Photography by Laurie Toby Edison ^ Text by Debbie Notkin

Digitized by the Internet Archive

in 2018 with funding from
Kahle/Austin Foundation

https://archive.org/details/isbn_9781885495006
Wwien Ett Large
Images of Fat Nudes
(A ^ Laurie Toby Edison
Debbie Notkin

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FOCUS
San Francisco, California
 All photographs copyright © 1994 by Laurie Toby Edison.

All text copyright © 1994 by Debbie Notkin,

with the exception of material within the text that is credited to
others, who retain copyright in that material.

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 94-096247

All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in

newspaper, magazine, radio or television reviews, no part of this
book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic
or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by
information storage or retrieval system, without permission in
writing from the publisher.

This book was designed by Jeanne Gomoll.

The text was set in Berkeley Book. Heads were set in Berkeley
Black and Myriad Tilt, all Adobe fonts.

Published in the United States by

Books in Focus, PO. Box 77005, San Francisco, California 94107.

FOCUS
“Enlarging: The Personal Story,” appeared in somewhat different
form as “Good Exposure” in the Summer 1994 issue of
Radiance: A Magazine for Large Women.

Printed in the United States.

First Edition

10 987654321

ISBN 1-885495-00-5
 For Bertha and Anna for then
and/or Cid and Shayinfor now

L.T.E.

For Laurie and for Alan who, in two very

different ways, taught me how to live in
and to love my own body

D.L.N.
 Any work of nonfiction represents effort and energy by many people, but few books represent
the kind of all-out community effort by dozens of people that Women En Large has been. As is completely appropriate for
a project about abundance, we wish to thank the abundance of people who have made this book possible.

From our very first workshops on fat and feminism, the science fiction community has been our home base, our
center for feedback and support, our primary source for fundraising and creative ways to solve problems on a shoestring,
and our greatest wellspring of time, energy, and everything else we’ve needed. When we branched out into the women’s
and fat activist communities, we found more feedback, more support, more money, more creativity, and more time and
energy waiting for us there.

Many, many people must be singled out for special appreciation.

Above all others, Richard F Dutcher and Nancy Marmol have put in literally hundreds of hours of volunteer
time, doing everything from basic strategic planning to stamping envelopes. Without Nancy and Richard, this book
simply could not have come to be.

In particular, Laurie would like to thank Ctein for the superb photographic suggestions, the support, the preci¬
sion, and the creative exchanges.

Michael Gilbert taught us more than we knew there was to learn about the fundraising that made the work
possible. Any time we had any kind of question about raising funds or dealing with contributors or potential contribu¬
tors, Michael was there—and the advice he gave us brought in concrete results every single time.

The people who contributed money to the project in its early years and loaned money to finance publication
were the grass roots from which we grew. In particular, we would like to thank our sponsors, James E Hudson and Ellen
Franklin, Cordelia Sherman, Donald I. Roy, Jr., Andrew Robinson, Doug Faunt, Harry Minot, Richard Weiss and Ctein.
Every contribution, large and small, was appreciated and necessary.

Carol Squires has been a constant source of help, sharing her many years of photographic experience and her
reliable political and ethical advice, not to mention dozens of hours spent spotting prints. Shayin Gottlieb has donated
energy, hard work, and invaluable criticism from Day One. Lyn Paleo gave us the book’s name and much more at the
project’s inception.

Ellen Franklin has donated more professional production, design, and marketing time to this project than we
could pay for if we each lived to be 250. Ellen’s flair, style, and attention to detail have made this book as beautiful as it
can be. Cynthia McQuillin not only provided us with beautiful fat-positive music for the slide shows, she has also
tirelessly made phone calls and supported the project every way she could. Cathy Miller has been a later addition to our
support team, and her boundless energy and enthusiasm have helped us cross many otherwise difficult hurdles.

If it wasn’t for William Rotsler, this book might never have happened. We owe him a great debt.

Dozens of women have appeared on the Fat, Feminism and Fandom panels and the Women En Large slide shows
around the country, each one bringing new contributions to how we saw the issue ... and the world. Of those, we
especially need to honor the memory of Gail Kaufman, who saw the project’s beginning and never lived to see the end. In

6
addition, many overworked convention organizers made time and space for our panels and did their best to be fair to a
subject that too many people thought was funny. In 1984, the Los Angeles World Science Fiction Convention bravely
gave the panel its first home; ten years later, this book is evidence that they made a wise decision. Mama Bear’s in Oakland
gave us our first slide show venue, although we had no book to sell.

The women of Fat Lip Readers Theatre have been an indomitable source of support and energy. Aside from their
many practical contributions, their very existence and their high-quality performances have given us more than we can
possibly describe.

All of the models and writers are essential to the book, but many have done a lot more than just provide their
beautiful bodies for the camera and their thoughtful words for the text. Several have spoken at slide shows, and offered
other help when it was useful. Elise Matthesen has made dozens of useful suggestions and contributed many hours of her
own time to our publicity and promotion efforts. Terry Garey distributed materials to galleries and newspapers, as well as
posing for a “faux nude” photo taken by a journalist for her hometown newspaper to promote the book. Jane Robinson
made more than one decrepit slide projector wake up and display photographs. Bernadette Bosky has promoted us and
our project in the on-line universe and elsewhere.

The women’s and feminist publishing community is a group that takes care of its newcomers, and their help has
been invaluable. When we got serious about turning the photographs into a book, we got advice, support, and encour¬
agement from an astonishing number of people. Carol Seajay of Feminist Bookstore News cheerfully fielded dozens of
phone calls, answering every question and pointing us to resources right and left. Photographer Tee Corinne made
invaluable suggestions to help us on our way to publication. The feminist bookstore and publishing community, includ¬
ing Barbara Kuhne and Della McCreary of Press Gang Publishers, Midge Stocker of Third Side Press, Andre of Wingbow
Press/Bookpeople, and Darlene Pagano of Old Wives’ Tales all did their part, and you can replenish their energy by
shopping at your local feminist bookstore and buying books from feminist presses.

Many public venues have hosted slide shows and promotional events. In particular, we would like to thank Rick
Simonson and Kurt Jensen of Elliott Bay Books, Barb Weiser of Amazon Books (who also must be thanked for Shadow on
a Tightrope, the book that launched the fat activist movement), and the women of Good Vibrations, who gave us our first
gallery show and our first exposure at the American Booksellers’ Association Convention.

Tom Whitmore made us the offer that made the self-publishing idea feasible, and got us started down this road.
Amy Thomson, Cordelia Sherman, and Chenda Fruchter have helped us to move further along. Jeanne GomoH’s inspired
design has been another invaluable contribution to the physical book. All our design work builds on the initial contribu¬
tions of Elarry Driggs, who created our logo, our stationery, and our initial sales materials. Charlotte Davis provided
Laurie with the use of her Nikon F2 for three years. Zoe Diacou put in many hours of promotion and brainstorming time
which helped immensely in our effort to get our message to the public. Kate Daniel contributed a variety of ideas which
helped form the text. Jane Hawkins was our “roadie” at every Seattle slide show. Joan Meyer and Teresa Nielsen Hayden
both contributed valuable professional editorial input; Joan was also generous with professional advice and directed us
toward much-needed resources.

We would like to thank Irene Jackson for her prayers.

The community that is closest to this project is the fat liberation and size acceptance community. We would like
to especially thank NAAFA (the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance). The Body Image Task Force in Santa
Cruz, the original Fat Underground, Fat Chance in Madison, Wisconsin, Alice Ansfield and Radiance Magazine, and
everyone else who crusades for the public acceptance of people of all sizes and shapes are inspiration for our work, and
many of them have been active supporters as well. If you like this book, support these organizations. We all need each
other.

To everyone who has helped this project in any way, this book is our thank-you letter to all of you.

Abundantly yours,

^ouUxjl ,JZUu
 so

bo

UJ

Fat women are big; they are hard not to notice. Nonetheless, there is a particu¬
lar way in which we don’t see fat women. I never used to think much about the artistic possibili¬
ties of fat womens bodies. When 1 began working with Debbie Notkin on issues of fat oppression
and size acceptance, I began really paying attention to their bodies (something most people never
do). I was thrilled as an artist to discover that fat women have marvelous curves and masses
distributed very differently from thin women, in aesthetically fascinating ways. Thin women are
also beautiful, but 1 was familiar with the limited variety of our bodies’ shapes. Fat women’s
shapes are wonderfully different from each other.

I am also a metalworker (jewelry and small sculpture). I tried portraying fat women in
that medium first. I always visualized nudes, because clothing masks the differences between
bodies. My intent was to show the beauty, variety and especially the individuality of fat women.
While the jewelry was fine, it didn’t begin to encompass the subject. Black and white photogra¬
phy far better expressed the beauty I saw; it more successfully conveyed the subtle textures and
masses of the women’s bodies.

Historically, most female (and male) nudes have been portrayed by male artists. In fact, in
the impressionist period, women painters were barred from life drawing classes, regardless of the
model’s gender. In that period, “nude” came to mean “female nude.” Many artists created nude
images that obscured the real woman, replacing her with a created stereotype generated to fulfill
a particular cultural requirement.

1 studied these stereotyped nudes—the figures which we see repeated over and over again
in museums, in movies and on television, in books, and on T-shirts. The poses have remained
consistent for more than a century, although the “preferred” size of the women has varied with
time. Nineteenth-century salon painting, with its poses ranging from passive to limp and atti¬
tudes from tender to evil, has had an especially strong influence on the popular nude.

The sheltered woman in her garden, the “angel in the house,” the sleepily-limp Victorian
maiden, the Calvin Klein ad: all are examples of the way the image of the nude is charged by our
culture and history. These nudes carry coded messages in every pose, curve, smile, every tilt of
the hip or head. They carry the baggage of gender politics and sexual dynamics across the centuries.

None of the familiar images were ones I chose to replay. Sometimes, instead, I took those
“classic” poses and subverted them by replacing the traditional figure with a beautiful, individual
fat woman, too real to be anyone’s simple stereotype. I usually photographed women in their own

8
' I • ' * I • I • I • I I • • < I I I I I I I I I I t I I I ! I I I I I I I I I I I I I • I I I I t t I I I ! t t «

homes, to produce images which emphasized each womans own sense of uniqueness, not merely
my perception of her.

Photographing the models in their homes also made them more comfortable. The pho¬
tographer/model relationship is very fluid. To photograph someone and capture some sense of
their essence requires two people working together. The model must feel safe and comfortable
enough to express herself, and I have to feel relaxed enough to compose, suggest, and even direct
the model in her poses.

