(via definatalie’s bits)

Special Journal Issue of Feminism & Psychology
Guest Editor: Dr Samantha Murray

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, to give voice to the lived experience of fat bodies, and to offer critical insights into, and investigations of, the ethico-political implications of the cultural meanings that have come to be attached to fat bodies.

This Special Issue will examine a range of questions concerning the construction of fat bodies in the dominant imaginary, including the problematic intersection of medical discourse and morality around ‘obesity’, disciplinary technologies of ‘health’ to normalise fat bodies (such as diet regimes, exercise programs and bariatric surgeries), gendered aspects of ‘fat’, dominant discourses of ‘fatness’ in a range of cultural contexts, and critical strategies for political resistance to pervasive ‘fat-phobic’ attitudes.

This Special Issue of Feminism & Psychology will showcase critical fat scholarship from around the globe by gathering together research from across a spectrum of disciplinary backgrounds (such as Cultural Studies, Fat Studies, Critical Psychology, Philosophy, Sociology, Human/Cultural Geography, Public Health, etc) as well as activists and health care professionals. The Special Issue seeks to begin a critical conversation 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.

• Papers 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 ‘fat child’ 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;
• Critical psychological responses to eating practices and body politics;
• 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.

Contributions will be expected to orient themselves to the core aims and mission of Feminism & Psychology, which is concerned with publishing work that fosters the development of feminist theory and practice in ­ and beyond ­ psychology, and that provides insights into the gendered reality of everyday lives.

The Special Issue will consist of papers in of the following formats:

• Papers between 5-­ 6000 words in length;
• Observation/Commentary-style papers ­ up  to 2500 words in length

Please note that all word counts include reference lists.

Contributions will be selected following an anonymous peer review process.

For further information regarding referencing styles and formatting guidelines, please go to http://www.uk.sagepub.com/journalsProdManSub.nav?prodId=Journal200868

Please send full-length papers, as Word doc attachments, to Dr Samantha Murray via email at Samantha.murray@mq.edu.au by Friday, 26 November 2010.

For those who don’t know what I’m talking about, today Australia has a new Prime Minister.  Our first woman Prime Minister, Julia Gillard.  Former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd stood down from his leadership of the Labor party after being faced with a party ballot which promised a resounding defeat.  There’s good coverage of the story on the ABC if you want more details.  His resignation speech was gut-wrenching.

When Rudd was elected in 2007, it was by far the best political day in my adult life.  It was the first time since I’d been old enough to vote that Australia had elected a Labor government.  More importantly, it was the first time in my adult life that we hadn’t elected a Liberal Government (Very Important Note: in Australia, Liberal does not mean liberal, it means conservative right wing assholes).  It was the first time I’d voted in an election that hadn’t resulted in yet another term of John Howard, whose political ambition revolved around returning Australia to the values of the 1950s.  His policies were anti-feminist, racist, and generally appalling.  So when he lost not only the election, but also his seat, it was a great night.  There was champagne and tears and hugging and shouting and jumping up and down with excitement, relief, joy, and … is that…pride?

But even then, I was cynical.  For me, the most important thing about Rudd was simply that he wasn’t Howard.  Now, this is a significant point of difference.  And while the Labor party had moved so far toward the centre they’d actually slid over to the right during Howard’s reign, it was also incredibly important that they weren’t the Liberal party.  That they were at least nominally left.  And Rudd did do some good things.  The Apology was one of the most significant to me, at least in terms of symbolism, if not real action.  He also failed to do some of the good things he’d promised, like tackling climate change.  Certainly, none of these things, the good or the bad, were his work or responsibility alone – governing isn’t about the will of an individual (thank goodness).

Our new Prime Minister, Julia Gillard is not only the first woman to be prime minister of Australia.  She’s also deliberately barren, unmarried, living in sin, working class, publicly educated, and godless.  These are all things I’m fully behind, and more than a little excited about.  But I’m not sure I’m actually excited about Gillard’s leadership.  I’m not sure it’s actually progressive.  I don’t think it will change much of anything at all.  I suspect that both of the major party’s policies on refugees, climate change, workplace relations, etc, will remain somewhere to the right of decent and humane.

