Wow! Since my last post, I’ve had a huge influx of new followers and readers of my little blog. Welcome to you all! And thank you to those who took the time to share my last post. I’m also really pleased to see so much positive response to the JCPenney campaign, that’s what we need to see when fat positive stuff gets done well – it shared, spoken about and promoted!
So what’s happening? As many of you know, I’m off to the New Zealand Fat Studies: Identity, Agency and Embodiment conference next week. I’m officially on leave from my day job now and am gearing up to head over to New Zealand, thanks to so many people who pitched in to my GoFundMe campaign! I will be speaking on Day 2 of the conference, I’m in the process of finessing the presentation now, just the shiny bits to go with the actual paper. Thank you to all who helped me out with content for that as well. I am SO excited about the conference, about taking one of my BFF’s with me to introduce her to the amazing community that happens around Fat Studies conferences and catching up with rad fatties from all over the world who will be attending. Some of whom I haven’t seen in person for six years!
Don’t forget you can register online for the conference, which will give you access to the live-stream and to on demand videos after the conference.
I’m also doing a reading/spoken word piece at an event at Palmerston North Library the night before the conference. This event is being organised by Dr Jenny Lee of Victoria University and promises to be a fantastic event. I hope to be able to publish the piece I have written for this event here on my blog afterwards, so that you can all read it. I will do the same for my conference paper if possible as well.
I’ve also got a couple of other projects on the boil which I can’t tell you about yet, but I will as soon as I can. 2016 is shaping up to be an exciting year!
The next thing I want to do today is give a shout out to some other fat activists that are doing amazing work lately. As I spoke about in a post the other week, it is getting harder and harder to find and hear actual radical fat activism, the stuff that really challenges the status quo, amongst the sea of “body positivity” coming from the mainstream right now. But there are people doing amazing work, and I just want to highlight a few right now.
Ali Thompson has written this amazing piece for Everyday Feminism titled 4 Ways Fat People Need to be Included in Reproductive Justice. I know Ali has done a LOT of research on this topic and really worked hard on this piece – and it shows.
Alysse Dalessandro does consistently good work on multiple platforms, both as a businesswoman with Ready to Stare, her indie fashion store, and with her writing. This piece she wrote recently interviewing a whole host of people about body positivity is exceptionally good (and includes yours truly!)
Aarti Olivia Dubey of Curves Become Her is also another consistently strong voice, and covers an incredibly broad range of topics. Plus she’s as cute as hell with her fatshion!
Michelle Allison aka The Fat Nutritionist never ceases to rock my world with her work on food and the culture around food.
Kelli Jean Drinkwater recently gave a fantastic and powerful talk for TedX Sydney. Don’t miss it.
Finally, there are two fat podcasts I never miss. Cat Pausé of Friend of Marilyn has a fantastic podcast which brings good value every week, including guests from all over the world. And if you’re not listening to Ariel and KC of Bad Fat Broads, you’re missing out on so much. Entertaining, thought provoking and sharp as hell. And Ariel manages to make me laugh out loud on the train at least once per podcast. I love you Ariel!
There are others out there, but these are the ones I’m really, really into at the moment.
Finally, I’m adding a donate function to this blog. Cos I wanna do more activism stuff and I can’t do it without fundage. I’m not going to harass people to donate and I don’t expect anyone to give if they can’t afford it. I’ll keep it to a donate button on the page and a note in the footer of each post. But if you can help, and want to support me in doing more activism work, I’ve got a GoFundMe here, or the donate button over there on the right side of the page.
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