Women's Studies International Forum 35 (2012) 415–425

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Women's Studies International Forum

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‘I'm totally smart and a feminist…and yet I want to be a waif’: Exploring

ambivalence towards the thin ideal within the fat acceptance movement
Ngaire Donaghue ⁎, Anne Clemitshaw
School of Psychology, Murdoch University, Murdoch, WA 6150, Australia

a r t i c l e i n f o s y n o p s i s

Available online 10 October 2012
Rising concern within western societies about the so-called ‘obesity epidemic’ has resulted in
ubiquitous public health messages regarding the risks to health from being overweight. The
prevalence of anti-obesity discourse has given rise to a counter movement, known as the ‘Fat
Acceptance’ movement, which challenges claims about the relationships between body weight
and health and promotes respect for people with fat bodies. This paper explores the subjective
experiences of women who participate in an online fat acceptance web log via their
descriptions of the ways in which they are affected by and attempt to resist cultural discourses
promoting the ‘thin ideal’. Using a feminist poststructuralist analysis, the findings indicate that
women experience many benefits of being fat-accepting, such as self acceptance, emancipation
from dieting, and more time and energy to pursue other interests. However, the women also
wrote at length about their struggles to give up striving for the social and self acceptance that
they associated with being thin, revealing the difficulties and complexities of these efforts at
resisting the ‘thin ideal’ that has become such a normative requirement of successful western
femininity.
© 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Introduction associated with the unrelenting exposure to aspirational

Fat is a (famously) feminist issue (Orbach, 1978). For
many decades, feminist scholars have documented and
deconstructed the images of ultra thin bodies that are
presented as the ideal of western femininity, and have
described the ways in which thinness has come to be the
basis on which other feminine achievement rests and
without which happiness and success are undermined (e.g.,
Bartky, 1990; Bordo, 1993; Gill, 2007; Malson, 1998; Wolf,
1990). Although appearance pressures on men in western
societies are increasing and fatness is stigmatised in men
(Gill, Henwood, & McLean, 2005; Monaghan, 2007), the
pressure on men to modify their bodies is mitigated to some
extent by the prevailing view that effortful management of
one's appearance is a feminine practice; for this reason we
focus our discussion in this paper on women. The academic
and clinical literatures are replete with evidence of the harms
⁎ Corresponding author.
images of extremely thin women that is a feature of life
in the contemporary west; body dissatisfaction and shame
(Tiggemann & Slater, 2004), disordered eating (Burns &
Gavey, 2008), engagement in potentially harmful amounts
of exercise (Stice, 1998), self-objectification (Frederickson &
Roberts, 1997), depression (Bessenoff, 2006), and self-harm
(Muehlenkemp, Swanson, & Brausch, 2005). Attention to
these issues has led to some efforts to regulate the images of
very thin women used in fashion and advertising in order
to shield young women from their influence. Yet the calls
that are made to protect women and girls from pressures
for unrealistic thinness are accompanied by a strong and
immediate caveat: of course it is not okay to be fat.
The aesthetic discourses of the thin ideal achieve further
power through their alignment with healthism (Crawford,
1980, 2006). Healthism refers to the changes in understandings
of health and illness that have occurred in western societies
towards a view of illness as the result of a series of quantifiable
risks, with a corresponding view of health as a direct outcome

0277-5395/$ – see front matter © 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.wsif.2012.07.005
416 N. Donaghue, A. Clemitshaw / Women's Studies International Forum 35 (2012) 415–425
of personal choices. In this view health status becomes a key
indicator of responsible self-management. Public concern
about ‘the obesity crisis’ brings body weight firmly under the
gaze of healthism: body size is understood as a modifiable
personal characteristic – a simple reflection of the balance
between eating and exercise – and obesity is put forward as a
risk factor for many diseases (diabetes, heart disease, cancer;
see Gard & Wright, 2005). Under these conditions, a fat body
does not simply transgress aesthetic standards, but also
embodies an irresponsible lack of self care; persons (allegedly)
displaying such disregard for their own health thus become
‘legitimate’ targets of social sanction and ‘caring’ intervention
(Rice, 2007; Throsby, 2007, 2008; Tischner & Malson, 2008,
2010).
And yet, despite the elision of contemporary ideas of beauty
and health with thinness in western cultures, there is a
counter-discourse rejecting the requirements of the thin ideal
and advocating for the recognition and celebration of diversity
among bodies in a wide range of respects, including body size
(Harding & Kirby, 2009; LeBesco, 2004; Rothblum & Solovay,
2009; Wann, 1998; Wolf, 1990). These alternative, ‘fat accep-
tance1’ discourses form a basis for resistance of the thin ideal,
and have provided a rallying cry for some of those marginalised
and excluded by mainstream exhortations to thinness. In this
paper we explore the ways in which the cultural promotion of
the thin ideal is resisted by people who participate at some level
in the circulation of these discourses of resistance.
Critiquing the thin ideal
The critique of social pressures for unrealistic thinness is a
longstanding project of feminist work (e.g., Bartky, 1990; Bordo,
1993; Malson, 1998; Wolf, 1990). As western women have
achieved more freedoms and successes in the public domains of
life, the aesthetic ideals against which they are judged have
become ever more unrealistic: in recent years, the body of the
‘ideal woman’ has added to extreme thinness the requirement
for large breasts and selectively toned muscles, a combination
that is literally unachievable for most women without cosmetic
surgery (Gimlin, 2007). The ‘normative dissatisfaction’ that
western women experience in relation to their bodies
(Tiggemann, 1994) is most often understood as involving a
faulty internalisation of the thin ideal — a failure on the part of
vulnerable young women and girls to realise that these images
are not ‘meant’ to be taken as literal aspirations (e.g., Nouri, Hill,
& Orrell-Valente, 2011; Thompson & Stice, 2001; Tiggemann,
1994). Efforts to ameliorate the harmful effects of these images
are thus often focused on finding methods to assist women and
girls in resisting the internalisation of the thin ideal.
