Dr. Charlotte Cooper

Written By Gem Kennedy

A Fat Femme Tomato Lady Doing a High-Kick - Series 1, Episode 1

In this episode of Queers & Co., I’m joined by Dr. Charlotte Cooper, psychotherapist, cultural worker and the author of Fat Activism: A Radical Social Movement and the newly updated Fat Activist Vernacular.

We chat about what it means to be a good ally, how climate activism is yet to get its act together around fat, what it means to be queer, punks who hate “normals”, the role of dance in exploring your body as a fat person and Charlotte’s encounter with a fat femme tomato lady doing a high-kick.

If you haven't already, be sure to join our Facebook community to connect with other like-minded queer folks and allies.

Find out more about Gem Kennedy and Queers & Co.

Podcast Artwork by Gemma D’Souza



Resources

In this episode, we mentioned the following resources:



Full Transcription:

Gem: Welcome to the Queers & Co. Podcast. I'm your host, Gem Kennedy, and I'm very excited to be recording the first ever episode. My guest today is someone whose work I've followed and loved since first hearing about her in 2016. She's a psychotherapist and cultural worker based in East London, as well as the author of books like Fat Activism and the Fat Activist Vernacular, which we're going to talk about today. I'm very excited to welcome Dr. Charlotte Cooper. Hi Charlotte.

Charlotte: Hi Gem. What a pleasure is to be here.

Gem: It's so nice to have you. Thanks for agreeing to do it.

Charlotte: My absolute pleasure.

Gem: So, I've got lists of questions. I don't want to bombard you, but it would be really cool if we can start off with hearing a bit more about your work and then we'll chat about the Fat Activist Vernacular that's coming out soon.

Charlotte: Yeah, sure. How to describe my work? I have fingers in a few pies. My main work is as a psychotherapist and I specialise in working with people who are on the edges in some way. I work with lots of queers and trans people, neurodivergent people, sex workers and also the occasional Normal comes along and I don't turn them away. I guess that's my day job, but it is a vocation as well. It's really important to me and I really love the work. I've also been making stuff for a long time so I call myself a cultural worker cause I think of making stuff as a political act. I started off making performances when I was in my teens and twenties and I have been making zines for a long time as well, probably for about 30 years cause I'm getting on a bit now.

Charlotte: Lately, I've been returning more to performance and I'm sort of exploring, making different kinds of things as well. A lot of my work is about fat and I've been doing that for about three decades or so. I started off with my own body and my own life and thinking about what it was to have grown up fat. But this turned into scholarship quite quickly. I did a Master's degree and the product of that was a book. I published a book called Fat and Proud in 1998 and then I got a bit burnt out, but then I got more involved in fat activism in the States through a zine called Fat Girl in 1994, which was this really fantastic fat queer publication that came out of San Francisco. I also started going to No Lose, which is a kind of conference that takes place in the States every now and again. I became part of that community and then as luck would have it, I met some people who knew of my work and they said that they had some funding available for a doctorate and was I interested that. So I applied for that and I got it and went to do a PhD for a few years in Limerick in Ireland. The product of that was the book Fat Activism, A Radical Social Movement. Although I'm interested in queer performance and queer publishing and DIY-zine making, I'm also really interested in fat and what that means and fat as a cultural experience. That's rather a wordy answer to a simple question, "What do you do?" but those are the main things.

Gem: That's a great answer. It's really useful to hear the background as well because there may be people listening to this who haven't come across your work before.

Charlotte: No, I'm really obscure and even though I've done a lot, people don't know much about me. One of the things that strikes me very much about the world of fat (and I guess people call it body positivity now, but it has lots of names and lots of genealogies too), younger people won't have heard of older people like me, but I wasn't the first. There were people who came before me as well and I'm interested in creating more intergenerational discussions about what it is to be fat.

Gem: Yeah. And I really love how you reference at the beginning of the Fat Activist Vernacular the people who came before you. It's something that's often forgotten in activists movements.

Charlotte: Yes, that's right. Everybody thinks they're the first, but they're not. In fact there's an entry in the Vernacular for the Rebel Wilson Effekt. It's about that feeling that you're always the first to discover something, but sorry mate, you're not the first. There are many, many people who came before us.

Gem: Yeah, absolutely. Maybe if we start with that first actually talking about the Vernacular. For me, it feels as though it's part of that having conversations with younger generations actually showing the history of the words that are used and how they've developed over time. I'm 32 now, no I'm 33. I lie. I'd say I recognise 80% of them, but there were a few references that I wasn't aware of. And so just having that kind of continuing conversation between different generations is something that's so helpful about having a vernacular available to actually continue those words and tell future people what they actually meant.

