress at that time, but I was also listening out for evidence of their resilience because I thought that that would offer clues to link the past and the present, and help them find strength in their experiences.
Why Are You Fat #2
Two very different traumatic events were presented in the second video, and together we explored their impact. Both stories are upsetting and there was quite a bit of risk in sharing them publicly, I admire Scottee and Amy for their strength in doing that. I felt that my role was to listen and reflect, and to try and make sense of the underlying feelings around the trauma. When this film was screened at Hamburger Queen, a small number of people laughed, as though it was funny. I called them out on it afterwards, and wrote about that experience: Why do you laugh at the fat people?
Why Are You Fat #3
The themes in this film feel slightly more nebulous but I think they are about Scottee and Amy's resources. Both use the resources that are available to them, for Scottee this is in a sacred self-belief that he is beautiful (he is!), and Amy's resources for feeling more fully embodied came via her celebrity. They talk about on-going struggles with eating and well-being, and had we had more sessions I would have explored some cognitive techniques for helping to manage that stuff, though it's possible that it might always be hard to handle because it is deep set and socially sanctioned in many ways.
My favourite part of this video is when I suggest that Scottee could address his eating problems and let his fatness take care of itself, rather than think about his fat body, which he loves, as problematic evidence of his pathology. In response to this, Scottee asks me "Is it ok for them to be separate?" to which I reply: "I dunno! I'm not the boss of it! I presume so!" This exchange reminds me of the trust and authority that people invest in therapists, which is not necessarily a good thing. I hope my response reminded Scottee that he is the authority of his body, even though that authority is frequently undermined in society in general.
Why Are You Fat #4
I think of this as the fuck you film, the culmination of struggling and questioning and valuing authenticity. The through line has to be "I don't want it to be plus size, I want it to be morbidly obese," which I take to be a very queer rendering of fat, ie one that is anti-social, ambiguous, punk, fucked-up, non-normative, messy, lawless, real and free. Amen!
By the way, can I just say how well these films are edited?! We only had a session each, yet Scottee has created a psychological journey in the four short films. At the screening I tried to bring the session threads together, acknowledging how the past influences the present, how there are tips and tricks you can do to make life easier, but that fat and queer people live in difficult social contexts that have a significant psychological impact. Coming full circle, I urged Scottee and Amy to reflect on their resilience and power again, to look at what they had made. The word 'magnificent' kept coming back to me when I thought about how they put themselves out in the world, about their art, the dialogue they create through their thoughtful, powerful work. I invited them to look around at the sold out house, packed with supporters, and to see that their work is transformative.
Final reflections
These two sessions, the short videos and the screenings at Hamburger Queen were fairly fleeting moments, but they represent a lot of work. It was an amazing privilege to be able to witness Scottee and Amy's journeys, and to facilitate moments of illumination and disclosure. It is incredible to me that we are able to talk about fat and queer life together in this way, that we even have language for these profound life experiences, and that we're able to share them and understand each other, and care for each other too. This didn't happen magically, it's the result of our work. We matter. On top of this, it's not just something that took place in the therapy room triad of Scottee, Amy and I (and Holly, who filmed it) but was an experience we brought to a packed venue over the course of a month, and to broader audiences online. The depth of discussion that these films represent is intense and I found the work very powerful and rewarding. I feel some grief that it's over! This is the work I want to do.
Do you like the look of this? Please get in touch if you are interested in working with me around fat stuff in a therapeutic way, or for more generic counselling/psychotherapy. I have some face-to-face slots available, and a Skype service coming soon, sign up for my newsletter to find out when. Likewise, if you would like to explore with me how psychotherapy might enhance your community event or performance, drop me a line.
26 March 2013
What the straight world could learn from fat lesbians but chooses not to
I'm working on a project at the moment which has entailed looking at data on lesbians and BMI (Body Mass Index, the hugely flawed socio-medical measurement tool that stratifies human body diversity into normal and abnormal/pathological states).
There is quite a lot of data available that correlates lesbians with higher BMI. This is surprising since lesbians are not usually the social group most likely to be invited to play in the petri dish. As research subjects go, lesbians are generally marginal, which means that evidence on issues that particularly affect lesbians is often slim on the ground. If you happen to be a lesbian, it can be difficult to make choices or to know where you stand in relation to certain health and social issues; that is if your choices are based in data.
But when you're talking about BMI, lesbians are the hot new social group in the research world.
Part of the interest in lesbian BMI is that lesbians also have a statistically raised risk of breast cancer, according to published research. This correlation may be significant in cancer research; what is it about lesbians that raises their risk for breast cancer? Can this variable be identified and used to help a broader population? Is the correlation about BMI? (By the way, this isn't a post about whether being a fat lesbian means that you'll get breast cancer, that needs a lot more unpacking than I have space to do here today, but we can certainly talk about it another time). As readers of this blog will know, BMI is a Big Deal in the same way that a cure for cancer is a Big Deal. When something is a Big Deal, research funding gets a lot easier to obtain.
Now lesbian BMI in its own right is the subject of a major research project. Last week The National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the US awarded $1.5 million (about £1m) to find out why lesbians are fat.
What appears to be the big puzzle is that although, statistically, lesbians generally have higher BMI than straight women, they don't seem to care as much about it as heterosexual women, it just doesn't bother lesbians as much. Yes, you read that correctly: there are some women who don't care very much that they're fat! How can it be?! They must be ker-azy! Whatta world!
Various hypotheses have been mooted for this social anomaly in a number of prior research projects, such as – and I paraphrase – lesbians aren't trying to please men and so they just let themselves go; or lesbians are somehow immune because they aren't part of the world of the normals; or lesbians are just weird. These explanations come saturated with stereotyping and are more likely to reveal broader social values and prejudices rather than much that is useful in the data.
There is a lot that is being overlooked here. It's possible that lesbians are more self-accepting of fatness because they are part of communities that have benefitted from 40-odd years of fat feminism. My PhD research tracked how fat feminism travelled through lesbian communities, through friendships and relationships, and through lesbian feminist, and later queer, media and organisations in the 1970s, 80s and 90s. This travelling fat feminism is also the stuff that enabled me to start thinking of my own fat body differently, back in the day. This was a phenomenon that was largely out of the sight of the straight world, though occasionally it surfaced on the Donahue show or, in the UK, with BBC chat-show host Terry Wogan, of all people. But I have evidence about the power of this discourse, shared and developed by peers, how it transformed many people's lives from abjection to social action, and how it continues to influence dynamic possibilities for living well at a higher weight. Lesbians basically invented fat activism, helped establish Health At Every Size and remain prominent within that movement.
Instead of building on this earlier work, learning from lesbian cultures, this new NIH funded project by Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston looks set to try and destroy it (yeah, that's Boston, the home of some incredible fat lesbian activists and women's health pioneers). Their grant description frames lesbians not as heroes who expose the hypocrisy of fat panic, who have offered long-term evidence of low-or-no-cost, risk-free, practical interventions for well-being that could easily be adapted by and for other populations, but as a saddo social group who are "disproportionately affected by the obesity epidemic," which, let's remember is “one of the most critical public health issues affecting the US today”. The use of social justice language to appropriate lesbians into the rhetoric of the obesity epidemic beggars belief. Homophobia is surely part of this story too. Presumably this new research will help return lesbians to the straight and narrow and teach them the errors of their fat-friendly ways.
