Fatshionista to Two Whole Cakes: New site, same old fattery.

[Short version of the below: I am changing my blog home from fatshionista.com to blog.twowholecakes.com. You can grab the new feed here.]

There are a number of reasons.

Fact is, “fatshionista” doesn’t really belong to me. It belongs to you.

Fatshionista, both word and concept, originally started as the name of a LiveJournal community founded by Amanda Piasecki for the purposes of carving out space to discuss fat style within a politically-savvy, social-justice-minded, fat-friendly context, without being overrun by the usual crap about the garments that are most “slenderizing” and ticking off lists of the things fat folk should never, ever wear. In LJ!Fatshionista’s halcyon early days, it was an environment both radical and intimate. Both of these things have changed in the intervening years, as the community has grown — and grown and grown — and has come to envelop members at many different points along the body-acceptance spectrum. What we sacrificed in political purity we made up for in scope, and many people new to these ideas benefited in the bargain. “Fatshionista” evolved into much more than a clever portmanteau; it became an identity.

Off-Livejournal, over the past few years, “fatshionista” began to proliferate through the internets, and a broad and diverse community of independent fat-fashion bloggers took root and flourished. I couldn’t even begin to tell you, at this point, how many blogs use some variation of the word “fatshion” in their titles. And I could not be more pleased about that — it’s a powerful word, a radical word, a word that puts “fat” right up front and center, a word that fat-style revolutionaries can throw out as a rallying cry. It’s our word, our identity, but it’s not my name.

My original vision for fatshionista.com was very different than what you see there today; frankly, it never occurred to me that my own writing would be enough to draw an audience to the site. It still surprises me that so many of you come here just to read the words I string together (or rather, glue together with a prodigious use of fuckwords and adverbs). The old site was not built with this in mind, and is thus technically-clunky and has been plagued with feed issues, security holes, and various and sundry other idiosyncrasies since day one. This new WordPress site will operate more smoothly as a traditional blog, and I will still be posting the occasional guest posts as they present themselves. Also, it will finally have a reliable RSS feed.

Oh, I’ll keep the fatshionista.com domain probably forever, and in the next couple days I will set it up to automatically redirect to this new site. The old site will live on as an archive for as long as the code holds up; while I’ve managed to import most* of my own posts, the comment threads, where many of the best conversations happen, will remain at fatshionista.com.

Otherwise, the content (cranky profanity-riddled rants) and mode of operations (half-assed) here will carry on as usual. Do you have an idea for a guest post? Email me about it. Have you recently emailed me and not yet heard back? I don’t always manage to respond to every message, but I probably have a half-composed draft that will go out to you eventually. Are you not on my blogroll and think you should be? I may have just forgotten about your site! Let me know it.

As always, I thank every single one of you — commenters, doubters, and lurkers inclusive — from the bottom of my enfattened heart for your brilliance, your patience, and your support. There is much to be optimistic about, as y’all represent a growing movement to be critical of what culture and media have taught us, about our bodies and about who we are and about what we’re allowed to be.

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*Posts going back to April of 2008 have been brought over, semi-successfully insofar as being complete in their original text but lacking their original comments, which bums me out a lot. I was altogether unsuccessful in getting posts from the site’s launch in October 2007 through April 2008 imported, owing to the limitations of my early Joomla install.

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