Event Date: 25 April 2016
Room 402
Birkbeck Main Building
Birkbeck, University of London
Malet Street
London WC1E 7HX
The Birkbeck Institute for Social Research in association with Birkbeck Gender and Sexuality (BiGS) presents:
Fat Activism is Dangerous
Charlotte Cooper‘s latest book, Fat Activism: A Radical Social Movement (HammerOn Press) is a para-academic project; an example of research justice; a proposal for queer and feminist activism; a critique of complacency and stagnation; a work that historicises an occupied and overlooked feminist social movement; an argument for exploding the myth of the perfect standard in activism.
Join Charlotte, Noreen Giffney and Naomi Segal for a free-wheeling interdisciplinary panel discussion about this disruptive book. Find out how it came to be written, why fat activism matters to anyone interested in social change, and what makes this social movement uniquely queer and life-enhancing in an age of anti-obesity rhetoric.
The Discussion will be chaired by Jennifer Fraser.
Charlotte Cooper is a psychotherapist, cultural worker and para-academic. She performs with Homosexual Death Drive and in SWAGGA, a dance work conceived by Project O. Charlotte is widely published, her award-winning writing has also been seized for obscenity. Her latest book, Fat Activism: A Radical Social Movement has just been released by HammerOn Press.
Dr Noreen Giffney works as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist in private practice in Dublin, Ireland. She was previously Lecturer in Psychoanalytic Studies in the Department of Psychosocial Studies at Birkbeck, University of London. She has published extensively on gender and sexuality studies, cultural studies, and psychoanalysis, including the books: Queering the Non/Human, The Ashgate Research Companion to Queer Theory, The Lesbian Premodern, Theory on the Edge: Irish Studies and the Politics of Sexual Difference, and Twenty-First Century Lesbian Studies. She convenes Psychoanalysis +, an interdisciplinary initiative that brings together clinical, artistic and academic approaches to, and applications of, psychoanalysis. She also provides private research supervision to clinical practitioners conducting research in the fields of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy.
Naomi Segal is a professor of modern languages, specialising in comparative literary and cultural studies, gender, psychoanalysis and the body. In 2004 she created and then directed the Institute of Germanic & Romance Studies, University of London. She has published 15 books, of which the most recent monographs are Consensuality: Didier Anzieu, gender and the sense of touch, André Gide: Pederasty and Pedagogy and The Adulteress’s Child: authorship and desire in the nineteenth-century novel. Naomi Segal is an Academic Associate of the British Psychoanalytical Society, a Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Palmes académiques and a Member of the Academia Europaea.
You can buy ‘Fat Activism’ here
