Reflecting on the Fattylympics Anthem

I've been co-organising an event called the Fattylympics. This is a non-commercial, community-based afternoon of messing around in the park. It's fat activism and, because I'm always interested in mixing it up, it's about other stuff too, namely the 2012 Olympics, which is happening in, and destroying significant chunks of, my neighbourhood in East London.

One of the forms of fat activism that I enjoy very much is about creating a platform from which many different things can emerge in unexpected ways. The Chubsters is an example of this, it's supported workshops, filmshows and even stonemasonry. I like fat activism with which people can engage in their own ways, where people make their own meanings out of things. I think it's great to draw on people's talents and the things that they like to do, and are really good at. It helps build community and encourages people to think about fat stuff creatively in whatever way it intersects with their own lives, and pass it on to others.

The Fattylympics is also in this vein. It's a satirical Olympics, it will take place on a particular day in London, but I also see it as space from which people can make stuff in their own way, to make something bigger and more complex than I could ever have imagined or produced by myself.

Some of this has come about by inviting people to contribute, for example. I knew that Bad Artists Becky and Corinna would make a great job of the Fattylympics mascots, and they did by coming up with the sublime Egg'n'Spoon. Other people have volunteered things, including performances and events. One person was the musician Verity Susman, of the wonderful band Electrelane, who also has solo projects in her own name and formerly as Vera November. Verity volunteered to write the Fattylympics Anthem and this she did, using words that I wrote. I really love her music in general, so it was a great experience to make something with her.

When I imagined the Anthem I thought about something that people could sing regardless of whether or not they were actually able to come to the Fattylympics. I wanted something hopeful and warm that people could hum when they needed a bit of strength. Although the Fattylympics is a big joke in many respects, I also wanted something heartfelt on the day. The Anthem is also released under a Creative Commons licence so people are actively encouraged to share and remix it. I'm hoping that people might video themselves singing it, perhaps with a group, or that they'll remix it, and that this can add to the project's archive.

We'll be singing the Anthem on the day at the Opening Ceremony. There will be a group of us singing it as a choir, though everyone is invited to join in. 

Why not have a sing?

The Fattylympics Anthem

I'm Presenting at Tate Modern on Friday

Kay Hyatt and I are presenting a little something at Tate Modern on Friday, as part of Allyson Mitchell and Deirdre Logue's Axe Grinding Workshop, part of the work they do as the Feminist Art Gallery in Toronto.

The ticketing is a bit weird, but do your best! Maybe give the Tate's box office a call?

Here's a link: Axe Grinding Workshop
East Room
Tate Modern, London
Friday 18 May 2012, 19.00 – 21.00

Psst: You can get tickets for £9 if you enter the promo code 'activist' on the booking page.

Fattylympics street art

Pivo has made some gorgeous images that can be printed, coloured-in, and pasted up as street art. Check 'em out, more will be uploaded soon.

Fattylympics medal-makers wanted!

The Fattylympics needs a large amount of medals to give out on the day. Would you like to make some for this historic and unique event? Please say yes. Here are the details:

Make Fattylympics Medals!

Overwhelmed by Burger Queen

My fat activist cake topper

Burger Queen is over for another year. It has been a totally overwhelming experience that will take me a long time to process, but here are some scraps for the meantime.

I took part in the competition this year because I loved it as a punter in 2011 and wanted to see it close-up and to immerse myself in the various fat discourses that circulate through it. I got to show off, got some applause, got to meet folks and, best of all, got to introduce the idea that a long-standing and diverse social movement of fat people exists. I didn't win the crown, and this didn't matter; although Burger Queen is framed as a competition, it is also a feast of fat embodiment and performance, it's a funny kind of competition, in a way, and it was a pleasure to see a superfat drag queen who really really wanted to win take the title. I know she will do it justice.

This is what I did for the final: for Trend I wore an outfit inspired by the Global Obesity EpidemicTM involving high-heeled trainers, hot-pants, lots of tits, arse and belly, wreaths of rainbow fat paper doll cut-outs, a light-up tiara spelling EPIDEMIC in blobby fat letters, and a multi-coloured staff topped with a model of a Big Boy. For Talent I introduced my film Lovely and Slim, showed it, and led a singalong. For Taste I made a triple-decker fat activist cake filled with cream, roasted strawberries and topped with a tiny scene of model fat activists protesting and being kettled by a fat policeman. People, I did my work. Although it was fun to take part and generally I feel very strong in myself, there were times when I felt quite vulnerable. It brought home that it’s a big deal for people who have marginalised bodies to put yourself out there and allow yourself to be judged in front of an audience. Fat or unfat, this is some people's worst nightmare, so it's pretty amazing that Burger Queen creates a place where this can happen relatively safely.

