RIOTS NOT DIETS: A QUEER HISTORY OF FAT ACTIVISM IN TWENTIETH CENTURY BRITAIN

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Abstract My project explores the origins of fat liberation in the UK. Using a mixture of textual, material, and oral history sources, I utilise a queer theoretical framework to analyse and interpret the history of fat activism in Britain which arguably reached its apotheosis with the National Fat Women's Conference of 1989 (NFWC). The conference itself and the group who convened it, the London Fat Women's Group (LFWG), have been neglected in queer and feminist histories of the UK. My research aims to correct this imbalance and enriches the current histories of queer and feminist activism in the UK by analysing fatness as a queer disruption of heteronormativity.Research Context, Aims, and BenefitsMy research examines histories of fatness and fat liberation in Britain from the mid to late twentieth century. It builds on my MA Queer History dissertation, currently deposited at the Bishopsgate Institute, which situated the National Fat Women's Conference within the greater historical context of queer history in Britain in the 1970s-1980s. My PhD research expands spatially and temporally to show how fat and queer activism in the UK combatted systemic anti-fatness both before and after the NFWC. In doing so, it elucidates the intersections of queer and fat history which are too often treated as mutually exclusive.While academic work considering fat intersectionality is growing, the vast majority of this work has been conducted in disciplines other than history (. Additionally, scholars of fat history rarely take queerness or queer theory into account (Rensenbrink 2010; Simic 2015; Strings 2019). Academics queering fatness may historically contextualise their arguments, but they are not historians (Lebesco 2001; White 2013, 2014; Cooper 2016). Some even reinforce systemic fatphobia; for example queer scholar Lauren Berlant's conflation of fatness with overconsumption which upholds classist stereotypes about fat people. Likewise, queer historians rarely consider fat intersectionality in their analyses. English literature scholar Elena Levy-Navarro's work on queering fat history offers one of the most substantial insights into how fat histories operate as queer (Levy-Navarro 2009). She argues that the privileging of normative identities to the detriment of non-normative ones has dominated history. To queer history then is to "begin to discover different relationships between the past and the present" allowing for the development of alternative histories which complicate dominant discourses. Examining histories of fat liberation as alternative histories creates a framework within which hegemonic ideas about fat are disrupted, or queered.This omission of fat histories from current historiography lies in the perception of the fat body as mutable and temporary. Fat people do not have histories because they are perceived in the present as having no futures. Fat lives are seldom written about or documented because a fat life is viewed as not worth living. The dominant rhetoric of the "obesity epidemic" has been extremely effective in framing the futures of fat people as being contingent on weight loss. Histories of fat are therefore circumscribed to histories of dieting, of BMI, of disease; for only when the fat body is relegated to an obese "before" is the thin "after" worthy of either a future or a past. The cultivation of these anti-fat attitudes in the general population go on to shape public policy about and treatment of fat people, further reinforcing stigma and oppression. Historical consciousness provides one of the greatest mechanisms we have for challenging systemic oppression. By illuminating the origins of fat liberation in Britain, my hope is that it will challenge contemporary anti-fatness as much as it enriches fat and queer historiography. As queer theorist Lee Edelman argues, "queerness can never define an identity; it can only ever disturb one". In that sense, my project will be as disturbing as possible.