What Does Body Positivity Mean in 2022?
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What is body positivity?
Body positivity, or #Bopo, is a movement that aims to help people accept and celebrate bodies of all shapes, sizes, skin color, ability, and gender.
Where did it start?
“Body positivity started being used as a phrase in the 1990s,” says Tigress Obsborn, chair of the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance (NAAFA). In 1996, an organization called The Body Positive was founded by an author who suffered with an eating disorder in her teens and a psychotherapist who specialized in treating eating disorders.
“But when people talk about ‘body positivity,’ they are really talking about the social media movement that started in the early 2000s on platforms like Facebook and Tumbler, created by queer people, Black women and femmes, fat people, and disabled people. They were building community spaces and social media campaigns around body positivity, uplifting marginalized bodies and creating media that featured marginalized bodies,” says Osborn.
Body positivity and its history in fat liberation and fat acceptance
“The fat liberation movement of the 1960s is one of the grand elders of the body positivity, movement,” says Osborn. “And so are any of the folks who were pushed to the edges of the mainstream beauty standard. But a lot of the language does come from things fat liberationists did in ’70s, and ’80s, especially fat feminists.”
NAAFA was founded in 1969, “dedicated to protecting the rights and improving the quality of life for fat people.” “For the first time, an organization exists to make life better for fat people without them having to change their bodies,” says Osborn. And from there grew the Fat Underground, a more radical offshoot that published the seminal “Fat Liberation Manifesto,” which demanded “equal rights for fat people in all areas of life,” highlighted the intersectionality of fat liberation with other oppressed groups, strove to end fat discrimination in the workplace, and called out the diet and health industries, among other things.
“These founding principles of the manifesto are the same things we see in the early body positivity movement,” says Osborn. “Including the idea that advertisers create beauty standards that aren’t realistic. That the medical world is not fair in their treatment of us. That the diet industry is a billion-dollar industry that wants you to think you’re terrible, so you’ll keep spending money.”
What is the difference between body positivity and fat liberation?
“Body positivity wants you to feel good about yourself. Fat liberation wants the system to change so you can actually live your life. It’s not about your personal self-esteem; it’s about access and equity. It’s not about inclusion in a feel-good way, it’s about inclusion in a practical, logistical way. Can I fit places? Can I be places? Can I be accepted in places? Not just, do I look in the mirror and see something I like?” says Osborn.
“Body positivity is focused on the individual. How do they feel in their bodies? Can they purchase clothes? Can people see themselves in magazines and on TV?” adds Evette Dionne, a culture critic and the author of Weightless: Making Space for My Resilient Body and Soul. “Fat acceptance focuses on systems: How does the world at large discriminate, target, and surveil fat bodies, trans bodies, disabled bodies, and anyone perceived as deviant from the ‘norm?’”
Dionne recalls facing fat discrimination as young kid. “Fat phobia is very insidious and started affecting me as a child around 8 or 9 years old,” she says. “I had an asthma attack and was prescribed steroids, which made me gain weight. After that the doctors only wanted to talk to me about diet. It was odd. Kids began to torment me, and I couldn’t find clothes that fit. I knew something was wrong.”
When she was 22, Dionne saw the influencer Gabi Fresh on social media and was wowed. “She wore bikinis, which was eye-opening for me. Having that confidence inspired me to find that power within myself. I discovered it wasn’t just me feeling this way.” Dionne learned about the fat acceptance movement when she was around 25, turning her attention outward toward examining systems and the way they oppress and discriminate against marginalized bodies.
“I have felt that I stuck out my entire life,” says Amie Anderson, a Hudson Valley therapist, educator, and activist who runs body liberation circles. “Feeling ‘othered’ is a trauma based in both systemic oppression and interpersonal interactions. So I use the phrase body liberation because it turns the issue on its head. What if it was never a self-esteem issue? It’s something that started on the outside of us and was reinforced by the messaging we get day in and day out about how we are ranked by skin color, size, gender, ability, and facial symmetry. Fat people are denied access to medical care, clothing, airplanes, restaurants, theaters, jobs. Even though it’s starting to get better, representation of fat people in the media is still atrocious, even children’s media. My activism work can’t just be about healing my relationship with my own body. I’m working to make space for people larger than me,” says Anderson.