Back in work mode, Burger Queen was a rich experience for me as a sociology researcher interested in fat activism. I see the event as a great example of fat activism because it presents multiple and queer ways of experiencing fatness; although Scottee is the main performer, it is produced by a team of people some of whom are fat and some of whom are not, for a fairly diverse audience. I love how this is mixed, and how it shows that fat is a concept relevant to people of all sizes and backgrounds. It demonstrates that there isn't one single way of doing or being fat.

It also follows the relatively undocumented fat activist tradition of cultural production and community-building. Burger Queen is truly eye-popping and immersive: from the glitter curtains, the design, to the team's uniforms, from the badges to the burgers themselves, you feel as though you've entered a different and better world when you're there. I find it very freeing to see such a great array of fat bodies in performance; sometimes this is in a big in-your-face way, such as when Scottee does his show, but it is also there in the supporting cast, from Sami behind the desk, to Rebecca at the door. To talk about shared identity might be a step too far because it's a diverse group, but what Burger Queen does is make fat visible and both extraordinary and normal.

Burger Queen is fat activism because it addresses the easy as well as the difficult. It presents basic ideas such as self-love but doesn't stop there. Here are three things I have found particularly thought-provoking:

a) In the final, Scottee asked if it's possible to be a fat activist and also be engaged with controlled eating. The answer is, of course you can, but these ambiguities tend to be sidelined in fat activist rhetoric, and have historical connections to the essentialism of Second Wave feminism from which this form of fat activism has developed. It's great to question fat activist orthodoxies and to do so in a playful and thoughtful way.

b) This year has seen Burger Queen overlap with mainstream media as Scottee and Amy Lamé have made various appearances. This has resulted in a lot of fatphobic hate towards them, from the comments from this Guardian article, to hate-filled Tweets about Amy's appearance on TV. What to do with this stuff? Perform live deconstructions to your audience is what you do, which strips them of their power to hurt. Fucking amazing. Similarly, the public performance and ridicule of Rebecca's syrupy-yet-controlling Tweets from her former Weight Watchers's leader have had me howling with laughter. Sublime is the word I'm looking for.

c) At Burger Queen people play with fat identity without much previous engagement with fat activism. There have been fatsuits. In fat lib there's a general consensus that fatsuits are a bad idea and to a large extent I agree with this. Watching people who have made fortunes on the back of their ability to conform to beauty ideals fatting up in a suit to show what life is really like for fat people is nauseating. It demeans the authenticity of fat people's voices, and adds to the stereotypes about fat bodies. But I wasn't offended by the fatsuits at Burger Queen because they were performed without malice. I really love it when people do things that are rude and irreverent, when they say the unspeakable. I imagined that fatsuit performances would be an absolute no-no in some fat activist spaces, many of them actually. But one of the things I love about Burger Queen is that nobody knows the rules, nobody's stuck, there are no party lines to toe. Everyone's having a go at articulating fat, sexuality and gender in their own way. I don't agree with everything that people present at Burger Queen but it's a wild queer ride on fat, it's breaking new ground.

Ok, that's all for now.

Confessions of a Burger Queen
Ten Reasons to Love Burger Queen

Photographs
Burger Queen
Burger Queen 2011
Burger Queen 2012 Episode One
Burger Queen 2012 Episode Two
Burger Queen 2012 Episode Three
Burger Queen 2012 Episode Four
Burger Queen 2012 Final

Zines and fat activism

Heather McCormack has just published an article on Library Journal Reviews listing some fat activist zines, including A Queer and Trans Fat Activist Timeline. Alright!

Fat Activism and Body Positivity: Zines for Transforming the Status Quo

My film January is screening at the London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival

Somewhat off-topic, I made a film that has made the official selection for the London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival (LLGFF) and is going to be screened as part of a programme of experimental short films on Monday 26 March. The festival website says that the screening is fully booked but there are usually a handful of tickets available on the night for people who don't mind queuing.

