The Fragility of Body Positivity

This story was originally published by Bitch Media on November 21, 2017.

There was a time when fat liberation seemed inevitable: Body positivity, a movement to dismantle systems that map stigma onto fat bodies, was having a cultural moment. Plus-size model Ashley Graham received a Barbie molded in her image. Per her request, Mattel made the doll’s thighs touch, an ode to the realness of Graham’s body and that of the 67 percent of women in the United States who are above a size 14. She also appeared on the cover of Vogue UK and American Vogue, designed a swimsuit line with Swimsuits For All, and became the first plus-size model to grace the cover of Sport Illustrated’s swimsuit issue. At the time, Graham’s ascendancy and success were treated as the collective win of a movement that had pushed for fashion, in particular, to become more inclusive of larger bodies.

Women of size were purchasing fatkinis in droves, unapologetically flaunting their curves on coveted magazine covers, selling out fashion collections, and generally pushing for and investing in representation that had long eluded us. Whether it was calling out fat-shamers in gyms, getting a line of Barbies that were more representative of actual bodies, or finally having stock photos that purposefully included plus-size women, women of size were declaring our right to exist without persecution. It felt like inhaling a breath of fresh air after being inside for too long. Though the average American woman wears between a size 16 and a size 18, we represented less than 2 percent of media images. Having access to cute clothes, two-piece swimsuits, and Photoshop-free advertisements was critical for a population that has long been starved, a punishment for daring to be large in a culture that idolizes thinness.

In the late 2010s and early 2020s, body positivity had become a mantra for those who are learning to reject diet culture and love their bodies, flaws and all. Graham and her peers—including Tess Holliday, Iskra Lawrence, Gabi Gregg, Nicolette Mason, and Danielle Brooks—championed the movement through their social-media platforms, their work with clothing brands and advertising partners, and their features on magazine covers. The ascension of body positivity gave us fat-girl memoirs that deliberately focused and centered the narratives of fat women, such as Kelsey Miller’s Big Girl: How I Gave Up Dieting and Got a Life, Gabourey Sidibe’s This Is Just My Face: Try Not To Stare, Roxane Gay’s Hunger, Jes Baker’s Things No One Will Tell Fat Girls: A Handbook for Unapologetic Living, and Tess Holliday’s The Not So Subtle Art of Being a Fat Girl: Loving the Skin You’re In. And multiple fashion companies, including Aerie and Target, even pledged to use minimal or no retouching in their advertising campaigns for a time.

The body-positivity movement used rhetoric rooted in empowerment to affirm women of size and encourage us to accept ourselves as we are, regardless of our dress size. Even now, a Google image search for “body positivity” offers an array of simple illustrations framed around the idea of empowerment. All bodies are good bodies. There’s no wrong way to have a body. All bodies are beautiful. Beauty comes in every shape and size. Honor my curves. Plus is equal. It’s time for us to reclaim our bodies. These catch phrases, and dozens of others, are powerful hashtags on Instagram. Tagging a photo with one of these popular hashtags lets other body-positive people know you’re a member of the community: Like them, you reject Photoshop, jiggle without shame, and paint your stretch marks with glittery, rainbow colors.

But as fashion became more body positive, the push to make other institutions—including media, law, schools, and housing—more inclusive of people whose bodies have been marginalized was sidelined. Legislators have ramped up their attacks on trans and gender-expansive people, airlines still make it difficult for plus-size people to travel, and the Department of Education is dismantling protections for people with disabilities. Yet, body positivity morphed to almost exclusively focus on fashion, empowerment, and selling products. It was a complete departure from the radical politics of fat acceptance, the movement that birthed body positivity. As we reflect on the (bygone) age of #bodypositivity, we should ask: What were the aims of the movement, who got centered and celebrated, and what bodies were considered “good bodies?”

Fat Acceptance For All

The fat acceptance movement began in the 1960s to battle antifat discrimination and celebrate plus-size bodies. In June 1967, WBAI radio personality Steve Post organized a “fat-in” at New York City’s Central Park to “protest discrimination against [fat people].” More than 500 people showed up, according to sociologist Charlotte Cooper, carrying banners that read “Fat Power” and “Buddha Was Fat” and wearing buttons that read “Take a Fat Girl to Dinner.” “People should be proud of being fat,” Post told the New York Times. “We want to show we feel happy, not guilty. That’s why we’re here.” Demonstrators also burned photos of supermodel Twiggy and diet books.