When I review the final photographs, I see my images and I see the success of my ef¬
forts. .. because I don’t see generic “fat women.” I see women who are comfortable, confident, and
beautiful. I see the twenty-five different, real, unique women who posed for this book.

Laurie Edison & Debbie Notkin. Photo by Carol Squires

9
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My Body Is A Map Of My Life
I perform a ritual when I remove my clothes with someone, whether it’s to
sunbathe, sauna, massage, or to make love.

I tell the stories of my scars.

Besides the pearly stretch marks that texture my arms, legs, breasts, and
belly, that I acquired during my two pregnancies, there are scars: a long
thick pink one that follows my right rib line for 6 or 7 inches (from gall
bladder surgery between the births of my son and daughter); a seam line
from hip to hip and one around my belly button from surgery that removed
three pounds of hanging skin; an appendicitis scar; and one-inch wide
stretch marks—after I lost the 120 pounds seven years after I gained them.

MY BODY IS A MAP OF MY LIFE, A PATCHWORK QUILT THAT IS WARM AND SOFT

AND STRONG.

I didn’t always appreciate my body. I used to be ashamed and embarrassed. I

had a difficult time baring myself with or even without other people around.
I would avoid looking at myself, really looking beyond the self-hate, beyond
the media image that 1 should be, that I could be if only... there was no real
sense other than I wasn’t good enough. I was constantly comparing my¬
self. ... It was one of my closet characters, and the more I denied it, the more
control it had over me. It was a drag. I wanted to be free of it, so I practiced.
I practiced being nude alone dancing, walking, sitting, laying, playing,
looking in the mirror at every angle of myself.

It wasn’t easy, but as the months and years passed, I became more comfort¬
able and accepting... you could even say I developed a nonchalant attitude
when in the nude. I began to feel at home in my body and in this growing
sense of well-being. SCAR WOMAN emerged from the closet.

All imperfections imposed, I claim the unique, distinctive markings,

making them perfect in the showing.

my body is a map of my life

it is a patchwork quilt

that is warm, and soft, and strong

—Lani Ka’ahumanu
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On the day I was taking pictures of Jasin, Jasin’s daughter and
this little girl, Fern, were playing in fairy costumes. Fern’s
mother was having coffee in the kitchen. At one point, Jasin
asked her daughter, “Do you want to be in the picture?”

“Only if it’s a picture of just me!” she said.

“Can I be in the picture?” Fern asked.

I said, “Sure.”

■Laurie Toby Edison

37
Shifting Focus
See the colors as they flicker in the glass

Light and shadow shifting focus as they pass,

Just illusion. Beauty’s image in a book,

Or the horror that you see each time you look,

What do you see? Is it real?

Is it only what you feel?

Perception lies...

The focus changes as it shifts from eye to eye.

So many points of view, so many mirrors lie,

Enlarge deficiencies, belittle points of view.

Reflected values and desires will never do.

What do you see? Is it real?

Is it only what you feel?

Perception lies...

Unveiled illusions, like the layers of a mask,

Dissolve before you with each question that you ask.

Enhance your image to resolve and make it clear.

When will you face what really lies within the mirror?

What do you see? Is it real?

Is it only what you feel?

Perception lies...

Within YOUR eyes.

■Cynthia McQuillin
39
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 Of all the pictures in the book, this is the only one that hasn’t
been shown around at slide shows and promotional events,
because I’m almost always there, and I don’t choose to talk about
it in public. The model is me; I was 8V2 months pregnant; and
our daughter died very shortly after her birth. Having this pic¬
ture is a real gift, one whose power I could never have known
beforehand. I’m so glad to have pictures of the pregnancy, be¬
cause it was a time of joy which ameliorates the terrible sorrow.

—Debbie Notkin
 Where My Ass Is
right between the two bones I sit on to assume the position?
but and when I finally get old—
some guys have a different idea about it want to lay myself down
sometimes I wonder about my various parts go all snaggle toothed and witchy,
being a woman isn’t all tits and ass, you know will it still be having conversations without me?
I worry about the pieces
about how I’m considered a piece man, as it were,
it’s a mystery
never get any, either
when I’m walking down the street keeps me awake at night

trying to figure out how to pay the gas bill trying to keep lay and lie straight
look good
this month
answer’s obvious if I would only listen keep tight

says some gentleman with his flap hanging out don’t sag

then I’m spurned don’t let him see you like that

by the next guy who says I don’t suit him at all and my ass

mama always my ass

imagine my disappointment sister:

use it or lose it
my father tells me fat women shouldn’t wear that’s what they say
pants how will I walk?
I don’t remember asking—
must have slipped my mind I dreamed one night my ass ran off with a Nazi

I say get it over with and standardize us all it was so embarrassing

maybe they can turn out our buns in a bakery knocked the bottom right out of me

and see for days

if they can get us right laid me low

so we won’t be such a pain in the I was up the creek without a paddle

you know but not my ass

on the face of it I know better, really
but these cheeks just keep getting out of control
enticing, batting their eyelashes at the damndest
times
like when I’m on a really serious subject,
y’know?
and my chest, and my legs and my hair and my
nose
and the rough spots on my elbows—mighod
it’s overwhelming what my body says
in the dream I worried
about whether it put the whole thing on
Mastercard
or used cash
bought patent leather panties, got them rumpled
lent them to some other derriere
running wild through my dreams
you can’t return underwear to the store,
you know
sometimes

when I’m not listening I wonder

if I can ever get behind my ass
so 1 keep wondering where my ass is, sneaking ‘cause I’d just like to see the end of it
up on some helpless it’s 10 o’clock
guy? do you know where your ass is?
being underhanded
—Terry A. Garey
supine or just prone

56
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10 ........ P. D. 51 .... ... Rhylorien n’a Rose

13 .... ... Ann West 53 .... ... Debbie Notkin

15 .... ... Virginia Fleming 55 ........ Carol S.

17 .... ... Lani Ka’ahumanu 57 ........ Terry A. Garey

19 .... ... Linda Sterk 59 ........ Edna Rivera

21 ........ Bayla Fine 61 ........ Cynthia McQuillin

23 ........ Dora Dewey-McCracken 63 .... ... Tracy Blackstone and Debbie Notkin

25 ........ April Miller 65 ........ Debbie Notkin and Chupoo Alafonte

27 ........ Lani Ka’ahumanu 67 ........ Chupoo Alafonte

29 ... .... Debbie Notkin 69 ... .... Bernadette Bosky

31 ... .... Edith Peck 71 ... .... Queen T’hisha and Robyn Brooks

33 ........ Edna Rivera 73 ........ Sue

35 ... .... Bernadette Bosky 75 ... .... Debbie Notkin

37 ... .... Jasin and Fern 77 ........ Debbie Notkin, Chupoo Alafonte,
and Carol S.
39 ... .... Cynthia McQuillin
79 ... .... Tracy Blackstone
41 ... .... Chupoo Alafonte
81 ... .... Lani Ka’ahumanu
43 ... .... Priscilla Alexander
83 ... .... Jasin
45 ... .... Linda Sterk
85 ... .... April Miller
46 ... .... Cynthia McQuillin and Jane Robinson
87 ... .... J Kellan Dewey-McCracken
47 ... .... Cynthia McQuillin and Jane Robinson
89 ... .... Debbie Notkin, April Miller, Carol S..
49 ... .... Queen T’hisha
Queen T’hisha, and Robyn Brooks

90
 Politics and Society
Debbie Notkin

Fat. Woman.

Fat is the way your body stores food for hard times. Fat is the soft white material cut off
the edge of a slice of meat and left uneaten, congealing on your plate. Fat is the metaphor for “too
much,” for waste in business or government. Fat is almost any part of a body that jiggles or is soft
to the touch. And fat is the feature of your body, and of other peoples bodies, that you are taught
earliest and most deeply to hate and despise.

A woman is a person with two X chromosomes. A woman is a person with a vagina and a
clitoris instead of a penis and testicles. A woman is a person whose body can bear children. A
woman is a person who expects to be judged by her looks every minute of every day.

A fat woman always carries both those labels with her; she is always fat, and always a
woman. Traditional stereotypes of the fat woman range from the fat lady in the circus through the
jolly fat aunt in the family circle to the lovely fat models of Renoir and Degas (who, although
beautiful, never seem like real people). In our generation, images of fat women are frequently
figures of fun, occasionally villamesses, often “bad examples” of people with no self-control or
low self-esteem. Like “corporate lawyer” or “sullen teenager,” the phrase “fat woman” contains the
implication that you now know all you need to know about the person being discussed.

As a fat woman myself, I had a lot to learn when doing this book. The most important
thing 1 learned was the one that should have been most obvious: the label “fat woman” tells you
only two of the hundreds of things you need to know about a person to understand her. Fat
women are rich and poor; of African, Asian, European, and other descent; big and small; power¬
ful and weak; interesting and boring; fulfilled and constrained; professionals and unemployed;
athletes and couch potatoes; artists and mathematicians; lesbian, queer, bisexual, transgender,
and straight; disabled and temporarily able-bodied; optimistic and depressed; fundamentalist
and radical; mothers, office workers, laborers, and sybarites; beautiful, good-looking, and ordinary¬
looking.

Nonetheless being fat is important enough to give fat women in this culture a set of shared
experiences, especially shared pain. Being fat is a gestalt of experiences that start before you arc
five and never end till the day you die. We are bombarded many times every day with I
messages about fat. Most of those mesages are also about women, from diet center vA
“Your Fiealth” columns to the images of conventionally beautiful thin women on ev, i
page and television screen. But the fat woman herself is rarely shown at all, and virtue
 shown as beautiful, or real. (Roseanne, bless her, is the exception: but, oh, has she had to fight
every day of her life to win and keep that status!) When a candy bar can have the slogan, “You can
never be too rich or too thin,” when a feminist conference can kick off with a performance featur¬
ing fat jokes, when six-year-old daughters can say, “Mommy, I love you but you’re too fat,” fat
women all too easily develop the bonds of oppression and shared self-hatred:

K ate Schaefer: Ambivalent about being fat? Who isn’t? (That is, who isn’t ambivalent if
their feelings aren’t unmitigated despair, shame, and anger?) What positive feelings I have
about my own fat are fairly few and far between. This is a book of pictures of women who
are more than an armful, and who are beautiful, yes, in these pictures and in other places, but
take that knowledge and turn it around for myself? Not in this lifetime.

Immediately, I have to qualify that: sometimes I can see myself beautiful in spite of the
fat. Beautiful in the fat? No.

One of my grandmothers was fat all during my youth, very fat. I dreaded being like
her, dreaded having fat hanging from my upper arm. I think I hate fat upper arms more than
fat anything else. Now I have fat upper arms. Now she is a little tiny woman. She lost fifty
pounds when she had heart surgery and another forty pounds when she went into a diabetic
coma. She said, “I look so old and sick now that I’m thin. When I was fat, I looked healthy."

