Body Positivity: Creating a Space for the Representation of Marginalized Bodies

1. Introduction

“True freedom from body oppression wouldn’t just be freedom from our own past shame, but a society that didn’t shame us for our bodies in the first place.”

-Alysse Dalessandro, Body Positive Writer and Designer

Started by fat women, for fat women, the Body Positive Movement originally sought to dismantle and nuance the powerful common narrative of the fat body through the visual representation of those that were marginalized because of the way they look. While Fat Liberation Activists had been engaging in activism since the 1970’s, in the early 2010’s self-representations of fat women on private Facebook groups, pages on Tumblr, and fashion blogs, continued this work and began creating a virtual space, online, where fat individuals could tell their own stories, empower and celebrate one another through the emerging movement, Body Positivity. Body Positivity was bred as a new face for Fat Activism and it was an intentionally political movement. In contrast, today the Body Positive movement is characterized by critics like Ariel Woodson, co-host of the podcast, Bad Fat Broads, as the promotion of self-love. In an interview with Alyse Delassandro, Woodson states, “Body positivity [in 2017] is about reassuring the least structurally oppressed that ‘they’re pretty too’ and focuses on assuaging individual feelings” (Delassandro). Delassandro elaborates, arguing that the face of body positivity is full of people with white skin, hourglass figures, and flat stomachs, who often see Body Positivity as a way to “advocate for their advancement of their bodies without considering the experiences of anyone else’s.” Individuals introduced to the movement today often understand Body Positivity as a space where all people are simply positive about their body, perpetuating the shift from what was once a movement about disrupting status quo modes of thinking that marginalized fat bodies as well as other kinds of different bodies to a movement that is represented primarily by people with normative bodies telling others to love themselves.

This paper is focused on testing the claim of Woodson and other critics that Body Positivity has become depoliticized and individualized. I do this by examining how Body Positivity is represented on Instagram. Instagram’s visual focus foregrounds the representation of bodies, and frames the meaning of these images through accompanying captions and sequential conversational discourse. Body Positivity’s focus on the visual representation of bodies that are marginalized because of the way they physically look has led Instagram to being the primary social media platform of the Body Positive Movement. Users create accounts which other users can follow and participate with in conversation. When an image is posted the use of hashtags is particularly important in positioning that image within the correct framework so that it is searchable by other users looking for specific content. The Body Positive Movement has adopted both the hashtags #bodypositive and #bodypositivity, among many others; these are now specifically associated with their movement. When users search for these hashtags, a list of all images using them are displayed with the nine “top posts” based on the Instagram algorithm placed at the top. The accessibility of these top posts, which are identified as the most popular posts in that moment, under that hashtag, raises the visibility of those accounts and associates them as main actors within the Body Positive Movement. By using Instagram, I was able to identify what types of bodies are most seen within the Body Positive Movement and understand the ideas that are being reproduced as Body Positive through visual content and language. While on the surface, the Body Positive movement appears to offer a counter-narrative to the assumption made about people with fat bodies, my study shows that the movement on Instagram currently upholds the devaluation of fat and other marginalized bodies.

2. “The People,” the Fat Narrative, Fat Activism and Body Positivity: A Brief Review

2.1. Who are “the People”

Judith Butler in her Introduction of, “Notes Towards a Performative Theory of Assembly,” asks “who really are the people,” (3). “The People” here being understood as those who are a part of us or those that we look out for. “The People,” according to Butler, “are not a given population, but are rather constituted by the lines of demarcation that we implicitly or explicitly establish” (3). When rules and norms are established for society, not only are who “the People” are being defined, but also who “the People” are not is being established. Because this can be done both implicitly and explicitly, the act of defining who a society seeks to protect and serve is often performative which serves to privilege the idea that the chosen rules and norms are natural (6). Butler describes those who are of “the People” as the “seen” and those that are not of “the People” as the unseen (5). Western cultures have privileged and normalized the experience of thin bodies as well as white bodies, cis-gendered bodies, able bodies, and healthy bodies. Society created a world for only able-bodied, cis-gendered, healthy and thin bodies and then assumed that it was natural. Thus, those that have bodies that deviate from the presumed “natural” state are marginalized. This marginalization manifests itself in economic, social, and political ways, even contributing often to the diminishing health and wellness of those who are not deemed a part of “the People”.

