Cat Made Me Do It

I wasn’t going to write on this blog ever again. I left it up so people could see my old posts, which I am very proud of, both for my writing itself and the work I did as a fat activist. But I was done with blogging. But then something awful happened. So awful it has taken me weeks to settle into a place where I can talk about it publicly.

One Saturday morning in March, I received a Facebook message to tell me that my darling friend Dr Cat Pausé had suddenly and unexpectedly passed away. A Facebook message sent to me by her devastated father, all the way from Texas. As I typed a shocked response to him and then started working on one to her dearest friends who found her, my phone rang in my hands and another lovely friend was calling me to tell me she was gone. I was in shock. Her father gave me permission to share the news publicly, and the shocked emails, messages, tweets and posts came in and I went into “helpful” mode, trying to console others, making sure the people who mattered to Cat and whom she mattered to were informed, and looking for other ways I could be supportive and useful.

I was deeply honoured to be asked to represent the fat community at the private service for her, where I was asked to speak on behalf of the community and be one of her pallbearers. I wrote a piece that I hope expressed how much she mattered to me, to us, which I will reproduce below. I also gave a similar version at the public memorial held at Massey University the following week, where I was so fortunate to finally meet in person her lovely parents, I can’t imagine the grief they are going through. I wish there was more I could do for them, I hope that I have expressed to them how much she was loved and respected and will be missed dearly by so many people.

I still hadn’t really cried right up until I literally had my hand on her coffin at the funeral, walking it through the funeral home, to the sound of the karanga, the formal Māori call to ceremony. Even then I know I still wasn’t grieving fully, it really wasn’t until after the service when two lovely wāhine Māori I didn’t even know held me so tight until I finally let myself fall into grief and begin really mourning my beautiful friend.

And it was at that moment I knew I would be blogging again on this page. Bloody Cat, she was always pushing my boundaries, in a way that always turned out to be good for me. I have heard from others in the fat community that they also have a fire lit under them to continue their activism and work in fat liberation. She will always be an inspiration to us, even though she has been taken from us so early.

So far we have already had a clothing swap for size 24+, organised by Joanna of House of Boom (she has a new range out, go support a fatty’s small business eh?) which was an amazing event of community, seeding Cat’s beautiful wardrobe out into the community of super fatties, the group most neglected and disrespected by both fat activism circles AND the entire community. It was a delight to sit back and watch so many fat babes comfortably trying on clothes and delighting over having something, anything available to them for once. To tell these fat babes they looked fabulous (they did!) and encourage them to adopt Cat’s lovely clothes and love them as much as she did. Cat would have loved it, I could feel her presence several times. She would have been in the thick of it, throwing garments and compliments around the room, as she had in life many times.

I’m not sure what I will write, or how often I will do so, but I at least wanted to take the time to pay respect to and remember Cat and share the piece I wrote for her on behalf of the fat community mourning her loss. My world will never be the same without her, and the world in general is diminished without her in it.

Cat and I in 2012 at the first Fat Studies New Zealand conference in Wellington.

Vale Dr Cat Pausé

What do I say? There are not enough words to convey what Cat meant to me personally, let alone the fat community in general. I first met her in 2010 in Sydney at the Macquarie Fat Studies conference, where this short redhead with the biggest smile I’d ever seen appeared beside me and fan-girled all over me. I’d never experienced such adoration in my life. Once I calmed her down we instantly became friends and in that time she has been my greatest champion, fiercest protector and strongest confidant. She is the reason I finally moved to Aotearoa after talking about it for years.

When I started sharing the news with the community that we had lost her, I expected to hear back from mutual friends. But I have received hundreds of messages in the past week. Cat touched so many lives. From her students, to the listeners of her radio show, fellow scholars, activists like myself, and just dozens of people living in fat bodies who had either seen a news article she was quoted in or chanced upon her social media and been deeply moved by the work she did. I have been told of her kind words, her fierce encouragement, he raucous laugh, her astonishing generosity and mighty intellect touching people she never met, or only met by chance. There was always word at every event or fundraiser that Cat had secretly contributed a lump of her own money to enable others less fortunate to be included. She once told me that her biggest goal was that she would no longer be the go to voice for fat community, because she would no longer be needed, that we would be respected, listened to and believed enough not to need her scholarly input.

We still need her. I still need her. But she gets to rest now, and there has been nobody who has earned that rest more than she has. She was an angel here on earth while she was with us, and I have no doubt wherever her spirit is now, she’s still an angel, just the one with the loudest laugh and biggest smile.

Still Here, Still Fat, Still Awesome

Hey y’all!

I’ve got a few lovely messages this week from people asking me if I’m OK, as I haven’t blogged in a while.  So first up, yeah I’m good, thank you to all who asked.  Nothing hugely dramatic from preventing me from blogging, just a bunch of little things that add up, you know?  I’m never very creative in the hot months, as hot weather just saps any creativity out of my brain.

