paperandglue.net

Yesterday I was organizing my filing cabinet and found something — well, two somethings — I thought I had lost in a move in 2007.

I thought I had lost it forever, but it turns out it was in my filing cabinet, safe and sound, the whole time.

What was it?

FAT MAP!

The fat map was a project that Stina of chubbluv zine did a few years backk, where she pasted pictures of fat people, fat animals and tasty food onto maps and sent them to you. I treasured this map, and added to it — the colour images are ones I glued on, including the likes of Camryn Manheim and Leslie Hall. This map dates back to 2006 — the days when I first became more into the fat acceptance/body positivity movement. As it is with most people, it’s a process to get to the point where you can say, “fat does not equal bad/ugly/gross/whatever.” For me, the journey started with my high school art teacher, who was fat and amazing and lent me copies of the now-defunct plus size fashion mag Mode. A couple years later, I started ordering zines from the (also now-defunct) Pander Zine Distro. I read the bio page for Ericka, the distro runner, where along with vital stats like name, age and location she also listed her height and her weight (!) with the parenthetical comment “Fat girls represent!” That kind of blew my mind, opening the pathways so I’d be ready to get into chubbluv and Fatshionista and the like.

Nowadays, you can find Stina at no futvre, where she continues to be excellent. You can find Ericka and her beautiful photography at elbfoto.

The second item returned to my possession by this expedition into my files was this strip of photo booth pics. It’s my brother and me at the airport. I’m probably 15ish and he’s probably 13ish here.

It’s surprising to see us getting along so well at this particular phase in our lives. It was before he grew to be bigger than me, nullifying any physical intimidation I was previously able to use to bend him to my considerable will; it was before we made it through the treacherous waters of adolescence, able to finally be friends as adults. Bro, if you’re reading, we should take another set of photo booth pics soon!

Tags: fat, maps, memories, photo booths

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 7th, 2010 at 12:08 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.