Biography

My name is Carlie Pendleton and I am a first year MA student in Queer History at Goldsmiths. My research interests are centred around the intersections of fat activism and queer activism in modern Britain, constructions of fatness and queerness in both the early modern and modern periods, and the ways in which fat queers queer identities.  

Abstract

Where are the fat queers? This is something I’ve wondered time and again both in general as a fat queer person and more specifically as a historian. How doubly pleased I was to then discover the National Fat Women’s Conference held in London by the London Fat Women’s Group on March 18, 1989. Founded on principles of radical lesbian feminism, the LFWG represented the epicentre of fat, queer political activism in London in the 1980s-early 1990s. Born out of the necessity to combat fat oppression within both lesbian and heterosexual feminist spaces, the National Fat Women’s Conference represents the apotheosis of fat activism in 20th century Britain. Furthermore the workshops offered by the conference, specifically those for fat lesbians, demonstrate the interplay between fat and queer identities during the event. And yet the conference is at best an obscure footnote in modern feminist history. Why?  

Unlike other feminist intersections, fat is still not taken seriously as a category of analysis due to both its characterization as mutable, and the racist, colonialist underpinnings of fatphobia that persist in western cultures. As a result, there is a serious dearth of scholarship on the history of fat activism and the many forms it took during the 20th century. Fat activism does not have the historical consciousness that other queer and feminist movements do, making it that much more difficult for present-day scholars and activists to dismantle the mechanics of oppression that afflict fat people on a systemic level. I argue that in order to answer these questions, to solve these problems, and to recover these fat histories, a queer approach is necessary.  

Reading List

Carlie has provided us with an extensive list of suggested reading so feel free to browse at your leisure. These texts are not mandatory reading for the talk.

Click here for the reading list.