Fatphobia is commonplace. Even among queers, the general assumption is that we are all on the same page about fat. Actually, we are not even reading the same book.
Fatphobia permeates the culture. In the United States, very few laws prohibit weight discrimination.
Fat people face harassment and discrimination on the job, in schools, when renting homes, when seeking medical care, when shopping, and when parenting.
While the Equal Opportunity Employment Coalition has recognized that legal protections likely exist for individuals on the higher end of the weight spectrum, plenty of people don’t qualify for those protections.
Some mainstream groups have taken the familiar “love the sinner, hate the sin” attitude toward fat folks; they agree that fat people should have basic civil rights, as long as they have weight-loss goals—so they are still promoting the use of weight as a stand-in for health.
Nolose is a nonprofit organization working to “end the oppression of fat people and create a vibrant fat queer culture.”
One of the exciting aspects about the Nolose approach is the understanding that fatphobia, as their bylaws state, is “integrally linked to other social justice issues, such as the women’s movement, the anti-racist and anti-imperialist struggles of people of color at home and around the world, the queer and transgender movements, class struggle, disability rights movements, and more. [Nolose believes] beauty, morality, and health must be divorced from size, shape, age, gender, sex, race, ability, religion, and sexual orientation.”
From body-embracing dance troupes like Oakland’s Raks Africa, to Nolose’s People of Color (POC) caucus, to the Canada-based “It Gets Fatter” video project, the work to center the voices of people of color within the fat justice movement, and specifically within the queer fat movement, has long been gaining momentum.
Because many of the funded scientific studies and much targeted diet propaganda focus on the bodies of people of color, and utilize well-known people of color as spokespersons, it is easy to see that the war on fat has become a war on bodies of color.
The voices of fat queer people of color are challenging this colonized paradigm, which exists in mainstream and queer culture alike.
Revisiting past work is helpful in understanding and communicating the important intersection of fat justice, queer community, and communities of color. The wisdom that precedes us lays a foundation for the work to come.
Taking a look back to powerful moments in a movement’s past creates access points for new people and new insights. Listening to the many amazing people of color who were Nolose Conference keynote speakers in the last several years, it is easy to recognize common themes.
Bianca Wilson, a biracial lesbian who spoke at the 2010 Nolose Conference (theme: Fat Panic), focused on the weight-health paradigm and how it affects work with black lesbian and bisexual women. “Incorporating an analysis of race means more than challenging how white fat community does or does not include the needs of POCs in social spaces,” she explains.
In her talk, she discussed the need to reject the dominant health framework that equates fat with illness.
In her 2013 keynote talk (theme: Survival of the Fattest), Fresh, a fat black dyke and poly-rural Southern girl, echoed Wilson’s observations. Fresh is organizing a community café in Chicago as part of her food justice and accessibility work.
She is also involved with a farm and eco-campus that has Healthy Food hubs in communities of color. One consequence of using weight as a proxy for health is the way it poisons the food justice movement. “I’m constantly in communities where others fighting for food justice and accessibility to fresh food are doing so on the ‘fight obesity,’ ‘anti-fat’ bandwagon, so there is a need to have tools to fight and survive,” Fresh reports.
“I’m also often amongst folks who are not self-advocating. They are fighting for what they think others need, not necessarily fighting for themselves, or their experiences, or even their personal communities.”
TaMeicka Clear, a self-identified black cis female big-bodied code switcher, focused her keynote talk on intergenerational healing and her own story of survival. She discussed the challenges of visibility and self-advocacy within Nolose. “I attempt to bring all of me to the table without exploiting my community or contributing to the villain-ization of black life, blackness, or black men, as my father was very fat-shaming when I was a kid.
That is the work I do often—being in queer/activist space and having to be very intentional and careful with my blackness and blackness [in general],” she says, adding, “I wanted it to be clear that spaces like Nolose are beautiful yet complicated.”
The reality of the ways in which people who have multiple and overlapping identities are required to parse themselves out when trying to find community is a common theme among the keynote speakers who are people of color. Collette Carter, who describes herself as black fat queer femme and working class, describes the conference as “one of the spaces where I felt I could be all of myself, even as a fan of pop culture and science fiction.”
While Nolose is no utopia, Carter reports, “It is an amazing string of experiences that define a person and the places that both replenish and challenge our point of view. It is not an easy skill to build community across difference, even when there is a larger identity as a gravitational pull.
How we prepare to engage and build community power is only as strong as our ability to listen, share, be accountable, and have hard conversations located within a shared historical context.” Carter goes on to explain: “Growing up in a country where I felt I was not supposed to survive, and understanding that many others have also felt the same, I wanted my keynote to reflect the possibilities and opportunities embedded in that energy, if harnessed intentionally.”
Harnessing that energy is crucial for survival. Fat oppression is a weapon that targets people of size, but hurts everyone. It promotes the belief that if we are to be worthy of happiness and respect, our bodies must meet a set of cookie-cutter criteria.
Those beauty expectations put the thin, white, able-bodied heterosexual at the center of the dialogue, and normality; the further a person’s lived experience is from that center, the greater the cost of that person’s existence. This narrow lens creates a dynamic whose primary function is to exclude and separate.
Queers are constantly trying to widen that lens, because we know too well how easy it is to be left out of the picture. We strive to build bridges and connections that span and represent our whole identity. Our work in these areas is often the humbling experience of acknowledging our own bias and expectations, but it creates countless opportunities to learn and grow.
Our society thinks fat people should be singularly focused on weight loss, so everything we do to negate that is activism. The fat justice movement is about speaking up when size prejudice is playing out in your community, no matter what your size.
It is about questioning biases and beliefs. It’s recognizing that fat oppression plays out differently across cultural, identity, and geographic lines.
It’s listening to people’s experiences of how that looks for them, and believing that people have the right to their own bodies. The fat justice movement is happening right now and there is plenty of room to join.