NOLOSE, Intersectional Politics, and the Urban/Rural Queer Split
The theme of this year's NOLOSE conference was "More Than Just Fat: The Intersection of All Our Identities." The conference's concentration on building a complex, coalitional movement recognizing the need to take a variety of identities and experiences into account-- for example, race, disability, trans identity, age, and the experiences of "superfat" people in addition to those who are simply plus-sized-- is, I think, crucial to building a truly effective movement. It is also a timely theme, given the explosion of conversations about race and racism in the fat blogosphere.
I think, however, that in order to build a movement that truly takes the intersection of all our identities into account, we need to be open to the element of surprise. That is to say, we need to be careful not to assume that we can know in advance which identities will intersect meaningfully with the issue(s) we choose to foreground. I think that this year's NOLOSE conference, with its focus on caucuses converging at a Town Hall meeting, potentially began some interesting conversations about the ways in which fatness and queerness intersected with certain other marginalized identities. But I also think that within that structure, there was little to no room for that element of surprise. There was very little room for marginalized identities and experiences whose importance was not determined in advance to make themselves known, and to ask the conference at large to take their experiences into account.
In my conversations with several conference attendees-- but most notably, my conversations with
Gini, we perceived two major splits that were scarcely, if at all, taken into account. One such split was the coastal/middle America split: conference workshops and attendees seemed to foreground certain fat activist happenings occuring on America's coasts (the Fat Girl Flea was a particular point of interest) as having special weight (no pun intended) for all fat activists, regardless of their geographical location. This is something that Gini and I-- and, I'm sure, others-- hope to remedy by planning and publicizing more Midwestern fat activist events. It is a work in progress.
But the other split-- and the one I wish to explore in more detail here-- is the urban/rural split: the differences of interest and approach between those queers living in cities, and those living in rural and small town settings. The workshops and conversations taking place at NOLOSE seemed, by and large, to be founded on the assumption that people interested in, and affected by, the ways in which fatness and queerness intersect predominantly hail from urban centers with flourishing queer communities, in which conversations on the politicization of fatness are at least beginning to take place. But this is not true. And in order to build a widely effective, truly intersectional movement, we have to consider geographical location as a valid axis of identity and experience. We need to build a movement that takes the experiences of rural queers into account, that gives them credit as activists and bearers of agency, and that, to some extent, decenters the city as the locus of activism.
Gini and I are planning to address these issues at the next conference with a workshop (tentative title: "Radical Rurals"). I'd like, however, to start some dialogue now, well in advance of next year's conference, about how to better address the needs of rural and small-town queer fatties. First, however, I'd like to begin with some disclaimers, and a bit of background about my own positioning vis-à-vis small town queer identity.
I want to begin by asserting that I don't claim to speak for all rural queers. I have a lot of privilege, and a lot of background, that isn't common to everyone in a small town setting. First of all, I'm college-educated. In fact, I currently live in a small-ish (but not that small) college town in Ohio-- a town I moved to specifically to attend graduate school. My volition in coming here, my participation in an academic community with at least a passing understanding of queer issues (and a small but nonetheless present constituency of fat studies scholars), and my understanding that, because I am here for school, my residence here is temporary, grant me certain kinds of material, financial, and discursive privilege that are not available to all rural queers.
I should also note that I am not from a small town. I was born in a city (Portland, Oregon, to be exact), and have lived in and around that city for most of my life. As a former resident of a city, I have had access to queer and fat-positive communities that not all queer fat folks living in small towns have been able to enjoy, and bring my urban experiences and views with me to my current small-town setting. I prefer urban spaces to smaller ones, and would like to move back to a city upon receiving my degree. I hope that the experience of being a queer fat person who has lived in small towns her whole life is something that Gini will speak to, as that has been her experience, and (unlike me) she seems to prefer smaller settings to larger ones.
I would also like to disclaim that I did not attend the Town Hall meeting on Sunday afternoon-- I only heard about it after the fact, in a phone conversation with Gini. But I'm going to claim my inability to attend that meeting as a function of certain kinds of privilege. Like many participants, I could not afford to stay that late on Sunday, as it is logistically difficult to travel from Northampton, Massachusetts to NW Ohio, and I had to be at work on Monday. I'm going to argue that those logistical difficulties in traveling to certain parts of the country, in a conference that always takes place on the East Coast, ultimately mean that the placement of the Town Hall meeting ensured that certain voices were privileged over others-- namely, the voices of those who live in East Coast urban centers, and/or those with the financial and institutional ability to skip work on Monday.
