RESEARCH CONVERSATIONS

Since September 2023, Abigail has been conducting and archiving a series of recorded conversations with a number of prominent figures, including writers, artists and content creators, associated 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.

Abigail is currently working to transcribe and summarise all of the interviews she has conducted so far, totalling some twenty-plus hours of recordings. Details of some of these interviews can be found below. 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.

 
 

A CONVERSATION WITH ELLE LARGESSE

Elle Largesse — alternatively 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.

  • Abigail first interviewed Elle in November 2023. During their almost three-hour-long conversation, the pair discussed Elle’s somesthetic (or sensory-perceptive) experiences of size-shifting and size dysmorphia in the context of AiWS, and her use of erotic fantasy as a way of managing these often disorienting sensations she experiences as a result. Also discussed were Elle’s early experiences with exploring size-kink content online as a teenager living through the era of Web 1.0 forums such as alt.sex.stories, and her eventual embrace of her queerness, kinkiness and expansive divergent erotic imagination — and the online and offline communities surrounding each — as an adult in her thirties.

    Elle’s (NSFW) blog can be found online at www.ellelargesse.com. You can read more about Elle’s experiences of living with AiWS and embracing her size kink specifically by reading her essay Size Dysmorphia: A Size-Shifter Origin Story, published on the same website.

    To read a full transcript of our conversation (coming soon), or to purchase the zine documenting the interview pictured above, click the buttons below.

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.

  • In this recorded conversation, conducted with Abigail in September 2023, Katharine discusses the origins of Deviant Desires — in particular the research process that went into creating both the original 2000 edition and the book’s dramatically reworked 2017 reissue, which involved tracking down and interviewing the leading figures of several niche kink communities — and the desktop publishing phenomenon of the 1990s, which triggered the printing and dissemination of numerous niche erotic magazines proudly portraying kinks that had never previously been represented in print or the public consciousness, prompting several new divergent kink communities to coalesce into being, and providing a paper trail of uncommon erotic practices and their practitioners for Katharine to follow. Furthermore, Katharine discusses her experiences visiting and speaking at SizeCon — an annual convention for Giant(ess)/tiny and body expansion kinksters, held just outside New York City — and how her personal explorations of her own sexuality, gender presentation and neurodivergence helped inform her research practice and interest in unusual kinks.

    More information about Katharine’s Kinkmap project and the 2017 reissue of Deviant Desires can be found at www.kinkmap.com. Information about Katharine’s earlier work as proprietor of Key Gallery and of art publishing house Gates of Heck can be found at www.gatesofheck.com.

    To read a full transcript of our conversation (coming soon), or to purchase the zine documenting the interview pictured above, click the buttons below.

A CONVERSATION WITH MISS KANEDA

Miss Kaneda is a transfemme giantess, crush, footwear and femdom fetish content creator and erotic novelist based in Massachusetts. Active within online kink communities for over two decades, adopting feminine personas in virtual space for much of this time, Miss Kaneda — real name, Kylie — began hormonally transitioning in 2020, having begun to find the courage to publicly present as a woman in the real world around half a decade prior. She credits the exploration of gender identity and divergent sexual expression she was able to perform online as her giantess dominatrix alter-ego as being absolutely crucial to her eventual discovery, and embrace, of her transgender identity.

  • Presenting publicly as a woman for the very first time at the inaugural edition of SizeCon, held in 2016 in a photographic studio in New York City, the size kink community provided Kylie with what she considered the perfect environment in which to experiment with gender identity and presentation: an extraordinarily queer-friendly space that actively celebrated difference and divergence of sexual and gender expression. Although she is not as active as once she was in online kink and fetish spaces, having discovered her sexuality to have altered somewhat under the effects of feminising HRT regimens, she has maintained her close connection to the size kink community — attending and performing at SizeCon each year it has run.

    Our conversation together explored the intersections between Kylie’s experiences of exploring her transgender identity and her evolving relationship with the size community. We discussed her shifting relationship with violent eroticised fantasies, gendered power dynamics and the subversive dichotomy of female dominance/male submission, and her own favoured sexual and romantic rituals, fantasies and forms of expression between her post-transition queer, polyamorous relationships and the more traditionally amatonormative, heterosexual relationships she pursued before coming out as a trans woman. 

    Miss Kaneda’s (very NSFW) blog, including an archive of her short stories and novels, can be found at www.misskaneda.wordpress.com.

A CONVERSATION WITH MATTHEW HUNTLEY

Matthew Huntley is a professional fine artist and illustrator based in Indiana, specialising in oil painting. He is also a current member of the staff team responsible for organising and producing SizeCon, and he runs monthly social events, creative challenges and art critique sessions on Discord as the SizeCon community’s resident artist. Primarily inspired by the Baroque and Academic traditions of figurative painting, and by late-20th-century cartoons and video games such as Gundam and the Powerpuff Girls, Matthew’s art explores subversions of traditional masculinity, femininity and binary gender roles — and of the cultural class divisions between what is considered to be “high art” and the DIY, pulp-fiction aesthetics of niche science-fiction subcultures completely unrepresented in mainstream culture or in fine-art spaces. The highly technical paintings comprising his ongoing Vigilant Lioness series depict giant female heroines protecting humanity from a series of monsters which, in the tradition of Japanese kaiju arising due to genetic mutations caused by nuclear detonations, were created as a result of genetic mutations caused by anthropogenic environmental pollution.

  • In 2015, as an undergraduate student at the Herron School of Art & Design in Indianapolis, Matthew began to develop Vigilant Lioness, an ongoing series of oil paintings, poster-painted illustrations and comics. Rooted deeply in science-fiction and superhero aesthetic traditions, the series features a collective of giant female heroines brought into existence by an intrepid group of rogue military scientists, who stole secret genetic modification technologies they had been working on for DARPA — the US Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency — in order to engineer a team of vigilantes tasked with saving the human race from the apocalyptic consequences of its own actions, known only as Lioness.