Alongside the emerging women’s movement, fat activists began publicly and directly challenging fatphobic people, institutions, and systems. For example, in 1968, writer Llewelyn Louderback published an article in the Saturday Evening Post that encouraged people to gain weight after his plus-size wife was discriminated against. Two years later, he published Fat Power: Whatever You Weigh Is Right, one of the first books that directly challenged the diet industry’s toehold on women, and pushed to upend and dismantle fatphobic systems. Louderback then partnered with another man who was angered by his wife being discriminated against, Bill Fabrey, to create the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance (NAAFA). Their goal, as Fabrey explained in a 2001 keynote, was to make the world a safer and more pleasant place for people of size.

As fashion became more body positive, the push to make other institutions—including media, law, schools, and housing—more inclusive of people whose bodies have been marginalized was sidelined.

Through conferences, demonstrations, and advocacy, NAAFA worked to undo fatphobia in schools, workplaces, and advertising. Their foundational work led to the Fat Underground, a collective of radical NAAFA members who departed the organization to create their own model of fat activism. Sara Fishman, one of Fat Underground’s founding members, was a devout follower of radical feminist therapy, a belief that oppression causes mental distress. Fat Underground coined the phrase “a diet is a cure that doesn’t work for a disease that doesn’t exist” and believed science and medicine, in particular, peddled fatphobia to line the pockets of the diet industry.

“The theory of fat then taught by [the University of California] Berkeley’s radical psychiatrists followed that of mainstream America, with a touch of rhetoric added for flavor: You’re fat because you eat too much, and you eat too much because you’re oppressed,” Fishman wrote in 1998. “The belief that fat people are just thin people with bad eating habits now could be seen as part of a system of mystified oppression.”

In the ’80s and ’90s, fat activism began making inroads in academia and literature. In 1994, Marilyn Wann published her zine Fat!So?, which later became a book, after lawyers successfully argued that discriminating against “severely obese people” in the workplace was illegal in 1993. Bonnie Cook sued the Ladd Center, a facility for people with disabilities in Rhode Island, for discriminating against her in the hiring process. She claimed their refusal to rehire her because of her weight violated the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, a law that is usually used to prove discrimination against people with disabilities. She was awarded $100,000 in damages and the Ladd Center was ordered to hire her. It was a major victory for fat activists, who were lobbying for legislation to protect fat people from weight-based discrimination. Thereafter, Michigan became the first—and only—state to explicitly prohibit workplace discrimination on the basis of weight.

Over the past 30 years, fat activism has also gained traction in academia through the burgeoning field of fat studies. The foundational Fat Studies Reader, which united 53 fat acceptance scholars and writers, laid the groundwork to legitimize the field. Fat studies became tangential to more established fields, including American Studies, African American Studies, and sociology; courses about recognizing and theorizing fat bias were introduced at multiple colleges; and there’s even a Fat Studies academic journal. Simultaneously, an array of bloggers and writers, including Marianne Kirby and Lesley Kinzel, gained prominence through their public work about fat acceptance. Fatshionista, Big Fat Deal, FatChicksRule, Fatgrrl, and other blogs criticized diet culture, shared clothing tips, and challenged the idea that weight loss is achieved by simply eating less and exercising more.

“[Our blogs] promote fat acceptance, or the idea that people should be able to accept themselves at the size they feel most comfortable,” Kinzel told ABC News in 2008. “And that fat people should not be humiliated or made fun of, and that fat people deserve as much respect as everyone else.”

Their visibility pressured institutions, mainly fashion, to become more inclusive of women of size. In the decade-plus since Gabi Gregg shook up the internet in her fatkini, scores of fat acceptance bloggers and writers have snagged fashion lines and book deals. It seems that we’ve won. We’ve got gorgeous clothes, body-positive icons, and even a state that recognizes weight bias as an inhibitor of career progress. Yet body positivity was only supposed to be one tenet of fat acceptance, a means of empowering ourselves and affirming our relationship with our bodies. It wasn’t meant to overtake the radical roots of the original movement. Instead, body positivity has become its own economy, and people with bodies that have been marginalized are no longer at the center of their own creation.

As fat acceptance writer Bethany Rutter wrote: “The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was snatching body positivity out of the hands of fat women and then convincing them it was never theirs in the first place.”

