Performing Fat Liberation: Pretty Porky and Pissed Off’s Affective Politics and Archive

Allison Taylor (), Allyson Mitchell and Carla Rice
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Allison Taylor: Re•Vision: The Centre for Art and Social Justice, University of Guelph, Guelph, ON N1G 2W1, Canada
Allyson Mitchell: School of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies, York University, Toronto, NE M3J 1P3, Canada
Carla Rice: Re•Vision: The Centre for Art and Social Justice, University of Guelph, Guelph, ON N1G 2W1, Canada

Social Sciences, 2023, vol. 12, issue 5, 1-15

Abstract: This article uses collaborative auto/ethnography to explore the circulation and potentiality of affect in the live performances and archive of Pretty Porky and Pissed Off (PPPOd), a Toronto-based queer fat activist performance art collective active during the late 1990s and mid-2000s. Drawing on video and audio recordings of five PPPOd performances alongside other performance ephemera and a series of conversations relating to these archival objects among the article’s three authors, we identify and theorize our affective responses to and situated recollections of these performances, both in their current form as archival objects and as historical live events. We argue that PPPOd’s archival objects/live performances disrupt the constellation of affects that constitute fat hate (e.g., fear, loathing, shame) and set in motion more affirmative affects (e.g., playfulness, pride, desire, love) that contribute to micro-worldings and prefigurative fat politics, as ephemeral as these might be. In capturing these fleeting moments of radical possibility, PPPOd’s activism and archive offer opportunities for touching and feeling a future where fat lives are more livable.

Keywords: fat; archive; art; fat activism; affect; Pretty Porky and Pissed Off; performance art; queer; world-making; fat hatred (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A B N P Y80 Z00 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
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