Redefining health on Instagram: Women’s experiences with body positivity and body neutrality

content on social media

By

Olivia Grace Scully

A thesis submitted to the School of Kinesiology and Health Studies

in conformity with the degree requirements for the

degree of Master of Arts

Queen’s University

Kingston, Ontario, Canada

January 2024

Copyright © Olivia Grace Scully, 2024

 Abstract

This thesis explores women’s experiences with body positivity and body neutrality movements

on social media. Body positivity is an umbrella term for a movement that resists diet culture and

beauty standards which emphasize thinness and whiteness. Mainstream body positivity focuses

on loving one’s body despite one’s flaws, while radical body positivity in the form of body

neutrality focuses on dismantling larger discourses surrounding health and body size. In other

words, body neutrality encourages a neutral feeling about one’s body. Throughout the study

design and data analysis, I used intersectionality to focus on how identities such as gender, race,

and class affect individual experiences with diet culture and body positivity content. Through

focus groups and journaling with seven cisgender women between the ages of 19 and 32, I

explored three topics with each group. My research sought to answer the following questions: 1)

how do individuals take up body positivity, and how do their identities influence their

consumption of the content? 2) how does consumption of body positivity content on social media

shape constructions of health? and 3) does body positivity content provide a counter-narrative to

diet culture? I used rhizomatic dialogic analysis throughout the data collection and analysis

phases, which allowed for a balanced relationship between the researcher and participants. I also

utilized semiparticipatory ethnography to include my voice in the data. My main findings include

identifying healthism and diet culture as influencing participants’ relationships with their bodies,

ultimately leading participants to seek counterdiscourses such as body positivity. Participants

identified three main critiques of body positivity, which I argue qualify body positivity as a

postfeminist culture. Participants discussed body neutrality as an alternative to body positivity as

it removes the focus from the body and allows for a balanced and mindful relationship with one’s

body. Participants agreed that their conceptualizations of health changed after engaging with

ii
body positivity and body neutrality content because it taught them to resist healthist discourses

and challenge the conflation of thinness with health. I argue that body neutrality may help treat

eating disorders by dismantling dominant discourses surrounding health and body size; however,

it maintains a neoliberal focus on the self through practices of self-care and self-help.

Keywords: body positivity, body neutrality, health, diet culture, race, fatness, fat activism,

women’s health, intersectionality, neoliberalism

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 Acknowledgements

Thank you to my supervisor, Dr. Courtney Szto, for your guidance throughout this

project. Your trust in me to bring my ideas to fruition is greatly appreciated. I also extend my

gratitude to the professors I have learned from during my two and a half years at Queen’s,

including Dr. Courtney Szto, Dr. Mary Louise Adams, and Dr. Samantha King. Your courses,

feedback, and encouragement have provided me with an engaging and thought-provoking space

that means more to me than you could know. If I take nothing else away from my time at

Queen’s, I will take the theories and concepts taught to me that have helped me make sense of

the world. Thank you to Dr. William Bridel for introducing me to sociocultural studies many

years ago, for I would not have been here now without your guidance throughout my

undergraduate degree.

Thank you to my parents; you two have supported and loved me through every dream I

have had – small or big. Thank you, Conor, for cheering me on and being my best friend.

Taylor, you are my biggest supporter and number one fan. Kingston provided me with

many things, but what I did not expect was to meet you. Thank you for helping me see this

through.

Thank you to my dog, Remi, for getting me through long days of writing, forcing me to

take a walk outside, and reminding me of the simple joys of life.

Jamie, your friendship made Kingston home. Your acceptance and kinship are so

valuable to me. I know I can always laugh and cry with you. Grace, I am forever grateful for our

coffee shop dates and craft nights. Jill and Gagan, you have taught me so much, academically

and otherwise, and have provided me with a sense of community.

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 Thank you to the people, scholars, content creators, and activists for advocating for body

acceptance and fat liberation. I have learned so much from the community and hope this

positively contributes to scholarship on body liberation.

Finally, thank you to my participants. I am so grateful for your vulnerability and

willingness to discuss topics I am passionate about. This project would not exist without you.

v
 Table of Contents

Abstract ........................................................................................................................................... ii

Acknowledgements ........................................................................................................................ iv

List of Figures ................................................................................................................................. x

Chapter 1 ......................................................................................................................................... 1

Introduction ..................................................................................................................................... 1

Chapter 2 ....................................................................................................................................... 10

Literature Review ......................................................................................................................... 10

The racist history of fatphobia .................................................................................................. 10

Healthism and the obesity epidemic ......................................................................................... 14

Gendered healthism as a postfeminist culture ...................................................................... 17

Intersectional approaches to Fat Studies ................................................................................... 20

Fat activism in Canada and the United States ........................................................................... 24

Contemporary fat activism as body positivity ...................................................................... 26

Current literature on media, body image, and body positivity ................................................. 29

Conclusion ................................................................................................................................ 31

Chapter 3 ....................................................................................................................................... 32

Methods, Methodologies, and Theoretical Frameworks............................................................... 32

Methodologies........................................................................................................................... 33

Rhizomatic dialogic analysis ................................................................................................ 33

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 Intersectionality..................................................................................................................... 34

My positionality ........................................................................................................................ 36

Methods..................................................................................................................................... 38

Focus Groups ........................................................................................................................ 38

Journaling.............................................................................................................................. 39

Recruitment ............................................................................................................................... 40

Participants............................................................................................................................ 42

Data Collection ......................................................................................................................... 44

Focus Groups ........................................................................................................................ 44

Journaling.............................................................................................................................. 46

Methodological and ethical challenges ................................................................................. 46

Data analysis ............................................................................................................................. 47

Finding my theoretical framework: Postfeminism ............................................................... 49

Conclusion ................................................................................................................................ 51

Chapter 4 ....................................................................................................................................... 52

Body positivity: radical or palatable? ........................................................................................... 52

Healthism and beauty standards in our early years ................................................................... 52

Diet culture at home .............................................................................................................. 53

Diet culture in the media ....................................................................................................... 56

Whiteness and thinness embedded in diet culture ................................................................ 57

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 Body positivity and its criticisms.............................................................................................. 59

The commodification of the body positivity movement ....................................................... 61

Appropriation of the body positivity movement ................................................................... 67

Mainstream body positivity as a postfeminist culture .......................................................... 70

Conclusion ................................................................................................................................ 75

Chapter 5 ....................................................................................................................................... 76

If not body positivity, then what? ................................................................................................. 76

A shift from body positivity to body neutrality ........................................................................ 77

How do participants conceptualize body neutrality? ............................................................ 79

Why body neutrality? ............................................................................................................ 82

But what about health?.............................................................................................................. 84

What does practicing body neutrality look like? .................................................................. 92

Does body neutrality go beyond the self? ................................................................................. 97

Conclusion .............................................................................................................................. 103

Chapter 6 ..................................................................................................................................... 105

Conclusion .................................................................................................................................. 105

References ....................................................................................................................................113

Appendix A: Focus Group Questions ......................................................................................... 133

Appendix B: Journaling Follow-Up Questions .......................................................................... 135

Appendix C: GREB approval ..................................................................................................... 136

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Appendix D: Recruitment poster ................................................................................................ 138

Appendix E: Letter of information and consent ......................................................................... 139

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 List of Figures

Figure 1: Focus group sessions and questions .............................................................................. 39

Figure 2: Focus groups.................................................................................................................. 42

Figure 3: “Real women. Real beauty.” Dove Ad Campaign, 2004 ............................................... 62

Figure 4: Good American website showcasing jeans on different sized models. ......................... 63

Figure 5: @danaemercer on Instagram ......................................................................................... 68

Figure 6: @beyondbeautifulbook on Instagram ........................................................................... 77

x
 Chapter 1

Introduction

My Instagram feed brought me here. The highly personalized and extremely accurate

collection of content created by mostly women, along with some men and gender-diverse people,

has influenced me so greatly that I am now here, writing a thesis about it. Roughly six to seven

years ago, in the throes of a relapse in my disordered eating, I stumbled upon a body positivity

content creator, @bodyposipanda. A picture posted by Megan (now @meganjaynecrabbe on

Instagram) of herself in only a sports bra flaunted her stomach rolls and claimed space in an

online community that I knew nothing about. I began to follow more body positivity and fat

acceptance influencers like @sydneylbell, @thebirdspapaya, and @ashleygraham. Around the

same time, I was taking an undergraduate seminar titled “Critical Perspectives of the Body” with

Dr. William Bridel at the University of Calgary. During one of our first classes, we watched a

lecture by Dr. Paul Campos given about his book, The Obesity Myth (2004), where I was

exposed to the idea that fat bodies could be healthy – a statement that very much opposed my

learnings throughout the previous four years. In the Kinesiology faculty, we focused on a

biomedical model of health and healthist discourses that pathologized fat and fat bodies as

unhealthy. To then see @bodyposipanda on the internet showing up in a fat body and claiming

that it was okay to be that way, that no one could judge the health status of a person based on

what they look like, and that she was happy in her body, was a moment that began to put things

together for me.

Growing up, I was surrounded by the harmful, pervasive diet culture of the 1990s and

early 2000s. Much like many other households of that time, my home was full of diet products,

comments about weight loss, and language that moralized certain foods over others. I want and
1
need to emphasize that this was not a personal moral failing of my parents but a product of the

dominant healthist discourses within Canadian culture at the time. At the young age of 13, I

already had a firm handle on which foods were “good” and “bad”, which foods would promise to

keep my body small, and which foods would threaten an increase on the scale. I knew I could eat

more on days when I had dance class. I also knew which bathroom to go to after meals to hide

my purging. My eating disorder1 gave me purpose; I was seeking “health” and obsessed with

clean eating and fitting into smaller clothes. At an age where I should have been gaining weight,

enjoying treats with friends, and exploring the wonderful foods I may not have tried before, I

was restricting myself, thinking that health was a smaller number on the scale. At an age where I

should have been learning about my changing body and making friends with this body, I was

instead learning what it meant to be “healthy” and, subsequently, what made me a “woman”:

skinny, sexy, and… hungry. Thankfully, my mom was able to notice some signs of disordered

eating and take me to the doctor, where I was referred to the eating disorder clinic at the Alberta

Children’s Hospital.

Following my discharge from the eating disorder program at 15 years old, I continued to

struggle with body image throughout my later teen years and into early adulthood. I had

developed coping mechanisms through therapy and the program but would frequently fall into

old habits, relapsing into disordered eating2 behaviours in times of stress. Losing weight and

being thin was, and continues to be, glorified in our society, and I was able to hide and fuel my

1
To clarify my language, I use the term eating disorder for a clinical diagnosis. Clinical diagnoses of eating
disorders can require more than showing disordered eating behaviours. There are many types of eating disorders,
each with their own exclusive symptoms.
2
Disordered eating describes behaviours which are not “normal” around food or diet but do not have a clinical
diagnosis. Some people may never get a clinical diagnosis of an eating disorder despite showing disordered eating
behaviours, for example, counting calories or obsessive weighing or measuring of food.

2
disordered eating through compliments from friends and family on how “good” I looked.

Remaining thin while gaining muscle meant I was healthy, dedicated, and disciplined. The first

few years of my kinesiology degree were filled with courses focused on “health,” including

courses that emphasized the importance of nutrition and exercise. While both are essential

aspects of health and a healthy lifestyle, I could hide my disordered eating patterns again by

being “fit,” eating “clean,” and frequenting the gym in excess. Arguably, I was the perfect

kinesiology student. Fatness was considered unhealthy, and conversations among peers centred

on how kinesiology students were “better” and “healthier” than others. During the second year of

my undergraduate degree, I took an introductory-level course on the sociocultural aspects of

sport and the body. I was indoctrinated by diet culture, wellness culture, and healthism

throughout my adolescence, and it was made concrete when the science-based courses in my

degree confirmed these ideas. Through Dr. Bridel’s sociocultural class, however, I learned about

concepts such as healthism, social determinants of health, and the patriarchy. The course taught

me how to put on my “critical lens” while viewing the world. With this new knowledge, my

eating disorder made sense to me. I did not have an illness – the world did. I was not wrong, bad,

or weak-willed; rather, neoliberalism and healthism have individualized our problems and have

made us responsible for things out of our control. After taking that course and many other

sociology courses, I could finally begin to understand my relationship with my body.

My experience as a young adolescent with body image issues, disordered eating, and

dieting is not rare. In Canada, roughly one in three girls and one in four boys aged 10-14 diet to

lose weight (Gusella et al., 2008; McVey et al., 2005). Dieting is the number one indicator for

developing eating disorders (Golden et al., 2016), and eating disorders have the second highest

mortality rate of mental health disorders, second to opioid addiction (Chesney et al., 2014).

3
Furthermore, recent research shows that trans youth, Black, Indigenous, and youth of Color

(BIPOC), and youth from lower socioeconomic statuses are disproportionately affected by eating

disorders and disordered eating (Coelho et al., 2019; Hooper et al., 2021). A study by Reba-

Harrelson and colleagues (2013) found that three of four women who do not have eating

disorders report concerns that their weight affects their mental health, meaning that a large

population of women feel somehow affected by diet culture. Beauty standards for girls and

women have historically been embedded in whiteness and thinness (Strings, 2019) and have been

proven to perpetuate disordered eating and poor body image (Heinberg et al., 1995), which

results in women altering their bodies to attain current beauty trends, Diet culture is pervasive in

our world, and the so-called “obesity epidemic” during the late 1990s and early 2000s has

embedded a fear of fat in Canadian society (Hobbes & Gordon, 2021).

