Workshop: Fat Embodiment

9 July, 2020
Online Workshop

Trainers: Magdalena Hutter and Mäks Roßmöller

What is structural about the issue of body-based oppression, when at the same time fat feels so personal? What does skinny privilege look like and how does it contribute to inequalities in access to health, a sense of self-worth, and a life free from discrimination? What does the discrimination of fatness have to do with other forms of oppression and with neo-liberal practices? How can we start relating to our own fat tissue in a positive or at least more neutral way?

In this workshop, we’ll look at how fatness connects and intersects with a host of issues from health to gender, dis/ability, body normativity, desire politics, aesthetics, and pleasure. We’ll look at foundations and relations of theories and contexts of fatness, while giving space to reflection and discussion, and always returning to our own bodies, using somatic experiences to reconnect with our own fat tissue. Because the best place to start unpacking internalized fat negativity is our own belly.

Magdalena Hutter is a documentary filmmaker and photographer based in Montreal and Berlin. Her projects frequently deal with themes of belonging, ranging from documentary film to installations and interactive documentaries. In addition to her own projects, she also works as a DoP and consulting producer on other documentary films, as well as a facilitator of hands-on film workshops. Since September 2018, she has been pursuing a research-creation PhD in the Interdisciplinary Humanities at Concordia University, researching the performance and representation of fatness in dance and movement art. 

Mäks Roßmöller received a diploma in psychology (specialized in discrimination based trauma, the body and Critical Psychology / Antipsychiatry ) with a gender studies focus from Free University Berlin, is a somatic practitioner (specialized in systemic trauma_discrimination and how to transform it via the body, fat tissue) and finishes systemic therapy training this year. Their research centers fat tissue and the fat body in movement as a gateway to an inclusive concept of health. They are a co-editor of the antipsychiatric and psychology-critical anthology “Gegendiagnose” (2015), which is part of the series “get well soon” at the collective publisher “edition assemblage.” Since 2010 they have given weight discrimination sensitization workshops for skinny privileged people and somatic empowerment-workshops for fat bodies all over Germany, Prague, London (Canada) and Portland, Oregon. In addition, they are a Spoken Word Drag artist writing about crisis, care work, nonbinary and fat liberation. Recently their artistic focus shifted to create fat tissue models in the form of video/light installations and interactive sculptures under the name “The Fat Mäksias”.

From a systemic or social justice perspective they are fat, invisibly disabled to a minor degree, nonbinary trans, dyadic, trauma/crisis experienced, white with the intention to act against racial oppression.