After their defeat at the last election, the Liberal party sort of imploded.  They had leadership woes and internal splits.  When Tony Abbot became leader, I was both amused and relieved – I thought he was a bit of a joke, that Australia would never elect someone with such regressive ideas.  But he gained popularity and started to look like a serious threat to the Labor party in the next election, which *shudder*.

What I do think Gillard’s leadership means is that Labor is more likely to win the next election, and, despite everything, that’s a good thing.  Because the alternative is the Liberals and Tony Abbot.  The most disturbing thing about this whole situation is that Abbot is even a contender – if Howard was stuck in the 1950s, Abbot is positively medieval, chastity belts and all.  And the prospect of another decade of right wing government is just too much to bear.

One of the aims of the strategy is to “halt and reverse the rise in overweight and obesity”, which is hardly surprising given that fat is considered self-evidently unhealthy and weight-loss is therefore considered self-evidently healthy.  The idea is so common-place I’m almost yawning with the can’t-be-botheredness of it (though I have a great deal of admiration for those who can be bothered and are fighting those fights).  But.  BUT. When I stop for a second and think about what that means, I realise my government is trying to put in place strategies to get rid of bodies like mine (I’m not the first person to point this out).

It’s not as overt as outright declaring war on obesity (which I hear happened in some other famously fat country), but it’s still clear: the fatties must go!  Why?  Well – and I’m barely paraphrasing here – because the fatties are lazy and expensive.  Fatties don’t work as much, chuck lots of sickies, and cost tax payers a fortune in health care.  We’ve all heard these arguments, again and again.  We’ve also heard these arguments smartly refuted, again and again.  The territory has been well and truly trod.  That doesn’t make it any less powerful or ubiquitous.  It doesn’t make the government strategy any less about my body, my personhood, my right to exist.

The title of this post references a quote about queers from Martha Shelly*:

You will never be rid of us, because we reproduce ourselves out of your bodies.

I goddamned love that quote.  I love that quote because it’s not only defiant, it’s right.  It’s a big fuck-you to obedience and conformity and towing the line.  It’s a big fuck you to neoliberal individualism, to notions of ‘proper’ citizenship, to any hope that freaks and rebels will just start behaving.  It’s a big fuck you to interventions like the Australian Government’s preventative health strategy which seeks to get rid of certain types of bodies, certain types of people who are positioned as troublesome, as non-compliant, as expensive.

Fatties have always existed.  Fatties will always exist.

You will never be rid of us.

_________

*Which I read years ago and can’t remember the source – if anyone knows, comment please?  Also, I don’t know that much about Martha Shelly apart from the brief bio I googled.

Also also, I’m wary of co-opting queer work in the service of fat acceptance (even – especially – as a queer), and I’m also wary of collapsing fat acceptance into queerness, but I do think there are important similarities and sympathies.  People far more eloquent than me have written about this. I highly recommend Charlotte Cooper’s recent post ‘What is Queer Fat Activism‘ at Obesity Timebomb, as well as Kathleen LeBesco’s essay ‘Queering Fat Bodies/Politics‘ in Bodies out of Bounds (which can also be found in her book, Revolting Bodies).

I have this fabulous postcard on the cork-board in my kitchen.  It’s called ‘Feminism Encourages’.  It’s a sepia-toned scene with two women in old-fashioned bathing suits standing in a forest clearing,  hugging each other and laughing.  There’s a quote underneath which is one of my favourite quotes of all time:

Feminism encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians.

Everybody who comes into my kitchen reads it and guffaws.  Oh, things were so lol in old fashioned tiems!  Then they read the attribution, and the date. 1992.  “What?  WHAT?  Are you fucking kidding me?”  Ah, ridiculous bigorty, you never fail to bring the lols.