Edited to add:
I've just read a post by Marcie Bianco, Editorial Director at Velvet Park magazine. She links to this blog post, completely misunderstanding it and twisting it to support her own rendering of obesity epidemic rhetoric with added lesbian. She writes:
I have asked the site to remove the link to my work because I don't want to be associated with fatphobia. I don't endorse what she has written at all. Feel free to write to Velvet Park if you would like to complain or make a comment about this article.
The broader point to be made here, however, is in the erasure of lesbian resistance to obesity discourse, not only in the mainstream, but by lesbians too, many of whom, it seems, have already swallowed the straight and narrow and are cluelessly happy to uphold this rubbish.
References
BBC (1989) Wogan UK: [Television], The London Fat Women's Group.
Bianco, M. (2013) 'Your Bliss Point & Lesbian Obesity', [online], available: http://velvetparkmedia.com/blogs/your-bliss-point-lesbian-obesity [accessed 27 March 2013].
Freespirit, J. (1986) 'doing donahue', Common Lives/Lesbian Lives, 20, 5-14.
Harrington, E. (2013) 'Feds Spend $1.5 Million to Study Why Lesbians Are Fat', [online], available: http://cnsnews.com/news/article/feds-spend-15-million-study-why-lesbians-are-fat [accessed 26 March 2013].
There is quite a lot of data available that correlates lesbians with higher BMI. This is surprising since lesbians are not usually the social group most likely to be invited to play in the petri dish. As research subjects go, lesbians are generally marginal, which means that evidence on issues that particularly affect lesbians is often slim on the ground. If you happen to be a lesbian, it can be difficult to make choices or to know where you stand in relation to certain health and social issues; that is if your choices are based in data.
But when you're talking about BMI, lesbians are the hot new social group in the research world.
Part of the interest in lesbian BMI is that lesbians also have a statistically raised risk of breast cancer, according to published research. This correlation may be significant in cancer research; what is it about lesbians that raises their risk for breast cancer? Can this variable be identified and used to help a broader population? Is the correlation about BMI? (By the way, this isn't a post about whether being a fat lesbian means that you'll get breast cancer, that needs a lot more unpacking than I have space to do here today, but we can certainly talk about it another time). As readers of this blog will know, BMI is a Big Deal in the same way that a cure for cancer is a Big Deal. When something is a Big Deal, research funding gets a lot easier to obtain.
Now lesbian BMI in its own right is the subject of a major research project. Last week The National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the US awarded $1.5 million (about £1m) to find out why lesbians are fat.
What appears to be the big puzzle is that although, statistically, lesbians generally have higher BMI than straight women, they don't seem to care as much about it as heterosexual women, it just doesn't bother lesbians as much. Yes, you read that correctly: there are some women who don't care very much that they're fat! How can it be?! They must be ker-azy! Whatta world!
Various hypotheses have been mooted for this social anomaly in a number of prior research projects, such as – and I paraphrase – lesbians aren't trying to please men and so they just let themselves go; or lesbians are somehow immune because they aren't part of the world of the normals; or lesbians are just weird. These explanations come saturated with stereotyping and are more likely to reveal broader social values and prejudices rather than much that is useful in the data.
There is a lot that is being overlooked here. It's possible that lesbians are more self-accepting of fatness because they are part of communities that have benefitted from 40-odd years of fat feminism. My PhD research tracked how fat feminism travelled through lesbian communities, through friendships and relationships, and through lesbian feminist, and later queer, media and organisations in the 1970s, 80s and 90s. This travelling fat feminism is also the stuff that enabled me to start thinking of my own fat body differently, back in the day. This was a phenomenon that was largely out of the sight of the straight world, though occasionally it surfaced on the Donahue show or, in the UK, with BBC chat-show host Terry Wogan, of all people. But I have evidence about the power of this discourse, shared and developed by peers, how it transformed many people's lives from abjection to social action, and how it continues to influence dynamic possibilities for living well at a higher weight. Lesbians basically invented fat activism, helped establish Health At Every Size and remain prominent within that movement.
Instead of building on this earlier work, learning from lesbian cultures, this new NIH funded project by Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston looks set to try and destroy it (yeah, that's Boston, the home of some incredible fat lesbian activists and women's health pioneers). Their grant description frames lesbians not as heroes who expose the hypocrisy of fat panic, who have offered long-term evidence of low-or-no-cost, risk-free, practical interventions for well-being that could easily be adapted by and for other populations, but as a saddo social group who are "disproportionately affected by the obesity epidemic," which, let's remember is “one of the most critical public health issues affecting the US today”. The use of social justice language to appropriate lesbians into the rhetoric of the obesity epidemic beggars belief. Homophobia is surely part of this story too. Presumably this new research will help return lesbians to the straight and narrow and teach them the errors of their fat-friendly ways.
Edited to add:
I've just read a post by Marcie Bianco, Editorial Director at Velvet Park magazine. She links to this blog post, completely misunderstanding it and twisting it to support her own rendering of obesity epidemic rhetoric with added lesbian. She writes:
As "fat friendly" as our community has become, I think it's time that lesbians really begin to reflect and interrogate their life styles. Our feminism doesn't mean the self-abuse of our bodies, which is what, I think, some people conflate with a "healthy body image." A recent blog over at ObesityTimeBomb explains how lesbians have become "the hot new social group in the research world" because we are statistically fatter than our straight counterparts. Seventy-five percent of us are obese. Overall we have higher BMIs (Body Mass Indexes) than hetero-women, which is one reason why the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is starting a new $1.5mil study to find out why lesbians are fat—correlatively, too, why we have higher rates of breast cancer, as well as some other cancers.
This study is immensely problemmatic for a variety of reasons (who is lesbian or how do we define lesbian being, to my mind, the largest one), and the answer seems obvious (poor diet aggrevates risk of disease/illness), so even I think this is wasteful spending. What would seem a better study might involve researching why queer women overeat—previous sexual abuse? Lesbian Bed Death? depression? other mental health issues stemming from their collective socio-economic condition in a straight, patriarchal world?
At the very least, lesbos, I think we need to reassess our "lesbian body consciousness."
I have asked the site to remove the link to my work because I don't want to be associated with fatphobia. I don't endorse what she has written at all. Feel free to write to Velvet Park if you would like to complain or make a comment about this article.
The broader point to be made here, however, is in the erasure of lesbian resistance to obesity discourse, not only in the mainstream, but by lesbians too, many of whom, it seems, have already swallowed the straight and narrow and are cluelessly happy to uphold this rubbish.
References
BBC (1989) Wogan UK: [Television], The London Fat Women's Group.
Bianco, M. (2013) 'Your Bliss Point & Lesbian Obesity', [online], available: http://velvetparkmedia.com/blogs/your-bliss-point-lesbian-obesity [accessed 27 March 2013].
Freespirit, J. (1986) 'doing donahue', Common Lives/Lesbian Lives, 20, 5-14.
Harrington, E. (2013) 'Feds Spend $1.5 Million to Study Why Lesbians Are Fat', [online], available: http://cnsnews.com/news/article/feds-spend-15-million-study-why-lesbians-are-fat [accessed 26 March 2013].