I’m always measuring myself against other women, mostly against other fat women.
Am I that fat? Am I that fat? I’m not that fat, am I? I don’t have a clear idea of just how fat I
am, actually. Not as fat as the woman who sat on me in the bus the other week. All the way
home, I thought about how much more space she took up than I did. I thought about how much
more space I took up than the person sitting in front of me did, and I felt ashamed. I thought
about how this woman was sitting on me and how uncomfortable I was and how uncomfort¬
able she probably was. Perhaps she resented me for not being thin enough to let her have a bus
seat and a half without sitting on me. Perhaps she resented the bus design for not allowing for
larger people. Perhaps she simply read her book and thought about politics and what she
would be doing that evening.

On another bus, l sat next to a thin woman who had her briefcase on the seat between
her and me. I wanted her to move the briefcase, which was actually on my half of the seat, but
I couldn’t think of any subtle way to make her move it. I couldn’t just say, “Excuse me, your
briefcase is on my side of the seat,’’ because to say that would be to acknowledge that I’m fat,
that I need the whole seat to sit on. I don’t like to tell myself that I’m fat. It’s really hell to have
to say anything to other people that says I’m fat. Of course, I don’t have to say anything about
it. Fat doesn’t have to be acknowledged to be visible.

Whether Kate acknowledges it or not (in fact, especially if she doesn’t), being fat is one of
the pains that rules her life, makes her decisions for her, controls her choices. Bus seats are a
perfect example of the daily pain of being fat, as are mirrors; the long-term pains include clothing
stores where nothing fits, love affairs blighted or never started, jobs lost the instant the interview

92
begins, and family patterns that reinforce self-hatred. Perhaps worst of all is the near-total lack of
any kind of cultural reinforcement for transforming that pain into anger, or political energy, or
even acceptance. When you are fat, you are supposed to hate yourself.

A few years ago, a thin friend of mine was dating a man with a pot belly. She sat down to
write him a love letter describing how she liked to run her hands over his stomach and feel the
hills and valleys of his body. She discovered that every single word she could think of to describe
his fat had connotations of ugliness or unpleasantness. The English language simply will not let
her describe her pleasure and enjoyment in complimentary terms.

As that anecdote implies, fat men face many of the same problems fat women face; gener¬
ally, however, men must be significantly fatter than women before they cross the line into the
territory of oppression. If a man is fat enough, he will be teased and taunted, have a harder time
getting and keeping jobs, and feel cut off from love and affection. He too will be told that only
lack of willpower is causing his troubles. And, of course, he won’t fit in airline seats, revolving
doors, restaurant booths, and all the other torture devices fat people dread.

As women, whether we are fat or not, were always supposed to be dieting. How many
times have you gone out with a thin woman who puts Sweet ’N Low into her coffee, who refuses
dessert with, “Oh, I can’t! I’m on a diet”? How many of your female friends of all sizes drink diet
soft drinks and eat Weight Watchers frozen dinners? (You think that’s not about fat, it’s about
health? Keep reading.)

Try an experiment. Look at your watch now. Look at it again the next time you hear
someone mention weight or fat in a negative context, or dieting in a positive context. How long
did it take? If you work in an office, or listen to commercial radio or TV, the odds are enormous
that you didn’t have to wait anything close to a whole day.

(“How old does a fat woman have to be,” one of our models asked one day, “before she
dies of old age instead of being too fat?”)

Let’s pause here to talk about the health issues. One common response we have gotten
when describing this book is, “But aren’t you encouraging people to be unhealthy? The over¬
whelming belief that being fat is unhealthy simply does not stand up to scientific scrutiny. The
greatest health dangers of fat are generally assumed to be higher risk of heart attacks and strokes.
In fact, these risks can be easily traced to two factors commonly linked with being fat, rather than
fat itself.

Lirst, many—if not most—fat people have spent some portion of their lives dieting, and
the medical evidence is incontrovertible that repeated weight loss and gain ( yo-yo dieting ) do
place significant strain on the heart. The most recent studies indicate that a gain or loss of as listie
as ten pounds in a short period of time can increase the risk of heart attack. Lat people who uavi
never dieted are at less risk of heart attack and stroke than chronic dieters of any size
Odell, et al, “Variability of Body Weight and Health Outcomes in the Lramingham 1 \ipu
New England Journal of Medicine, June 1991.)
 Second, the increased rate of heart attacks and strokes among fat people can be compared
to the rate in “normal weight” oppressed populations, such as the African-American community.
Whether you are black, fat, homosexual, a member of some other marginalized population, or all
of the above, spending every day of your life either giving in to or fighting internalized oppression
and low self-esteem is hard on your system, increasing your risk of death from stress-related
illnesses.

C hupoo Alafonte: When I think of what it means to he a fat, black woman, I think of my
ancestors, women at the lowest rung of society, who were forced to serve, nurture, and give
birth to a nation that hates and fears people who look like me. Those women were the
invisible foundation used to build other people’s wealth and self-esteem. During slavery in this
country, black women and men were used to physically build America. Black women were
used as chattels to continuously replenish the slavery populations, as pawns to destroy black
men’s self-esteem, and as meat to satisfy white men sexually. These women did not have the
luxury of worrying about their growing dress size. The life they lived called for big, strong
bodies that could endure. Many petite, frail little women just couldn’t (and didn’t) survive the
brutishness of living in America.

These facts may seem like ancient history to some, but it’s been less than forty years
since white people decided it was all right for black people to sit next to them at a lunch
counter. As a matter of fact, it’s still not okay for fat black people to sit next to whites at a lunch
counter. One can say or do just about anything they want to a fat person in public. What
makes the abuse different for women of color as opposed to white women is that for black
women it’s nothing new.

Most people of color in this country are not living in their natural habitat. Most Afri¬
can and Indigenous people living in American come from a place where geography and climate
dictated that the evolution of their bodies’ metabolism be efficient and able to store food to
survive in their native environment. As we were introduced to European culture, we immedi¬
ately began to lose access to the foods and remedies we knew.

The percentage of large people in communities of color is much larger than in white
communities, and the less we have assimilated to the dominant European culture, the more we
are accepted in our own community. I rarely experience discrimination because of my fat in
the black community. I feel the hatred when I am in public, where white people dominate. Even
other black people will ostracize me if we are in a white environment.

So when you ask me about my life as a fat black woman, I have to talk about the many
struggles of my people. A black woman is often invisible even in the movements where she is on
the front lines. Black males reaped the benefits of the civil rights movement. White women
benefit from the women’s movement and affirmative action. Black women are on the bottom of
the heap even in these struggles. The realities of our lives are overwhelming, and we still don’t
have the luxury of contemplating our growing dress size.

Survival is more important than acceptance.

94
 One of the best-known and most revelatory studies about the real health risks of fat is a
longitudinal (several generations) study of a small self-contained Italian-American mining com¬
munity in Pennsylvania. (Bruhn, John, The Roseto Story, University of Oklahoma Press, 1969.)
The community came from a fairly limited genetic pool, and lots of people were fat. Throughout
the period that the town was insular, when people who were born there usually died there,
married each other, raised their children, and lived among people they knew, their longevity rates
did not vary with their size. In the middle of the twentieth century when the mines were closing
and the children were growing up and leaving home for big cities where they encountered fat
oppression for the first time, their mortality statistics changed to match those of fat people in the
larger population. Was it their weight or the way people treated them that changed?

Everyone “knows” how fat is bad for you; few people know (and few doctors will tell you)
about the health benefits of being fat. First and foremost, fat is an evolutionary advantage when
tough times, especially famines, lie ahead. (Historically, tough times lie ahead for most popula¬
tions in most periods.) Fat evolved for a reason. Fat is your body’s attempt to protect you from
starvation. In fact, every time you starve yourself by dieting, your body gets more concerned and
more protective, and therefore more efficient at storing food for the next hard time. In the mind-
body communication, fat is love, protection, nurturing, and planning ahead.

But there are more specific health benefits. Fat women, as we age, are at far less risk for
osteoporosis. Why? Because osteoporosis happens when a) your estrogen levels go down and b)
you lose enough body mass that your bones stop having to work to carry your weight. That’s why
doctors recommend exercise to prevent bone loss. More weight equals more work for your bones
equals less osteoporosis. Fat women frequently have better, easier, and healthier pregnancies than
thinner women, partly because the weight gain is less of a percentage of our normal weight and
therefore less of a strain, partly because we’re used to the social stigma people give our fat bellies,
and apparently partly because certain dangers of pregnancy (like toxemia) are reduced in fat
women.

Suppose all the above information is wrong and fat is a genuine threat to your health. In
that case, you might as well accept the threat because DIETS DO NOT WORK. Ninety-five percent of
all diets fail within five years, and each one that fails increases the strain on your system and the
health risks related to yo-yo dieting. A health professional in the San Francisco Bay Area puts it
this way: “If you had a disease that was not fatal in the near term but was statistically likely to
shorten your life by a few years, and we had a ‘cure’ that worked in only five percent of the cases,
while in the other ninety-five percent it was likely to shorten your life even more, would you take
it? Would we be ethical in encouraging you to take it?” (Hyman, Sempos, Saltsman & Glinsman,
“Evidence for Success of Caloric Restriction in Weight Loss and Control," Annals of Internal Medi¬
cine, September 1993.)

Certainly, some conditions can be improved specifically by weight loss (bad b.c. !
bad knees simply benefit from carrying less) and others are completely dependent on
management of what you eat and how you exercise (like diabetes). Usually, in such ■
matic weight loss is not necessary (even if it is possible), and learning to eat the right wn.
body does not mean starving yourself or trying to match your body to the insurance-company
weight charts.
v

What about exercise? Yes, exercise is good for virtually everyone. Exercise makes you
healthier, stronger, more capable of dealing with stress, and even improves your self-esteem. But
if it isn’t combined with a weight-loss diet, exercise will not make you thin. You’ll lose a little
weight, maybe, or gain a little because you’re replacing fat with muscle bulk. You’ll burn some of
the fat that your body is saving for the famine ahead. But your fat body won’t turn into a thin
body. On page 55 is a picture of Carol S. dancing. Carol dances when she gets up in the morning;
she dances while she’s waiting for someone to answer the doorbell; she probably dances in the
shower. And a lot of it is an aerobic, energetic, high-powered workout. If constant daily exercise
made people thin, Carol couldn’t have modeled for this book.