One way in which resistance has been facilitated is by direct
critique of images of very thin women, pointing out the ways in
which such images are digitally altered. Many interventions
that are designed to inoculate girls and young women against
the pressure for thinness focus on deconstructing the images
and developing ‘critical media literacy’, presumably on the
assumption that if women understand that these images aren't
‘real’ that they will lose their power (e.g., Yamamiya, Cash,
Melnyk, Posavac, & Posavac, 2005). This research, however
well intentioned, locates the problematic relation between the
image and the girl or woman viewing it, and seeks its solution
in undermining the credibility of the image. However, recent
work has called into question the idea that the ability to
critique these images lessens their impact. For example, Vares,
Jackson, and Gill's (2011) study of preteen girls in New Zealand
found that although they were sophisticated decoders of media
images, they also reported that these images made them feel
‘bad’ and ‘sad’. Similarly, in Carey, Donaghue, and Broderick's
(2011) interviews with Australian high school girls about the
appearance cultures within their schools, girls talked at length
about the nature of the pressures they felt to be thin and
beautiful, and described how the various body image work-
shops that were a regular feature of their school health
curriculum simply failed to understand the lived reality of
their experience — that what you look like matters. In response
to findings such as these, Vares et al. (2011) have called for
nuanced research into the possible benefits of critical media
literacy that rejects simplistic notions of ‘inoculation’ against
media effects and that understands media images as having
profound social, as well as psychological, effects.
In addition to the psychological burden imposed on many
women by the thin ideal, there are also significant material
costs for women who exceed the very low ideal body weights
prescribed for them. In a recent review, Fikkan and Rothblum
(2012) document the penalties for ‘excess’ weight experienced
by women in employment and income, education, romantic
relationships and health care. They show that women, to a
much greater extent than men, receive substantial penalties for
deviations from their ‘ideal’ weight, and that these penalties
begin even at the higher end of the ‘normal’ weight range. The
privileges attached to thinness are very real, and reinforce the
importance of understanding preoccupation with weight as a
thoroughly social issue, and not as a result of problematic and
unnecessary ‘internalisations’ made by individual women
themselves (Donaghue & Smith, 2008; Murray, 2008).
Despite the myriad ways in which fatness is penalised in
many of the arenas of contemporary western life, thinness is
not generally constructed as an externally imposed obligation;
it is a truism of the diet industry that weight loss can only be
successful when a woman is ‘doing it for herself’ (see Stuart &
Donaghue, 2012, for a discussion of ‘choice’ in relation to
feminine beauty practices). It is via the cultural nexus of
thinness, femininity, success, health and happiness that the
thin ideal exerts its disciplinary power (Bordo, 1993). As many
scholars have observed, contemporary neoliberal societies are
marked by their lack of overt regulation; self-responsible
subjects accept the requirement to inform themselves of
expert knowledge concerning the best ways to identify and
achieve their own potential and to mitigate risk, and then
monitor and regulate their own behaviour to align with the
prescriptions of these experts (Foucault, 1994; Rose, 1996,
1999) The expert injunctions to lose (or avoid gaining) weight,
and the ‘tips and techniques’ for adjusting one's diet, activity or
attitudes constitute a ‘regime of truth’ (Foucault, 1994) and
produce a related set of ‘technologies of self’ that form a basis
for self-regulation and self-surveillance (Foucault, 1994). The
daily disciplines involved in ‘watching one's weight’ come to be
understood as practices of self-care, and function as a primary
means of subjectification, in which women come to discipline
and experience themselves according to the ideologies and
agendas of the thin ideal, while at the same time understanding
the pursuit of thinness as their own personal desire and choice
(Foucault, 1994; Heyes, 2006; Malson, 1998; Rose, 1996, 1999).
 N. Donaghue, A. Clemitshaw / Women's Studies International Forum 35 (2012) 415–425
Resisting the thin ideal: the ‘fat acceptance’ movement
Unsurprisingly, the sustained public assault on fat bodies
has met with organised resistance, in the form of the fat
acceptance (FA) movement. As a political project, fat
acceptance rejects the cultural devaluation of fat people.
The FA movement has a long history, with the civil rights
group the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance
founded in the United States in 1969 (Solovay & Rothblum,
2009). As Cooper (2009) has noted, the FA movement is
strongly US-centric: even though much fat activism occurs or
is organised online, which reduces some of the geographical
barriers to participation, and although many of the issues
facing fat people across western societies are similar, the
agenda and activities of the FA movement are primarily
focused around concerns relevant to fat Americans. Further-
more, although issues of intersectionality and privilege in FA
are frequently raised within the movement, the public face of
the FA movement remains predominantly white, middle
class, and highly educated (e.g. Thomas, 2012).
Recently, with the rise of what has become known as the
‘Fatosphere’ in 2007, FA has come to obtain a high public profile
and increased participation from people who would not
necessarily identify as fat activists (Harding & Kirby, 2009).
The Fatosphere is a set of inter-linked blogs in which pro-
ponents of FA confront the personal and political elements of
the pathologisation and demonisation of fat bodies by sharing
their thoughts, feelings, experiences, and personal practices as
they pursue fat acceptance as well as their reactions to and
analyses of public discourse concerning fatness. The diversity
and approachability of many of these blogs and their
encouragement of extensive commenting from readers are
important means by which the threshold for participation in
the FA movement has been lowered (Harding & Kirby, 2009).
Fat acceptance blogs can be thought of as liminal spaces,
in which those who are looking for alternatives to the
cultural consensus that fatness is a sign of failure can explore
this possibility within a community of like-minded others.
Although fat acceptance blogs are diverse and there is tension
within the fat acceptance movement about the extent to
which fatness is seen as an attribute to be accepted, as
opposed to celebrated (Cooper, 2009; LeBesco, 2004), fat
acceptance advocates largely agree that fatness is a stable
characteristic of some people, and that efforts to lose weight –
via dieting and exercise, or via the increasingly promoted
weight loss surgeries – are both harmful and futile. Members
of the fat acceptance movement challenge the assertions of
obesity crisis discourse that fat is an important risk factor for
disease as well as the more fundamental assumption that fat
is, in and of itself, unhealthy (see Bacon & Aphramor, 2011,
for an extended discussion of FA perspectives on these
issues). Although the rejection of the message that fat is
unhealthy is a central focus of fat acceptance, fat activism
extends over a broad array of sites. In their book, Lessons from
the Fatosphere (2009), Kate Harding and Marianne Kirby
discuss issues that get a regular airing on their own FA blogs
as well as many others. These include: evidence that diets
don't work; strategies for replacing body shame with body
acceptance; finding fat-positive friends, partners, and health
professionals; experimenting with fashion as a means of
projecting body positivity; critiquing media representations
417
of fat people; and engaging in health promoting practices that
do not define success in terms of weight loss.