22 March 2013
Hamburger Queen - Why Are You Fat?
The third Hamburger Queen therapy video is now online. Scottee has a revelation and Amy Lamé talks about her experience of Celebrity Fit Club in more depth.
This is what face-to-face therapy with me looks like, sort of, though I don't film regular sessions, it's not shared with anyone, and you won't have a light shining right in your face. Get in touch if it looks like something you'd like to do, and tell your friends too.
This is what face-to-face therapy with me looks like, sort of, though I don't film regular sessions, it's not shared with anyone, and you won't have a light shining right in your face. Get in touch if it looks like something you'd like to do, and tell your friends too.
18 March 2013
Dr Charlotte Cooper Psychotherapy is Now Accepting Clients
I have a new website at www.charlottecooper.net feel free to have a poke around.
As you can see from the website, I am now accepting clients as a Counsellor/Psychotherapist. More services will be added soon, including some that are more specifically to do with fat, but for now here is the deal for regular therapy. Please tell everyone you know about this.
Having my own therapy practice is a long-held dream of mine.
By the end of the 1980s when I was in my early 20s I was in a sad state, having survived a childhood where there was abuse and neglect at times, and having witnessed the deaths of my mother and brother in quick succession. I sought therapy to help me but found doors closed because I had no income and couldn't pay for anything. I got turned down by an agency, the only place to offer free therapy for young people that I knew of at that time. They referred me to a psychiatrist, whom I met once in a dismal hospital room and cried whilst he took notes on me dispassionately. I never went back and I still think how easy it would have been for me to get channelled into the mental health system when I was so vulnerable, when all I really needed was for someone to listen because I was so completely and appropriately depressed.
I struggled on by myself, and got involved in community organising, which helped. I thought that knowing more about therapy would help me find a way both of getting help and of helping others, so I took an introductory evening class at The City Lit, where I was taught by a great teacher. Later, I met someone who was in similar straits to me, and we devised something we called co-counselling, which I now know is different to the theoretical model offered by the co-counselling movement. We met weekly and took turns in listening to each other talk in confidence about things that bothered us. This went on for a couple of years and was pivotal in enabling me to articulate some of what I'd been through, and to deepen my knowledge about mental health.
In 2004 I injured my back and was laid up. This gave me time to think about my life and to make some plans for the future. I decided to go back to Uni to learn how to be a psychotherapist because I felt that my work in this area was unfinished. I managed to get onto a Postgraduate Diploma course at the University of East London. Many people apply for this course, so I felt delighted to have been chosen. My place was deferred for a year, but in 2006 I started and later I graduated with hundreds of hours of teaching and practise under my belt, a long-term volunteer placement in an award-winning agency for LGBT people in East London, and a distinction. I would have gone on to do the MA, but I got an offer of a PhD scholarship, and I knew this was an opportunity that I could not refuse or delay. So I went and did that, knowing that I would want to come back to the therapy some day.
Now it is 2013, I am Dr Charlotte, and I am more than ready to get stuck in. I kept my professional credentials up to date during my PhD and never let go of my interest in therapy, even though my research and academic work took me to other kinds of places. Sometimes there was friction: my supervisor freaked out, and never really got over it, when I said that I sometimes felt like a child at the hands of some unforgiving parents, my metaphor for being a PhD student in the university system. This kind of metaphorical knowing, and the expression of feelings like this, are bread and butter to psychotherapy, but not this guy's brand of sociology! On the other hand, I think my sociological work segues really well into the therapy, it offers an understanding of the social context in which people's problems, and their potential solutions, are situated. I certainly feel that my practice is all the richer for having this knowledge.
So I am open and available to work with people as a counsellor/psychotherapist. I'm really excited and hopeful about this, I think there is potential for some really great work to happen, and I certainly see the work of therapy as linked to the work of broader social change. There are a bunch of FAQs over on the site that give more details about how and where I work. If this sounds like something you'd like to do, please get in touch either via mail@charlottecooper.net or the contact page on my website. Similarly, if you know someone who is looking for a therapist, please mention me to them.
15 March 2013
Why do you laugh at the fat people?
Hamburger Queen is well underway and last night's show was electrifying.
As regular readers will know, this season I am honoured to serve as Hamburger Queen's in-house psychotherapist. I really honour the work that Scottee and Amy have done with these sessions. I think the complexity they bring to the question of fat identity, and their sheer realness about it, is very powerful. It makes space for other people in the world who can't live up to the nonsense poster queen myth of the perfect fat activist. I will be doing a bigger round-up sometime soon, but for now I want to talk about something that happened last night.
In Why Are You Fat? #2, both Scottee and Amy Lamé recount difficult and painful moments in their lives, which they think have a significant bearing on why they are fat.
Hamburger Queen is a riotous affair, people are drinking, and this video presented a dramatic change in mood. There are some good lines, but I don't think of this video as funny at all. The stories are about fear, panic, vulnerability, shame. What's funny about that? Not much, not anything. Yet a small clutch of people in the audience laughed, they laughed throughout, even at the most difficult disclosures.
Fat people experience hatred in many forms. Sometimes it's pity, other times prurience. It can be physical, it can take the form of name-calling or physical assaults. But mostly it's more subtle, like the systematic denial that we are even people that plays out in a thousand daily micro-aggressions. But laughter, that's a headfuck, to use the official terminology.
To be laughed at when you are disclosing deep trauma that has been compounded by shame is a particular kind of violence against the self that is profoundly disturbing. It says, to me, "everything you are is a joke, there is nothing of substance about you, your deepest pain is a triviality." It's the laughter of annihilation.
I found the laughter last night shocking, but not surprising, it's a depressingly familiar experience. Fat people are supposed to be funny. Being funny is a survival strategy for many of us, and a lot of famous fat people got that way because they had a knack for being hilarious. I suppose what we witnessed last night was a shadow side to this jolly stereotype.
But being able to turn the laughter around is a powerful weapon against hate. I try and do that with my own activism, and Hamburger Queen is a weekly masterclass in this tactic. Last night it was the fatsos not the laughers who called the shots. When you're in a room full of people – of all sizes too! – who love their fat friends, love fat spectacle, love being together, it makes it easier to see that the ones who are laughing inappropriately are probably doing so because their minds are being blown and they don't know how else to cope but gibber helplessly. When you're in a room of people who want to see fat people thrive, and are appalled by the people who laugh at us meanly, it makes it easier to call out a small group of thoughtless people. So we called them out and they stopped laughing.
As regular readers will know, this season I am honoured to serve as Hamburger Queen's in-house psychotherapist. I really honour the work that Scottee and Amy have done with these sessions. I think the complexity they bring to the question of fat identity, and their sheer realness about it, is very powerful. It makes space for other people in the world who can't live up to the nonsense poster queen myth of the perfect fat activist. I will be doing a bigger round-up sometime soon, but for now I want to talk about something that happened last night.
In Why Are You Fat? #2, both Scottee and Amy Lamé recount difficult and painful moments in their lives, which they think have a significant bearing on why they are fat.