Unquestionably, the medical evidence of the dangers of fat has been overstated in the
minds of many, if not most, people. One common response women get when they tell their family
and friends, “I have cancer,” is “Well, at least you’ll lose weight.” Yes, it’s a flippant response to
news that no one wants to hear. Yes, it’s an attempt to make the woman with cancer feel better,
and almost certainly well-intentioned. But it also says something about just how deep the culture’s
hatred of fat goes.

Is it really more dangerous to eat sugar than to eat the complex carcinogens that we put in
diet foods? Is it really more dangerous to eat chicken skin than to starve yourself into lethargy,
constant viruses and colds, and a depressed immune system? Is it really more dangerous to gain
weight as you age than it is to have your mouth wired shut or your stomach stapled to force you
into taking off that weight? (If you read horror stories for pleasure, look at the history and the
results of stomach stapling; my own stomach is too weak to go into them here.)

So, a) fat is not necessarily unhealthy; b) dieting is clearly unhealthy.

In 1994 it isn’t really too difficult to find people who believe those things: even some
mainstream health professionals are coming around to the truth about fat, in the face of dozens of
studies underscoring the evidence on both points. Fat people don’t eat more than thin people do
either; that’s another myth that the studies regularly refute. (Frank, “Futility and Avoidance: Medical
Professionals in the Treatment of Obesity,” JAMA, April 1993, citing medical evidence going back
to Flemyng, 1760.)

But health isn’t the whole story. And it’s not what this book is about. I can spend a great
deal of time and effort trying to convince you that fat isn’t bad for you, but if you think you’re
ugly, being fat is never going to be good for you. We aren’t highly skilled at teaching anyone in this
society, especially any woman, that she isn’t ugly. You can be thin, you can be curvaceous, you can
be tall, you can be elegant, you can be sexy—but when you look in the mirror, it’s a safe bet that
what you’ll see is what you don’t like about your body, what you wish you could change, what
you’ve learned to believe you should be ashamed of.
 D awn Roberts: I grew up with the idea that the human body is not aesthetically pleasing.
Faces am different, faces are often beautiful. But I was not raised to ever consider the
human form that way; I often wondered why sculptors and painters spent so much time
on it. I may have picked this up from my mom. She’s a doll, everyone’s mom or grandma, and
people just automatically like her. But she makes Queen Victoria look like a libertine. I remem¬
ber her horror when two-piece swimsuits came out; they were immoral by definition. Bare
navels! I know she tsk-tsked over nudes in art and would not look at naked bodies even in
National Geographic.

It always seemed to me that there are too many dangly bits on human bodies, without
concealing fur. Animals have fur and sleek smooth muscles. Human bodies only seem graceful
and beautiful when they approach the appearance of a ballerina, for example. Polished, smooth,
no jiggle or bounce or dangle, one solid piece of smooth movement. Which is about as far as
one can get from the way most real-life human animals look. That sort of refined abstraction
was beauty, humans who jiggled (such as me or Mom) were not.

I guess it really is an asexual sort of ideal, since I always preferred even animals to
have no dangly bits, or else fur to cover. Mares or geldings, not stallions. Breasts should be so
firm or so small (or so restrained, as by most dance costumes) that there’s no motion or jiggle.
Fat, of course, jiggles, so it is by definition ugly.

It’s a rejection of nature in many ways, an over-refinement away from anything as

messy as life. So perhaps this is getting to the roots of my dislike of human bodies. Can such
attitudes be turned around, I wonder? I nursed my daughter, since I had decided that nursing
was a natural and healthy thing. (It shocked Mom when I did so in front of her.) But this may
be harder. I can now see that the ideals of beauty I held were sick and unnatural, maybe, but
when I look in a mirror there’s a helluva lot of other baggage as well. Would you believe me if
I said I have this small self-image problem? It isn’t just weight-related, believe me! If it were, I
would have liked myself fine at 113 pounds, and I didn’t. And I’ve always felt the weight gain
in part came from the dislike, leading to more dislike and a fairly classic vicious circle.

For reasons like Dawn’s (not her real name), learning to appreciate your own body is
extraordinarily difficult. Okay, you can live with being fat. You shouldn’t hate yourself for it. You
should make the best of it. Maybe you should even wear clothes that fit and that look good on
you. (Radical, isn’t it?) Now, suppose you try to buck the trend all the way and think of your fat—
not only you despite your fat, but your fat—as beautiful. You’ll probably find demons coming at
you from every corner of your mind, your history, and your socialization, explaining to you just
how wrong you are.

C ynthia McQuillin: I’ve spent my entire life looking into mirrors and not seeing what’s
there. I felt just as huge at 150 pounds as I have at 350 because I’d been taught to t> ust n
reflection in someone else’s eyes more than what my mirror told me. I learned to “ha!
plain sight,” because I’m an entertainer. I’ve constantly tried to overcome and compels
the fact that I differ radically from the size and shape the audience expects. With /io
 frequency, audience members who’ve heard my tapes come up and say, “Gee, you don’t look
quite like I expected. ” After all these years of hiding, you can imagine how hard it is to come
out in this book and say, “Hey! Look at me,” in a way where no one can fail to really see me.

Cynthia’s bell-like voice and her fine guitar playing have enhanced many of the Women En
Large slide shows. To watch her and listen to her, unselfconscious and charming and professional
on stage, has been an inspiration to the rest of us nonperformers who have had to learn how to get
up in front of audiences and talk about naked fat ladies. It’s difficult for me to see how she could
be anything but beautiful, yet I know that the world gives her a completely different message on
an all-too-regular basis.

One of our most pervasive cultural myths is that beauty and sexuality are somehow inex¬
tricably entwined, that if you are not beautiful (by the arbitrary standards set from outside), the
whole universe of sexual expression and sexual fulfillment will always be a closed book to you.
Fat women battle issues of sexual attractiveness every day, from the comments our dates get in
public to the pitying looks we get when out by ourselves. Some people think fat women are easy
prey; I’m told that one piece of male locker room wisdom is, “The ugly ones put out,” and I’ve
certainly read advice columns which talk about the problems of the promiscuous fat woman:
“Dear, if you could only lose that weight, you wouldn’t have to be so desperate.”

B ernadette Bosky: The myths about fat and sexuality may be among the most widespread
lies about us, and the most damaging. Fortunately, it’s been one of the areas in which I’ve
been the luckiest and learned the most, especially in the past twelve years. Given the right
frame of mind and the right partner, it is amazing how little effect size and weight can have.

Often fat people are thought to be asexual, not only undesirable, but beyond any
desire themselves. What we are instead, I think, is shy and full of shame.

I personally was told that fat would affect not my own passion, but my attractiveness
in the eyes of others. This, I have found, is both true and false. In my experience, beingfat does
decrease the number of potential partners, especially when one is young. In high school and
college, I didn’t know where or how to look for boyfriends, and I’d been subtly told that I
shouldn’t even bother until I was thin.

What I didn’t realize then was that while my potential lovers may have been fewer,
they were out there—and would be as wonderful as could be hoped for, once I found them. I
think that over the years, I did three major things right: refuse to settle for partners who made
me feel bad about myself; seek out men who like my body but want a relationship based on
many other kinds of attraction as well; and join a special-interest community which is just a
little bit less crazed about fat than most of our culture.

My partners appreciate me, not because I’m fat, but not despite the fact, either. I can’t
imagine any weight-changes making much difference in our love, or our sex. On the other
hand, we do figure all that flesh and skin is there to be enjoyed. In my teens, I wouldn’t have
believed I’d someday relish compliments about my big butt, or be happy to have a man gaze at
 my thighs and stroke my belly. I have also discovered that in sex, physical condition and shape
matter much less than most people think, and creativity and a good-hearted openness to each
other matter much more.

While the cultural prejudice against fat will be around for a long time yet, we can fight
against letting it into our bedrooms. The more we recognize that it is natural for fat people to
love and be loved, desire and be desired, the more it will happen.

We learn our ideals of beauty from the people and the world around us, and the ideals we
learn are generally simplistic and limited, if not downright nasty and painful. Fat women have a
hard enough time learning to embrace our own beauty, but what about those who also have other
characteristics the culture labels “ugly”? What about the disabled?

R hylorien n’a Rose: Eight years ago, I seriously resisted trying out and eventually select¬
ing an electric scooter, even though a mechanical device would help conserve my limited
energy. The scooter gave me membership in the disabled community; I could now experi¬
ence the multiple humiliations and frustrations society directs at those outside of the range of
normalcy.

In the days following, I thought I learned about how important it was for me to develop
a thick, strong, impervious, and protective exterior to shield me. Accompanying my psycho¬
logical shell’s growth was a physical weight gain which added another dimension to the adjust¬
ments being made. In ways both subtle and overt, my family and the world at large let me
know I was now a fair target for their expressions of scorn and disgust relative to their personal
phobias related to obesity and disability.

It took time to find out and be comfortable with who I am—right now, this size, this
disabled. When I found myself feeling okay with myself, I noticed I was able to stand my
ground firmly, to assert myself, and to give off vibrations of power not related to physical
strength. I no longer needed my previous shielding. I understood that beyond the fat, beyond
the disability, beyond the missing body parts, what really matters was how I felt about who I
am. I don’t need approval from anyone except myself. I am not what others think of me. I am
what I think of me. My world is now quite different from what it was yesterday; the difference
between now and yesterday is my frame of reference. My body may be fat and physically
challenged, but I am strong and beautiful.... Right now.

This stance is one you have to grow into—usually have to fight like hell to discover the
room to grow into. What’s it like while you’re growing? When you’re a fat girl, and most particu¬
larly when you’re a fat teenage girl, all the hope and fear in the universe is contained in the word
“diet.” Most teenagers want desperately to be, if not like everyone else, at least accepted by every¬
one else. That most assuredly includes not being fat. Diets simultaneously present the false prem¬
ise of (literally) shedding your differences and the actuality of living in “cottage cheese jai
only way to get what you want, you’re told, is to make yourself miserable for what sound'. T <
forever (and usually it is forever). And, of course, being unable to stick to your diet proves that
you lack “willpower,” another of the words used to control fat women.

C arol Squires: I’ve probably started over a hundred diets in my life and the night before
most of them I would have a terrible dream. Sometimes I would remember the dream with
clarity, and sometimes I would just wake with my heart racing and that feeling of impend¬
ing doom. One dream, though, repeated itself several times, and I’ve always remembered it.

I was walking through a forest when I came to the edge of a cliff. It was a straight drop
and the bottom seemed a mile away. As I was standing there, taking in the wonderful view, I
heard some people approaching. I didn’t recognize any of them, but they knew my name. As
they came closer, I began to get scared and started to back up. I found myself falling over the
cliff, and then suddenly I was hanging by a rope looking up at all those faces. I clutched the
rope with all my strength, but I knew I couldn’t hang on very long. I called out for help. The
people started to talk among themselves and I could hear some of what they were saying: “Poor
fat woman, must be three hundred pounds, it was all that bread, it’s a shame, lazy, just plain
lazy.”