Given these parameters, I don't want to claim that I have covered all the ways in which rural queers are marginalized in the context of NOLOSE. But I hope that I can go some way toward beginning a conversation that, I think, is far past due.
The Framing of Intersectional Politics
As I said above, I am in favor of a conference about queer fat politics that attempts to take into account "the intersection of all our identities," providing a forum for much-needed conversations. As I reflect on the conference, however, I continue to feel uneasy about some of the ways in which intersectional politics were framed. Conversations with Gini and other conference attendees seem to reveal that one of the principal criticisms of the conference was that, while workshops and other events focused on foregrounding identities other than queerness and fatness, specific conversations about queerness and fatness and their intersection were all but absent. Indeed, I agree that there was an extent to which the connections between queerness and fatness were assumed, within the context of the conference, to be a "done deal," apparent and obvious to all attendees. Which is, of course, not the case, and we have to be careful not to make that assumption.
More specifically, though, my principal concern with the framing of intersectional politics at NOLOSE-- in the keynote speech, and in some of the workshops I attended-- was the assumption that these discussions about intersectional politics are taking place in the context of a movement that already exists. In other words, one of the conference's founding assumptions seemed to be that all attendees have equal access to an in-person movement where discussions about queerness and fat oppression are already taking place, and that our principal concern with intersectional politics is to inject a broader analysis into a conversation that is already taking place, everywhere.
As a queer fat woman in a small town, I do not live in a place where the intersection between queerness and fatness is a "done deal." In fact, I don't live in a place where queer and fat issues are separately taken into account. Again, as a graduate student, I have access to resources that not all small town residents enjoy, but I still wouldn't say that I belong to a queer "community" here so much as a group of queer friends-- and, because of queer alienation and invisibility in small towns, even that has taken months to cobble together. Here, I'm just beginning to hear the barest whisper of discussion about fat politics-- and again, that only because I have access to a campus.
In workshops, I heard quite a few people from urban settings note that NOLOSE was a safe space for them, because most of the time they felt surrounded by thinner people, and thus marginalized as fat people. I suppose it's true that fat bodies are more visible in my Midwestern small town. But I'd like to remind people that, just as being surrounded by women does not necessarily mean that one is in feminist space, living in an area with more fat bodies does not necessarily mean that one lives in a fat-positive environment. I have many fat friends, but quite a few of them are enrolled in Weight Watchers, and many others struggle in less formal ways with accepting their size. Consequently, the conversations I have with people face-to-face are still quite elementary: debunking the obesity epidemic, explaining Health At Every Size, attempting to demonstrate that fat acceptance is a valid social movement. I cannot afford to assume that queerness or fatness, let alone the intersection between the two, is something that does not need explanation.
This is not to say that I have no use for intersectional politics. In general, I think that the trajectory of most social justice movements is problematic and needs to change: you know, begin with a single-issue movement, universalize the experiences of the most privileged members of that movement, piss off a bunch of marginalized groups, and then attempt (or don't) to build a more intersectional approach once the already-biased base has already been formed. It would, I think, be really nice if, in my current environment, I could help to build queer and fat communities and movements that are intersectional from the get-go. But in order to do that, intersectional politics needs to be reframed as the founding basis for a movement, not something you work to achieve once certain structures are already in place. And that reframing, I assume, is something that would benefit all queer fat folk, not just the ones who don't have urban privilege.
Different Stakes, Different Strokes
I'd like to thank Glenn Marla for help on this next point: it was his offhand comment in the "More Than Just Fashion" workshop about rural settings that helped me solidify what was, until that point, a series of inarticulate misgivings into a full-fledged analysis. In that particular workshop, we discussed what
Cristy has called the "NOLOSE Fashion Olympics": the perceived pressure on the part of several conference attendees to dress in certain fashionable ways, possible issues of exclusion that issue from the pressure to dress up, and the meanings of fashion and exclusivity in a conference where a) sexuality and sexual desirability are foregrounded, and b) issues of race, class, gender, size, shape, age, and so on are always already present.
All but absent in this conversation, I think, is the particular effect the Fashion Olympics may have on rural conference attendees in particular. Foremost, of course, is the question of material access for fatties in small towns. Internet access may work to some extent to level out the playing field in terms of clothes shopping, but shipping costs, the logistics of having to return clothing that doesn't fit, technological savvy, and other factors may work to limit equal access in a small-town setting.