Hamburger Queen is a riotous affair, people are drinking, and this video presented a dramatic change in mood. There are some good lines, but I don't think of this video as funny at all. The stories are about fear, panic, vulnerability, shame. What's funny about that? Not much, not anything. Yet a small clutch of people in the audience laughed, they laughed throughout, even at the most difficult disclosures.
Fat people experience hatred in many forms. Sometimes it's pity, other times prurience. It can be physical, it can take the form of name-calling or physical assaults. But mostly it's more subtle, like the systematic denial that we are even people that plays out in a thousand daily micro-aggressions. But laughter, that's a headfuck, to use the official terminology.
To be laughed at when you are disclosing deep trauma that has been compounded by shame is a particular kind of violence against the self that is profoundly disturbing. It says, to me, "everything you are is a joke, there is nothing of substance about you, your deepest pain is a triviality." It's the laughter of annihilation.
I found the laughter last night shocking, but not surprising, it's a depressingly familiar experience. Fat people are supposed to be funny. Being funny is a survival strategy for many of us, and a lot of famous fat people got that way because they had a knack for being hilarious. I suppose what we witnessed last night was a shadow side to this jolly stereotype.
But being able to turn the laughter around is a powerful weapon against hate. I try and do that with my own activism, and Hamburger Queen is a weekly masterclass in this tactic. Last night it was the fatsos not the laughers who called the shots. When you're in a room full of people – of all sizes too! – who love their fat friends, love fat spectacle, love being together, it makes it easier to see that the ones who are laughing inappropriately are probably doing so because their minds are being blown and they don't know how else to cope but gibber helplessly. When you're in a room of people who want to see fat people thrive, and are appalled by the people who laugh at us meanly, it makes it easier to call out a small group of thoughtless people. So we called them out and they stopped laughing.
11 March 2013
Fat Talks Back at WOW2013
This year, WOW bit the bullet and invited a bunch of us to do a panel on fat. Corinna Tomrley chaired, and I participated, alongside Isha Reid and Caroline Walters. We called the panel Fat Talks Back because of the history in mainstream feminism of marginalising fat within broader discussions of 'body image,' 'beauty,' 'dieting' and so on. We thought of the space as an opportunity to speak for ourselves.
I know the hard-working organisers had no intention of pushing us to the back, and they made every effort to make space for us, but I also had a sneaky giggle to myself because the room was in quite an obscure place in the building, and I was reminded of how the fat clothes are always pushed to the back of the shop. This made it especially delightful that we packed out the room. I don't know the exact figures but I think over 100 came, and it was standing/squatting room only.
Corinna organised the panel so that the three of us gave prepared answers to three questions:
- What is fat activism for you or, how does your fat activism manifest itself for you?
- Mainstream discussions about fat and size tend to focus on the concept of ‘skinny’ vs the ‘average-sized UK woman’ (apparently size 14-16): what does this mean for fat activism? And women who are bigger than a size 16?
- How/does fatness and feminism intersect for you?
Our answers were pretty diverse and reflected our interests: Isha in fatshion and blogging; Caroline in teaching and academic life; me in fat feminism and activism, and psychotherapy. I was glad of this because I think there's a temptation to try and simplify the experience of being fat, or an activist, to single narratives, when actually there are many different ways of expressing this stuff.
After this, we answered some questions from the floor. If I had a penny for every time questions from the floor start with "Yes, but is it healthy?" I would be richer than Croesus. It's especially bewildering when health has not been a part of the previous discussion. It's as though talking about fat can only ever be a discussion about health and, even then, a discussion of how fat can't really be healthy, with the subtext that we must be deluding ourselves. Am I frustrated about this? Yes. There is a lot more to be said about fat and feminism than "Yes, but is it healthy?"
My favourite question came at the end; someone asked about the emphasis being put on thin privilege within fat activism. I answered that I thought this was a shame, that you often come across fat activism that focuses on how terrible it is being fat. I think being fat is often terrible, but that activism is about joy, power, strength, making lives liveable.
The session lasted an hour, and there was so much more that could have been said. From the quiet and respectful audience, the packed room, the comments and discussion afterwards, I really got a sense that people were hungry for this stuff and wanted to talk more, but perhaps didn't know where to start, such has been the overwhelming silencing effect of obesity epidemic rhetoric in the last ten years or so.
You can watch the session here, in the WOW YouTube channel. There are technical issues in the first minute or so, but the rest of it looks fine.
Meanwhile, check out some pics on the Fat Talks Back event page, read Isha's round-up, and visit the Storify. By the way, the image comes from the gorgeous drawn minutes of the festival, but I can't find any more information about this project.
09 March 2013
Watch a talk about fat, feminism, activism and research
A bunch of us were invited by Dr Geneva Murray, the Director of the Women's Center at the University of Wisconsin in Oshkosh, to talk about feminism, research and activism for International Women's Day. We did this via a Google Hangout, it was really exciting to meet, talk and present like this, despite the technical challenges.
You can watch the event here: International Women's Day Hangout.
You can watch the event here: International Women's Day Hangout.
08 March 2013
Hamburger Queen: Why Are You Fat? #1
Last night was the first of this year's Hamburger Queen happenings, and it was bloody brilliant.
As previously announced, I am serving as the Hamburger Queen in-house psychotherapist in 2013. This involved a couple of sessions with Scottee and Amy Lamé where they spilled their guts and we filmed the results.
The first of the four Hamburger Queen 2013 therapy videos is now online and it's all about childhood and food. That's me in the therapist's chair.
Why Are You Fat? #1
As previously announced, I am serving as the Hamburger Queen in-house psychotherapist in 2013. This involved a couple of sessions with Scottee and Amy Lamé where they spilled their guts and we filmed the results.
The first of the four Hamburger Queen 2013 therapy videos is now online and it's all about childhood and food. That's me in the therapist's chair.
Why Are You Fat? #1
05 March 2013
Trademarking Health At Every Size
The Journal of Critical Dietetics has just published an article I co-authored with Jacqui Gingras called 'Down the Rabbit Hole: A Critique of the ® in HAES®'.The article came about through discussions of what it meant that the Association for Size Diversity and Health (ASDAH) had trademarked the concepts Health At Every Size, and HAES.
As activists and scholars, we wanted to raise difficult and impertinent questions about who owns the movement, and about who watches the watchers. We have offered this paper as a means of creating dialogue about the trademarking. I think it also has relevance for discussions about professionalisation within grassroots social justice movements.
Critical Dietetics is an open access journal. This means that you don't have to pay to read the articles, although you do need to register on the site to access them (the other articles in this issue are really good too!). Go to the journal page to register and download the article (link at the beginning of this post). There is also space to comment on the Critical Dietetics blog.
Gingras, J. and Cooper, C. (2013) 'Down the Rabbit Hole: A Critique of the ® in HAES®', Journal of Critical Dietetics, 1(3), 2-5.
26 February 2013
Documenting anti-fat street harassment
When I talk to people who have no idea about fat politics, the thing that they most fixate on, after "but is it healthy?" is the fact of street harassment. They usually express a great deal of shock that fat people get stared at, spat at, shouted at, touched, followed, photographed, attacked, and laughed at by strangers in the street. This isn't some abstract fatty I'm conjuring here, these things have happened, and continue to happen, to me too.
