Fat Activism: A Radical Social Movement

by Charlotte Cooper

What is Fat Activism and why is it important?

Charlotte Cooper, a fat activist with around 30 years experience, answers this question by lifting the lid on a previously unexplored social movement and offering a fresh perspective on one of the major problems of our times.

In her expansive grassroots study she:

Reveals details of fat activist methods and approaches and explodes myths

Charts extensive accounts of international fat activist historical roots going back over four decades

Explores controversies and tensions in the movement

Shows that fat activism is an undeniably feminist and queer phenomenon

Explains why fat activism presents exciting possibilities for anyone interested in social justice

Fat Activism: A Radical Social Movement is a rare insider's view of fat people speaking about their lives and politics on their own terms. It is part of a new wave of accessible, accountable and rigorous work emerging through Research Justice and the Para-Academy.

This is the book you have been waiting for.

Charlotte Cooper is a psychotherapist, cultural worker and para-academic living and working in London. She is a founding proponent of Fat Studies.

'Charlotte Cooper’s fierce new book Fat Activism: A Radical Social Movement should be required reading for scholars and activists. Cooper draws on extensive interviews with fat activists to render a trenchant analysis of our field of motion. She takes a penetrating look at activist efforts and self-understandings, eschewing easy praise in favor of discernment that ultimately promises to invigorate the movement.'

Kathleen LeBesco / Marymount Manhattan College (Associate Dean)

'Charlotte Cooper is once again in the vanguard of radical social change with this book about fat activism. She has captured the history of the fat rights movements, interviewed fat activists, and demonstrated the extensive and exciting breadth of fat activism in a global setting. Fat activism is often portrayed as ineffective when in fact its lack of conformity and interdisciplinarity can serve as a model for other social movements.'

Esther Rothblum / Editor / Fat Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Body Weight and Society

For any civil rights movement to succeed, it must know its history; to build on its strengths and learn from its mistakes. With the ubiquity of the Internet, the historical knowledge and record of activism can be rewritten with 140 characters. That is one of the many reasons that Fat Activism: A Radical Social Movement is important. Anyone interested in the epistemology, ontology, and methodology, (not to mention history) of fat activism should make this a central text of their library.

Cat Pausé / Massey University / Co-Editor of Queering Fat Embodiment

It is in the interest of the ethically and intellectually dubious field of "Obesity Research" to flatten fat subjects; rendering our voices narrowly defined by punchy rhetoric, our activist interventions reduced to child-like flailing against the big bad thin-dominated world. Charlotte Cooper's book resists this myopic view of resistance to fat oppression in form and content. Fat Activists need more researchers and writers examining and reflecting on our work from within, and this book stands as an offering and opening in that vein.

Naima Lowe / Artist and Member of the Faculty at The Evergreen State College

Contents: Acknowledgements / Introduction / 1. Undoing / 2. Doing / 3. Locating / 4. Travelling / 5. Accessing / 6. Queering / Bibliography / Index

Genres: Nonfiction, Feminism, Fat Studies, Fat, Activism, Social Justice, History

301 pages, Kindle Edition

Published January 2, 2016

Reviews

[Catherine · Rating 1 out of 5]

Bloviating and Grueling

I have never in all my years as an English literature major, avid reader, fat woman... never have I seen such a self-aggrandizing writing. And I had to suffer through Hemingway. She claims this is research but I couldn’t make it past the first chapter where her incessant bloviating about herself, her old dead projects, her research she did for a PhD once. It goes in circles with an endless sea of I-statements. She’s supposed to be talking about her research methodologies and proxies. It’s simultaneously grueling/boring and condescending as she’s writing in an incredibly casual style while using terms no one understands. Read this book with a glass of water, though, because this book is DRY. I have a problem with this book never actually defining what fat activism is. But she goes through and puts down absolutely everyone else, every other idea, every work as being inadequate... except her own. Even though she’s referencing dead projects that she admits are outdated and dead. She spends two entire pages on “this is what my fat activism looked like in 2011”, but it’s just an itinerary of her incredibly unrelatable day. This book says thin people shouldn’t get to write much research on fat people because they don’t experience fatness and their research becomes unrelatable. This author is completely unrelatable. This isn’t research. I’m a nurse. I know what research looks like. This is an unrelatable woman self-aggrandizing and calling it science. Just write an autobiography and stop whatever this book is supposed to be. I just wasted hours of my life reading “I did this... I did that... I think this and that and everyone else is wrong because of research parlance”. I’m sorry I bought this book. I’m sorry I read it.

[Mia Westrap · Rating 3 out of 5]

I would probably give this a 3.5/5 but not a 4. There’s many chapters of this book I enjoyed, specifically the historical elements of the book. There was however a few uncomfortable comparisons made towards the end between fatphobia and racism that didn’t sit right with me and weren’t developed further.

