Fat Politics Lecture at Smith

• In getting ready for the talk last night, I went into the box of old files in the bottom of my closet. I've got a lot of stuff in there, programs from various fat gatherings over the years, a set of consciousness-raising questions about fat that a group called WOW used in NYC in the seventies (might have lost that...), an outline of a workshop an older fat activist gave me when I was first starting to do public speaking around these issues -- she had used it in the late seventies/eighties. (I'd cite her by name, but I should probable ask permission before I do that on the internet.) And my own stuff in various forms, including answers from workshops where I asked people to interview each other about fat politics, and written responses to Fat Girl Dances With Rocks from a college class on women and economics that had been assigned to read it. Also chapbooks and zines. Not to mention at least three or four antique fat liberation t-shirts. I wonder if I could get the Sophia Smith Archive interested in some of it.



• I talked about this past Nolose and the cold pool and quoted stillwell's keynote before I read Drink. I talked about FLARE and read poems dedicated to cherry_midnight, and had a conversation with a charismatic and fired-up young person who has applied to law school at Berkeley, is eager to work on legal issues with the disability rights center there, and who asked me what needs to happen to end fat oppression. (I said something like I think that the whole economic and political system needs to be built over from the ground up, and that the only way I know to start that is to do whatever you and your friends can come up with next, learn from your mistakes, and keep going.)
  
  She also said, "Don't be offended, but I think that fat has a lot in common with disability, especially facial or cosmetic disability." I said, "I'm not offended! There are serious political alliances to be made, lots and lots of common ground, including in many of our own bodies."



• It was moving to me to be reading work from Belly Songs, some of which I wrote in the mid-eighties, and to experience the aging in my body in some of the changes over time in how it feels to move with the poems. And to have Sally there, and be able to talk in public about how she helped publish Belly Songs when three of us formed a micro press out of a lesbian writers group we were in way back in the day, and how she helped organize the speakout against fat hatred when I was reeling from fat hate mail, and how stepping up for the hard parts and taking full pleasure in the rest of long, deep friendships is so central to sustaining political, artistic and intellectual work, especially on hetereodox, complicated issues like fat oppression.



• I cited amarama's box of clothes and charlottecooper's recent beautiful draft of a paper about fat activism. Some folks took copies of the paper. I was feeling the presence of some of y'all on my friendslist, for sure.



• There was a warm feeling in the room. People were listening with beautiful, serious intensity. It was good to see maryjholliday and somechicksings. It was good to talk with the organizers from Size Matters about what they've been doing and thinking about. It was good to let the writing have the life of being heard. It felt good to do the work.