The exchanges that occur on FA sites allow insight into the
dynamic processes by which embodied subjectivities are
made and remade. In the posts describing aspects of their
day-to-day lived experience and in the comments which
variously encourage, advise, critique, congratulate and com-
miserate, bloggers and their followers create spaces in which
their embodied subjectivities are explicitly negotiated. The
importance of online spaces in this regard has been
recognised by several scholars who have studied the
‘pro-ana’ (anorexia) webpages, live journals, and blogs in
which young women create communities where they can
speak freely (and usually anonymously) about their practices
of weight control and hunger management, about the
complexities of their desire to be thin, and their feelings
about their own bodies (e.g., Dias, 2003).
To date, very little research has studied online interac-
tions in fat acceptance spaces with a view to understanding
the role of these spaces in negotiating embodied identities. In
an early study, Kathleen LeBesco (2004) analysed posts on FA
discussion lists, although her focus was on the use of these
lists as a means of developing fat identity and mobilising
political action rather than on exploring the subjectivities of
participants. More recently, Marissa Dickins, Thomas, King,
Lewis, and Holland (2011) interviewed authors of FA blogs
and developed a model in which FA was presented as
providing a set of resources and experiences that allowed
these bloggers to progress from ‘self and body hatred’
(stage 1) to ‘fat acceptance’ (stage 3). Yet although this
study provides important evidence of the power of FA to
open up alternative possibilities for identity as a fat woman
than those made available by dominant cultural discourses,
the use of interviews that were explicitly about the role of the
fatosphere in promoting self-acceptance may have encour-
aged participants to adopt an advocacy role and to provide a
somewhat idealised version of FA as a straight path from
self-hatred to self-acceptance. Our study draws on material
directly presented in these blogs (rather than reflections
about the blogs) to explore the complexity of the sub-
jectivities associated with attempting to resist the thin ideal.
Participants in the fatosphere exist in a range of different
relations to the thin ideal. In the disembodied realm of
cyberspace, bodies are figured with words, and it is a common
feature of the culture for posters to ‘declare’ themselves, so as
to clarify the position from which they speak. Some are fat, and
have always been fat; some are now fat but have been thin for
periods in the past; some are thin and struggle with their
dissatisfaction at the extent of the sacrifice required to remain
so; and some are thin having been fat in the past; some are
‘inbetweenies’, occupying the ambiguous cultural space
marked out for the not-thin and the not ‘truly’ fat. Although
these are spaces in which fat women are visible in important
ways, it is not only fat women who populate this movement.
We approach this space – which is pre-defined as a space of
resistance – with the aim of exploring the nuances of this
resistance. We aim to identify its key arguments and agendas,
its themes and tropes, and its major battlefields, both against
the wider culture at large and the internal battles of its
adherents. By paying attention to the everyday ways in which
women push back against the strictures and the false promises
418 N. Donaghue, A. Clemitshaw / Women's Studies International Forum 35 (2012) 415–425
of the thin ideal, we aim to describe the lived experience of
resisting a culture that equates feminine value with thinness.
Method
The data
The data corpus consists of comments posted in response to
two posts on the ‘Shapely Prose’ blog (www.kateharding.net).
The diverse content of this blog sees it covering issues ranging
from where to find quality plus-size fashion, to dealing with fat
prejudice from health professionals, to mounting letter writing
campaigns against airline seating policies that discriminate
against fat people. The two target posts for our analysis are
entitled ‘The fantasy of being thin’ and ‘Stop her before she diets
again!’ ‘The fantasy of being thin’ reflects on the ways in which
‘thinness’ can come to represent far more than simply a bodily
state but rather can serve as an emblem of a perfectly happy life,
in which a person does not only have the kind of body that she
would aesthetically prefer, but also becomes the kind of person
that she ideally wants to be. ‘Stop her before she diets again!’
was written in response to a comment made on another post in
which the commenter felt herself ‘slipping back’ into the
mindset that losing weight would help her to feel happier about
herself, and asked for ‘help’; this post reflects on the
unglamorous ‘realities’ and ultimate futility of dieting, while
recognising that, for many women, the idea that their bodies
(and thus, their lives) can be ‘fixed’ via dieting retains a
powerful allure. These particular posts were chosen because
they explicitly reflect on the complex subjectivities involved in
taking on the philosophies of fat acceptance and rejecting the
thin ideal. Additionally, these two posts were among the most
highly commented on posts on the blog, attracting 210 and 289
published comments respectively.
The three hosts of the blog identify as white, middle class,
able-bodied, college-educated women in their late 20s to mid
30s. Two describe themselves as straight and one as queer.
Although of course no systematic demographic information
is available about those who comment on the blog, our
impression in reading is of a group generally quite similar to
the host bloggers: mostly women, college educated, mostly
between their mid 20s and late 30s (although with consider-
able numbers of both older and younger), majority white,
middle class. It is common for people to note in their comments
any characteristics that they think would distinguish them
from the ‘typical’ reader (e.g. being male, being older than 40,
being a woman of colour, living somewhere other than the
USA, living with a disability), but of course the absence of such
a declaration is not a confirmation that the commenter
considers herself ‘typical’ of the readership. Although the
readership is international, the cultural references that are
made throughout the posts on the blog are almost exclusively
American or (occasionally) British, suggesting that the women
who participate on the blog are, if not all living in western
countries, then at least strongly engaged with western culture.
Ethics
The ethics of conducting research using material posted
on the internet are complex and still being fully thought
through by scholars working in this area. Our approach to
working with this material was informed by the ethical
guidelines developed by the Association of Online and
Internet Researchers (AOIR, Ess, 2002). Shapely Prose, the
blog from which the comments that we analyse in this paper
were taken, is a high-profile, high-traffic blog that was active
from March 2007 to September 2010. No passwords or forms
of log in were required to access any of the material on the
blog. Shapely Prose has been discussed on several occasions in
the mainstream press, including in the New York Times and
the Chicago Tribune, and the blog's founder and main writer,
Kate Harding, was referred to in the press by the epitaph
‘Queen of the Fatosphere’ (Schoenberg, 2009). Thus, the blog
was very well known, was regularly linked to by other blogs
both within and beyond the fatosphere, and was clearly a
public venue. The published comments policy on the blog
stated that all comments were subject to moderation, and the
blog writers frequently made references to the very high
volume of ‘fat hating’ comments that were submitted (but
not published). In this way it was very clear that the audience
for the blog was wide and indeed that significant elements of
it were hostile. We thus feel confident that posters to the site
will have no reasonable expectation of privacy — on the
contrary, many of the contributions made by commentors to
the blog can be read as additional contributions to the
political project of making fat acceptance mainstream and
visible. Although we feel confident that commenters to this
blog consider their comments to be public, it is likely that
many also use the same pseudonyms to post on other,
potentially less public, fora; for this reason, we identify each
post using a double pseudonym (Ess, 2002).
