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A Queer and Trans Fat Activist Timeline: Queering Fat Activist Nationality and Cultural Imperialism
Charlotte Cooper
a a

University of Limerick, Limerick, Ireland Version of record first published: 19 Jan 2012.

To cite this article: Charlotte Cooper (2012): A Queer and Trans Fat Activist Timeline: Queering Fat Activist Nationality and Cultural Imperialism, Fat Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Body Weight and Society, 1:1, 61-74 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/21604851.2012.627503

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Fat Studies, 1:6174, 2012 Copyright Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN: 2160-4851 print/2160-486X online DOI: 10.1080/21604851.2012.627503

A Queer and Trans Fat Activist Timeline: Queering Fat Activist Nationality and Cultural Imperialism
CHARLOTTE COOPER
University of Limerick, Limerick, Ireland

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A Queer and Trans Fat Activist Timeline is a project located in multiple spaces that began as an attempt to co-create a snapshot of community history. The timeline began as a conference workshop, became an object produced by that workshop, and then transformed into other entities: something that could be discussed and remodeled into multiple forms, on- and ofine, and into archival objects. It originated as a fat activist dialogue with community histories and memory, but has moved beyond its original intent. The content of this particular fat activist project is not under discussion here: the process of fat activism and the cultures within which it takes place are the areas with which I wish to engage in this article. However, I encourage readers to downloaded digital copies of the zine from my blog (Cooper, 2011b). KEYWORDS fat, activism, queer, trans, zine, blog, archive, Do It Yourself, cultural imperialism

I write in the rst person with a nod to autoethnography and critical narratives of the self, which Jacqui Gingras has used so productively in generating accounts of embodiment within Fat Studies and Health at Every Size (Ellis, 2004; Holman Jones, 2008; Adams and Holman Jones, 2008; Chang, 2008; Gingras, 2009). The act of writing myself into this work follows earlier feminist sociological methodology, which draws attention to power within research relationships, as well as the humanity of research participants (Oakley, 1981; Finch, 1984; DeVault, 1996). It is also consistent with Pierre Bourdieus argument for the necessity of reexivity within sociological
Address correspondence to Charlotte Cooper, 33 Romford Road, London, UK E15 4LY. E-mail: mail@charlottecooper.net 61

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research and, I would propose, within academia more widely (Bourdieu, 1992). In producing such a work I seek to neither develop generalizable research results nor make universal truth claims. Instead I want to evoke the richness of my experience as a fat activist, do so critically, and offer some thoughts about the interplay between theory and practice. This style of academic writing is also an indirect challenge to the ways that fat people tend to be presented in obesity research: as pitiful, abject, anonymous research objects lacking in agency, community, or culture. This article consists of three main sections: a description of A Queer and Trans Fat Activist Timeline, a discussion of cultural imperialism within fat activism and fat studies, and a consideration of how the timeline might queer nationality within a movement that is assumed to be located in the United States, and how Iand othersmight subvert and address that relationship.
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MAKING A QUEER AND TRANS FAT ACTIVIST TIMELINE

The academic literature about fat activism is fairly meager, especially that produced by people who do fat activism (Cooper, 2010b). I have decided to introduce A Queer and Trans Fat Activist Timeline with an account of what I did. This has two purposes: it explains the projects form and gives insight into what it is that a fat activist does or might do, countering a mythology based on the scarcity of documentation that fat activism is a certain set of limited practices (Wann, 1998; Gimlin, 2002; Gard and Wright, 2005; Kirkland, 2008). The synthesis of product and process is at the heart of my own fat activism. The timeline began as an idea. As an activist and doctoral student researcher investigating fat activism, I have become very interested in the earlier periods of this social movement, which illuminate how it functions today. I have had opportunities to talk to people whom I think were instrumental in establishing fat activism, including Llewellyn Louderback, Bill Fabrey, and Judy Freespirit (Louderback, 1967, 1970; Freespirit, 1983; Cooper, 2010a; Cooper, 2011a). These conversations have been exciting, moving, and enlightening, and I hunger for more of them. In 2010 I made preparations to attend that years NOLOSE gathering in Oakland, California. NOLOSE began in the United States in the 1990s as the National Organizations for Lesbians of SizE and has since expanded to a broader community of queer women and trans folks resisting fat oppression, which manifests mainly as a semiannual three-day gathering. I have presented workshops at previous NOLOSE conferences, delivered the keynote address in 2005, and was part of the keynote panel in 2010. My preparations to attend the 2010 gathering included a proposal for a workshop about fat activist histories and memories. I offered this in response to the conference theme of Fat Panic, arguing that an understanding of queer

