meeting on one point

[keryx]

The single most striking thing about the FAT-A conference was just how much people in the fat movement only meet on one point: body size. And that... really only sorta.

One of the Toronto peeps mentioned concern that coming out as a fat activist could jeopardise her work, for instance. I've worked in tech companies, small companies, liberal corporations - it's never occurred to me that a political stance, kindly expressed, could make it hard for me to get or keep a job. And there are of course forms of discrimination & "unfit" that I don't encounter because I'm a mid-fat person [my peeps came up with a whole milk/2%/1%/skim/rice milk analogy that we applied to all movements, fwiw]. There was also very little discussion of the class or race components of Fat Studies, which are, in my mind, the things that make the idea of fat studies a little disturbing. I expect it will become increasingly difficult to study fat without going and studying those poor folk, which will be very hard to do from academia without being just plain racist and classist. I felt a lot more drawn to the non-academic portions of the conference as a result, but even those couldn't touch on anything remotely close to the heart of the class and race issues implicit in the fat movement. We are limited by our own experiences.

Which is, come to think of it, why I was disappointed to feel - I think I said outnumbered before - throughout the weekend. Like there were some boundaries drawn - maybe those who'd been in the movement for longer versus those not, maybe some size boundaries, definitely some class boundaries and maybe some racial one (you know, for the TWO not white people). I felt like the combination of topics, speakers & more vocal audience members meant that only a handful of experiences were represented. How do you make a small conference aware of or sensitive to a wide range of experiences, though?

How do you make an entire movement do it, for that matter?

Comments

[snidegrrl.livejournal.com]

I am reading Dan Savage's stupid yet awesome book about the 7 deadly sins, and I just got to the "gluttony" chapter where he goes to a weekend conference of NAAFA.

And oh my god.

Just don't read this book. Just don't. Or read it if you're in a particularly jaunty mood and can take getting ticked off.

[keryx.livejournal.com]

Dan Savage is already on my list of people for the tribal gods to smite. He'll get his.

And wait, you were reading a Dan Savage book? Is the rapture here? Has my dear friend been kidnapped by aliens? ;)

Seriously, what's up with that? What was the awesome part?

[snidegrrl.livejournal.com]

Book club voted to read it. I was unthrilled.

He makes some great points about the conservative camp and some of the points he even made kind of well for an advice columnist. (The chapter about pot smoking I thought was spot-on.)

If only he could stop hating on fat people and to some extent women!

[keryx.livejournal.com]

Ah, book club... where democracy means you get to read books you initially think are shitty.

People who hate on the fat but are otherwise smart and liberal make me want to poke out their eyes.

[sheana.livejournal.com]

Agreed to everything. I come from a poverty background, and I can say that I definitely felt a little alienated because of that and my size (being on the smallerish end of the spectrum, at least for who was at the conference) and my lack of experience. We (the organizers) definitely took note of the lack of diversity present in the room, and I know that next year's organizers are going to try to get the word out better so that a more diverse audience and speaker pool are reached.

On the same note, though, it's hard, because I certainly don't want to seek out some patronizing poor fat folk speaker just because they're addressing class... not that I think that someone talking about the intersections of class and fatness will necessarily be that, but it's something I worry about. I know it's my own internalized shit and I should probably just get over it, but it's there, and it effects all the other intersections I can think of... if someone comes and talks about race and fatness, will it be a creepy Margaret Mead ethnography or will it be someone seriously looking at the relationship between race and fatness, at the different experience of sizeism and discrimination, etc? I dunno.

Anyhow, good points, and I promise we (and really I guess, they - since I won't be a part of it anymore) are working on it for next year.

[keryx.livejournal.com]

Well, sure - and if you go out of your way to have the Token Black or Token Poor Speaker, you may give a more balanced perspective, but you're coming at it in a way that makes it nigh on impossible to not act racist or classist. Even if the TBS/TPS truly examines the race/class issues and doesn't turn it into a patronizing ethnography.

Not an easy answer. And it's a problem with the movement overall, not your conference - if you had managed to solve for that problem, you'd be doing better than pretty much everyone who preceded you in the movement.

[cmolieri.livejournal.com]

i (and the folks I was with) were really annoyed and offended at some of the assumptions about fat activism and being fat - the best which was 'fat people are last socially accepted ostracized group' or some bullshit like that. the conference was not framed at all in a social justice/anti racist framework and as a result people were saying that one form of oppression was worse than the other.

[keryx.livejournal.com]

I've been hearing that bullshit a lot lately. And I know what people must be trying to say is that it's still acceptable to should "fatso!" in a derisive way in the street while racial and queer slurs are perhaps less so. Or that say the morning news can medicalize my body on a daily basis and they can't quite get away with doing that wrt race. That is not the problem. The problem is in what people think and feel, in a lack of empathy - and oh, yeah... political and economic disadvantages for every oppressed group.

And I can't excuse people for not getting that just cause we're a bunch of white educated yupsters; all it really takes to get that is listening.

[cmolieri.livejournal.com]

listening aside, there still should be an acknowledgement, ya know? i mean, i totally could see that what may have been the underlying sentiment was that oppression is wrong in any form, but that was not what was being vocalized. and although we need to be listening there also needs to be awareness of what streams of bullshit are coming out of the mouths and how the folks in the room will percieve it. that acknowledgement is key.

[keryx.livejournal.com]

ps - I wish we'd stood up and demanded more conversation about these issues over the weekend. I feel a lot more like a connected community since leaving & discussing the conference than I did at it.

[volondoinyaface.livejournal.com]

I wonder how much that has to do with the difficulty of speaking face to face about intense issues...It seems easier to take a deep breath, look back on what I've learned, and try to say (type) something relevant and unclouded by trepidation and general shyness here. At any rate, a Conference of any kind is not going to foster much discussion, no matter the benevolence of the hosts, simply because of the I'm Fatter/MasQueer/MasActive tone the discussions have. Discussions with "experts" are decidedly one sided, in my experience. The most conversation I heard was about "coming out" as an activist at work, and that was pretty limited because of incongruous views between authorities (I thought, anyway).

Sigh. We did a good job over ice cream, though. Maybe that's the real solution--ice cream.

[cmolieri.livejournal.com]

yeah. i sort of couldn't really process everything until after the fact. my hope is that next year some thought is given to the conference and the speakers and maybe there will be some workshops and break out sessions exploring these issues.