“Please help me!” I screamed. I tried to pull myself up, but I couldn’t move. My hands
were numb.

The buzz of voices started to chant the same words as I lost my grip and started to fall.
“It’s all your fault. It’s all your fault. It’s all your fault.” I always awoke before I hit the ground,
in a cold sweat and repeating, “It’s all my fault. It’s all my fault.”

Nothing could strike closer to the core of the agony of being fat. It’s all your fault, and it’s
always all your fault. Even if everything else in your life goes perfectly (work that you love, ideal
relationships, terrific children, and the most beautiful garden in town), you still always know
you’re a failure because you can’t control your body, can’t keep the discipline, can’t fit the stan¬
dard. So what if it’s impossible? It’s still your fault that you can’t do it.

Some fat teenage girls flirt with diets and some fall into a lifetime obsession with them. As
a flirt myself, I still remember the odd combinations (the all-protein-and-water diet, the carrots-
and-grapefruit diet) and the incessant failures of resolution. Self-hatred is a horrifyingly inexpen¬
sive commodity in this culture for all genders, races, and lifestyles, but for fat teens the immediate
price is minuscule; your ongoing reasons to despise yourself are written on your “pretty face” and
measured in the size clothes you buy off the rack. If you have to shop at a “fat store” because other
stores don’t sell clothes you can wear, hating yourself is easier still. The long-term costs of self-
hatred, to each one of us and to society, are remarkably high, but we are a culture that generally
does not take long-term costs into account in most things, and this is no exception.

So the prototypical fat teenage girl diets sporadically (because she wants to be loved and
to love herself), eats sporadically (because her body is crying for the food it needs to grow), and
moves more deeply into body-hatred with each swing of the pendulum. And she learns to see
herself as fat even if she grows up as a model for the insurance-company ideal-weight charts,
part of her will always see herself as fat.

D elia Sherman: When I was twelve, I was fat. My arms and legs were thin, almost skinny,
and my body was round and padded. I resembled (I told myself) a marshmallow on tooth¬
picks. My mother sighed whenever she looked at me, and reminded me to hold in my
stomach. It didn’t help much. Nor did giving up candy and cake and ice cream for Lent. Nor
did the elasticizcd garter belt that always ended up rolled uncomfortably around my waist
because I was too young to wear stockings. “You’ll have to go on a diet,” my mother told me.
“You’ll never get married if you’re fat.”

So 1 went on a diet. I don’t remember much about it, except hearing my mother saying,
“Deedee won’t have any. She’s on a diet,” a lot. I do remember skipping lunch and then coming
home from school and sneaking slices of bread and mayo. The “diet” stopped when I turned
fourteen and suddenly became 5’9", but the worry about my shape did not. My mother, looking
at my small pot belly, would still sigh and remind me to hold in my stomach.

As it happens, I never married, although my unwedded state has everything to do with

my sexual orientation and nothing to do with my weight. And when I look at pictures of myself
in my “fat years, ” I can see that my image of a marshmallow on toothpicks was largely the
product of my mother’s—of society’s—conception of perfect female beauty. I was not thin;
therefore I was fat. In fact, I was merely pre-adolescent and not very active. Because of the way
my body is built, I will always have a belly and a butt, no matter how thin I am. And as long
as I protrude fore and aft below my waist, I look fat to myself. I know this is an illusion. I don’t
think other women with bellies and butts are fat. I don’t even think I am fat. But from time to
time I hear my mother’s soft Southern voice reminding me to hold in my stomach.

When I had occasion to dig up a photograph of myself at age nineteen, I was thunderstruck
by how thin I was a) compared to now and b) compared to what l believed was true then. I look
at that picture and 1 want to cry, because 1 can see that 1 wasn’t fat. Heavier than the average
college girl? Sure. But not like I am now, not like I’ve become in the intervening years. Since I
knew I was fat and everyone told me I was fat, I dressed like a fat woman and carried myself like
a fat woman and dated like a fat woman and made a fat woman’s life for myself. It’s a good life. But
I sure would have been a lot happier at nineteen if I could have believed that I wasn’t particularly
fat. (And happier still, of course, if I could have been any size I wanted to be and still known I was
beautiful.)

Sometimes I want to rent a time machine, go back twenty-five years, and tell my younger
self, “You’re beautiful.” I was probably thirty before I ever heard that from anyone who wasn’t a
relative—and the relatives sent mixed messages (you’re beautiful, but you should lose
anyway) that were far better than unmixed negative messages, but confusing just the

Unfortunately, it isn’t only fat women who become obsessed with diets, bat
least have something to diet away—diets may be bad for our long-term health,
immediate killers.
 E lise Matthesen: I got asked to write something for this book. First I was honored, and
then I was terrified.

See, I’m a recovering anorexic. The fear of fat that our culture glories in is no stranger
to me. It nearly killed me. Actually, I should be more accurate. It nearly convinced me to kill
myself. To do its dirty work. To disappear myself my female, fleshy self. To tidy up, like a good
girl, leaving no trace of breasts, buttocks, hips, upper arms. No folds, no curves. All flat,
sterile, a-womanly. To become the antiwoman.

This little essay will not be comfortable to read. I assure you, it is no more comfortable
to write. Yet because I have been asked, and because telling the truth is worth more to me than
rubies, I will tell you a few things about this dance of flesh and shadow from my perspective.

The women making this book showed me some pictures a while ago. When I was alone
again, I thought about them. Thinking, I realized they made me want to cry. Why? For the
braveness. For the sheer unmitigated courageous act of a woman standing there in the flesh she
is, all of it, and being nakedly herself. There are many moods of woman in this book; all of
them are women of courage. Honor and praise to them, I thought. Honor and praise to their
breasts, their rounded great haunches, their keen minds and wicked wits. Honor to their strong
hands and gentle spirits. Praise to their stubborn big female selves, refusing to disappear.

What are these tears about? These on my face. These tears, my friends, are the tears of
one who has come out of the desert into the land of rain on green growing things. This is the
face of a former starvation artist. See: where the sharp curve of bone was along the cheek, the
sharply-pointed chin, making me look almost insect-like. See where the upper arms were so
narrow, the place along the ribs where, before, there were no breasts. These tears are the tears
of one who has come out of prison, out of the camps. And because I have been anorexic, these
are the tears of a collaborator.

To take on the image of the Thin Good Woman, to carry the societal banner of starving
sickness, is to collaborate in the war against womanflesh. It does not, in one sense, matter that
my war against my own body was one of the few forms of rebellion against a complicated
woman-hating culture. In one sense, I will always be one of the ones who played along. Who
gave in, played by their rules, and was a reproach to those who did not. I was “an example.”
“Why can’t you be thin like Elise? She doesn’t seem to have any trouble staying on a diet.” As
inside, the wolves gnawed, and I watched my image being used to shame women and girls
larger than me.

Years later, when a woman told me she wished she could be anorexic, I found myself
answering, “If you really hate yourself that much, just buy a gun and shoot yourself. It’s quicker.”

Yet the push goes on: lose weight, prove your willpower, make yourself beautiful. Forego
comfort and pleasure and health and self-acceptance; beauty is first, always. And beauty and fat
cannot, can never, coexist in one package. But as you get older, as the diets fail, and fail again, and
fail again, and as each time you get larger, what then?
 A pril Miller: I’ve been jat all my life and I’ve always received a lot of sexual attention
related to my size. When I was a child I was constantly “ignoring" the comments adult
men made about my breasts and my body. I spent puberty turning down their offers of
money and gifts if I would be “nice” to them, let them touch me, let them fuck me.

I was raised to hate my body. My size made me visible, vulnerable. It made people
behave in ways that left me frightened, angry, and ashamed. When I was in ninth grade, I
entered the hospital for a month on a strict five-hundred-calorie-a-day diet. I weighed in every
morning and one morning I’d gained three pounds. My doctor screamed at me. He said I could
only have gained weight by sneaking candy. That diet was my last-ditch attempt to be “nor¬
mal. ” I knew that I had done everything perfectly and that those three pounds were not my
fault. Maybe none of it—my weight, the way people treated me—was my fault.

I decided that I was never again going to allow someone to victimize me because of my
size. Furthermore, I decided to enjoy myself the way I was. Body and personality both.

I have developed a personal style which is sexually aware and challenging. Once 1
realized that part of accepting myself was claiming and enjoying my sexuality, I decided to be
the sexiest fat girl I was capable of being. I began to change the way I dressed and behaved, and
the changes got bigger and bolder as I realized that I liked it.

I have a voluptuous body and a very sensual nature. Acknowledging my sexuality

makes me feel powerful, desirable, and in control. I have more fun. I get hassled less. I believe
that we should all glory in ourselves and share our best with the world. I’m creative, intelligent,
charming, and lush. What’s not to like?

Most of us aren’t as outrageous as April, but one way or another we do find an accommo¬
dation that works for us. At least we learn to offset the self-hatred and failure messages with some
attitude that gets us through the day. At age fifteen you can obsess about your weight fourteen
hours a day; at age twenty-five you’re earning a living, having a love life, and generally getting on
with business despite the voices that threaten you in the dark.

B ernadette Bosky: Posing for this book was both a celebration of and another step along
in a journey toward self-acceptance that has been a major part of my life for most of the
past decade. In general, I feel very lucky, rich in circumstances and people that have
helped me reach happiness and contentment despite the myriad messages of a fat-phobic
culture.

One powerful way to learn body-love is to think of one’s physical self as an instrument
for expression and action, rather than a merely visual object. On my worst days now, I think of
myself as an old car or pickup truck (a ’57 Ford, perhaps); maybe not as impressive-looking as
a streamlined racing car, but it gets where it’s going. On my best days, I realize that affecting
the world around us is a kind of beauty—perhaps the most important kind. Because of this
attitude, and the help of others, I have finally come to see the beauty in my mirror as well
 Posing for these photos, l tried to convey this idea of beauty through action. I was
always conscious, but not self-conscious. I was not embarrassed, but was intensely aware of
the position, feelings, and presence of my body, what I was experiencing and what I was trying
to express. Posing was a physical experience for me, in a way that had profound psychological
dimensions as well. I also found, thank God, that the physical act of posing helped me work out
the inevitable nervousness.

Like every other human experience, growing up fat isn’t the same for everyone. One thing
we learned while doing this book is that fat women have different kinds of bodies. We gain and
carry our weight in different patterns, for different reasons. Diabetic fat women, for example,
have a unique and immediately recognizable body shape—and their own problems to go with it.