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and trans fat activist histories can enable people to defy and endure against anti-obesity interventions. I thought that a conference in the San Francisco Bay Area would attract people who were involved in the earlier parts of the movement and that it would be interesting and inspiring to facilitate an intergenerational discussion about the movement in this space. As someone engaged with DIY (Do It Yourself) cultural production, a grassroots ethic and aesthetic, I was interested in possibilities for collectively co-creating an object (Spencer, 2005; Stasko, 2008). I settled on the timeline format because it was easy to administer and would t in my suitcase. I thought this would be a fun way of facilitating conversations and would produce something that looked beautiful and enticed people to want to know more. Construction involved buying a roll of plain wallpaper; drawing a line along the bottom of it, along which years were calibrated; populating it with a few items; sticking it to a wall at a level where everyone could reach it; and inviting people to add their own memories and significant dates and events to the timeline with felt-tipped pens, in their own handwriting. The workshop lasted about an hour, and people wrote on the timeline and talked about it throughout the session. In my introduction at the workshop I was deliberately vague in how I dened fat activism; I wanted people to write what they thought was signicant to them. Although I was caught up in organizing the workshop, making sure nothing went wrong, and encouraging people to contribute, I found the sight of people working together to create the timeline very powerful, given how socially isolating it can be to be fat and queer and/or trans. Older people were at one end of the timeline and younger people were at the other; the sparse earlier years gave way to a ourishing and owering of many different kinds of queer and trans fat activism. Although NOLOSE is mostly attended by people from the United States, the workshop attracted participants from the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada and Germany. People talked and wrote, asking for clarication and discussing events they were simultaneously memorializing. It was like a dialogue between the past and the present, a statement of memory. I recorded two people speaking about particular memories on a digital voice recorder, but these were never used in the ongoing timeline project. NOLOSE is inaccessible to many people because of the expense and the physical and psychological work required to attend. Even though it was a record of a particular time and space, I wanted the timeline to exist beyond the workshop. I did this in several ways so that more people could enjoy and engage with it. First, between June and November 2010 I brought the timeline to three separate fat-related events. The rst was Think Tank, a longstanding meeting of Health at Every Size (HAES) activists in the Bay Area; the second was the Economic and Social Research Council Fat Studies and Health At Every Size seminar in East London, in the United Kingdom, a conference of fat

