Fat Performance

You may hear a series of loud whoops today if you listen carefully. This will be a group of writers, performers and editors across the world cheering Fat Performance, which is now published through Intellect.

It has been a long time coming. The book has its roots in a series of workshops devised and facilitated by Gillie Kleiman in 2020 through our beloved Live Art Development Agency in London. These were offered online because of the pandemic and established an international network of practitioners. The Fat Performance Workbook zine was also one of the outcomes alongside a desire to produce an edited anthology. I’m thrilled to see that a slightly earlier work of mine, Tantalising Glimpses, was also part of the book’s origin story, and honoured to have a chapter in it exploring dance and activism.

Fat Performance cannot be everything to everyone, that’s an impossible task. But, at nearly 300 pages long, it does an excellent job of documenting, including, expanding, considering and generally blowing minds. This is a book of integrity, disobedience and queer, black, crip intersectionality; it is local and global, conversational and scholarly, reflective, rich and deep; it’s informative, sexy, poetic, funny and it has illustrations and photographs. It draws on the past and considers the future. I’m barely scratching the surface, it will take me some time to digest it all.

People who know my work will recognise the emphasis I put on knowledge developed by and for fat people, that it’s essential we speak for ourselves and are not mediated through thin or normative perspectives. It is brilliant to read 16 chapters that centre fat from lived experience and care for it deeply. I’m especially drawn to chapters that explore bad behaviour and failure, topics entirely absent from straight-world narratives but are tenderly understood amongst ourselves.

I hope there will be parties to celebrate this publication. I offer the deepest and heartiest congratulations to the editors Ju, Magdalena and Gillie. I am buzzing about the new knowledge that will emerge as a result of this collection. I’m even more excited when I anticipate the fat performance that this book will inevitably influence. I feel proud to belong to this imaginative, courageous, gritty, stylish, intelligent and visionary community. Surely this work must now form the backbone for conferences, panels, gatherings and conversations.

The world that I’m in is undergoing a surge of fatphobia at the moment. I’ve been around long enough to know that this is cyclical, but it’s still grinding. Fat Performance is a reminder that other ways are possible and that creative expression, the arts and especially performance, are essential strategies for understanding, world-building and change.

Fat Performance
Edited by Jussara Belchior Santos, Magdalena Hutter and Gillie Kleiman
2026, Bristol and Chicago: Intellect

PS. Like many textbooks, Fat Performance is very expensive even in digital form. There is no affordable version at the moment and I don’t know if there are plans to produce one. I don’t have a paper copy of my own. I would love people to read this book but regret that it won’t be accessible to many. Your best bet might be to try and get it via a library or to look for pre-prints. I expect there will be pirated copies around, but please try to avoid this route because it stiffs the authors who have worked so hard to bring the book into the world.