When I finished my PhD someone asked me about my plans for publishing it. I said that I might publish it myself and they looked at me aghast, this would clearly have been academic suicide. A book published by an academic press would most likely be expensive and would have to conform to an idea of what an academic book is. In my experience, academic books may be full of useful knowledge but are generally very boring to read. I didn’t want to produce something that sends people to sleep. I want my writing to help people feel alive and full of possibility.Somebody else said that the thesis contained some work that would be REF-able papers. REF refers to the Research Excellence Framework, a model …

My book, Fat Activism: A Radical Social Movement is published today by HammerOn Press. You can get it directly from the publisher, in bookshops, from all the usual online sellers. Paperback, hardback and EPUB formats are available.HammerOn and I decided to publish the book today because for many people it is the first miserable day back at work after the holidays. It’s the peak of New Year diet season misery, where people realise what their pledges to lose weight actually entail. We thought that readers deserved something better: a tool to help them incite revolution in an accessible way.Oh yeah, we made a video.In Fat Activism: A Radical Social Movement I write about what people say about fat activism, how they’re quite limited and …

It’s taken years to get Fat Activism: A Radical Social Movement together and the experience has been a strange mixture of aloneness and putting things into a public realm. I did quite a lot of public speaking over its main research period, from 2008-2012, and of course there’s blogging. But the work of putting a load of complex, scattered ideas together into something coherent, which started with the thesis, is a solitary thing shared only with a few close people. Perhaps what I’m saying is that I have felt alone in holding the full picture of this research and the book in my head. Now things are changing.I have started speaking about the book in public. Last week we had its launch, and yesterday I spoke at …

To celebrate the publication of my book, Fat Activism: A Radical Social Movement, I am doing a series of blog posts about some of the stuff I came across during the research period that people might not otherwise get to see. I’m ripping off the BBC project, in association with The British Museum, called A History of the World in 100 Objects, in that there are 100 things, I’m listing them in more or less chronological order, and it will take me a year or so to blog ’em all. But that’s where the similarity ends. Where that list is founded on a series of values I don’t share, this one is queerer, more feminist and more unruly.1. The Venus of Willendorf The Venus is a statue of a …

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 …