Body positivity is a social movement that predominantly lives online via social media

platforms such as Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok (Cwynar-Horta, 2016). Darwin and Miller

(2021) identified four main types of body positivity: mainstream body positivity, fat positivity,

radical body positivity, and body neutrality. Body positivity can be considered an umbrella term

that encompasses these four types of content but is mainly marked by loving oneself despite

one’s flaws (Cwynar-Horta, 2016). Body positivity was born out of the fat acceptance movement

as a way to resist diet culture, weight stigma, and beauty standards (Cwynar-Horta, 2016). It has

been seamlessly integrated into mainstream culture through its commodification and emphasis

on individual solutions to structural problems, aligning with neoliberal values. Body positivity

content has been shown to have positive effects on body image, body appreciation, and self-

esteem for women (see: Cohen et al., 2021; Cowles et al., 2023; Guest et al., 2019; Lazuka et al.,

2020; Nelson et al., 2022; Rodgers et al., 2022; Tiggemann et al., 2020). These studies

4
investigated body positivity through mainly quantitative lenses within psychology and

communications studies. However, to my knowledge, no research has explored the impacts of

the body positivity movement on women qualitatively. Further, body positivity research has been

limited in considering intersections like race, gender, and class. A recent study by Griffin and

colleagues (2022) investigated body positivity using intersectionality but did so through

exploring content rather than speaking to people. The existing critiques of body positivity (see:

Cwynar-Horta, 2016; Darwin & Miller, 2021; Griffin et al., 2022; Miller, 2016; Luck, 2016;

Swami, 2022) have helped situate my research project. With these critiques in mind, my project

was guided by the following research questions:

1. How do individuals take up body positivity? How have their identities affected how

they navigate through body positivity content?

2. How does consumption of and interaction with body positivity content on social

media shape individual constructions of health?

3. Does body positivity content provide a counternarrative to diet culture?

My first research question addresses the gap in intersectional qualitative analyses on body

positivity content. Current literature tends to focus on the outcomes of mental health; thus, my

second question reflects a connection to health more holistically by allowing other forms of

health to be defined, such as physical, social, and/or spiritual. My third question was meant to

determine how productive body positivity messaging is with respect to resisting diet culture and

healthist discourses.

The main goal of my project was to explore how individuals’ conceptualizations of health

and their relationships with their bodies have been affected by engaging with body acceptance

content online. Moreover, I sought to provide a space through my methods for participants to

5
unpack their own experiences and benefit from the study through rhizomatic discourse analysis

(Saukko, 2003). As a white, genderqueer femme person from an upper-middle-class background,

I come from a privileged standpoint. While not discounting the struggles I went through, I

acknowledge that engaging in disordered eating behaviours such as dieting, eating “clean,” and

over-exercising comes from a privileged place, requiring both economic and cultural capital

(Bourdieu, 1986). To have food available to me and to choose not to eat it is inherently

privileged. Access to “healthy” foods such as fresh produce and organic meat requires economic

capital, and the cultural capital I hold as an educated white person has given me access to

knowledge surrounding exercise and dieting. I was interested in exploring the experiences of

those from different social locations to understand how diet and wellness culture and the body

positivity movement affect individuals of different races, genders, ages, sexualities, and

dis/abilities.

My research goals for this project were as follows:

1. To use this project for social change by fostering a space for people to talk through

their experiences with body positivity, diet culture, and health, using focus groups

and journaling. The primary goal of my project was to give back to participants and to

create a space where connections and conversations could provide support and

comfort. I hope the participants left focus groups, reflected on what they learned from

other participants, and then talked it through with their friends and families.

2. In writing my thesis, I wanted my project to represent the unique voices I heard

during my study. I wanted to gather rich data from both the focus groups and the

journals and use that data to tell the stories of the participants in a holistic way. The

topics covered throughout the focus groups are sensitive and deeply personal; talking

6
 about one’s body and one’s relationship to one’s body may be scary and complicated,

and so I hope that through my thesis, I told the stories of my participants clearly and

elevated their voices in a way that emphasizes how their identities are tied to the way

they experience their bodies.

My research goals of mobilizing social change through my project and representing my

participants' voices are hefty. In writing my proposed methods for my project, I had a discussion

with a friend, leading me to choose focus groups over interviews. I wanted to get women

together to have a conversation and to be able to continue that conversation over a few months

with the hope that we could all form a sort of bond. I also wanted my project to give back to my

participants immediately, providing them a space where they could learn from each other and

lean on each other about topics that are typically “off-limits.” To have people together who resist

diet culture felt like a way forward in a world that feels increasingly daunting. In writing my

thesis, I tried as best I could to maintain the person behind the quote and contextualize their

quotes as much as possible. I am so grateful for the conversations my participants and I had, and

I hope their stories, opinions, and perspectives are presented as accurately as possible.

Following this introduction, Chapter 2, Literature Review, contextualizes how the body

positivity movement came to be. I first historicize the racialization of fatness from the 1600s to

the present day. I then explain the concept of healthism and how it has worked with

neoliberalism to create the thin ideal. I discuss the obesity epidemic and outline its implications

on racialized people. I explain the connections between healthism and beauty standards and the

concept of gendered healthism, which affects women differently from men. I then explore

intersectional approaches to Fat Studies and the embedded whiteness in the field. Further, I

outline fat activism in Canada and the United States and contemporary fat activism manifesting

7
as the body positivity movement. I then give an overview of current research on the body

positivity movement and the body neutrality movement to situate the current project.

In Chapter 3, Methods, Methodologies, and Theoretical Frameworks, I outline my

methodologies, which include rhizomatic dialogic analysis (Saukko, 2006), intersectionality

(Crenshaw, 1989), and “semiparticipatory ethnography” (McLeod et al., 2023, p. 6). I then

discuss my positionality and how I am situated within the project. Next, I describe my methods,

which were focus groups and journaling, and I explain the timing of the sessions and the

questions asked in the focus groups. I discuss recruitment and consent meetings and describe my

participants, and then explain some methodological and ethical challenges before going into my

data analysis. I summarize how I analyzed my data and conclude by describing my theoretical

framework, postfeminism.

Chapter 4, Body Positivity: Radical or Palatable? is the first of two analysis chapters. I

begin by discussing how healthism and beauty standards have influenced participants’

experiences growing up through the home and media and how whiteness and thinness are central

to diet culture. Participants discuss their experiences with diet culture, disordered eating, and

how that influenced their relationships with their bodies. This section indicates why participants

felt the need to engage with body positivity in the first place. The following section dives into

body positivity and its criticisms, of which my participants identified three: commodification;

appropriation; and reproduction of thinness. Through these critiques, I argue that body positivity

is a postfeminist culture, as defined by Gill (2007) in her article on postfeminist sensibilities.

Understanding body positivity as a postfeminist culture allows alternate forms of body

acceptance to flourish.

8
 In Chapter 5, is titled If Not Body Positivity, Then What? I detail the shift from body

positivity to body neutrality as described by my participants. I explore my participants

experiences in contrast to some recently published body neutrality content, such as books and

academic literature. Comparing to this recently published content, I explore how my participants

conceptualize body neutrality, showing how their definitions differ from body positivity. I also

outline participants’ reasons for preferring body neutrality over body positivity. Next, I engage

with body neutrality and health. I explain how participants define health and how it has been

affected by body positivity and neutrality content. I then include a section outlining participants’

body neutrality practices and how those practices may help with resisting diet culture. Finally, I

offer my critiques of the body neutrality movement, namely that it falls under self-care and self-

improvement tropes and may be commodified like body positivity was. I also offer potential

benefits of the body neutrality movement. It can actively resist diet culture in a productive way if

used with a vision of a world where fatness is not discriminated against.

My sixth and final chapter, Conclusion, offers concluding thoughts after the analysis. I

explore some ways that I have learned and changed throughout this process. I also answer my

research questions reflect on how I achieved my research goals. I provide limitations, future

directions for this research, and finally provide some thoughts on the future of fat activism.

9
 Chapter 2

Literature Review

In this chapter, I review the literature on body size, fatness, and health. I start with a brief

history of the racist underpinnings of fatphobia, followed by the contemporary medicalization of

fatness and how it has affected people based on their gender and race. I then discuss some

intersectional approaches to Fat Studies, exploring intersections like race, sexuality, queerness

and transness, and disability. Next, I explore fat activism in Canada and the United States,

outlining some of the first groups to argue for the rights of fat people, which leads to a

conversation around body positivity. Finally, I explain the current research that has explored

body image and media, body positivity, and body neutrality to situate my study.

The racist history of fatphobia

While discussing health and body size in contemporary times, we must understand how

body size, particularly fatness, has become racialized in Canada and the United States. In this

section, I will mainly be referring to Sabrina Strings’ book, Fearing the Black Body: The Racial

Origins of Fat Phobia (2019), which is a phenomenal and careful account of how fatness was

historically moralized and racialized. While Strings’ book is situated within the United States, I

use her book because Canada has followed the United States’ trajectory towards anti-fat bias.

Women’s appearances have been critiqued for as long as we have history to show

(Kuipers, 2015). Before the 1600s, white women’s beauty standards focused on roundness and

robustness (Strings, 2019). Conversely, men were expected to be thin, as “thinness was seen as

more befitting the intelligent, self-possessed white male” (Strings, 2019, p.43). Due to

colonization, the importation of sugar from colonies in Brazil and the West Indies altered the diet

of the wealthy, providing them with desserts and sweetened alcohol. This new diet increased

10
fatness among the wealthy classes, simultaneously becoming associated with unhealthiness due

to increased gout for those indulging in this new diet. Discourses around fatness began to

circulate, where fat men were frequently depicted as “too self-indulgent to be particularly

intelligent” (Strings, 2019, p. 59). Many works by Shakespeare touted fat men as “gluttonous,

drunken, braggart, and [thieves]” (Strings, 2019, p. 59). A moralization of fatness in the 1500s

undergirds the discourses we continue to perpetuate in contemporary times.

The racialization of beauty standards can be traced back to Shakespearean times when

whiteness was revered through artistic representations in paintings, poetry, and Shakespearean

productions such as Othello (Strings, 2019). During the 17th and 18th centuries of the

Enlightenment, white men such as François Berner and Georges-Louis Leclerc, who were

scientists and intellectuals, created race as a scientific category. Where Berner’s observations

classified people according to their skin colour, Leclerc’s observations depended upon highly

moralized beliefs about body size. Leclerc claimed that the Africans who were “meager” and

“small” were not Black but instead defined them as white. He argued that Black Africans were

“tall” and “plump,” differentiating them from white Africans who were “small” and “slight”

(Strings, 2019, p. 76-77). Leclerc went on to infer intelligence from body size, arguing that the

Black Africans were “plump” due to their environment: they lived in abundant lands with lots of

food to nourish themselves with, which Leclerc argued made them lazy and lacking intelligence

needed to hunt or forage (Strings, 2019, p. 77). The creation of a racial classification system by

wealthy white men had far-reaching implications for how Black people were thought of in these

times and how they continue to be treated today. It is also important to note that Leclerc did not

travel to any of the areas he discussed – his claims are entirely unfounded and not based on

actual observations (Strings, 2019). These observations were shared among colonists throughout

11
the 18th and 19th centuries as white men colonized more African countries. Discourses

constructing Black Africans, and particularly Black African women, as fat, lazy, and unintelligent

continued to be depicted in documents and pictures/paintings (Strings, 2019).

The 1700s and 1800s saw what Strings (2019) calls “the ascetic aesthetic” (p. 99). At this

time in Great Britain, “new standards detailed the rules of etiquette, which included, among other

things, ideas about how well-mannered women and men should eat, drink, and otherwise

comport themselves” (Strings, 2019, p. 99). British citizens were encouraged to be restrained in

consuming food and drink to avoid gaining weight, further supported by Puritan values at the

time. While both men and women were encouraged to stay slim, women were mainly responsible

for embodying this ideal because women are treated as the objects of beauty under the patriarchy

(Aubrey & Frisby, 2011; Fredrickson & Roberts, 1998; Speno & Aubrey, 2018). Strings (2019)

states:

… at the same time that gluttony and fatness were becoming associated with African

women in scientific racial literature, the values of delicacy, discipline, and a slimmer

physique were becoming associated with English women by the arbiters of taste and the

purveyors of morality (p. 100).

It is no coincidence that discourses connecting thinness to morality and beauty for white women

were influenced by the messaging from European intellectuals about the fatness, laziness, and

low intelligence of Black women. Body size was marked as a racial difference stemming from

the assumed inferiority of Black people touted by white supremacy. This is gendered in a

patriarchal society where women are upheld to standards of appearance over any other aspect of

their being.

12
 The “ascetic aesthetic” (Strings, 2019, p. 99) moved from Britain to the United States in

the late 1700s and quickly gained momentum through:

… religious revivals, the expansion of racial theorizing, and the immigration of persons

feared to be ‘part-Negroid’ to make thinness a key goal for Anglo-Saxon Protestant

women during the nineteenth century… many American women and men during the era

began to regard svelte forms as a superior aesthetic ideal for white Christian women

(Strings, 2019, p. 122).

As Puritanism spread across the colonies on Turtle Island, so did the racial and moral values of

fatness. Anglo-Saxon women were encouraged to show temperance in eating and drinking to

stay slim, but also as a way to prove the racial superiority of Anglo-Saxon women over all other

women, including Greek and Irish, but primarily over Black women. This created a new beauty

standard for white Anglo-Saxon women, and as whiteness contemporarily does not tend to

differentiate between European ancestry, thinness as a beauty standard for women has embedded

racial implications today. Dieting then became popular and can be traced back to the 1900s when

diet advice was touted in women’s magazines (Boero, 2013; Strings, 2019).

