There’s, as you’ll be able to think about, a variety of planning that goes into writing a ebook. I’d spent a few years on my ebook proposal, chapter outlines, and story mapping earlier than I wrote any of Grasping Guts, my memoir, and I didn’t anticipate to come across any surprises when the writing course of would really start. In any case, it’s primarily reminiscences with some principle and ideas woven via – what can really shock you about how you concentrate on your life to this point?
In direction of the tip of the ebook, I shift the narrative (spoiler alert) from one which has been negatively affected by fatphobia to 1 that has been positively uplifted by the fats liberation motion.
One of many key experiences to this viewpoint was acting at Fats Satisfaction, a stage takeover at Manchester’s Satisfaction festivities in 2021 that has remained part of the lineup since its inception on the 2020 digital celebrations. Fats Satisfaction is precisely what it says on the tin – an occasion to acknowledge and lift a drink to the fats expertise. Not simply that, however to experience fats positivity, and to take action particularly by getting a bunch of fats performers on stage to go-go dance to the tunes of a fats DJ for an viewers of whoever desires to attend an occasion as explicitly straightforwardly physique optimistic because the identify and programming presents.
Mitchell Severs
I bought concerned on this occasion via understanding its organisers, Joe and Niall, who had labored for Manchester Satisfaction beforehand and pitched, curated and produced the stage takeover on the occasion. We have been associates from going out in Manchester’s queer scene in addition to from prolonged chats about fats lib over espresso. I used to be honoured to be invited to take the stage and shake my tits as a part of the celebration, and the expertise is one I’ll at all times maintain near my coronary heart.
In writing concerning the sticky summer time night the place I danced for tons of on a stage in a parking lot simply off Manchester’s notorious Canal Avenue, I wished to make use of the chapter to discover how fatness and queerness have intersected for me and all through historical past. I detailed the earlier than, throughout and after of the Fats Satisfaction occasion whereas additionally discussing the impression of fats queer celebrities on the artistic consciousness. From Sister Rosetta Tharpe to Divine to Beth Ditto and past, this piece in Grasping Guts was all concerning the indelible intersection of queer and fats identities.
Whereas exploring what Satisfaction itself met – each LGBTQ+ and fats iterations – I discovered myself an increasing number of drawn to anti-assimilatory queer principle. Summed up artfully by RM Barton for Wussy magazine, “Queer anti-assimilationists search options to current norms; particularly, options that problem heteronormativity and the prescriptive ethical and moral codes which might be enforced on society from the highest down. They recognise that conformity is a social building and make the purpose that it’s also a political weapon.”