Lynne Murray says: In August of 2010, I posted here about feminist artist Brenda Oelbaum’s work turning diet books into papier mâché models of the Venus of Willendorf. Now Brenda is bringing her vision to the larger stage with “a national ad campaign to take down $66 BILLION Diet Industry.” She calls her project “DUMP [...]

Lynne Murray says: I recently tried once again to read George Orwell’s 1984. As always, I got a few chapters in and had to stop because it was so depressing that I couldn’t live in Orwell’s evocation of mind-controlled totalitarian world for a minute longer. One thing I did get out of the experience was [...]

Lynne Murray says: Debbie pointed out this Washington Post blog by Delia Lloyd about “plus-sized” Swedish department store mannequins and the storm of interest in them: Let’s face it. Part of the mannequins’ viral appeal was no doubt the illusion that they came from Sweden, that Nordic bastion of pushing-the-envelope cultural fare that brought us [...]

Lynne Murray says: I’ve recently come across articles about the seemingly unrelated topics of engineering food to be addictive and conditioning teenagers to be lifelong dieters. The first common element that struck me was disconnecting the body’s natural relationship with food and turning it into a marketable commodity. Food consultant Howard Moskowitz, who earned his [...]

Lynne Murray says: The Greeks had a word for it–deus ex machina. Playwrights who got their characters into an unsolvable predicament would trundle out a piece of stage equipment, a crane or mekhane, to lower actors playing gods onto the stage. The god characters would then solve the mortals’ problems. Fat characters in fiction often [...]

Lynne Murray says: I heard a lot about the TV series, Huge, before I found out it was based on a book by the same name. I watched the  clip of the scene that opens the series where the incandescently subversive Nikki Blonsky turns a fat camp weigh-in into a rebellious (and hot) striptease act. [...]

Lesley A Hall is an archivist at the Wellcome Library, London and a historian who has published extensively on issues on gender, sexuality and bodies in the nineteenth and twentieth century UK. Her most recent publication is Sex, Gender and Social Change in Britain since 1880, 2nd edition (Palgrave, 2012). Check out her website and [...]

Lynne Murray says: We value children in America, but some more than others. Many, if not most, fat children learn very early that approval and sometimes even affection will be withheld unless and until they lose weight. Since no reliable method exists that will guarantee weight loss or prevent weight gain for most people, children–even [...]

Debbie says: Earlier this week, the San Francisco Chronicle ran a story about how people who’ve had weight-loss surgery (or “bariatric” surgery) are much more likely to show up in the hospital with acute liver failure due to acetaminophin poisoning. Acetaminophin, more commonly known as Tylenol in the U.S. and as paracetamol in Europe, is [...]

Lynne Murray says: Hot & Heavy: Fierce Fat Girls on Life, Love and Fashion (Seal Press, November 2012). had such an appealingly “fat, hot and in your face with it” cover that I knew I needed to read and review it. Heroes and stories teach us who we are and what we can do. In [...]