Add to that a shoulder injury that I incurred back when I was in New Zealand in June/July – I took a spectacular stack on some mossy concrete and sprained my right ankle in a magnificent fashion (pics below) and made my whole body hurt.  Once the ankle healed (remarkably quickly, thanks to the hot thermal pools in Rotorua I believe!) and the residual soreness of the rest of my body eased, my shoulder has continued to be a problem.  Got it checked, ran it through some time to heal, no joy, so back to the doc I went this week.  I’m waiting for the results of my X-rays and ultrasounds to see if I’ve buggered the rotator cuff, or whether it’s just bursitis.  As unpleasant as bursitis sounds, it’s the lesser of the two evils, because a buggered rotator cuff may mean surgery.  GAH!

And generally I’ve just been really busy!  The Christmas/New Year season, work stuff, friends, life in general.

But I am still around and still fat (yes loser troll, I am still fat, and still more awesome than you!) and still pissed at the way fat people, particularly fat women, are treated like we are sub-human.  I still have a lot to write about, just not a lot of time to do that writing.

I’m really glad people care and check in with me, it’s lovely!

Is Radical Fat Activism Dead?

I was just reading this post over at Fatty Unbound, about why she no longer blogs about fatshion, and I was just hit with such a wave of sadness.

Don’t get me wrong, I understand why she, and so many others have decided to give up blogging – I have a lot of the same feelings myself and it makes it really hard to keep blogging the way I used to.  But understanding why doesn’t mean I’m any less sad that so many amazing, bold, innovative fat activists and/or bloggers are deciding to pack it in.

The reality is, body politics have been branded and corporatised.  Companies are taking the work that we did, for generations – remember fat activism has been around since the 60’s, and they sanitise it, sand back the rough edges, take out all the radical messages and sell it back to us, as this awful, bland, homogeneous pap called “body positivity”.  And so many people just lap it up.  Many through no fault of their own – they simply haven’t seen any alternative.  The brands and those who are keen to represent them simply have volume and a bigger platform than your average radical fat activist.

And look, I get it.  It’s bloody hard work to keep up as a radical fat activist.  This shit grinds you down.  It takes a lot of emotional energy to step up and put your life out there as a fat person.  There aren’t a lot of rewards for the average fat woman to put herself on the internet and speak up for fat women’s rights – unless you’re young, white, cisgender, able-bodied, a smaller fat, have an hourglass or pear shape, have a pretty face and have access to a lot of new clothes, makeup and photography, and are willing to smile and play along with the expectations of the brands who will fund you if you’re a nice, good fatty.

There are also a lot of negatives that come with being a visible fat woman.  The constant stream of concern trolling, ignorance and sheer bigotry you have to face is so corrosive, it eats away at your energy levels and is so frustrating dealing with people who refuse to listen or think about the ignorance they’ve swallowed and regurgitated for so long.  On top of that there is the abuse and harassment.  The constant barrage of shitty little people who have nothing better to do than either wank over you or spend every minute of their time trying to find some way to hurt you.  Or in many cases – both.  The same people who profess they hate you and find you repulsive are the ones wanking furiously over pictures of you.

These things are so bloody hard to deal with.  So I fully understand why so many fat women just decide “Fuck it, I don’t want to deal with this any more.”

But… I still feel sad that this is happening.  I feel so sad that brands and haters have pushed us out of OUR space.  It is ours.  It doesn’t belong to them.  They haven’t worked and fought so hard to carve out this space in the world, despite so many telling us we’re unworthy of it.

I feel sad that there are so many fat women who are missing out on what I found all those years ago – radical fat activism that blew apart my world and shook me to the core.  That helped me give up the endless cycle of self hate and suspension of actually living that was my life.  That inspired me to take up fat activism myself, and tell my story and start showing people like me that we do not have to be classed as inferior to people who have smaller bodies than we do.

I don’t really believe radical fat activism is dead – there are still some amazing people out there doing some incredible work.  I think I’ll do a post over the weekend with some links to the ones I really love.  But the numbers are dwindling.

What I really want is for those of us who feel like we’re being pushed out of our spaces and shouted down by brands and haters that we’re not going away.  We’re not letting them shove us out of our spaces, and that all of us that don’t fit their little plastic boxes are still here, we still have voices and we’re still going to celebrate who we are.  I want all the unruly fat women, the ones that are ignored by the brands and told they’re not good enough by the haters to put on an outfit that makes them feel good (regardless of what anyone else thinks about it), hold their head up high and stick their middle fingers in the air and declare “I have the right to exist and be seen in this world too.

Here, I’ll go first.

Photo by Paul Harris