Fat Sex: New Directions in Theory and Activism

Helen Hester, Caroline Walters

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781472432544
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317136354
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

While fat sexual bodies are highly visible as vehicles for stigma, there has been a lack of scholarly research addressing this facet of contemporary body politics. Fat Sex: New Directions in Theory and Activism seeks to rectify this, bringing debates about fat sex into the academic arena and providing a much-needed critical space for voices from across the spectrum of theory and activism. It examines the intersection of fat, sex and sexuality within a contemporary cultural landscape that is openly hostile towards fat people and their perceived social and aesthetic transgressions. Acknowledging and engaging with some of the innovative work being done by artists, activists, and academics around the issue of fat sex, this collection both challenges preconceptions regarding fatness and sexuality, but also critiques and debates various aspects of the fat activist approach. It draws on a wide range of disciplinary perspectives, bringing together work from the UK, US, Europe, and Australia to offer a wide-ranging examination of the issues of size, sex, and sexuality. A cutting-edge exploration not only of fat sex, but of identity politics, neoliberalism and contemporary body activism in general, Fat Sex: New Directions in Theory and Activism will be of interest to scholars of sociology, cultural studies, geography, porn studies and literary studies working on questions of gender, sexuality and the body.

Chapter 1
Riots Not Diets!: Sex, Fat Studies and DIY Activism

Helen Hester and Caroline Walters

Fat Sex and its Academic Absence

Fat studies, which has roots in fat activism, emerges as a response to a contemporary cultural landscape that is openly hostile towards fat people and their perceived social and aesthetic transgressions. This book builds on a deep admiration for this discipline and examines the relationship between fat, sex and sexuality. It follows in the wake of key texts – including The Fat Studies Reader (eds. Rothblum and Solovay, 2009), Deborah Lupton’s Fat (2012), and the academic journal Fat Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Body Weight and Society – which have broken new ground in the debates around fat embodiment. Their insights encompass issues such as health and the medicalization of ‘body mass’, cultural geographies of weight and size, and fatness and social justice. The discipline has been ahead of the curve, too, in understanding how intersecting forms of oppression impact embodiment. It has consistently demonstrated a commitment to better understanding the ways in which factors such as class, gender, race, age, ability, ethnicity, and sexuality can inform one another and shape the lived realities of fat people. Fat Sex: New Directions in Theory and Activism owes a debt to this activism infused scholarship, and seeks to draw on the strengths of the tradition in order to make a contribution to the field.

But while fat studies as an emerging discipline demonstrates an extraordinary sensitivity to issues that have frequently been neglected within other forms of scholarly debate, there appears to be a gap within the literature when it comes to theorizing fat sex. While there have been one or two important and insightful essays on the topic (Murray 2004, Gailey and Prohaska 2006), it is only with very recent additions to the field, such as Queering Fat Embodiment (Pausé, Wykes and Murray, 2014), that the insights of fat studies and sexuality studies have been brought together. There is much more that might be done to facilitate a sustained and productive conversation between these traditions, and to help further detailed critical engagement around the intersection of size and sex. Contributions from diverse perspectives are certainly to be encouraged, and this volume is an attempt to foster such diversity. Fat Sex: New Directions in Theory and Activism aims to address the lack of dedicated scholarship, and is one of the first academic texts to focus exclusively and directly on fat sex.

Fat (and) Sex: Activist and Community Origins

Although academic material on fat sex has been slow to emerge, there is a richer and more respected tradition of writing on this topic to be found within the sphere of activism, self-help, and (auto)biography. Hanne Blank’s Big Big Love: A Sex and Relationships Guide for People of Size (2011) and Rebecca Jane Weinstein’s Fat Sex: The Naked Truth (2012), for example, provide different (though similarly sex- and fat-positive) perspectives on fat embodiment, and seek to reflect on the specificities of sexual practices, intimacies, and relationships for ‘people of size’. Works specifically dedicated to fat sex are complemented by texts that include issues of sex and sexuality as part of broader discussions about fat life experiences. Virgie Tovar’s collection Hot and Heavy: Fierce Fat Girls on Life, Love, and Fashion (2012) would be one example here, drawing as it does from a range of voices to offer short reflections on the topics of sex, identity and the fat female form. These are accessibly written texts, aimed at delivering a body-positive message to a broad general audience. As reflected by Weinstein’s text, whose publication was crowd-funded via a Kickstarter campaign, there is often a spirited and enterprising DIY ethos to be found behind much of this literature, and indeed, behind fat sex activism more generally.