The eugenicist movement began in the 1900s. Doctors of the time, such as John Kellogg,

were more concerned with maintaining and improving the health of the white race to ensure its

survival and power (Boero, 2013). The early 1900s saw the creation of health insurance

companies in America, which resulted in the standardization of weight for population health

outcomes. Articles in outlets such as the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA)

began to discuss the dangers of excess fat, and the 1910s saw multiple books focused on diet,

health, and body size. Further, articles concerned about the correlation between obesity and

sterility for white women began to surface. These beliefs were intimately tied to the eugenicist

13
movement to keep the white race strong: “the point was that these women needed to learn the

scientific management of their bodies. Their own health, along with that of their offspring, was

the basis for the fitness of the race, and the nation” (Strings, 2019, p. 194). These views on health

remained right up until the 1970s. The 1980s turn to neoliberal policies implemented by

conservative governments began to individualize health by removing government involvement in

public health and other social services. The standardization of health during the 1900s led to the

ideology of healthism and the “obesity epidemic.”

Healthism and the obesity epidemic

Healthism states that health no longer means the absence of disease, but a state of well-

being to continually strive for and can be attained through personal behaviours and choices

(Crawford, 1980). Since the late 1970s, “health” has become increasingly individualized and

commodified. The personalization of health has been informed by the rise of neoliberalism, an

economic and political ideology made popular by Ronald Reagan in the United States and

Margaret Thatcher in Great Britain during their respective political leadership in the 1980s

(Steger & Roy, 2010). Ericson and colleagues (2000) identify the five tenets of neoliberalism as

follows: “minimal government intervention, market fundamentalism, risk management,

individual responsibility and inequality as a consequence of choice” (as cited in Ayo, 2012, p.

99). Ayo (2012) argues that “healthism and neoliberalism mutually reinforces the vision of the

responsible, entrepreneurial citizen” (p. 100). The five tenets of neoliberalism have influenced

health and healthcare. First, we see less and less government funding for healthcare in Canada

(Naylor et al., 2020). Second, we look to the market for health products that will help manage

our health risks (the third tenet). Fourth, individuals are responsible for their health through the

enactment of behaviours such as proper diet and exercise (Gard & Wright, 2001; McCuaig &

14
Tinning, 2010; Wright et al., 2006); and fifth, leaving health behaviours up to individual choice

ignores the social determinants of health which are out of our control, such as race, class, gender,

and education, among others (Marya & Patel, 2021).

The rise of healthist discourses and the increasing weight of the population in the United

States triggered a moral panic and, subsequently, the so-called “obesity epidemic” (Boero, 2013;

Hobbes & Gordon, 2021; Hobbes & Marshall, 2018). Boero describes the obesity epidemic as a

postmodern epidemic in her book Killer Fat (2013), where epidemics are no longer connected to

an outbreak of a contagious pathology. Instead, postmodern epidemics are typically social issues

which have been medicalized, for instance, the opioid epidemic. Medicalization is the process

through which human experiences become defined and treated as medical conditions (Conrad,

2007). Boero (2013) astutely points out that postmodern epidemics are medicalized to rely on

biomedical solutions; however, because the epidemic is not biomedical, medical interventions

are ineffective. For instance, the high rate of failure for weight-loss interventions is arguably

because fatness is not a problem to be solved (at the very least individually), yet the healthcare

industry continues to seek “solutions.” The obesity epidemic was made possible by healthcare

practitioners implementing the body mass index (BMI). The BMI is an equation that was created

by Adolphe Quetelet, a mathematician in the 1800s who was interested in calculating the

“average man” (Your Fat Friend, 2019). It was based on the statistics of middle-class white men,

making it completely biased, and was never intended as a way to measure health (Your Fat

Friend, 2019). The medical profession took up the BMI as a way to diagnose people as

overweight and then provide them with weight-loss treatments. Further, the BMI was re-

categorized in 1998 by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which lowered the BMI

categories for the overweight and obese categories, putting a huge number of people into these

15
categories overnight (Boero, 2013; Hobbes & Gordon, 2021). With the drastic increase in the

American population defined as “overweight” and “obese,” the obesity epidemic was born.

Given that fatness is historically racialized (Strings, 2019), the obesity epidemic was

racialized as well. The threshold for overweight and obese diagnoses is biased towards middle-

class white men, with Black and Latine women overrepresented in the overweight and obese

categories (Sanders, 2019). This overrepresentation of racialized women in the highest categories

of the BMI scale further racializes fatness. However, “black women had higher BMIs than white

women” while “they also had lower mortality rates at a given BMI” (Strings, 2019, p. 202).

Further, Strings (2019) states that through the obesity epidemic, “the association between fatness

and black femininity… reemerged. Yet again, black women were to become the focus of fear,

anxiety, and degradation over the size of their bodies” (p. 202-203). Sanders (2019) argues that

the growing fatness in white people triggered a “racial anxiety” (p. 291). Whiteness has typically

been associated with thinness (Strings, 2019), and Sanders (2019) argues that obesity among the

white population poses “a threat to the superior status of whiteness” (p. 291). Further, Sanders

(2019) argues that “the definition of obesity as a public health problem disproportionately

afflicting minorities functions to revalue whiteness and normatively white ideals [and]

reinstate[s] the privileges that attach to white identity” (p. 293). A paper by Zerafa (2023) adds to

Sanders’ argument, stating that the scientific racism which undergirds the medical field enacts

further racial violence on fat Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour (BIPOC).

A dominant obesity discourse developed where obese bodies were constructed as lazy

and at-risk (Rail & Lafrance, 2009). In later work, Rail (2012) further critiques the obesity

discourse for constructing obesity as a disease and directly linking obesity to ill health and poor

lifestyles, moralizing health and body size. The obesity discourse perpetuates weight stigma,

16
marginalizing higher-weight bodies and deeming them at a higher risk of experiencing

discriminatory behaviours from family, friends, employers, and doctors (Puhl & Heuer, 2009).

The moralization of health marked the ideal body as thin, made possible through disciplinary

practices such as diet and exercise. Therefore, personal responsibility for a “healthy” body

encourages self-surveillance: constantly monitoring oneself compared to the ideal body. Scholars

have used Foucault’s concept of docile bodies to understand how neoliberal discourses

encourage self-surveillance and “technologies of the self” (Foucault, 1977; 1988). Cairns and

Johnston (2015) argue neoliberalism and healthism are gendered in that women are pressured

towards thinness more than men through beauty standards.

Gendered healthism as a postfeminist culture

Though healthism affects people of all genders, scholars of postfeminism have argued

that women are the perfect neoliberal subject for healthist discourses of self-improvement as

their bodies continue to be the most important aspect about them, and they are pressured to

perform perfect femininity (Bordo, 1993; Cairns & Johnston, 2015; Camacho-Miñano et al.,

2019; Elias & Gill, 2018; Gill, 2007; 2019; Stover, 2014). As the obesity “epidemic” raged on,

diet culture that emphasized weight loss became pervasive: Jenny Craig, Weight Watchers, the

South Beach Diet, and The Biggest Loser were central aspects of popular culture in the early

2000s. Heyes (2006) argues that weight-loss programs such as Weight Watchers are examples of

Foucauldian disciplinary power, where individuals use technologies of the self and self-

discipline to adjust their bodies to fit the norm. Feminist writings on diet culture, such as Susan

Bordo’s Unbearable Weight (1993), argue that dieting and weight loss programs are oppressive

in that they reify unrealistic beauty standards for women. Boero (2013) explored Weight

Watchers critically and explained that commercialized weight loss programs assume their

17
audience to be white, middle-class women. They use what Boero (2013) calls “normative

pathology,” which implies that:

… women are more likely to have problems with food and eating than men and that the

problem arises when women cannot control this pathological relationship to food in a

way that prevents them from gaining weight. That both emotional eating and dieting are

simply a part of the everyday experience of being a woman is built into the Weight

Watchers program (p. 89).

The underlying belief that women have an inherent problematic relationship with food and

weight is pervasive and is encouraged by neoliberal discourses of self-discipline. The diet

industry then feeds off this lie, targeting white middle-class women specifically to spend money

on quick fixes and solutions to maintain the perfect figure.

The contemporary prominence of social media makes it possible for anyone to

disseminate knowledge online, and touting health advice has been a popular category of content

creation (Friedman, 2023). Whether sharing keto recipes on a blog or posting a video of one’s

most recent workout, social media is a place for sharing and disseminating knowledge among

peers. Scholars have argued that online health and fitness spaces are forms of “biopedagogies”

which “…include normalizing and regulating practices that provide individuals with the

knowledge to understand themselves, change their behaviour and take action upon themselves

and others to improve health” (Camacho-Miñano et al., 2019, p. 653). Biopedagogies can be

understood as a form of biopower (Foucault, 1978) which encourages individuals to regulate

themselves through bodily practices (Wright, 2009). Popular subsects of the internet called

“fitspiration” and “thinspiration” (also known as “fitspo” and “thinspo”) have been framed as

biopedagogies, as they “produce ‘truths’ about the relationships between body shape, fitness and

18
health and urge young people to work on themselves” (Camacho-Miñano et al., 2019, p. 653).

During the 2000s, “fitspo” and “thinspo” modified body expectations so that women now not

only had to be thin but also visibly muscular and strong. A meta-analysis of the effects of

fitspiration content from 2000 to 2022 found that fitspiration is associated with negative body

image (Jerónimo & Carraça, 2022). Further, scholars argue that fitspiration content focuses on

appearance and can perpetuate dangerous weight loss behaviours (Camacho-Miñano, 2019;

Pilgrim & Bohnet-Joschko, 2019).

Postfeminism can be described as a sensibility where feminism is seen as obsolete

through an emphasis on women’s empowerment (see: Camacho-Miñano et al., 2019; Gill, 2007;

Gill & Scharff, 2011; McRobbie, 2004). Furthermore, postfeminist cultures are steeped in

neoliberal values through their “emphasis upon self-surveillance, monitoring, and discipline,”

“focus upon individualism, choice and empowerment,” and “an emphasis upon consumerism”

(Gill, 2007, p. 149). Gender, and more specifically, femininity, is to be appropriately performed,

undermining the myth of choice that is touted by neoliberalism. Healthist biopedagogies online,

such as “fitspiration” and “thinspiration,” are postfeminist cultures where women disseminate

knowledge about ways to achieve thinness and the ideal body (Camacho-Miñano et al., 2019;

Camacho-Miñano & Gray, 2021; Washington & Economides, 2016).

Cairns and Johnston (2015) explore another form of postfeminist embodied

neoliberalism, that of the “do-diet” (2015). Healthist discourses surrounding food and diet are

contradictory and hard to follow. The “do-diet” is described as “a healthy eating discourse that

frames dietary restrictions as positive choices while maintaining an emphasis on body discipline,

expert knowledge, and self-control” (Cairns & Johnston, 2015, p. 154). This discourse is

contradictory in that women should know about food and what to eat or not eat while not

19
appearing to care too much about their diet. This can be connected to Boero’s concept of

normative pathology (2013); because of women’s “inherent” issues with diet and weight, they

must have access to the newest information regarding their bodies and their health to make the

right choices to perform their femininity to perfection. Given that whiteness, classism, and

ableism undergird beauty standards and body size, we need to explore the intersectional

implications of healthism, diet culture, and fatness.

Intersectional approaches to Fat Studies

Zerafa (2023) argues that history sets a foundation for the future, yet history is often

biased. The history of fat activism is primarily embedded in whiteness and does not account for

how obesity discourses are racialized. Scholars and activists have called for an intersectional

approach to Fat Studies; Zerafa (2023) states that the commonly known origin story of fat

activism neglects the connection between fatness and other oppressions. Scholars like Ellison

(2020), Rinaldi and colleagues (2020), Sanders (2019), and Strings (2019) attempt to re-tell

history while paying attention to the stories that do not typically get told. The whiteness

embedded in the Canadian and American healthcare systems have led to a significant portion of

the literature surrounding healthism and the obesity epidemic lacking the recognition of race,

gender, disability, body size, and class intersections (Zerafa, 2023). Rinaldi and colleagues

(2020) call for an intersectional approach to Fat Studies, stating that “the normative subject of

the field still tends to be a young(ish), white, cisgender woman, and typically one who is from

the Global North” (p. 2). Their book Thickening Fat: Fat Bodies, Intersectionality, and Social

Justice includes works written through different intersectional perspectives, including race,

sexuality, queerness, disability, and transness. The essays presented in Rinaldi et al.’s book

(2020) explore these complex intersections qualitatively. Additionally, an essay by van

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Amsterdam (2013) uses intersectionality to argue that body size is a site of oppression, where

thinness is privileged, and intersections with other identity markers are increasingly complex.

Meerai (2020) explores her experiences as a fat Brown woman to encourage others to

resist medical discourses that problematize both the colour and size of her flesh. Meerai (2020)

speaks to how intersections of her identity affect how medical practitioners assess her health:

The distortion within medical discourse of what is healthy becomes complex at the

intersections of disability, race, gender, and class, among many other identity markers. I

attribute many of the ways in which fat racialized bodies are read and taken up in medical

discourses as attempts to perform an embodied whiteness under the guise of health (p.

92).