Throughout the course of the conference, both Gini and I heard some urban conference attendees display contempt for some of the major brick-and-mortar plus size clothing stores, such as Lane Bryant, Fashion Bug, and so on. I'm very much in favor of supporting independent vendors whenever possible, but the fact is that because I live in a small town, I'm basically thrilled whenever there's a store with clothes in my size that I can walk into. I'm lucky enough to live in a place with a Lane Bryant, Fashion Bug, and Torrid in relatively close proximity-- but even then, all three stores are in towns half an hour away, and because I don't own a car, I'm at the mercy of friends whose shopping moods and financial windfalls coincide with my own. Let's not forget that being able to shun the principal paths to plus-size fashion is, in and of itself, a privilege.
More important for me, I think conversations on the Fashion Olympics and NOLOSE sexual economies failed to take into account that, due to our differing geographical locations, attendees have differing emotional stakes in the conference. In particular, I am thinking about a comment during the "More Than Just Fashion" workshop asserting that conferences are perhaps more fun, and less stressful, if one does not attend with the expectation to participate in some sort of sexual economy, and/or if one does not attend with the expectation that NOLOSE will be the place where one is accepted. I think that kind of nonchalance is much easier when one lives in an urban setting, with a vibrant queer community and a significant fat-positive voice, where access to social acceptance and sexual currency is much easier to come by. But while, for some attendees, NOLOSE is a place where they can focus their energies and bring their experiences back to already-vibrant communities, for many rural attendees, NOLOSE is the only place where we can hope to depend on social and sexual acceptance. Many of us come to NOLOSE-- I certainly did-- with the knowledge that what community and connection we don't find at the conference, we will almost certainly not find at home. That automatically raises the stakes for us.
As such, when we talk about fashion and exclusion in a setting like NOLOSE, we need to take into account not just differences of material access for conference attendees, but also emotional access. We must also realize that small-town queers may not have access to the social connections enjoyed by urban queers, and as such, gaining entry to the social life of the conference may be more difficult-- a problem compounded by these increased emotional stakes.
* * * * * *
Those are my thoughts on the urban/rural split for the moment. As it has only been two days since the end of the conference, I don't have any firm conclusions or definite solutions yet. But I hope that this can be a starting point for a productive dialogue on how to include rural and small-town queers in NOLOSE, and in fat and queer politics more generally. I certainly welcome suggestions and comments on all of the above points, and would love to hear about the experiences of other small-town conference attendees.
I think, however, that in order to build a movement that truly takes the intersection of all our identities into account, we need to be open to the element of surprise. That is to say, we need to be careful not to assume that we can know in advance which identities will intersect meaningfully with the issue(s) we choose to foreground. I think that this year's NOLOSE conference, with its focus on caucuses converging at a Town Hall meeting, potentially began some interesting conversations about the ways in which fatness and queerness intersected with certain other marginalized identities. But I also think that within that structure, there was little to no room for that element of surprise. There was very little room for marginalized identities and experiences whose importance was not determined in advance to make themselves known, and to ask the conference at large to take their experiences into account.
In my conversations with several conference attendees-- but most notably, my conversations with
Gini, we perceived two major splits that were scarcely, if at all, taken into account. One such split was the coastal/middle America split: conference workshops and attendees seemed to foreground certain fat activist happenings occuring on America's coasts (the Fat Girl Flea was a particular point of interest) as having special weight (no pun intended) for all fat activists, regardless of their geographical location. This is something that Gini and I-- and, I'm sure, others-- hope to remedy by planning and publicizing more Midwestern fat activist events. It is a work in progress.
But the other split-- and the one I wish to explore in more detail here-- is the urban/rural split: the differences of interest and approach between those queers living in cities, and those living in rural and small town settings. The workshops and conversations taking place at NOLOSE seemed, by and large, to be founded on the assumption that people interested in, and affected by, the ways in which fatness and queerness intersect predominantly hail from urban centers with flourishing queer communities, in which conversations on the politicization of fatness are at least beginning to take place. But this is not true. And in order to build a widely effective, truly intersectional movement, we have to consider geographical location as a valid axis of identity and experience. We need to build a movement that takes the experiences of rural queers into account, that gives them credit as activists and bearers of agency, and that, to some extent, decenters the city as the locus of activism.