Charlotte: Oh, that's great to hear. I'm really excited to hear that there were bits that weren't familiar. I mean, there will be bits in it that aren't familiar because I've just made some of them up. I think of it as a glossary of terms that are familiar to many fat activists, possibly of my generation. And also it's got this kind of queer feminist sensibility to it as well. Some of them I just made up and they're just a product of my imagination so you won't have heard of them. I think it's important to try and instil an idea in people that there were others who came before, and not that the others who came before were stupid. These are sophisticated thinkers and activists who were organized. And I guess one of the problems is these histories get forgotten very easily and they're very ephemeral so another part of my practice that I've come to as I've got older, is thinking about archiving and how to transmit and preserve these stories. And I think the Vernacular is a part of that. It's thinking about language and how language shapes your understanding of things. It's also very irreverent, so it's taking the Mickey out of official language and the official view of what it is to be fat. I'm interested in slang as well so it's about other ways of seeing, not the the mainstream way. I think it's a survival tactic actually. I think fat people are really good at looking at things [inaudible] and I hope that's what the Vernacular does.

Gem: Yeah, absolutely. I guess now's a good time to let people know how they can get hold of it. I know that you published it as a zine a while back and I'm guessing that you had quite a few requests from people to make it available again.

Charlotte: You guessed right. It was a paper zine and I sold out of that and my practice with zines is usually I don't really do reprints so once it's gone, it's gone. But also when I thought about it, there were so many entries that I wanted to include that I didn't. So this current version, and there may be more in the future, I'm not sure, but this version has over 600 entries in it. It's quite a whopper. You can get it directly from me from my website, which is www.charlottecooper.net. I also work with the Live Art Development Agency and they have a bookshop, which is, www.thisisunbound.co.uk. You can get it from there and if you buy it from them, then a portion of the money goes towards live art in the UK or you can get it from all the usual ebook retailers online.

Gem: Amazing. Thank you. Doing my job for me. So I guess it would be useful to actually look at a couple of the entries. I've written down a few because there are loads. I highlighted all the pages! I'm just gonna pick out a couple that feel really relevant to the kinds of things that we've have discussed in the zine in the past. One of the first ones was Ally. I just want to read it out and then it would be great to hear a bit more about that...

Charlotte: Okay, cause it's such a cynical entry, but anyway go ahead Gem.

Gem: Yeah, it's a great way of thinking about it though. So it starts "Someone who's supposed to stand by you and help. Often someone who exploits and betrays you, uses you to prop up their privilege, doesn't understand and doesn't help. Maybe this model for people in social justice is not that great."

Charlotte: I guess that entry was born out of a lot of disappointment really. And around fat... I don't know, it's such a complex subject. People have so many different feelings about it. There's a lot of pressure... It's not just a pressure to be thin or normative. It's also pressure to be a really good fatty as well. I think finding supporters around that or people that you can really rely on is quite difficult because it's quite a confusing thing to talk about for a lot of people too. So there are inevitably disappointments around it. It's rather a cynical and disappointed entry, but maybe there could be other models as well.

Charlotte: One of the things that I tried to do a while back now... I had a project called the Chubsters, which was a fictitious girl gang, which was also kind of real as well. And the idea with the Chubsters was that anybody could be a Chubster, but it was a girl going for fat queer, badly behaved women, but you didn't have to be fat or queer, remotely badly behaved or a woman to be a Chubster. And if you just wanted to be a Chubster, you could be one. You'd get a little badge and a membership card by writing me an email or asking to ask me to join. Sometimes we had workshops where people would join en masse and sometimes we had little events as well. The idea of that was that it wasn't an exclusionary space. That was a much more productive way of thinking about fat and including people rather than this idea that there's a line between a fat person and an ally.

Charlotte: But I know I'm out of step with most people because the concept of ally is super mainstream and popular and that's how people think about activism at the moment.

Gem: Yeah, but it doesn't mean to say that there aren't better ways or more useful ways of doing it.

Charlotte: Yeah, there could be other ways. You're right.

Gem: Yeah. I really like the sound of the Chubsters. I'd like to join if it was still going.

Charlotte: Well, it's on hiatus at the moment, but again, you never know it could come back. I mean it was an important project for me because until that point, I'd thought of fat activism as really hard work. And the Chubsters was something that was really ridiculous, imaginative, really playful, silly, but also meaningful to people as well. We had a symbol called the Screaming C, which I have tattooed on me. Sadly a couple of Chubsters died recently and their partners returned their cards and badges to me. Even though it was this really irreverent and silly project, it also had these deeper resonances and meaning to people.

Gem: Yeah, that sounds amazing. There are two others that I wanted to look at in the Fat Activist Vernacular. As I said, there are lots that I would choose, but I guess one that really pissed me off - not what you'd written - but one that really pissed me off that I come across a lot in my work is this idea of Protective Layer Theory.

Charlotte: Oh God. Yeah.