[Ellen Bridson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Accessible read for those with some political/historical theory background and a great dip into fat activism. Nonetheless, I think this would be a great read for anyone interested.

[rabble.ca]

http://rabble.ca/books/reviews/2016/0...

Review by Laura Brightwell

After reading Charlotte Cooper's new book, Fat Activism: A Radical Social Movement, I found it difficult to summarize what fat activism is for readers who may be new to the concept. Cooper intentionally shows fat activism to be multifaceted.

For her, fat activism can range from the Health At Every Size (HAES) movement, to fatshion (a portmanteau of fat and fashion) to the stage persona of Beth Ditto, lead singer of indie rock band Gossip, who is well known for unapologetically strutting her fat naked stuff on stage.

It turns out that fat activism is not reducible to one thing and is susceptible to the internal contradictions and misdirected political intentions of any contemporary activist movement.

Cooper is a prolific writer, activist and cultural worker. Fat Activism originates from her doctoral research at the University of Limerick in Ireland.

Originally asked to study fat discrimination in the dietetic clinic, Cooper intentionally shifted her research to fat activism. This shift allowed her to place fat people at the centre of knowledge about themselves.

Rather than reproducing fat people's helplessness and marginalization via the power of the non-fat, medical expert, exploring the history of fat activism allowed Cooper to focus on fat feminist perspectives.

As a self-identified fat person and fat activist herself, Cooper's project originates from the community to which it speaks. It is a rare instance of knowledge production by and for fat people.

Read more here: http://rabble.ca/books/reviews/2016/0...

[Hannah · Rating 3 out of 5]

Someone I follow on Twitter posted a picture of this quote from this book so naturally I bought it right away:
"But this is not a book about obesity, a word I use to describe the idea that fatness is a problem in need of a solution, or the obesity epidemic, a rhetorical device to leverage fat panic. Although there is plenty that is awful about how fat people are treated, that awfulness is not at the heart of this book either. I think of shame as political, not a natural inevitability. I am not going to explore whether or not fat people are healthy, the prime concern in the world of obesity, although I am very much interested in how fat people cope with being treated as unhealthy. Neither will I explore whether or not fat people are a drain on resources, a factor in global warming, a symptom of over-consumption or a product of obesogenic environments. People preoccupied with how fat people can be caused, managed, and prevented will not find much about it here."

So I really wanted to love it but some of the things Cooper chose to focus on had me puzzled or didn't quite sit right for ways I can't articulate yet. I'll probably revisit some parts to see if I interpreted them wrong (the language is hella academic and I'm rusty)

I did find the chapters "Doing" and "Accessing" to be overall helpful and important, particularly the validation of micro and cultural activism. They even gave me some ideas for stuff I could do as I've been veering more toward those forms of activism than traditional organizing.

[Claire Bracegirdle · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really engaging & accessible read. Some things I particularly liked:

Cooper's reflections on the limitations of standard ways of studying social movements, and how she developed more appropriate ways of studying fat activism, in her case autoethnography -

'Angharad E. Beckett argues that if you want to understand a social movement, in her case disability activism, it is not enough to try and theorise it using existing models, you need new approaches that reflect the content of that movement. I agree.'

And her discussion of the ways in which the knowledge and perspectives of fat people are marginalised (or... completely ignored?) within obesity research and discourse -

'...it doesn’t treat fat activism as a viable and less risky public health strategy. This reproduces the idea that fat is an awkward and intractable problem instead of finding answers within it; fat activism’s main value is limited to challenging prejudice or promoting health. Fat activists are almost never consulted and fat people are repeatedly positioned as failed subjects, typically constructed as absent, abstract, abject, anonymous and Othered, passive patient-consumers in need of expert intervention.'

And her exploration of the boundary policing of what constitutes activism, and how the theorising of social movements doesn't currently account how 'ambiguous' movements, or how social movements shift, change, iterate and adapt -

'By adopting a hierarchical understanding of activism, one that privileges certain forms over others, fat activists are stuck between what is commonly understood as activism, and what they actually do in the everyday. This is not surprising given the preponderance of political process activism as the definitive form, with all other interventions treated as poor relations... This awkward ambiguity is intriguing precisely because it upsets the idea that activism has a fixed meaning with solid boundaries.'

And finally, the 'gentrification' of fat activism, and the problems with using the capitalist system as the basis for activism -

'...within the gentrification of fat activism it is access rather than social transformation that has become the main motivator... What started as resistance and critique by people with limited capital to participate in neoliberal culture is now a buying opportunity that further excludes those who are too poor to participate.'

[Hal Lowen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read through my local radical library Rubicund

I wouldn't recommend this as a first dip into fat activism - it was mine and I felt myself getting a little lost in places and needing to backtrack. HOWEVER it is a fantastic book for anyone interested in an examination of fat activism and all the different forms it takes as well as touching on assimilationism and how it's not that great.