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activists and fat studies scholars; and the third was Rebel Bellies in Berlin, Germany, an informal evening where fat activists got together to show lms, do performance, and talk. I felt that people at Think Tank were generally disinterested in the timelinethe person who invited me to the meeting had to advocate strongly for it to be shown to the group. Two people made two small additions to the timeline, which can be seen on the original in a different kind of pen. In retrospect this was a mistake and came out of my sense of awkwardness at the meeting, where once again I was positioned as British, and where I tried to manufacture interest in the project. What I learned from this experience was that to maintain a clear picture of the timeline as a representation of a specic point, place, and community, I needed it to remain untouched by subsequent groups. I had not sought formal consent from the original participants and wanted to be careful in how I used their work. This was the rst time that I had facilitated a timeline and I was learning about how it could be used. Now that I have more experience, I might do it differently and encourage different groups of people to contribute in different spaces. The groups in the United Kingdom and Germany were more engaged with and respectful of the project. The length of the paper and the longevity of the movement it represented were noted, and there were discussions about how fat experience could be modeled, and how the timeline might be expanded with, for example, overlays, or using computer-aided design to create virtual three-dimensional models. These meetings are where the original timeline began to mutate. The object that was co-created at the workshop became a discussion object, a traveling object, an educational object, an object that sparked imaginative possibilities for other kinds of fat activisms in other places, and an object that enabled new dialogue. Second, in the original workshop proposal I talked about making the text of the timeline into a zine, a homemade publication. To do this I needed to create a working space aside from my everyday commitments and research for my Ph.D., where I could write the zine content, design and lay it out ready for printing. This came in the form of an artists residency in Hamburg, Germany, a city where I already had some connections in relation to my fat activism. I spent three weeks at Villa Magdalena K, a feminist shared house, writing an accompanying essay, digitizing the timeline, and undertaking the tasks required for preparing it for print. The timeline became a part of the Villa during my residency; it was something talked about at the dinner table and with the many visitors the house attracts. I was interviewed about the project for a local queer feminist radio program, a mixture of German and English fat activism. I chatted about it with people I met in the citys queer communities. The timeline became part of my shifting identity as an activist, DIY cultural producer, and artist. The object itself became more ambiguous;

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not only was it a document of a workshop, its aesthetic quality as art became more pronounced during this period, which I recorded in photographs and a short lm. Third, while I was in Hamburg, I donated the original timeline to Bildwechsel, a queer- and trans-friendly feminist arts-based archive based in the city, but which has associate organizations worldwide. I planned to donate the timeline to Bildwechsel from the outset. It was vital that the object not remain in private ownership, that it would be publicly accessible and available to people beyond the scope of my life, and that it would be hosted in a specic kind of archive where people might understand or appreciate it, and where queer, trans, and feminist politics were a given. More importantly, Bildwechsel is a place where English is spoken but is not peoples rst language. I gave the archive the timeline to encourage creative cross-cultural dialogue beyond Anglophone communities, and to engage with ideas about cultural imperialism within the ways that fat activist knowledge travels around the world. This act included an implicit critique of my own role as a fat activist who moves between countries and who may be an agent of that cultural imperialism. It could also be argued that lodging the timeline with Bildwechsel is another form of Anglophone cultural dominance, but I wanted to show that it isnt enough to export U.S./Canadian/U.K./Australian identity politicsthat they dont always t different contextsand encourage people within those other contexts to speak back. Whether this happens is moot, but these were my intentions. Thus, the timeline became a cross-cultural archival object, something with which activists and researchers removed from its original site of production might engage. Currently, archivists at Bildwechsel have proposed their own version of A Queer and Trans Fat Activist Timeline as a website. Fourth, in May 2011 I published A Queer and Trans Fat Activist Timeline as a zine and began distributing it. Zines are mentioned in the timeline as a means by which people came to queer and trans fat activism. They reect the ephemeral transience and vulnerability of queer and trans fat activist histories, and they are also a form of autonomous cultural production in which I am fairly uent. Digitizing and reformatting the timeline transformed it into another kind of object, a multiple object as a paper zine, and an innite object as a digital download of that paper zine. Judy Freespirit, whom I consider one of the founders of fat activism, worked for a while recording audiobooks. Her work inspired me to record an audio version of the zine that would be accessible to English-speaking people with and without visual impairments. The audio zine could be downloaded from my blog, where I also offered other accounts of the timeline. I sold paper versions of the zine to pay for the print run and to enable me to send it to archives and zine libraries worldwide. I released the zine under a Creative Commons license that allowed others to reproduce and distribute the zine noncommercially. The timeline continued to morph into a consumer object and,

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now, a different kind of archival object to the version that was lodged at Bildwechsel. At the time of writing, the timeline has become the subject of online discussions in social media as people engage with the zine, and through emails circulating as I sell the zine. I am anticipating further comments from the readers of Fat Studies as I write about this project here and open the project up for new audiences. I now move on to discuss cultural imperialism within fat activism and fat studies, and consider how the timeline has enabled me to question these power relationships.