Gem: Yeah, fuck that. I'll probably not explain this as well as you, but I'll just really quickly say for anyone listening if you don't know what it is, it's essentially what you read about in Fat Is A Feminist Issue. So the idea that people have kind of put this layer of fat around themselves to protect their bodies, particularly following sexual assaults. I'm just going to say this really quickly. One person that I know of who is a coach suddenly announced one day that they'd realize they'd been living in a fat suit and that they were going to 'lose the weight' and 'finally live their full life'. And obviously I was horrified. But it seems to be quite a common idea that people are protecting themselves from something in some way. It feels very spiritually bypassing and bullshit basically.

Charlotte: Gem, it is total bullshit, but it's a really popular view amongst people who absolutely should know better. My understanding is that it came out of psychoanalysis and it also came out of these feminist takes on psychoanalysis, hence it's in Fat Is A Feminist Issue, which draws on those ideas. That book was so popular, so phenomenal that this has just become taken as fact, but it's not, it is bullshit. I realised actually after I wrote that entry, what I forgot to put in is that it's really victim blamey and it relies on an idea of sexuality as something that's about genitals rather than a social view or a sense of identity or a different way. It's very genitally focused and I just thought, "Yeah, what bloody out of date, useless nonsense." I don't know who it helps really, that idea. I did find that entry really hard to write because it's one of those ideas that is so pernicious and that people really internalise and it's bullshit but it's so, so fat phobic, it's misogynist, it's really anti-sexuality. I think it has so many problems with it and I really wish people would stop using it. And you're right, it also draws on this idea of your fatness is some kind of fat suit that you wear and that there's an authentic thin person inside you. It's bloody nonsense actually.

Gem: Yeah, it really is. I was actually really pleased to see it because sometimes I think it can feel quite isolating doing the kind of work where you're telling people that there are layers of oppression involved and there's nothing wrong with fatness and then you have other people spouting this kind of stuff. Also I've recently seen even on Instagram I've seen a pile of books, which actually includes your Fat Activism book but with Fat Is A Feminist Issue kind of lumped in with it as though they're of a similar thought and they're clearly not. So I think that's really important to distinguish as well.

Charlotte: They're very different books and they come from different traditions, certainly. Yeah I find the book Fat Is A Feminist Issue extremely problematic and I've written many places why that is but one of the things that you said that sparks hope in me is a sense of not being alone with it. And one of my greatest hopes actually for the Vernacular, is people will recognise parts of their lives in there and won't feel isolated and will know that somebody else might be thinking about it and that there are others too. One of the things that has influenced me in my life has certainly been a feminist practice of naming things, giving things form instead of them being abstract or unknowable. And once you name something, then you can talk about it and work it out, in my opinion so I hope the Vernacular does that in some ways too.

Gem: Yeah, I'm sure it will for lots of people. I definitely felt that way when I was reading it.

Charlotte: Well that's good to hear.

Gem: The third one, I actually, I don't even want to talk about it cause it makes me so mad. I feel like it might be useful. I sound very angry today by the way. I'm actually not, it's just I picked these three out because I think that they're things that maybe people who are listening to this podcast who've come at it from a queer angle for example, who maybe don't know so much about fat activism, it would be really great for those people just to hear kind of some of the things that they may be doing without realizing it. I think a lot of, you know, the whole health thing, I'm not even gonna go there because I think people can go away and educate themselves by listening to the many other podcasts that you've been on or by reading your books. But there was one that was the "climate crisis fatphobia" entry. I'm just going to read it real quick if that's okay. It says, "Middle-class activists have yet to get their act together around fat. They consider fat people a threat to the planet because of over-consumption and they don't pull George Monbiot when he publicises ignorant and pitying articles about us." Yeah, Charlotte, what do you think?

Charlotte: Well, Oh dear, what to say? I don't know. I think that's a lot to do with class. I mean I've been talking to some of my friends about climate activism and fatness and how it's conceptualised and I think there is a great fear, an unexamined fear. And possibly this is because of the people that I see doing that kind of activism don't really have an intersectional take on things. And so it's a particular kind of really middle class white guy - it is the George Monbiots - who don't really know what it's like to be othered. I mean he went to Stowe or Eaton or something. This is a posh guy and it's not that I want the planet to end at all, but I do want the planet to be a place where everybody can be and it not be that doing climate activism isn't just a set of arguments marginalising people further, like a punching down I suppose. I think that's what's going on at the moment and I'm a bit tongue tied about it because clearly it's stuff that I need to think about a bit more but this is my very superficial take on what climate activism looks like at the moment. And I think they really need to get their heads together around fat. You can't be upholding one group of people and scapegoating another. We all have to share the planet together and to understand each other and get along hopefully. I don't find that "fat people are the problem, over-consuming too much". I think it's really fatphobic actually.

Gem: Yeah, it just ties into that whole idea of fat equals greed or over-consumption.

Charlotte: Yeah and death actually and the end of humanity. There's another entry which is, "dead before their parents", which is another cliche that's come out of obesity epidemic rhetoric, which is fat people herald doom. As somebody who comes from punk, I quite like that ethic that we do herald doom. That's great. But there's another part of me that thinks, well no. I think it's really discriminatory. It's stigmatising. It's horrible to be positioned in that way.

