“Stop Postponing Your Life Until You Lose Weight and Start Living Now”: Vancouver’s Large as Life Action Group, 1979–1985
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Vancouver fat acceptance group Large as Life (LAL) was active between 1979 and 1985. The founding members of LAL met at a Gestalt therapy workshop for fat women only in 1979, but ultimately decided that talking was not enough to resolve the problems they experienced on a day-to-day basis. For these women, fat was not just a feeling but a material problem that could be solved through the development of social sites and services that catered to fat women. These would include fitness classes, fashion shows, clothing swaps and personal development workshops. Using interviews with former Large as Life members, together with articles from the group’s newsletter, The Bolster, this paper examines fat women’s perspectives on femininity, health, and fashion in the 1980s. It argues that the shared practices developed among members of Large as Life are an example of the lived complexity of femininity in the 1980s, and, specifically, offers insight into how women experienced and situated themselves in relation to the beauty and bodily norms of the 1980s.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.029 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".