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

我的项目探讨了英国脂肪解放的起源。使用文本，材料和口述历史来源的混合，我利用一个奇怪的理论框架来分析和解释英国的脂肪激进主义历史，这可以说是1989年全国肥胖妇女会议（NFWC）达到了顶峰。在英国的酷儿和女权主义历史中，会议本身和召集会议的伦敦肥胖妇女组织（LFWG）一直被忽视。我的研究旨在纠正这种不平衡，并通过分析肥胖作为异性恋规范的酷儿破坏来丰富英国酷儿和女权主义活动的当前历史。研究背景、目的和益处我的研究考察了20世纪中后期英国肥胖和脂肪解放的历史。它建立在我的硕士酷儿历史论文的基础上，目前存放在毕晓普斯盖特研究所，该研究所将全国肥胖妇女会议置于20世纪70年代至80年代英国酷儿历史的更大历史背景下。我的博士研究扩展了空间和时间，以展示英国的肥胖和酷儿激进主义在NFWC之前和之后是如何对抗系统性反肥胖的。在这样做的过程中，它阐明了酷儿和肥胖历史的交叉点，而这些交叉点往往被视为相互排斥的。虽然考虑交叉性的学术工作正在增加，但绝大多数工作都是在历史以外的学科中进行的。此外，肥胖史学者很少考虑酷儿或酷儿理论（Rensenbrink 2010; Simic 2015; Strings 2019）。学者们可能会将他们的论点置于历史背景下，但他们不是历史学家（Lebesco 2001; White 2013, 2014; Cooper 2016）。有些甚至强化了系统性的肥胖恐惧症；例如，酷儿学者劳伦·伯兰特将肥胖与过度消费混为一谈，这支持了对胖子的阶级刻板印象。同样，酷儿历史学家也很少在他们的分析中考虑到大量的交叉性。英国文学学者埃琳娜·利维-纳瓦罗（Elena Levy-Navarro）关于肥胖的酷儿历史的著作，为肥胖的历史如何作为酷儿运作提供了最实质性的见解之一（利维-纳瓦罗2009）。她认为，规范身份的特权对非规范身份的损害一直主导着历史。酷儿历史就是“开始发现过去和现在之间的不同关系”，允许另类历史的发展，使主流话语复杂化。将脂肪解放的历史作为另一种历史来考察，创造了一个框架，在这个框架内，关于脂肪的霸权观念被破坏或被边缘化。当前史学中对肥胖史的遗漏，是因为人们认为肥胖的身体是可变的、暂时的。胖人没有历史，因为他们现在被认为是没有未来的。肥胖的生活很少被写下来或记录下来，因为肥胖的生活被认为不值得过下去。“肥胖流行病”的主流言论非常有效地将胖人的未来框定为取决于减肥。因此，肥胖史仅限于节食史、BMI史和疾病史；因为只有当肥胖的身体被降级为肥胖的“之前”时，瘦的“之后”才值得拥有未来或过去。在普通人群中培养这些反肥胖的态度，进而影响了有关肥胖人群的公共政策和待遇，进一步强化了耻辱和压迫。历史意识为我们挑战体制压迫提供了最伟大的机制之一。通过阐明英国脂肪解放的起源，我希望它能挑战当代的反肥胖，就像它丰富了脂肪和酷儿的历史编纂一样。正如酷儿理论家李·埃德尔曼所说，“酷儿身份永远不能定义一个身份；它只能打扰一个人。”从这个意义上说，我的项目将尽可能地令人不安。

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.