Ep 85: Fat Liberation

Today’s episode is all about fat liberation with Max Airborne and Caleb Luna. Max is an organizer for collective liberation, rooted in fat liberation and disability justice. They co-founded Fat Rose and an organizer for the No Body Is Disposable campaign. Caleb is a performer-scholar-activist. They are a Ph.D. candidate in Performance Studies at UC Berkeley, where their research focuses on historicizing performances of eating and cultural representations and fat embodiment. Max and Caleb will talk about their lived experiences as fat people, the hate, violence, and oppression toward fat people and what fat politics and liberation is all about. Transcript [Google doc] [PDF] Related Links No Body Is Disposable, campaign against discrimination in triage “An Unacceptable Sacrifice: Fatphobia, Ableism, and the COVID-19 Pandemic,” Finn Gardiner, March 30, 2020, Disability Visibility Project. Fat Activist Vernacular, Charlotte Cooper, 2019. Fat Activism: A Radical Social Movement, Charlotte Cooper, 2016, HammerOn Press. Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia, Sabrina Strings, May 2019, NYU Press. About Caleb, a fat brown disabled femme, places their hands on their hips and looks at the camera defiantly. They are wearing blue plants, a blue bomber jacket with pink florals, and a black t-shirt that reads GORDA in a cursive script. Caleb Luna (they/them) is a performer-scholar-activist. They are a Ph.D. candidate in Performance Studies at UC Berkeley, where their research focuses on historicizing performances of eating and cultural representations and fat embodiment. They are interested in embodied difference as a generative resource toward fatter understandings of collective freedom. You can find their writing online at Black Girl Dangerous, Everyday Feminism and The Body Is Not An Apology. Their print publications include Nepantla: An Anthology Dedicated to Queer Poets of Color (2018); Canadian Art magazine (Winter 2018); and the forthcoming Queer Nightlife anthology. They also produce exclusive content at Patreon.com/CalebLuna. Twitter: @chairbreaker_ Max Airborne, a fat white person wearing blue jeans, an aqua t-shirt, a red knit beanie and round glasses, sits on a scooter in front of San Francisco ICE headquarters, speaking through a bullhorn. Resting on the front of their scooter is a large cardboard sign hand-painted with the words “No Body Is Disposable.” On their left someone is interpreting in ASL, and on their right someone is recording audio using a handheld device. Max Airborne is an organizer for collective liberation, rooted in fat liberation and disability justice. They co-founded Fat Rose: fatrose.org Instagram: @fatlibink Twitter: @fatroseaction Support Disability Media and Culture DONATE to the Disability Visibility Project® Credits Cheryl Green, Audio Producer and Text Transcript Alice Wong, Writer, Audio Producer, Host Lateef McLeod, Introduction Mike Mort, Artwork Theme Music (used with permission of artist) Song: “Hard Out Here for A Gimp” Album: NO BIG DEAL Artist: Wheelchair Sports Camp Music “Affairs of State” by Shaolin Dub. (Source: FreeMusicArchive.org. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 License.) Sounds “VOCODER countdown” by Jack_Master. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons 0 License. “8 Bit Beeping Computer Sounds” by sheepfilms. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons 0 License.