I kinda want to make one of these for fat acceptance, with all the ridiculous, outlandish accusations that get levelled at this movement.  How about:

Fat acceptance encourages people to leach off society, kill all boners, eat two whole cakes, force feed skinny folk baby-flavoured donuts, and become immobile.

I’m sure someone feeling more word-smithy than me can come up with something cleverer.  Have at it!

First of all, while I was a little nervousness about meeting new people – even people I knew online – I didn’t have that sense of steeling myself for it, the dread of not fitting in because I’m fat.  I know social stuff can be tricky for a lot of folks, but there’s something about the immediate visual difference of being deathfat that seems to add an extra layer of challenge for me.  The (real or imagined) pressure I usually feel to immediately overcome (real or imagined) assumptions about my intelligence, interests, tastes, self-esteem, sex life, or general awesomeness just wasn’t there.  And I liked it!

The other amazing thing about hanging out with fatties was the free clothes! Kate very generously offered a bunch of clothes to new homes and I picked up a couple of dresses and a top which I adore.  I think it’s actually the first time in my life I’ve been the beneficiary of someone else’s generosity in this way.  I’m usually too big for other people’s clothes; it’s always been me handing things on.  This was amazing and exciting and I felt more grateful and more guilty than I probably needed to.  The best of my new acquisitions is a form-fitting black frock with a fishtail bottom that makes me thing of Divine if she were a Melbourne hipster who wore all black all the time and not a fabulous and colourful queen.  I’ve actually been holding off posting this entry until I could get a photo to illustrate, but for now Divine herself will be more than enough.  (I will try to get a photo up in the next few days, though.)

The other thing I’ve been thinking about a lot is how I use social media.  There’s a lot in this I want to think through more, but when we talked about weather people were like their online personas, it made me hope that I’m not.  I realised that my twitter feed is kind of angry – I tend to use it as a quick outlet for frustrations (mostly at Metro Trains).  I do tweet delicious and beautiful things as well, and use it to connect with a lot of fatties, so it’s not all angry, but it’s certainly not how I (think I) am in real life.  My livejournal account is mostly dormant – I use it mainly for commenting, for checking out the fatshionista community, and occasionally for extreme emo.  My facebook status is primarily made up of song lyrics, which can be awkward when people misinterpret them as being about my actual life (I’ve started using “/” to indicate line breaks in the hope of stopping that).  As for this blog, it’s more serious and confessional than I really am in person, while my other blog is pure joy.  It’s a slightly uncomfortable feeling, to think about the gaps between my self-image and my self-representation.  And none of this even touches on reading practices, which for me are very different from my writing practices.  But that’s a whole ‘nother 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?

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 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.

Why?  I’m doing this PhD on fatness and sexual subjectivity.  Part of what I’m looking at is the interventions fat people are making into representation and discourse; how we negotiate/re-negotiate our fat identities.  In a way, it’s sort of turning into a thesis on the fat/size acceptance movement.  And because of that, I want to do some ‘field work’ of sorts.  That is, hop over to the US (being the centre of the FA-universe) and hang out with some awesome fatties doing awesome fatty things.  So I’m starting to put together a sort of calender of fatty events for next year so I can try to figure out the best time to go and fit in as much as possible.

Dear people of the fat-o-sphere, I need your help.  I know it’s probably a little early to really know when things are happening in 2010, but if you do know of any awesome and fat-related events or places I should visit, please tell me all about it!  I’m particularly interested in:

- Conferences (both academic and activist)
- Performances (theatre, dance, burlesque, etc)
- Community events
- Fatshion-related stuff (eg, fat girl flea, Re/Dress, etc)
- Awesome fatties who might be interested in hanging out and talking
- Pretty much anything else you care to mention

Thanks heaps in advance!

Ok, go!

(x-posted everywhere I go)

ETA: I’ve added a calendar to track and share any events.  You can comment here, there, via email, or however you want.  Awesome. ]]> http://www.fatuosity.net/2009/10/19/places-to-go-things-to-do-request-for-fat-events-info/feed/ 2