Zoe Holmes and Kath Read embrace the ‘F’ word: Fat and proud

DISCRIMINATION on the basis of sex, gender, race and religion is illegal, so why do we continue to judge people on their appearance?

Zoe Holmes is fat. Kath Read is fat. Very fat, even.

They are also intelligent, articulate, funny and successful, each with friends and families they love and who love them.

Drinking tea and preparing for work in her quirky, inner-city art deco unit, the stylish Holmes, 26, slips on earrings as she recounts a recent trip to New York where she saw nine stage shows in two weeks. A good exchange rate meant the musical theatre tragic could also indulge her other love: clothes.

Quietly spoken and personable, Holmes spent two years teaching English in Japan before returning to Brisbane where she works in administration at the University of Queensland and blogs about “fatshion” part-time.

Holmes got to know the heavily-tattooed Read, 39 - a self-described bolshy, punk librarian who has a black tutu (more like a “four-four”, she laughs) in her wardrobe and says pink is her natural hair colour - as participants in a Griffith University study on attitudes towards fat people.

Photos of them shopping, riding bicycles, doing yoga, putting on make-up, working and generally going about their daily lives have circulated nationally in a new image library created for mass publication.

Together with an exhibition by Queensland College of Art photographer Isaac Brown planned for October, stockybodies.com aims to replace the generic “headless fatties” images that negatively represent obese people.

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