Approach to analysis
We began our analysis by collating all 499 comments
published in response to the two target blog posts into a single
document that formed that data corpus for the study. We each
read the entire corpus several times, and over a series of
meetings in which we compared our initial notes we began to
focus on particular issues that recurred frequently in the data
and that were responded to by other commenters in ways that
suggested that they were common and recognisable experi-
ences. In particular, we focused on commenters' accounts of
what they saw as the benefits that FA had provided them with,
which included the belief that diets don't work, and their
realisation that thinness does not necessarily deliver happi-
ness. We were also interested in the limits of fat acceptance
discourse in the face of widespread anti-fat prejudice, and in
the widely espoused idea that fat acceptance is an ongoing
process rather than a fixed position. Retaining extracts from the
comments that are related to these themes provided the body
of instances for our analysis.
These data were analysed using a feminist poststructuralist
approach (Gavey, 1989). Post-structuralism is a basis for
analysing subject positions in relation to language, cultural
practices and the material conditions of people's lives, primarily
to understand power relations and identify areas for change.
Although the anonymous nature of the blog comments means
that we cannot be sure that they are ‘true’, we make the
assumption that the comments are posted in good faith and do
not involve deliberate misrepresentation. Furthermore, al-
though we do not assume that there is a single ‘reality’ to
 N. Donaghue, A. Clemitshaw / Women's Studies International Forum 35 (2012) 415–425
these women's lived experiences that they are directly
reporting, we do view the posted comments as genuine
participation in a collective endeavour to understand and
transform their embodied subjectivities in relation to the
feminine thin ideal. Our analysis involved locating individual
statements in relation to discourses of fat acceptance and the
thin ideal, highlighting ideological assumptions present in the
discourse, and examining the ways in which people negotiate
positions for themselves as critical, resistant subjects, who are
able to ‘see through’ the culturally constructed discourses of the
thin ideal but who are nonetheless unable to entirely escape
their influence.
Analysis and discussion
Our analysis is organised around four main themes that we
identified in the comments. We begin by discussing the ways in
which commenters talked about the benefits conveyed by
taking up aspects of FA's critique of the thin ideal, focusing
particularly on the ‘freedom’ from dieting and the acceptance
of the belief that happiness is neither delivered by nor
contingent on thinness. We then present an analysis of the
various ways in which commenters recognise and respond to
the continuing influence of the thin ideal on their lives, and
their efforts to convey a sense of the complexity and difficulty
of maintaining a fat accepting orientation given the saturation
of feminine identity with the ideology of the thin ideal.
Diets don't work (and are miserable)
Many of the commentors describe their path into FA as
having begun with the growing understanding that sustained
weight loss was not possible for them to achieve. For
example, in the following extract, Tracey matter-of-factly
outlines her understanding of the futility of dieting:
I just review the numbers when I feel that old insidious
diet urge. I am 51 years old. I have been on diets in some
form or another for 43 years. I weigh more now than ever.
I am living proof that diets don't work — for me, anyway.
So why waste the valuable time and head-space on yet
another one? It's perfectly illogical. Tempting, though —
so very tempting. (Tracey).
Many of the commenters identified how their involve-
ment with FA had led them to reflect on their past
experiences of dieting in a new light. Rather than thinking
about diets solely in terms of whether they were ‘successful’
or not, they wrote about their dawning realisation that their
efforts in pursuit of thinness were a major source of misery
and self-limitation.
why did I waste my whole life thinking that diets would
work when they never did, I just have to say that,
hallelujah, I have found great freedom in accepting who
I am RIGHT NOW and not worrying about what I will be,
when it comes to weight loss I believe there is a
relationship to fantasy and weight gain — the more I
dream about being thin, the more I hate myself in the
present, the fatter I get (Di)
419
One of the things that helps me recognize that I no longer
want to diet, is witnessing the behaviour and mindset and
personality of those I work with who do diet, how much
like them I am when I am dieting and how their lives (and
mine when I'm doing it) are reduced to nothing but
dieting — so so BORING. I have so much more I want to do
with my life, I literally cannot afford the head space and
the time to dieting, nor the endless boring discussions
about it, nor the near hermetic existence I live when
“successfully” dieting. So, yeah, I don't live in a bubble,
occasionally I experience the temptation to diet (Tammy).
I ran across a conversation where people were discussing
their past or present efforts to keep weight off and
recognizing that it's like taking on a second job — it takes
that much time and effort, y'know? If someone choses to
do that, then fine and good; but it needs to be a choice and
preferably a knowledgeable one. Because, yes, dieting
carries costs, and when I can get outside of the cultural
mindset it's shocking how many people can so casually
demand others pay this cost, with no consideration of
what else the people being pressured might be able to do
with that time and effort (Cathy).
The description of the urge to diet as a ‘temptation’ was
widespread throughout the comments, usually immediately
following a heartfelt cataloguing of the pains of dieting, making
the use of this word both striking and curious. Temptation
usually refers to experiencing a desire for something that we
know to be either bad for us or wrong. Both of these elements
were present in the way that the commenters talked about
dieting. There was a clear awareness/memory of their own
miserable experiences of dieting, and the ways in which it
reduced their engagement and participation in their own
lives to a narrow and unsatisfying focus on (not) eating and
exercise — a powerful account of dieting as not advancing their
own properly understood interests. There was also often a
sense of dieting as a moral transgression against the principles
of FA and/or feminism; a sense that dieting was ‘wrong’. And
yet, the frequent and apparently taken-for-granted references
to being tempted to diet suggest that the sense that ‘being
on a diet’ conveys – the belief that through sufficient effort
and diligent self-restraint that one can become thinner – is
powerfully attractive.
Dieting's power to usurp all other personal interests and
pleasures was often invoked by commentors as a reason for
resisting the temptation to diet. The hard bargain of dieting
was framed as an intrinsic part of the practice — it was not
simply that these commenters individually saw themselves
as having to diet ‘hard’, they attributed this requirement for
unrelenting focus on monitoring the intake and expenditure
of calories to the nature of dieting, and saw it in the lives of
their friends and acquaintances on diets as well as in their
own history. This careful accounting of the full costs of
dieting, when set alongside the marshalled arguments about
the long term failure rates of diets works to further
strengthen the construction of dieting as an irrational
practice, one that, rather than leading to a fuller life, comes
at the expense of full engagement in their own lives and ‘the
headspace and time’ to fully develop their own talents and
interests.