D ora Dewey-McCracken: I’ve been diabetic since I was nineteen, but I had this body
shape long before I was diagnosed. Small arms and legs, with a big torso and no butt, are
called a “predisposition to diabetes. ” The only pants I can buy are called “petite,” because
they’re for short-legged women! I feel like I’m on a safari every time I go clothes shopping.

All my life I gained and lost at least sixty pounds each year. Those diets, not my fat,
were the downfall of my health! I tried all diets, eating disorders, and fasts, only to gain the fat
back, and more each time. I’m the fattest I’ve ever been, and yet my diabetic blood work is the
best it’s ever been. My doctor once told me, “As long as your disease is controlled and your
blood chemistry is good, your fat is just a social issue. ” I’m extremely lucky to have this doctor;
with most doctors, fat-phobia is the rule, not the exception. They see the fat and their brains
turn off to all further discussions.

Dora brings up two other issues (besides dieting) that always arise when fat women talk to
each other: clothing and doctors. The clothing that doesn’t fit, that makes you look ugly (or even
fatter than you are), that hurts when you wear it, or that simply doesn’t exist is familiar to all fat
women in this culture. Similarly, the doctors who criticize, threaten, patronize, and simply don’t
understand are a common experience that, as fat American women, we all share.

Dora is immensely fortunate in her doctor (I don’t say lucky, because I assume she did a
lot of work to find a doctor she could respect). Most of us spend our lives with doctors who
lecture us on weight when we go in for an earache, who refuse to treat serious illnesses until we
lose weight, who threaten us with various forms of torture disguised as weight-reduction surgery,
and who get rich by refusing to let us believe that there’s nothing wrong with us. The diet industry
won’t reveal much about their success rate, but it is estimated that the average cost of losing one
pound through a diet center (the places where they “live off the fat of the land”) and keeping that
pound off is about one hundred dollars. At that rate, to lose twenty-five pounds costs more than
a trip to Europe. To lose eighty pounds, you would pay the price of a new car. To lose anything
whatsoever and keep it off, you have to fight not only the cultural demons of willpower and self-
control, but the actuality of your body’s fear that you are starving yourself to death.
 Women in this culture discuss clothes almost as endlessly as we discuss weight, and fat
women have a long history of discussing clothes ruefully. Fortunately that is changing. The changes
are coming for two reasons: first, a handful of small activist companies sprang up to make natural-
fiber, comfortable, attractive clothes for fat women; previously, no such clothing was available.
Second, and partly in response to these cottage industries, a number of major clothing manufac¬
turers and retailers discovered that fat women are (pardon the pun) a growth industry, and that
many of us have professional jobs, need nice clothes, and can afford to buy them. We could have
told them that decades ago, if they had asked!

Nonetheless, most stores still consider the “large sizes” to be 12 and 14. Above that range,
not only the natural fibers but the good-quality synthetics disappear. The decrease in quality and
style that shows up in most stores at around the size 16 rack marker is another way of reminding
fat (and mid-size) women that we are not good enough to deserve the kinds of clothes our thinner
sisters can buy, even in the stores that stock our sizes. Most of us have shopped in those stores
with our mothers, who have a tendency to point out how beautiful the size 8 clothes are—in a
carefully neutral tone. But then, fat is an ongoing issue between mothers and daughters, in a great
many ways.

L aurie D. T. Mann: While never a skinny kid, I did not get fat until I was in fourth grade.
That was the year my grandfather died, my best friend moved away, and I started to
realize how different and alone I felt. Being something of a chocoholic at an early age, I
attacked any candy in the house when I got home from school.

In retrospect, I was not all that fat in those days. But self-image can be strongly influ¬
enced by what people tell you, particularly when you are approaching adolescence. I felt enor¬
mous.

Back in the sixties and seventies, my mother was fat too. Her own obesity did not stop
her from nagging at my sister and me over our weight. “Why do you always buy chocolate chip
cookies and ice cream? If the food wasn’t in the house, I wouldn’t eat it,” I frequently com¬
plained.

“They’re for your brothers and your father,” she always responded. But my brothers
also went through their fat periods. Maybe it’s synthetic memory, but I don’t remember my
folks reminding them that they were fat the way they did my sister and me.

As is typical when you become a parent, I’ve tried to avoid making the mistakes with
my child that my parents made with me. We don’t have too much junk food in the house. My
daughter has always been hyperactive, so from an early age I tried to limit how much sugar
she ate. She is more willing to eat fresh fruits and vegetables than I was at her age. But hei
favorite foods are starches like macaroni and cheese, or candy.

One of the most important things we can do for her is to not make a big deal about ha
weight. Maybe she will get fat as she grows up. I hope we’ll support her if she chooses to due
and not nag her about her eating habits. Since she was in grade school, though, gills in i
 class have been aware oj weight. When she was in fourth grade, she was out for a day with the
stomach flu. When she went back to school the next day, she came back with the following
insight, “It’s not so bad to throw up. It makes you lose calories.”

I asked her who told her that. “A friend at school.” I explained that they were all
growing children and losing calories should not be foremost in their minds. But how do you
explain bulimic tendencies to a nine-year-old? More importantly, why do we live in a society
where young children think that throwing up is a good way to “lose calories”?

We must find a way to teach our children to love themselves, at all sizes, shapes,
colors, textures, and moods.

I read Laurie Manns ruminations about her daughter and I think of where that child
could be in five years, and of all the other ways we throw our children away, like worn-out toys,
because they don’t fit this year’s model of the perfect child.

But then, some children (bless them!) are impervious to being discarded.

Q ueen T’hisha: I was born in the San Francisco Bay Area. I found out I was a girl at age
eight. I found out I was African-American at age fourteen. I was told I was fat at age
twenty. I had been a professional dancer for four years. I had auditioned and gotten
accepted by a dance company, but was not allowed to perform because “they” said I was fat.
But I was so obviously talented they accepted me into the company. What a crock of shit.

Being fat only marginally impacted my life until I went to college and interacted with
the white majority. As I tried to assimilate, my naivete continued to turn the survival Rubik’s
Cube over and over. Racism and sexism as practiced in America included body hostilities. I
didn’t grow up with the belief that fat women were to be despised. The women in my family
were fat, smart, sexy, employed, wanted, married, and the rulers of their households.

I had plenty of romantic relationships with people raised outside this society, or who
didn’t adhere to its sexist standards of beauty. They affirmed my sanity and gave me a worldly
perspective, not one limited by white racist misogynist American culture. I’m tall, African-
Nature,fat, smart, and deserve all the things I want.

And that’s the best possible transition: from a teenage girl (fat or thin, but obsessed with
her weight); through a young woman fat or thin, but learning how to live with her body, whatever
size and shape it may be; to a woman who can look in the mirror and see herself—size, weight,
race, ability—and love what she sees. To look in the mirror and see yourself, all of yourself, and
to be pleased and satisfied. Should it be an impossible dream? Or is it something we all, each and
every one of us, deserve?
E lise Matthesen: What does this mean, these thoughts, these tears when 1 see the women
who are here before you on these pages? It means that I want to tell you, with all the
urgency I can summon, to look at these women. Look at all of them. Look again, and be
glad there is so much of them to look at, for these women know something very basic. Some¬
thing I had almost to die in order to learn:

We have a right to our woman selves. We have a right to take up space. We have a
right to stretch out, to be big, bold, to be “too much to handle. ” To challenge the rest of the world
to grow up, get on with it, and become big enough themselves to “handle” us.

How much room does a woman deserve to take up?

As much as she wants.

The answer is the same when the question is love.

Please join me in singing honor and praise to fat women, that we may come to a time
when no more of us need to starve ourselves to death for lack of having enough room, or love,
to be who we are.

Fat. Woman.

Look in the mirror. You can learn to love what you see.
 Whew! Women En Large: Images of Fat Nudes is a book! Every book is its own
journey, but this one has been longer, and more complex, than most. Most things have been easy;
one or two have been remarkably difficult. When 1 think about the forty-one finished photo¬
graphs (with my naked body one way or another in seven of them), about writing and editing
essays on the triple subjects of women, fat, and nudity, I frequently stop and wonder, “How did I
get here?” If anyone had told me ten years ago that I would become a nude model and a fat
activist, I would have known she was crazy. But here I am. So what happened?

In 1984 I didn’t know enough to pay attention to insults. I thought they were part of my
day, like getting up in the morning or cooking dinner. I noticed the egregious ones, the way I
notice when my periodically sore knee bothers me; I walk carefully for a day or two and the pain
goes away, until the next time. But I happened to complain about one particular insult to Laurie
Edison—we must have been talking just at the moment when I was the most upset.

Laurie and I are both involved in science fiction fandom, a large and inchoate social/pro¬
fessional/recreational system far too complicated to explain here. Laurie is a professional jeweler;
I am an editor, a writer, and a sometime bookseller. Both of us read science fiction for pleasure
and have done so for most of our lives. A prominent (fat) man in that community had written a
letter to a private-circulation magazine, explaining that he didn’t go to nudist camps “not because
I am afraid of getting an erection at an inappropriate time, but because of my terror of being
confronted by a three-hundred-pound naked woman with an appendectomy scar.” I thought he
was being cruel. I too believed that the woman he described would be ugly, by definition, but I
was hurt just the same. Just because we’re ugly is no reason to be mean to us, I thought.

“That’s awful!” Laurie said. “We have to do something about that.” Laurie and I hadn’t been
close friends for very long, and I didn’t yet know that when she says, “We have to do something,”
she means it. Before I knew it, she and I were organizing panel discussions at science fiction
conventions, with fat women from the science fiction community as fellow panelists.

We called the panels “Fat, Feminism and Fandom,” and we talked about fat oppression
and fat liberation, terms I had barely heard. People filled the rooms and they stayed and talked
and listened. Panels scheduled for an hour ran overtime and had to be moved into hallways and
vacant rooms. Writers talked about how they wrote about fat characters; readers talked about
how they responded. Everyone talked about their personal experiences—lots of fat women came
and talked, along with a surprising number of thin women and men of various sizes.

108
 Before we noticed it, the panels had turned into a movement. Some people thought we
were troublemakers and the panel was “just rationalization.” This was easy to say about the fat
panelists, including me, but hard to say about Laurie, who weighs about f20 pounds and has
nothing to rationalize. Some people came to scoff, but many more came to share their stories. We
began to learn just how much size, weight, and self-esteem affect the lives of most women and
many men, and how very few forums exist to discuss it, let alone to make changes. (Ten years ago,
that was a lot truer than it is now.) We discovered the wellspring that has kept this project going
for all these years: an astonishing range of people have something to add to the work of size
acceptance and fat celebration, and almost everyone adds it eagerly, grateful to be part of the
process.