Gem: I've actually found that because I've done some coaching in climate activism spaces and I've found that I've felt really judged as a fat person. And I'm a small fat person, so I recognise that I have a lot more privilege than fatter people who might go into that space. But even in those spaces, I've felt very judged just for existing in the body that I do, as though I can't be that interested in helping the climate if I'm fat.

Charlotte: Well Gem I'm really sorry to hear that. It's not okay. What that makes me think of is, I'm gagging for a super fat group of climate activists.

Gem: Oh my God, that would be amazing.

Charlotte: Wouldn't that be wonderful? Wouldn't that be great?

Gem: So cool. Maybe we should talk about how that could be set up.

Charlotte: Oh yeah, I'd love that. That would be wonderful, wouldn't it? I think the time is right for that kind of activism.

Gem: Yeah, absolutely because there's a whole new area of activists who aren't thinking about that. And so to bring that into into the light more would be a really cool thing to do.

Charlotte: Yeah, yeah.

Gem: Thank you for talking about it. I'm feeling less angry about it now. I have so many questions, so I'm conscious of reigning it in and where are we going to go? Maybe while we're on the activism thing, you mentioned that after doing quite a lot of activism, there was a period where you were quite burnt out and I just wondered what that burnout period was like for you and whether there was anything in particular that you did or that you found useful to bring yourself out of it and then hopefully to navigate it or even avoid it going forward.

Charlotte: Well, that's a lovely question. What a caring question. Nobody has ever asked me that before.

Gem: Oh it's so important.

Charlotte: It really is you're right. So I did my master's degree and then I published Fat and Proud and I published it with a feminist press called The Women's Press, which no longer exists. I published it with them because they were looking for a book about fat and also because I'd loved many of the books that they had published, but it was a real trial actually publishing with them. I didn't realise it at the time. I was quite naive, but they were very set in their ways. There were things in the book that I wanted to publish, for example, I wanted to publish about Fat Girl, which was a really powerful and profound experience for me being involved in that project, but they wouldn't allow me to mention it because they thought the zine (which it did) promoted BDSM and trans people and queer, which they had political problems with. They also had problems with some of the language that I used, which was rather fruity. They didn't want me to talk about trans people either, which I had a whole section on so we had a giant fight and there was a point at which the book might not have been published and if I was going through the same thing now, then I would go to a different publisher, but I was 28 at the time and I thought, okay either the book happens or it doesn't happen so I'm going to publish it and also talk about these problems too, which I did. But this took a massive toll on me. It was really, really exhausting and I just felt really sod this! I absolutely had enough. Around that time as well, I was starting to question a lot of the feminism that I had been socialised with. I was looking at other kinds of feminism, more sex positive feminism and trans feminism as well. I started to read a lot more and find out a lot more about that. At that point I thought, "God, I just don't want to write about fat ever again. I'm just sick of this." But of course it's one of those subjects that's part of my life and I'll have a lifelong engagement with this subject, I imagine. So about four or five years later, I saw a flyer for No Lose, which is this conference that takes place in the States sometimes. It was such a cute picture and I thought, I really have to go to that. It was a picture of a fat femme tomato lady doing a high kick and I thought, "That's where I want to be". I knew many of the people who had been involved in setting up the conference and setting up that community so it wasn't a bunch of strangers particularly. That was the thing that changed really, and gave me other ideas about what activism could be and what fat feminism could be as well. It didn't have to be this TERFy, anti-queer thing. It could be something else. That's what kept me going. In the meantime, I was also doing other projects. I was learning how to make websites and I was getting work, cause I had struggled to get work up until that point so materially, my life was changing. So those things helped too but I think it was the tomato lady actually that was who was the turning point and gave me hope after a pretty grueling and lonely time trying to get this book out into the world and on the shelves.

Gem: That's amazing. Thank God for the tomato lady. Did you ever meet her?

Charlotte: I didn't meet her, but I think my friend might have designed her. I need to talk to her about.

Gem: That's really cool. So that actually brings me on to my next question. When you were publishing Fat and Proud, you talked about how the publishing house didn't want you to identify as queer. They kind of pushed that you were bi, and I just wondered how that felt and what queerness means to you because it can mean quite different things to different people and it would be really great hear a bit more about what you mean when you use that term?

Charlotte: Yeah. Well, no shade on any bisexual people ever, ever, ever but it's not necessarily how I identify. People often put me in that role. It was difficult with the publisher demanding that I identify as bisexual because nobody has a right to demand how you identify. That's your identity, surely? That was really difficult. And the queerness, let me think. What is that about? It's something I take for granted now. I also identify pretty strongly as a dyke. These are words that have a kind of non-normative, anti-assimilation, they're quite anti-social terms sometimes although queer less so these days. They're about identifying maybe with the margins rather than with the centre. They have a punk ethic to them, which I really like and they're inclusive terms as well. I think of dyke as being pretty inclusive, but queer especially so. Queer can encompass anything really. I really like what Noreen Giffney says about queer, which is it has this kind of unintelligibility about it, you can't quite pin it down. I know Judith Butler talks about that as well. I like that it can be what you make. You can't really pin it down. Sometimes people do try and pin it down to a haircut or a style or something, but actually it's not, it's something much more nebulous and strange than that. That's what I really like about it and that's what I identify with because I mean, Lord what am I? I don't know what I am even at this ripe age so queer seems to suit that quite well.