420 N. Donaghue, A. Clemitshaw / Women's Studies International Forum 35 (2012) 415–425
Thinness doesn't equal happiness
As well as questioning the long term sustainability and
effectiveness of dieting, many posters also set out to
undermine the basic premise of dieting — that thinness will
provide greater happiness. Drawing on their own past
experiences of having ‘successfully’ dieted, or of having
been thin before becoming fat, several posters wrote about
their gradual realisation that having a smaller body did not
deliver the dramatic changes to their lives that they had
expected it would.
‘I was a fat child/adolescent/young adult who lost my
weight in my early twenties. I am now a thin adult who
went through many years of confusion, ‘I am thin now!
When does the party start? Well maybe I just need to the
thinner. And thinner. And thinner’ (Glenice)
I was thin in high school (after being a fat kid), but I was
completely convinced that I was fat. Why? Because I was
still a weird outcast queer nerd with a strange family and
if I were thin all that would have changed, right? Now, at
28, after being fat and thin and in-between, I'm thin again,
and you know what? It's not the “real me” or a “thin me”
that's been waiting all along. It's just me. I am even shaped
the same; I just take up a little less horizontal space. That I
ever thought that being narrower would revolutionize my
personality and my family is baffling to me now. (Jo).
I won't get into my life story here but I have been a self-
help addict for the last 10 years and I think over time you
get so caught up in the fantasy of that “ideal” life, the
“ideal” body, blah blah blah that you forget to really
appreciate and love who you are all the gimmicks I bought
into, all the money I spent trying to buy a better life, all
the time I wasted trying to fix my life, instead of living it
and I swear it makes me wanna throw away every single
diet and exercise book (Gemma).
I was somewhat surprised when I finally reached the
mythical land of skinnydom. I thought I'd finally get a
boyfriend, friends, and a good job. Okay, so I was taken
more seriously professionally than when I was fat, but the
first two never materialised. And, I was more miserable
thin than I ever was when I was overweight and didn't
obsess about what I ate and didn't spend all my free time
exercising or thinking about food or both. (Rebecca)
In these extracts, the commenters express surprise and
dismay about their former willingness to believe that their
lives would be fundamentally transformed by becoming thin.
As many scholars have observed, contemporary western
cultures understand fat bodies as a basic sign of failed
selfhood, and so ‘fixing’ the fat body through weight loss is
held out as a means of transforming one's life in a profound
way (Bordo, 1993). In these posts the writers remember
when they held these beliefs, and draw on their own
experience of the non-transformation of their lives, of the
continuation of personal and relational struggles, of the
non-materialisation of boyfriends and friends, and of their
surprise that their lives had not turned into the ‘party’ they
had imagined. And although these tales are recounted with a
slightly self-mocking tone, there is a sense of the once-real
expectation that losing weight would transform their
everyday lives in profound ways. That lack of transformation,
and their resentment of the bad faith with which the
‘mythical land of skinnydom’ is sold, are used by these
women as a touch stone in their accounts of their determi-
nation not to get caught up in its false promises again.
Resistance is enacted here, not so much by strengthening the
self against ‘temptation’, but by tearing down the curtain to
reveal the illusionary nature of the powerful promises that
thinness did not deliver.
Limits: the reality of thin privilege
However, among the many testimonials of the greater
self-acceptance and freedoms conferred by beginning to
personally reject the lure of the thin ideal, there was a
frequent reminder that being thin conveys real social
advantages in many aspects of life. Many of the comments
contained descriptions of the everyday burdens imposed on
people who are not thin ‘enough’ and the opportunities,
experiences and relationships that are placed out of reach or
made more difficult for those deemed ‘too’ fat.
One of the blocks I run into sometimes is that society does
treat thin people better. But, I think of things like dating
(where on online profiles, most of the women I see
specify that they're not interested in the biggest body type
option offered) or when I was still acting and being told
that I was very good, but there were simply not a lot of
parts for fat women And it's easy to fall back into the
fantasy b/c the uphill battle of social change is very hard
(Chloe).
I was normal sized before I was fat, so I do know the doors
and opportunities that are shut to me as a fat woman as
opposed to a thin-enough woman BUT as the rest of you
know, being thin enough isn't by itself enough to make
you successful, or enough to help you let your true self out
(Tania).
In both of these extracts, the women matter-of-factly
acknowledge the discrimination that they experience as fat
women. Chloe draws on these ‘blocks’ as a way of under-
standing why she is still drawn to the idea that she could
become thinner, while Tania softens her discussion of ‘the
doors and opportunities that are shut to [her]’ by appealing
to the shared knowledge that although thinness may make
some things easier, it does not automatically deliver them,
and that in the end, the goal is to let one's true (fat) self out.
In the next extract, Melissa extends the idea of the ‘real’
benefits of thinness beyond the treatment received from
others to her own feelings about herself.
“I accept myself the way I am.” and “But I need to lose
weight in order to feel better.” The cognitive dissonance is
sort of comforting, because it's been the same noise in my
head for 39 years. (Hey, I'm smart! But, I'm fat so I
 N. Donaghue, A. Clemitshaw / Women's Studies International Forum 35 (2012) 415–425
shouldn't be proud. Hey, I'm a good writer! But, I'm fat so I
have nothing interesting to say. Hey, I want to be friends!
But, I'm fat so I'll understand if you blow me off…On and
on and on.) But, here's another truth for me. When I was
thinner, I was more outgoing and more social and more
focused in my career and sexier and had more dates.
Possibly, I was even smarter (Melissa)
Although Melissa's tone is ironic and slightly self-
mocking, she sets up her experience of fatness as involving
a change not only in the ways in which she is seen by others,
but also, and perhaps more importantly, in the kind of person
she ‘really’ is when thin.
In these extracts, the commenters demonstrate a perva-
sive sense that there are real losses attached to giving up on
the idea of being/becoming thin. Melissa and Tania both draw
on their personal experience of having been thinner to tell
how, although in many ways miserable and unsustainable,
their thinner selves did enjoy certain privileges that they see
as no longer being available to them. In doing so, these
commenters clearly resist any sense that the desire for
thinness resides purely in the (deluded) minds of individual
women themselves, that it is a ‘silly wish’ that they have
somehow managed to become fixated on. Instead, they frame
their own attempts to relinquish the desire for thinness as a
difficult challenge because of the real disadvantages and
rejections that so often attend a fat body.
Misrecognition by others
In addition to the routine injustices that commenters saw
as a part of the life of a fat woman, several also wrote about
the ways in which they felt that fatness acted as a kind of
distorting field around them, preventing other people
(including those closest to them) from directly and clearly
seeing the person “within”.