Working with knowledgeable panelists, we had to study a lot to hold our own. We started
reading about the medical issues and the literature (what little there was) of the fat activist com¬
munity. I discovered Shadow on a Tightrope, edited by Lisa Schoenhelder and Barb Wieser (Aunt
Lute Books, 1983, recently reprinted), and it changed my life. Laurie and her daughters and I
went to the West Coast Womens Music Festival in the mid-1980s, and I discovered Fat Lip
Readers Theatre, another revelation. (I sat with Laurie’s younger daughter, then about ten; she
drank in the Fat Lip performance as if it was the milk and honey of the goddesses. I superimposed
my ten-year-old self on the ten-year-old sitting next to me, and some wounds I was sure I didn’t
have began to heal.)

Over the next several years, the panels continued and grew. Moments from them stick in
my memory:

A woman talking about how her high blood pressure “vanished” when she went to a
doctor who used an oversize cuff big enough to truly encircle her arm.

A man saying to his wife, “You say you’re starting to come to terms with your weight.
But how will you respond if our daughter grows up to be fat?”

A woman body-builder, saying, “People treat me like there’s something wrong with my
body; until I started listening to you all today, I thought it was me. Now I know it’s them. ’

We began to see visible changes in our community. Many science fiction fans wear cos¬
tumes to conventions; an acquaintance planned an elaborate masquerade presentation showcas¬
ing a Playboy-style figure, a stick-thin woman, a fat woman, and an older woman as contest
winners from various planets with different aesthetic standards. Women who had been to our
panels started dressing differently, moving differently, speaking differently.

1 learned a lot about noticing insults and not letting them wash over me, about appropri¬
ate anger and inappropriate internalized hatred, about how much I was teaching myself by help¬
ing other people learn. I thought I had turned the corner, and understood the issue. But I uuic
wasn’t finished.

Laurie is a visual artist, and she sees everything with an artist’s eyes. She also has ;
and penetrating a political consciousness as you could ever hope to learn from. We were a
about fat being okay, and about fat oppression being unacceptable, but not about beauty. Fat
women rarely talk about beauty; it’s the taboo subject because it’s the unreachable state. But
Laurie was looking at the panelists and the audience, analyzing what was missing, and seeing
unexplored artistic territory.

She invited me over to model for her, making jewelry. I took off my clothes for her and
listened to her murmur with pleasure as she worked. She transformed my body into a beautiful
piece of bronze jewelry, heavy and imposing, and sold a few copies. But it was inevitably expen¬
sive, and it didn’t really satisfy her artistic cravings or her fervor to do political work about body
image. “I have to do something about this,” she said. By then I knew enough to take her seriously.

She took photographs of a nude midsize woman. Those first photographs weren’t espe¬
cially successful, but Laurie had embarked on a new career. She brought her camera to my house
and I took my clothes off again. She took dozens of pictures while I moved self-consciously
around my living room, wondering what 1 was really getting into. When she showed me the
contact sheets, I didn’t like them very much. She developed the picture that became the cover of
this book, “Debbie with stripes.” (We have used it on almost all of our flyers and publicity mate¬
rials.) As I have said many times in the last few years, “1 never thought my reaction to public
distribution of a nude picture of me would be boredom.” But when I’m not tired of seeing that
picture over and over, I can see that it is a magnificent photograph. At that time, though, just
knowing that those pictures existed made me uncomfortable and tense.

Laurie took pictures of a woman whom I had always thought of as “beautiful for a fat
woman” about six months later. Then she went back to jewelry, 1 went back to bookselling and
editing, we kept doing panels, and that seemed to be that.

In the beginning of 1989, I came back from an extended stay on the East Coast to find
Laurie transformed into a dynamo. She had a vision of a book, a beautiful, trenchantly political,
affordable book that could reach a wide audience. We’re both lifelong readers; we think of every¬
thing in terms of books. “Sure,” I said, “why not?”

Laurie lined up more models, took some phenomenal pictures, and began to understand
the extraordinary expenses of professional photography. “We have to do something about this,”
she said. So we became fundraisers.

We didn’t know anything about fundraising, but we both knew how to learn. With the
help of expert advice, we started collecting a mailing list and learned how to write fundraising
letters. With the help of our dedicated supporters, we financed the photography for three years
entirely on grass-roots funding. Our connection with Shifting Focus, a nonprofit corporation
which helps artistic and educational endeavors, made contributions to the project tax-deductible.
We published a newsletter for contributors, printing a high-quality photocopy of a new photo¬
graph, a “Letter from the Artist” feature, relevant articles, and a lot of material by me, keeping
supporters aware of what was going on with Women En Large.
 And Laurie kept taking photographs. We had feared that models might be difficult to
find, but volunteers kept popping up out of the woodwork, sometimes more than Laurie could
manage to schedule. We began to concentrate on diversity: we were committed to having a book
for every fat woman to look at and find herself. We did not want women of color to see a book
about the beauty of fat white women, nor old women to see a book about the beauty of fat young
women. We wanted midsize and supersize women to find themselves. We knew how important
the politics were. What we didn’t know (or at least 1 didn’t) was how much we would learn and
how much the book would be enriched by the effort to include the whole spectrum.

I started writing text for the book and we’d include pieces in the newsletter. The text
changed form and conception many times. It didn’t really take shape until we solicited contribu¬
tions from models and other writers. When Elise Matthesen spoke so eloquently at the panel
about recovering from anorexia, I knew I had to have her voice in the book. (I didn’t know she
and I would develop a lifetime friendship, but that’s how this project has been.) I thought a lot
about topics that had to be covered: not only oppression and liberation, but children, sex, medi¬
cal issues, activity, men’s issues, clothes, jobs.

The next three years followed a fairly predictable pattern: photographs, fundraising, news¬
letters, new models, new text. We kept doing panels at conventions around the country, showing
the pictures, talking about the book. We acquired passionate Japanese supporters that way, and
eventually found ourselves written up in a cutting-edge Japanese magazine—although it took us
almost a year to get the article translated.

When we diversified from doing panels into doing slide shows, generally at feminist book¬
stores, we began to learn which pictures were universally popular and which ones were contro¬
versial or “edgy.” For example, the photo on page 29 shows a very pregnant woman (me), and it
shows only my torso: no head or legs. Some women find this picture dehumanizing, even when
the twenty others in the slide show all show women’s faces. So we paired that picture with the one
on page 31, which shows only Edith’s face and shoulders, not her whole body, and most people
seemed to relax.

We constantly asked our supporters for feedback and suggestions, and we used a lot of
them. Over and over, women asked for active pictures, which is one reason the book features
dancing, weightlifting, and stretching. The best suggestion we got is one I’m still sorry we couldn’t
realize: a group of fat women picnicking on the grass. Laurie did take a lot of pictures of us
picnicking on the beach, the same day that the picture on the rocks (page 89) was taken, but none
of them came out perfectly enough. Oh, well.

The final forty-one pictures include women ranging in age from twenty-two to fifty-six
when they were photographed. Over forty percent of the pictures feature women of color. We
always knew we wanted pictures of disabled women, but Laurie was (justifiably) very nervous
about coming too close to the “freak photography” tradition of pictures of the disabled, so she
consciously waited until she was extremely comfortable with a wide range of portrait photogra¬
phy before shooting three remarkable pictures for the final book: one of an extraordinarily powcrfu!
woman in a wheelchair (page 73); one of a woman with a diabetic fat body, very different than
other fat bodies (page 23); the third a hauntingly elegant shot of a woman with a mastectomy
(page 21).

Also, late in the process, we got official U.S. government approval (well, sort of). Laurie
approached a woman who works for a federal agency. Being a direct and honest person, who
didn’t want to get in trouble later, the potential model asked her boss for permission to pose
nude. The request traveled up through the layers of bureaucracy, and the answer traveled back
down: “We wish you wouldn’t, but we can’t stop you. Just don’t use your name and don’t name
the agency.” So she posed for a stunningly sexy picture, and I hope they like it when and if they
see it!

During the last year or so of photography, the project changed focus yet again. We began
looking for a publisher (the only painful part of the process). 1 know about looking for publish¬
ers; publishing is my business. It almost worked. Three different publishers approached us, and
one deal got to the handshake stage, but fell apart because the collective could not reach consen¬
sus. Another very receptive publisher backed out because their printer was unwilling to print the
nudes. (Usually, nudes are not a problem for printers, though sex pictures sometimes are. Since
our photographs are not sex pictures, we suspect the printer was reacting as much from fat-
phobia as from anything else.)

We talked on and off about self-publishing, but we faced two huge hurdles. First, publish¬
ing is a lot of work and we were already doing a lot of work. We wanted to find a publisher to take
some of the responsibility off our shoulders. Second, printing is very expensive, and printing
photography is even more expensive, and our grass-roots fundraising was not going to stretch
easily into the tens of thousands of dollars we would need. The discouraging search for a pub¬
lisher had two balancing compensations: we made some invaluably knowledgeable allies, and we
learned that our work is just as dangerous and threatening to people who don’t think fat women
are beautiful as we could ever hope. We like to think that means we did something right.

We continued doing slide shows and promotional events, which turned out to be enor¬
mously rewarding. Nothing prepared me for the sensation of hearing a roomful of people gasp
with pleasure when my picture appears on the screen. Before publication, we presented ten slide
shows in four states, featuring models talking about their experiences, wonderful songs by Cynthia
McQuillm (she’s hugging her guitar on page 39), and audience discussions. Each show provided
its unique boosts for the project; we’ve found investors for self-publishing, leads for magazine
articles, suggestions for venues for other slide shows, and all kinds of feedback and support.

When the publishing rejections were coming too frequently and one of us would get
disheartened, the other one would always say, “But the slide shows are so successful!” This book
was always the goal. But the fundraising, the panels, and the slide shows taught both of us that
Women En Large is not just a book, but a social change project that operates on several levels. We
learned that there’s a large and receptive audience eager to see and respond to this work.
 Fat activism needs to take this one big step: fat is not just okay, it is a way of being
beautiful. When an African-American model said at a slide show, “I decided I could model when
I saw a picture of another beautiful African-American woman at the first slide show I saw,” she
made the whole five years of work worthwhile. (She’s one of the models in the picture on page 71,
and in the group shot, page 89.) When a woman came to a slide show and said, “I heard you on
the radio; I’ve just left my husband and 1 promised myself I’d do something for me, so I came
here,” I wanted to cry, and hug her, and sell the book, produce the slide show, talk on the radio in
every city in the country, just so more women can learn that they are fat and beautiful, powerful
and strong, real and remarkable.

