Fatshionista.com: a heady mixture of social justice, fat-girl memoir, and popular culture http://www.fatshionista.com/cms Mon, 06 Sep 2010 17:55:01 +0100 FeedCreator 1.7.2 index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=189 Hello to anyone still checking this feed! Just a couple of updates regarding the new blog feed (Which has paragraph breaks and active links! Imagine!): For Livejournal users: the new syndicated feed on LJ is here (http://syndicated.livejournal.com/fatsdotcom/profile) . For Notes From The Fatosphere readers: I'm still working on getting this updated, please hang in there with me. For everyone else (Bloglines, etc): The feed URL is all its raw goodness is here (index.php?option=com_mojo Itemid=66 feed=rss2) . And, of course, the new blog can be most readily accessed via the site homepage, Fatshionista.com (http://www.fatshionista.com/) . The GroupBlog - The GroupBlog Tue, 08 Apr 2008 13:33:29 +0100 index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=188 Hi folks. I've switched the site over to a new blog format (index.php?option=com_mojo Itemid=69) - you'll see it automatically if you go to fatshionista.com, or you can click the home link in the main menu to get there. There is also a new RSS feed (index.php?option=com_mojo Itemid=66 feed=rss2) for the site as well - the old one will no longer update, so you may want to adjust your subscriptions accordingly. The old blog entries are archived here (index.php?option=com_content task=blogsection id=1 Itemid=9) for all posterity. If you run into any bugs or problems, please do me a favor and drop me a note (index.php?option=com_contact Itemid=3) letting me know. Thanks! The GroupBlog - The GroupBlog Sun, 30 Mar 2008 06:25:52 +0100 index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=187 In 2000, Malcolm Gladwell wrote a book (that has since garnered much acclaim) entitled, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference. Gladwell's definition of tipping point, gets across the basic premise of his book, a sociological term, the moment of critical mass, the threshold, the boiling point (Gladwell, 12). In his book he looks at many case studies in which a brand or item or activity went from being almost entirely unknown to something everyone had to have/see/do. He makes connections and speculations about why certain things spread, like a virus (that is, getting more efficient at replication the more the thing is replicated) and other things don't. He also sets forth a whole slew of tipping point scientific terminology, creating a tipping point language. Why am I telling you all of this? I've been thinking a lot about the fat acceptance tipping point, and when we will know if we've made it. What will that look like? This has been particularly on my mind in light of this past Tuesday's hearings at the State House on House Bill 1844, An Act to Eliminate Discrimination on the Basis of Weight and Height, in Massachusetts sponsored by Rep. Byron Rushing. If this bill passes it would be illegal for workplaces (and in most cases landlords and realtors) to discriminate against you based on your height or weight. If this bill passes, Massachusetts becomes the second state (first was Michigan, 30 years ago) to have such a law. Cities San Francisco, Santa Cruz and Washington DC have similar protections. Rushing himself reports that activists and supporters were snubbed by lawmakers ten years ago when he proposed a similar bill. He says he feels more confident of passage now because of an increased awareness of the issues. Why? Why is he more confident now? Is it a preponderance of fat blogs? Is it Joy Nash's rant? Is it that there are simply more fat people in America? Is it that the local news stations actually covered the hearing? Or that it made it to the front page of the local free paper? Or that I found the conspicuous coverage of the hearing suprising? Or more fat people who are unwilling to engage in useless and often harmful diets? From where I sit, there are actually more ex-fat people in the media, so I can't point to more fat role models as the answer. So again, I ask myself: what does the tipping point look like for fat acceptance and how will I know when I'm looking at it? How do you think you'll know? The GroupBlog - The GroupBlog Thu, 27 Mar 2008 09:01:30 +0100 index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=183 I've noticed a fair amount of both annoyance and miscommunication amongst a lot of white people in response to the recent posts about race on this blog. Which is, honestly, totally understandable - I, like many white folks who try to maintain a certain level of awareness of privilege and racism, did not spring from the womb fully informed on these issues and passing out xeroxed copies of Unpacking The Invisible Knapsack to the nurses in the maternity ward. It was something I learned, slowly, painfully, and with much resistance. So I feel like I can pretty keenly relate to what some folks are feeling. Which, I think, enables me to offer a little bit of tough love here. (Better yet, let's pretend this post is administered with promises of cupcakes and fluffy pillows and snuggly kittens at the end.) Yes, being sensitive is hard. Having to think about intersectionality and respecting the multiple identities of the people you struggle with in a political movement is hard, especially when it's so easy to just not. Privilege works because it creates an environment in which it is simpler and takes less effort for those in a position of privilege to ignore racism (or insert your favorite -ism here) than it does to notice it, because they foolishly believe that it doesn't affect them. This is a lie. I may be putting it harshly, but it is a lie. But ultimately, it isn't about me, or how it does or doesn't affect me, or how it affects other folks with unexamined privilege, struggling with the idea that they have benefited from racism. By this, I don't mean that it's not my responsibility to be constantly vigilant and always increasing my awareness of my own privilege and my own positions in the world and in