….A big part of my Wizard-of-Oz'esque fantasy of being
whisked into the land of Skinny involves not what will
happen to me, but rather, what will happen to all those
around me. They'll start to see me the way I see myself —
they'll see the ‘me’ I see in the mirror (Lucy).
It was very painful to realize recently that I don't feel like
anyone has really seen ME — the for-real me, in a dog's
age. So I think, then, when I didn't feel like I LOOKED like
me, it became this focal point for not feeling like me. Or
rather, feeling like the person people were dealing with
was not me. I think also the occasional “slimming” outfit
or foundation garment might have to be what gets me
through days like this until I'm further along in self-
acceptance. It's not just that they're slimming, it's that
they make me look more like the me that I fear has been
lost (Jamie).
Jamie writes about the ways in which even those others
who don't ‘judge’ fatness nonetheless see through its lens.
She is confronted by the ways in which her (now fatter) body
apparently conveys things to others about her that don't
reflect her own sense of herself.
421
A couple of years ago, when my mom was giving me the
biannual “DON'T YOU KNOW YOU'RE FAT AND OMG
OBESITY KILLS” speech, she mentioned my old childhood
nemesis, and said that the nemesis was “winning.”
Because she was thin and married… So for my mom to
say that she was “winning” was tantamount to saying that
being kind, getting good grades, and accomplishing things
in my professional life meant NOTHING, because I was (a)
fat and (b) single. (And, of course, my mom thought that
(a) was the reason for (b).) (Dawn).
I laugh when I think about how hard my mom tried to get
me down to that weight. Never mind that I was a basically
straight A student, or that I could sing, had a gift for music
(that I never pursued, but am now!), won my state's
spelling competition…none of that “counted” because I
was “fat”. Mind you, my youngest sibling, who was a
cheerleader in high school and a model, is skinny as a rail
and 5′10″ or so, and is also a raging alcoholic in a
treatment program after having lost custody of her 3 little
children due to a suicide attempt. Oh yeah, I'm the one
with the problem, alright (Deb).
Several commenters wrote bitterly about the ways in
which their personal qualities and achievements were
overlooked or spoiled by their families' fixation on their
weight. Being ‘too’ fat trumped any other achievements and
outranked any other ‘vices’. The negativity was understood
by most commenters to be motivated by concern, however
misguided and hurtful, and designed to push the fat person
into taking steps that were sincerely intended to produce
lasting weight loss and thus a fuller and happier life. The
recognition of the well-intentioned nature of the constant
focus on losing weight did not remove the deep sense of hurt
and anger that many commenters expressed about the way
in which the usurping of identity by the body left them as
being understood as defective and lacking by those who
loved them.
Some commenters actively took up others' misreadings of
their bodies as part of their own resistance. In the following
extract, Julie locates the problem of misrecognition in the
limited focus of the beholder, suggesting that it reflects more
on that person's own body hatred than on her own identity
or worth:
But lately it has occurred to me that if people can look at
me, a bright, accomplished, young woman, and only see
the size of my ass…then I pity them, and I think you
should do the same. Because anyone who would be that
focused on another person's body, probably spends a lot
of time looking in the mirror and hating their own (Julie).
The experience of misrecognition by others because of
their fat bodies is reported by commenters as one of the most
difficult aspects of their attempts to live the credo of FA.
Several posts describe the lingering sense of hurt, disap-
pointment and frustration experienced over the failure of
others – partners, parents and friends – to be able to fully
recognise them without being influenced by their bodies.
These comments show how conceptualising the desire for
422 N. Donaghue, A. Clemitshaw / Women's Studies International Forum 35 (2012) 415–425
thinness as a faulty internalisation of an abstract ideal misses
the profoundly relational and social aspects of embodiment.
The dilemmatic nature of fat acceptance
Many of the comments made reference to the dissonance
or contradictions they experienced in trying to take on the
messages of fat acceptance.
I am totally smart and a feminist and a major caller outer
of bullshit and yet I want to be a waif. And don't feel in
control and pretty and validated unless I'm small. I obsess
about my size, what I am or am not eating, from the
moment I wake till the moment I sleep. I am always
comparing my size to other women. I use the fear of
getting fat again as motivation to workout. One part of me
says use the fear, because if I'm more than a size 4 I am
miserable. The other says there's a better way. I believe
that in principal but not in practical (Dee).
Dee frames her ‘obsession’ with remaining thin as funda-
mentally at odds with her intelligence, feminist commitment,
and usual invulnerability to ‘bullshit’; she presents her body as
a fraught battleground between two unreconciled ‘parts’ of
herself. Other posts extend this theme, stressing the amount of
energy and effort required to maintain a fat accepting mindset
while still experiencing the draw of the desire to be thin.
I'm just still in that phase of fat acceptance where it's
something I have no problem applying to others, but
cannot yet apply to myself. Accepting myself, accepting
that this doesn't mean failure or defeat, that it's just a
more realistic way to live, doing it day after day, is literally
the hardest thing I have ever done. It takes just as much
effort as pursuing an unattainable ideal. And in between
both of them I am expending the energy to do both
(Andrea).
I'm at a total loss, and I feel like I can't win for losing.
That's at the core of it. I want to do the right thing and just
freaking forget about the essentially nonsensical idea that
thin(ner) will = (more) content, because I know it would
heal so much pain. But damn, that means working at it
every day. And there are times I honestly feel like I don't
have the strength to wrestle with all the other crap in my
life AND do that, too (Alice).
These posts vividly describe the experience of believing that
trying to lose weight is both futile and hurtful and of being
intellectually committed to the idea of fat acceptance, while at
the same time experiencing the strong draw of the desire to be
thin. Several commenters describe this struggle in terms of the
effort required to actively maintain an FA mindset over the
more well-rehearsed lines of feminine weight loss culture, and
many conveyed a sense of deep distress at feeling caught
between these two paths, unable to fully commit to either and
thus to do anything ‘right’. Many commenters incorporate
recognition of the ubiquity and strength of the cultural ideal for
feminine thinness into their understanding and practice of FA;
references to ‘dissonance’, ‘good days’ versus ‘bad days’, and
‘phases’ of FA are made in an offhand way that suggests that
they are a taken-for-granted experience, and the reflexive
orientation to the existence of the conflict shows how
normalised it is as part of the FA discourse. Nonetheless, the
ways in which many of the extracts start by recognising this
aspect of FA, and then go on to tell their personal experience of
why, even with this awareness, the dilemma still feels so
difficult, suggests that the deeply felt sense that that successful
feminine identity is undermined by a not-thin body remains
powerful and tremendously hard to shake.