Gem: Yeah and something that I always include when I'm trying to define it to people because you're right, it's such a difficult term to define. For me it feels that the political aspect is really important. So having queer politics and again, what is that? But I guess just to identify as queer but not be political or not be intersectional in your view of things, for me that feels like maybe there's a bit of a contradiction there so it feels like a really important part to have that political element as well.

Charlotte: Yes, I agree too. I think it is intensely political to be queer. Maybe it's to do with my age and the people with whom I grew up because when I was a teenager and in my early twenties, you could be a lesbian or you could be gay. There was nothing else. That was it. And so queer has always struck me as being really political because it disrupts all that stuff really amazingly. This would also have been through Fat Girl as well. When I started finding out that there were other ways that I could be, that I didn't have to be one or the other that didn't necessarily fit me that well, queer was really useful. I do think that's a political place to be, to be a person who is not quite definable is quite a dangerous place to be as well because people do want to pin you down and put you in your box.

Gem: Yeah. That just makes you think of how queerness and fatness intersect. It's a huge question but what has being fat and queer meant for you?

Charlotte: Well, badly paraphrasing James Baldwin, they've been tremendous gifts in my life. I was very lucky to know people as a teenager, I worked in a charity shop as a Saturday girl, and my boss was a punk from the 70s and her boyfriend had been in a band as well. They really, really hated normal people. They really, really hated them. It was almost like being in a John Waters film working there. I grew up with this great sense, although my own family had a whole different take on it and really struggled to be normal, my friends and the people who I really considered my kin really, really hated normality. That's been an enormous gift in my life really. I think about fat and queer having come from that. Luckily, I also encountered feminism and punk around that time too, which also fed into my view of myself. But I think fat and queer are both non non-normative states and somebody, I can't remember who, has written about fat and done scholarship around fat being a queer state of being. I think fair dos. I think that's pretty apt actually. Whether people want to adopt that or not is something else because I think many fat people do really fetishise and crave normality mainly because we've been denied it. We're denied those alleged prizes of being normal. But for me those prizes are illusions and and what we have are riches actually. Other ways of seeing things and understanding things, I think is a great gift in life.

Gem: Yeah and taking away the external oppression and the layers of shitness that come with being an other person, internally it can feel so liberating and empowering to be like, "Well, I don't actually have to adhere to any of these societal expectations because there's a whole other group of people who I can meet up with and make cool things with and there are no limits on what's possible anymore.

Charlotte: Yes, that's very important to me. My politics do veer towards anarchism and I'm very interested in what autonomy looks like actually, what agency looks like, what happens if we get to make our own worlds. Not that this should ever involve crapping on anybody else, but what does it look like to make your own life, to be a nonconformist? The people who've been most powerful in my life have been extremely non-conformist and I value that enormously. I think fat and queer is part of that tradition, for me. I know it isn't for everybody and I have no beef with that but for me, my path is very much around non-conformity, about making your own world, making a world in which you can exist and thrive. That's important to me.

Gem: Yeah and something that I really love about your work is that willingness to play with what is and what isn't acceptable. You've mentioned experimenting with the grotesque through dance and just doing things that if you were a "normal" and were conventional in your thinking about what was and wasn't possible for a fat queer person, you probably would never have tried. Things like your performance...

Charlotte: Yes, that's true. Yeah. Sorry, I'm interrupting you.

Gem: No, no, no, not at all. I was just going to say it'd be really cool to hear more about your performance and I know that you've been through different dance types, like you mentioned flamenco a while back and also hip hop. So what has that exploration been like as a fat queer person?

Charlotte: Yeah, dance has been something that's been part of my life since I was really young, but because I was fat, I don't know about queer so much, but because I was fat, I never thought there'd be a place to me in dance. But it turns out that there is. I was extremely fortunate to work with Alexandrina Hemsley and Jamila Johnson-Small a few years ago as part of a project called Swagger, where we created a show together and performed that. Unfortunately, dance training is not really available to people like me. I'm too old, I'm too stiff, I don't look like everybody else and there's this sort of gatekeeping around who's allowed in and who isn't. But Jamila and Alex gave me and my performance partner Kay an enormous brilliant schooling in contemporary dance. And that opened up so many doors and opportunities for me in terms of me thinking about what might be possible for myself. This had never been available to me to before, this kind of access. We met people who were just delighted to have us and we started going to different kinds of dance spaces and feeling much more involved in that world and that kind of crossed over much more into live art as well. Oh, what can I say about it? I'm just interested in dance forms that are about the street, that are about protest. I find crump especially beautiful and I also like flamenco and there are elements of that in the dance that Kay and I do. And we've been working on a very, very long-term project for the past few years where we go to the studio pretty regularly, usually once a month for a few hours and we just make space to move and to consider how we... this is going to sound so pretentious, please forgive me, but to consider how we're moving as fat queers and what it is to be - again pretension alert - what it is to be a fat queer moving in space. I can't believe I've said that, but there it is.

