Boston and Fat Studies

Turns out that I don't have time to do an extended post on my time in Boston this weekend -- it was good and interesting for me. I was only able to atttend the one panel that I was on at PCA conference, but opn has posted a lively summary of her experience attending Fat Studies area panels at the conference, if you're curious. A group went to the hot tubs -- it really is such a powerful theme running throughout so many moments of pushing back against the dominant discourse about fat that I've been part of, the thing about the exquisite relationship between fat bodies and water. The post is on fatshionista. I had a blast with old friends and meeting warm, engaged people for the first time and was very happy to see opn and maryjholliday at the panel.

Also, as I said in the comments to that thread, I'm looking forward to the books of the other two folks I presented with: The Fat Studies Reader, edited by Esther Rothblum (who was there) and Sondra Solovay, which I've mentioned here many times before; and, new to me, Amy Farrell's Fat Shame: a cultural study of stigma, feminism, and fat politics. Amy, who also wrote a history of MS magazine and what her subtitle calls "the promise of popular feminism," said that the title of Fat Shame might change a bit, but that one thing she's writing about are the links between the origins of fat activism and second wave feminism. I'm excited to see somebody doing that, because I feel as if I've been watching as that history disappears and is forgotten.

And, yeah, Boston -- I searched for the fire escape that I scraped and painted the summer of 83 as my first job there. Stirring scenes of my youth, for sure. I saw John Adams' library at the library in Copley Square -- Shakespeare! Cervantes! A copy of the first edition of the Koran produced in the US! -- published in Springfield, Massachusetts, of all places. He wrote all over a book by Mary Wollstonecraft about the French Revolution (it was the most annotated book in his library).