Collectivizing and generating tools of our own: situated fat experiences in Córdoba

Interview with Luisy Alfonso, Sofi Recchiuto and Meli Linares

Abstract

Interviews have taken a leading role in our beloved journal Etcétera, a section where we have sought to address issues that are on the agenda and are of current relevance. In this opportunity, we draw some lines on body diversity and we arrive at a problem that affects us closely: the fat-hatred. Our own or close experiences prompted us to ask ourselves about how this violence is reproduced, but also the ways in which different collectives grouped together to face them. While we were thinking about the questions that would sahep this conversation, an event of discrimination that showed up in the news: a girl was expelled from a nightclub because "she was taking up too much space". This event is far from being an isolated case, and adds to an extensive list of scenarios where fat bodies are singled out and transformed into repositories of negative imaginaries. These are ugly, sick, unwanted, guilty, invisible and, at the same time, phosphorescent bodies in societies where thinness was naturalized as the expected shape. The conversation we had at the end of October with Luisy, Sofi and Meli brought us closer to a set of experiences located in Córdoba, where they intertwined fat becomings, childhoods, militancy, collective processes, poetry, classrooms, radio programs, laws, fictional worlds, television... and a list that could not end in these pages. We hope that this instance will be one of many encounters where we will enter the local universes of diversities.