Doctors treated her condition of hypertension as solely a symptom of her weight, disregarding

her life stressors, such as planning a wedding while working full-time, a stressful situation for

any person. On top of this, Meerai experiences fatphobia and racism daily, contributing to daily

stressors that the white, thin woman does not experience. Still, doctors argue for her weight loss

as the only solution for her hypertension and chest pains. Meerai (2020) argues for a shift in the

assumptions embedded in the healthcare systems, and states that we need to investigate the

embedded biases in biomedical explanations of health and focus on how environmental factors

affect health, especially for racialized folks.

Daufin (2020) argues that there is a misunderstanding in Fat Studies by both white and

Black scholars that weight stigma does not exist in Black communities. There is an assumption

in critical weight studies that studying women includes all women when, in reality, the

experiences of Black, Indigenous, and other women of colour (BIPOC) are left out of the

conversation. Daufin (2020) emphasizes that lacking an intersectional approach ignores the fact

21
that 82% of Black women and 64% of Latine women are of higher weight than white women.

Representations of Black women as “Mammy” are typically dark-skinned, fat, funny, and

motherly (Bailey, 2021; Daufin, 2020), suggesting that fat women in the Black community are

somehow more accepted. The “Mammy” caricature, combined with the fact that Black and

Latine women weigh more, has led to the assumption that racialized women do not experience

weight stigma, further marginalizing fat BIPOC women by excluding their lived experiences

(Daufin, 2020).

Sanders (2019) argues that racialized obesity discourses have specifically stigmatized

obese Black women in conjunction with the welfare queen stereotype, which positions Black

women as lazy and irresponsible. As obesity discourses construct obese bodies as lazy, the Black

obese woman is further reified as lazy, undisciplined, and unwilling to exercise. A study by

Justin and Jette (2022) explored fat (categorically obese), physically active Black women’s

understandings of health, body size, and physical activity. Their participants explained that while

they had “thick” bodies, their perception of their health was more linked to being able to exercise

or move unassisted. The authors argue that these women redefine health in their resistance to

obesity discourses, which define them as obese according to the BMI. Justin and Jette (2022)

explain that scholarship suggests Black women prefer a larger or “thick” body, including larger

curves. This preference may be seen as resistance to the thin ideal and indifference towards

obesity and the discourses that follow it; however, it may also be seen as reifying scientific

racism, which reserves thinness for whiteness.

Another intersection that frequently gets lost in healthist and obesity discourses is that of

sexuality and trans identities. Since beauty standards and the ideal body have been developed as

a function of the male gaze (Holliday & Taylor, 2006), beauty and thinness assume that women

22
are heterosexual and cisgender. Gender and fatness confuse the gender binary because fat men

are feminized for lacking masculine notions of discipline, while fat women are masculinized for

taking up too much space (White, 2020). Lind (2020) explores how both queerness and fatness

resist gender norms and heteronormativity, as they both challenge the accepted way to exist in

the world. White (2020) calls out the complete exclusion of trans people in Fat Studies,

emphasizing the need for more explorations of fat/trans and fat/non-binary embodiments. In

interviews with fat, non-binary, and gender non-conforming people, White (2020) found that

those engaged in the body positivity movement felt that they could not fully participate as body

positivity is grounded within the gender binary. Non-binary and gender non-conforming

participants also discussed the expectation of thinness and flat-chestedness to pass as

androgynous or be perceived as non-binary. Another exploration of trans bodies and fatness is

the “correct” distribution of fat to be perceived as a man or a woman. Trans participants

discussed the use of hormones and how they can alter weight distribution to align more with the

expected body shape of that gender (White, 2020). White did not explore race or class in their

article; however, they do vital work to include the experiences of fat trans and non-binary

people. Another aspect of fatness and gender involves the anti-fat bias prevalent in gender-

affirming care. Gordon (2023) speaks to the issue of BMI and gender-affirming care, arguing

that “trans patients are regularly excluded from what can be lifesaving care on the basis of their

weight” (p. 66). More research should be been done to explore how the exclusion of fat trans

people from gender-affirming care affects them.

A lacking area of scholarship is that of fatness and disability. Gill (2020) writes about his

experience as an impaired, fat white man and how his impairment is intimately connected to his

fatness. Fatness can be seen as a cause of disability; if one were to lose weight, their disability,

23
impairment, or condition would supposedly solve itself. Cooper (1997) has argued that fatness

could be considered a disability under the social model of disability, that “it is not disabled

people that need to be changed, but society and the environment that should no longer disable

people” (as cited in von Liebenstein, 2021, p. 90). von Liebenstein (2021) states that for better

anti-discrimination laws against fatness/obesity, it should not be within disability laws since

current regulations require the medicalization of bodies to recognize a disability. She states that

to be impaired requires medicalization, which is the opposite of what fat activism has been

fighting against for decades (von Liebenstein, 2021). This conversation, however, ignores the

unique intersections between fat and disabled people, who may have different experiences. The

intersections discussed here emphasize the need for a fat activism which problematizes not only

the obesity discourse but also centres the multiple systems of oppression which affect fat people.

Fat activism in Canada and the United States

Fat activism can be traced back to the 1960s and was led by two major groups. The first

group, the National Association to Aid Fat Americans, now called the National Association to

Advance Fat Acceptance (NAAFA), was started by Bill Fabrey, who was upset with how his

wife, Joyce, was being treated because of her fatness (NAAFA, n. d.). Their mission is “to

change perceptions of fat and end size discrimination through advocacy, education, and support”

(NAAFA, n. d., para. 3). NAAFA holds national conventions and events such as fat fashion

shows, fat pool parties, and fat dance parties. The second group emerged around the same time

and was founded by seven fat women from the West Coast, called The Fat Underground. They

were a radical fat liberation movement, arguing for the changing of society rather than the

changing of themselves, viewing medical weight-loss treatments as oppression. In 1973, they

24
published the Fat Liberation Manifesto (Freespirit & Aldebaran, 1973), which demanded “equal

rights of fat people in all areas of life” (p. 18).

While these groups worked in the United States, women in Canada were also mobilizing

for fat acceptance (Ellison, 2020). Groups like Lesbiennes grosses cinq (LG5) (Montreal, QB),

Hersize (Toronto, ON), and Pretty Porky and Pissed Off (PPPO) (Toronto, ON) worked towards

liberating fat women from the bodily expectations of femininity. LG5 specifically argued that

“fat oppression was not only the product of the stereotyping, rejection, and humiliation of fat

people but also of a heterosexual class regime” (Ellison, 2020, p. 21). They stated that class was

about both income and heteronormativity and that the thin ideal for women is a heteronormative

project. Hersize, a group aimed at the prevention and treatment of eating disorders, was critical

of dieting and diet culture, arguing that it perpetuates weight preoccupation and takes time away

from women’s lives, preventing them from advancing their lives with autonomy (Ellison, 2020).

PPPO also critiqued obesity discourses through challenging stereotypes about fatness. They

particularly critiqued the fashion industry for not carrying large enough sizes, claiming: “… us

plumped-up ladies are fed up with clothes that don’t fit and feel bad. Being fat doesn’t have to

mean feeling gross” (as cited in Ellison, 2020, p. 38). These groups are examples of Canadian fat

activism from the 1970s until 2005.

Ellison (2020) points to the lack of intersectionality in early Canadian fat activism,

aligning with Zerafa’s critiques of the history of fat activism (2023). The 1990s saw

conversations among feminists attempting to define the universal woman; Black feminists at the

time argued that gender is problematized by race and class (Ellison, 2020). Hersize was

cognizant that they had not provided the unique perspectives of racialized women and wanted to

hear from women of colour to include their voices in the organization. However, no other groups

25
discussed intersections such as race, class, or dis/ability and how those interact with fatness

(Ellison, 2020). Ellison (2020) also points to the exclusion of Indigenous people from Canadian

fat activism, which is especially concerning considering that Indigenous people have the highest

rates of obesity and diabetes in Canada. Ellison (2020) discusses the fact that Indigenous girls

and women feel more pressure towards the thin ideal when living in urban settings rather than

rurally; however, Ellison also states that there is much more to learn and unpack here about

Indigenous women and girls and the effects of colonization on bodily perceptions.

Ellison (2020) argues that “Canadian fat activists had stronger links to feminist women’s

health activism than the American movement” due to the “overlap between professional health

work and activism… which have tended to work cooperatively with the state and public

institutions to achieve social change” (p. 29). Hersize was also instrumental in arguing for body

diversity, arguing that “women… come in various body sizes and shapes, all of which should be

considered attractive” (Ellison, 2020, p. 31). The group critiqued popular culture through a

feminist lens to explore beauty standards and how women were represented in the media, and

they argued for advertisements to represent “real” women. This was before the now popular

body positivity movement, which has been the dominant focus of fat activism contemporarily.

Contemporary fat activism as body positivity

Body positivity is rooted in fat activism (Cwynar-Horta, 2016) but gained popularity with

the creation of “The Body Positive” by Connie Sobczak and Elizabeth Scott in 1996 (Gordon,

2020a). “The Body Positive” is an organization that teaches its members:

… how to reconnect to their innate body wisdom so they can have more balanced, joyful

self-care, and a relationship with their whole selves that is guided by love, forgiveness,

and humor (Gordon, 2020a, p. 4).

26
This organization was crucial to the growth of what we now know as the body positivity

movement. Body positivity has created a large community of individuals acting in digital

resistance to healthist and obesity discourses, diet culture, and beauty standards. The body

positivity movement has been on Instagram since Instagram began in 2012. It is an online

community of individuals who post candid photos of their bodies, sometimes accompanied by

vulnerable captions (Cwynar-Horta, 2016). Body positivity posts are typically words, photos,

and infographics that challenge dominant healthist discourse and beauty standards, encouraging

individuals to reclaim their bodies and self-worth (Cwynar-Horta, 2016; Darwin & Miller, 2021).

Mainstream body positivity advocates explicitly for loving one’s body, learning to love one’s

imperfections and flaws, and being proud of the body one is given, even if it does not look like

the ideal body (Darwin & Miller, 2021).

Fat acceptance began as resistance to anti-fat discourses and the medicalization of

obesity. It is rooted in feminist theory to “renegotiate how fat and gender have been reframed

within the rationale of neoliberal citizenship” (Afful & Ricciardelli, 2015, p. 454). While fat

acceptance can be considered included in body positivity (Darwin & Miller, 2021), body

positivity refers to accepting all bodies, regardless of size, gender, skin tone, or age (Leboeuf,

2019). Mainstream body positivity has been criticized for working within the oppressive system,

broadening what is perceived as beautiful rather than deconstructing the very worth of beauty. In

contrast, fat acceptance works towards the systemic issues that underpin the discrimination that

fat bodies experience (Cwynar-Horta, 2016). Body positivity has been challenged for being co-

27
opted by white, straight-sized women3, leaving fat women out of the conversation that was theirs

to begin with (Cwynar-Horta, 2016).

The body positivity movement has been commodified with companies capitalizing on its

growing popularity among women (Brathwaite & DeAndrea, 2022; Cwynar-Horta, 2016).

Cwynar-Horta (2016) describes how companies use the body positivity movement to sell plus-

sized clothing, thus reaching a new market segment; however, the advertisements do not include

larger body sizes or different races, further perpetuating feminine beauty standards. Companies

offering plus-size clothing have been criticized for not showing models over a size 16, creating

an acceptable fat woman and further marginalizing those who are larger than that. Cwynar-Horta

(2016) argues that the commodification of the movement causes body positivity advocates to

“lose sight of their purpose and begin reproducing capitalist ideologies, objectifying their bodies,

and accepting beauty modification practices” (p. 37). Where the body positivity movement began

as a place for community building and acceptance of all types of bodies, the exploitation of the

movement by companies and corporations has rendered it yet another capitalist trope (Brathwaite

& DeAndrea, 2022; Cwynar-Horta, 2016). The body positivity movement requires women to

expose their bodies to challenge the dominant body and beauty ideals, which scholars of

postfeminism have called the entanglement of objectification to subjectification (Gill & Scharf,

2011). Through this self-objectification, Sastre (2014) contends that the body positivity

movement “reinforces heteropatriarchal values by encouraging women to self-objectify in the

name of liberation, leaving hegemonic power structures unchallenged” (as cited in Darwin &

Miller, 2021, p. 875). Mainstream body positivity does not challenge existing power structures

3
Straight-sized refers to people who can find clothes that fit them in any store without having to seek out plus-sized
clothing.

28
and fails to understand intersectional aspects of oppression, such as how race, gender, education,

and age interact to influence peoples’ individual experiences.

Body positivity is an umbrella term under which content that touts body acceptance falls.

Darwin and Miller (2021) defined body positivity in four ways: mainstream body positivity, fat

positivity = body positivity, radical body positivity, and body neutrality. Body neutrality,

specifically, has gained popularity in the past five years. The term can be traced back to 2015 but

has gained more popularity since 2020 (Kessel, 2018; Perry et al., 2019). Body neutrality has

been written about in notable publications, such as The New York Times (Cowles, 2022), VICE

(Khan, 2022), and The Washington Post (Haupt, 2022). It has been touted by celebrities such as

Jameela Jamil and Taylor Swift (Haupt, 2022). As opposed to body acceptance or self-love

content, body neutrality dispels the main arguments of body positivity. Body neutrality works

towards decentering the body and appearance as necessary, instead allowing for a neutral stance

of one’s body (Pellizzer & Wade, 2023).