The funny thing about it is that it even applies to the fat
acceptance movement. At some level, I say to myself,
“Hey, accepting and loving my body will be great! It
doesn't matter what size I am, and my life will become
lovely and happy! Great! But I'll start working on it when
I'm thin.” It actually took me a long time to realize how
ridiculous that sounds. I guess it's just another example of
the conflation of thinness and happiness (Barb).
I think it's too much to ask that no one waver. On
occasion, I have moments where non-feminist thought
sneaks in; less and less as I ‘practice’. Body image is even
more insidious. My doctor made a point of reminding me
that my weight is now ‘the highest it's even been’, so I've
been feeling the pressure, too. (Andrea)
Some days I read the FA blogs and wonder what is
WRONG with me that I'm not perfectly enlightened and
loving myself ALL THE TIME already! I know it's irrational
to think that and that in reality it's always a journey for
everyone, but there you go (Mel).
In the above extracts these commenters clearly articulate
the widely espoused view throughout the comments that,
rather than representing an achieved position of resistance, fat
acceptance is an ongoing process of resisting unsustainable
beliefs and practices and trying to disengage from the desire
to be thin.
General discussion
Online fat acceptance communities provide their mem-
bers with a powerful counter to the widespread cultural
insistence that fat bodies are pitiable and pathological. The
comments on this blog are full of personal testimonies to the
power of FA to open and to nurture a different type of
engagement with their bodies for women with long histories
of relating to their own bodies with disgust and disappoint-
ment, and of engaging in punishing and usually futile regimes
to discipline their bodies into an ‘acceptable’ form. De-
scriptions of past selves still in thrall to the belief that
becoming and remaining thin was just a matter of finding the
discipline to eat and exercise ‘correctly’ were often described
in ironic or mocking tones, as if the naivety of such beliefs
could scarcely be believed. Feelings of relief and freedom
were commonly expressed as accompanying the messages of
the FA community.
And yet, it would be a mistake to assume that the discovery
of the FA community correspondingly diminishes the power
 N. Donaghue, A. Clemitshaw / Women's Studies International Forum 35 (2012) 415–425
and attraction of the thin ideal. One of the striking things about
the testimonials made in response to the blog posts is that
despite the strong appeal and desire to take up the relation to
one's own not-thin body offered by FA, that these subject
positions of resistance were occupied in a transient, unstable
manner. In fact, the ‘building in’ of the instability and
dissonance as part of the normative experience of FA strongly
orients to and preempts the likelihood that members of the FA
community will still, on occasion, experience a strong desire to
be thin. In this way, our findings differ from those of Dickins et
al. (2011), who presented a more linear stage model, in which
exposure to FA leads fat people, albeit gradually, from a starting
point of self and body hatred to an achieved position of fat
acceptance. The instability of feelings of acceptance of their fat
bodies reported by the women on the Shapely Prose blog
resonates with fat acceptance activist Samantha Murray's
(2008) personal account of the alienation she has experienced
in response to the unambiguously ‘fat and proud’ narrative that
has dominated parts of the FA movement, a narrative that does
not allow for the complexity and contradiction of her own
subjective experiences of her fat (activist) body (see also
Bovey, 2002; Mack, 2007).
How can we understand the instability of this resistance, and
the dissonance that is such a strong feature of people's own
accounts of their experiences of fat acceptance? Commenters on
the blog were generally extremely well-versed in arguments
against the thin ideal, on both pragmatic and ideological
grounds, so much so that it seems difficult to account for the
instability of their resistance entirely as a failure of ‘critical
media literacy’. Understanding the desire for thinness as a
simple reflection of a problematic relation between individual
women and images of unrealistic thinness misses the complex-
ity of women's relation to these images, and the inadequacy of
sophisticated critique to fully undermine the images' power.
Many comments reflected on the difficult position of ‘knowing’
that they are (or would be) better off accepting their fat bodies
while at the same time still ‘feeling’ a powerful desire to be thin.
The intellectual critique of the thin ideal that is a feature of both
FA and psychological interventions design to increase resistance
fails to capture the ways in which images can work on a
different ‘level’, engaging emotional and affective responses and
creating resonances that deepen and naturalise the subjective
experience of wanting to be thin (see Harvey & Gill, 2011 for a
discussion of these issues in relation to sexualised images).
A further aspect of the difficulty with resistance can be
understood as arising from the reality of thin privilege in
contemporary western societies (Fikkan & Rothblum, 2012).
Although many commenters mocked themselves for elements
of their magical thinking around thinness, there was also
frequent recognition that there are very real ways in which life
is easier for thin women than fat women. Many commenters
drew on their own experiences of having lost weight in the past
to talk about the ways in which others' impressions of and
assumptions about them varied with their body size, and
although the privileges of thinness were usually rhetorically set
against the unsustainability of constant and increasing dieting
and exercise, there was still a sense that some real benefits
were lost in letting go of the struggle for thinness. This again
reflects these women's resistance to the idea that the desire for
thinness is simply a personal preference or ‘choice’ that they
could choose to just ‘get over’, and strongly asserts the
423
enormity and ubiquity of the social pressures for thinness
experiences by these women.
Resistance to the thin ideal was overwhelmingly predicated
on the grounds that diets don't work, rather than on denying
the attraction of thinness. The bottom-line argument from
which these accounts proceed is of the futility of dieting; if you
are fat, that there is nothing permanent to be done about it, and
that it is better to accept that reality and to get on with life than
to continue to pursue at great cost a goal that is not (lastingly)
attainable. There is a sense of resignation, as well as relief, that
comes from no longer hoping to be thin that illustrates what
some fat activists consider the problematic view that the best
that fat people can hope for is acceptance (rather than
celebration) of their bodies (see Cooper, 2010; LeBesco, 2004,
for discussion of these issues). Other writers and activists have
criticised those pushing for fat pride (as opposed to fat
acceptance) for their unrealistic expectation that fat people
can simply ‘rise above’ the cultural demonisation of fat and
choose how to experience their fat embodiment (e.g. Mack,
2007; Murray, 2008). The specific posts and comments that we
have analysed here, as well as the content of the Shapely Prose
blog (and others in the fatosphere) more generally are strongly
grounded in the pursuit of acceptance as the (potentially)
achievable goal in relation to fat embodiment, and indeed
spend considerable time reassuring readers that it is complete-
ly understandable that they would still personally prefer to be
thin, given the immensity of the western cultural privileging of
thinness over fatness. This emphasis on normalising the desire
(but not the opportunity) for thinness seems oriented to
concerns that trying to accept one's fat body and yet continuing
to be ‘tempted’ to diet can simply give fat (or not-thin) women
yet another thing to feel bad about. This pragmatic view does
not prevent attempts to deeply challenge the meanings
associated with fat bodies, but does largely set this to one side
in favour of the perhaps more approachable goal of promoting
personal acceptance of one's own fat body.
