#nomy lamm

Nomy Lamm

Gender: Female

Sexuality: Lesbian

DOB: 1 September 1975

Ethnicity: Ashkenazi Jewish

Nationality: American

Occupation: Singer, songwriter, musician, activist, presenter, minister

Note 1: Had her leg amputated as a child

Are you not a groupie, but a “Band Aid” as Penny Lane famously put it? Is your love of music beyond the scope of a crush, to the point of being an entire lifestyle? Are you sick of being told by boys to just admire, and feminists of a less open minded kind telling you to tone it down, to not be so desperate? These are my favorite books when I want to be a fan, and not an uppity “music writer.” Here’s this weeks installment; I’ll have three more review next week!

1.) Just Kids by Patti Smith

I never expected to love this book so much. I read it two years ago, and have been re reading passages over and over since. In it, we learn what it is to love and turn that love into your life, to become fully yourself through your adoration of others. Throughout the book, Patti describes every beautiful and melancholy detail of escaping her small Jersey town, falling in love with almost everything, including Robert Mapplethorpe, dirty hotels, and people others might view as broken, who she describes with the adoration of someone witnessing earthly angels.

2.) There Goes Gravity by Lisa Robinson

Though much more critical and questioning than Patti’s book, Robinson’s book is an in depth thesis on what it is to be an effortlessly cool rock journalist. Throughout the early parts of her career, she traveled with the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin, championed the New York Dolls, and founded the cult favorite music ‘zine, Rock Scene. Lisa never fails to express a negative opinion (she doesn’t like Madonna! Gasp!), but her love of other acts, like Michael Jackson and The Clash, are relatable to any impassioned music fan.

3.) Girls to the Front by Sara Marcus

Before I liked Nirvana or the Sex Pistols in high school, I loved Riot Grrrl bands like Bikini Kill and Bratmobile. In this book, Sara Marcus takes us into the DIY venues and independent, feminist art galleries of early 90s Olympia and beyond. While those more famous bands (Bikini Kill and Bratmobile) get plenty of pages, Sara dedicates just as many, if not more, to smaller bands and zine writers, like Nomy Lamm of the fat positivity zine, “I’m So F*cking Beautiful” and even notable fans like Jessica Hopper, who has since become a famed music writer. While Sara sings much of Riot Grrrl’s praises, she also acknowledges its problematic aspects of punk exclusivity and its frequent ignorance of intersectional issues.

Conceived and led by disabled people of color, the Sins Invalid performance project develops and presents cutting-edge work where normative paradigms of "normal" and "sexy" are challenged. Join us for a film screening and Q&A with filmmaker Nomy Lamm on Friday at 4 p.m. 

Free and open to the public; see accessibility info.

Nomy Lamm. Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha. Ellery Russian. Patty Berne. Mia Mingus. Seeley Quest. Leroy Moore. Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore. Frida Kahlo. Harriet Tubman. Laura Hersey. Stacey Milbern. Audre Lorde. Everyone who has ever worked with Sins Invalid and Deaf Poets’ Society. 

Without you I would not have made it this far. 

What is Lamm’s main point in this piece? What does Lamm say about the media in relation to weight? What does Lamm seem to think about the idea of “judging only by what’s inside”?

The main point of the piece is to explain that a revolution is happening. “Where's the revolution?” Lamm asks, she continues by answering “My body is fucking beautiful, and every time I look in the mirror and acknowledge that, I am contributing to the revolution.” The piece explains her experience with body image. It explains a lot about how simply loving your body is a huge revolution. Lamm says that it is her life and that her words “are the most effective tool I have for challenging Whiteboyworld,” what Lamm then continues to explain is her way of saying the “patriarchy”.

Later in the piece the author goes through many of her childhood memories of being fat in a thin world. These memories are filled with diets and hate from school peers and her parents. After these memories Lamm continues: “But what about the lifetime of media I've been exposed to that tells me only thin people are lovable, healthy, beautiful, talented, fun?” She explains that all of her life “the media and everyone around me have told me that fat is ugly.”

In regards to the idea of “judging only by what’s inside”, Nomy Lamm says “Ignoring our bodies and "judging only by what's on the inside" is not the answer.” She continues by saying it’s “Bullshit! The more we ignore these aspects of ourselves, the more shameful they become and the more we are expected to be what is generally implied when these qualifiers are not given -- white, straight, rich, thin, male.” Lamm finishes off that thought by saying “True revolution comes not when we learn to ignore our fat and pretend we're no different, but when we learn to use it to our advantage, when we learn to deconstruct all the myths that propagate fat-hate.”

Hey guys, so I'm TA-ing for a class, Disabilities Studies, and I needed to come up with a one page summary for a presentation about Nomy Lamm and fatness and fat body issues as related to feminist and disabilities studies. I love Nomy Lamm and when I took this class a year ago, I did my final paper all about her. 

Nomy Lamm at Sins Invalid.  There's no transcript but there's sign language in portions of it.  (Unfortunately not all of it, and the camera doesn't linger on the interpreters enough.)