NAAFA Community Voices Blog
Sharing thoughts and ideas from fat community.
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Report from the International Weight Stigma Conference
The annual Weight Stigma Conference (WSC) is an international interdisciplinary gathering of scholars, advocates, community leaders, and others whose work addresses weight stigma (bias against people who are considered “overweight” in their cultures). Founded by British scholar and activist Dr. Angela Meadows in 2013, the conference has been held in Birmingham (UK), Canterbury (UK), Reykjavik (Iceland), Vancouver (Canada), Prague (Czchek Republic), Leeds (UK), and London (UK). Although the conference was founded in 2013, COVID-related delays made this year the 8th offering of the in-person conference, with a commitment to adding more virtual elements in 2023 and a fully hybrid conference in 2024. 2023 and 2024 locations are yet to be announced.
NAAFA has supported the conference as a sponsor for many years. This year, for the first time, we sent an official delegation. Board Chair Tigress Osborn and Board Member-at-Large Elaine Lee traveled to Berlin in July to represent NAAFA at the conference and learn from fat community leaders from sixteen countries.
I Lost My Queer Identity the Day I Said I Do
From a young age I had no doubt that both boys and girls were beautiful to me. Growing up in a home where my parents were also foster parents, I was exposed to lots of different types of kids. Not only the privileged kids that I went to school with, but the children who didn’t come from a “stable home” with two parents who paid attention to them and showed them love every day. I learned that people are interesting and loveable no matter how they grew up.
Asexuality for Pride Month
According to Meriam Webster, Asexuality (Ace) is: not having sexual feelings toward others : not experiencing sexual desire or attraction. Basically, it is an inborn absence of sexual desire.
Fat Liberation or Body Positivity can be hard spaces for Asexual people to navigate sometimes because for many, body liberation also includes sexual/sensual aspects of their lives. For myself personally, talk of fat sex/pleasure or images of those things makes me uncomfortable.
Finding safety in Queer spaces can be hard for Asexual people. When you are Fat and Asexual, it also comes with all the Fat bias, weight stigma, Fat hate too.
Asexual people are not wrong or broken or looking for attention. We are here and we are valid.
Driven to End Weight Stigma
In this piece for Women’s History Month 2022, Barbara Altman Bruno PhD gives us a glimpse into why she felt “driven” in working to end fat stigma and toward fat liberation. Dr. Bruno conveys some of the history of the fat acceptance/fat liberation movement from her perspective, the beginnings of Health At Every Size and her work in preserving our history for the future.