CULTURAL IMPERIALISM IN FAT ACTIVISM AND FAT STUDIES

When Esther Rothblum invited me to submit an article for publication, I offered to write about fat studies in the United Kingdom. I imagined this to be an account providing a historical context, a description of current events, and an analysis of some of the themes arising from emergent work in the discipline. I felt qualied to write such an article because I live in the United Kingdom, have thought of myself as a fat activist for about twenty years, and have also traveled with this identity to the United States, where I have mediated various encounters. I have written elsewhere about Amerocentrism in fat studies, and thus the purpose of this article would be to make fat studies in the United Kingdom palatable, understandable, and consumable for what I presumed to be a readership that is predominantly in the United States (Cooper, 2009). In proposing this article I reasoned that increasing the availability of knowledge about fat studies happening outside the United States would increase the opportunities for engagement beyond national boundaries by scholars and activists working in the United States. After submitting the proposal I recalled a small presentation I had given in 2009 at the Association for Size Diversity and Health annual conference in Washington, DC, where I had been invited to talk about HAES in the United Kingdom. I introduced that talk with a caveat about my ambivalence about being positioned as a voice of International HAES in relation to a HAES that is presumably located in the United States. I encouraged delegates and organizers to undertake some self-reection on what it means to locate HAES geographically, culturally, and psychologically in the United States; integrate diverse HAES supporters throughout the program instead of separating international speakers on a special panel; and travel and represent their work at international fat studies and HAES gatherings. Nothing much came of my miniature critiqueperhaps I embarrassed the conference organizers by voicing these thoughtsand I nevertheless continued to perform as an invited foreigner, a reluctant representative.
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Two years later I was proposing exactly the thing that I had criticized at that conference. As the deadline for writing this article drew closer I realized that I lacked enthusiasm for the piece; I felt uncomfortable with what I had proposed. First, I could not talk convincingly about the United Kingdom as a representative of British identity or, more specically, Englishness. My own relationship to nationality is complicated given that I am not a patriot and I associate Englishness with colonial domination, the unfair rule by monarchy, class stratication, parochialismconcepts I do not wish to uphold. I live in a part of London that will host the 2012 Olympics and am sickened daily by nationalist rhetoric surrounding this event (Cooper, 2010c). I accept that nationality matters, and that whether or not I want to be regarded as British is irrelevant because I will be forever positioned in this way; my habitus reects the cultures in which I have been socialized, and carries material benets. However, though greatly privileged, my British citizenship is an accident of birth rather than a positive identity, and speaking for British identity is not something I would want to do. Second, my subject position in relation to fat and fat activism makes me disinclined and unable to speak for a wider fat demographic. I come from a particular lineage of fat activism that is rooted in radical lesbian feminism, queer identity, punk, and anarchism. Although these radical locations can illuminate the center greatly, they are still marginal, and purposefully so. Following this, I reject the idea of a leadership that speaks for others and favor an autonomous speaking for oneself. I would no more want to speak for fat studies and fat activism that extends beyond my own philosophical and political leanings than I would want others to speak for me; I think people should speak for themselves wherever possible. On closer inspection, my discomfort in proposing to speak for fat studies in the United Kingdom for a presumed U.S. readership revealed that I had internalized a form of colonialism, or rather cultural imperialism. Cultural imperialism here refers to a power relationship between cultures that results in the subordinate positioning of one in relationship to another, produced through ideology, policy, and prevailing cultural attitudes (Tomlinson, 1991; Duggan, 2003). It bears theoretical and metaphorical connections to colonialism, which more generally refers to concrete historical and ongoing political dominance and exploitation worldwide (Fanon, 1961; Said, 1978). Given Englands colonial status, even within the British Isles, it seems odd to talk about the United Kingdom as a colonized country, and it is othered differently to other countries that are currently facing U.S. invasion on the grounds of race, religion, or politics; indeed, the United Kingdom benets from U.S. colonialism elsewhere. The cultural imperialism I refer to is a more subtle form of dominance where, for example, the adoption of U.S. over native idioms is regarded as culturally sophisticated, or that the United States represents future and progress. It is beyond the scope of this article to offer