2.2. The Fat Narrative: What does it mean to be fat?

Fat bodies are constantly objects of criticism, resulting in dehumanization. According to Lynn Mabel-Lois, being fat means a life of ridicule, rejection, starvation, self-hatred, and guilt (Schoenfielder and Wieser 54). Society believes fat women choose to be fat and therefore deserve to suffer the consequences of their choices; they gain recognition only when they buy into the weight loss game, exhausting themselves trying to gain social approval (Goodman 171). Per this narrative, the fat woman cannot be beautiful, dynamic, or interesting because those are terms reserved for thin women (172). From a social and political perspective, Kathleen Lebesco illuminates how the fat person is characterized: “In a modern capitalist patriarchy such as the United States, fat is repulsive, funny, unclean, obscene, and above all, as something to lose” (16). She goes on to say that fat women’s experience is flattened down to “ugly, disgusting, sometimes laughable objects of derision.” They are cast “as pitiful victims of bad genes and psychological anomaly, whose greatest ambition is to lose fifty pounds and thereby solve all of their problems” (41). Samantha Murray explains this as well. “In the mainstream sexual marketplace, fat bodies are not marketable commodities,” she writes, “The fat body stands as a symbol of gluttonous obsessions, unmanaged desires and the failed self” (239). Debbie Notkin, fat liberation activist and writer of Women En Large explains why the representations of fat bodies in the Body Positive movement are so necessary: like “corporate lawyer” or “sullen teenager” the phrase “fat woman” contains the implications that you now know all you need to know able the person being discussed (91). In the prevailing narrative of American culture, fat women don’t have individual identities. The narrative flattens all that they are into one general “fat woman” stereotype. Not only this, as Petra Kuppers argues in her essay “Fatties on Stage,” the voices of women of size are stripped from them. “As fat in contemporary society strips away agency and subjectivity, fat takes away the voice and acquires its own vocabulary,” she explains, “And a vocabulary of the fat female body tells not of agency, but of loss of control” (Evans Braziel and LeBesco 278). All this culminates in a very discouraging, dehumanizing, and objectifying narrative of fat women. The question that Body Positive activists ask is: if our bodies are read against our will, how do we perform our specific and individualized identity?

2.3. Fat Activism: Where does Body Positivity come from?

At its inception, the Body Positive movement worked to queer the bodies and lives of marginalized people. In their article, “Queering beauty: fatshionistas in the fatosphere,” Lauren Gurrieri and Helene Cherrier define “queering” as a “mode of critical engagement” that “aims to resist and denaturalize the taken for granted” ideas of identity (277). Queer is understood as something that is active, recognizing that our identities are not fixed, and that the culture and its norms are ever changing. This is reflective of Michel Foucault’s contention that “‘performance of the self’ offers a liberatory route for the expression of individual identity. Conceiving identity as the dramatic effect of one’s performances enables an individual to craft different forms of performance, in the process housing the potential to challenge binaries that structure understandings of the self and reinvent any perceived confines of identity” (Gurriere et al., 278). In his book, The History of Sexuality, Foucault understands power as not simply repressive as it is often believed to be, but also creative (92-93). Power is not simply enacted upon the subject, but the subject also has power to confront, transform, and reverse the ways in which power is dispersed within society (92). With this understanding, people with marginalized bodies have the ability to cultivate the life that they want to live based on the understanding that they have the power to challenge existing norms, and that by living as happy and fulfilled individuals, claiming their own ability to be sexual beings, and living boldly, they are making a political statement about how their bodies are not burdens, but instead are powerful, autonomous, and valuable to the population as a whole. The body becomes the source of power; and, in defining their existence according to their own beliefs about themselves they are making a political statement.

Body Positivity developed from the fat liberation movement, which in the 1970’s sought to disidentify with the grand societal narrative of fat bodies by forming liberation groups and bringing awareness of their oppression to the forefront of feminism. Fat feminists in Los Angeles who were a part of a local feminist radical therapy group were inspired by their personal experience as fat women and the radical therapy approach of the “personal is political” and created the Fat Underground in 1972. The small group fluctuated in membership over the next decade, but it did succeed in producing The Fat Liberation Manifesto and bringing fat issues to the attention of the wider feminist movement (Shoenfielder and Wieser xiii). At its core, Fat Liberation highlights the oppression fat people face, the culprits of that oppression (commercial and sexist interests), the reason that oppression exists, and recognizes the need for the narrative of fat lives to be challenged.

