Lynne Murray says: Social futurist Sara Richardson recently wrote a piece so profound that I felt I should have known her points all along. I lived through the change in attitudes she’s describing. Her conclusion surprised me because it’s so true and yet so invisible. Richardson explains: When people look back on the 20th century [...]

Laurie says: Debbie and I are off to Wiscon. We are taking our traditional week off from blogging. Debbie is one of the Guests of Honor, and is facing several days of fully deserved acclamation and celebration. I have eight photographs of Debbie from Women en Large in the front of the art show. And [...]

Debbie says: I wanted to share this message from Deb Burgard, a leading fat activist: Joslyn Smith and I wrote a letter to the APA about our concerns with their development panel for treatment guidelines for obesity, and have now created a petition for everyone (not just APA members) to sign.  Please help us ensure [...]

Laurie and Debbie say: We were struck by this post on Shakesville about how Melissa McEwen’s photograph has been treated on the web. Someone posted a fake OKCupid profile using my picture…, then linked to it on Reddit. The profile was, of course, full of fat jokes, but it was also deeply racist: The entire [...]

Debbie says: At first, I was just amused by the Tumblr page “Is This Feminist?”, which has the tagline “Because being a marginally acceptable feminist is a full-time job.” The concept is pictures of Women Doing Things, with short text explaining why, no matter how feminist–or harmless–the Things They Are Doing may seem, there’s always [...]

Laurie says: I was just at SFMOMA’s Photography of Mexico exhibit.  The work ranges from the 1920′s to the present. The initial work is by visitors Edward Weston and Tina Modotti, who both photographed and taught there and were instrumental in the 20th century Mexican photography movement.  The post revolutionary period also funded work that [...]

Lynne Murray says: For a long time I’ve been convinced that dieting is addictive behavior. This conclusion was reinforced by a throwaway reference in a recent New York Times Magazine article by Sam Anderson  on the addictive nature of digital games. A side note in the article brought home to me how the diet industry [...]

Laurie says: I was down in Santa Cruz last week visiting my daughter Cid as she gets ready for the tour of What We Do in Winter.  She created the dance during her Fulbright scholarship (school year 2009-10) when she was teaching at Tallinn University in Estonia.  She was back there in March both to [...]

Laurie and Debbie say: A connection of ours who does excellent community work, including in the field of fat activism, has asked us to summarize how we create community involvement (especially diversity of involvement) in our work. Because all of the work we did before Body Impolitic was done before the explosion of social media, [...]

Debbie says: For a show set in Miami in 1959, the director and casting director are discovering that women who haven’t had breast augmentations are hard to find. Producers discovered many women of South Florida have been surgically enhanced beyond anything natural to the late 1950s. “I’ve actually had better luck finding synchronized swimming groups [...]