Nomy Lamm
Ms. : Women of the Year January/February 1997
For inspiring a new generation of feminists to fight back against fat oppression
By Anastasia Higginbotham

Twenty-one-year-old Nomy Lamm is trying to paint a portrait, paint herself raw and real. Through her writing, pictures, poetry, and performance, Lamm strives to tell, as she says, "the story of a white/jewish middle-class queer/disabled/fat girl and the toll that american capitalist ideology has taken on her teenage dream wish-world." IN a pink prom dress, wtih the words "No Fat Chicks" scrawled across her chest, she is glamour, humor, and rebellion. This is her slogan: "fuck slogans: I wanna understand." Zine maker, portrait artist, revolutionary grrrl, Nomy Lamm, born Naomi Elizabeth Lamm, has been self-publishing for four years. In that time she has transformed herself from a body-shy outrageous-girl-waiting-to-happen to the creator of I'm So Fucking Beautiful (ISFB), a 'zine that dares to take on fat oppression as an institutionalized form of discrimination and exploitation, epitomized by the $1.7 billion per year diet industry that targets women for everything they're worth. ISFB numbers 1, 2, 2 1/2, and 3 are written from the radical perspective of an emotionally and physically healthy fat person, with contributions from writers fat and thin who actively support the fat grrrl revolution. I'm So Fucking Beautiful (so named because "that's what I want to hear, and it may as well start omewhere") is Lamm's call to arms and awareness.

The trail to liberation she is blazing is shared and supported by other activists and feminists who have been tackling fat oppression for years. Lamm uses ISFB to raise a flag for organizations like the National Associate to Advance Fat Acceptance and 'zines such as Fat Girl," a 'zine for fat dykes and the women who want them," and Fat!So? "for people who don't apologize for their size." As greater numbers of groups and individuals join the fight against sizism, it is Lamm's extremely personalized journey, the force of her intellect, and her ability to make connections between systems of oppression that set her apart. She describes a struggle that is both uplifting and exhausting, a mission to expose the common cord that nourishes capitalism, misogyny, classism, and fat hatred, and she challenged us, through her example, to cut off the poisonous supply for her own survival and ours.

Her voice is rebellious, funny, and flirtatious. ISFB #2, designed as a self-mailer, puts the addressee's name in a box inside which she's written, "i'm in love with..." and "you+me=revolution." Her message is one of self-acceptance and self-education, of learning and unlearning, of separating lies, connecting truths, and exposing oppressions. Along the way, the 'zines show her own evolution. For example, in ISFB #1, Lamm speaks out about hurtful incidents of discrimination in her past (her frustration at stores refusing to stock cute clothes in her size, and how people downplay sexual harassment when it's directed at a fat woman) and affirms a fat-positive attitude ("Fat is fun! Fat is very womanly! Fat is Punk! Fat people are rebelling against societal standards!"). In ISFB #2 Lamm criticizes the drawings of fat women she did for ISFB #1, which she later felt were too thin. "The fat grrrl revolution is for all of us, and my artwork was maybe ostracizing some fatter women. None of the drawings...were as fat as I am." The later issue is adorned with illustrations of much fatter women and photos of Lamm (who, she reveals in ISFB #3, loves photo booths).

From the second issue on, her work has become more confrontational. To read ISFB is to face your own fat-phobia, your own myths about why people are fat, your own hatred of your body, and the ways that we, as feminists, don't always practice what we preach in this arena. After she says that her weight fluctuates between 195 and 210 pounds, she writes: "I have never told anybody that. Why? Does it matter to you?" And later, after she discusses the continuum of fat oppression in which the depth of prejudice is proportional to body size: "Are you 5'3", 145 lb. girls feeling relieved now coz I said you're not fat? Don't feel relieved. Thin does not equal compliment. Fat does not equal insult."

Her most complex work to date, ISFB #3 explores the "mind/body war" she has waged on herself since early childhood. Lamm was born with a condition that slowed the growth of her femur (thigh bone), making her left leg shorter than her right. When she was three, her foot was amputated so that she could wear a prosthesis. Later, she would mark this time as the beginning of her dissociation from her body, from all that was missing and all that remained. Lamm's feelings about her disability have added a significant dimension to her writing. As one who excelled in all aspects of school - art, performing, and writing, areas that rely predominately on power and force of ideas - Lamm treasured her mind as a "jewel." Yet during her adolescence, she punished her "abnormalweird fuckedup body" by isolating it, neglecting it, starving it into submission.She illustrates this conflict in ISFB #3 with a girl drawn in rounded parts, pieced together like a rag doll. Fingers and toes jut out like stickpins and one leg hangs shorter than the other. "Terrorist?" floats above the image like a working title, while "naomi e. lamm" rests underneath in childish handwriting.

