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

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

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

Find out more about Gem Kennedy and Queers & Co.

Podcast Artwork by Gemma D'Souza

Resources

In this episode, we mentioned the following resources:

• Dr. Charlotte Cooper’s website
• Fat Activism: A Radical Social Movement by Dr. Charlotte Cooper
• Fat Activist Vernacular by Dr. Charlotte Cooper. Also available here (some of the proceeds go towards supporting live art in the UK) or other main ebook retailers
• Fat and Proud: The Politics of Size. Available here
• The ebook launch of the Fat Activist Vernacular on 29th January 2020 at the Live Art Development Agency. Get your free ticket here
• No Lose
• Dr. Charlotte Cooper’s Twitter account
• Alice Coltrane’s Journey in Satchidananda is available here
• Fat Cabaret's Facebook page
• Photo of Charlotte on a motorcycle by Substantia Jones. Check out the Adipositivity Project

Full Transcription

Full Transcriptions of every episode are available here.

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

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

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

Charlotte: My absolute pleasure.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Charlotte: Oh, that's great to hear. I'm really excited to hear that there were bits that weren't familiar. I mean, there will be bits in it that aren't familiar because I've just made some of them up. I think of it as a glossary of terms that are familiar to many fat activists, possibly of my generation. And also it's got this kind of queer feminist sensibility to it as well. Some of them I just made up and they're just a product of my imagination so you won't have heard