In some cases, this ethos is explicitly linked to the radical amateurism of counter-cultural movements such as punk and riot grrrl, which have distinctive traditions of self-publishing. Within the Tammy Rae Carland Zine Collection (located within New York University’s Riot Grrrl Archive), one can find numerous examples of fat activism within the feminist zine cultures of the 1990s. In some cases, this manifests itself as individual articles within general interest zines; Everybody Sucks But Me, for example, subversively vandalizes found material on the topic of ‘Fat and How Not to Be’ (n.d.), while queer punk fanzine Three Dollar Bill seeks to raise awareness about the systematic oppression of fat people, and to encourage closer ties between fat liberation and lesbian feminist movements (‘Fat Oppression and Fat Liberation’, 1991). In other cases, activism takes the form of publications specifically dedicated to exploring issues of fat embodiment from a riot grrrl perspective – The Adventures of Big Girl (1993), for example, or I’m So Fucking Beautiful (n.d.).

These publications address a range of issues, from clothes shopping and street harassment to diet culture and self-acceptance, but what is important for our purposes is their tendency to include sex (and sexual pleasure) as an integral part of their diverse political projects. I’m So Fucking Beautiful (n.d.), for example, discusses the author’s embodied experiences of the sensuality of fat flesh (‘fat is fun! [ … ] fun to suck on’), and accompanies many of its articles with erotically-tinged nude sketches of fat female bodies. The Nerdy Grrrl Revolution (n.d.), meanwhile, includes a personal reflection on the difficulty of being desired for one’s fatness – an experience that is problematized for the author after she receives sexually explicitly fan mail. Within this riot grrrl tradition, then, sex – whether painful, problematic, or pleasurable – is shown to play an important role in fat embodiment.

Inspired by the punk movement and DIY culture was one of the most influential fat activist zines: FaT GiRL: A Zine for Fat Dykes and the Women Who Want Them, which ran from 1994 until 1997. It was compiled and published by the FaT GiRL Collective based in San Francisco, but had international contributors, featuring work by Charlotte Cooper, Sondra Solovay, Max Airborne and Judy Freespirit. It was an expansive zine, with each issue coming in at 60 pages of A4, and included stories, interviews, comics, poetry and an incredible array of photo spreads showing fat women enjoying sex. The collective members wanted to present a diverse array of fat lesbian bodies and to challenge cultural norms of appropriateness. Its ever-present politics, explicit sexual representations and size meant that this was one of the few fat zines that academics have written about (Snider 2009). In chapters 2 and 3 of this book, Zora Simic and Cat Pausé respectively, consider this zine’s legacy, its position within fat activism, and its contribution to representing fat queer sexuality.

The people who produce these zines – many of whom present themselves as young, female, queer, and/or economically disempowered – do the work of consciousness-raising within their own communities, while also sharing experiences, coping strategies, and subcultural knowledge about fat sex. The publication of contact details and the culture of non-monetary exchange (in which the price of a zine is often advertised as a simple zine for zine swap) enable these writers to engage in semi-anonymized conversations. This facilitates unique ways of building networks, obtaining support, and enabling knowledge exchange around culturally-loaded issues. The self-publishing tradition also gives fat punks the space to run against the received wisdom about sex, size, and their intersection. Zinesters write fat sexual practices and the fat sexual body against those mainstream knowledges that typically exclude and produce them. In this sense, we can position queer punk and riot grrrl zine making as part of a culture of determined and resistant amateurism. It resists hegemonic understandings about fat sex by clearing a subcultural space for certain marginalized voices.

