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

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.

Misfits Meet Art and Technology: Cripping Transmethodologies

“…As the case studies we have selected show, the creatively disruptive ways disabled artists access, use, create, and interact with technology confound eugenic-norms governing western understandings of embodiment and with this, the euro-masculine-abled subject’s privileged status as authoritative architect-arbiter of “knowledge” and “culture” ( Braidotti, 2013 ; Chen, 2012 ). Disability arts works to pry open spaces of knowledge and cultural production for non-normative creativities to presence and activate our abounding vitalities ( Collins et al, 2022 ; Collins et al, 2023a & 2023b ; Johnson et al, 2024 ; Rice, Pendleton Jiménez, et al, 2020 ; Rice et al, 2017 ; Taylor et al, 2023 ).…”

Introduction to the Special Issue “Rethinking Artful Politics: Bodies of Difference Remaking Body Worlds”

“…Auto/ethnographic explorations into the archive (consisting of performance videos, posters, emails, administrivia, etc.) of the queer feminist fat performance collective Pretty, Porky, and Pissed Off show the "liberatory, life-affirming, and life-giving potential" of fat embodiment and activism (Taylor et al 2023). Even relational spaces thought more traditional, such as professor-doctoral student relationships, transform when students and professors centre difference, demonstrating that writing can become a creative conversation between supervisor, student, and guiding theorist, in this case, Gloria Anzaldúa, that opens onto new thresholds of Anzaldúa-inspired and informed queer Chicana knowledge (Alvarez-Hernandez and Flint 2023).…”