Fat Activism and Fat Liberation
“If the work of Fat Studies is to confront and critique cultural constraints against notions of “fat-ness” and “the fat body” and explore fat bodies as they live in, are shaped by, and remake the world; and theorize how society conceptualizes and pathologizes fat bodies; then the fat activist has been charged and continues to answer the question of ‘what then?’”
(Taylor, Cat Pausé, Sonya Renee. “Fattening up Scholarship.” The Routledge International Handbook of Fat Studies, Routledge, 2021, pp. 1–18, https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003049401.)
Books
Fat Activism by ISBN: 9781910849002Publication Date: 2016-01-04What is fat activism and why is it important? To answer this question, Charlotte Cooper, a fat activist with more than 30 years experience, presents an expansive grassroots study that traces the forty-year history of international fat activism and grounds its actions in their proper historical and geographical contexts.
The Body Is Not an Apology, Second Edition by ISBN: 9781523091003Publication Date: 2021-02-09World-renowned activist and poet Sonya Renee Taylor invites us to reconnect with the radical origins of our minds and bodies and celebrate our collective, enduring strength. As we awaken to our own indoctrinated body shame, we feel inspired to awaken others and to interrupt the systems that perpetuate body shame and oppression against all bodies.
You Have the Right to Remain Fat by ISBN: 9781936932313Publication Date: 2018-08-14Tovar is hungry for a world where bodies are valued equally, food is free from moral judgment, and you can jiggle through life with respect. In concise and candid language, she delves into unlearning fatphobia, dismantling sexist notions of fashion, and rejecting diet culture’s greatest lie: that fat people need to wait before beginning their best lives.
Fat Rights by ISBN: 9780814749074Publication Date: 2008-03-01Fat Rights asks the first provocative questions that need to be raised about adding weight to lists of currently protected traits like race, gender, and disability.
Articles and other resources
Fat Liberation Archive
A collection of the fat liberation cultural and organizing history we have access to: zines, flyers, articles, audio recordings, and other evidence of the lives of fat liberation-oriented queers, anarchists, feminists, lesbians, and revolutionaries from the 1970s to today, mostly from the US and the UK. This is a people’s archive, a labor of community love meant to ensure the fat activists of today and tomorrow know some of the radical Fat Liberation history that made our lives possible: the dreams and joys and community and epiphanies and love, the struggles and pains and ignorance and mistakes.
Fat Liberation Manifesto, November 1973
Originally published by the Fat Underground in 1973, the Fat Liberation Manifesto is one of the earliest texts of fat activism and liberation.
Life In The Fat Underground by Sara Golda Bracha Fishman
A reflection on the radical collective The Fat Underground. The Fat Underground was active in Los Angeles throughout the decade of the 1970s. Feminist in perspective, it asserted that American culture fears fat because it fears powerful women, particularly their sensuality and their sexuality. The Fat Underground employed slashing rhetoric: Doctors are the enemy. Weight loss is genocide. Friends in the mainstream-sympathetic academics and others in the early fat rights movement—urged them to tone it down, but ultimately came to adopt much of the Fat Underground's underlying logic as their own.