We can see the legacy of this DIY culture in numerous strands of fat activism today. Hard copy zine making continues to have its place and many activists use it as a tool in their practice, but we can also see the continuance of the self-publishing tradition in a different form in the wake of the development of Web 2.0. As the use of personal blogs and social networking sites has become increasingly common, activists have sought to exploit these platforms in order to agitate for fat liberation and to build communities. In recent years a number of tumblrs have emerged seeking to challenge preconceptions about the politics of size and sex; fat-sex-is-good-sex.tumblr.com (n.d.), fat-sex.tumblr.com (n.d.), and fatsexadvice.tumblr.com (n.d.), for example, are all dedicated to the topic. Microblogs of this kind tend to incorporate a mixture of practical advice, comical memes, and sexually explicit imagery of various kinds as part of a multi-faceted engagement with fat sex. The repurposing and re-contextualizing of existing material that takes place through ‘reblogging’, as well as the prevalence of user-generated content, strongly recalls certain elements of 90s zine culture.

These sites retain an interest in the kind of sex- and body-positive messaging demonstrated by riot grrrl publications, and continue to avow a commitment to providing resources for their communities: ‘Here we believe that good sex is not dependant on your weight. Need some advice? Ask away. Tired of not seeing your body type represented in porn? We will find it’ (fatsexadvice.tumblr.com, n.d.). While we might seek to problematize uncritical assumptions about the value of activism based on locating and sharing pornographic images of particular body types, there is no denying that these virtual materials speak in some way to the politics of fat sex. A particular version of what fat sex is and means is generated by these tumblrs, and they make accessible a particular form of visibility for big bodies – one which courts an overt recognition of their sexuality. Indeed, the potential role of pornographic imagery in twenty-first century fat activism is an issue that needs to be addressed, and is discussed by several of the authors included in this volume (see Ingraham, Smiet and Klumbyte). This attention to porn, and to the labour that produces it, is arguably one of the unique strengths of this text.

Despite the lack of relevant scholarly research there are a number of extremely rich and interesting traditions dealing with the topic of size and sex to be found elsewhere. This is something that Fat Sex: New Directions in Theory and Activism is keen to acknowledge, and the collection is influenced by (and engages with) some of the innovative work being done by artists, activists, and para-academics. This book seeks to demonstrate some of the ways in which academics are also activists and activists are also academics, since the boundaries between these two seemingly commonsensical categories are often less clear-cut than they might appear. For example, many of the contributors to this collection straddle the boundary between academia and activism. Several activists have contributed to the volume, and their strategies for raising awareness, challenging preconceptions, and advocating for a culturally stigmatized community inform much of the material included here. At the same time, however, various strategies of ‘making visible’ are critiqued and challenged, as the way forward for political agitation and cultural representation is debated. The result is a cutting-edge exploration not only of fat sex, but also of identity politics and contemporary body activism in general. This collection will seek to build on the important contributions of the activist community, bringing debates about fat sex into the academic arena, and providing a critical space for voices from across the spectrum of contemporary theory and activism.

Fat Sex: New Directions in Theory and Activism

While activism has long been influential in exploring fat sex, this is the first collection of work focused specifically on its critical and political potential. The chapters collected here cover a range of approaches to fat sex which draw from the traditions of history, sociology, performance studies, literary studies and gender studies. We hope that reading work from these different disciplines side by side will help to give the reader a more comprehensive picture of the interdisciplinary intellectual debates surrounding fat studies in general and, more specifically, fat sex. Fat Sex aims to be international as well as interdisciplinary, and the collection goes some way towards addressing Charlotte Cooper’s concern that fat studies should really be called ‘Fat American Studies’ (2009, 327–333). Not only is the collection edited by two British academics, but it includes contributions from the UK, mainland Europe, the US, and Australasia. We hope that future work in this area will be able to further increase its global reach.

To help the reader traverse the complex material in this book we have arranged it in sections, beginning with general wide ranging debates before moving on to specific intersections between fat, sex and its representations. We outline the themes in these sections by explaining the function of each section and each chapter’s contribution. While there are four categories, the material does overlap and speak to chapters in other sections, for the individual pieces are less discrete than the organiziation of this text may make them appear. The sections are: Fat Histories, Fat Communities; Fat Gender Politics; The Pornography of Fat; and Culturally (In)Visible Bodies.

