This page is dedicating to documenting and archiving the research process underpinning Abigail’s current multidisciplinary creative/academic research project, The Giantess Speaks. Featured towards the foot of this page is documentation of a series of recorded conversations Abigail has conducted as part of her endeavours to archive the voices and insights of the “size community,” which the project is intended to document and celebrate. As time progresses, and her research starts to properly crystallise into the body of non-fiction and academic literature she intends to eventually publish as part of this project, Abigail will additionally begin to add additional content such as reading lists, short essays and draft book extracts to this page too.
Abigail is always interested to hear from individuals who might wish to contribute to her work, or share with her any materials they believe may prove valuable to her research process. In particular, she is currently seeking to hear from queer/transgender, female or non-binary, neurodivergent or disabled members of the size kink community, who might be willing to sit down and participate in a recorded Zoom conversation with her as part of her efforts to archive the experiences of marginalised members of this particular erotic community. She is also extremely interested in hearing from other artists or researchers, who are also studying or producing work about divergent human sexuality and the marginalised body. To contact Abigail in relation to her research practice, please click the button below and fill in the contact form.
More information on The Giantess Speaks as an overarching project can be found here.
Have something you’d like to contribute? Click the button below!
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Want to see a list of references for Abigail’s research process? Click the button below!
RESEARCH CONVERSATIONS
Since September 2023, Abigail has conducted and archived a series of recorded conversations with a number of prominent figures, including writers, artists and content creators, associated with the “size community.” Undertaken in a loose, relatively informal fashion, 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 — to amass a body of oral history depicting a stigmatised community consigned predominantly to the margins of the Internet, whose cultural corpus has historically been extremely ephemeral as niche, community-managed websites and forums have come and gone, and community presences on mainstream social media and art distribution platforms have been destroyed, or threatened with destruction, by the effects of legislation such as FOSTA-SESTA, or by digital payment providers such as PayPal or Stripe withdrawing support for transactions involving the exchange of adult goods or services.
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 interviews from this project — including the very first interview she conducted, with author of Deviant Desires: A Tour of the Erotic Edge Katharine Gates, and her November 2023 interview with prominent size kink author and community figurehead Elle Largesse — both of which are currently on sale through her online shop, and both of which are currently in the process of being acquired by the Wellcome Collection Library.
A CONVERSATION WITH ELLE LARGESSE
Elle Largesse — alternatively known as “MightyTinyGiant” — is a size-shifting bisexual/pansexual polyamorous kinky erotica writer and blogger. She began to participate in “Giant/tiny” size kink spaces online in late 2015, embracing the community as a safe haven that helped her cope with size dysmorphia triggered by her experiences living with with Alice-in-Wonderland Syndrome (AiWS) — a 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.
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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 (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, and was 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 independent, avant-garde contemporary art gallery in Richmond, Virginia, from 1991-93. Between 1992 and 2008, she also ran an artist’s publishing house — Gates of Heck — which would publish works by Annie Sprinkle, Charles Burns, Gary Panter, Joe Coleman and Art Spiegelman, amongst others. She is also the creator of the Kinkmap, an attempt to chart as many niche kinks and fetishes as possible, and the connections between them. The Kinkmap has been reprinted in Human Sexuality, a college psychology textbook, and can also be found online.
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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.
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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 work 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 — through his highly technical paintings depicting 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.
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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.
RESEARCH AFTERWORD & UPDATE — APRIL 2024
So far, I have conducted nine 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 Nancy//the World 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.