Although the term “Body Positive” was coined in 1996 by Connie Sobszak and Elizabeth Scott, founders of The Body Positive, a national organization created to “build a community to foster healing from the societal messages that breed body hate,” it was not associated with a broader movement until about fifteen years later, when it became associated with the fat activism movement online. The availability of the Internet in western culture provided a space for fat activists to speak about fat issues, oppression, and representation from the comfort of their homes. Known as the “Fat-o-sphere”, online blogs and forums for fat women enabled fat activists to discuss anything from fashion to relationships and fat oppression. According to Marie Southard Ospina, a body positive writer, the term Body Positivity “seemed to be primarily used by folks whose roots were in radical size acceptance and body politics. Its tie to the fat community was undeniable — so chances were that anyone using it was fighting for an end to the kind of size discrimination that comes from society, by and large, not treating all bodies as good bodies” (qtd in Delassandro). According to Virgie Tovar, writer and fat activist, “once fat activism began to get mainstream attention” the term became more widespread (qtd in Delassandro). The goal of this study is to examine representations of Body Positivity online and to consider whether contemporary representations meet the original goals of the movement or, as Delassandro and others assert, reproduce hegemonic bodily norms.

3. Methods

In order to determine the current understanding of Body Positivity, I looked at Instagramover the course of a week, documenting the nine top posts in both the #bodypositive and #bodypositivity hashtags each day of the week. I chose these hashtags because they are synonymous with the Body Positive Movement. At the end of the week, there were ninety-eight distinct posts receiving between 2,136 likes to 77,834 likes each. I examined each image for who was represented in the image, how they were presenting themselves within discussions of Body Positivity, and the language used within the caption in order to identify several different themes. I then used the constant comparative method which is concerned with identifying phenomenon and connecting it to larger social concepts to analyze the images, not with a specific hypothesis in mind, but to interpret the relationship of the post to the larger Body Positive discourse in the past and present. Overall, I consider how or if these top images and accounts are addressing Body Positivity’s original purpose to destigmatize marginalized bodies.

In order to critically analyze my data for information pertaining to the current purpose of the Body Positive Movement, I used Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). CDA was developed in the 1980’s to address the lack of critical analysis along lines of social inequality in current research analysis (Van Dijk). It is an interdisciplinary approach to study how text-based discourse is used to resist dominant narratives in society (Williams). CDA “focuses on the ways discourse structures enact, confirm, legitimate, reproduce, or challenge relations of power and dominance in society” (Van Dijk 353). To add to this, I also employed Critical Technocutural Discourse Analysis, a technique that is used to analyze internet and digital interactions and artifact. According to Andre Brock, “CTDA requires the incorporation of critical theory—critical race, feminism, queer theory, and so on. CTDA is a technique rather than a method; it draws energy from Nakamura's (2006) argument that Internet studies should match considerations of form, the user, and the interface with an attention to the ideologies that underlie them.” CTDA recognizes that technology is used as a place of social and political power negotiations and seeks to identify how certain platforms facilitate this. In this paper, I use CTDA to examine prominent themes in the discourse and imagery of the Body Positive Movement, and analyze how they uphold or challenge dominant narratives. While coding the images to identify prominent themes that exist within the Body Positive Movement, I looked at the image itself, the caption, and the overall content of each user’s account. I identified the race, body size, ability, and gender of the subject in each image. I then looked for repetitive imagery in what the subjects were doing in each image. It was important to look for themes that contributed to the Body Positive narrative. Similarly, I looked at the captions attached to each image for reoccurring themes and what those themes presented about how the Body Positive movement is understood today.

4. Results and Discussion: Queering Body Positivity

4.1. Visual Representations in the Body Positivity Movement: Image Content

4.1.1. Who is Represented

Visual representations have long been a central aspect of Fat Liberation Activism, used to “reach people emotionally” thus humanizing the subjects, so that “a genuine change of attitude towards fatness would occur” (Stein 10). Unsurprisingly, Instagram, which centralizes images as its primary content, has become the primary social media platform of the Body Positive Movement. However, the images found on Instagram frequently reproduced normative body representations. In my research, sixty-four of the ninety-eight unique top posts featured a thin-white woman. Fourteen of the images featured persons of color. Only Seventeen of the images were of perceivably fat women, and only nine were of fat women of color. None of the images featured a trans-identifying person or visibly disabled person. The truth is that the people representing the Body Positive movement currently are not people with marginalized bodies, but are largely thin, white, able-bodied, cis-gendered women.