Current literature on media, body image, and body positivity

A meta-analysis by Grabe and colleagues (2008) found that “media exposure is linked to

women’s generalized dissatisfaction with their bodies, increased investment in appearance, and

increased endorsement of disordered eating behaviours” (p. 471). As this study occurred before

the advent of social media, it included media such as movies, magazines, and television. Studies

focused on social media’s effects on body image have found that social media perpetuates the

internalization of the thin ideal, decreased body satisfaction, and disordered eating (Fardouly &

Vartanian, 2016; Lazuka et al., 2020; Tiggemann & Slater, 2014). Other scholars have examined

the effects of “fitspiration” and “thinspiration” posts on social media and found that they serve as

diet culture propaganda to encourage surveillance of the body through diet and exercise

29
(Tiggemann & Zaccardo, 2015). Cohen and colleagues (2017) found that following appearance-

focused accounts on Instagram were associated with more body surveillance and aspirations to

be thin, potentially leading to dieting and disordered eating habits. It is essential to note the

gendered pattern of media consumption: girls use social media more than boys (Camacho-

Miñano et al., 2019) and are more likely to follow content which perpetuates beauty standards

for women, including thinness and whiteness.

There has been an uptick in researching the body positivity movement and its effects on

body image and dissatisfaction in recent years. These studies are primarily within the disciplines

of psychology and communications, which utilize quantitative methods to explore the

widespread prevalence and impact of body positivity on social media, including platforms like

Facebook, Instagram, and Tumblr (see: Cohen et al., 2021; Cowles et al., 2023; Guest et al.,

2019; Lazuka et al., 2020; Nelson et al., 2022; Rodgers et al., 2022; Tiggemann et al., 2020).

Overall, these studies have shown that interactions with body positivity content have improved

body appreciation, body image, and self-esteem for women. Further, Cohen and colleagues

(2021) found that body positivity content can increase health-promoting behaviours such as

exercise for fat women through decentering weight loss. While these studies show the positive

effects of body positivity, there needs to be more literature on qualitative explorations of lived

experiences with consuming and/or creating body positivity content.

As for body neutrality, limited academic research has been done on it or its effects

because of its relative infancy. A recent study by Pellizzer and Wade (2023) developed a

definition for body neutrality after sifting through over 100 websites. They made this definition

in hopes that it could be used in future interventions for eating disorders. Other research includes

a proposal for body neutrality for eating disorder management for gender diverse youth (Perry et

30
al., 2019), an article that explores the effects of body neutrality content on young women’s body

image and mood (Seekis & Lawrence, 2023), and a project piloting an intervention for

adolescents with poor body image and depression (Smith et al., 2023). A recent content analysis

by Hallward and colleagues (2023) also compared the content of body positivity and body

neutrality on TikTok. A few books have been published regarding body neutrality. However, the

only academic book on the topic, to my knowledge, is by Eleanor Clark, an eating disorder

therapist, titled Body Neutrality: Finding Acceptance and Liberation in a Body-Focused Culture

(2022). There was also a Masters’ thesis published in 2022 by Elizabeth van Vliet, which

explored body image discussions on social media, emphasizing body neutrality. To the best of

my knowledge, there has not yet been any published work exploring the lived experiences of

those consuming body neutrality content.

Conclusion

Given the long history of the moralization and racialization of fatness, its implications are

far-reaching. The way that fatness has been discussed both in academia and in larger discourse is

deeply embedded in white supremacy and fails to investigate the effects of racism on the obesity

epidemic and Fat Studies/activism more broadly (Zerafa, 2023). As body positivity has become

the dominant form of contemporary fat activism, we must continue to discuss the ways that white

supremacy undergirds the way we think about bodies, body size, fatness, and beauty standards.

In the next chapter, I will outline my methodologies and theoretical frameworks. These

methods were chosen to address the disconnect between the existing literature’s fascination with

bodies and body image without acknowledging the importance of embodiment.

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 Chapter 3

Methods, Methodologies, and Theoretical Frameworks

During my Master’s degree, I took a graduate course titled Critical Methodologies:

Politics of Knowledge with Dr. Mary Louise Adams. Readings from the course emphasized that

knowledge created by the academy is privileged and highly valued within our society and that

we should question and critique the knowledge produced by and through the academy (Liboiron,

2021; Scott, 1992; Smith, 1999). I can use my power in writing a thesis by producing knowledge

about advocacy and activism (Tallbear, 2014). I also want to use my power as a scholar and my

privilege as a white person to represent the voices of my participants, aligning with teachings

from Haraway (1988) about producing what she calls situated knowledges:

I want to argue for a doctrine and practice of objectivity that privileges

contestation, deconstruction, passionate construction, webbed connectionism and

hope for transformation of systems of knowledge and ways of seeing (p. 585).

With this in mind, I chose rhizomatic dialogic analysis and intersectionality as methodological

approaches. Therefore, I chose methods that emphasize that knowledge produced through this

project was a collaborative effort with and by my participants. I also hope that my chosen

methods have benefited my participants first and foremost. As one of my participants, Ekam,

stated in a focus group: “enacting and practicing body positivity includes advocacy as well.” In

alignment with her statement, this project aims to create social change; I define this as doing

research in a way that undoes the harmful taken-for-granted power structures and ideologies that

tend to undergird research practices, such as racism, colonialism, and the cisheteropatriarchy. In

their book Pollution is Colonialism (2021), Liboiron describes how colonialism assumes access

to information through a story told by one of their students: “… later, I realized: I claimed what

32
was not mine to claim and never once questioned my methods. That is colonialism” (p. 69). We

can see this assumption in the researcher-researched relationship through the extraction of

knowledge, mainly as a qualitative researcher, where participants discuss their personal

experiences about sensitive topics. By adopting rhizomatic dialogic analysis combined with

intersectionality, I hope to alleviate some of those power imbalances and create immediate

benefits for my participants, first and foremost.

Methodologies

Rhizomatic dialogic analysis

In light of my research goal of social change, I followed a methodology called rhizomatic

dialogic analysis (RDA), which Paula Saukko coined in 2003 in her book Doing Research in

Cultural Studies: An Introduction to Classical and New Methodological Approaches. RDA is a

type of discourse analysis that can reach beyond subjects (the researched) and objects (the

researcher), allowing the participant to deconstruct their own experiences in the interview

process. This approach can create an intimate dialogue and dissolve some power relations

between the researcher and the researched (Saukko, 2003). This methodology is based on

problem-posing education, coined by Paolo Freire (1970), where the teacher (or researcher, in

my case) is self-reflexive about their ideas and knowledge on a particular subject. The student

(participant) then challenges the knowledge to create a dialogue where the topic can be

questioned and critically contextualized (Saukko, 2003). The researcher-researched relationship

becomes more balanced as the two are conversing about discourse, analyzing it together as they

work towards a common goal of understanding power structures. As the participant deconstructs

discourses in the interview process, social good comes as they are reaping the benefits of the

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research without having to wait for the “product” of the research to come out, whether in the

form of a thesis, a publication, or in some form of knowledge translation.

Researchers working with people must treat participants with their own socially situated

stories, considering that the researchers are also bound by their social locations (Clandinin, 2006;

Haraway, 1988). Saukko argues that the researcher is not objective: they are also affected by

discourse and do not come from an objective place (Haraway, 1988; Saukko, 2003). Saukko

describes a shift towards collecting data and producing knowledge, creating a space where

participants can carefully critique the discourses that have produced their subjectivities. RDA

allows for a space in which both the researcher and the participant can become critically aware of

how their social location has been constructed through discourse. RDA allows me as a researcher

to acknowledge my positionality within the project, a methodology called “semiparticipatory

ethnography” (McLeod et al., 2023, p. 3), where the interviewer’s voice is also a part of the data.

I analyzed my voice and considered it a part of the data, making me an additional participant. I

wanted to ensure that my methods reflected my methodology, making my data collection

methods a place for participants to learn from each other and develop bonds with others who are

also interested in body positivity and body neutrality; for this reason, I chose to do focus groups

and journaling instead of one-on-one interviews. Further, I wanted to take participant social

location, such as their gender, class, and race, into consideration.

Intersectionality

Intersectionality was coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw (1989) in a legal paper investigating

the unique discrimination that Black women experienced at the nexus of both gender and race

discrimination. However, Black women have historically fought for their rights and expressed

their needs as unique compared to their Black men and/or white women counterparts (Crenshaw,

34
1989; 1991). Crenshaw argues that both feminism and antiracism fail to include Black women’s

experiences in that feminism focuses on the experiences of white women. In contrast, antiracism

focuses on the experiences of Black men (Crenshaw, 1991). This is a function of the white

supremacist, patriarchal society that we are situated in, that creates:

… the uniquely and co-constitutive racialized and sexist violence that befalls Black

women as a result of their simultaneous and interlocking oppression at the intersections

of racial and gender marginalization (Bailey, 2021, p. 1).

Intersectionality as a theory has evolved to include multiple intersecting identities such as

sexuality, class, ability, size, and age. Calasanti and King (2015) argue that “bodies are cultural

objects” (p. 195), where power interacts with bodies to maintain subordination and hierarchies.

The precise organization of bodies into racialized and gendered categories has allowed certain

groups to hold and maintain power over other groups, leading to stratified experiences

throughout one’s life, and is usually out of one’s control. This conceptualization of the body as a

site of power can help us understand how specific identities hold privileges while others are

oppressed. A crucial use of intersectionality explores how race affects peoples’ lived experiences

within the context of white supremacy. Ahmed (2007) describes the phenomenology of

whiteness as the experience of navigating a world rooted in whiteness. Ahmed describes how

racialized people have to orient themselves towards whiteness as a critical way of knowing about

the larger structures at hand. Whiteness defines how people can move about the world and what

is available to them according to their inherited race, as it shows:

… the subtle and insidious ways in which white supremacy is embedded in the careful

silences, the hidden assumptions, the social norms that claim to have nothing to do with

race (Lind, 2020, p. 189).

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Utilizing Ahmed’s (2007) phenomenology of whiteness, society can also be understood as

patriarchal, heteronormative, and ableist. There are orientations towards maleness and adhering

to gender norms, heteronormativity, and being non-disabled (both mentally and physically).

Centring these intersections and orientations while conducting research will enable the

researcher to dismantle power structures and acknowledge participants' unique experiences.

By using intersectionality as a lens (Crenshaw, 1989; 1991), I examine how identity,

power, and privilege interact to influence peoples’ experiences. Intersectionality has informed

my project from study design, formulation of my research questions and focus group guides,

recruitment, and analysis. Informing my project through an intersectional framework combined

with rhizomatic dialogic analysis (RDA) has centred the relationship between peoples’ lived

experiences and power structures, allowing for an analysis of dominant discourses and power

structures and how they affect people’s lives based on gender, race, and class.

My positionality

Koch and Harrington (1998) argue that all research is interpretative in that researchers are

not objective; as researchers, we hold our own biases and perspectives based on our social

location (Haraway, 1988). Throughout this project, I have engaged with and reflected on my own

biases and perspectives and how I can learn from them and the perspectives of others. Koch and

Harrington (1998) argue that reflexivity “acknowledges that interpretation exists in a complex

matrix of alternate representations” (p.888), and I view that type of reflexivity fitting in perfectly

with RDA as the researcher and the participant are in tension with each other in conversation.

Additionally, I am the author of this thesis and the person who wrote the words on the page; I

had the choice to include and/or exclude the quotes I did and the sources I read to situate myself

in the literature. In an ideal situation, my participants and I could create a shared document that

36
was written together. However, due to the confines of my project, I can only offer my

interpretation.

I want to state that I am an uninvited white settler, currently living and writing in

Katarowki, the traditional name for the lands where the city of Kingston is situated. Katarowki is

the traditional lands and waters of the Anishinaabek and Haudenosaunee peoples, who have lived

here for thousands of years and continue to live here. I recognize the benefits I reap from living

here and will continue to reap through getting a degree from Queen’s University. My whiteness

has privileged me in countless ways throughout my life. Namely, it has enabled me to succeed in

academic institutions such as the University of Calgary and Queen’s University, schools which I

have attended. I have always had someone who looked like me in spaces that showed me who I

could be: other undergraduate students, graduate students, and professors, among others. My

whiteness is a factor that has propelled me into graduate school and will continue to propel me

into spaces that benefit me.

I have also always been represented in the media growing up as a thin, white girl and

woman. Despite my rejection of womanhood the past few years (and looking back, throughout

my lifetime), as I now identify as genderqueer and nonbinary, I was always perceived as a girl

and woman and was conventionally attractive. As a thin person, any concerns about my health

were taken seriously; when my health was a concern, it was because I was too thin and was,

therefore, treated with care and attention. When discussing the topic of this thesis, I fell into a

category of people who benefited from the appropriation of the body positivity movement by

thin, white women. My experiences with body positivity were primarily positive, healing, and

helpful. I became more critical of the body positivity movement throughout my undergraduate

and graduate degrees, where I could apply critical lenses to the world and question the taken-for-

37
granted power structures from which I benefitted. In recognition of my positionality, I ensured

that I stated these parts of myself to participants before they consented to participate in the study

and again during the focus group sessions.

Methods

Focus Groups

Rather than conducting one-on-one interviews that tend to hold a power imbalance

between researcher and participant (Saukko, 2006), I conducted small focus groups with three to

four participants each. In these sessions, we worked to unpack and work through the harmful

messages within diet culture and popular culture that we have been subjected to throughout our

lives. I was particularly interested in how focus groups can help neutralize power imbalances

because the participants speak with each other rather than speak one-on-one with a researcher in

an interview (Sparkes & Smith, 2014). Focus groups can also create a collective resistance and

foster a space where dominant discourses are challenged, creating possibilities for “both

individual and group empowerment” (Sparkes & Smith, 2014, p. 87). There are, however,

weaknesses that go along with focus groups, which I will address in the next section.

