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| - FaT GiRL: A Zine for Fat Dykes and the Women Who Want Them was a zine created by a changing collective of self-identified fat dykes from the San Francisco Bay area for the three years between 1994 and 1997. The zine contains images and text, including drawings, photographs, cartoons, poetry, prose, reviews, and transcribed round-table discussions. FaT GiRL was printed on uncoated paper and circulated both nationally and internationally. The cost was $5 for each sixty to seventy page edition, printed at two thousand copies per issue. Sales were via subscriptions and distribution to stores internationally.
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| abstract
| - FaT GiRL: A Zine for Fat Dykes and the Women Who Want Them was a zine created by a changing collective of self-identified fat dykes from the San Francisco Bay area for the three years between 1994 and 1997. The zine contains images and text, including drawings, photographs, cartoons, poetry, prose, reviews, and transcribed round-table discussions. FaT GiRL was printed on uncoated paper and circulated both nationally and internationally. The cost was $5 for each sixty to seventy page edition, printed at two thousand copies per issue. Sales were via subscriptions and distribution to stores internationally. Each of FaT GiRL's seven issues contains a variety of texts and images that contemplate and celebrate issues of being fat and lesbian, as well as related matters, such as race, class, S/M, food, advice about sex and dating and sexual accoutrements, personal ads, and listings and ads for fat- and queer-positive companies, stores, and organizations. In their mission statement, the FaT GiRL collective writes, "Fat Girl seeks to create a broad-based dialogue which both challenges and informs our notions of Fat-Dyke identity." The style and format of FaT GiRL underscores the politics of resistance and pleasure that permeate the zine. Because zines are self-published by individuals and/ or collectives, their pages do not conform to traditional magazine and journal formats in terms of layout, content, and sponsorship. FaT GiRL, as its first and subsequent issues articulate in their table of contents pages, is a publication that includes "action;" "comics;" "conversations and surveys;" "hints, advice, and resources," "photos," "poetry," "rants and raves," "reviews," "smut," and "stories." Admittedly, one might find several of these kinds of section titles in traditional women's magazines as well. But the content of each, one would not. For example, listed as a recipe in FaT GiRL #1 is the "Fat Girl Revenge Cocktail," which consists of a "quart of brightly colored kefir (yogurt drink)" and "one teaspoon syrup of Ipecac (vomiting agent)" to be taken in succession and vomited on the offending target (diet centers are suggested as one good example of such a target). As the FaT GiRL masthead proclaims, "FaT GiRL iS a PoLiTiCaL ACT," one that raises the stakes of living in fat and queer bodies within a culture that tends not to recognize either within mass media representation and publications. Taking its basic mode of operation from the 1970s feminist motto, "The personal is political," the Fat Girl collective worked to politicize issues about being fat and lesbian in contemporary culture. But they were not merely interested in producing a publication that reflected their social standing. Rather, the zine and its collective were thinking critically about identities – not just replacing, but remaking representation in their own forms and in the forms they wished to see. The zine is fundamentally about how fat dykes make themselves matter -- how they both materialize in visual representations and what they mean within a context of multiple communities located within the larger social world that effectively nullifies both queer and fat subjects' experiences. As zine historian and creator Stephen Duncombe writes, "zines put a slight twist on the idea that the personal is political. They broach political issues from the state to the bedroom, but they refract all these issues through the eyes and experience of the individual [or collective] creating the zine. Not satisfied merely to open up the personal realm to political analysis, they personalize politics [….]" The collective places into visual representation images of actual fat queer female subjects engaged in erotic activities; they are shown enjoying themselves and other fat lesbian bodies in ways that defy stereotypes if only due to the sheer number and variety of scenes and women depicted. The fat lesbian/dyke who rejects normative body ideals and objects of desire has the potential to move beyond immediate commodification by American culture, into re-presentation of self in various ways that might be seen to change, at least parts of, popular culture and ideals of subjectivity (and/or "beauty"). These alternative images can provide a set of safe and sensual locations within the larger fatphobic and heterosexist culture that validates multiple subject positions of the fat and queer female subject. The photographs published in FaT GiRL work to subvert hypersexual/asexual fat woman models by exploring in excess female-on-female sexual and gustatory pleasure; if the fat queer women are shown as insatiable, it is in ways that claim fat women's bodies as deliciously corporeal. The range of sexual positions and interactions display fat dykes as enthusiastically able to participate in sexual acts no matter their size and bodily ability; if sex is desired, a way will be found to enjoyably achieve it. FaT GiRL was a publication at once intimately connected with past lesbian and feminist activism on the printed page and divergent from its predecessors. Dealing with both queer and fat communities, dyke and fat pride, FaT GiRL combines images and text to reformulate and define the multiplicities of fat dyke subcultures and its creative productions at a moment in history highlighted by greater visibility of queer communities and incipient size acceptance and fat pride activist movements.
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