Example: Top Posts under the #BodyPositive hashtag on 24 March 2017

Thin, white women are celebrated for having the ideal body in our society currently. When an image of a thin, white woman is shown to someone, there is nothing uncomfortable or radical about it. It’s easy to “like” the image and celebrate these women for embracing their bodies as they are now. Privilege matters in the Body Positive conversation and those with the most privilege in their body, are palatable, and therefore, the Instagram algorithm based on likes pushes images of thin, white women to the forefront of the movement, a movement that was created for the celebration of marginalized bodies. Bethany Rutter in her article, “How ‘body positivity’ lost its true radical meaning,” sums up the frustration many Body Positive activists express:

“A genuinely radical and useful ‘movement’ would aim to scoop up all the people whose bodies our culture otherwise rejects. That’s what body positivity used to be, was meant to be. Bodies that weren’t getting a pat on the back just for turning up. Bodies that weren’t thin and white and cisgender and functioning at 100 percent all the time, or even any of the time. A radical movement, like body positivity is meant to be, would be a group of, essentially, social misfit bodies finding a place to celebrate their existence, assert their right to be there, bond and find peace.

Instead what we’re left with is slim-but-curvy white women being treated like the Messiah for acknowledging they have one microscopic belly roll.”

Self-representation has been used throughout the history of Fat Liberation to disrupt and call into question the prevailing narrative of fat women that dehumanizes them to the point that their existence becomes invisible and their voices are silenced. It’s a means of self-empowerment, a way for the fat woman to define her own identity and place in the world, where fat women have so long felt as if there was no alternative to believing they were not good enough. Instagram has given Body Positive Activists and their content a more mainstream audience, but my findings show it has also privileged the voices of those whose voices and existence is already celebrated.

In Delassandro’s article, Corissa Ennecking, a Plus Size Fashion Blogger and YouTube Creator, is quoted saying, “I think that what started as a movement, has become a catch all phrase for ‘you do you.’” Very early on, Body Positivity took on the catch all phrase, “All Bodies Are Good Bodies,” to center the conversation around seeing bodies in a positive light and as a sign that everyone was welcome in the movement. Yet as time has gone on, it seems that that saying has been understood as the centralizing purpose of Body Positivity, leaving behind its political and radical roots. “Body positivity is incredibly political, and is centered on facing and tearing down oppression of bodies outside the ‘norm.’ As it’s become more mainstream, we’ve seen people shy away from confronting the political components of what it means to be in a body that faces oppression. People have started using the words without actually thinking critically about why they’re using them,” says Ennecking (qtd in Delassandro). Delassandro elaborates on this, “The phrase, “all bodies are good bodies” may seem like the simplest way to describe the body positivity belief system. But it loses traction in the actions of those who use it most loudly. As the voices of some become elevated over others, it feels like the message is far more individualized.” My findings support these assertions. Those with the most privilege have understood body positivity within their own context to mean something far less radical than its original intention and have then had their voices heard more often, resulting in a Body Positivity that looks very different than the one that it set out to be, which was a movement that centers, celebrates, and represents marginalized bodies.

4.1.2. What is Represented

Since it is not only the embodied identities of each subject that conveys a message, it is also important to analyze what the individuals in the image are doing. As I stated above, fat activism and currently Body Positivity use images to represent the lives of people with marginalized bodies. The content of the image tells a story about who the person is and how they live their life, hopefully challenging the stereotypes of their bodies and binary understanding of marginalized existence. It’s important to ask if the content of the images in the Body Positive Movement actually challenge societal norms and oppressive structures.

4.1.2.1. Body Parts

Example: Two thin-white women grab their bellies while sitting in bikinis.

A common theme in many of the nine-eight posts over the course of the week was the emphasis of on how a body part can look different based on a person’s stance or pose. Nine of the ninety-eight images featured this sort of content. For example, the image above shows two thin, smiling white women siting down, hunched over and bringing attention to their “belly rolls” by grabbing them. With their smiling faces, the image conveys the idea that their fat belly rolls do not bother them. While not inherently damaging, this image features women with acceptable bodies using the body positive hashtags to say that their happiness within their bodies is enough to be considered Body Positive. Virgie Tovar addresses the impact of the Body Positive movement being used in this way, saying, “It’s like women who have a t-shirt that says ‘girl power’ but don’t want to call themselves feminists because that is committing to an actual principle, it’s actually a political stance. So, they are getting the benefits of the work done by those of us who are risking something, but also setting up deniability. It’s cowardice that is obscured through alternative language” (qtd in Delassandro). The subjects in the image are not actually addressing the systemic oppression of marginalized bodies, in fact they aren’t even saying that fat on their bodies is irrelevant. What they are saying is, even though they have fat on their bodies or that their bodies can look larger in certain poses, that is ok, because they still love themselves. In other words, the fat on their bodies is still being framed as something about which they should be ashamed, but that their “self-love” frees them from those feelings of inadequacy.

