Feeling ‘Pretty Porky & Pissed Off’: a photo essay on fatness, affect, art, and archives

ABSTRACT

This photo essay is about the process of creating a digital archive dedicated to Pretty Porky and Pissed Off, a Toronto-based fat activist and performance art collective active in the late 1990s and early 2000s. As a leading member of the collective and the project’s principal investigator (Allyson Mitchell) and the project’s researcher archivist (Allison Taylor) we explore the affective potential of the visual archival fat representations produced through Pretty Porky and Pissed Off’s artistic practice. We first provide an overview of the Pretty Porky and Pissed Off archive project. Second, we contextualize our photo essay within queer and fat studies scholarship on affect, archives, and the visual. Third, we present a set of stills from archival video footage of a Pretty Porky and Pissed Off clothing swap in Allyson Mitchell’s art studio. Using these stills, we consider the affectively rich nature of visual archival representations of fatness. We suggest that feelings are a central component of visual archival fat representations; feelings offer important insights about the potential of visual artistic and archival practices to represent, embody, and imagine fatness otherwise.

KEYWORDS:

• Fat
• archive
• art
• fat activism
• affect

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. This poem is a collection of phrases from the audio-visual material analyzed in this essay.

2. Our understanding of affect is critical of distinctions between affect and feelings. We are concerned “with how we are affected by things,” (Ahmed 2015, 209) and experiences of “sensation, thought, feeling, [and] judgment,” (Ahmed 2015, 210) such that it does not make sense, in this essay, to separate feelings from affect.

3. Artwork and video stills [Images 1–8] by Allyson Mitchell and reproduced with permission by the artist.

Image 2. Allyson’s hand extends to grasp a red jacket as Tracy reaches out to pass the garment to her. Joanne and Zoe sit on the couch, observing the exchange and conversing³.

short-legendImage 3.

short-legendImage 4.

Image 5. Joanne picks up and looks at a pair of pink leopard print pants, slips a leg into the pair and assesses her appearance in a mirror.

Image 6. Abi is walking off with her collection of clothing from the swap. Zoe holds up and assesses a pair of jeans. Joanne stretches.

Image 7. Allyson is holding up a shirt and looking at it. Joanne is looking at it with her. Zoe is putting an item from the swap in a bag.

Image 8. Joanne and Tracy are seated on the couch.

4. Our desires to see certain things in these images are a strategy to resist fatphobic imagery. Laden in these images are also power dynamics, fatigue, “bad feelings,” and the heaviness associated with being fat queer women in a fat-hating, heteronormative world.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Bodies in Translation, Activist Art Technology and Access to Life (BIT), a project of Re•Vision: The Centre for Art and Social Justice at the University of Guelph.

Notes on contributors

Allison Taylor

Allison Taylor is a postdoctoral fellow at Re•Vision: The Centre for Art and Social Justice. She holds a PhD in Gender, Feminist, and Women’s Studies from York University. Her work appears in places including Fat Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Body Weight and Society, the Journal of Lesbian Studies, and Psychology and Sexuality.

Allyson Mitchell

Allyson Mitchell is a maximalist artist working in performance, installation, and film. She is an Associate Professor in the School of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies at York University and ran FAG, a feminist art gallery with her partner Deirdre Logue for ten years. Currently, Logue and Mitchell are developing a feminist/queer permaculture artist residency in rural Ontario.