Fat activism makes me feel sexy.
Being a fat girl in a short dress while walking around the Marina with an enormous whoopie pie filled with vanilla buttercream (thanks, Susie Cakes!) - as was the case on Tuesday - is an act of political resistance. Because fatties have so thoroughly been pushed into the margins of society and because food and fat have been so successfully demonized the potential to perform radical acts of fat love reside within all kinds of otherwise commonplace things. My short skirt, my whoopie pie are symbols of my refusal to capitulate.
So, when I got an email last Thursday from some fellow fatties about a direct action flash mob (coordinated by Marilyn Wann, author of Fat?So!) to protest the Obesity Treatment and Prevention Conference at the Hyatt in SF, I was all about it. An aside about the word obesity: it's a medical pathology, not a politically correct neutral word. I don't like that word because it's hella long and it doesn't really sum up my identity as a fat girl. I prefer the word fat because it's short and cute and it's become part of my erotic subjecthood. The word fat is used to scare people... the threat of that word is used to police people's bodies and their intake. But it doesn't scare me.
I was at the Hyatt at 3pm, the designated time. I was excited about getting to do some public dancing. I had fantasies about a dance party right there near the foo-foo Embarcadero, inspiring gasps and giggles from Sur la Table ware-toting tourists far and wide. But it turned out that wasn't what the plan was. My e-mail skimming abilities are not so great, and I had missed the part about storming in during a talk and interrupting the conference with a joyous display of hot jigging fatties. Mmmmk. Recalculating. Interrupting old white dudes at conferences had been a total fantasy of mine, but this was the moment it was going to happen and I was pretty terrified.
Marilyn opened the side door of the hotel and the rest of us slipped in. We walked into the back of the conference room. Lo and behold: an old white dude. He was at the front of the room. We entered to his lethargically detailing something about adipose tissue. Marilyn blew the whistle and turned on her boombox, and we began strutting up the center aisle. There were obesity treaters and preventers on our left and right, all around us. The lyrics to the song were "chin, belly, hips and ass." Just that over and over. We got to the front of the room. Dude was trying to talk over us, but was having a hard time.
In these glittery moments of resistance we stood before these bewildered folks pointing at our fat and getting down. There was shimmying and shaking and laughing. And then there was the security call. So we proceeded to strut back down the aisle, yelling things like "correlation does not equal causation!" and "happy international no dieting day!" The conference coordinator was mortified and said, "Shame on you. Shame on all of you." She was fat too. But the internalized fatphobia had got to her.
I ran out of there giggly and elated. This was something. We had interrupted the stream of miseducation that occupies bodies and minds. We had shimmied our big asses in the face of the dominant paradigm and there was only one thing left to do. Eat at Rubios.
