Eating Disorders

I have been making zines – small homemade publications – for some time and I have just published two new titles. Buy them here.Fat Activist VernacularAs I was finishing up my book, Fat Activism: A Radical Social Movement, I thought I’d take the pressure off a little by writing a zine. 15,000 words later I ended up with this behemoth, and there’s still so much more to be said.The Vernacular is a list of words and their definitions, like a dictionary, but a lot less formal. I wrote it because I thought people not in the know might like a glimpse of the subcultural riches of fat activism, and because activists might like to read about some of the beauty that our movement has generated. The …

I started the series of 100 fat activists last week with the 25,000 year-old Venus of Willendorf and from there I’m jumping straight to 1967. What happened in the middle? There are cultural historians of fat and weight loss who can fill in some of the gaps, Elena Levy-Navarro, or Hillel Schwartz, for example. But the genealogies of fat activism that I am interested in kick-in towards the end of the 1960s.In my book, Fat Activism: A Radical Social Movement, I plot the beginnings of fat feminism in an event produced by the WBAI radio host Steve Post on 4 June 1967 (some sources say it was on 3 June) at Sheep Meadow, Central Park, New York City. Around 500 people turned up for the spectacle, which I describe in …

One of the papers archived in the collectionDo you like to read? Do you own books? What does your bookshelf say about you? Do you take bookshelfies? Looking at people’s reading collections can provide some insight as to what they are thinking about, what inspires them, or about the scope of their interior landscape. It can give context to a person.The Mayer Collection of Fat Liberation is housed at the Archives & Special Collections at the Thomas J. Dodd Research Centre, part of the University of Connecticut Libraries in Storrs. This is a collection of personal papers and reading donated by Vivian Mayer, who was also known as Aldebaran, and now goes by Sara Fishman. Mayer wrote the forward to Shadow on a Tightrope, Aldebaran was …

Llewellyn Louderback was a jobbing writer from New York who published an article in the Saturday Evening Post in November 1967, four months after Steve Post’s Central Park Fat-In. He may have written the piece earlier, magazine lead-in times can be quite lengthy. I don’t know if Louderback went to the Fat-In, I think at that time he may have been more straight-laced than Post, but he was certainly impressed by it. It strikes me that 1967 was when fat activism had a moment of convergence with civil rights, pranksterdom and popular journalism. That late 60s feeling that anything could happen.In his article, Louderback calls for many of the rights and recognitions that remain preoccupations of fat activists today. He talks about fatphobia, discrimination, …

I’m pretty sure that Erving Goffman was not a fat activist. It’s been a while since I picked up a copy of Stigma, and I’m not sure if the book even specifically mentions fat people. Did he ever meet any fat activists? If so I haven’t been able to find any documentation, though I love to imagine it. But I’m including this work here because it was a foundational text for early fat activists, and worth a read for anyone interested in the movement.Goffman is one of the big names of sociology and, yes, he is another dead white guy, so there are a few strikes against him already. But Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity, first published in 1963 towards the middle of his …

NAAFA, the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance, started out on the East Coast of the USA around New York and New Jersey in 1969 as the National Association to Aid Fat Americans.I can’t remember when I first heard about NAAFA, it must have been some time in the 1980s and, like most people back then, I was amazed that an actual organisation of fat people could exist. It is still an amazing thought, evidence that fat is a social and political identity, that fat people have agency, community, ambition. That NAAFA has been in existence for so long also suggests that fat people have histories and cultures too. These remain radical ideas in a present day context where fat people are usually rendered as passive and …

I kind of agree with this, but probably not in the way that these algorithms have been generated. I love wrongness, there’s certainly a lot of bullshit flying around at times, and is it dangerous? Yes it is.

Me giggling whilst being brainwashed by one of Tim Hunkin’s machines. It tickles!Tim Hunkin is an artist who makes subversive and humourous arcade machines, automata, ride simulators and all kinds of brilliant stuff. I had the pleasure of visiting his Under the Pier Show in Southwold at the weekend, and not for the first time. If you are ever in the vicinity of his work, make sure you have a supply of 20ps to pop in the slot, you won’t regret it. If you have several hours to kill, I sincerely advise you to spend them knocking around his extensive website.I’ve been wanting to mention Hunkin on the blog for a while because of three of his pieces: The Doctor, QuickFit and Instant Weightloss. They …

This eighth post of the series marks the end of the period when the earliest foundations for fat activism as I understand it in my book were put in place.Radical Therapy was an offshoot of the anti-psychiatry movement as it manifested in the 1960s. This movement had many concerns and approaches, and histories that stretched back to the earlier part of the 20th century. By 1967 theorists and activists were arguing that psychiatry was a suspect science and that mental health services were oppressive. Radical Therapy was a practical critique of the mental health system, which was seen as perpetuating oppression and inequality and acting in the interests of a corrupt dominant culture. Radical Therapy sought to reformulate mental distress as an understandable response to living …

The Fat Underground was a fat feminist group that came out of the lesbian feminist and radical therapy scenes of Los Angeles in the late 1960s. They are foundational to fat activism, and I write about them extensively in my book.Largesse was a project that ran for over a decade and which hosted an online archive of early fat feminist writings. It is no longer live, but you can navigate fragments of it through the Wayback Machine by searching for https://www.eskimo.com/~largesse/.One of the collections that Largesse curated was a set of Position Papers published by the Fat Underground in 1974. These are titled: Job Discrimination, Eating, Health of Fat Women: The Real Problem, Psychiatry and Sexism.A Position Paper is an essay, …