Gem: I don't think it sounds that pretentious. It could be worse.

Charlotte: Well I do, but there will be documentation of that coming out in the next couple of years. I'm writing a long piece about it. I think it's a resource that will help other people, not just fat queer-bodied people, but anybody who has a body really to use movement to heal in a lot of ways. A lot of the movement we've been doing has been about healing from fatphobia and finding ourselves, finding our bodies. Again, that sound so pretentious to put it into words, but I guess that's how the dance has developed from me dancing in clubs throughout my life and being a go-go girl and also through the contemporary dance experience and now through this much more experimental dance research process that I've been embroiled in for the past couple of years.

Gem: Yeah. I guess one of the things that I have...probably when I discovered what diet culture actually was and started to move away from it, one of the things that I still actually have a hangover about is movement. Just moving my body and particularly around moving my body in public. I know that that's a thing that lots of fat people and non-fat people, but particularly fat people who've been shamed in PE or have been told that they can't do a particular sport cause they're too fat. There's a lot of.... Well, it's just a really problematic area for people, isn't it quite often.

Charlotte: Yes, it is. You know, one of the things we do in these sessions is we do what we call experiments and we'll do things that we've been scared to do. They're heartbreaking really but they are things like, what's it like to jump? How does it feel? We'll do an experiment in jumping or what did we do the other week? We did some kind of like falling on each other. What's it like to do that? What's it like to get really out of puff? These things that I have felt a lot of stigma around and shame around too so we'll do some experiments around that and I've got to say it's enormously healing and fun to be able to do it. In the studio that we go to, it's extremely private. We just take a few hours to explore this stuff and talk about it afterwards. But again, it is heartbreaking to hear of your experience. It shouldn't be like that, you know. Movement is, God kill me, but it's so natural. It's a natural thing to do and a fun and lovely thing to do and it's a shame that I identify with enormously, a shame that we're so disconnected from that. And that is the result of fatphobia. It truly is.

Gem: Yeah, absolutely. Also the idea of when you're trying to lose weight that you're exercising and it's a punishment. You need to do more of it because you're a bad fat person. So thinking about that then, how has dance and getting more in touch with moving your body, how has that changed your relationship to your body? If it has, which I'm imagining it has.

Charlotte: Well, yeah, I'm a better groover these days. I've got some moves I could show you.

Gem: Awesome!

Charlotte: Yeah. How has it changed? I mean, I haven't got any fatter, I haven't got any thinner. I've stayed the same. I haven't got musclier. I haven't got more fit. I haven't become any of those things that diet culture says that dance will bring you. I can't remember steps. I can't remember sequences. I'm not a "good dancer". But I am a good dancer. I know that one of the things that has changed actually is that I know I'm absolutely compelling to look at when I dance. I know that I turn heads and when I see other fat people dancing, anyone dancing really, but especially fat people, then they're the stars for me. I have a sense of that. I guess that's the main thing that dance has given me. A sense that I look really good when I move and I'm absolutely compelling to look at and whatever I do in any kind of dance circumstances will be good enough and will be great actually. I feel confident. Maybe that's what I'm talking about. I feel really confident about movement.

Gem: Yeah and are there any other forms of moving your body or exercise that you've found that with?

Charlotte: Sorry you zoned out a little bit there. In terms of what, in terms of movement?

Gem: Oh sorry. Yeah, are there any other forms of exercise or movement that you've found that with? Because I feel like dance is a really special way of moving your body and I just wondered if there were any others that you've found.

Charlotte: Yes, there are. I've always swum. I was a child synchronized swimmer and I got my Grade Two badge, which means I could do some very basic moves and I can still just about do that. So swimming has always been important to me. I love going to lidos. I go to Charlton lido in London, which is a giant heated outdoor pool and I swim there throughout the winter. It's absolutely gorgeous. I was just there the other day. I don't swim fast. I do doggy paddle quite a lot. I like to chat and swim at the same time with whoever's swimming with me. You know, I don't do it for fitness, but I absolutely love being in the water and I love playing in the water and playing silly games and doing handstands and stuff like that. That's important to me. I kind of enjoy being... this is going to sound really, really middle-aged, but I love being in nature and I love looking at animals and birds and insects and leaves and trees. I'm quite fearful when I'm in nature, so I've got these two walking poles that I use to help prod me along. I don't walk fast. I don't walk very far. I hope there's a nice cafe at the end of it where I have a tea and a scone. It's not.... well, it is adventurous, but it's because you don't really see many fat people out and about in nature. Maybe we don't feel that we're that entitled to it, but it's not adventurous. I'm not climbing mountains or doing anything major or going on 10-mile walks or anything like that, but I do like a bit of an outing. I'm a member of the Essex Wildlife Trust and I enjoy going to their nature reserves and maybe walking a circuit around there or going and sitting in a hide and looking at birds. Now I'm really revealing myself. She thinks she's so punk, Gem, but really she actually likes birdwatching.