Gini and I are planning to address these issues at the next conference with a workshop (tentative title: "Radical Rurals"). I'd like, however, to start some dialogue now, well in advance of next year's conference, about how to better address the needs of rural and small-town queer fatties. First, however, I'd like to begin with some disclaimers, and a bit of background about my own positioning vis-à-vis small town queer identity.
I want to begin by asserting that I don't claim to speak for all rural queers. I have a lot of privilege, and a lot of background, that isn't common to everyone in a small town setting. First of all, I'm college-educated. In fact, I currently live in a small-ish (but not that small) college town in Ohio-- a town I moved to specifically to attend graduate school. My volition in coming here, my participation in an academic community with at least a passing understanding of queer issues (and a small but nonetheless present constituency of fat studies scholars), and my understanding that, because I am here for school, my residence here is temporary, grant me certain kinds of material, financial, and discursive privilege that are not available to all rural queers.
I should also note that I am not from a small town. I was born in a city (Portland, Oregon, to be exact), and have lived in and around that city for most of my life. As a former resident of a city, I have had access to queer and fat-positive communities that not all queer fat folks living in small towns have been able to enjoy, and bring my urban experiences and views with me to my current small-town setting. I prefer urban spaces to smaller ones, and would like to move back to a city upon receiving my degree. I hope that the experience of being a queer fat person who has lived in small towns her whole life is something that Gini will speak to, as that has been her experience, and (unlike me) she seems to prefer smaller settings to larger ones.
I would also like to disclaim that I did not attend the Town Hall meeting on Sunday afternoon-- I only heard about it after the fact, in a phone conversation with Gini. But I'm going to claim my inability to attend that meeting as a function of certain kinds of privilege. Like many participants, I could not afford to stay that late on Sunday, as it is logistically difficult to travel from Northampton, Massachusetts to NW Ohio, and I had to be at work on Monday. I'm going to argue that those logistical difficulties in traveling to certain parts of the country, in a conference that always takes place on the East Coast, ultimately mean that the placement of the Town Hall meeting ensured that certain voices were privileged over others-- namely, the voices of those who live in East Coast urban centers, and/or those with the financial and institutional ability to skip work on Monday.
Given these parameters, I don't want to claim that I have covered all the ways in which rural queers are marginalized in the context of NOLOSE. But I hope that I can go some way toward beginning a conversation that, I think, is far past due.
The Framing of Intersectional Politics
As I said above, I am in favor of a conference about queer fat politics that attempts to take into account "the intersection of all our identities," providing a forum for much-needed conversations. As I reflect on the conference, however, I continue to feel uneasy about some of the ways in which intersectional politics were framed. Conversations with Gini and other conference attendees seem to reveal that one of the principal criticisms of the conference was that, while workshops and other events focused on foregrounding identities other than queerness and fatness, specific conversations about queerness and fatness and their intersection were all but absent. Indeed, I agree that there was an extent to which the connections between queerness and fatness were assumed, within the context of the conference, to be a "done deal," apparent and obvious to all attendees. Which is, of course, not the case, and we have to be careful not to make that assumption.
More specifically, though, my principal concern with the framing of intersectional politics at NOLOSE-- in the keynote speech, and in some of the workshops I attended-- was the assumption that these discussions about intersectional politics are taking place in the context of a movement that already exists. In other words, one of the conference's founding assumptions seemed to be that all attendees have equal access to an in-person movement where discussions about queerness and fat oppression are already taking place, and that our principal concern with intersectional politics is to inject a broader analysis into a conversation that is already taking place, everywhere.
As a queer fat woman in a small town, I do not live in a place where the intersection between queerness and fatness is a "done deal." In fact, I don't live in a place where queer and fat issues are separately taken into account. Again, as a graduate student, I have access to resources that not all small town residents enjoy, but I still wouldn't say that I belong to a queer "community" here so much as a group of queer friends-- and, because of queer alienation and invisibility in small towns, even that has taken months to cobble together. Here, I'm just beginning to hear the barest whisper of discussion about fat politics-- and again, that only because I have access to a campus.
In workshops, I heard quite a few people from urban settings note that NOLOSE was a safe space for them, because most of the time they felt surrounded by thinner people, and thus marginalized as fat people. I suppose it's true that fat bodies are more visible in my Midwestern small town. But I'd like to remind people that, just as being surrounded by women does not necessarily mean that one is in feminist space, living in an area with more fat bodies does not necessarily mean that one lives in a fat-positive environment. I have many fat friends, but quite a few of them are enrolled in Weight Watchers, and many others struggle in less formal ways with accepting their size. Consequently, the conversations I have with people face-to-face are still quite elementary: debunking the obesity epidemic, explaining Health At Every Size, attempting to demonstrate that fat acceptance is a valid social movement. I cannot afford to assume that queerness or fatness, let alone the intersection between the two, is something that does not need explanation.