Street harassment really touches a nerve. Never mind that many of us also experience harassment from our partners, families, friends, colleagues, people serving us in shops or restaurants – and that we also harass ourselves! You can almost see people's brain cogs whirring into action when you tell them about it: "Must.. not… get… fat… not just ugly and unhealthy… but… street… harassment… too."
Sometimes I get the feeling that the shock is a little overdone, it's hard to believe that they have so little clue about what it is to be hated, but there it is. The converation ususally ends with me being pitied. This is the point at which I realise that we have little left to discuss because, as disabled activists have shown, pity is not much better than hate, if you're trying to get someone to treat you as a proper living person.
Accounts of harassment in fat activism are as old as the movement itself but, apparently, they have made little impact on the world in general. NAAFA (National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance) was founded with a remit against harassment, and there are numerous accounts of it by the fat feminists of the 1970s and 1980s. My book, Fat & Proud, published 15 years ago, also documents the phenomenon extensively. Anecdotal evidence suggests that many fat people suffer with agoraphobia, which isn't much of a surprise in this context. It's not as if fat people are keeping this stuff to themselves, we are outraged about it.
Now a new wave of activists and artists are trying to show what it's like to be a fat person who leaves the house. Haley Morris-Cafiero is a photographer whose project Wait Watchers documents those oh-so-familiar stares that pass in a fleeting moment and are tricky to explain to people who are not on the receiving end of them. Kath from Fat Heffalump produced her own version of these photographs, demonstrating that Haley's experience is not unique. Substantia Jones, whose fat photo-activism with The Adipositivity Project is legendary, has recently launched Smile, Sizeist! The tagline goes: "Next time someone's a dick to you about your size, raise your most powerful weapons. Your voice and your camera." She presents sometimes harrowing photographic evidence of the violent effect of anti-obesity rhetoric in everyday lives.
These fat art and activism interventions bring to mind other projects concerned with transforming power in street harassment. The appalling case of the woman killed after being raped on a bus in Delhi has further mobilised groups of activists against the continuing assault of women and girls in public spaces, for example. Elsewhere, Hollaback! was founded in 2005 and now has numerous chapters around the world. It's mission is simple, to end street harassment. Originally a project about sexist harassment, Hollaback! now addresses other forms of harassment and is a ripe contender for collaborative work around anti-fat street abuse in the West, in my humble opinion.
When fat people seize the power inherent to our own gaze and turn it outwards, we repudiate the cruelty directed towards us, we refuse to be transformed into passive objects and we claim our humanity. Whether or not the normals will take any notice of this and move beyond a patronising pity of us into action that helps prevent harassment remains to be seen. I am concerned that those documenting harassment should tread carefully around revenge. I have written elsewhere of my reticence about Bash Back, for example, and I think fighting violence with violence only escalates matters. But it is crucial that we record and witness these incidents for ourselves at least, and remind each other that we are not alone. If we can do it collectively, with style, across intersections, then all the better.
Street harassment really touches a nerve. Never mind that many of us also experience harassment from our partners, families, friends, colleagues, people serving us in shops or restaurants – and that we also harass ourselves! You can almost see people's brain cogs whirring into action when you tell them about it: "Must.. not… get… fat… not just ugly and unhealthy… but… street… harassment… too."
Sometimes I get the feeling that the shock is a little overdone, it's hard to believe that they have so little clue about what it is to be hated, but there it is. The converation ususally ends with me being pitied. This is the point at which I realise that we have little left to discuss because, as disabled activists have shown, pity is not much better than hate, if you're trying to get someone to treat you as a proper living person.
Accounts of harassment in fat activism are as old as the movement itself but, apparently, they have made little impact on the world in general. NAAFA (National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance) was founded with a remit against harassment, and there are numerous accounts of it by the fat feminists of the 1970s and 1980s. My book, Fat & Proud, published 15 years ago, also documents the phenomenon extensively. Anecdotal evidence suggests that many fat people suffer with agoraphobia, which isn't much of a surprise in this context. It's not as if fat people are keeping this stuff to themselves, we are outraged about it.
Now a new wave of activists and artists are trying to show what it's like to be a fat person who leaves the house. Haley Morris-Cafiero is a photographer whose project Wait Watchers documents those oh-so-familiar stares that pass in a fleeting moment and are tricky to explain to people who are not on the receiving end of them. Kath from Fat Heffalump produced her own version of these photographs, demonstrating that Haley's experience is not unique. Substantia Jones, whose fat photo-activism with The Adipositivity Project is legendary, has recently launched Smile, Sizeist! The tagline goes: "Next time someone's a dick to you about your size, raise your most powerful weapons. Your voice and your camera." She presents sometimes harrowing photographic evidence of the violent effect of anti-obesity rhetoric in everyday lives.
These fat art and activism interventions bring to mind other projects concerned with transforming power in street harassment. The appalling case of the woman killed after being raped on a bus in Delhi has further mobilised groups of activists against the continuing assault of women and girls in public spaces, for example. Elsewhere, Hollaback! was founded in 2005 and now has numerous chapters around the world. It's mission is simple, to end street harassment. Originally a project about sexist harassment, Hollaback! now addresses other forms of harassment and is a ripe contender for collaborative work around anti-fat street abuse in the West, in my humble opinion.
When fat people seize the power inherent to our own gaze and turn it outwards, we repudiate the cruelty directed towards us, we refuse to be transformed into passive objects and we claim our humanity. Whether or not the normals will take any notice of this and move beyond a patronising pity of us into action that helps prevent harassment remains to be seen. I am concerned that those documenting harassment should tread carefully around revenge. I have written elsewhere of my reticence about Bash Back, for example, and I think fighting violence with violence only escalates matters. But it is crucial that we record and witness these incidents for ourselves at least, and remind each other that we are not alone. If we can do it collectively, with style, across intersections, then all the better.
21 February 2013
NOLOSE 2013 Announced
Preliminary details for NOLOSE 2013 have just been released. NOLOSE is a unique gathering in the US that has emerged from the fat feminist movement. Historically a lesbian event, the conference is now open to people of all genders and retains a queer and trans sensibility.
NOLOSE 2013 will take place in Portland, Oregon, 19-21 July. Visit the NOLOSE website for more details. Registration opens on 1 March, and there are many opportunities for volunteering.
Survival of the Fattest is this year's theme. This is all about sharing skills and info, and also about: "passing the mic to superfat folks, who bear the burden of so many other NOLOSErs' fears and anxieties, and who so often get left behind when fatties try to prove we're 'just like everyone else.'"
NOLOSE is a pretty amazing experience. But getting to Portland in July is likely to be a bit of a trial for many. There are three Financial Assistance funds available, to which people can now apply. Of particular interest to readers of this blog might be the 12 scholarships covering registration costs to people from groups underrepresented at NOLOSE, including those from outside of the US and North America.
NOLOSE 2013 will take place in Portland, Oregon, 19-21 July. Visit the NOLOSE website for more details. Registration opens on 1 March, and there are many opportunities for volunteering.
Survival of the Fattest is this year's theme. This is all about sharing skills and info, and also about: "passing the mic to superfat folks, who bear the burden of so many other NOLOSErs' fears and anxieties, and who so often get left behind when fatties try to prove we're 'just like everyone else.'"