4.1.2.2 Before and After Another problematic theme identified in my research was before and after weight loss pictures. Five of the ninety-eight top posts in the top body positive images were of people who were using their body positive platform to celebrate weight loss by comparing their thinner body to their previously fatter one. Even though this is just over five percent of the images, the fact that they are under the Body Positive hashtags at all is problematic. While Body Positivity is not explicitly against weight loss, it is a space that was created to be absent of diet culture and weight loss talk. In fact, Body Positivity, much like fat acceptance movements, seeks to educate about how and why diet culture exists and the lies about health and weight diet culture perpetuates. Body Positivity is set aside as a place that does

Example: The user posts a side-by-side image of her body before-and-after weight loss.

not devalue people for being unhealthy or praise people for being healthy. It also seeks to disrupt the correlation between fatness and health and the view that fat bodies are inherently unhealthy and obesity is a disease. When fat bodies are placed as the “before” body and the thinner body as the “after” body, it supports the understanding that the thinner body is healthier and more appealing, thus placing the fat body as the body that needed to be changed. In her interview with Delassandro, Ospina demonstrates why the celebration of weight loss and body positivity are two exclusive ideas:

“The thing is, it’s crucial that we interrogate why we want to do certain things to our bodies, primarily when those things are arguably rooted in the oppression of women and femmes. The weight loss/dieting industry is precisely that: An

industry. It’s a clever one, too. It’s one rooted in promoting the idea

that weight loss is a cure-all to every possible ailment (physical or

psychological). It promises us that a smaller body will lead to happier, more fulfilled life. Ultimately, those are not empowering

or radical or inclusive messages. Therefore, I can’t personally imagine a scenario in which the promotion of weight loss would ever feel body positive” (Delassandro).

Body Positivity asks why we feel that we need to lose weight and looks for the answer not in the individual, but at the societal context in which we live. Body Positivity realizes that ignoring the cultural values and forces that individuals, especially women, experience in western culture, would be to ignore a primary source of oppression towards women. As Bordo states, “Through the exacting and normalizing disciplines of diet, makeup, and dress—central organizing principles of time and space in the day of many women—we are rendered less socially oriented and more centripetally focused on self-modification. Through these disciplines, we continue to memories on our bodies the feel and conviction of lack, of insufficiency, of never being good enough” (91). She goes on to further conclude that this pursuit for the acceptable feminine body often leads to silence, dehumanization, debilitation, and even death. This is the reality of the impact of values places on bodies, so Body Positivity takes issue with any sort of recognition of the acceptableness of this hierarchy, as with the before and after picture.

4.2. Language Within the Body Positive Movement: Caption Content

4.2.1 Diet Culture

Surprisingly, the most common theme among the top posts in Body Positivity was the promotion of diet culture. Diet culture, although not clearly defined, is the set of beliefs and ideas that contribute to the understanding that everyone can have a perfect, healthy body and that that body is thin. Diet culture correlates better health with weight loss at any cost (Burgard, 44-47; Eller). The lines of diet culture and body positivity have most definitely been blurred, allowing for the infiltration of counterproductive ideas that hold up stigma and oppression against fat people. Twenty-nine of the accounts in my study explicitly stated that they were on a weight loss journey in their account bio. Nine of those also explicitly stated they were body positive. Fat Studies scholars and Body Positive activists, however, are opposed to Diet Culture. Body Positivity, backed by scientific research, argues that the current understandings of fatness and weight loss in our society are based on problematic research and misunderstandings of how fatness affects the individual. The emphasis on weight loss in our culture hinges almost exclusively on the idea that having fat is unhealthy. Yet research shows that this is not a clear conclusion to draw. Health at Every Size proponents including clinicians, health professionals, and researchers have recognized holes in the conversation of fatness and health that is perpetuated today. A person’s obesity categorization is determined almost exclusively by their BMI. In Deb Burgard’s essay, “What is ‘Health at Every Size,” she outlines the methodological critiques of the research on high BMI and health (46-47). If BMI is the standard by which current obesity research categorizes someone’s health status we need to be reasonably certain that the claims we are making by this measurement are supported by research. Yet, when we dig past the surface level diet culture and weight loss talk, BMI as a measurement that determines whether someone is healthy becomes rather unstable. For instance, Burgard discusses that “The diseases that are associated with higher BMI also occur at low BMI” (46). Yet the negative health concerns are stigmatized and circulated for those with a high-BMI. She also states that, “Health improvements attributed to weight loss occur without any weight loss when research participants improve their health practices. There is no dose-response relationship between the degree of weight loss and the degree of health benefits, which is what we would expect if weight loss was causing the health benefit. Also, weight loss in the absence of improved health practices, like liposuction, has not been demonstrated to correlate with health improvements” (47). With this evidence in hand, Body Positivity recognizes that diet culture is not supported by evidence and that the ways in which diet culture upholds a system that values thin bodies, able bodies, young bodies, white bodies, and cis-gendered bodies over marginalized bodies is extremely harmful. Body Positivity from its inception has been anti-diet culture and the idea that health is associated with someone’s weight this is especially true when we recognize that research shows that weight loss alone does not improve the health of an individual, but healthy practices around consuming nutritional food and movement of our bodies do show signs of improving health whether weight loss occurs or not (Burgard 47). Even then, Body Positivity goes one step further and seeks to value everyone, healthy or not.

