ABSTRACT
In 2013 the thirtieth anniversary of the 1983 publication of the anthology Shadow on a Tightrope, a collection of writings by women on fat oppression, was cause for much celebration in the ‘fatosphere’. Ragen Chastain, founder of the online archive In Our Own Words: A Fat Activist History, was a young girl when Shadows was first published, and marvelled at ‘how these women came together – without the internet, the fatsophere, facebook or smartphones’ to help start a ‘movement from scratch’ (Chastain, 2013). Fat Studies pioneer Esther Rothblum cited Shadows as a ‘classic book’ that by that early 1990s was one of ‘over a dozen’ fat affirmative books available. In the past decade Rothblum has established the Fat Studies journal, co-edited the Fat Studies Reader (2011) and her first edition of Shadows is worn from re-reading (Rothblum, 2013). British fat activist, psychotherapist and writer Charlotte Cooper, ever attentive to the US-centrism of fat politics, also owns a ‘dog-eared’ copy that she treasures, but hers is from 1989 when Shadow was first published in Britain. She bought her copy in the feminist bookshop Silver Moon, and is both ‘grateful for’ and ‘wary of’ the ‘feminist sensibility’ that produced and disseminated Shadow in the first place: that is ‘essentialist, fundamentalist and separatist feminisms’ that have since been meaningfully critiqued and challenged by people of colour, trans people, queers, sex positive feminists and sex workers. Still, it was not necessary to be part of US lesbian feminism to appreciate it: ‘I had the vital knowledge of my own fat body, and Shadow on a Tightrope validated that knowledge’ (Cooper, 2013).
