The Day 2 challenge for Blogging 101 is about editing your blog title and tag line. To me, it’s an additive exercise to yesterday’s “who am I and why am I writing” meditation — now just taken that one next step of distilling that mission statement to its essence in order to create a title and tagline that, to quote the assignment, “give visitors context and help them decide to stick around.”

Obviously, being as I am already 5 years and/or 6 months into the game, I have a well-established blog title,* and it’s one I’m not eager to change. The question of tagline, though, is wide open for consideration, and I’m happy to talk about both these elements after the jump.

So how did I concoct the name for JALC, anyways? It stems from the ways I started this blog thinking it was going to be pretty closely focused around fat acceptance topics (filtered through my own unique, intellectual-spiritual sensibilities, of course).

As I was thinking and thinking about what sorts of phrases could feed both into an available WordPress URL and into a blog-name, somehow I started mulling over the way that fat-shaming and diet-talk have been subsumed under the umbrella of “making a lifestyle change.” It’s a concept brilliantly deconstructed by Kate Harding on Shapely Prose many many moons ago.

And I was struck by the core truth that, however nice the phrasing or polite the metaphors used to call a diet something not-a-diet, that process — whatever the name — feeds off of women’s bodily insecurities. It’s a process that perpetuates (and is perpetuated by) a culture of misogyny, of body policing, and the objectification of women. Also, at a deeper and more essential level than that, it’s a process that perpetuates (and is perpetuated by) a culture of self-judgement, inadequacy, and not-enoughness.

So, somewhere out of all those muddled musings came the notion that “Wouldn’t it be great if self-acceptance and self-love were the lifestyle change we were all working on?!?”  I checked to confirm that some distillation of those words was available on WordPress, and lo!

Self-Love: It’s Just Another Lifestyle Change was born!

Even though I’ve moved on to talk about a wider range of topics than fat acceptance, keeping JALC as my blog-name feels authentic and the appropriate thing to do. For one, I’ve grown ridiculously fond of my little acronym. More substantively, I still see the unconscious patternings around inadequacy, dishonor and not-enoughness as being core to so many of the other cultural patternings I try to unpack and explore. Self-love,in a mature, centered, dignified, joyful way — that’s still the lifestyle change I wish held prominence in the culture. So, the name JALC is gonna stick around for a while…

Now about that tagline:

fat, feminist, feisty

I’m less certain that still suits. I mean, those three adjectives are all still true, and I will forever love me some alliteration. But are these the three most important adjectives to describe the Sherri that shows up to write these essays on JALC?

Feminist still rings truest and most relevant. Keep it: no doubt, no question.

Fat is still true, but no longer the central topic of my writing here. On the other hand, a lot of my insights into our glamor culture have directly been influenced by my time as a fat girl, and it would feel a bit like I was playing into those beauty standards if I were to erase mention of my body size from the “theatre marquis.”

And, even though I worry some that emphasizing Feisty makes me sound like I’m playing the one-note samba of feminist anger in a way that isn’t entirely true, I might as well cop to the fact that I voice enough outrage and exasperation in these posts that I’ve created a special tag for the phenomenon.

So I guess, for now, the three F’s will stay as-is.** But I’ll keep watching them and thinking on this all. Maybe something more resonant will emerge over time.

* Well, “well-established” to all 20 of my readers…

** Bonus points if you understand the artwork by now…

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Image credit: “D Major on bass clef” by Rljohnson821. Unaltered. Used under a Creative Commons license. (Retrieved from: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:D_major_on_bass_clef.png )