    Over the years since Vigilant Lioness was first conceived, Matthew has exhibited his work at exhibitions and conventions across the United States, and in publications such as Infected By Art and Studio Visit Magazine. In 2020, a successful Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign allowed Matthew to publish a book detailing the development of the series to date, and the artistic process behind the creation of each painting within it.

    During our conversation together, conducted in February 2024, Matthew and I discussed the subversive appropriation of oil painting as a “traditional” high-art medium, in order to create detailed artworks distinctly divorced from the (often highly gatekept) aesthetics, histories and artistic canons — and the baggage of upper-class cultural pretences — associated with it. We discussed our experiences of art school as relative creative contemporaries working in very different media, focusing on the difficulties Matthew faced as an artist obsessed with traditionally skilled, highly process-based and labour-intensive methods of making art — which typically involve producing numerous maquettes, models, preliminary sketches and studies, and conducting several photoshoots, per painting produced — in the context of contemporary art-school spaces which have largely moved away from prescriptively teaching such skills and processes over the last four decades, instead taking a far more conceptual, fluid, and ultimately laissez-faire approach to arts education. 

    All of Matthew’s Vigilant Lioness paintings can be viewed on his website, www.matthewjhuntley.com.

Image credit: Way Cooler Than Sea Monkeys (2024) by Matthew Huntley.

Image credit: Mankind’s Biggest Hero Isn’t A Man (2018) by Matthew Huntley.

A CONVERSATION WITH JOYCE JULEP

Joyce Julep is a professional erotica author and erotic role-player, who produces short stories and novels featuring giantess fantasy themes for commission. Publishing her works primarily on sites such as DeviantArt and erotica platform Giantess World, as well as maintaining a large following for her exclusive or early-access content on both Patreon and adult subscription service SubscribeStar, Joyce has fostered enough of a following to be able to live purely off of the income she has made as a size content creator.

Subverting many common tropes within giantess writing focused on depicting "giant/growing woman and tiny/shrinking man” dynamics, typically in ways designed to serve a cis-het male gaze, Joyce’s literature is infused with a distinctive self-awareness and queerness despite its typically heterosexual focus. Her novels in particular delve deep into exploring the fragility of contemporary masculinity and the male ego, expertly deploying the inversion of gendered social power dynamics practically inherent to giantess erotica as a genre in order to manifest both social and internalised crises of emasculsation — to render inexorably visible patriarchal masculinity’s existential fear of slipping down the gendered social hierarchy — and comment upon or satirise these anxieties.

A CONVERSATION WITH SCOTT GRILDRIG

Scott Grildrig is a prominent author of “giantess fetish” fiction who has been active within size kink community spaces since the late 1980s, during which time the only way of finding niche kink art or literature, or of seeking community with others who shared an uncommon erotic affinity, was through print media: in the case of giantess kinksters, through tangentially relevant pornographic magazines targeting a much broader audience, such as iconic fetish magazine Leg Show, or through smaller DIY publications such as Giantess, originally published in 1988. One of the earliest size content creators to emerge on the early Internet, in July 1993 Grildrig published a short story called Janice in the City — a simple “giantess rampage” story about a woman inexplicably growing to skyscraper-size and destroying swathes of a city loosely based on Los Angeles — to the USENET board alt.sex.stories in response to a fellow user’s request for erotic literature featuring giant women. One of the absolute progenitors of size kink fiction as we know it today, over the thirty-plus years since Janice in the City’s initial release Grildrig has consistently been one of the most prolific and well-known creators of kinky giantess fiction, establishing several of the signature styles and literary tropes commonplace within modern size literature, and comedically subverting them in turn.

  • Grildrig has collaborated with several other artists and writers within the size community, providing literary accompaniments for their visual art projects, or on occasion collaborating on stories. Having been present within size community space through several different shifts from online platform to online platform — from the aforementioned alt.sex.stories, to the IRC chatroom #!!giantess, to niche online forums such as GiantessCity and larger, more mainstream social media and art-sharing websites such as DeviantArt, Discord and Twitter more recently — his knowledge and personal experience of size community space and its evolution is invaluable to constructing an understanding of what this community is, and how it emerged in the first place. Stories such as IRC URC, published in 1997 and featuring actual users of #!!giantess as characters, and characters such as “Kathy the Giantess Wife” and “Mitzi the Ditz” (inspired by pre-Internet giantess model Kathy Castro, and by a character created by early-1990s size artist Cat, respectively) serve to document a time period in the size community’s early history that has sadly otherwise gone unarchived.

    A full list of Grildrig’s size stories can be found on his DeviantArt page here.

 

Image credit: Biggest Baddest Besties Forever by Aphrodite, from Grildrig’s short story Janice & Pam: Fourth Wall.

 
 
 

RESEARCH AFTERWORD & UPDATE — AUGUST 2024

So far, I have conducted thirteen recorded research interviews as part of this project, and taken short testimonies from several other figures. I am currently working to edit interview transcriptions — almost all of which are over two hours long, and some of which are over three — and produce small fold-out zines based on these research interviews, similar to those I created in late-2023 for my conversations with Elle Largesse and Katharine Gates. Please be patient — this webpage, and The Giantess Speaks as an overarching endeavour, are both a one-person operation maintained by Abigail herself in between her day job!

If you would like to support me in continuing this research endeavour, please do consider supporting my work on Ko-fi! Any donations would mean the world to me — particularly as I am currently fundraising to ensure I can continue to have access to the critical mental health and disability access support that have allowed me to make this wild endeavour a reality.