And we’ve learned that fat isn’t the whole story. From the first panel to the most recent
slide show, people of all genders, all races, all sizes, all shapes have come to us with body-image
doubts and triumphs, with stories of their fat brother, or parent, or child (not to mention fat
parents and thin children). Size acceptance truly is everyone’s issue; we hope Women En Large is
everyone’s book.

I’ve come a long way on this strange journey from one insult to a world of diverse beauty,
including my own—and I’ve never been prouder of any journey I’ve made. Laurie’s different
journey at my side, has been equally rewarding. Sometimes a journey of a thousand miles begins
with a friend who says, “We have to do something.”
 odels' Biographies
Chupoo Alafonte is a radio
producer and Director of Com¬
puter Services at KPFA, Pacifica
Radio in Berkeley. She has been
active in the fat community for
many years.
Since graduate studies in English
at Duke University, Bernadette
Bosky has taught English and
done freelance writing. Her
published work ranges from
Renaissance culture to science
fiction, from the language of
mysticism to self-esteem. Her
work on weight, eating, and body
image includes a personal essay
in Journeys to Self-Acceptance: Fat
Women Speak, and a study of
those themes in the fiction of
Stephen King, in The Dark
Descent: Essays Defining Stephen
King’s Horrorscape. Her science
fiction erotic novella “None of the
Above” features a sexy, fat
protagonist in a fat-positive future
(in Worlds of Women, from Circlet
Press; reprinted in the 1993 Best
American Erotica). She lives with
her two spouses, Kevin J.
Maroney and Arthur D. Hlavaty,
in the suburbs of New York City.
Dora Lee Dewey-McCracken
lives in the San Francisco Bay
Area with her partner, Kellan.
Dora hopes that by modeling she
will encourage other diabetic
women not to be ashamed of
114
their bodies and to know that
“our body type is unique and
beautiful.”
J. Kellan Dewey-McCracken
grew up in a military household,
learning early on that everything
must fit into the ranks, but also
expecting to be taken care of by
the outside world. It took her
years to learn that the civilian
world does not always play by the
same rules. She is now an active
scuba diver and lives with her
partner Dora in the San Francisco
Bay Area.
P. D. is an opera singer who also
works for the U.S. Government.
Bayla Fine is currently working
in the computer software field,
doing technical support. She has
previously been employed in a
wide spectrum of fields, her work
ranging from bank teller to
semiconductor process specialist.
Her interests include sewing,
cooking, and reading anything
that is handy.
Terry A. Garey is a writer, poet,
artist, and library assistant. In the
past she really cleaned up in
show business, mostly after The
Flying Karamazov Brothers got
done with the stage at the late
lamented Magic Cellar. Her goal
in life is to become an eccentric
old woman and she’s well on her
way. Peace. Recycle. Save the
whales and the gorillas. Remem¬
ber, the only shit worth taking is
the compostable kind.
Jasin is a poet on hiatus, who has
been spending the past two years
pushing the edge of her emo¬
tional envelope and seeking out
the monkey dance. She lives in
San Francisco with her musician-
lover, her artistic son, and her
theatrical daughter.
Lani Ka’ahumanu is a long-time
feminist organizer and activist, an
HIV educator, and a writer and
poet who co-edited Bi Any Other
Name: Bisexual People Speak Out
(Alyson 1991). She serves on the
Lesbian/Gay/Bisexual/Transgender
Advisory Committe to the San
Francisco Human Rights Com¬
mission, is one of the six national
co-coordinators of BiNET USA, and
is a member of Asian Pacifica
Sisters. Lani is the mother of two
grown children and enjoys
growing older and wiser.
At the age of 41, Cynthia
McQuillin is a singer-songwriter
with over 200 songs in publica¬
tion, who owns her own record¬
ing/publishing company and
jewelry business. (She is listed in
Who’s Who of the West and Women
in America). She and her partner
Jane Robinson comprise the
Comedy-Folk Singing duet
Mid-Life Crisis. Cynthia also
designs and makes jewelry, and
writes science fiction and fantasy
(stories appearing in several
anthologies and Marion Zimmer
Bradley’s Fantasy Magazine). She
and Jane have produced such
notable tapes as Bedlam Cats and
Mid-life Crisis.
April Miller lives according to
the maxim “If you’ve got it, flaunt
it!” An artist, actress, singer,
dancer, designer, and otherwise
extremely busy woman, she is a
member of Fat Lip Readers
Theatre, one of the editors of Fat
Girl magazine, and has had a
short story published in the
magazine Venus Infers. She works
in the law for money, and in the
arts for love.
Debbie Notkin is a professional
editor and writer with special
interests in science fiction,
multimedia, and political and
social commentary. As well as
being the author and one of the
models for Women En Large, she
has been a political activist for
twenty-five years and a fat activist
for ten years.
Edith M. Peck enjoys her job as a
molecular biologist working in
the biotech industry. She adores
her extremely energetic eight-
year-old son. Edith is a member
of Fat Lip Readers Theatre. She
savors the assorted aspects of her
full life.
Rhylorien n’a Rose has been a
professional public school teacher
for thirty-two years and a clinical
sexologist for eleven years. She
has been a non-traditional female
person since birth. When she was
married thirty-six years ago, no
one “gave her away.” She walked
down the aisle with her partner at
her side, in a formal church
wedding! That marriage lasted
until her husband’s death three
years ago. She is the mother of
four and the grandmother of one.
She is a polio and a cancer
survivor. In her spare time she
designs and produces unique
clothing for special needs.
Edna Ann Evangelista Rivera is
an American of Filipino descent.
She is currently pursuing a
bachelor’s degree in English with
a minor in biology at San Fran¬
cisco State University. She hopes
to teach English and biology
when her trials at the university
are over. Having started life as a
wallflower, she realized early on
that the wall continues to stand
when you walk away from it.
Now she is one of the big beauti¬
ful belles of the ball.
Jane Robinson is a retired
paleontologist with a Ph.D in
Biology and a thriving practice as
a massage therapist, as well as
being a part-time songwriter and
performer. She and her partner
Cynthia McQuillin perform and
record as Mid-Life Crisis.
Carol S. is a photographer by
training, a fat woman by genetics,
and a fat activist by necessity. A
member of Fat Lip Readers
Theatre, she can now scratch off
nude modeling from her list of
“Things To Do Before I Die.”
Linda Sterk is a housewife, a
mother of two, and a plant-lover.
She lives in the suburbs of the
San Francisco Bay Area.
Queen T’hisha is a published
author, writer, actor, reader,
counselor, proprietor for the
Financial Security Circle Leader
for the First Women’s Church/
Circle in the San Francisco Bay
Area, and a professional dancer.
She is currently seeking to
network people and organizations
with revenues and resources for
change and growth. Queen
T’hisha has lived in many com¬
munities and knows the impor¬
tance of having one’s own re¬
sources and land. One of the goals
of this network is to have a
permanent retreat for women to
live, work, study metaphysical/
shaman principles, educate, and
be themselves in safety and
security.
Ann West is a property manager,
businesswoman, S/M educator
(stressing safe practices, thorough
negotiation skills, and consensual
behavior), a health-care activist
involved with substance abuse
recovery and AIDS services, a
mother, a grandmother, and a
lover-of-life. She has experienced
incredible growth and positive
change through her own recovery
process and hopes that her
enhanced self-esteem and positive
attitude will encourage and
empower other larger women to
feel good about their bodies and
themselves.
Laurie D. T. Mann, Elise
Matthesen, “Dawn Roberts,”
Kate Schaefer, and Delia
Sherman are all writers who
share an interest in women and
body image issues.
 ^elected Resources
NAAFA (the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance) is an excellent resource for medical informa¬
tion, social-change energy, and other size acceptance information. NAAFA also has local chapters and
regional and national conventions for people who want to make connections with other people struggling
with these issues. They can be reached through their national office, RO. Box 188620, Sacramento, Califor¬
nia 95818; telephone 916-443-0303.

“Nothing to Lose” is a performance video featuring Fat Lip Readers’ Theatre. To order, send $22.00 plus
$3.00 shipping and handling to Fat Lip Readers Theatre, P.O. Box 29963, Oakland, California 94604.

Radiance: A Magazine for Large Women is a magazine focusing on the joys and glories of fat women.
Sample issues and subscriptions are available from RO. Box 30246, Oakland, California 94604; telephone
510-482-0680.

Shadow on a Tightrope edited by Lisa Schoenfielder and Barb Wieser is available from Aunt Lute Books,
RO. Box 410687, San Francisco, California 94114; telephone 415-826-1300. This is the book that launched
the fat liberation movement and is an essential resource for anyone interested in this topic.

“Shifting Focus,” which appears in this book, is one of the songs from This Heavy Heart by Mid-Life Crisis,
the singing partnership of Cynthia McQuillin and Jane Robinson. Available on compact disc as well as
cassette, This Heavy Heart is a collection of songs dealing with self-image, perceptions and relationships.
Many of the songs deal specifically with size issues. For more information about This Heavy Heart or a free
catalog, send an SASE to Unlikely Publications, RO. Box 8542, Berkeley California 94707.

1 To order additional copies of this book: Books in Focus, PO.

■in-
FOCUS Box 77005, San Francisco, CA 94107 or call 1-800-463-6285

116
 Women En Large is a coming-out in proud black and white. Freed of convention and easy with
themselves, the women here have turned around society’s discomfort with large bodies. “Here
are my big thighs,” they say, “my broad breasts, my rolling belly. Don’t like them? That’s your
problem, not mine. ”
Hollis L. Engley, Gannett News Service

Like painter Lucian Freud’s monumental nudes of performance artist Leigh Bowery... the nude
women in.. .Women En Large: Images of Fat Nudes, have a certain majesty, the unabashedness
of Henry Moore sculptures. They have escaped. And they’re enough to convince you that clothes,
not flesh, are what make fat people look diminished.
Tracy Young, Allure

Women En Large is an incredible collection of photographs that portray beautiful, strong,

courageous, powerful, elegant, handsome mid- to super-size women.... The focus on the beauty
and power of fat women provides an unforgettable and radical contrast to the ugly images of fat
women which pervade our lives. As if that weren’t enough, the text discusses fat oppression and
fat celebration, health and body size, fat and sexuality, activity and ability, fat and ethnicity
and more. This is our book if ever there was one.

Carol Seajay, Feminist Bookstore News

Women En Large is a powerful, positively subversive debut. Those who would prefer to keep
women ashamed, starved and preoccupied are sure to be horrified.

Susan Kano, author of Making Peace with Food

5 2 49 5 >

BOOKS
- in
$24.95 USA

9 ro-1085 495006'
FOCUS $33.95 Canada

ISBN 1-6654^5-00-5