Virgie Tovar

We wrote this article while driving from Yachats, Oregon to the northernmost tip of Oregon with a little Airstream named Bambi hitched to Jen’s car. We decided we wanted to share the three biggest lessons we’ve learned from roadtripping together:

A cake related fatphobic incident is that moment when it's time to eat cake, and an otherwise joyous experience gets ruined by a moralizing impulse.

Fat girls have less latitude in every arena – clothing is no exception with high school dress codes. Fat women’s bodies are constructed as “outlaw” bodies.

How does a weight loss company sell weight loss products to people who don’t want to be fat but also don’t want to say they don’t want to be fat or identify as being on a diet? This question lives at the heart of what I’m going to call “BoPo-washing.” BoPo-washing is the new paradigm of companies using weight-neutral or body positive language in order to peddle products.

Shade is a resiliency tool constructed and wielded by those who have been forced to survive systems of unfairness. Shade isn’t polite, but everyone knows that the high road is over-sold to oppressed people! I knew I had to begin my own complete anthology of fat girl shade. And I thought I would start the chronicle here with Take the Cake. This tale is one from the vault, and it starts in high school.

When it comes to plus-size fashion, we’re all outsiders to this world — a world that makes amazing garments in our size and welcomes us with open arms full of bubbly water and tiny cakes.

Fat Girl Scarcity — the sense that we are not enough or that we don’t have enough — permeates the life of a person in a marginalized body.

I got tired of waking up and being terrified for my health and so I decided to do what I’d been taught to do in moments of distress: craft.

I hadn't been to a club like this one — the kind full of straight men who are probably homophobic and at least a little coercive, who smell like Old Spice deodorant and have enough disposable income to keep an open tab (the kind of men I'd been taught were "a catch") — for a very, very long time. I tried to remember exactly how long. A decade? More?

By the time you read this, Babecamp Jamaica will be over. My 57 mosquito bites will have just stopped itching.