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

Abstract

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.