Sunday links, 6/15/14

Maple bacon donut = HEAVEN.

Fa(t)shion
-Leah is organizing a challenge called Outfit August, which is like Fatshion February but focused on re-using and re-purposing items you already have. I will be participating, although I’m not sure yet to what extent–it depends on how much time/energy I have, and how much the hot muggy August weather takes away any desire I have to be fashionable.
–Scarlett & Jo uses bloggers ad models for their new collection, and other brands should probably follow suit.
-Good news: Wet Seal will be extending its plus size line to a bunch of stores this summer, including two in the Boston area.
-Re/Dress is now carrying exclusive items from Chubby Cartwheels, including two pastel lace skirts that I’m in love with.
-This fat babe sweatshirt is so cute. And would go really well with either of the aforementioned lace skirts!
-Georgina of Cupcake’s Clothes is selling hand-made clothes. Huzzah!
–This high schooler turned her prom dress into a work of art.

Fat Acceptance
–I’m cute, fat, and living.
–Can we please stop body-shaming ourselves and each other as a form of female bonding?
-A comic about dealing with street sizeism.
–Seriously, weight loss doesn’t work.
–Why isn’t obesity research better known?
-Help fathlete Kelly Leo Gneiting swim the Anacapa Channel.

Climate and Sustainability
–Welcome to West Port Arthur, Texas, ground zero in the fight for climate justice.
-Two great responses to Ezra Klein’s privileged pessimism on climate change: Three reasons you shouldn’t lose hope on climate change and Why it’s still not “game over” for global warming.
–A new environmentalism for an unfractured future.
–Cowboy and Indian Alliance plant sacred Ponca corn in the path of the Keystone XL pipeline.
–Protesting coal with cupcakes = my kind of activism.
–Yes, black people talk about climate change.
–Rite of passage: a father and son explore a changing landscape.
–Kid play zones in parks: “Leave no trace” inhibits fun and bonding with nature.
–The real triumph of the city will be seen in Buffalo.

How We Live: A Journey Towards A Just Transition from Kontent Films on Vimeo.

Wednesday Fa(t)shion Inspirations, 6/11/14

Cid Style File

Femme Queen

OOTD: Unicorns and playing dress-up with puppies

I wore this to a clothing swap/picnic that I co-hosted with a friend this weekend. One of the best parts of the event: her boyfriend had to dog-sit for his mom’s dogs at the last minute, so he brought them along. I particularly bonded with the yellow lab, who reminded me so much of the lab I grew up with…and I had a bit too much fun dressing her up. That’s what dogs are for, right? 😉

Top: Lane Bryant via clothing swap, skirt:  two small skirts from the Buffalo Exchange sewn together by a friend, vest: Torrid via the Big Thrifty, fascinator: a vendor whose name I forget at a local craft fair, earrings (made out of plastic bath mats!): The Blue Cloud Gallery, necklace: Fancy Lady Industries, spiked bracelet: So Good, studded wristband: PacSun

Holly looked like a rockstar in my sunglasses. 🙂

Ethical shopping isn’t always easy–or even possible–for everyone.

I keep reading articles about how ethical clothes-shopping is so easy, and I’m getting pretty sick of them. They’re well-intentioned, but erase the amount of privilege it takes to be able to find ethically-made clothes in your size and price range. Sure, shopping ethically can be easy–if you have a lot of money, a normatively-sized body, and the time/energy to research manufacturers’ practices, which are often not particularly transparent. Even thrifting, which is often held up an option that has a low impact on both workers and the environment, is fraught with ethical dilemmas, from the Salvation Army’s anti-gay policies to Goodwill’s exploitation of disabled workers to the surplus donations that are exported to developing countries, where they put small local producers out of business and destroy the markets for indigenous, hand-crafted textiles.

It’s pretty painfully ironic that if you’re already marginalized, say by being fat and/or poor, that makes it harder to make consumer choices that don’t harm others. Being able to vote with your wallet for a better world takes a lot of privilege–which is why, even though I support ethical shopping, I consider it neither a requirement for activists nor particularly likely to lead to systemic change, as it doesn’t truly challenge existing power structures. If taken to extremes, it can even become a distraction from the kinds of collective action that can actually lead to change.

This all reminds of me a post Sal wrote a while back in which she explained the market realities behind why it’s so hard to find clothes that fit more than one or two of the following consumer expectations: low price, quality construction, available in a variety of sizes, ethical manufacturing processes, and made locally. I appreciate her explanations, but personally, I’m more interested in changing the system. If, under capitalism, clothing made without brutal treatment of workers is a niche market? Then maybe capitalism is the problem. If, under capitalism, clothing that fits the majority of people is a niche market? Again, maybe capitalism is the problem.

