Call For Papers – Fat Studies: A Critical Dialogue

I cannot even begin to describe how excited I am about this!  A fat studies conference!  In Australia!  With Charlotte Cooper!  And the absolutely brilliant Sam Murray!

PLEASE CIRCULATE TO ALL INTERESTED PARTIES

Call For Papers – Fat Studies: A Critical Dialogue

To be held 10 ­ 11 September, 2010 Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia

While cultural anxieties about fatness and stigmatisation of fat bodies in Western cultures have been central to dominant discourses about bodily ‘propriety’ since the early twentieth century, the rise of the ‘disease’ category of obesity and the moral panic over an alleged global ‘obesity epidemic’ has lent a medical authority and legitimacy to what can be described as ‘fat-phobia’. Against the backdrop of the ever-growing medicalisation and pathologisation of fatness, the field of Fat Studies has emerged in recent years to offer an interdisciplinary critical interrogation of the dominant medical models of health, gives voice to the lived experience of fat bodies, and offers critical insights into, and investigates the ethico-political implications of, the cultural meanings that have come to be attached to fat bodies.

This two-day event will put Australasian Fat Studies into conversation with critical fat scholarship from around the globe by gathering together scholars from across a spectrum of disciplinary backgrounds, as well as activists, health care professionals, performers and artists. This conference seeks to open a dialogue between scholars, health care professionals and activists about the productive and enabling critical possibilities Fat Studies offers for rethinking dominant notions about health and pathology, gender and bodily aesthetics, political interventions, and beyond.

Confirmed keynote speakers:

* Charlotte Cooper (Department of Sociology, University of Limerick)

* Karen Throsby (Department of Sociology, University of Warwick)

Abstracts are sought that engage with topics such as (but not limited to):

* Interventions to normalise fat bodies (such as diet regimes, exercise programs, weight loss pharmaceuticals and bariatric surgeries);

* The ethico-political implications of the medicalisation of ‘obesity’;

* Constructions of the Œfat child¹ in childhood obesity media reportage;

* Representations of fat bodies in film, television, literature or art;

* Intersections of medical discourse and morality around ‘obesity’;

* The somatechnics of fatness;

* Fat performance art, fat positive performance troupes;

* Histories of fat activism and/or strategies for political intervention;

* Fat and queer histories/identities;

* Fat embodiment online, the Fat-O-Sphere;

* Feminist responses to fatness;

* Constructions of fatness in a range of cultural contexts;

* Systems of body quantification, measurement, and conceptualizations of (in)appropriate ’size’;

* Fat as it intersects with race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, gender, disability and/or ageing.

Please send abstracts of 300 words, or panel proposals, to Dr Samantha Murray via email at Samantha.murray@mq.edu.au by Friday, 16 April 2010.

Diva Citizenship

Well, this blog has been rather quiet lately.  Mostly because I’m not a very regular blogger to begin with, but also because of been off doing Epic Productivity (TM) on my actual thesis.  Theoretically, that should feed in here, but I have thousands of words of notes towards a chapter rather than a nice concise little five hundred word post.

Anyway, instead of a ‘proper’ post, I thought I’d share an extended quote from a book I’ve just started reading, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship by Lauren Berlant.  There is a chapter that talks a little bit about fat, but the book is more concerned with the race and sexuality in America. I want to make it clear that I think caution is needed in not appropriating wholesale the arguments and terminology of other struggles (I wouldn’t claim ’subaltern’ for white fat acceptance, for example), but I think this passage says some really useful and interesting things about privilege, activism, speaking, visibility, and the necessity for faith in other people.

Moments of optimism for the transformation of…political and social culture abound in the stories of subordinated peoples… A member of a stigmatized population testifies reluctantly to a hostile public the muted and anxious history of her imperiled citizenship.  Her witnessing turns into a scene of teaching and an act of heroic pedagogy, in which the subordinated person feels compelled to recognize the privileged ones, to believe in their capacity to learn and to change; to trust their desire to not be inhuman; and trust their innocence of the degree to which their obliviousness has supported a system of political subjugation.  These moments are acts of strange intimacy between subaltern peoples and those who have benefited by their subordination.  These acts of risky dramatic persuasion are based on a belief that the privileged persons of national culture will respond to the sublimity of reason.