When formulating questions for my focus group, I focused on creating open-ended

questions, which allowed for a broad range of answers and, most importantly, prompted

conversation (Krueger, 1998a). I held three focus group sessions, each aligning with one of my

research questions. Below are the questions asked in each session (see: Appendix A):

Session 1: Learning about Session 2: Identity Session 3: Health and Diet

body positivity Culture

38
 Where did you first learn How do you feel your Has consuming and/or

about or hear about the term identity/identities have engaging with body positivity

“body positivity?” affected the ways in which content changed the way that

you consume body positivity? you view your body?

What was it about the body How has/have your Does body positivity create a

positive community that identity/identities affected counternarrative?

pulled you in? how you navigate through

diet culture?

Do you have your own Is body positivity something How has body positivity

definition of body positivity? you practice? If so, what does affected your definition or

that look like for you? understanding of health?

Have you come across body

neutrality?

Figure 1: Focus group sessions and questions

I also prepared follow-up questions for the main questions to help guide them where needed (see:

Appendix B). Since I considered myself a participant, I also engaged with the questions,

responding to participants with my own experiences, which Krueger (1998b) claims is an

excellent way to engage participants and encourage conversation.

Journaling

I chose journaling as a data collection method in addition to focus groups to address some

of the weaknesses that can come with focus group methods. A significant weakness in focus

groups is that participants may not feel comfortable speaking openly about sensitive topics

(Sparkes & Smith, 2014). Another limitation is that one or two participants may dominate the

39
conversation, leaving others unable to speak. Conversely, a strength of journaling lies in the

therapeutic nature of writing and the privacy it provides (Välimäki et al., 2007). Journaling

allows participants to process their thoughts, feelings, and emotions tied to the topics explored in

the focus groups (Välimäki et al., 2007). I conducted research where participants interact, and I

recognized that some people process through speaking in the moment (like me), while others

may want to absorb what others are saying and process it in private (e.g., through journaling or

talking to a loved one). Another benefit of journaling is that I could examine changes over time

(Bandini et al., 2021). This was especially useful for my project because I wanted the focus

groups to facilitate critical thinking about the larger discourses about body positivity, diet

culture, and health, along with any other topics that may come up throughout the study.

Recruitment

After receiving approval from the General Research Ethics Board at Queen’s University

(Appendix C), I began recruiting participants. I circulated my physical and digital recruitment

poster (Appendix D) throughout Queen’s campus, including the main libraries, the School of

Kinesiology and Health Sciences building, and Yellow House (a community for QTBIPOC

students). I also circulated my poster at a few places in Kingston, such as the local library and

bookstore, to expand my recruitment beyond the university. I emailed my recruitment poster to

Dr. Brianna Wiens in the English Language and Literature department at the University of

Waterloo because she is a scholar of feminist online and digital cultures. To recruit a participant

pool that spoke to intersectionality and ensured a diverse participant group, I emailed the

following groups and clubs at the University of Toronto to target recruitment of racialized and/or

queer participants:

• Black Students’ Association

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 • Connections (A Group for Black Women)

• The Feminist Equal Rights Alliance

• Her Voice

• Lesbians, Gays, Bisexuals, and Trans People of the University of Toronto

• The Asian Culture Association

• The Centre for Women and Trans People at the University of Toronto

• University of Toronto’s Women’s Advocacy and Outreach

• UTSC Women’s and Trans Centre

• The Black Graduate Students’ Association

• The South Asian Women’s Society

• The Women’s Health Collective

I also used online social networks to recruit, posting to my personal Instagram and Twitter pages.

Most participants found my study through my poster at Queen’s University. I also gained

a few participants from my poster being circulated on my professional Twitter account, and I had

one participant reach out through my personal Instagram account. When participants responded

to my research call, I set up a one-on-one Zoom call to discuss the letter of information and

consent form (Appendix E). In the consent meeting, I introduced myself, discussed how I came

to do this research, and discussed my personal experiences with body positivity content. I did so

to establish an open dialogue with the participants from the start, hoping that it would make them

feel more comfortable discussing personal experiences. Once the two of us talked through the

letter of information and the participant could ask questions, I video- and audio-recorded their

verbal consent. Scheduling focus groups was challenging because my participants were spread

out geographically from California to England. I used [Link] to schedule focus groups,

41
giving participants the option of using their real names, pseudonyms, or participant code to

provide their availability (i.e., participant A).

Participants

All of my participants have been given pseudonyms. Participants were allowed to choose

their pseudonyms, which one did. Otherwise, I gave them two or three names to choose from. I

recruited seven participants for my project, and they were separated into two groups based on the

order they joined the study (Figure 2).

Group A Group B

Ella Ekam

Georgia Clare

Norah Sofia

Lana

Figure 2: Focus groups

While grouping participants, I had initially tried to consider their identity markers,

ensuring that each group had a balance of racialized versus non-racialized people, for instance, or

cis versus non-cis participants. I wanted to ensure no one person was marginalized within the

focus group. Due to slow recruitment, however, I grouped participants as I recruited them to get

data collection underway. This resulted in focus groups with a mix of racialized and white

participants.

Ella is a Canadian 26-year-old white woman with a graduate degree. Georgia is a 26-

year-old white woman who works as a researcher for a non-profit in Canada. Norah is a 24-year-

old South Asian woman from the United States with a background in cognitive science and

linguistics, currently working in public relations. Lana is a 32-year-old graduate student. She

42
identifies as a woman and is an international student from Asia. Ekam is a South Asian woman

24-year-old working on her graduate degree. Clare is a 19-year-old white woman from The

United Kingdom, completing her undergraduate degree. She identifies as neuro-divergent and

autistic. Sofia is a 26-year-old international graduate student who identifies as a mid-fat woman.

All of my participants expressed having complicated relationships with their bodies at

some point in their lives, with two of them explicitly discussing having a diagnosed eating

disorder in their past. They all engaged with body acceptance content through following body

positivity, body neutrality, fat acceptance, or fat liberation content. The content was consumed

through social media, mainly Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. Participants also identified

practicing body acceptance practices in their lives due to being exposed to the content. My

participants all identified as cisgender women despite my attempt during recruitment for gender-

diverse people. This may be due to the overrepresentation of cisgender women in the body

acceptance community (Cohen et al., 2019; Cwynar-Horta, 2016), leading to an audience of

primarily cisgender women. My participants’ ages range from 19 to 32, with the majority (5 of 7)

between the ages of 24 and 26. This age range could be due to multiple factors, including where I

chose to recruit from, the age of those who use these forms of social media, and potentially those

between the ages of 24-26 growing up with the rise of body positivity in media and popular

culture.

As stated, I participated in the focus groups and analyzed my voice as data, a method

called “semiparticipatory ethnography” (McLeod et al., 2023, p. 3). To situate myself among my

participants, I was 26 when conducting my research and writing this thesis. I have a history of a

diagnosed eating disorder and have subsequently suffered from disordered eating and exercise

behaviours. I have engaged with body positivity, neutrality, and fat acceptance content on

43
Instagram since 2017, and I have had a keen interest in health sociology since my undergraduate

degree. I came out as genderqueer in the fall of 2022, which has shed new light on how I fit into

the body acceptance movement; however, as I grew up identifying as a girl and a woman, and

my perceived woman-ness by those who do not know my pronouns, I could engage with and

relate to the women in my study.

Data Collection

Focus Groups

I held nine total sessions with my participants:

• March 27th, 2023: session 1 with group A

• April 17th, 2023: Session 1 with group B

o With Ekam and Clare

• April 19th, 2023: session 1 with group B

o One-on-one interview with Sofia

• May 1st, 2023: session 2 with group A

• May 16th, 2023: session 2 with group B

• June 5th, 2023: session 3 with group A

o With Georgia, Norah, and Lana

• June 12th, 2023: session 3 with group A

o One-on-one interview with Ella

• June 13th, 2023: session 3 with group B

o With Ekam and Clare

• June 16th, 2023: session 3 with group B

o One-on-one-interview with Sofia

44
To ensure that my methods reflected RDA, I wanted to spend more time with my participants to

get to know them as people. Saukko (2003) encourages having fewer participants but spending

more time with them, perhaps even having more than one interview. Due to scheduling conflicts

and participants falling ill, I also held three one-on-one interviews. I held a one-on-one interview

with Sofia for the first and third sessions as she could not make the focus groups at the scheduled

times. I also held a one-on-one interview with Ella, as she missed the third session due to being

sick the day our focus group was scheduled. When I conducted the one-on-one interviews, I

shared information from the session they would have participated in with the other participants’

permission to allow them to participate in the conversation they missed. Focus groups ran

anywhere from 60 to 90 minutes, while one-on-one interviews ran around 30 to 45 minutes.

When considering the sessions’ timing, each participant had around an hour of speaking content,

equivalent to what would be expected for seven separate one-on-one interviews.

Before each focus group, participants were sent the session’s discussion questions to

prepare their thoughts in advance. I did this to ensure that participants knew what to expect and

could think through some of their ideas before coming to the group, especially considering that

the topics discussed in the focus group can be personal, in line with trauma-informed practice,

which can aid in recovery (Auty et al., 2022). In the first focus group, I introduced myself to the

participants and told them what we would discuss that day and my main goal for the session. For

example, the first session aimed to discuss their definitions of body positivity and the content

participants consume. We then did introductions among the participants with an “ice breaker”

question to allow the group to get to know each other a little before diving into questions. The

first session was meant to be less personal to ease the group into conversing. The second and

45
third sessions dove deeper into more vulnerable conversations once the participants knew each

other more.

Journaling

Journaling was presented to participants as optional, a way to engage with the questions

privately or to sift through their thoughts after the focus groups. I was hopeful for journaling and

its potential for the participants and me as the researcher. However, only a few participants

completed journaling. Of the few that did journal, they did not journal after every group. Upon

reflection, I could have made journaling mandatory to ensure completion by participants,

although I believe that my participants would have used journaling if they felt it necessary. I also

think I could have made my journaling questions different from the focus group questions, as the

questions for the journaling were very similar. Participants may not have journaled because they

felt like they had nothing more to add. I coded the few journal entries I received and used those

codes in my analysis.

Methodological and ethical challenges

Keeping in mind that “safe spaces” are a “white fantasy” (McKittrick, as cited in Hudson,

2014, p. 237-238), I did not assume that every focus group would be a space where people would

be able to talk through personal experiences. As a white researcher, I acknowledge that I am not

privy to all participant information and do not assume that a participant’s experiences are my

data. I also recognize that if I was not the one leading the focus group but a racialized person, the

dynamic of the conversation could be completely different. Despite acknowledging this and

attempting to create a comfortable space, I knew that there would be times when the

conversation would be difficult for some people more than others, namely racialized people. I

received feedback from Ekam, who is South Asian, that she felt much more comfortable talking

46
when Sofia, who is Latine, was also there because she felt solidarity in speaking about issues she

faced as a Brown woman. Unfortunately, Sofia was not able to participate in two of the three

focus groups, leaving Ekam as the only racialized woman in the group. This resulted in a space

where Ekam did not feel comfortable speaking about her experiences as a racialized person. I

checked in with Ekam once I received this feedback, explaining that I initially wanted racialized

participants in one group and white participants in the other. I am aware of the harm that I may

have caused due to scheduling issues with Sofia, Ekam, and Clare’s focus group and regret not

rescheduling the focus groups to ensure that everyone could be present. I also feel that having

mixed groups had its benefits; for instance, Clare, a white woman, was able to become conscious

of her whiteness through these conversations and was reflective of her experiences with the body

positivity movement for this reason. This is not to say that the racialized women in the group are

responsible for teaching the white woman, but that Clare may have been put in a conversation

that she may not have been exposed to otherwise.

Data analysis

Following RDA, I found that throughout the focus groups, initial analyses happened as

participants spoke with each other. For instance, in Group B, Ekam and Sofia were consistently

critical of the whiteness of the body positivity movement. Clare, the third participant, was a

white woman. In the first focus group, Clare’s comments were more optimistic, adhering to the

mainstream body positivity movement and lacking a critical lens. By the third focus group,

however, Clare made comments that showed she was beginning to understand how race played a

role in the body positivity movement. This is one example where participants continually

analyzed each other’s comments, ultimately leading to a learning space, relating to each other,

and questioning larger discourses at play. Focus groups provided a space where the intended

47
benefits of RDA could occur, and participants were left with a meaningful conversation among

peers about a topic they were interested in.

My analysis began with transcription. I transcribed each focus group using [Link], an AI

software that turns audio files into transcripts. I then listened through each audio file while

reading the corresponding transcript created by [Link] to ensure that the transcript was correct.

Once I had completed the anonymized transcripts, I sent the transcripts to participants. Since

each transcript had multiple participants, I bolded responses one participant at a time so they

could read their responses and how they interacted with others. Once I received approval from

the participants regarding their transcripts, I went into the coding phase of analysis, using a two-

fold approach described by Krueger (1998b). The first reading was more general, looking for

more prominent themes. My second reading was closer, looking to pull some principal codes

apart and break them into smaller ones. I engaged with both groups, coding transcripts from each

group from the same session one after the other to ensure I was creating cohesive themes through

both groups. As each session discussed a different topic, each session had different codes. I

looked for recurring themes. Codes included definitions of body positivity and body neutrality,

discussions around health, diet, food, and exercise, disordered eating/eating disorders, body

ideals and beauty standards, weight loss/gain, identity markers like race, gender, and

socioeconomic status, and fatphobia.

