Dr. Charlotte Cooper - A Fat Femme Tomato Lady Doing a High-Kick - 001 Queers and Co.

In this episode of Queers & Co., I’m joined by Dr. Charlotte Cooper, psychotherapist, cultural worker and the author of Fat Activism: A Radical Social Movement and the newly updated Fat Activist Vernacular.

We chat about what it means to be a good ally, how climate activism is yet to get its act together around fat, what it means to be queer, punks who hate “normals”, the role of dance in exploring your body as a fat person and Charlotte’s encounter with a fat femme tomato lady doing a high-kick.

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Full Transcription available on at gemkennedy.com

Gem: Welcome to the Queers & Co. Podcast. I'm your host, Gem Kennedy, and I'm very excited to be recording the first ever episode. My guest today is someone whose work I've followed and loved since first hearing about her in 2016. She's a psychotherapist and cultural worker based in East London, as well as the author of books like Fat Activism and the Fat Activist Vernacular, which we're going to talk about today. I'm very excited to welcome Dr. Charlotte Cooper. Hi Charlotte.

Charlotte: Hi Gem. What a pleasure is to be here.

Gem: It's so nice to have you. Thanks for agreeing to do it.

Charlotte: My absolute pleasure.

Gem: So, I've got lists of questions. I don't want to bombard you, but it would be really cool if we can start off with hearing a bit more about your work and then we'll chat about the Fat Activist Vernacular that's coming out soon.

Charlotte: Yeah, sure. How to describe my work? I have fingers in a few pies. My main work is as a psychotherapist and I specialise in working with people who are on the edges in some way. I work with lots of queers and trans people, neurodivergent people, sex workers and also the occasional Normal comes along and I don't turn them away. I guess that's my day job, but it is a vocation as well. It's really important to me and I really love the work. I've also been making stuff for a long time so I call myself a cultural worker cause I think of making stuff as a political act. I started off making performances when I was in my teens and twenties and I have been making zines for a long time as well, probably for about 30 years cause I'm getting on a bit now.

Charlotte: Lately, I've been returning more to performance and I'm sort of exploring, making different kinds of things as well. A lot of my work is about fat and I've been doing that for about three decades or so. I started off with my own body and my own life and thinking about what it was to have grown up fat. But this turned into scholarship quite quickly. I did a Master's degree and the product of that was a book. I published a book called Fat and Proud in 1998 and then I got a bit burnt out, but then I got more involved in fat activism in the States through a zine called Fat Girl in 1994, which was this really fantastic fat queer publication that came out of San Francisco. I also started going to No Lose, which is a kind of conference that takes place in the States every now and again. I became part of that community and then as luck would have it, I met some people who knew of my work and they said that they had some funding available for a doctorate and was I interested that. So I applied for that and I got it and went to do a PhD for a few years in Limerick in Ireland. The product of that was the book Fat Activism, A Radical Social Movement. Although I'm interested in queer performance and queer publishing and DIY-zine making, I'm also really interested in fat and what that means and fat as a cultural experience. That's rather a wordy answer to a simple question, "What do you do?" but those are the main things.

Gem: That's a great answer. It's really useful to hear the background as well because there may be people listening to this who haven't come across your work before.

Charlotte: No, I'm really obscure and even though I've don