I call these moments acts of Diva Citizenship.  Diva Citizenship does not change the world.  It is a moment of emergence that marks unrealised potentials for subaltern political activity.  Diva Citizenship occurs when a person stages a dramatic coup in a public sphere in which she does not have privilege.  Flashing up and startling the public, she puts the dominant story into suspended animation; as though recording and estranging voice-over to a film we have all already see, she re-narrates the dominant history as one that the abjected people have once lived sotto voce, but no more; and challenges her audience to identify with the enormity of the suffering she has narrated and the courage she has had to produce, calling on people to change the social and institutional practices of citizenship to which they currently consent.

Diva Citizenship has a genealogy that is only now beginning to be written; the fate of its time- and space-saturating gesture has been mostly to pass and to dissolve into nostalgia, followed by sentences like “Remember that moment, just a second ago, when X made everything so politically intense that it looked like sustained change for good would happen?”  The centrality of publicity to Diva Citizenship cannot be underestimated, for it tends to emerge in moments of such extraordinary political paralysis that acts of language can feel like explosives that shake the ground of collective existence.  Yet in remaking the scene of public life into a spectacle of subjectivity, it can lead to a confusion of wilful and memorable rhetorical performances with sustained social change itself.

Lauren Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship, p222-223

I can think of a few examples of Fat Diva Citizenship – Beth Ditto’s whole public persona, for one.  The profile of Lezley Kinzel being herself in the Boston Globe.  Everyone who posts pictures to Fatshionista (livejournal or flickr) or Deathfatties.  The whole damn fatosphere in general, and any time “when a [fat] person stages a dramatic coup in a public sphere in which she does not have privilege.”

The claims of these moments of Fat Diva Citizenship tend to get co-opted by mainstream commercial interests in order to sell more magazines, but then, I wonder – is that a sign of some sort of sustained social change, even if it’s not the sort of change that upsets – or even challenges – the system in any real way?

Desireable objects and desiring subjects

So I’ve been reading and writing and thinking and talking a lot about fat and sex lately.

Well, ok, I haven’t been reading a lot, exactly, because there’s not a lot of academic work on fat and sex to read and some of what there is, is frankly appalling.  I have been reading what Samantha Murray, Jana Evans Braziel, and Laura Kipnis have to say on fat and sex, though, and it’s most interesting.  It’s got me thinking.

There’s so few images of fat women as sexual beings in mainstream representation.  Most of these representations are set up as parodic, absurd, carnivalesque, grotesque.  Images from fat porn occasionally find their way into the mainstream, where they are recontextualised as objects of ridicule rather than desire.  Any fat woman who dares to desire sex  is cast as oblivious to the disgust and repulsion her body must engender.  She must be delusional to think anyone could possibly want her.  As Murray says:

as a ‘fat’ woman I am expected to deny my own sexual desires and identity because my body stands as an ‘embolism’, to use Sedgewick’s term, between  my sexuality and my society (p123)

Yeah, I fucking love Sam Murray.  But that’s not really the point I’m trying to make.

The point I’m trying to make is that what this suggests to me is that being able to conceive of ourselves as a desirable object is integral to constituting ourselves as validly desiring subjects.  Extended out to the cultural level, it is necessary to be able to conceive of a body as desirable in order to conceive of its desires as valid or real.  In order for desire to be intelligible as desire.

What do you think?

References:

Samantha Murray, The Fat Female Body, 2008

Laura Kipnis, ‘Life in the Fat Lane’ in Bound and Gagged: Pornography and the Politics of Fantasy in America, 1996

Jana Evans Braziel, ‘Sex and Fat Chics: Deterritorializing the Fat Female Body’ in Bodies Out Of Bounds, Desirable objects 2001

Privilege

So there’s a bit of talk about privilege going on at the moment.  Sometimes I take issue with the way privilege is talked about, specifically, the way in which people ‘acknowledge’ that they have privilege but then proceed to exercise it in really obnoxious ways.  Paying lipservice doesn’t make it ok to do that. I highly recommend Lesley’s 101 over at fatshionista.  This isn’t going to be a 101, so if you’re not sure what I might mean by ‘privilege’, I’m happy to wait while you read that first.

