Fat Activism

Charlotte Cooper

Description

What is Fat Activism and why is it important?

Charlotte Cooper, a fat activist with around 30 years experience, answers this question by lifting the lid on a previously unexplored social movement and offering a fresh perspective on one of the major problems of our times.

In her expansive grassroots study she:

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  Reveals details of fat activist methods and approaches and explodes myths

  
  


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  Charts extensive accounts of international fat activist historical roots going back over four decades

  
  


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  Explores controversies and tensions in the movement

  
  


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  Shows that fat activism is an undeniably feminist and queer phenomenon

  
  


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  Explains why fat activism presents exciting possibilities for anyone interested in social justice

  
  

Fat Activism: A Radical Social Movement is a rare insider’s view of fat people speaking about their lives and politics on their own terms. It is part of a new wave of accessible, accountable and rigorous work emerging through Research Justice and the Para-Academy.

This is the book you have been waiting for.

Contents: 

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1. Undoing

2. Doing

3. Locating

4. Travelling

5. Accessing

6. Queering

Bibliography

Index

Sujets

• LGBTQ+ Studies
• Social Science
• Sociologie, société et politique
• Tabla de Asignación de Archivos
• Sociology
• Social movement
• General officer
• Feminism
• Fat
• Activism
• General
• Cultural Studies
• Queer
• Music

Informations

• Publié par: Intellect Books
• Date de parution: 01 janvier 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781910849026
• Langue: English

