“Don’t assume… I don’t like my body,” begins a manifesto shared at a 1989 Fat Women’s conference in London. Generally known as the “Fat Dykes Statement”, it contained a listing of 29 assumptions, from serious points (“Don’t assume… I feel your body is best than mine”) alongside more playful ones, which emphasise the ludicrousy of assuming anything a couple of person based on their body shape (“Don’t assume… I would like a Food regimen Coke”). 

Should you think fat liberation began in 2011 with Tumblr feminism and fat fashion blogs, you’ve never had the pleasure of interacting with Carlie Pendleton’s work. The scholar focuses on the history of fat activism in modern Britain, with particular attention to the queer histories of the movement – just like the incendiary Fat Dyke Statement.

Pendleton is an element of a growing effort to document and record the fat liberation movement for posterity. The recently created Fat Liberation Archive, for instance, is a digital collection of the ephemera of the cultural and organising history of fat liberation activism, including zines, flyers, articles, audio recordings. Providing evidence of over 50 years of radical fat activism, you may find out about fat liberation leaders from history like poet Sharon Bas Hannah, Fat GiRL zine editors and activist Judith Stein. 

Chatting with The Fat Zine founder Gina Tonic, Pendleton discusses how fatness and queerness intersect, the intricacies of fat lib activism over the many years, and their very own personal stake in fat politics.

Dr Charlotte Cooper wrote in her book, “What I’m presenting shouldn’t be the history of fat activism, there can never be one history.” What do you’re thinking that this statement means?

Carlie Pendleton: So full disclosure: I am keen on Charlotte, and I count her as a friend and inspiration for my work. I’ve interviewed her for my thesis as well. That being said, I do agree that there is no such thing as a one, universal history of anything. It’s why I even have entitled by PhD thesis “Riots Not Diets: A Queer History of Fat Activism in Twentieth-Century Britain.” Histories often conflict in complicated and interesting ways, and I feel it’s essential to acknowledge this in my work. The fat histories I’m researching are a part of the story, not the complete story.  

Although many inside our community are aware that fat lib owes an enormous debt to Black queer people, it’s especially harder to seek out evidence or reference to this work. Do you’re thinking that it’s because of whitewashing or simply poor documentation?

Carlie Pendleton: That is something that I’m definitely experiencing in my current research. While a number of distinguished Black activists and artists, resembling Barbara Burford, Rita Keegan, and Grace Nichols, show up in primary sources on UK fat liberation, the vast majority of the individuals who hold space within the archives are white and middle-class.

The Glasgow Women’s Library actually has a large collection on Barbara Burford’s life which is something I hope to access this summer. And while groups just like the London Fat Women’s Group acknowledged that Black fat women were subjected to each racism and anti-fatness, an intersectionality that was unique for the Eighties, the truth was that white voices were amplified essentially the most. So yes, I feel whitewashing greater than poor documentation is in charge.

I discovered a duality in researching fat lib history: I felt empowered and legitimised that this struggle has been ongoing for thus many many years, but additionally disillusioned that so little has modified for fat people in that point. Did you are feeling this? 

Carlie Pendleton: Oh my god I feel this so hard! You’ve summed it up perfectly, this dichotomy of  feeling empowered by history and likewise frustrated at the dearth of systemic change for fat people. My advice for overcoming this sense is, perhaps selfishly, to maintain digging into and learning about fat histories, art, literature etc. Fat, queer zines especially like Fat Girl and The Fat Zine. Also, search out fat communities wherever you’ll find them. Capitalism and industrial body positivity have diluted radical, fat liberation with individualised self-love. And while your relationship with yourself is very important, it cannot develop and thrive, for my part, and not using a wider critique of how fat is political.

Also in my research, I discovered a lot of fat liberation work within the 70s onwards was aligned with specifically lesbian and queer female movements, why do you’re thinking that that is?

Carlie Pendleton: There’s an awesome quote by US fat activist Vivian Mayer in Shadow on Tightrope: Writings by Women on Fat Oppression (1983) which says: “In theory, then, lesbian feminism offered a haven wherein a fat woman could affirm her beleaguered sense of womanhood and will almost forget she was fat. The expectation was satisfied up to a degree. That time got here when fat women sought lovers amongst other women.”

Lesbian feminism offered fat women each a homosocial framework to explore their identities and a respite from heteronormative beauty standards, or in order that they thought. What quite a lot of fat women present in lesbian spaces were the identical thin-centric beauty ideals that they were attempting to escape. On the subject of queer spaces in later many years, I feel the acts of defiance against heteronormativity allowed for extra space to be taken up by fat women. It was more punk, disruptive, and underpinned by a way of “fuck you!”

Queerness and fatness has been aligned for a few years, but how does queerness and fatness intersect today?

Carlie Pendleton: Speaking from my very own personal fat, queer perspective, queerness has offered me not only an instructional way of viewing myself, my identities and my environment, but a path to making a more liveable world for everybody. To queer, as a verb, means to disrupt, to defy the binary. It shows you that it’s not about fat/thin, healthy/unhealthy, cis/trans, but concerning the mechanics of oppression that trap us into binary structures in the primary place. Thus queer can and does extend beyond sexuality and becomes a, not the, approach to liberate oneself from being regulated and disciplined by heteronormativity. 

In an identical vein, how do you see the intersection of gender and fatness? I’ve seen arguments explaining how fatness can impede gender expression and the way it could actually liberate – which side do you fall on? 

Carlie Pendleton: The intersection of fat and gender is something else I explore in my research and was discussed by many fat activists previously i.e. how does fatness change the way in which your gender is read? For instance, the title of my upcoming talk, “Don’t assume I’m a Failed Heterosexual” comes from the Fat Dykes Statement written in 1989 on the National Fat Women’s Conference in London. It explored how fatness, in some ways, masculinised women, sometimes causing them to be read as butch or a “diesel dyke” even when that was not how they identified. 

I don’t think fat itself impedes gender expression, but relatively there’s a scarcity of access to clothing and material goods which permit fat people to play with and express their gender. There are also significant medical barriers for fat trans people in search of gender affirming care resembling BMI limits for surgery. Having the privilege to explore my gender identity while doing this degree helped me to understand that I’m genderqueer/trans. A lot of how I expressed my gender outwardly previously was in an effort to cover or apologise for my fatness, like having long hair and covering my stomach. I’m also a medium fat (size UK 20) which implies that I even have many more clothing options in comparison with super and infinifats. 

Going back to historical moments in fat liberation, what are your personal favourite stand out moments you discovered in your research?

Carlie Pendleton: I feel the creation of the Fat Dykes Statement in 1989 continues to be one in every of my all time favourites. It’s such a wealthy resource which covers a great deal of angles on fatness like gender, sexuality, race, disability, age. Also discovering the EXACT problems with the Leeds Women’s Liberation Newsletter within the Feminist Library in London was like finding buried gold. The July 1982 issue continues to be the earliest example I’ve been in a position to find on fat liberation within the UK. 

Finally, there’s an awesome quote from Carmel Lough, a fat activist from Hull within the Eighties and Nineties, within the September 1994 issue of Fat News. Writing about her disappointment at how fat women were being exploited by expensive, plus-size brands, and the way capitalism was distracting fat women from more vital issues, she said: “Now beat me with a bar of Bournville if I’m improper, but how does this further the explanation for fat acceptance?” And I don’t know, it just made me laugh! It still does. She is just so done, and it’s extremely relatable.