Body Positivity is not about health. Unhealthy or not, everyone is valuable and worthy of living their best life and not experiencing discrimination, stigma, or oppression. According to G.M. Eller, in their article, “On Fat Oppression,” Dworkin and Wachs address how healthism, a view in western society that claims, “one’s weight is one’s own personal and moral responsibility…obscures the impact of government and structural contributions to health disparities” (234). The very idea that a person’s health is solely determined by their actions, while proven false, upholds ideas of fat phobia and is relied upon for diet and weight loss culture to exist and it gives a pass to the broader societal institutions that hold primary power over citizen’s health such as how physicians treat their fat patients often dismissing their ailments as simply side effects of their weight. In fact, when weight loss is celebrated as a sign of health, this again contributes to bolstering up the hierarchy of bodies present in our society. In my research, of the ninety-eight captions, twenty of them focused on feeling healthy or being healthy. Of those twenty images, thirteen correlated weight loss with better health and most discouraging was that six of them outright promoted a specific weight loss plan or fad. An example of this is pictured below.

Example: A caption from a top-post in the #BodyPositivity hashtag.

In fact, this caption has nothing about Body Positivity, just straight diet culture. The user is using body positive hashtags either as a ploy to target a specific audience, meaning she is seeking to infiltrate their safe space to promote diet culture, or that she believes that body positivity and health, fitness, and weight loss are intertwined. It is clear from the frequency of mentions of health and weight loss in the captions of the top post in body positive hash tags that this latter idea exists.

4.2.2. Self-Love

In my analysis, “self-love” was a significant theme in many of the captions, making an appearance in nineteen of the posts. Body Positivity originally was about creating a community where individuals with marginalized bodies could find themselves represented and where they could share their experiences of oppression and discrimination while also representing how they live their lives, challenging the stereotypes about them, yet as time has gone on there has been a significant move towards representing Body Positivity as an individual practice.

Examples: Captions from two posts under the #BodyPositivity hashtag that center self-love

In the above examples of captions from my research, both users express how their body negativity has been and can be overcome by love for their bodies. The user, @selfloveclubb explains that it is because of Body Positivity that she now loves her thighs and can enjoy activities she had previously avoided because they made her thighs bigger. In no way is she disputing that big thighs should be devalued, but instead, she has interpreted Body Positivity as a space that allows her to overcome the negative feelings and see her flaws as irrelevant to the way she understands herself. @danaisabellaaa also conveys this idea by stating that she knows her worth doesn’t just come from her body, but that she’s learned, “to love what makes [her] body unique.” She also goes on to highlight what she accepts as flaws, dimples on her thighs, scars on her shins, and stretch marks, again not disputing their categorization as flaws. For her, her ability to love her body and get over the body negativity she has been taught is enough to allow her to exist in the world without perceived discrimination and oppression. It is important here to note that both these users are thin, white passing women.

These findings suggest that Body Positivity for many has become synonymous with self-love. This correlation is very damaging as it both “distracts from the point and eliminates a level of accountability to create systemic change” (Delassandro). Sonya Renee Taylor, founder of the Body Positive organization, The Body Is Not An Apology states, “simply feeling good about one’s body isn’t enough to dismantle the systems of oppression that come against bodies. The way that we talk about body positivity is very limited in scope. It’s usually just about size in a way that is relatively normative. That conversation leaves a lot of people absent. As it’s gotten more mainstream, it has also highlighted the places where it’s lacking analysis” (qtd in Delassandro). Angela McRobbie, in her work on Post-Feminism, understands this individualization of power as a way of dismissing social and political critique about gender and the lives of women. She describes the move from the “we” to the “she” starting in the 1990’s in her article, “Post-Feminism and Popular Culture” (256). During this time, women in popular culture were portrayed as having the ability of choice. There was this idea of “female individualism” in which women were now free to have a career, be successful, and indulge in sexual conquests as long as the opportunity was understood outside of more autonomous feminist politics (258). The individualization of their opportunity for success was proof that feminist politics were no longer needed. McRobbie demonstrates and briefly mentions though that this understanding of the world could only exist if the female subject of women’s empowerment was young, white, thin, well educated, and perceivably healthy (259). Self-love, like the idea of individual female success, works in the same way, within current systems that privileges some bodies over others to promote that all people will have a better life if they love themselves. Frank Furedi’s critique of therapy culture in his book Therapy Culture: Cultivating Vulnerability in an Uncertain Age reveals how this is toxic to society by explaining that when we foster ideas that see the individual as the point of change, we normalize the illness and ignore the socio-economic realities that are the primary cause of the way the subject feels. According to Furedi’s logic, when self-love is taught as the prescription for body negativity and body marginalization, the real reason bodies are marginalized is ignored, upholding the system all together.