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even a brief account of the material and cultural history between the United Kingdom and United States, and how it has changed over the centuries. However, the cultural imperialism referred to here is a product of neoliberal agendas that emerged in the 1970s and were solidied through the political relationship between President Ronald Reagan and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s, military and trade agreements, and older colonial ties. Providing a conveniently packaged account of fat studies in the United Kingdom is reductive and hides the relationships and tensions within work that takes place in the country where I live. I was seeking to explain and justify complex cultural relationships and histories on the terms of an assumed noncomprehending dominant culture. I realized that to do this would be similar to angling for a place at the masters table, an act that would succeed only in further reinforcing the marginal position of fat studies in the United Kingdom in relation to fat studies (in the United States, a sufx that is never added because of the rarely questioned cultural location of fat studies). It would fail to address or challenge the inequitable relationship of dominant to subaltern. I should add that at no point did Ms. Rothblum demand I take this position; I offered instead what I thought was required of meI enacted an internalization of cultural imperialism because I am always already constructing myself as other during encounters with the United States as a person from outside that space. The urge to simplify and reduce fat studies accounts from the United Kingdom and make them palatable for scholars in the United States does not come from nowhere. For example, rather than reecting on their ignorance of international contexts, my fat activism has been called into question and diminished by some in the United States and fat studies scholars because it does not t paradigms that are well known to them. For example, my project the Chubsters queers fat activism and refuses its limiting denitions. This has confounded some U.S. activists and scholars who fail to understand how it works and try to force it into models they understand better (Saguy and Ward, 2011). The false promise of connection with the expansive fat activist community in the United States dangles like a carrot ahead of me and fuels a self-destructive urge to placate and conform. Similarly, I have had to make difcult decisions when negotiating interest from prominent U.S.-based fat studies scholars who want to represent my work but who lack understanding of and do not engage with the milieu from which it comes. This echoes wider problems in how fat people are represented in academia; it reminds me of the handful of ethnographies of fat activists that are produced by people who have little direct connection to this group of people and, in a broader sense, it follows the absenting, abjecting, and anonymizing of fat people in traditional obesity scholarship (Goode and Preissler, 1983; Klein, 1996; Martin, 2002; Gimlin, 2002; Butland et al., 2005; Tischner and Malson, 2008). The distinction between work produced by fat activists or fat studies scholars and those who do not identify in this way may turn out to be a false

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dichotomy in time. But for now, given the scarcity of critical work about fat activism produced by those who have direct experience of it, it is important to consider this standpoint. Given that my work has been critical of certain national dominant voices in fat activism and fat studies, it makes no sense to write about the fat studies and fat activism closest to me, without critique, in a form compromised by cultural imperialism. What I want from fat studies is scholarship that addresses multiple or expanding experiences, that is complex, rich, unxed, and evolving. This is what the timeline does, and this is why I have decided to write about it here.