NOLOSE is a pretty amazing experience. But getting to Portland in July is likely to be a bit of a trial for many. There are three Financial Assistance funds available, to which people can now apply. Of particular interest to readers of this blog might be the 12 scholarships covering registration costs to people from groups underrepresented at NOLOSE, including those from outside of the US and North America.
18 February 2013
My Guardian article on Fat Panic and Fat Activism
The Guardian has published my piece about the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges' report on obesity, which came out today with a slew of headless fatties plastered all over the media.
There's no need for this obesity epidemic hysteria
If you want to see more articles like this in the news, please consider writing to the editor and telling them how much you like my work, and how the paper should get on board with more critical work on obesity.
Edited to add: look, they put me on the front page, my whole name and all. I drew a ring around it because I can. How come Tim Lobstein gets to be called Dr and I don't?!
There's no need for this obesity epidemic hysteria
If you want to see more articles like this in the news, please consider writing to the editor and telling them how much you like my work, and how the paper should get on board with more critical work on obesity.
Edited to add: look, they put me on the front page, my whole name and all. I drew a ring around it because I can. How come Tim Lobstein gets to be called Dr and I don't?!
15 February 2013
Fat Talks Back at WOW in London
A bunch of us are going to be on a panel about fat at the Women of the World Festival (aka WOW) in London on 10 March.
More details to come, but here's what we've got so far:
Fat Talks Back
Charlotte Cooper, Caroline Walters, Stacy Bias and maybe others to be confirmed, chaired by Corinna Tomrley.
Sunday 10 March, 12-1pm.
Women of the World Festival, 6-10 March 2013.
Edited to add:
For reasons I don't understand, this post has attracted more than the usual amount of hate mail and spam. This one is the best of the bunch: "Totally agree with all these. Unfortunately, I have met men who have had all of these traits. I am by nature a pleaser and love giving to my partner, but have learned to back off a bit and reserve that for the mn who is deserving and not selfish. When a man is really into pleasing me, it makes me want to please him even more, and it's a win-win for everyone!"
Good for you, sexy lover, are you coming to the WOW fat panel?!
More details to come, but here's what we've got so far:
Fat Talks Back
Charlotte Cooper, Caroline Walters, Stacy Bias and maybe others to be confirmed, chaired by Corinna Tomrley.
Sunday 10 March, 12-1pm.
Women of the World Festival, 6-10 March 2013.
Edited to add:
For reasons I don't understand, this post has attracted more than the usual amount of hate mail and spam. This one is the best of the bunch: "Totally agree with all these. Unfortunately, I have met men who have had all of these traits. I am by nature a pleaser and love giving to my partner, but have learned to back off a bit and reserve that for the mn who is deserving and not selfish. When a man is really into pleasing me, it makes me want to please him even more, and it's a win-win for everyone!"
Good for you, sexy lover, are you coming to the WOW fat panel?!
11 February 2013
Radical people and their fatphobia
Back in August last year, I had a testy interaction with someone on Facebook about something they did that I thought reeked of fat hate.
The Real Art of Protest (TRAP) is a Facebook group dedicated to reposting protest images. Their About page states that they will ban users for racism, sexism, comments offensive to those who are LGBT, ableism, trolling, using personal insults and justifying the existence of fascist organisations. Very honourable. They're a popular page.
But in August I started to see them reposting an image. Of course now I can't find it! Perhaps they quietly took it down when no one was looking. Hmm, an apology would have gone a long way too. Anyway, the image included a fat kid, junk food, and the Olympic stadium. It was a visual comment trying to make a point about McDonald's corporate sponsorship of the Olympics, implying that one of the Games' legacies would be the production of more fat kids. I haven't been able to find the originator of this image, and TRAP doesn't always give out that information. I left a comment immediately saying why I thought this image was a mistake, and then I sent TRAP a message about it inviting dialogue about the picture. I also wanted to talk to them about their use of imagery relating to fat capitalists, but we never got that far. The full transcript of the exchange is below.
I've been wanting to make a blog post out of this exchange for a while but I couldn't get a handle on it. Mostly I was angry about having my careful comments dismissed in such a patronising and cavalier way. But there were other themes that bothered me, and which couldn't be contained in a neat narrative for a blog post. Instead of waiting for inspiration to strike, I thought I'd just go ahead and write a messy post all about it. Not everything can be neatly storyfied after all, life is messy.
One of the themes is about the continuing failure of the radical Left to consider other forms of liberation politics, especially things that could be thought of as fringe, including fat stuff. The use of headless fatties and the language of fat hate was not confined to the mainstream, particularly during the Olympics in London, where I live. It was also included in radical spaces. The Olympics brought with it a giant, overwhelming rhetoric of patriotic groupthink, it was like an invasion of the pod people. Critics of this moment were few and far between, or at least their voices were barely represented anywhere. To be a critic of the Olympics was to be politically radical, yet here were radicals capitalising on fatphobia.
It would be churlish to expect everyone to know about fat politics, but what shocked me was how I was shut down when I called them on their depiction of fatness. This was in a context where they had posted other images that supposedly supported embodied liberation, and where their About page specifically mentioned ableism, which has a lot to do with how embodied difference is culturally positioned in negative ways. It felt really hypocritical to me, that some forms of resistance are acceptable, and others not, and that TRAP were unwilling to adopt a critical view of this stuff.
Another theme was the insistence that fat has nothing to do with politics, it just is, and it should be eliminated. I'm still staggered by this! The denial that fat has a political dimension, by people interested in politics, just amazes me.
This makes me think about other fatphobes who have some radical politics and know that they can’t talk shit about fat. What they do is dismiss fat politics in other ways. X implies that fat activism isn’t queer or feminist. Y implies that it is a white person’s thing. Z describes it as a hipster fad that's out of touch with real people's experiences of health or embodiment. None of them have done their homework but they arrogantly assume that they don’t have to. Their voices are influential within their subcultures and the lie continues that fat activism is conservative, rigid, limited, not worth bothering with. Fat is always trivial, secondary, not real.
The exchange brought into light the difficulty of speaking about fat. I'm lucky in that people often want me to talk about this stuff, but it reminded me of what it's like to speak into a vacuum, to people who have no concept of your framework. Sometimes this can bring up funny and even fruitful mismatches in discourse; for example, I enjoy listening to the fatphobe who's really interested in what I'm saying but is bound to a way of thinking about fat that can't really encompass my perspective. How they struggle! But then there are exchanges like this, where I might as well be speaking Martian, and where what I am saying cannot be at all tolerated. The silencing is really chilling, as is the automatic assumption in the exchange by the other person that they must be right.
Anyway, here is the transcript from the exchange, for your reading pleasure. I think of it as a little example of fatphobic micro-aggression. If you're fat and you want to talk about it it's likely that you've experienced many occasions like these. It's also a reminder of how profoundly fat politics threatens people.
1 August 2012
08.30
Charlotte Cooper
Dear TRAP,
Stop using images of fat people to promote ideas of greed, laziness, ill-health, capitalism. This is fatphobia. Your About page says that you will not tolerate ableism, so why bash a demographic that is closely associated with the most impoverished people around (want stats about how fat people in the West are more likely to be poor, older women of colour? I can send them). Not only impoverished, but a group of people that are subjected to the most egregious daily discrimination and stigma (again, I can send you data if you want it), that images like the ones you have produced do nothing to address.