Although it features me as a fat woman in the frame, January is not a film primarily about fat, it's about abuse in queer relationships. It's heavy! It came about because I've been wanting to write about this subject for some time, and I had the opportunity last year to learn about a theatrical technique called Verbatim. Verbatim entails making a recording of someone telling a story which is then acted by someone else. In January I am acting the story given to me by someone talking about how they have been abusive towards me. The effect is unnerving because the authenticity of the original recording is allowed to come through the headphones and then through my mouth. It's a way of telling stories that might be very difficult, and which maintains the anonymity of the original speaker, who might not be able to speak without that protection.

I thought Verbatim would be a good way of making a piece of work about abuse, and that I could do it very simply. My film-making aesthetic, through necessity because I am untrained, is of using very lo-fi equipment in a DIY fashion. With January it is just me and an old camcorder on a tripod. I edited the film on some free software that came on my computer. I have no distributor, I just burn and post DVDs as needed.

January has been a risky project for obvious reasons. I often think about Laurie Anderson's chorus "It's not the bullet that kills you, it's the hole," which I have reinterpreted over the years as: "It's not the abuse that kills you, it's the silence." I feel a great need to break that silence, I am doing so in various ways, and I see this as part of a feminist tradition of speaking the unspeakable. As well as being risky and heavy, the film represents hope and recovery to me, and a connection to politics and subjectivity that move me very much; it feels really good that I can make and show this film.

I hope other screenings will follow. I won't be making it available online for some time, sorry, but I will be submitting it to various festivals, and I am happy to come and show it to a group, or have a discussion about it. Drop me a line if you are interested in organising something.

January, by Charlotte Cooper, screening at the LLGFF as part of Radical Constitution, Monday 26 March 2012, 20.40, NFT3

Propose a Fattylympics Event!

I am co-organising the Fattylympics this summer. We are looking for people to propose and create participatory events. Fancy it? Pass it on!

Propose a Fattylympics Event!

Allyson Mitchell's fat feminist art and me

I won't lie, xmas makes me feel mentally ill and if I smoked crack I would be huffing on a big fat pipe of it right now. In past years I've published a Hits and Shits list on this blog in an attempt to create some kind of temporal narrative about fat. This year I've given up.

Instead I'm going to mark the end of the year by sharing a drawing that one of my favourite artists, Allyson Mitchell, has produced. Allyson is one of the founders of the now defunct fat activist group Pretty, Porky and Pissed Off, who reclaimed the streets of Toronto a while back. She's also an assistant Professor in the School of Women's Studies at York University. Oh yeah, and she co-owns the Feminist Art Gallery (FAG) and is an accomplished artist in her own right. I've added that last but actually it should go first.

So, picture the scene, I'm sitting at my computer, contemplating xmas-related suicide, and up pops an email from Allyson. She's attached a drawing that features me. The email says that I am in the middle and the image comes from a photo shoot I did for FaT GiRL in 1996. It goes on to say that the other figures are also based on women in FaT GiRL and that I was the inspiration for the piece.

The drawing is part of a project started by Ulrike Müller, who I don't know and have never met, that Allyson has worked on. Allyson wrote in her email: "Ulrike took the titles of images that are archived in the Lesbian Herstory Archives in Brooklyn. Artists were asked to draw an image that represents the title in some way without seeing the actual image. I randomly got the title 'A Group of Naked Women...Very Curvy' – what luck!!!!"

It's now a few days later and I'm still trying to work it out. I feel very happy and proud that something I did a long time ago can be part of something really excellent today, it makes me reflect on the importance not just of developing fat queer cultural production, but also the value of using our bodies within the things we make. I love Allyson's art and am absolutely delighted to feature in it. Thinking about this drawing makes me feel as though I'm swirling around in a whirlpool of beautiful things that mean a great deal to me: queer archives and especially the Lesbian Herstory Archives, fat dykes, activism, Allyson's art, FaT GiRL, wooooo! The picture reminds me of an incredible time in my life when I kind of bloomed into my queer-fat self after a long time of feeling frozen. Playing naked on a Californian beach exemplifies that period so well. It's also amazing to see my nudey fat body there, I'm feeling a lot of self-love about that, and that's a precious feeling for people like me. Not only that, but it's amongst the other bodies too; I know that I couldn't have inhabited that emotional-embodied-social-political space without the others. It feels really fantastic to see myself acknowledged as part of this amazing fat feminist movement, in ways that I relate to, by someone who knows and who is also implicated in it herself. I love the luck and randomness of how the image came about. It gives me chills of happiness to think about other people seeing this work as it becomes circulated in new spaces that Ulrike is developing, and it becoming part of other people's consciousness.

Woah, head explodes.

Image courtesy of Allyson Mitchell