Extrait

FAT ACTIVISM
FAT ACTIVISM
A RADICAL SOCIAL MOVEMENT
Charlotte Cooper
HammerOn Press
Charlotte Cooper’s fierce new book Fat Activism: A Radical Social Movement should be required reading for scholars and activists. Cooper draws on extensive interviews with fat activists to render a trenchant analysis of our field of motion. She takes a penetrating look at activist efforts and self-understandings, eschewing easy praise in favour of discernment that ultimately promises to invigorate the movement.
Kathleen LeBesco / Marymount Manhattan College (Associate Dean)
For any civil rights movement to succeed, it must know its history; to build on its strengths and learn from its mistakes. With the ubiquity of the Internet, the historical knowledge and record of activism can be rewritten with 140 characters. That is one of the many reasons that Fat Activism: A Radical Social Movement is important. Charlotte’s latest text provides a detailed presentation of fat activism throughout the twentieth and twenty first centuries, including illumination of those who have appropriated and occupied fat activism for their own agendas. She highlights the achievements of fat activism, while also acknowledging where it has often failed (for example, the dominance of the work in the United States, the often limited accessibility, the lack of intersectionality). Charlotte allows space for both assimilationist and anti-assimilationist activism, closing the text with delightful examples of her own work as a queer fat activist. Anyone interested in the epistemology, ontology, and methodology, (not to mention history) of fat activism should make this a central text of their library.
Cat Pausé / Massey University/ Co-Editor of Queering Fat Embodiment
Charlotte Cooper is once again in the vanguard of radical social change with this book about fat activism. She has captured the history of the fat rights movements, interviewed fat activists, and demonstrated the extensive and exciting breadth of fat activism in a global setting. Fat activism is often portrayed as ineffective when in fact its lack of conformity and interdisciplinarity can serve as a model for other social movements.
Esther Rothblum / Editor/ Fat Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Body Weight and Society
It is in the interest of the ethically and intellectually dubious field of “Obesity Research” to flatten fat subjects; rendering our voices narrowly defined by punchy rhetoric, our activist interventions reduced to child-like flailing against the big bad thin-dominated world. Charlotte Cooper’s book Fat Activism: A Radical Social Movement resists this myopic view of resistance to fat oppression in form and content. By remaining true to her own subject position as a Fat Activist who works in community with other Fat Activists, Cooper lays out a methodology and practice of fat studies research that positions lived experience at the center of her rigorous analysis. This book is full of honesty about the challenges of doing research on a complex, diverse community, and acknowledges its own pitfalls and under-developed critiques gracefully. Fat Activists need more researchers and writers examining and reflecting on our work from within, and this book stands as an offering and opening in that vein.
Naima Lowe / Artist and Member of the Faculty at The Evergreen State College
FAT ACTIVISM: A RADICAL SOCIAL MOVEMENT
© Charlotte Cooper, 2016
The right of Charlotte Cooper to be identified as Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patent Act 1988
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission from the publisher, except in the context of reviews.
ISBN-13: 978-1-910849-02-6
ISBN-10: 1910849026
Fat Activism: A Radical Social Movement/ Charlotte Cooper
1. Social Movement Studies 2. Fat Studies 3. Public Health 4. Obesity 5. Cultural Studies 6. Feminism 7. Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer.
First published in 2016 by HammerOn Press
Bristol, England
http://hammeronpress.net
Cover design by Eva Megias
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
It has taken me years to write this book. I am grateful to everybody who consented to be interviewed for this project, all the reviewers and every single one of the hundreds of people who offered me words of encouragement and opportunities to share this work. Thanks to Simon Murphy, Kay Hyatt, Deborah Withers, Eva Megias, Natalie Brown, Ann Kaloski Naylor, The Institute for the Study of Knowledge in Society, The Irish Social Sciences Platform and Sociology at Limerick.
CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
INTRODUCTION
UNDOING
Proxies
Fat activism is about body positivity
Fat activism is NAAFA
Fat activism is about eating disorders and body image
Fat activism is about obesity and health
Developing fat activist research
Standpoint
Theories
Foucault, power, social movements
The killjoy
Research Justice
Scavenging qualitative methodology
Methods
Doing activism
Talking to fat activists
Using and thinking about archives
DOING
This is fat activism
Political process fat activism
Activist communities
Fat activism as cultural work
Existing cultural forms
New cultural forms
Micro fat activism
Ambiguous fat activism
A meta social movement
LOCATING
My awakening
Understanding contexts
Fat Feminism
Why fat feminism is obscure
Fragile historicising
Political rifts
Occupation
Some starting points
The Fat-In
NAAFA
Anti-feminism
The Fat Underground
Formation
Theorising fat oppression
Strategies
Struggles
Legacies
TRAVELLING
Moving West to East through community
Cultural journeys
Transnational crossings
Queer transmissions
Travel and power
Movement and stagnation
ACCESSING
Being the same
Gentrifying fat
Consumerism and gender
Professionalisation and class
Supremacy and race
Healthism and disability
Rethinking borders
QUEERING
Defining queer
Queer fat activism
The Chubsters
The Fat of The Land: A Queer Chub Harvest Festival
A Queer and Trans Fat Activist Timeline
The Fattylympics
Who knows?
REFERENCES
INDEX
For you.
INTRODUCTION
Fat 1 people are a fact of life, part of the fabric of humanity. There is evidence that we have existed for many thousands of years. 2 We are here. There are many who would prefer fat people not to exist, but we are here regardless of whether or not we are allowed or supposed to be here. Fat people are as valuable as anyone else and our existence reveals important things about how societies operate. As a psychotherapist, I am interested in the ways in which people might grow towards hopes and dreams, express agency, by which I mean the capacity to choose and act independently, even within restrictive social contexts; to really live. I see activism as a strategy for developing what Judith Butler calls “liveable lives” in contexts that are extremely trying, as well as creating social change. 3 How can and do fat people try to make liveable lives for ourselves and others? That’s basically what this book is about.
I begin by examining what others have already said about fat activism 4 which, in my opinion, is quite limited and does not reflect my own decades-long experiences of the movement or its everydayness. I go on to argue that different kinds of research methods are needed in order to unlock knowledge that has already been generated by fat people. I describe how my peers do fat activism and I locate these actions in historical and geographical contexts. I ask “How did fat activism reach me?” and chart a particular genealogy from coastal USA in the late 1960s to Europe in the 1980s and beyond. I show that fat activism has enjoyed an expansiveness that is currently being stalled by conservative values and I end by encouraging fat activists to resist the pull of access and assimilation, if they can, and consider queer 5 strategies to reinvigorate the movement.
I am writing in a context where being fat is commonly experienced in the West 6 at this moment in time as being at best pretty awful. But this is not a book about obesity, a word I use to describe the idea that fatness is a problem in need of a solution, or the obesity epidemic, a rhetorical device to leverage fat panic. 7 Although there is plenty that is awful about how fat people are treated, that awfulness is not at the heart of this book either. I think of shame as political, not a natural inevitability. I am not going to explore whether or not fat people are healthy, the prime concern in the world of obesity, although I am very much interested in how fat people cope with being treated as unhealthy. 8 Neither will I explore whether or not fat people are a drain on resources, a factor in global warming, a symptom of over-consumption or a product of obesogenic environments. 9 People preoccupied with how fat people can be caused, managed and prevented will not find much about it here.
The dominance of anti-obesity rhetoric means that dissent is usually understood as being part of a debate. In this book I present fat activism as a social movement, not a debate. That is to say, it is a concept that is not always concerned about participating in this debate or in need of validation through it, it exists regardless of whether or not there is a debate, and it has done for some years. When I say social movement I mean the actions that people take that often have some connection to social change and which are bound together by various threads to do with history, place, philosophy, identity and so on, of which this book is full of examples. Fat activism is an idea that connects many different kinds of people and activities and contributes to how people think of social action, social change and social movements. Fat activism shows that you do not have to be corralled into a debate in order to think, speak and act.
Fat Activism: A Radical Social Movement is linked to another book, Fat