RESEARCH CONVERSATIONS

Since November 2023, Abigail has interviewed sixty socially marginalised members of the size community as part of an ongoing oral history project, conducted as part of The Giantess Speaks, titled Conversations with the Size Community. These conversations have been conducted partly for the purpose of furthering her academic research into the intersections between queerness, neurodivergence, disability, and divergent erotic expression, and partly to create a record of the faces and voices of all those who have made the size community what it is today.

Undertaken in a loose, relatively informal fashion, these recorded conversations comprise an extensive body of oral history depicting a highly stigmatised community consigned predominantly to the margins of the Internet, whose cultural corpus has historically been extremely ephemeral. It remains a community almost entirely consigned to online space, with in-person gatherings having historically been rare. Its niche, community-managed websites and forums have come and gone over the years, taking with them huge amounts of unarchived media as their servers went offline, and its community presences on more mainstream social media and art-sharing platforms are routinely destroyed, or threatened with destruction. A proudly kinky, sex-positive community at heart, the size community has been hit hard by the growing sanitisation and gentrification of the Internet, manifest through the effects of legislation such as FOSTA-SESTA, by mainstream social media platforms prohibiting “sexually explicit content” in order to placate advertising partners, or by digital payment providers such as PayPal or Stripe withdrawing support for transactions involving the exchange of adult goods or services. Through collecting these oral testimonies and transcripts, Abigail hopes to ensure that there remains a permanent, comprehensively archived record of the size community in its current form, and of as much of its history as can be retrieved, in order to foster a stronger understanding of this community and others like it within both public and academic space.

So far, Abigail has conducted over sixty research interviews as part of this project, and taken short testimonies from several other figures. As of September 2025, she is currently working through the process of transcribing and summarising all of the interviews she has conducted so far, totalling some two-hundred-plus hours of recordings. As a way of introducing the project, descriptions of the first four interviews and their participants can be found below; a more extensive account of the entire project, and detailed discussions of the other interviews in the series, will follow in due time once the archiving process is complete.

So far, Abigail has also created two zines documenting two of her earliest conversations from this project — those she conducted with author of Deviant Desires: A Tour of the Erotic Edge Katharine Gates, and with prominent size kink author and community figurehead Elle Largesse. These zines are both currently on sale through her online shop, and have both been acquired by the Wellcome Collection Library.

A CONVERSATION WITH ELLE LARGESSE

Elle Largesse — also known as “MightyTinyGiant” — is a size-shifting bisexual/pansexual polyamorous kinky erotica writer and blogger, who began to participate in “Giant/tiny” size kink spaces online in late 2015.

The size community has since become a safe haven that has helped her cope with feelings of size dysmorphia triggered by her experiences of living with with Alice-in-Wonderland Syndrome (AiWS) — a rare neurological condition that produces, in those who live with it, an inability to consistently gauge the true scale of objects around them or of their own physical bodies — and learn to love her body and her queer sexuality. Alongside being a prolific publisher of erotic fiction, she is also a regular panelist and community event host at SizeCon Micro, an online convention for size kinksters of various flavours.

A CONVERSATION WITH KATHARINE GATES

Katharine Gates is a writer, anthropologist, publisher, artist and curator based just outside New York City. She is the author of Deviant Desires: Incredibly Strange Sex, which was originally published in 2000 by RE/Search Publications, and reissued by PowerHouse Books with the amended subtitle A Tour of the Erotic Edge in 2017. Katharine was also the curator of KINK: Geography of the Erotic Imagination, an exhibition hosted by the Museum of Sex, NYC, in 2006.

Katharine was the curator, owner and proprietor of Key Gallery, an avant-garde contemporary art gallery in Richmond, Virginia, from 1991-93. Between 1992 and 2008, she also operated an independent art book publishing house — Gates of Heck — which would publish works by renowned artists such as Annie Sprinkle, Charles Burns, Gary Panter, Joe Coleman and Art Spiegelman, amongst others. In addition to her work as a writer, publisher and gallerist, Katharine is the creator of the Kinkmap, an ongoing attempt to document as many niche kinks and fetishes as possible, and chart the various connections between them within a single graphic matrix. The Kinkmap has been reprinted in Human Sexuality, a college psychology textbook, and can also be found online.