The left, including the revolutionary left, has a dismal history of using the imagery of fat to denote corporate greed and the downfall of the world, and this has to change.
Here are some links that might help you understand a bit more why your headless fatty McDonalds picture is bullshit, and why you should apologise for it and get on board with radical fat activism.
http://obesitytimebomb.blogspot.co.uk/2011/11/stereotyping-fat-and-capitalism.html
http://obesitytimebomb.blogspot.co.uk/2011/05/how-left-failed-fat.html
http://obesitytimebomb.blogspot.co.uk/2011/10/progressive-enlightened-anti-capitalist.html
http://obesitytimebomb.blogspot.co.uk/2011/08/stereotyping-fat-in-visual-language-of.html
http://www.charlottecooper.net/docs/fat/headless_fatties.htm
You want radical images of fat that relate to the Olympics? I live in E15, in the shadow of the beast. Check out our community project, the Fattylympics:
http://fattylympics.blogspot.co.uk/
http://www.gamesmonitor.org.uk/node/1647
Charlotte
16:14
TRAP - The Real Art of Protest
the imagery is a dig at corporations and not people as is the only interpretation of that image taken as a whole with the text and the corporate logos of the olympics largest sponsors. The lead off from unhealthy food is obesity and therefore the image will not be removed or rendered. Sorry, but you are being hypersensitive.
16:15
Charlotte Cooper
Did you read the links?
16:23
TRAP - The Real Art of Protest
If you knew anything about the page you would know we have CONSISTENTLY attacked corporations with regard to the olympics. The only individuals who we attack are politicians, corporate spokespersons and royalty i.e. the enemy.
16:26
Charlotte Cooper
Yes, I get that, and I applaud it, I am no supporter of the Olympics, I live close to the Olympic Park and am disgusted by it, the corporate intrusion into East London is deplorable. But did you read the links I posted? Perhaps we could have a discussion about the use of headless fatty imagery, for example.
Also, "The lead off from unhealthy food is obesity" actually, this is not necessarily true. Would you like to talk about this?
16:41
TRAP - The Real Art of Protest
Not really, we are already very mindful of the nuances of our posts and do not need educating on sensitive activism. We take your input seriously and can assure you we will access your links and review our own processes. Thanks for the links and thanks for your input - it is appreciated.
16:49
Charlotte Cooper
Actually, you have been anything but sensitive on this issue. You are out of touch on the fat stuff, and your use of fat bodies is insulting and problematic. This is not just me being 'hypersensitive'. I am offering you an opportunity to develop your understanding of fat politics, and to understand how it intersects with disability rights, queer politics, anti-capitalism, and to develop shit hot activism that takes this stuff into account. I am a world expert on this stuff, widely published and respected around the world. I'm not talking out of my arse. But you are giving me the brush-off. This does not look like appreciation to me, it looks like arrogance. You don't want free knowledge? Your loss. Continue producing images that crap all over a demographic of people who don't need your shit, continue alienating people who could otherwise be supporting you.
The Real Art of Protest (TRAP) is a Facebook group dedicated to reposting protest images. Their About page states that they will ban users for racism, sexism, comments offensive to those who are LGBT, ableism, trolling, using personal insults and justifying the existence of fascist organisations. Very honourable. They're a popular page.
But in August I started to see them reposting an image. Of course now I can't find it! Perhaps they quietly took it down when no one was looking. Hmm, an apology would have gone a long way too. Anyway, the image included a fat kid, junk food, and the Olympic stadium. It was a visual comment trying to make a point about McDonald's corporate sponsorship of the Olympics, implying that one of the Games' legacies would be the production of more fat kids. I haven't been able to find the originator of this image, and TRAP doesn't always give out that information. I left a comment immediately saying why I thought this image was a mistake, and then I sent TRAP a message about it inviting dialogue about the picture. I also wanted to talk to them about their use of imagery relating to fat capitalists, but we never got that far. The full transcript of the exchange is below.
I've been wanting to make a blog post out of this exchange for a while but I couldn't get a handle on it. Mostly I was angry about having my careful comments dismissed in such a patronising and cavalier way. But there were other themes that bothered me, and which couldn't be contained in a neat narrative for a blog post. Instead of waiting for inspiration to strike, I thought I'd just go ahead and write a messy post all about it. Not everything can be neatly storyfied after all, life is messy.
One of the themes is about the continuing failure of the radical Left to consider other forms of liberation politics, especially things that could be thought of as fringe, including fat stuff. The use of headless fatties and the language of fat hate was not confined to the mainstream, particularly during the Olympics in London, where I live. It was also included in radical spaces. The Olympics brought with it a giant, overwhelming rhetoric of patriotic groupthink, it was like an invasion of the pod people. Critics of this moment were few and far between, or at least their voices were barely represented anywhere. To be a critic of the Olympics was to be politically radical, yet here were radicals capitalising on fatphobia.
It would be churlish to expect everyone to know about fat politics, but what shocked me was how I was shut down when I called them on their depiction of fatness. This was in a context where they had posted other images that supposedly supported embodied liberation, and where their About page specifically mentioned ableism, which has a lot to do with how embodied difference is culturally positioned in negative ways. It felt really hypocritical to me, that some forms of resistance are acceptable, and others not, and that TRAP were unwilling to adopt a critical view of this stuff.
Another theme was the insistence that fat has nothing to do with politics, it just is, and it should be eliminated. I'm still staggered by this! The denial that fat has a political dimension, by people interested in politics, just amazes me.
This makes me think about other fatphobes who have some radical politics and know that they can’t talk shit about fat. What they do is dismiss fat politics in other ways. X implies that fat activism isn’t queer or feminist. Y implies that it is a white person’s thing. Z describes it as a hipster fad that's out of touch with real people's experiences of health or embodiment. None of them have done their homework but they arrogantly assume that they don’t have to. Their voices are influential within their subcultures and the lie continues that fat activism is conservative, rigid, limited, not worth bothering with. Fat is always trivial, secondary, not real.
The exchange brought into light the difficulty of speaking about fat. I'm lucky in that people often want me to talk about this stuff, but it reminded me of what it's like to speak into a vacuum, to people who have no concept of your framework. Sometimes this can bring up funny and even fruitful mismatches in discourse; for example, I enjoy listening to the fatphobe who's really interested in what I'm saying but is bound to a way of thinking about fat that can't really encompass my perspective. How they struggle! But then there are exchanges like this, where I might as well be speaking Martian, and where what I am saying cannot be at all tolerated. The silencing is really chilling, as is the automatic assumption in the exchange by the other person that they must be right.
Anyway, here is the transcript from the exchange, for your reading pleasure. I think of it as a little example of fatphobic micro-aggression. If you're fat and you want to talk about it it's likely that you've experienced many occasions like these. It's also a reminder of how profoundly fat politics threatens people.