QUEERING FAT ACTIVIST NATIONALITY AND CULTURAL IMPERIALISM

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When I offered a supercial account of fat studies in the United Kingdom to the editor of this journal, I positioned myself as a type of British person easily knowable by a mass U.S. readership, and as a person who could speak for an understandable and boundaried population. I did this at the expense of articulating the complexities of my identity and communities in the United Kingdom and elsewhere. A Queer and Trans Fat Activist Timeline queers this idea of nationality because the identities it relates to are not so containable, the timeline sprawls expansively, disregards national borders, and shows that what is assumed to be xed or natural can be interfered with productively. The timeline is queer not just because of the identities of those who produced and participate in it, but also because it queers. By using queer as a verb I am referring to the act of making strange that which is assumed to be natural, to interrogate the taken for granted in order to talk productively about its social construction (Sullivan and Murray, 2009). The timeline that was proposed for the NOLOSE 2010 workshop had distinct aims. It sought to document and highlight hidden histories to make them an available resource from which people in the present and future could draw through co-creation. I wanted to encourage people to document their queer and trans fat activisms so that fat activism could further develop into a rich and diverse movement. It had potential to create dialogue about what fat activism is, who does it, and where and when it takes place. I wanted to challenge and complicate two truisms about fat: that it was acceptable to be fat in the past, and that it is acceptable to be fat in other cultures. These statements reveal the historical and cultural contingency of fatphobia, but they themselves have become reductive and problematic. By engaging with memory, the timeline would challenge the notion of a single, universal, truthful fat activist history. The timeline could not be contained within these broad aims. As it became a series of related objects, so its intentions, sites, and effects

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multiplied (indeed, the latter may not be revealed until time has passed, or may never be revealed at all). It is now owned by many different people and has come to reect multiple discourses. The items listed on the timeline demonstrate that the past is as multiple and contingent as the present, but the project is not simply about time: it includes place. The action of stewarding the timeline through different forms demonstrates too that over there is as multiple and contingent as over here. That this project could be used to queer fat activist nationality did not occur to me at the outset, but this is what I discuss in the remainder of this article. The timeline documented a workshop in the United States and acknowledges the specicity of the place in which it was initially constructed rather than presenting it as a universal site for fat activism. It was produced within the United States and reects a particular genealogy of fat activism that originated in Los Angeles through the work of a particular group of people, and then traveled and transformed through lesbian feminist networks and beyond, similar to the ways that other feminist knowledge has travelled, as shown by Kathy Davis (2007). Yet the project is not restricted to this place; it was facilitated and co-created by, has come under the ownership of, and may be subjected to the critical gaze of many people elsewhere. I consider the work a criticism of Amerocentrism rather than Amerocentric. Criticism forms a dyad with that which one criticizes, and there is clearly a relationship with the United States in this timeline, but the form and process of this project could be applied to any space anywhere, and it is thus not intrinsically located within the United States. The timeline cannot be pinned to one clearly circumscribed place; instead it reects the potential for sprawling, border-crossing, fat activist networks. It is difcult to distinguish the dominant and subordinate voices in this project in terms of colonial relationships between activists of different nationalities; everything has become mixed up, although the timeline remains rooted in Western culture and thus remains a product of another set of dominant discourses. A Queer and Trans Fat Activist Timeline is ongoing; it is not closed but an evolving and mutating set of objects and ideas. Unlike the xed certainty of colonial identity, the timeline is dynamic and represents a shifting series of relationships and identities. The timeline that was co-constructed at the NOLOSE workshop initially appears as a moment in time, but this too is ambiguous given that two people at the Think Tank meeting added to it, not everyone who contributed is named, and many more people came and left the workshop as undocumented witnesses. It speaks to the fuzziness of memory rather than hard fact and casts doubt on the certainties of truth. Instead of trying to speak for or at a rigid idea of peoples identity, the timeline has enabled me to create opportunities for dialogue across a exible and overlapping readership. Furthermore, it challenges a kind of fat activism that is concerned with simplifying and reducing ideas in order to speak to a mass constituency; the timeline project is a case in favor of

