Fat Activism (Second Edition)

Charlotte Cooper

Description

In this new edition of her accessible autoethnography of fat feminist activism in the West, Charlotte Cooper revisits and discusses her activism in the context of recent shifts in the movement. The new preface explores the impact of the Coronavirus pandemic on fat people and fat activism and how Black Lives Matter is inspiring new forms of activism. Cooper issues a call to action in Fat Studies and offers alternatives to current public health approaches to Diabetes. 

What is fat activism and why is it important? To answer this question, Charlotte Cooper presents an expansive grassroots study that traces the forty-year history of international fat activism and grounds its actions in their proper historical and geographical contexts. She details fat activist methods, analyses existing literature in the field, challenges long-held assumptions that uphold systemic fatphobia, and makes clear how crucial feminism, queer theory and anti-racism are to the lifeblood of the movement. She also considers fat activism’s proxy concerns, including body image, body positivity, the obesity epidemic and fat stigma.

Combining rigorous scholarship with personal, accessible writing, 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. This is the book you have been waiting for.

Preface to the Second Edition

Acknowledgements

Introduction

 

1. Undoing

2. Doing

3. Locating

4. Travelling

5. Accessing

6. Queering

 

Bibliography

Index

 

Sujets

• LGBTQ+ Studies
• Gender Studies
• Social Science
• Sociologie, société et politique
• Activism
• Cultural Studies

Informations

• Publié par: Intellect Books
• Date de parution: 29 avril 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781910849323
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 5 Mo

Extrait

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
FAT ACTIVISM: A RADICAL SOCIAL MOVEMENT (SECOND EDITION)
© Charlotte Cooper, 2021
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.
Print ISBN 978-1-91084-930-9
ePDF ISBN 978-1-91084-931-6
ePUB ISBN 978-1-91084-932-3
Cover design by Eva Megias
http://evamegias.com
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 2021 by HammerOn Press
Bristol, England
http://hammeronpress.net
HammerOn Press is an imprint of Intellect
Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK
www.intellectbooks.com
FAT ACTIVISM
A RADICAL SOCIAL MOVEMENT
SECOND EDITION
Charlotte Cooper
HammerOn Press
CONTENTS
PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION
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?
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
For you.
PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION
It’s been five years since I wrote this book and over ten since I embarked on the research that produced it. Now is as good a time as any to revisit the work, reconsider its context and think about what has – and hasn’t – changed. When I reread this book recently I was scared that I’d find lots of holes and mistakes, but it was a weird and surprisingly pleasant experience. It felt like a gift from past me to future me, like reading something validating by someone who really understands you. This is an exceptionally rare feeling in my life and one of the reasons I have associated myself with Do It Yourself (DIY) culture: if you can’t find what you want and need, make your own. Fat Activism was originally published as a DIY project on a modest scale, working with friends and taking on all the business of getting it into the world ourselves. I took this route to secure my ownership of the book and to make it accessible, community-based and not another expensive, corporate, academic monograph. I think D-M Withers and I have a lot to be proud about, but now it’s time for Fat Activism to reach other readers. I am excited about the new readers who will come across this work through Intellect’s networks, and I am curious about what you will find in a book that has now matured.
FAT POWER
Let me orientate you to my approach. I have a long shelf of books on fat that I have collected over the years. My own works are among them, which helps to remind me that I am part of something. I’ve arranged these books chronologically because I am interested in how people think about fat over time. Fat work reflects its cultural location; each upsurge in interest, each murmuration, reinterprets the theme and this is, of course, embedded in ideology and technology. My shelf begins with Fat Power , first published in 1967, and its latest addition is Happy Fat , which appeared in 2019. 1 From power, allied with Black Power and Gay Power, to happiness; from anger and revolution to pleasure and perhaps complacency.
It is power that makes me interested in fat, not the prospect of happiness. I find the latter too monodimensional as a life goal – nice, but a bit flat. Sara Ahmed reminds us that happiness can be used to justify oppression and that punishment awaits those of us, we killjoys, who challenge the imperative to be happy. 2 I had no way of articulating fat power as a child, but it was clear to me that people were power-tripping on my body. Many years later, I still believe that fat activism is a dance with power.
This book is about fat activism; it’s a part of Fat Studies in that it centres fat people and is underpinned by an ethic of liberation. People in this field are considering power, who speaks about fat, how knowledge about fat people is created and distributed. The situation at the moment is not good, but fat activism offers opportunities for change.
I had hoped that Fat Activism: A Radical Social Movement would incite more people to look at and value the social movement of fat people that has been underway in various forms since the 1960s. This book cannot be the only word on the subject; many more perspectives are needed. My hopes have not yet come to fruition. Two academic books have had a stab, but they are not grounded in community and activism itself; they are not products of Research Justice, which is a consideration of power and knowledge. 3 Work that only treats fat activism as a fascinating subject for study will never get to the heart of things. Activism is a dance with power that means praxis, theory and practice; theory alone doesn’t work.
These shortfalls are not the fault of the authors; their work is correctly argued within the bounds of the academy. The problem is about the kinds of knowledge that are allowed to emerge, namely those which are empirical with a glaze of professionalised distance; which speak the language of the institution, preferably with a smattering of medicalisation or quantitative methodology; which are