It also contextualizes a lot of experiences living as fat and trans and queer in a way that's both driving (other people have the same and are using it to fuel activism!) and almost disheartening (other people might feel as bad as I do). I do wish there was more research into/written about trans experiences, but I am glad it wasn't exclusionary!

Like I said, I do reccomend this 100% but maybe not as a first jumping off point.

[Helen · Rating 4 out of 5]

At first I was a bit apprehensive because I didn't have a lot of background knowledge but overall I don't think that was too much of a problem. My favourite bit was at the end when it was about specific examples of activism in the UK - I hadn't heard of the Fattylympics before but I thought it was a really cool idea. I liked the fact that the author didn't try and say that certain types or methods of activism are better than others. It certainly gave me a lot to think about.

[Nina bo wagner · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mediocre book. I was looking for a theoretical take on how fatness is queer but I think I should have read her debut novel for that. Instead this was very much just a long run down of a bunch of historical fat activism and some not super enlightening theorizing about the meaning of activism. I skimmed through the last third. Did however provide good inspiration for doing my own thesis and showed me how mediocre some studies are that actually get funding. Gives me faith in my own work.

[Meredith · Rating 4 out of 5]

While I didn’t love the way this book was formatted/presented (it read very much as a dissertation turned into a book, which is always a bit awkward for me), the content was excellent! It gave me a lot to think about and reflect upon in terms of my academic work and activism, and I know I’ll be revisiting it many times.

[Kai Guerrero · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very useful and helpful, especiallt for researchers and activists, but also for people who want to know more about the history of fat activism and what it is about. There's a lot of bibliography, too, which I'm grateful for.

[Laura Aranda · Rating 5 out of 5]

Inspiring, comprehensive, reflective and accessible. I'm so grateful for the work of fat activists and for Charlotte Cooper's writings.

[Tassa DeSalada · Rating 5 out of 5]

Interesting

[Ang · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is really academic, but there were some really key insights here. I particularly took something away from the little segment on healthism.

[Lily Heron · Rating 1 out of 5]

Kind of reads like an unedited thesis, or like, lots of random blog post ideas in a word doc.

[Darnell · Rating 1 out of 5]

Academia gone fully dysfunctional.

[Lynne Murray · Rating 5 out of 5]

Charlotte Cooper’s new book takes a comprehensive and entertaining look at the history of combating prejudice against fat people. Although some might calculate the start of this movement towards social justice from the "fat-in" staged in New York's Central Park in 1967, or possibly from the founding of NAAFA (National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance) in 1969, Charlotte Cooper argues (and I agree) that ground zero for full-frontal, all-inclusive fat activism is probably The Fat Liberation Manifesto, written by Judy Freespirit and Aldebaran in 1973. In any event this is movement with four decades of history, and a myriad of different approaches. This book covers more of this history than any other available resource.

Fat Activism provides an in-your-face, yet firmly practical look at what people have done to fight fat prejudice over the decades, what it has and hasn’t worked and how it might evolve in future. She doesn’t shy away from controversies and problems in how groups trying to attack prejudice can stumble into other forms of discrimination in the process. Her approach is positive and affirming rather than simply fault-finding. She provides a constant invitation to listen and learn from one another in hopes of going forward together more effectively.

This book is worth having if only to get Cooper’s insights into her own work in organizing several very creative, radical events and activities such as The Fattylympics, held in London on 7 July 2012, a few weeks before the beginning of the official Olympic Games. Her critiques of other groups and events ring with the authenticity of personal experience.

In the vein of full disclosure practiced by Charlotte Cooper herself, I have to say that I received a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review, and I can honestly recommend it to anyone interested in better understanding the challenges of living and thriving while fat.

[Claudia Cortese · Rating 5 out of 5]

Grateful that this book exists. The history of fat feminism has largely been forgotten. This activist remembering is really important. This book challenges what we think of as fat activism—eating disorder advocacy, body positivity—and shows that, though those are important, fat activism is about so much more: it’s about community, belonging, and challenging the monstrosity of capitalism, white supremacy, patriarchy, all of which need to define some bodies as human and others as abject, some lives as valuable and others as disposable, so as to justify the violence these systems perpetuate. This book helped me re-think and expand my fat feminist praxis.

[Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fantastic overview of the history of fat activism. At times the chronology was unclear, and I wondered whether it was Cooper's intention to destabilize the idea of progressive movement in time. My favourite part was Cooper's description of her own activism, and her linking of the absorption of fat acceptance into social media and fatshion with the neoliberal investment in individualism. She argues that this accommodation has morphed fat activism from a collective social movement to individualized consumer relations.

[Amanda Boyer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Heavy material and lots of good information. Wish there was more on what actions we can take/do next to help with this!