Gem: I think the two can go hand in hand though. You can make it cool. That idea of actually just moving for pleasure I think is something that feels so radical because swimming is also a really contentious subject for people who have difficult relationships with their bodies for whatever reason. And so it feels actually really radical to be doing two of the things that a lot of people would tell you that you can't do; dancing and swimming.

Charlotte: Yes. Well, these things have been part of my life for a long time and swimming was one of the things that I've always loved to do since I was a kid. I've never really stopped swimming. I don't go every week to a particular schedule. I just go when I feel like it or when I can get to the pool or when there's time. I just really, really, really like it. I love being in the water. It's great when the sun shines and I like the patterns that the sun makes on the water. If I go on holiday, I like to go snorkeling and look at creatures underwater. I just feel pretty at home blobbing about in the water or in the sea or something.

Gem: It sounds really cool. One of my things for this year is to try and organise a fat pool party in London.

Charlotte: Oh Gem, well count me in. I'm totally up for that.

Gem: Yay! Okay. Amazing. Yeah, I've just got to find a pool, but I wrote down Charlton once you said that. I could get in touch with them maybe.

Charlotte: Oh Charlton's great. Maybe we can talk later on, but there are other pools that you can probably hire. I went to a really wonderful trans swimming session in Lewisham. Yeah. So you might want to talk some trans people about... There have been some Trans Splash events and trans-friendly swims because trans people also experience similar shaming and body problems when you want to go swimming.

Gem: Yeah, I just had this dream of like a fat queer space where everyone just lounges around and chats and swims.

Charlotte: Yeah. It'd be lovely, wouldn't it? Yeah.

Charlotte: Cool. So there's one thing I really wanted to mention actually to people if they're not aware of it, but I should just check with you that you're still doing it. I know that you said for your 50th that you opened your front room as an archive where people could come and book time to come and spend time with you. Is that still something you're doing?

Charlotte: Yes. It's an ongoing project. So as I sit here, what I'm looking up at are one, two, three, four enormous shelves full of stuff that I've made over the past 30 years or so, including diaries and notebooks and videos and zines and talks and scholarship and there's a whole library of fat stuff and then there's a whole DIY shelf with queer zines and zines and films and dance and scrapbooks and all sorts. And then there's a shelf of books that I've published or have been published in or I've been mentioned in. There's a load of stuff that I think of as my life's work and after I die, this stuff will be lodged at the Bishopsgate Institute so it'll be available to people of the future, I hope, as long as Donald Trump nuke us all in the next couple of weeks. The intention of the project is I'm building a catalogue at the moment and when that catalogue is as complete as it can be, I mean it will be growing all the time, I'm going to make that public and people can book in time to come and visit me and to talk and look at stuff that I've made and to just have a conversation either by themselves singly or in groups. So that's what's happening with that. It's called 33 Archive.

Gem: Great and I'll link to that in the show notes or just make mention of it so people can get in touch because it sounds like such a cool thing to do.

Charlotte: Thank you.

Gem: And so with that in mind then, what's next. You mentioned this ongoing long-term dance project that you're documenting and what else are you working on?

Charlotte: Yeah, well, I'm working on a couple of things. So when I turned 50, one of the things I did was think, what do I really, really want to do? What's important to me? To really focus on things because up until now my habit has just been to do what comes along. But I thought, maybe now I'm a proper grown-up I should plan a little bit more and invest a bit more in the project. So a couple of things. I'm part of this women working class group that's going to be going on for the next three months at the Live Art Development Agency, which I'm excited about cause I've never really worked in a group of people around making stuff before. I'm working on a project about power and the misuse of power and how people respond to the misuse of power as well so that's what I'll be doing there and that will be possibly a book at some point. But more immediate projects, I'm making another ebook with my collective zines in them because these things are all out of print and extremely ephemeral and I think it's time to make a collection of them. I think people would really enjoy that. I've got projects around therapy and fat and the dance stuff is happening too. And in terms of performance, Kay and I have been working on a piece called But Is It Healthy?, where we have a dance that we're dancing at sites of extreme fatphobia in an attempt to transform them in some way or transform ourselves, I don't know. And that'll be us alone dancing, but also we might invite people to come in and learn that dance and do that dance collectively in those spaces too.

Gem: That sounds amazing. I'm going to ask you a question about that in a second actually, but I just wanted to mention for people who are listening to this, you've got a couple of appearances coming up. So there's one on the 29th January 2020 where you're talking at the Live Art Development Agency about the Fat Activist Vernacular. I think you said that tickets are available from www.thisisliveart.co.uk.