4.3 Intersections of Race

As stated above, fourteen of the ninety-eight unique posts in my study were of women of color. Nine of those fourteen were fat women of color. While I do not want to speak for women of color, I want to make sure to not erase the differences and nuances in their participation within this study thus reproducing white privilege. Interestingly, eight of these images were reposted images not on the account of the original creator. The caption still included the original post’s caption as well as the user who reposted its commentary. One image was a before and after weight loss post, the same user was the only woman of color to promote diet culture in her caption. Yet the most common themes among the posts by women of color had to do with self-love (four of the fourteen images) and images that simply represented the lives of these women existing in their bodies. Further research may be able to conclude how self-love manifests itself differently for women of color than it does for white women. Williams, in her research that specifically looks at women of color in the body positive page on Tumblr, Fat Women of Color, finds that women of color are less preoccupied with dieting and more comfortable being overweight than white women, but more importantly that they use their bodies to portray resistance to dominant narratives of beauty (5-6). The idea that their very presence or visual representation is in and of itself a political negotiation of deviance and resistance often means the language that often accompanies body positive images of white women is no longer necessary.

What I think is most important to take away from the specific research in my study is that, even though there is a presence of women of color in these top posts, it is still often on the terms of and by the means of users who are white and who can fit the representation of women of color into their own narrative of Body Positivity. The celebration of the image is not given credit on its own, but only after someone with a larger following who is less marginalized brings attention to it.

5. Policy of Exclusion in the Body Positive Movement

At is inception, the Body Positive movement worked to queer the bodies and lives of marginalized people by making the body a source of power and defining fat women’s existence according to their own beliefs about themselves. Yet, as Foucault argues in The History of Sexuality, there is no free-standing subject outside the field of power (92-96). While power in society consists of positive forces working against each other, the system itself is oppressive. True liberation cannot fully be realized until the current understanding of bodies defining the person is destroyed.

My research supports the view and the claims by Rutter, Delassandro, and the activists interviewed in her article. At one point, Body Positivity was meant to signal a space that was going to engage with and represent marginalized embodied identities in a way that was not oppressive, harmful, or triggering. It was focused on questioning the stigma that was associated with assumed traits of marginalized bodies. It was about breaking down barriers that defined health, happiness, and agency only for certain bodies. It was about representation, making the unseen, seen. Yet, in an attempt to prioritize inclusivity and the impact of body oppression on all people, the movement instead became one more space in which the least marginalized were centered, represented, and able to redefine the movement for their own purposes. As my findings show, the current Body Positive movement is represented on Instagram primarily by thin, white women, resulting in a Body Positivity Movement that is characterized by self-love and the continued promotion of diet-culture. Neither of these address the systemic and institutionalized marginalization of fat bodies, trans bodies, bodies of color, and disabled bodies; in fact, both self-love and diet culture maintain the status quo.

Parameters were produced since I looked specifically at those users who still use the #BodyPositive and #BodyPositivity hashtag. Admittedly the overall invasion of thin, white bodies within the Body Positive movement have made many people with marginalized bodies disidentify with the movement, finding that their story within their body was no longer represented there as with women of color, transgendered, or disabled folks or whose, experience had never been centered at all. Empowerment within their bodies may and often manifest itself differently than it does for thin and fat white women, Yet speaking to this was not the goal of this study, searching out different hashtags more commonly associated with women of color, disabled, and transgendered folks would have produced different results, but those hashtags are not explicitly tied to the Body Positive Movement and I did not want to interpret the feelings and ideas of people whose intersections of identities I did not experience myself. Further research could reveal the how and why the Body Positive movement most strongly tells the story of the white, cis-gendered, feminine body by exploring the hashtags women of color, transwomen, and disabled folks use to find representations of other people like themselves and through in-depth interviewing could reveal why they disidentify with Body Positivity all together.