This is not to say that I have no use for intersectional politics. In general, I think that the trajectory of most social justice movements is problematic and needs to change: you know, begin with a single-issue movement, universalize the experiences of the most privileged members of that movement, piss off a bunch of marginalized groups, and then attempt (or don't) to build a more intersectional approach once the already-biased base has already been formed. It would, I think, be really nice if, in my current environment, I could help to build queer and fat communities and movements that are intersectional from the get-go. But in order to do that, intersectional politics needs to be reframed as the founding basis for a movement, not something you work to achieve once certain structures are already in place. And that reframing, I assume, is something that would benefit all queer fat folk, not just the ones who don't have urban privilege.
Different Stakes, Different Strokes
I'd like to thank Glenn Marla for help on this next point: it was his offhand comment in the "More Than Just Fashion" workshop about rural settings that helped me solidify what was, until that point, a series of inarticulate misgivings into a full-fledged analysis. In that particular workshop, we discussed what
Cristy has called the "NOLOSE Fashion Olympics": the perceived pressure on the part of several conference attendees to dress in certain fashionable ways, possible issues of exclusion that issue from the pressure to dress up, and the meanings of fashion and exclusivity in a conference where a) sexuality and sexual desirability are foregrounded, and b) issues of race, class, gender, size, shape, age, and so on are always already present.
All but absent in this conversation, I think, is the particular effect the Fashion Olympics may have on rural conference attendees in particular. Foremost, of course, is the question of material access for fatties in small towns. Internet access may work to some extent to level out the playing field in terms of clothes shopping, but shipping costs, the logistics of having to return clothing that doesn't fit, technological savvy, and other factors may work to limit equal access in a small-town setting.
Throughout the course of the conference, both Gini and I heard some urban conference attendees display contempt for some of the major brick-and-mortar plus size clothing stores, such as Lane Bryant, Fashion Bug, and so on. I'm very much in favor of supporting independent vendors whenever possible, but the fact is that because I live in a small town, I'm basically thrilled whenever there's a store with clothes in my size that I can walk into. I'm lucky enough to live in a place with a Lane Bryant, Fashion Bug, and Torrid in relatively close proximity-- but even then, all three stores are in towns half an hour away, and because I don't own a car, I'm at the mercy of friends whose shopping moods and financial windfalls coincide with my own. Let's not forget that being able to shun the principal paths to plus-size fashion is, in and of itself, a privilege.
More important for me, I think conversations on the Fashion Olympics and NOLOSE sexual economies failed to take into account that, due to our differing geographical locations, attendees have differing emotional stakes in the conference. In particular, I am thinking about a comment during the "More Than Just Fashion" workshop asserting that conferences are perhaps more fun, and less stressful, if one does not attend with the expectation to participate in some sort of sexual economy, and/or if one does not attend with the expectation that NOLOSE will be the place where one is accepted. I think that kind of nonchalance is much easier when one lives in an urban setting, with a vibrant queer community and a significant fat-positive voice, where access to social acceptance and sexual currency is much easier to come by. But while, for some attendees, NOLOSE is a place where they can focus their energies and bring their experiences back to already-vibrant communities, for many rural attendees, NOLOSE is the only place where we can hope to depend on social and sexual acceptance. Many of us come to NOLOSE-- I certainly did-- with the knowledge that what community and connection we don't find at the conference, we will almost certainly not find at home. That automatically raises the stakes for us.
As such, when we talk about fashion and exclusion in a setting like NOLOSE, we need to take into account not just differences of material access for conference attendees, but also emotional access. We must also realize that small-town queers may not have access to the social connections enjoyed by urban queers, and as such, gaining entry to the social life of the conference may be more difficult-- a problem compounded by these increased emotional stakes.
* * * * * *
Those are my thoughts on the urban/rural split for the moment. As it has only been two days since the end of the conference, I don't have any firm conclusions or definite solutions yet. But I hope that this can be a starting point for a productive dialogue on how to include rural and small-town queers in NOLOSE, and in fat and queer politics more generally. I certainly welcome suggestions and comments on all of the above points, and would love to hear about the experiences of other small-town conference attendees.