The Empowerment Model

Empowerment is an important facet of understanding our relationship to our bodies and making connections between the size of our bodies and the way we’re treated within institutions. I’ll volunteer as tribute: Up until I was 8, I’d always been, according to doctors, a normal-sized kid—gangly arms, pencil-thin legs, flat chest—developing at a normal rate.

Then, I had my first asthma attack. A short time later, I had my second asthma attack. Then came my third and fourth asthma attack, which was later paired with pneumonia. I spent so much time in Children’s Hospital Colorado that I knew the nurses by name. The doctors gave my parents a very simple solution: Prednisone, a steroid that would strengthen my lungs, ward off asthma, and keep me out of emergency rooms. It worked. I didn’t have another asthma attack until I was 18. However, weight gain was the side effect the doctors failed to tell my parents about. Prednisone permanently transformed my body. Less than six months later, I had C-cup breasts and my body was too large for children’s doctor’s charts. Soon thereafter, I began spilling out of my jeans, and learned very quickly how to navigate being ostracized. I became the largest person in class, and everywhere I turned justified this mistreatment.

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I didn’t see myself reflected on television shows, movies, or music videos. I couldn’t purchase the same cute clothes as my smaller friends and had to settle for accessories and shoes when at the mall. By the time I was 18, visiting an amusement park became impossible because I could no longer fit on roller coasters. Flying became a hassle, an embarrassing ordeal that has brought me to tears more than once. Suddenly, strangers and classmates felt comfortable making inappropriate comments about my body. “Here comes Evette with the big C-cups” was a chant that followed me through junior high school. I’d hide under baggy clothes, eager for my body not to be the center of attention. It didn’t work.

Learning about fat acceptance in college emboldened me with confidence. As companies realized the value of plus-size markets, I got access to cuter clothes and better role models, but outside of that individual and personal empowerment, not much has changed for fat people. Medical providers do not trust us to be stewards of our bodies and our health, leading to deadly misdiagnoses. By the time I was diagnosed with heart failure in 2019 at the age of 29, I had been diagnosed as fat countless times at the expense of legitimate symptoms that all pointed toward a cardiovascular issue. Though research has proven that there is a dubious connection, at best, between weight and long-term health outcomes, medical providers in the U.S. are still being trained in ways that exacerbate anti-fat bias.

The mistreatment—and sometimes glaring absence—of fat people in media is also not improving: According to a 2024 study by the Geena Davis Institute, of the 82 family films released in 2023 with budgets over $10 million, only 6.5 percent of characters were fat and only 2 percent of lead actors were fat. When we do see fat characters—such as Chrissy Metz as Kate Pearson on This Is Us, Nell Carter as Nell Harper on Gimme a Break, and Natasha Rothwell as Mel in How to Die Alone—they’re obsessed with losing weight, lonely, and nurturing of everyone but themselves.

As fat acceptance writer Bethany Rutter wrote: “The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was snatching body positivity out of the hands of fat women and then convincing them it was never theirs in the first place.”

Fat people are also still discriminated against in workplaces. The Stop Obesity Alliance found that as weight-based stigma has increased, workplaces have become even more discriminatory against fat applicants and employees: “Research has shown that during the hiring process, recruiters are more likely to categorize job applicants with obesity to be ‘less suitable’ for a job than people of normal weight,” writes Dr. William H. Dietz in a 2024 article. “For people already working, those with obesity are less likely to be promoted and make less money than people at a normal weight.”

The Council on Size and Weight Discrimination found that plus-size workers are paid $1.25 less an hour than average-size workers, which could lead to a loss of around $100,000 over the course a career. Additionally, women of size make 6 percent less than thinner women, and also receive fewer raises. “Fat people are hired less and paid less, have poorer access to medical care, and are intensely ostracized in all forms of media,” Rutter told Bustle in 2016. “We need to specifically name the stigma and hatred that puts us in that position, not have it erased by thin women who want a piece of the action without having to deal with any of the stigma.” 