Body Positivity has operated under a policy of inclusion of all bodies since it’s inception based on the recognition that most individuals in our society have negative feelings about their bodies. After doing this research, I, however, propose that for the Body Positive movement to again become a space of political disruption of the status quo that privileges some bodies over others, only representations of marginalized bodies should be visible under Body Positive hashtags and campaigns. A policy of exclusion should be adopted in order to re-center the movement around bodies that are not seen in other spaces in our society. The idea that those immediately affected by oppression should be the center and face of the social movements that seek to challenge the systems that oppress them is seen in movements such as Black Lives Matter and various LGBTQ+ movements. People with marginalized bodies experience systemic oppression that impacts their health and livelihood in a way that individuals with thin, white, able-bodied, cis-gendered bodies do not. Therefore, those with normative bodies should be seen as allies instead of subjects of the movement. Black Feminists and activists have been critiquing how white allies interact with their movements for quite some time. Mia McKenzie, the Execuative Director, Creator, and Editor-and-Chief of the blog, Black Girl Dangerous, sums up her frustrations with white allies in a post titled, “No More ‘Allies,’” “Allyship is not supposed to look like this, folks. It’s not supposed to be about you. It’s not supposed to be about your feelings. It’s not supposed to be a way of glorifying yourself at the expense of the folks you claim to be an ally to. It’s not supposed to be a performance. It’s supposed to be a way of living your life that doesn’t reinforce the same oppressive behaviors you’re claiming to be against.” Allyship recognizes and values the common goal of both the marginalized people group and those that seek to correct the injustice, but it must not center the experience and feelings of the Ally. For many thin, white women Body Positivity has become a performance in which they show their love for themselves while espousing a love for all bodies, often ignoring the real injustice and institutional marginalization of other bodies. Currently, their participation within the movement centers their story and their solutions and again takes up space in a movement set aside for the representation of bodies that are not represented any other space.

Without the presence of bodies that are not systemically marginalized, the Body Positive hashtags and top posts will be able to be filled with images of fat women graduating from college, trans women of color falling in love, disabled folks playing sports, Latina women raising their children. The hashtags will make what has been hidden, seen and will provide as place for people who don’t see themselves represented elsewhere to come and celebrate and empower one another.

Once people with marginalized bodies have the Body Positive space set aside for them, they can use Instagram and body positive hash tags to simply share their lives. Creative power doesn’t have to be enacted through campaigns or elaborate performance. For example, when it comes to folks who are marginalized because of their fat bodies, there are many really great examples of a Fat Activists who uses their accounts to live their queered fat life unapologetically. Images of fat folks indulging in baked goods, wearing colorful and form fitting clothing, talking about their dating experiences and sexual exploits, and sharing pictures of their friendships with other fat and marginalized people. Sharing stories of traveling the country, educating others about fat liberation, spending time on the beach, and the personal struggles and discrimination they experience in their bodies and lives builds a bigger picture of their truth. Their lives are quite normal, but their fatness and other intersections of identities make their posts political. Through self-representation of their authentic life, they challenge the norms of our society. They make the stigma and stereotypes that are thought to be natural look silly. They do not have to say they love themselves, because their lifestyles convey that they are engaging in life, not letting shame and stigma hold them back. They share our experiences and feelings about how others react to them. They are empowered and through this empower others.

In seeking to queer body norms and dismantle oppressive body hierarchies, Body Positivity must be visually represented by marginalized bodies alone. They must be the faces of the movement and their experiences must define the purpose and goals for the movement. Currently, a policy of inclusion has led to the reinforcing of the status quo as those with the least marginalized bodies have individualized the solution by promoting self-love. In order to take the movement from where it is currently to one that creates space for representations of only marginalized bodies, everyone who believes in body positivity must be held accountable. This is an active undertaking and one that must be in conversation with the community and society in general. Body Positivity’s political origins and radical ideas only exist when the movement is one that is queer, in that it exists outside the boundaries of normative ideas and identities. It must recognize that marginalized bodies are not inherently deviant or unnatural. It must critique a societal structure that privileges a very specific type of body while dismissing and dehumanizing the existence of those with marginalized bodies. The Body Positive movement is not a movement that excludes normative bodies, but instead it is a movement that centralizes and includes marginalized bodies. The evidence shows that this is not currently what is being done. It is imperative that privileged bodies intentionally step out of visibility within the movement so that the voices of fat people, trans people, disabled people, and people of color can be heard. This will be the first step in creating a Body Positive movement that will be able to use its power to dismantle the societal structures denaturalize, oppress, and silence marginalized bodies.

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