By Tigress Osborn and Team QWOCMAP

When the Queer Women of Color Media Arts Project (QWOCMAP) reached out to NAAFA to invite us to become one of their community partners in support of their annual film festival, we were excited to show our support. As you’ve hopefully seen in our own programming for the past few years, we’re working hard to create lots of opportunities for fat people to engage in intersectional learning that spans the wide diversity of who fat people are. Part of that work includes creating lasting relationships with other orgs who we can share with, support, and learn from as we all work together towards liberation for everyone. QWOCMAP has been intersectional and social justice oriented from their inception in 2000. Their mission is to use film “to shatter stereotypes and bias, reveal the lived truth of inequality, and build community around art and activism.” This aligns so clearly with our mission and our vision of a world in which all fat people are free, celebrated, and liberated from every form of oppression. 

QWOCMAP’s Queer Women of Color Film Festival, their signature event, is hosted this weekend in San Francisco (June 10-12). The festival is free to attend (registration required) and there is fat-friendly and accessible seating available.  Be sure to check out the COVID safety procedures if you are planning to attend in person. The festival will also have an encore virtual screening. Join QWOCMAP’s mailing list for more info. NAAFA is a co-sponsor of Saturday night’s Centerpiece Screening, Hearts Aflutter. Hearts Aflutter features several short films, including fat protagonists on screen and fat filmmakers behind the camera. 

Whether you participate in the film festival in person, online, or not at all, we hope you’ll join us in supporting this organization’s on-going work throughout the year. With QWOCMAP’s permission, we’re sharing their Community Solidarity Statement about fat people. You can read their other statements of solidarity and much more at qwocmap.org. 

“Fat Bodies Are Fabulous” by QWOCMAP 

Fat bodies deserve respect as they are.

QWOCMAP strives to end body policing based on race, ethnicity, gender presentation, ability, and size. We encourage our accomplices in justice to accept and respect the natural diversity of body types, shapes, and sizes. We encourage us all to find joy in our bodies in the ways that we can, to increase our vitality.

We refuse to engage in the body shaming of fat people.

Sizism and fatphobia take a toll on our wellbeing, and our mental and physical health, because they cause people to become alienated from their own bodies through both hatred and the various methods through which people seek to control or shape their bodies. They have resulted in oppression, self-hatred, and preoccupation with food, our bodies, and the bodies of others. It means people of all different sizes are not at peace with their bodies, and that fat people bear the brunt of this collective unhappiness through specific size oppression.

There is a distinction between the ways that fat phobia affects the body, the structural oppression that reinforces, and is reinforced by, sizism and fatphobia, and the personal journey toward self-acceptance experienced by the many people affected by sizism and fatphobia. They affect fat people and everyone else, whether they love their bodies or not. The effects can be due to oppression related to discrimination in employment, education, and healthcare that have dire and life-threatening consequences. We do not accept the medicalization or pathologization of different kinds of bodies based on stereotypes and oppression, especially those found in science. We believe that all bodies can be healthy at every size (HAES[®]). We focus on the overall well-being of our community and know that good health is achieved independent of size. We also know that health is not a measure for worth. That fat and disabled people are worthy of regard and respect.

We see that fatphobia takes an economic toll in extra costs that are incurred from clothes that cost far more or are simply unavailable; or the extra charges for plane seats. We understand the connections of fat phobia to white supremacy, with so much focus on weight, fat children are not only bullied but can be seen as the result of bad parenting, which increases institutional scrutiny of our communities.

We want to make sure that loving our bodies is tied to activism, justice, and the end of structures that perpetuate harm and oppression.

To that end, we focus on pleasurable activities, we celebrate rather than shame foods, we offer wider, sturdy seating, and additional seating options, we create enough space for people to move freely.

If there are other ways that we can accommodate audiences and develop additional practices that counter size oppression, please let us know.

We were influenced by the Lesbian Health & Research Center at UCSF to follow the World Health Organization’s definition of health:

“Health is a state of physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.”

Loving fabulous fat people and changing structures that oppress us bring us all to a state of wellbeing for our entire community.