The current body-positivity movement has failed to address this systemic discrimination as its foremothers did. Instead, the movement has focused on feelings and empowerment as a means of opening it up to all instead of zeroing in on those who still face rampant discrimination. That is one of the reasons fat liberation, which is supposed to be a collective movement to increase dignity, care, and legal protections for fat people and others with bodies deemed non-normative, has become so distorted and focused on individual journeys with health. If fat liberation had achieved its aims and become even more mainstream, it would have been harder to defang the movement and pivot from a world expanding to accommodate fat people to the troubling world we are beginning to inhabit: one with fewer and fewer fat people altogether.

All Bodies Are Commodified Bodies

Much like feminism, body positivity has been warped by capitalism and media to sell experiences rather than pushing for protection for people whose bodies are marginalized. Take, for instance, Robbie Tripp, an author and activist who wrote a letter to his “curvy wife” on Instagram in 2017. “I love this woman and her curvy body,” he wrote to his more than 70,000 followers (at the time). “As a teenager, I was often teased by my friends for my attraction to girls on the thicker side, ones who were shorter and curvier, girls that the average (basic) bro might refer to as ‘chubby’ or even ‘fat.’ Then, as I became a man and started to educate myself on issues such as feminism and how the media marginalizes women by portraying a very narrow and very specific standard of beauty (thin, tall, lean) I realized how many men have bought into that lie.”

More than 40,000 people liked his photo, which depicted him and his wife in a loving embrace on a beach, and it quickly went viral. The coverage of his public affection only reinforced fatphobia. A headline on E! News read “Husband’s letter to his curvy wife is going viral for the most beautiful reason,” and Today’s headline boasted, “Husband pens body-positive note to ‘curvy’ wife—and everyone’s swooning.” Through his declaration, as well as the media’s coverage, their love was depicted as an anomaly, rooted in the idea that plus-size people are starved of love so any form of affection is worth celebrating. The body-positive media economy centers these affirming, empowering, let-me-pinch-a-fat-roll-to-show-how-much-I-love-myself stories while failing to actually challenge institutions to stop discriminating against fat people. More importantly, most of those stories center thin, white, cisgender, heterosexual women who have co-opted the movement to build their brands. Rutter has labeled this erasure “Socially Acceptable Body Positivity.”

“On social media, it actually gets worse for fat bodies: We’re not just being erased from body positivity, fat women are being actively vilified,” she wrote. “Health has become the stick with which to beat fat people with [sic], and the benchmark for whether body positivity should include someone.”

If fat liberation had achieved its aims and become even more mainstream, it would have been harder to defang the movement and pivot from a world expanding to accommodate fat people to the troubling world we are beginning to inhabit: one with fewer and fewer fat people altogether.

In other words, body positivity is no longer synonymous with fatness. All bodies should be included within a movement, but what happens when those who are centered are those whose bodies have been historically and contemporarily celebrated? Body positivity used to be a means of celebrating bodies that have been maligned, but now excludes the very people who built momentum for the movement. The message sent is all bodies must be thin bodies to be good bodies. For instance, Vogue’s 2017 “great beauty shakeup” cover included Graham and Imaan Hamman, a more diverse group of models than normal, and the magazine declared themselves body positive and the torchbearers of the future of body positivity. Yet not a single person on the cover was darkskinned, trans, or disabled.

That continues to be the case, even as the very influencers and designers who once profited from “embracing their bodies and their flaws” are becoming thinner and thinner, turning their backs on a movement that once lined their pockets. At the same time, as Marie Southard Ospina reported for Refinery29 in 2022, the market is simultaneously shrinking for fat fashion influencers, leaving them with fewer opportunities and turning “fatshion” in an internet relic, no different than any fad that has come and gone. It was the inevitable conclusion to body positivity being commercialized, commodified, and treated as simply another means of peddling products to willing consumers. Now, as the pendulum once again swings away from body positivity and toward a new version of the thin ideal—where dangerously skinny bodies are dominating runways and red carpets—there are clear lessons to be gleaned here.

Slapping a body-positive sticker on a capitalistic venture does not it make body positive if it’s not about upending the dieting industry or protecting fat, trans, and disabled people from discrimination, and instead re-centers the very people who have always been centered. Body positivity can’t focus on thin, white women and simultaneously tackle discrimination against fat, trans, and disabled people. Expanding legal protections must be the focus, otherwise the outcomes of our lives will continue to be determined by fatphobia, transphobia, and ableism. Until body positivity centers that, the message will continue to be that all bodies are good bodies, but some bodies are still treated better than others.

This story was updated to include more up-to-date references, dates, and statistics.