Once the transcripts from the session were completed, I transferred codes and quotes to

an Excel document. I organized the document by code, with separate sheets for each code. Each

sheet was organized by participant and included their quotes according to the codes. Some codes

overlap, meaning they appear in two or more sheets. I then began to work through how I would

like to organize the themes and corresponding quotes. I tried to ensure that each participant was

48
represented, even if their perspective differed from the majority. When I presented preliminary

observations at the annual meeting of the Society for the Study of Social Problems 2023, the

experience helped me identify my two main themes, represented by the two following analysis

chapters. Presenting helped me distill my data into the most important and compelling aspects of

my thesis, creating my analysis two chapters: body positivity and its critiques (Chapter 4) and

body neutrality as an alternative to body positivity (Chapter 5).

Finding my theoretical framework: Postfeminism

I used a grounded theory method to analyze my data, allowing the theory I would use to

emerge from the data (Charmaz, 2006). Krueger (1998b) describes analyzing focus groups as a

maze: there are many different paths, and each path the analysis takes invites more potential

paths. I did not have a particular theory in mind when beginning my analysis. However, I

acknowledge that I was already influenced by many of the perspectives I learned throughout my

undergraduate and graduate degrees. Foucauldian theories of the body, such as docile bodies and

technologies of the self (Foucault, 1978; 1988), have been used commonly in the field of sport

sociology, health sociology, and sociology of the body. These theories, along with neoliberalism

and healthism, are ever-present in my work. As I began to analyze data and gather my main

themes, I searched for a way to explain the contradictions between the positives and the critiques

of body positivity. In my reading on this topic and for my analyses, I noticed a use of

postfeminism in explaining women’s issues of embodiment. Many scholars have used

postfeminism as a theoretical framework to explore the topics of women’s bodies and their

relationship to diet culture, healthism, and body positivity (Cairns & Johnston, 2015; Camacho-

Miñano et al., 2019; Camacho-Miñano & Gray, 2021; Darwin & Miller, 2021; Gill, 2007; Gill &

Scharff, 2011; Luck, 2016). In reading these articles, I became interested in how contemporary

49
liberal feminisms like girl-boss feminism (Liederman, 2022) and commodity feminism (Luck,

2016) maintain and reify gender norms for women, namely in that they fail to question the roots

of the cisheteropatriarchy and ignore factors such as race and colonialism entirely. I was also

interested in how women have embodied neoliberalism to produce postfeminist cultures that

make women the ideal subjects for healthism (Cairns & Johnston, 2015) and how this could be

translated into body positivity.

Gill and Scharff (2011) explain that postfeminism can be understood in four different

ways: first, it can be understood as an “epistemological break” (Gill & Scharff, 2011, p. 3) from

feminism that intermingles with other concepts, such as postmodernism and poststructuralism.

These concepts identify an intellectual shift, characterized by skepticism toward the stability and

certainty of “Truths” and linear thinking that characterized modernism (Jameson, 1991). Second,

it can be seen as a historical shift after second-wave feminism, where feminism is no longer

needed or has been considered “in the past.” Third, postfeminism can be understood as a

backlash against feminism where feminism is mocked; and fourth, it can be understood as what

McRobbie (2004) describes as a double entanglement, where contemporary discourses are

marked by “both a doing and an undoing of feminism” (Gill & Scharff, 2011, p. 4). While the

first three explanations help understand the broadness of postfeminism, the fourth explanation

helps understand the contradictions of postfeminist cultures, in this case, body positivity.

For my project, I have used Gill’s (2007) definition of postfeminism as a sensibility

where postfeminist cultures are marked by some or more of the following tenets:

… the notion that femininity is a bodily property; the shift from objectification to

subjectification; the emphasis upon self-surveillance; monitoring and discipline; a focus on

individualism, choice and empowerment; the dominance of a makeover paradigm; a

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 resurgence in ideas of natural sexual difference; a marked sexualization of culture; and an

emphasis upon consumerism and the commodification of difference. (p. 149)

I used Gill’s framework of postfeminist sensibilities (2007) to analyze my data and think through

my project. These tenets are vital in understanding the contradictions and the un/doing of

feminism over the past twenty to thirty years and help to explain how diet culture and body

positivity were both able to flourish as well as they did.

Conclusion

I was surprised with how much I enjoyed designing the methods of my project; I attribute

this to the amount of learning I did throughout my degree, which helped me think through the

reasons we do research, rather than simply how to do research. This helped me frame the project

not only for myself but for my participants and the larger population of consumers of body

positivity content. The use of focus groups and journaling allowed for the conversations that I

crave to come to fruition, and the amount of (un)learning that happened for both me and my

participants is invaluable, regardless of whether I wrote this thesis.

The RDA and intersectionality were integral to my exploration of these topics as I

holistically engaged with my participants, the data, and the literature in my analysis. Thinking

through postfeminist theory enabled me to unpack many of the contradictions that came up

during the focus groups. The next chapter begins my data analysis, where I dive into the topic of

body positivity and outline some of the main critiques raised by postfeminist theory.

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 Chapter 4

Body positivity: radical or palatable?

My focus groups followed different topics for each session, which separated the data into

themes naturally. In the analysis of the data, I identified three overarching themes: first, we

discussed the prevalence of diet culture, especially in our formative years; second, we discussed

body positivity and also criticized it; and third, we identified body neutrality as a useful concept

(which I discuss in Chapter 5). In this chapter, I explore the first two themes. I first explain how

my participants were affected by diet culture both at home and through the media. Participants

criticized the whiteness and thinness of diet culture. I use healthism as a framework to unpack

how thinness has become conflated with health in contemporary times (Crawford, 1980).

Exploring diet culture helped to frame how and why participants came to engage with body

positivity content as resistance to diet culture. Postfeminist theory is utilized in this section to

analyze body positivity and name it as a postfeminist culture (Gill, 2007).

Healthism and beauty standards in our early years

Before discussing body positivity, I wanted to talk to participants about diet culture and

our relationships with our bodies more generally. As expected, participants were eager to discuss

the obsession in society with thinness and beauty and how these discourses have manifested in

their lives. Thinness has been moralized to signify healthiness (Crawford, 1980) and is

symbolized as the mark of a successful woman in neoliberal and postfeminist times (Cairns &

Johnston, 2015). Thinness and diet culture have been embedded within different areas of our

lives under the guise of achieving health as an essential aspect for which to strive (Crawford,

1980). Healthist discourses are embedded within our families, in messaging from media, from

the healthcare industry, and within our education systems (Cohen et al., 2017; Crawford, 1980;

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Hobbes & Gordon, 2021; Kirk & Colquhoun, 1989; McCuaig & Tinning, 2010; Tiggemann &

Slater, 2014; Wright et al., 2006). Western body ideals around thinness have affected each of us.

Although they affected us differently, there was a consensus among participants that being thin

was, and still is, in some circumstances, the most prevalent message we received and continue to

receive about our bodies. We discussed how healthist discourses within our families affected how

we thought about food, health, diet, and exercise.

Diet culture at home

Norah, 24, recalled learning about fad diets from her parents:

I remember growing up, I feel like there wasn’t a lot of information telling us about

eating a balanced diet. There was more information about going on, like, the South Beach

diet, or whatever other fad diets there were, and I know this because my parents, [when I

was] growing up, they would try every single diet together, and then try a new one.

Norah explained that her parent’s obsession with fad diets and healthy eating mainly stemmed

from their belief that there is a high prevalence of diabetes and heart disease in the South Asian

community. However, Norah recognized that social determinants of health contribute to that,

stating, “it’s more so [diabetes and heart disease] than a lot of other races just because of

colonialism and famines.” Social determinants of health, such as colonialism and food insecurity,

are deeply ingrained in lineages of South Asian descent, affecting their community’s health

(Marya & Patel, 2021). Her parents, however, have been influenced by neoliberal notions of

health, which blame health outcomes on individual choices, such as diet and exercise (Cairns &

Johnston, 2015; Crawford, 1980). Further, the healthist notion of diet as a way to prevent these

chronic illnesses was spread throughout the South Asian community of which her family was a

part. Norah remembers her mom sharing “healthified” recipes for Indian dishes with ingredient

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substitutions or additions to increase their nutritional value, like “adding sprouted beans”

(Norah).

The influence of healthism in her youth arguably led Norah to start dieting in adulthood.

When we began to discuss weight, Norah stated:

I think I’m very lucky that I grew up not really looking at food as a means of gaining

weight or losing weight. Growing up, I was very, very skinny. And so, obviously, I didn’t

have to deal with, like, a lot of the comments that I know my peers would have to deal

with. But when I gained weight later on in my 20s, that’s kind of when I started actually

thinking about diet culture, as actually thinking about food as a way to, like, lose weight.

Norah reflected on growing up skinny, understanding that while her parents may have been

obsessed with fad diets, she did not have to worry about losing weight. Later in life, however,

when she gained weight, her immediate response was to alter her diet to lose weight. The

conditioning she experienced growing up, whether it be through her family, the media, or

otherwise, potentially led her to think she needed to lose the weight that she had gained, and the

way she knew how to do that was through dieting.

Georgia, a white 26-year-old woman, had a similar experience with diet culture in her

home. However, her parents had different reasons for engaging with diet culture:

The cooking in my house growing up was, like, substituting to make it healthier, but

although, in my case, it’s not related to physical health, like avoiding diabetes. It’s about,

like, staying trim, you know? Making cauliflower rice instead of actual rice, or zucchini

noodles, or spaghetti squash noodles, or using applesauce instead of eggs or something if

you’re baking cookies and whatnot.

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Georgia’s parents subscribed to the ideal of thinness. However, it was not explicitly focused on

health; it fell more into the trope of the morality of thinness, where thinness indicates being a

responsible citizen through caring for one’s health (Cairns & Johnston, 2015; Crawford, 1980).

She even discussed how her dad will still call certain foods “fattening” and how that language

triggers her disordered eating thoughts. Weiss and colleagues (2022) found that parental

influence plays a significant role in adolescents’ practices around eating and affects beliefs

surrounding food and dieting. Further, Haworth-Hoeppner (2004) found that the family

environment can be significantly influential in the production of eating disorders.

Lana, an Asian international student living in Canada, talked about how her upbringing in

Asia affected her ideas surrounding diet culture and thinness:

Back [in Asia], there are so many, too many thin people there that I see, and I

don’t think that’s good for me. So… I feel more comfortable here [in Canada].

And then the family culture there, they comment on my body... every time any

family member sees me. And it’s like, I will say 90% of them, like, it’s a positive

thing. But I don’t want that either. But they just do that. And so, whenever I go to

a family gathering, I would expect it, like, ‘I’m going to get some comments on

my body.’

Lana also said that anytime she has to return to Asia, she begins to diet again to prepare herself

for being there. When asked why, she stated, “diet culture in [Asia], it’s a bit too big.” Goodwin

(2023) explains that East Asian beauty standards emphasize extreme whiteness and thinness and

that fat shaming and body shaming have become overwhelmingly normalized. Lana internalized

diet culture and a fixation on her body to the point of developing an eating disorder, from which

she has recovered, but is afraid of relapsing when faced with those intense pressures again upon

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returning to Asia. Lana’s experience is directly related to fat-shaming cultures in East Asia (Ho,

2021; Lee, 2016). While it was once believed that white women had the highest prevalence of

eating disorders in the United States, research has shown that Asian American women are now

the most affected race (Javier & Belgrave, 2019). Javier and Belgrave (2019) found that one’s

family, and especially the elderly members of the family, such as grandparents, is significant in

how Asian American women internalize thin beauty ideals. Another place where diet culture is

perpetuated is in the media (Fardouly & Vartanian, 2016; Grabe et al., 2008; Lazuka et al., 2020;

Tiggemann & Slater, 2014).

Diet culture in the media

Georgia, Ella, and Clare found that their ideas surrounding beauty standards and body

ideals were influenced by popular culture. These participants are all white, middle-class, and

straight-sized, indicating that the media they consume reflects the type of person who looks like

them.

When I think about what I was consuming when I was younger, in terms of pop culture, I

think that has more shaped my identity. The role models I was looking at when I was

younger, like Britney Spears, and the Spice Girls, and Hannah Montana, you know, like

that. (Georgia)

Yeah, my experiences echo that [of Georgia’s] for sure. I also grew up in a middle to

upper-class white family, so I didn’t experience food insecurity or anything like that. But

yes, because of that kind of privileged upbringing, I also mainly consumed pop culture in

regard to, like, what was on eTalk, or [Access Hollywood], or whatever I used to watch

when I was younger. And so, typically, it is white celebrities that get shown. (Ella)

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 I just saw lots of pictures of, like, women with the very stereotyped Western body image,

like, having the slim waist, big hips, and things like that. And it just, it caused a lot of

issues for me because it made me feel awful about myself, and you know, it made me

think lots of different things about myself that were quite negative. (Clare)

Unlike Norah, who reflected on her thinness, Clare and Georgia were not critical of their

privileges, such as their thinness and their whiteness and how that has affected their experiences.

This may have affected the way they internalized beauty standards and the thin ideal for

themselves as it was something they could achieve, or try to achieve, through diet and exercise.

Ella, however, has reflected on her positionality growing up in a white, middle-class home,

meaning that she may reflect on her internalization of the thin ideal in a different way now. We

know from the literature that media exposure is linked to disordered eating behaviours for

women (Grabe et al., 2008); however, that study does not investigate effects depending on

women of different races.

