Fat Con 2025 Puts Fat Liberation Front and Center

Now in its second year, Fat Con is back once again to put the "fun" in "fat" with an extensive schedule of events centering and celebrating the fat community.

Founded by lauded burlesque performer and advocate Mx. Pucks A'Plenty, the three-day convention is bringing together speakers, athletes, performers, and artists from around the country for workshops, performances, markets, and pool parties, all with the goal to uplift fat liberation as praxis and practice.

From Jan. 31 to Feb. 2, Fat Con will take over the King Street Ballroom at the Embassy Suites in Pioneer Square. It's the biggest convention centering fat people on the West Coast with over 30 hours of programming. Attendees will have the chance to listen to keynote speeches from speakers like hiker and mental health advocate Andy Neal, mer-tivational speaker Mermaid Chè Monique, and size-inclusion expert Andrea Kelly. Fat Con's sibling event — also produced by Pucks's production company Puckduction — Fatlesque Fest NW will happen in the evenings from Jan. 30 to Feb. 1, giving con attendees something to do both in the day and the evening.

The idea for Fat Con came to Pucks back in 2022. As someone who straddles both the burlesque and con spaces, Pucks knew they wanted to bring together a series of activities for fat people in the region with nighttime entertainment. For years, Pucks has been an activist for queer, Black, and fat artists, organizing events like What the Funk?! An All POC Burlesque Festival and Fatlesque Fest NW as a means of community-building. A convention specifically celebrating fat joy and liberation seemed like a natural extension of their previous work.

"Over the years, the [body positivity] movement has kind of backed away from really uplifting the experiences of fat people and became more of a catch-all for anyone," said Pucks in a recent interview. "You were noticing lots of white women doing doing yoga being the #BodyPositivity. It was getting further and further away from the discrimination that folks receive and also just the rampant fat phobia that's out there."

Fat Con comes as the country reckons with Ozempic, Wegovy, and other semaglutide drugs, which were originally developed for people living with diabetes, and which are now being used by thousands as a quick way to lose weight. Fat and plus-size celebrities, social media influencers, and regular people have begun to shrink before our eyes in what can be seen as a pointed backlash against body positivity or neutrality and self-acceptance. Events like Fat Con serve as a space for fat people to remember that they aren't alone.

"This idea that a good body is a thin body is not true. You can be extremely healthy in a fat body and you can be radically unhealthy in a thin body and everything in between," reflected Pucks. "Our society is really good at making marginalized people feel like it's all in their head. They're all alone. They're separate from — and that's not true at all. I think one of the beautiful things about Fat Con is that it's a chance for people to make fat friends — and it's as simple as that."

Despite the event's joy-centered nature, last year's iteration received some backlash online. MyNorthwest, a local conservative website, dubbed the event "an incredibly dangerous, backward movement that harms the very people it pretends to liberate" and that the concept of fat liberation "demands that society and institutions pretend there are no significant health consequences of obesity." Pucks and their fellow Fat Con organizers saw the outcry as excellent promotion.

"They made this event sound real sexy!" they said. However, Fat Con did receive a lot of hateful emails and people lashing out on social media. "There was this extreme hatred for us being like, 'Cool we'll throw an event where we can just hang out.' It was upsetting for them, the fact that we want to be together and talk about things that are of interest to us."

Fat Con will feature tons of themed meet-and-greets for people to link up with fat people of different backgrounds, pilates and yoga demos, as well as workshops on parkour, sex, water sports, and powerlifting. Additionally, Fat Con is also hosting a Fat Babe Marketplace featuring 12 vendors selling photography, clothing, jewelry, and other products made specifically for fat bodies and lives as well as a fashion exhibition showcase. It's an immersive event that Pucks hopes will serve as a launch point in the future.

"At the end of the day, we want people to leave the event being like, 'I got the phone number of one person who I can call, and I'm not gonna feel like I'm doing this all on my own,'" they said.

More information and tickets are available over on Fat Con's website.