"It was only two years ago that I started identifying as being disabled at all," she says, a result of being raised by parents who taught her she could "overcome" it. She spent the first two years of her life in Dunmire Hollow, a commune in Tennessee. Her parents made sure she could choose whatever she wanted to do; for their part, they would find a way to help her do it. Whether it was taking gymnastics lessons or attending the first grade on the second floor of an elementary school with only steps to climb and a principal who underestimated her, Lamm would determine for herself what was worth the effort. Not afraid to admit she's had a hard life, she writes in Present Tense: Writing and Art by Young Women (Calyx Books), "the last of six babies born within a year [on the commune], I was the one who sat
aside and watched, wore a funny shoe."

Since she was a little kid, Lamm has written and performed. More than just a natural expression of her intellectual and emotional strengths, the arts also offered a way to establish an environment in which she could thrive. "She used to organize people in the neighborhood to do plays," recalls her father, "because if she didn't do that then they'd be off running and she couldn't keep up with them."

She's lived in Olympia, Washington, ever since her parents "went back to their middle-class roots." Although she was always politically active, when Lamm was a senior in high school (simultaneously enrolled in a class at a local university), she attended a Riot Grrrl meeting as a part of her research for a paper on feminism and discovered their small group forums with "all these girls talking about their lives." Someone gave her a fat-positive 'zine called The Adventures of Big Grrrl written by a young woman who calls herself Alleee. Lamm's initial response was "Oh, well, that's really interesting and amazing that she can feel that way, but I sure can't." Soon, the honesty with which Alleee and other women were writing and speaking about themselves no longer intimidated her. She found that she had something to say in their consciousness-raising sessions. It was her first opportunity to explore, with other fat girls, her feelings about what it means to be fat, and more important, what it means to be oppressed.

She then read Shadow on a Tightrope: Writings by Women on Fat Oppression edited by Lisa Schoenfielder and Barb Wieser, which replaced myths with illuminating facts about fat oppression, the hierarchy of thinness, and the damage inflicted on fat people out of ignorance, hatred, and homage to the big bad business of weight loss. It became painfully clear that everything else she had learned about fat was bullshit, the consummate example being Susie Orbach's Fat is a Feminist Issue, frighteningly well-received approach to fat women as "compulsive overeaters" desperate for "protection, sex, mothering, strength, assertion, and love." Lamm's first 'zine was born of the rage and clarity evoked from having read both works.

Since that time Lamm has been educating herself and others through workshops, lectures, and spoken-word performances. Her writing has been featured and xcerpted in numerous anthologies and national magazines. Hundreds of letters and requests for copies of her 'zines (so many that she doesn't have enough time to even begin to answer them) indicate the growing demand for what Lamm has to offer.

Her writing is extremely personal, calling up incidents of harassment and shame in a way that is vulnerable and brave, and oftentimes hilarious. In ISFB #1, Lamm relates a story about a boy who insisted on shouting "hey hot stuff" and "whoo! foxy mama" every time she passed him. She begins, "there was this boy, dick (not his real name)." In anticipation of those who would seek to fetishize fat liberation by merely concluding that even fat girls are fuckable, she writes, "I refuse to be the self-appointed full-figured porno queen. figure it out on your own."

Her witty, informal style has been misinterpreted by critics and fans alike as an emotional outpouring that reads like a diary entry or an intimate conversation with an old friend, which Lamm sees as "a romantic way of looking at ['zines]." Furthermore, it diminishes 'zine publishers who are giving voice to a lot of talented writers. The accessibility of the 'zines themselves (for the cost of a couple of bucks and a stamp) and the complex themes they explore with such seeming casualness speak of a strategy for remaining open to the reader - talky rather than preachy, questioning rather than commanding. In spite of, and in reverence to, these goals, Lamm's
'zines contain analysis of complicated issues of identity, class, race, power, and privilege.

Lamm speaks about her own experiences in an effort to make necessary connections between her life and the great scheme. Determined to find her place "within a capitalist culture and hierarchical system of exploitation," she states in ISFB #3: "I will fight for the liberation and self-determination of all people. I will not allow myself to be discouraged or disillusioned. I will find beauty, life, and meaning in this struggle."

Now nearing graduation from Evergreen State College, she works with a community AIDS project and is currently compiling submissions for a 'zine that promises to become a testimony to the spirit of all those "working for change & healing." She has sent out a call to punks, activists, and revolutionaries asking: Where do you get your strength? Wait till she finds out they get it from her.