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complexity and specicity, inviting many forms of dialogue across a plethora of sites. The process of producing the timeline highlights the value of my own shifting identities as activist-researcher and as someone who frequently crosses boundaries, national or otherwise, that enable me to engage across many networks. The timeline exposes mongrel-hybrid identities and praxis as forms of cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1986). The timeline queers nationality by suggesting that other forms of kinship may be more powerful with regard to fat activism. Queer and trans communities might well take the place of nationality, yet I would hesitate to offer this uncritically given the critique of homonationalism offered by Jasbir Puar (2007). A queer and trans fat activist identity characterized by universalist essentialism is a naive one that fails to acknowledge, for example, the problematic ideologies underpinning some kinds of fat activism, or accounts of racism within the movement (Murray, 2008; Shuai, 2008; Anonymous, 2008). Finally, the timeline queers fat activist nationality and resists cultural imperialism because it is fun. Fun is rarely talked about in fat studies, yet it is central to my activism and my being in the world, and I never would have embarked on this project if it did not provide me with some fun. I think of fun as queer in its potential for subversion and deance because it is non-conformist. Culture-jamming, dtournement , spectacle, punk, and prankishness conrm this association (Debord, 1984; Vale and Juno, 1987; Stasko, 2008). The joy and humor recorded by the timeline, and the dynamic way that it playfully adapts to new forms transcends limitations imposed by national identity, imperialism, heteronormativity, or fatphobia. Fun is a rejection of perfection; the timeline is not a smooth thingit has many limitations and it is a work of omission. The embracing of that which is hit-and-miss, fractured, and untidy is also a queering and thus also interferes with a neat, commodied, and colonizable identity.

CONCLUSION
I have written about how I have seen myself as an object of cultural imperialism in some areas of my fat activism and fat studies, and how my positioning as a British spokesperson is anathema. Following this, I have used A Queer and Trans Fat Activist Timeline to think about ways of addressing nationality in fat activism. I have described the process and form of this project, which has transformed into multiple objects as it has progressed, and discussed how the timeline queers nationality and imperialism. Fat activism, of which queer and trans fat activism is a part, could itself be seen as an act of decolonization. By engaging with alternative ways of negotiating embodiment, protest, community, or cultural production, fat activists often work to resist dominant obesity discourse and its effects on the body. Yet there is a recolonization at play in regard to dominant voices

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within the movement, and in power relationships between activists, which can manifest as new forms of cultural imperialism. The timeline became a project of further resistance to colonization, one of its many sites of action, and came into being partly because my nationality could not be assumed universal, because I had experiences of being othered within the movement, and because of my commitment to creating inclusive encounters. It has now become a product of my ability to resist complicity with a certain kind of positioning (which is largely what queer and trans fat activism is about, I would suggest) and instead offer a queered anti-colonial work, one that is multiple, unxed, and enjoys many stakeholders. I see it now as part of an ongoing project that features my own talking back to scholars and activists in the United States who have sought to reduce, direct, and control what I do. Following this, I encourage other activists to undertake their own anti-colonial work and create a network of fat activism that resists the globalization of a U.S. model in favor of multiple multicultural fat activisms that reect local identities that may or may not be based on nationality. Theoretically, this would develop fat activism that is expansive and complex in the face of obesity theory that always seeks to reduce fat experience (to energy balance or, more compassionately, to stigma and discrimination), and that makes space for critical dialogue and reection. Such fat activisms are in a better position to reect the limitless possibilities for fat queer and trans embodiment. My experience suggests that it is likely that the nuances of such work may be lost when speaking to dominant cultures, but their endorsement is not necessary, and activism does not have to t restrictive models to be legitimate or productive.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Many thanks to those who contributed to, and continue to participate in, A Queer and Trans Fat Activist Timeline. Thanks to Esther Rothblum for inviting me to write for this journal, and to the three anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.

REFERENCES
Adams, T. E., & Holman Jones, S. (2008) Autoethnography Is Queer, in: Denzin, N. K., Lincoln, Y. S., & Tuhiwai Smith, L. (eds.) Handbook of Critical and Indiginous Methodologies. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 373390. Anonymous. (2008) Rethinking 1000 Fat Cranes. Two Whole Cakes [Online]. Available from: http://blog.twowholecakes.com/2008/09/rethinking-1000-fatcranes/ [Accessed 6 June 2011].

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CONTRIBUTOR
Charlotte Cooper is a queer fat activist and scholar.