MARY LAMBERT

A collaboration with Mary Lambert, these limited edition art prints are handmade with fat fingers in Vancouver, B.C. 

A message from Mary about the prints: 

Mary, why would you hope to be "fat forever"? The short answer is because I really do love being fat. I used to think that people that looked like me were lying, saying things like "I'm happy in my body" to make themselves feel better because no one *actually* would choose to be fat, right? The amount of space that trying to be thin took up in my brain and in my life was enormous. The shape wear, the scales, the dieting, the exercising compulsively, the secret eating, the shame, the destructive behaviours. When I was at my thinnest, I was smoking a pack a day and getting blackout drunk every night. I was starving myself during the day and bingeing at night. But to everyone else, I had done a great job: I was thinner! I got so many compliments about my weight loss and the praise was intoxicating, which made the inevitable rebounding of weight gain feel that much more shameful. The feelings of failure were at times, debilitating. Then I'd start a new diet, and go through the whole cycle again! It was literally madness.

I am grateful for being queer because it gave me a template to understand that some people might see my queerness as something akin to failure (as in, I failed at being straight), but queerness really just means it's something that is not normative, and one thing I've learned about societies, is that what is "normal" is not static. At one point in my journey, I would have done anything to take a magic pill to be straight or thin. But I'm not either of those things, and whether or not I was "born this way" doesn't really matter. This is my body, and I am no longer ashamed of the space that it takes up.

The argument people use against fat activists about "health" is demoralizing, inaccurate, and ableist. Health is subjective. There are a lot of places you can learn about anti-diet work and fat liberation, and if this print or this idea makes you uncomfortable, I urge you to seek out work from fat activists. I have a workshop that centers around fat liberation called Everybody is a Babe, but there are so many brilliant folks that educate and speak on this subject: Caleb Luna, Ragen Chastain, Asher Larmie, Da'Shaun L. Harrison, Aubrey Gordon, Sonya Renee Taylor, Sabrina Strings, and of course, my collaborator in this project, Layla Cameron. 

You can read more about Mary and her work on her website, https://marylambertsings.com.