“The mainstreaming of body positivity has opened a lot of doors for a lot of people,” says Osborn. “A lot of dialogue has been created. And some cultural attitude shifts in expanding beauty definitions create a little breathing room. But for people who are still farthest out on the margins, #bopo isn’t changing their lives.”
“When you look at the hashtags for body positivity now, what comes up is a lot of skinny white women posting, ‘Look how brave I am posting a pic in my bikini after I gained three pounds!’ which is a real erasure of the fat Black women who started this movement,” says Anderson.
This is a sentiment Lizzo shared on Tik Tok, saying:
“Because now that body positivity has been co-opted by all bodies, and people are finally celebrating medium and small girls and people who occasionally get rolls, fat people are still getting the short end of this movement.… We're still getting shit on, we're still getting talked about, meme'd, shamed, and no one cares anymore, because it's like, 'Body positivity is for everybody.… Yes, please be positive about your body, please use our movement to empower yourself; that’s the point. But the people who created this movement—big women, big brown and Black women, queer women—are not benefiting from the mainstream success of it.”
“When body positivity starts, it is a radical, social movement on social media created by people who are farthest of mainstream beauty standards really demanding their right to be seen, heard and be themselves as they are without having to fix themselves,” says Osborn. “But as it gets more popular it gets more mainstream and as the marketplace starts to recognize body positivity as something that is really popular, they start to co-opt it in advertising. So, it’s not the same radical roots as that beginning of body positivity on social media and it’s definitely not the same radical roots as the beginning of fat liberation.”
What is body neutrality?
In her book What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Fat, author Aubrey Gordon defines body neutrality as the viewpoint that “bodies should be prized for their function, not their appearance, and that simply feeling impartial about our bodies would represent a significant step forward for those of us whose bodies are most marginalized bodies.”
“We don’t have to be happy, happy, joy, joy, all the time,” says Anderson. “If someone has a troubled relationship with their body, does that mean they’re not invited to the revolution?”
“The expectation that you have to love your body and feel all ‘Yay, my body!’ is a lot of pressure that’s not just about your internal landscape,” says Osborn. “It’s about the actual practicality of how your body works or how it works in the world and maybe asking people to feel positive about that is just too much. I don’t have to feel crappy about my body, but I don’t have to be having a romanticized love affair with my body, either. I just have to meet my body where it’s at.”
Osborn also offers that body neutrality gives room for vulnerability. “There can be so much vulnerability in taking the steps towards loving your body in a culture that is set up to tell you to not love your body. There are all these messages that tell us our bodies are bad, or they’re not good enough or we have to fix them or be cured of something. It’s beautiful if you can—despite all of that—have a love affair with your body. But there might be days, or it might be every day, that that is asking too much of you. The alternative doesn’t have to be hating yourself, there can just be acceptance.”
Where do we go from here?
“The first step is self-interrogation,” says Dionne. “How do you think about your body and other people’s bodies? Interrogate your own biases with fat, trans, and disabled folks.” she encourages.
“Body Positivity has been an important stepping stone to get us to where we are now, but there is still a lot of work to do, “says Anderson. “Explicit body shaming may have gone down a little, but implicit bias is actually up. People make the assumption that fatness is changeable and a choice, and this is largely not the case. There’s this idea that bullying someone is somehow healthy for them, which couldn’t be farther from the truth, and this type of thinking leads to real harm at every scale. Everyone should be examining their own bias around this issue. There are many great writers who highlight the intersectional experiences of people in fat bodies, and activists are working toward making real systemic long-term change. The best way to help someone to feel good about their body is not a t-shirt that says “you go girl”, it isn’t a pep talk. It’s a commitment to justice. “
Resources:
Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia
Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness
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