Charlotte Cooper

This is how it started
I've been fat all my life and went through the usual experiences of dieting and body shame from childhood. These petered out by my early twenties because, as a teenager in the late 80s, I started getting interested in fat as an identity. I was very lucky in that my early explorations (reading Shadow on a Tightrope!) led to building and finding fat community, doing academic research into fat liberation in the early 1990s, and publishing a book, Fat and Proud: the Politics of Size, in 1998. Amidst all that were countless conversations with friends and people I was starting to meet online, and lots of small-scale publishing around fat in zines such as Fat GiRL and GirlFrenzy, and some academic publishing too.

Then this is what happened
I got severely burned out after my book was published, and put fat stuff aside for a bit. But the thing is that when you write a book people tend to read it, so during this down-time I was still fielding questions and comments from people who wanted to talk about fat. Of course I was still fat, that was unlikely to change, and my social networks include many fat activists, so fat reality was and is my daily existence. Slowly, I got back into the life and started doing work around fat again. I have been amazingly supported in this by fat activists in the US, especially nolose, who invited me to keynote the conference in 2005.

Here's what's been going on more recently
- I've been lecturing on fat activist history and culture in universities in the UK and Canada.
- I trained as a counsellor and am in the process of setting up a private practice that draws on Health At Every Size, and developing training around this approach.
- I kept publishing smaller-scale stuff, in zines and online, and kept doing odd bits of academic publishing.
- I started a fat queer girl gang.
- I won a scholarship to do a PhD around fat, healthcare and discrimination at the University of Limerick in West Ireland, where I am now spending a lot of time.

Want to know more?
Here's a bunch of links to my stuff:
Obesity Timebomb my fat blog.
CharlotteCooper.net - Fat the fat section on my website, an archive of older stuff.
Chubstergang.com badass bitches!
I also post on fatstudiesuk and fatstudies from time to time.

My activism focus right now
- More lecturing and publishing
- Health at Every Size, especially relating to counselling
- Exploring and documenting fat activism history, fat culture
- Witnessing obesity stakeholders, by whom I mean people, health and government institutions that promote fat hatred and are invested in "the obesity epidemic"
- Integrating fat and peace activism
- Networking around fat activist perspectives outside the US
- Making and reading fat zines
- Fat queers, fat punks, fat freaks and fat outlaws, as ever!