Love, dirt, being of use, and why I wish “intuitive working” were possible

My friend Bethany recently wrote a beautiful meditation on transitions, rituals, and love. She argues that, contrary to our mainstream cultural narratives, graduation is not the only time when we can embark on new journeys and adventures, nor is marriage the only valid expression of love.

To illustrate of the many ways that people can express their love for each other and the world, she describes her current job on a farm:

Farming is teaching me more about patience and cycles and transitions than anything I may have ever done before. I see, almost daily, how the labor of my body—led by the love in my heart for the world and my place therein—interacts with the plants in the ground. On Friday, I pounded tomato stakes, hoed potatoes, weeded chard, broccoli and kale, helped uncover beds and beds of cabbage, ate the fruits of last year’s harvest for lunch with the farm team, hoed squash and cucumbers and basil, hand weeded dill, listened to the plans made for the coming weeks, and cleaned the tools at the end of the day.

When I read this, I could barely keep from crying.

This is the work I want, achingly, to be doing.

I know my body feels best when I’m moving around. I know my mind feels best when I’m engaged in meaningful work, work with tangible results. I want, as Marge Piercy puts it (in the title of a poem that I saw on the subway on my way to my office job), to be of use:

I want to be with people who submerge
in the task, who go into the fields to harvest
and work in a row and pass the bags along,
who are not parlor generals and field deserters
but move in a common rhythm
when the food must come in or the fire be put out.

The work of the world is common as mud.
Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.
But the thing worth doing well done
has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.

OOTD: 100% Big Thrifty goodness

This year’s Big Thrifty was awesome. And I scored some really, really good finds, including all three pieces of this outfit:

Vest: Torrid, tank top: Cacique, and skirt: Dots, all via the Big Thrifty; shoes: Clarks, headband: Alice & Sara, earrings and necklace: Domino Dollhouse,  studded wristband: PacSun, zipper cuff: a store that was closing on Newbury Street years ago, rings: ancient

The vest was an especially exciting find, both because it’s SO ME and because it was new with tags!

Zipped up, it could even work on its own as a crop top.

Sunday links, 6/8/14 (with pictures from recent adventures around Boston)

Fa(t)shion
-The summer issue of Skorch is out, and it’s full of amazingness as always.
-Melissa McCarthy will be creating her own clothing line. It sucks that she had to do this because she had so few options, but I am excited for her line.
-A DIY floral fascinator tutorial, parts one and two.
-Another DIY tutorial that I need to try soon: metallic sparkly flower sunglasses.
-Tori writes about her experience with glasses-shopping and how awesome it was to feel included, in contrast to her experiences with shopping for clothes.
-Sarah rounds up little white dresses, and Kellie rounds up kimono jackets.
–Bow ties for humans who don’t want to wear actual bow ties.
–Confession: I still have occasional body image issues that are exacerbated by fatshion blogs.
-Cassie writes about how she supports and promotes small, indie, women-owned cosmetics companies as a form of feminist solidarity.
-I love love love most of these chunky platform shoes, especially the Hello Kitty, mermaid, and star ones, and so wish they came in wide sizes.

Fat Acceptance
–CBC: obesity research confirms long-term weight loss almost impossible.
-A great cartoon from Stacy Bias about 12 Good Fatty archetypes.
-Ragen takes down five really bad arguments against fat acceptance and HAES.
–On rudeness, “looking unhealthy,” and being called a fatass at the beach. Through one of the comments, I found out about Fat Witch brownies, which I will definitely have to check out next time I’m in NYC!
-I can’t wait to read SparkleFat, a book of poems by Melissa May.
–Obesity is not the opposite of CrossFit.
-Rachele has changed the name and focus of her blog to Rad Fat Vegan, and started a corresponding YouTube channel with cooking tutorials.
-This scale-smashing workshop during Wellness Week at Syracuse University sounds awesome.
–we braved the cold and possible arrest to get this incredible body-positive image. Love it!
–NHS–just give fat people a pony already. Seriously, where’s my pony? I would also take a golden retriever, labrador, or Samoyed puppy.
–SWAGGA is unassimilated fatness.

A great fat-pos poem:

Fighting fat-phobia matters. For so many reasons other than body image.

Lately, it seems like fat acceptance has been slowly but surely making headway into our larger cultural consciousness. It’s been about 7 or 8 years since I first became aware of the movement, and I’ve seen a sea change in the general awareness of the fact that fat isn’t a bad thing, that bodies come in all shapes and sizes and they all deserve respect.

But as the messages of FA have become more popular, they’ve also been diluted. So, so much of the cultural discourse about fat bodies focuses on body image: on the personal, interior journeys of fat people (mostly women) to accept themselves.