this movement; it is. I mean the statement literally: these conversations are not about me. It isn't about how much work it is to remember that many if not most POC don't have the luxury of being color blind or ignoring race, how trying it is to remember the different experiences and identities of others when choosing my words, how damned difficult it is to come to terms with the fact that my POC friends don't speak for all POC everywhere, and how troubling it is have to strain so hard to see something that is usually, insistently invisible to privileged white folks like myself. It isn't about how much I hate having to just shut my fucking mouth and listen to someone tell me I've offended them, and how, and why, and to respect and trust their experience, and to not tell them they're wrong, or what they ought or ought not to be offended by, and to deal with the fact that being told these things makes me uncomfortable, and/or makes me feel stupid. It isn't about me. It's about making room for marginalized and silenced voices to be heard. No matter how hard it is to hear what they have to say. By making it about me and my feelings and... The GroupBlog - The GroupBlog Tue, 25 Mar 2008 09:58:15 +0100 index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=182 Through all of this discussion and debate about fat and race and why thinking about both of them together matters, I thought I'd add my $.02 to the long and rich discussion about intersectionality and why it matters to me and to you. I literally could not tell my own story as a person without intersectionality. Having found myself on the cusp of and entrenched in a number of different identity categories, (for disclosure, those would be: biracial (half-Taiwanese/Chinese, half-white/Jewish), queer, raised by mixed-class parents (but mostly middle class), high femme, cisgendered, able-bodied, and fat) I have never truly found a home in any single-politic movement. If I tried to talk about my queerness in a vacuum, my words would be stilted and my story incomplete, because my gender identity as a high femme, my class background, my race, and my fat have all modified my experience of what it means to be queer. If I try to talk about my experience of race in a vacuum, I would again come up short, because that experience is informed by my gender identity, my class, and my queerness. I literally could not talk about any one of those identities listed above without relating them to my experiences of those other identities. They are too intertwined, too connected, and too important to leave off the table. A number of folks responded to my post about POC in the FA movement with a question about why it was necessary to bring race or any other non-fat-related identity or experience into the picture. For that, I have several responses: 1. Because it's not just me whose experience of fat is shaped by my other identities. You may not know it, but every single one of your identities (whether that be white, poor, disabled, upper-class, transgender, etc.) changes the way the world experiences you, and thus affects the way you experience the world. If any one of those identities were to change overnight, I would bet my last dollar that your experience of fat would be different. 2. Because even if you can't possibly imagine how something like race could change a person's experience of fat, it behooves you to listen other people in the movement who can bring to the table a different perspective on how fatphobia affects them. And when you think about it, how could it be a *bad* thing to widen your own personal analysis of fatphobia? 3. Because if we really want to advance fat acceptance, we should know that historically, single-issue causes haven't ever managed to capture the full breadth of how and why and when and where and on whom oppression works, and therefore could never be completely successful in the long term. If we are truly interested in working towards a just and equitable society, eliminating just one oppression at a time isn't going to work. 4. Because we want our movement to be as strong as it can be, and we should realize that in order to attract more people to support our cause, we're going to have to make the case for why fat acceptance should matter to them, and having an analysis on how their identity fits into that picture is a really effective way of making that case. After my post was referenced... The GroupBlog - The GroupBlog Mon, 24 Mar 2008 18:47:28 +0100 index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=181 Dear fatshionistas, I am in the process of changing the blog component this site currently uses over to a much user-friendlier (and more immediately familiar) WordPress-based system instead. While I am working on this, the homepage may look odd now and again. Should you come upon this strangeness, fret not! The Groupblog link (index.php?option=com_content task=blogsection id=1 Itemid=9) in the upper left menu will always return you to the old blog. If things should go totally haywire on you, drop me a line (index.php?option=com_contact Itemid=3) and let me know. Your patience is appreciated. Cheers, Lesley The GroupBlog - The GroupBlog Mon, 24 Mar 2008 08:41:25 +0100 index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=180 There are reasons why people of color aren't flocking to the fat acceptance movement, and they're probably not the reasons you're thinking of. I swear, if I read or hear one more comment about POC not participating in the fat acceptance movement due to access, I am going to scream. If we're talking about internet communities, one only needs to do a quick Google search to find that there are vibrant pockets of the blogosphere where people of color are contributing their thoughts and stories and building online communities that work for them in droves. If we're talking about in-person fat activism, people of color from all sorts of backgrounds have always found time and space to contribute to the anti-oppression movements that matter most to them. People of color know resistance. So I don't wanna hear it. We're here all