Beyond the identification of the many ways in which thin
privilege operates ‘out there’ in social life, some commenters
wrote of the ways in which their bodies prevented others from
seeing and appreciating them in the spaces of their most
intimate relationships. Powerful stories of parents who failed
to recognise or value qualities and achievements in their fat
daughters, or of partners who no longer saw the ‘real’ person
were used to convey the sense that the ability to communicate
key aspects of identity was blocked by the hyper-meaningful
sign of the fat body. This overdetermination of identity by the
body was drawn on to express the frustration and hurt at the
persistent misrecognition brought on by their bodies and that
contributed to the paradoxical but powerful sense that ‘I don't
look like me’. As Elizabeth Grosz observes ‘…bodies speak
without necessarily talking because they are made into signs’
(p35, 1994); in many of these women's experiences, their fat
bodies seem to drown out even the most personal and intimate
communications from ‘inside’.
Identity is not a private achievement, and these comments
about the failures of recognition, attributed to fat bodies,
highlight the ways in which the subject positions made
available in the discursive matrix are not simply subjective,
but also, crucially, intersubjective. Identity is a relational
project, and the ability to hold a certain view of oneself requires
a confirming reflection from another (Gergen, 1994). It is this
424 N. Donaghue, A. Clemitshaw / Women's Studies International Forum 35 (2012) 415–425
aspect of identity that requires fat acceptance to be understood
as both a political project and an intersubjective experience,
and that goes some way to explaining the instability of the
experience of secure, positive identity as a fat woman that is
such a striking feature of commenters' accounts of their own
subjectivity. Just as the thin ideal is not only ‘in the minds’ of
those who aspire to it, fat acceptance also needs to be ‘in the
ether’ if it is to provide a basis for change in the interlocutors of
fat women that could form a constant and secure basis for
identity.
The material in our analysis comes from comments made
on two blog posts, and does not by any means reflect the
entire content of this blog, let alone the fatosphere or the fat
acceptance movement more generally. We selected these
posts in particular because they explicitly explored the
continuing pull of the thin ideal, an experience that they
identified as widespread even among those fully ‘on board’
with fat acceptance. Although discussion and reflection on
this issue was by no means restricted to these two posts, it is
important to note that many other posts on this blog, and
elsewhere in the fatosphere, do not feature the same degree
of self-conscious reflection on the difficulties and dilemmas
of fat acceptance. The two post that we have analysed in this
paper were popular and highly commented on – they clearly
touch on an aspect of FA that resonates with many in the
movement – but in focusing on this aspect we do not wish to
imply that it is the single focus of the fatosphere nor to
undermine the importance of FA blogs in the creation of
spaces in which community is built and activism is fostered.
The posts made by commenters on a fat acceptance blog
cannot, of course, reveal the full range of experiences of
women as they attempt to find a way to resist the pervasive
discourses of the thin ideal. Although this blog, like many
others in the fatosphere, makes frequent references to the
importance of intersectionality and is self-conscious about its
own relatively narrow perspective on fatness, the experi-
ences described on the blog appear to come mostly from
young, white, highly educated, middle class American
women. The pseudonymous, minimally identified nature of
interactions within these spaces is part of the ‘reality’ of the
culture of these blogs; it may also be part of what allows
people to participate in FA on these sites in the ways that
they do. However, this feature of the blog culture does mean
that our analysis of it is seriously limited by our inability to
consider intersections between fatness and other identity
characteristics, particularly ‘race’, class, sexual orientation,
and cultural/national background.
Furthermore, many of the commenters describe them-
selves in ways that do not place them among the truly fat, but
rather as ‘in-betweenies’ or not-thin. While this in no way
diminishes the importance or the difficulty of finding ways to
resist the dictates of the requirements for thinness, it does
represent a particular relation to these standards that
complicate the relation of these women to the thin ideal.
For example, although many ‘in-betweenies’ would ‘fail’
against the aesthetic standards of the beauty ideal, they
may get a ‘pass’ against the health focused judgements that
suggest that unarguably fat people are hopelessly irrespon-
sible in their wanton neglect of their health (as well as
unattractive). Although some of the posters whom we have
quoted in our analysis do ground their comments with
references to their own size or size history, we are wary of
attempting to make comparisons between women on this
basis, with such partial information. For this reason, we are
unable to fully answer Fikkan and Rothblum's (2012) recent
call to address specifically the experiences of fat women, and
to distinguish between the lived experience of fatness and
the fear of fat among not-fat women that is a much more
frequent focus of scholarly investigations of the thin ideal.
However, this alliance among women of widely varying body
sizes is a feature of the blog communities comprising the
fatosphere, and the discourses of resistance that organise
these spaces are addressed to women of all sizes and all
manner of personal histories. Although only some of these
women identify (and are identified by others) as fat, all share
an investment in denaturalising and overturning the cultur-
ally endorsed assumption that bodies can be read as evidence
of health, happiness, worthiness, and responsibility.
These comments echo the observations made by Kathleen
LeBesco (2004) about the neverendingness of the battle to
resignify fat bodies. The fat acceptance movement in general,
and the many blogs of the fatosphere in particular, form a
powerful intervention into cultural understandings of the
meanings of fat, and our analysis reveals how much its key
messages resonate with women who, by their own account,
have struggled with body acceptance for long periods. Yet
although the fat acceptance movement provides a space within
which (some) fat people can challenge and change their own
minds, unless and until it is more widely engaged by culture
more generally, it can only address part of the problem. Part of
the solution to fat oppression can lie in resisting and refusing
the spoiled cultural meanings of fatness, but part of it also
consists in overthrowing the relentless reproduction of the
oppressive ideology of the thin ideal.
Endnote
1
Although ‘fat acceptance’ is a widely used term by fat activists
(including the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance, and the
writers of the blog that is the subject of this paper), it is worth noting that
this terminology is contested. Some fat activists reject it on the grounds that
it reinforces the notion of fatness as undesirable — something to be
‘accepted’ rather than having any positive value in its own right (see Cooper,
2010, for a discussion of these issues).
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