I’m not denying that body image is important. Accepting one’s body can be life-changing in so many ways, and everyone deserves the chance to begin that journey. Everyone deserves to know that their body is ok just how it is. Developing a good relationship with one’s body–or at least a detente in the war against it–can be an important step in developing the firm emotional grounding needed for further activism.

But body image should be one of many things we work on, not the be-all-and-end-all of fighting fat-phobia. Fat-phobia matters not just because it leads many people to hate, starve, and become alienated from their bodies, but because it enforces structural discrimination that affects fat people regardless of whether they love their bodies.

There are countless ways that this discrimination plays out: everything from charging fat people extra for plane tickets, to a lack of availability of clothing in plus sizes, to prejudice in health care that often has dire consequences. One that I find particularly terrifying, as a fat person partnered with another fat person who might someday have fat children, is the way that governments police parents of fat kids.

I just read an article about a couple in the UK who were arrested on suspicion of child neglect because their 11-year old son weighs 15 stone (210 lb) at 5’1″. This isn’t the first time I’ve read about something like this (caution: not all links are from fat-pos sites, read at your own risk), and it makes me so angry I don’t even have words.

Because of fat hatred, parents can have their children taken away from them. I wish I had words for how fucked-up this is, but all I have right now is a strong urge to scream.

This is one of the many, many reasons why I fight. I want to live in a world where no one has to worry about losing their children for any reason other then actual abuse or neglect. I want to live in a world where fatness is seen not as evidence of bad parenting, but as a natural variation in body shapes (and in some cases, a symptom of underlying medical problems, which are also not the parents’ fault).  I want to live in a world where no one faces discrimination or policing for their body size or their children’s body size.

I will keep shouting from the (virtual) rooftops: fat-phobia has real-life consequences. It harms people in ways that go far beyond body image, and therefore our conversations need to go far beyond body image.

Fat acceptance, fat activism, fat justice–whatever you want to call this movement–isn’t just about body love. It’s about breaking down structures that harm and kill fat people. It’s about working toward a fair and just world for people of all body sizes. Are you in?

OOTD: ModCloth fail

I had to return this dress because it didn’t fit, but I took pictures anyway because I loved it so much. It was one of the many dresses I bought online while trying to find something for my cousin’s recent wedding. (I ended up wearing this dress, which I’ll post pictures of soon!)

ModCloth’s sizing is well-known for being inconsistent, so I ordered it in both a 22 and 24, and figured I’d return whichever one didn’t fit. Sadly, even the 24 was too small–and 24 is the biggest size available, which makes me go ARRRGHH. I hate how fancy dresses tend to run small, which means that even though I wear a 20 or 22 in most clothing, I find myself sized out of a lot of fancy dresses that go up to 24. Damnit, all fat people deserve floofy tulle dresses (if they want them–and if not, they deserve awesome non-floofy dresses, kilts, suits, and/or tuxes. I love the woman-in-a-tux look a la Janelle Monae, and I want it to be available to fat women, even though I probably wouldn’t wear it myself for Pants Are Not Comfortable On Me reasons).

Dress: ModCloth, jewelry: So Good, headband: Crown & Glory

Two more downsides of this dress: it itched like hell, and it didn’t cover my bra. If I had a bra that was the same color as the dress, it would blend in perfectly fine; but unfortunately, I don’t (and got the dress so last-minute that I wouldn’t have had time to look for a new bra bra before the wedding). But I took pictures anyway, with the bra I happened to be wearing, again because this dress was so beautiful it just needed to be documented.

I so need more floaty tulle dresses with gold floral embroidery in my life.

Dear ModCloth, please get your sizing shit together, make all dresses in a much larger range of sizes, add linings so that bras don’t show, and use non-incredibly-itchy materials. Love, Laura

Obesity Apocalypse: the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard, and also a great band name

This is what the Obesity Apocalypse looks like. Pretty menacing, huh?

I just came across a post by closetpuritan pointing to an article in which the author, in all apparent seriousness, describes the existence of fat people as “the obesity apocalypse.”

When I read shit like this, I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. Or both. On one hand, it hurts that there are people out there–published authors, no less–who see the existence of bodies like mine as something akin to a zombie takeover or nuclear winter. On the other hand, it’s too ridiculous not to laugh at. It illustrates just how absurd anti-”obesity” rhetoric truly is.

And it would make a really, really great band name. I can picture it now: a riot grrl-esque group of fierce fatties, with reclaimed epithets like “fat bitch” scrawled across their exposed stomachs in lipstick. They wear metallic booty shorts and, like Beth Ditto, often perform in nothing but their undies and bras. They rock hard, take no shit, and inspire legions of young fat girls to revolt.