right; we're just not with you. I see the fat acceptance movement making many of the same mistakes that second wave feminism did, and it's both sad and maddening. We built this movement; why don't they come? That is the prevailing attitude I read over and over again. But rarely, if ever, do I see white fat acceptance bloggers talking critically about why the movement may not be relevant or structured in a way that attracts fat people of color and their allies. Let's break it down for a minute. Fat acceptance bloggers are guilty of the same sins of white feminism in that there is often a wholesale grouping of all fat people under the same oppression umbrella, with little or cursory examination of how things like race, class, sexuality, gender and gender presentation, ability, and age play into the fat equation. At minimum, folks in the fat acceptance movement need to take serious stock of their own position in the world, and how their privilege may be blockading their understanding of how other peoples' experiences, identities, and embodiments change the way they experience their fat and how their fat is experienced by the world at large. I also need to say that if I hear the fat is the last acceptable oppression meme one more time, I am going to scream (louder). Fat hatred is often blatant, shameless, vitriolic, and completely public. But guess what? So is racism! (And classism, heterosexism, ableism, and sexism.) Racism is institutionalized into our laws, our classrooms, our work places, and our daily interactions. Just because some white folks think it's unacceptable to say the n-word, doesn't mean that racism is gone or that it's not acceptable. When people in the fat acceptance movement say that fat is the last acceptable oppression, it alienates and invalidates the struggles of people of color, who know first-hand that racism not only exists, but that it is also very much acceptable in polite society. Another offensive myth that I hear parroted around fairly often is that people of color are more accepting of fat bodies, and that men of color love a thick woman. Let's just say that that is NOT my experience. In many different Asian communities, that is the opposite of the truth. By Taiwanese (where my mom is from) beauty standards, my 5'4, size 20, size 10 shoe... The GroupBlog - The GroupBlog Fri, 21 Mar 2008 07:47:04 +0100 index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=179 This evening I shifted over to a new RSS feed module for the site, as the old one was a pain in the ass, insofar as stripping all html and formatting from the posts in the feed. I am still trying to get the new module to function correctly, as currently it's showing the first few posts on the site ever, from the beginning, which are certainly great posts, but which are not supposed to be there. Thus, I apologize for any feed catastrophes that may take place while I am working this out. Thanks for your patience. The GroupBlog - The GroupBlog Wed, 19 Mar 2008 17:42:44 +0100 index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=178 Today my coworkers decided to order out for lunch. I can rarely resist a good hot lunch even when I have tasty food of my own to eat - my defenses are much weaker still on days like today, when my intended lunch plans were to assemble a peanut butter and jelly sandwich from its individual components, which was all I had time to grab in my hasty flight out the door of our home this morning. Usually, when my office orders out, we get Hong Kong Cafe, or Canestaro's, or College Pizza. Sometimes Thai, if they feel like humoring me. Today, my coworkers wanted to order from a heretofore unknown to me healthy fast food place, the cutely named B.Good (http://www.bgood.com/) . Get it? B Good = be good, by eating healthy , which makes you not bad! It's clever! Anyway. The stuff on the menu - mostly burgers, and a few sandwiches - looked tasty, so I was down. I called my husband (who happens to work at the same institution I do, and with whom I have lunch most days) and asked if he wanted in. He did. I alighted on the El Guapo, which, according to the menu, consisted of a house-ground burger with lean, all-natural bacon, jalapeno-ranch sauce, lettuce, tomato, and red onion on a toasted whole wheat bun . My husband wanted the buffalo chicken sandwich: oven-crisped chicken breast topped with buffalo sauce, homemade blue cheese dressing and crisp lettuce on a toasted whole wheat bun. Also, some of the bafflingly-named real fries , which are hand-cut, oven-crisped... never fried! (Frying, it seems, removes the reality of other fries! Exclamation point!) It all sounded pretty good, notwithstanding the meticulous accounting of fat grams for each sandwich on the menu. I thought to myself, Self, this looks suspiciously like some kind of specifically low-fat restaurant. But I squelched my reluctance and handed over our order. Forty minutes later, my husband and I were sitting in the lunchroom, and I took the first bite of my burger and chewed. I feel like a talk a lot here about my Dieting History. I don't, in daily life, talk about it much at all anymore, having made what peace I can with the decisions both I and my parents made regarding my size and my eating habits while I was growing up. For whatever reason, here I find myself talking about it a lot, and the enormous, irreversible effect it had on my life, my relationship with my body, and my relationship with food. It had such repercussions that even though I stopped dieting in 1995, it still affects me, however slightly, almost on a daily basis. Today, however, it had a somewhat more dramatic effect. I bit into that burger and chewed and I had a flashback - for the sake of this story, we'll pretend it was just like in the movies. The camera zoomed in and the screen went blurry and suddenly, suddenly I was fourteen, and fat, and standing in... The GroupBlog - The GroupBlog Wed, 19 Mar 2008 12:50:09 +0100 index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=177 What can be said about Divine, really? The GroupBlog - The GroupBlog Fri, 14 Mar 2008 10:07:32 +0100