1 August 2012
08.30
Charlotte Cooper
Dear TRAP,
Stop using images of fat people to promote ideas of greed, laziness, ill-health, capitalism. This is fatphobia. Your About page says that you will not tolerate ableism, so why bash a demographic that is closely associated with the most impoverished people around (want stats about how fat people in the West are more likely to be poor, older women of colour? I can send them). Not only impoverished, but a group of people that are subjected to the most egregious daily discrimination and stigma (again, I can send you data if you want it), that images like the ones you have produced do nothing to address.
The left, including the revolutionary left, has a dismal history of using the imagery of fat to denote corporate greed and the downfall of the world, and this has to change.
Here are some links that might help you understand a bit more why your headless fatty McDonalds picture is bullshit, and why you should apologise for it and get on board with radical fat activism.
http://obesitytimebomb.blogspot.co.uk/2011/11/stereotyping-fat-and-capitalism.html
http://obesitytimebomb.blogspot.co.uk/2011/05/how-left-failed-fat.html
http://obesitytimebomb.blogspot.co.uk/2011/10/progressive-enlightened-anti-capitalist.html
http://obesitytimebomb.blogspot.co.uk/2011/08/stereotyping-fat-in-visual-language-of.html
http://www.charlottecooper.net/docs/fat/headless_fatties.htm
You want radical images of fat that relate to the Olympics? I live in E15, in the shadow of the beast. Check out our community project, the Fattylympics:
http://fattylympics.blogspot.co.uk/
http://www.gamesmonitor.org.uk/node/1647
Charlotte
16:14
TRAP - The Real Art of Protest
the imagery is a dig at corporations and not people as is the only interpretation of that image taken as a whole with the text and the corporate logos of the olympics largest sponsors. The lead off from unhealthy food is obesity and therefore the image will not be removed or rendered. Sorry, but you are being hypersensitive.
16:15
Charlotte Cooper
Did you read the links?
16:23
TRAP - The Real Art of Protest
If you knew anything about the page you would know we have CONSISTENTLY attacked corporations with regard to the olympics. The only individuals who we attack are politicians, corporate spokespersons and royalty i.e. the enemy.
16:26
Charlotte Cooper
Yes, I get that, and I applaud it, I am no supporter of the Olympics, I live close to the Olympic Park and am disgusted by it, the corporate intrusion into East London is deplorable. But did you read the links I posted? Perhaps we could have a discussion about the use of headless fatty imagery, for example.
Also, "The lead off from unhealthy food is obesity" actually, this is not necessarily true. Would you like to talk about this?
16:41
TRAP - The Real Art of Protest
Not really, we are already very mindful of the nuances of our posts and do not need educating on sensitive activism. We take your input seriously and can assure you we will access your links and review our own processes. Thanks for the links and thanks for your input - it is appreciated.
16:49
Charlotte Cooper
Actually, you have been anything but sensitive on this issue. You are out of touch on the fat stuff, and your use of fat bodies is insulting and problematic. This is not just me being 'hypersensitive'. I am offering you an opportunity to develop your understanding of fat politics, and to understand how it intersects with disability rights, queer politics, anti-capitalism, and to develop shit hot activism that takes this stuff into account. I am a world expert on this stuff, widely published and respected around the world. I'm not talking out of my arse. But you are giving me the brush-off. This does not look like appreciation to me, it looks like arrogance. You don't want free knowledge? Your loss. Continue producing images that crap all over a demographic of people who don't need your shit, continue alienating people who could otherwise be supporting you.
05 February 2013
Why anorexia and obesity are not the same
Zoe Williams' recent article for The Guardian is the latest instance of a journalistic conflation of anorexia and obesity. To me, these concepts are very different to each other, and treating them as mirror images of each other is damaging to people with eating disorders, and fat people. I think it perpetuates particular stereotypes associated with each group, and overlooks the possibility that fat people might suffer from anorexia too.
With this in mind, I've drawn a handy table with some notes in it about how anorexia and obesity are different, and how they have some similarities. I have no deep knowledge of eating disorders, so what I say about anorexia is a lay understanding, and there will probably be things that I've said clumsily and need clarifying or addressing. But my aim with this table is to encourage people, particularly journalists, to be careful when they throw these concepts about.
I'm using 'obesity' here to mean a medicalised discourse of fat.
With this in mind, I've drawn a handy table with some notes in it about how anorexia and obesity are different, and how they have some similarities. I have no deep knowledge of eating disorders, so what I say about anorexia is a lay understanding, and there will probably be things that I've said clumsily and need clarifying or addressing. But my aim with this table is to encourage people, particularly journalists, to be careful when they throw these concepts about.
I'm using 'obesity' here to mean a medicalised discourse of fat.
| Anorexia | Obesity |
| Is a kind of mental illness that affects people of all sizes, though is commonly associated with very thin people, especially young women. | Is a means of classifying and stratifying certain kinds of bodies. |
| Is primarily assumed to be associated with not eating. | The etymology of the word is rooted in the concept 'to have eaten' but fat body size does not tell you much about people's eating behaviour. |
| Is typified by particular behaviours. | Is assumed to be the result of particular behaviours, particularly 'compulsive eating'. |
| The behaviours typified by anorexia are associated with mental illness. | Some fat people have mental illness, it's hard not to when you are a highly stigmatised social group, but fat itself is not an automatic signifier of mental illness or pathology, even though Susie Orbach and many others have popularised this view. |
| Is a series of behaviours associated with a faulty relationship to food. | Is assumed to be the result of a faulty relationship with food. |
| Treatment for anorexia may or may not be helpful. | Treatment for eating disorders is unlikely to be helpful for fat people who don't have an eating disorder. |
| Lack of political organisation, unless you count pro-ana as activism. | Fat people have critiqued 'obesity' and are politically organised, to some extent. |
| The extremes of very thin (anorexic) and very fat (obese) people are often used as mirrors of each other. Fat and thin are not opposites, but part of a vast diversity of human body shapes. | |
| Anorexia and obesity are both subject to a lot of social anxiety and cultural mythology, supported by medicalisation. | |
| Anorexia and obesity are both subject to a muddled discourse, often rooted in Second Wave feminism, which often raises the spectre of the 'bombarded by media images' origin story cliché. | |
| Anorexia and obesity are both associated with untimely death, even though people with eating disorders and fat people can live long and productive lives. | |
| Both anorexia and obesity really upset the normals. | |
| 'The anorexic' and 'the obese' are groups of people who are commonly abstracted, made anonymous, voiceless and abject, and are rarely offered space by 'the experts' to speak for themselves. | |
| Are reduced to an assumed anxiety about the body and food, but people with eating disorders and fat people have interests elsewhere, for example in the struggle to be autonomous people, a struggle against medicalised control, a struggle against social restrictions. | |
04 February 2013
New edition of the Fat Studies journal is out
Nerd alert: the latest edition of Fat Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Body Weight and Society is now available online. I serve on the board for this journal and I have to say that this edition is hot! I'm especially delighted by the review of Fat Studies in the UK, to which I contributed.
The journal is behind a paywall, as is common with academic publishing. Please contact me if there are things you would like to read but cannot access through an institution, or if you don't have the money to pay for them.
The journal is behind a paywall, as is common with academic publishing. Please contact me if there are things you would like to read but cannot access through an institution, or if you don't have the money to pay for them.
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