Charlotte: Yes and it's a free event as well.

Gem: Amazing. And then the other one's on the 5th February 2020 which is you talking about queer fat activism at Goldsmith's Uni in South London.

Charlotte: That's right. I don't have details for that at the moment, but I will be posting them on my Twitter feed, which is @thebeefer, over the coming weeks.

Gem: Okay, great. And I'll just repeat that cause I think it cut out a bit there. So it's @thebeefer. And so going back to dancing in fatphobic spaces. I hope I'm right in saying that this is the same dance that you did at the Wellcome Trust. Is that right?

Charlotte: Yes, that's right. It's ages ago now in 2016. They put on a really big event, a wonderful event, about language and invited me to talk about my book at that event. And I sneakily said, would it be okay to do a dance as well? And they said, yeah, fine, because they had... ah bless them. So I danced with Kay in... they've redone it now but they had an exhibit called Obesity, which was a really dreadful exhibit and always bothered me and we did a dance in that space around a sculpture that I find particularly fatphobic. Yeah, it was really intense. A really, really intense experience but we did that and I made a zine to go with it and I also made some beats for us to dance to, which were based on a fat feminist panel that had taken place in the early Eighties. It was really phenomenal. And then sometime later, it was maybe last year, one of the people that works at the Wellcome told me that that piece of work had made them really reconsider the exhibit and that they were getting rid of the sculpture. I think they have a much more inclusive take on bodily difference now in re-display, which I haven't been to yet. I need to go to it. So they were really receptive to the work we did, but it was very intense and difficult and risky as well. I'm really proud of that and can't quite believe it happened but it did happen and we're hoping to do similar interventions with that dance in other places and at the moment we're drawing up the list of places and working out the logistics of it.

Gem: Great. And will people be able to come along to those places to watch you or will it be whoever's there at the time?

Charlotte: You know what, I haven't really thought about that yet. Maybe. I'm not sure. There'll be documentation certainly. And yeah, I would like to invite people to come and dance with us and to learn the dance. It's pretty simple. But yeah, really we're just we're working it out right now.

Gem: Great. Yeah, that sounds like a really exciting project.

Charlotte: Thank you.

Gem: So I think I've mentioned this before at the beginning. I could ask you questions all day. I've absolutely loved chatting to you about these things but I'm conscious of time, so I'd just like to remind everyone that if they'd like to read the Fat Activist Vernacular, which they absolutely should, they should go to your website www.charlottecooper.net or www.thisisunbound.co.uk, where part of the proceeds goes to live art in the UK and any other ebook place, such as the one that we won't name, to download the ebook. It's amazing. There are I think 265 pages of different definitions around fatness and it's just such a great conversation starter. I think for anyone who hasn't come across fat activism before, it's actually a really good place to start because it just starts you thinking about the terms that are used and the language and then obviously you can go away and read other books, maybe like Fat Activism, to get like a slightly deeper understanding. But yeah, I'd really recommend checking that out and going along to the events that Charlotte's going to be at if you can.

Charlotte: Thank you so much, Gem.

Gem: Thank you. And one last thing I wanted to ask you was whether you had anything that you were really enjoying at the moment that you'd like to recommend to everyone?

Charlotte: Yes, so I've got a couple of things. One is well I've been listening to a lot of Alice Coltrane and her journey in Satchidananda, I can barely pronounce it. It's just so beautiful and soothing and meditative and mystical and strange. I was lucky to see a performance of it last year. So Alice Coltrane, she works on the harp and she's a jazz harpist can you believe? Yeah. Far out. And so I've been greatly enjoying that. But in terms of fat, I just want to really give a giant handclap to the Fat Cabaret lot in Brighton. I think the work that they're doing is really phenomenal. It's super grassroots. It's really raucous and wild and eye-popping. Whenever you see a show that they put on, it's unforgettable. It's kind of burned on your retinas. So Matilda Gregory and Rosie Blackwell-Sutton. Good work folks, good work. I'm so happy to know them. I'm working with them in a week or so and just really big up to them. They're absolutely wonderful people and the work they're doing is phenomenal.

Gem: Yeah, really they are. I've been to Trans Fats and also Fatty Fat Cabaret which was incredible. I would second that recommendation. Yeah. Thank you so much Charlotte. And yes, everything that we've discussed will be in the show notes so people can check it out there and obviously come and find you on Twitter. I know you've said that you're not a prolific poster, but it's worth going and giving you a follow there.

Charlotte: Well, that's where I post stuff that I'm doing, so yeah that's where you'll find out about me. But you know, you can drop me an email on my website and I'll answer that. I'm quite old school in that way.

Gem: Great. Thank you so much.

Charlotte: An absolute pleasure, Gem. Thank you.

Gem Kennedy https://www.gemkennedy.com
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