Privilege is a tricky thing.  It has a tendancy to be invisible.  It’s hard to see when you have it, and it can also be really hard to see when you don’t have it – mostly because not having it is constructed as an individual fault rather than part of a structural and/or cultural system (poor people are poor because they don’t work hard; fat people are fat because they’re lazy and greedy).

For me, fat is the main area where I’m consistently aware of privilege and oppression.  The other big ones in my life are class/economics (my childhood wavered between welfare class and working poor), never having had any family or partner support to speak of (I’ve actually never seen anyone articulate this as privilege, but I absolutely believe it is), and some pain issues about having messed-up feet and joints (not related to being fat, but it interacts with it in perception).  There’s also being a woman and being queer, which I know are massive categories but I don’t experience the same level of difficulty around them – I think this has more to do with how normalised/naturalised gender categories are, rather than those particular oppressions being in any way minimal.  But for this post, I’m going to focus on fat.

I’ve always been fat.  I always AM fat.  And it’s always obvious.  It’s the physical characteristic I’m most aware of, and because of that, I have this unspoken assumption that it’s what other people are most aware of about me, too.  This may or may not be the case, but it colours every interaction I have with the world and everyone in it.

I’m usually the fattest person in the room.  I’m often the only fat person in the room.  When I meet someone for the first time, there’s a part of me that’s already – subconsciously – convinced they won’t want to know a fat person.  When I talk to some cutie at a party, there’s always a part of me that’s already – subconsciously – convinced that they won’t want to get stuck talking to the fat girl all night when there’s hot (read: thin) girls to be talking to.  When I meet some potentially eligible partner, I’ve already rejected myself on their behalf.  When someone does express an interest in me, I wonder if they’re trying to be politically correct, or they’re fetishising me, or they feel sorry for me, or they have some sort of horrified curiosity.  When I go on a date, I feel like I have two-and-a-half strikes against me before I’ve even opened my mouth.  These are not merely the products of my imagination – they’re the products of popular culture, of discourse, of personal communication, of experience.

When I go to the gym, I’m fat.  And there’s a part of me that knows people are looking at me and making judgements – about how hard or fast I’m exercising, about how much I should do, about why they think I’m doing it (no, it’s not to loose weight, but you can’t tell that by looking).  When my friends invite me to go out dancing, I hesitate because I’m aware of by fat body and how I’m not supposed to dance in public.  When they go to dance class and don’t invite me, I’m pretty sure it’s because I’m fat.

When I go to a new class, or to a conference or a seminar or a reading group, I feel like I don’t belong.  When I go to a new bar I wonder if I’m going to be ignored – or worse, looked at – because I don’t fit in.  Because I don’t fit in.  Whenever I go into a shop that doesn’t cater specifically to fat people, I know I won’t find anything to fit.

When I walk down the street in a halter-neck or spaghetti straps and get cow-called by a passing car, I know how revolting my body is seen to be.  When I go swimming and I pass a group who burst into whale song, I know exactly why.

When I go to the doctor, I know the blood pressure cuff won’t fit and they’ll suggest I exercise more and eat better.  When I go for a job interview, I know how hard I have to work to convince them I’m not lazy or sloppy or bad for the corporate image.

Wherever I go, I’m fat.  Wherever I go, it’s the most visible thing about me.  Wherever I go, I know that fat is not cool, not pretty, not desirable, not elegant, not hip, not wanted.

This isn’t a play for sympathy.  It’s not about me being a sad individual with low self-esteem (most anybody who knows me would shoot milk out their nose if you suggested that).  And it’s most certainly not all in my head.  It’s an example of how privilege works to keep oppressed people down.  It’s just a little bit of what I – an otherwise conventionally pretty, stylish, intelligent, accomplished, reasonably popular fat girl – have to deal with every time I leave the damn house.  It’s an example of the extra crap on top of all the ordinary crap that everyone has to deal with.  It’s how things get made just a little bit harder for certain groups of people, in ways which look like individual issues (shyness, self-esteem) but are really produced by the culture at large.

Places to go, things to do: request for fat events info