Fat Histories, Fat Communities

In order to look forwards and forge new directions in research, we wanted the book to open by looking back at the histories of fat activists, academics, and writers who made the existence of this collection possible. With the advent of the fatosphere, it can be easy for many to think this phenomenon of being critical about fat is a new-fangled fad that arose in the wake of the obesity epidemic, which would be denying our histories. These chapters by Zora Simic and Cat Pausé explore the roots of contemporary considerations of fat sex by paying close attention to the complex legacies of fat activisms and early influential writings.

Zora Simic’s chapter ‘Fat as a Feminist Issue: A History’ opens this book by tackling the legacies of fat feminisms and activisms, and by considering the ways in which feminisms have dealt with fat. This complex chapter helps to ground contemporary work on fat sex by providing the necessary contextual material. Its first section focuses on the development of fat feminism from the 1970s American pioneer fat activist group, Fat Underground, via the queer fat activism of the FaT GiRL collective in the 1990s, through to the fatosphere of the 2000s. The second part of her chapter examines mainstream critiques of fat by positioning two best-selling texts in their social and historical context: Susie Orbach’s Fat is a Feminist Issue (1978) and Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth (1991). Simic’s chapter provides readers with a useful foundation to the subsequent debates and discussions about fat sex by looking at the ways that a variety of previous writers and movements have dealt with these issues.

While Simic’s chapter offers a historical overview, Cat Pausé’s chapter focuses on work from the past decade and on the ways that representations of fat sex engage with prevalent anti-fat attitudes and discourses. Pausé reflects on why it is not surprising that fat sex is rarely discussed if the majority of empirical academic research focuses on reasons that people would be unhappy with their bodies, their size, and its negative impact on their sexual functioning. The second half of this chapter entitled ‘Human Nature: On Fat Sexual Identity and Agency’ considers a variety of activist books, websites and interventions that offer practical strategies and support for fat people to re-engage with their bodies and sexuality. Together these two chapters help to frame the focus of the book by positioning the academic research firmly within the tradition of fat studies, its relationship with feminisms and activism.

Fat Gender Politics

Since much of fat studies is written by women due to its roots within feminism (see Pausé, Chapter 2) it is unsurprising that several chapters in this book explicitly consider the ways in which gender, fat and sex intersect. This section serves to demarcate those chapters where gender and its political relationship with fat is a primary focus.

Chapter 4 by Jeannine Gailey entitled ‘Transforming the Looking-Glass: Fat Women’s Sexual Empowerment through Body Acceptance’ is based on in-depth interviews with 74 North American fat women who talked with her about their sexual and dating experiences. Through this data Gailey discovers that embracing one’s size can enable sexual empowerment and satisfaction. She considers the role of age, alternative sexual lifestyles (e.g. non-monogamy and BDSM), discovery of the fatosphere and online dating. This chapter contains many extensive quotations from Gailey’s participants, which enables readers to follow her conclusions and disrupts the power dynamics between researcher and participant.

Frances Hatherley’s chapter ‘Against “Good Taste”: Class, Corpulence and the Subversive Pleasures of “Unfit” Femininities’ uses an intersectional approach to consider how class, fat and femininity become differently marked. She chooses not to use the word fat in this piece but rather corpulence, because for her ‘it describes a body that is an overabundance, of almost pure corporeality. Its very bodiliness strongly connects it to the lower stratum, of the vulgar and the base. Likewise, the working class body shares many of these cultural associations with lowness and dirt’. This provides Hatherley with a framework for her intersectional analysis of ways that working class femininities can flout conceptions of good taste. In order to make this argument she uses the work of ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• About the Editors
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Riots Not Diets!: Sex, Fat Studies and DIY Activism
• FAT HISTORIES, FAT COMMUNITIES
• FAT GENDER POLITICS
• CREATIVE INTERLUDE
• THE PORNOGRAPHY OF FAT
• CREATIVE INTERLUDE
• CULTURALLY (IN)VISIBLE BODIES
• CREATIVE INTERLUDE
• Index