Whiteness and thinness embedded in diet culture

For racialized participants like Ekam, the whiteness of beauty standards meant that she

could never achieve the ideal body. For instance, she discussed colourism in Brown communities

and the bullying she faced growing up about Brown girls having body hair:

… in racialized communities, I know in Black communities, this is a thing, in Brown

communities, this is a thing, where skin bleaching creams are very advertised to us by our

own, in our own communities… I think I’ve faced a lot of bullying because of things like

body hair… because I was also a unibrow girly, you know… like, I have PCOS, and

because of it, my chin hair has been flaring up so bad... and it’s, like, bringing me back

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 into that state of being a child and being, like, so scared to go to school because of what

people are going to say.

Colourism is a term that describes the discrimination that happens within racialized communities

against darker-skinned people (Hunter, 2007). It is reflected in beauty standards in different

cultures (Mady et al., 2023). Sofia also discussed colourism in that she was privileged in her

country for having “whiter” features, both in skin colour and in her facial features. Because of

this, she stated that she did not feel discriminated against in her country growing up because of

her skin colour but instead her body size.

Sofia is the only participant in my study who self-identified as fat. Here, she explains the

pressure she has felt to lose weight:

I grew up fat, and I grew up with this whole concept that fatness was an inherently bad

thing that I needed to change, and that I needed to constantly try to achieve thinness as

the end goal. And then I think the most important part that really switched things for me

is, like, I used to have the mindset that my life was going to start after I got to a certain

weight.

Sofia experienced weight stigma, which is a term that describes the widespread discrimination

against fat people, including in settings such as healthcare (Cossrow et al., 2001; Puhl & Huer,

2009), hiring and the workplace (Cossrow et al., 2001), and even in friendship and romantic

relationships (Cossrow et al., 2001; Puhl & Huer, 2009; Vartanian et al., 2014). Sofia did not

discuss any stories directly correlating to these settings, but she did discuss how she used diet

and exercise to lose weight throughout her life. She was diagnosed with an eating disorder at 18

years old as a result of her weight loss attempts. This is not an uncommon story: being diagnosed

as overweight or obese can perpetuate eating disorders and disordered eating (Greenhalgh,

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2016). While Sofia did not specify that she was formally diagnosed as overweight or obese, she

did state that she grew up fat.

This section shows how healthism, diet culture, and beauty standards have affected my

participants. Through the prevalence of diet culture in our media and our homes growing up, the

ways that women are taught to interact with their bodies put them at a higher risk for eating

disorders, disordered eating, and unhealthy relationships with their bodies (Cohen et al., 2017;

Crawford, 1980; Hobbes & Gordon, 2021; Kirk & Colquhoun, 1989; McCuaig & Tinning, 2010;

Tiggemann & Slater, 2014; Wright et al., 2006). In light of the harms produced by diet culture, a

counterdiscourse developed: body positivity. I argue that society’s hyper-fixation of beauty and

health intersects with neoliberal tenets such as individualism and consumerism to create a

postfeminist culture (Gill, 2007) that encourages diet culture and body positivity.

Body positivity and its criticisms

The body positivity movement began in the 1990s as an extension of the fat acceptance

movement (Gordon, 2020a), which began in the 1960s (Cwynar-Horta, 2016). The movement

moved online through blogs, Tumblr, and Instagram around 2012 (Cherry, 2020) and has now

also shown up on TikTok and YouTube. Body positivity can be defined as loving oneself despite

one’s flaws (Cherry, 2020; Cohen et al., 2019; Cwynar-Horta, 2016). Participants described body

positivity content as being celebratory, positive about one’s body, and loving one’s body no

matter what. Sofia described body positivity as “the vibrant part of the [body acceptance]

movement.” She follows content creators like @meganjaycrabbe (previously @bodyposipanda),

who posted videos of herself dancing and celebrating her fat body. Other participants discussed

body positivity content as celebrating specific traits that have been villainized by diet culture,

such as cellulite and rolls. Norah consumes content that normalizes skin imperfections such as

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acne, birthmarks, and razor bumps, as shown by the creator @mikzazon. Georgia and Sofia both

follow try-on hauls, a category of lifestyle, fashion, and beauty content where mid- and plus-

sized creators try on clothes they purchased to show how they fit; @remibader is one of many

creators of this content who was discussed by participants. Despite the variety of content within

the body positivity umbrella, all participants agreed that what defines body positivity content is

its focus on feeling positive about one’s body and emphasizes loving one’s imperfections, no

matter your size or shape. This aligns with current definitions (Cherry, 2020; Cohen et al., 2019;

Cwynar-Horta, 2016) and explicitly aligns with what Darwin and Miller (2021) call mainstream

body positivity.

Participants identified three main criticisms of the body positivity movement, aligning

with previous critiques in academic literature and popular media sources. First and foremost, the

body positivity movement has been commodified. Corporations use body positivity tropes and

have shifted their advertising to social media (Cwynar-Horta, 2016; Hund, 2023; Luck, 2016;

Shenoy, 2021). Beauty products were previously sold to women because they should strive to be

“beautiful;” however, through body positivity, they are sold under the guise of helping women

love themselves. Second, body positivity has been appropriated by thin, conventionally attractive

white women, actively excluding those for whom the movement was initially created (Cwynar-

Horta, 2016). Third, body positivity reproduces existing ideals of thinness and beauty standards

by claiming one is still beautiful, even with one’s flaws. It does not challenge larger discourses,

such as why we still focus on bodies and why body size and health have been conflated (Shenoy,

2021). Postfeminism and neoliberalism can help us understand how body positivity has been

appropriated, commodified, and accepted into mainstream culture so successfully (Camacho-

Miñano et al., 2019; Camacho-Miñano & Gray, 2021; Darwin & Miller, 2021; Genz, 2006; Gill,

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2007; Gill & Scharff, 2011). Through these three critiques, I argue that body positivity is a

postfeminist culture in that it meets the criteria outlined by Gill (2007) in her article on

postfeminist sensibilities:

… the notion that femininity is a bodily property; the shift from objectification to

subjectification; the emphasis upon self-surveillance; monitoring and discipline; a

focus on individualism, choice and empowerment; the dominance of a makeover

paradigm; a resurgence in ideas of natural sexual difference; a marked

sexualization of culture; and an emphasis upon consumerism and the

commodification of difference (p. 149).

Gill’s definition of a postfeminist sensibility can be applied to body positivity in multiple

forms. For the purposes of this chapter, I will focus on the aspect of commodification and

consumerism, a focus on empowerment, and a focus on the body as a feminine property.

The commodification of the body positivity movement

When I asked where participants first learned of body positivity, Georgia had early

memories of the Dove “Real Beauty” ad campaign launched in 2004 (Figure 3). The campaign

used “real women” rather than models to sell their product (Johnston & Taylor, 2008). While the

women in the ad have more “normal” bodies, these women were all straight-sized, cisgender,

feminine, and mostly white, very much upholding contemporary beauty standards. This ad was

arguably the beginning of the mainstream body positivity movement (Darwin & Miller, 2021),

and while it was seen as radical at the time, it was one of the first instances of the

commodification of the body positivity movement (Cwynar-Horta, 2016; Johnston & Taylor,

2008). The ad capitalized on women’s insecurities by selling them “real women.”

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Figure 3: “Real women. Real beauty.” Dove Ad Campaign, 2004
[Link]

successful

The ad was financially successful, far exceeding forecasts and generating huge sales. Culturally,

the ad received attention in popular magazines like People and endorsements from celebrities

such as Oprah (Johnston & Taylor, 2008). Dove’s campaign marks a postfeminist culture (Gill,

2007) through its emphasis on women’s bodies, the empowered choice for women to participate

in such an ad, therefore subjectifying themselves, sexualizing the women in the ad through

wearing lingerie, and commodifying body positivity through marketing.

Other companies such as Aerie, Good American, Skims, and Yitty followed in Dove’s

footsteps. These companies all use models of various sizes to showcase their clothing. Aerie has

received applause for its #AerieREAL campaign (Luck, 2016), similar to the Dove Ad campaign,

for using “real people” to model their products. Good American, a denim brand owned by Khloe

Kardashian, sells jeans from size 00 to plus size 32 ([Link], n. d.) and will not allow

a company to sell their clothing unless they agree to buy the whole size range (Goldsztajn, 2022).

The clothes also have to be in the same section, they cannot be separated into petite or plus-sized

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sections (Goldsztajn, 2022). They also advertise their jeans in multiple sizes, offering models

wearing a size 0, size 8, or size 16 (Figure 4).

Figure 4: Good American website showcasing jeans on different sized models.

Screenshot taken September 11th, 2023, at 10:09 p.m. by Olivia Scully.

[Link]

Skims, owned by Kim Kardashian, was the first lingerie company to sell shapewear in an

extensive range of colours to suit more skin colours. Similarly, Yitty is a company owned by hip-

hop and R&B artist, Lizzo, that sells mostly lingerie and swimsuits in an extensive size range

(Feldman, 2022). Participants like Georgia and Ekam stated that they were more likely to

purchase clothing from companies such as these because they could see themselves in the

product:

How can you know what it’s going to look like if it’s only ever on the standard, skinny

figure? And so, that’s why I started, that’s how I got into this space because I was like,

yeah, that’s something that really bothers me… I never know how something is gonna

really look on me because I’m only seeing it on these types of bodies… When I do follow
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 people, when it comes to like, clothing hauls, it’s all people within the 8 to 10 size range.

That’s not exactly my size range, but it’s like, you know, I can at least relate to it a bit

more than the under or over from that. (Georgia)

It is important to note that Georgia is straight-sized and thin, meaning she can find clothes in any

store that will fit her body. However, because of the extreme thinness portrayed in fashion, she

always felt she needed to see what clothing would look like on her size six to eight body because

clothing is usually shown on much smaller sizes (Dockterman, 2016; Ingraham, 2015). For

Georgia, the commodification of the body positivity movement has meant that she feels more

comfortable in her body in terms of buying clothing, meaning that she has internalized the

branding logic of the body positivity movement. While this feels like a step forward for her, it

still ultimately reinforces consumption and gives her more space to participate in the fashion and

beauty economies. Postfeminist theory explains that giving women more choices may feel

emancipatory, but it is not because they still must participate in capitalism (Genz, 2006; Gill,

2007). Georgia sees her ability to buy clothing from a brand like Aerie as empowering when, in

actuality, it perpetuates and maintains the hegemonic ideal of altering the appearance of her body

through clothing in order to participate in society (Gill, 2007).

Ekam also discussed choosing one brand over the other in the case of Skims and Yitty;

however, the reason for the choice is where the money goes. Ekam, who is critical of capitalism

on a larger scale, stated:

I love Lizzo’s brand, Yitty. I’m so happy that she’s doing that. And it’s shifting the

emphasis away from other brands like Skims, which like, Skims is great… Like, I love

that now, I could buy shapewear in my color. But then, I would rather buy it from a brand

that is benefiting the life of a fat Black woman.

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Ekam acknowledges that Yitty and Skims are doing good things for diverse representation:

having an extensive size range, using diverse models, and having shapewear that comes in more

skin colours. While these structural changes can be attributed to the body positivity movement,

Ekam also critiqued the commodification of the body positivity movement:

I guess for me, it’s very rooted in capitalism. It’s very rooted in bodily capital. And so, I

see it as a project, a capitalist project of consumption for a broader audience to consume

and think that they’re interrogating this idealized norm of what bodies are supposed to

look like, and the people that are making capital and making money off that movement

look like that prototype.

Ekam astutely points out that people think they are making a difference by consuming body

positivity content, and in some ways, they are. For instance, Georgia feels better about herself

because she can buy certain brands over others. However, selling body positivity requires it to be

more palatable, leading to the dilution of the movement. On this note, Ekam pointed out, “it [the

body positivity movement] was integrated seamlessly into culture without very much pushback

in the sort of predominantly white agenda that it serves.” Sofia stated that “body positivity is

rooted in anti-racist, anti-fatphobic origins,” aligning with my discussion of the roots of the body

positivity movement in Chapter 2. However, it has been altered and appropriated to benefit

capitalism, which I will discuss in the next section.

Where body positivity was once rooted in a radical acceptance of bodies in response to

negative attitudes toward fatness, it also challenged diet culture and healthism. Through its

commodification, however, it has been co-opted by the diet and wellness industries. In their

content analysis of #bodypositivity posts on Instagram, Gelsinger (2021) found that many posts

with #bodypositivity were also tagged #fitspiration or #fitspo. #fitspiration is a hashtag used on

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social media for fitness content, which tends to glorify weight loss through neoliberal ideas of

health, such as modifying diet and exercise (Cairns & Johnston, 2015). A few participants

discussed how a part of the body positivity content that they consume includes reframing

exercise as not centring weight loss or body manipulation. My participants were careful in what

content they were consuming – content that celebrates joyful movement and decenters weight

loss as the primary goal of exercise (which I will discuss in Chapter 5). However, because of the

high cross-posting of #bodypositivity and #fitspiration, the meaning of the body positivity

movement has been completely lost. Creators will use #bodypositivity to sell their workout

plans, and most concerning to me are those using #bodypositivity as a way to sell weight loss

products such as supplements. Participants and I discussed seeing body positivity influencers

advertising supplements such as greens and collagen peptides under the guise of body positivity.

Since body positivity is about loving yourself, what better way to love yourself than to buy

supplements that claim you will have more energy, healthier-looking nails and hair, and feel

better in your skin?

Examining the commodification of the body positivity movement through a postfeminist

lens is helpful here. Postfeminism allows us to see contradictions in women’s empowerment:

because women have the “choice” to present themselves in different ways (through consuming

different products), they have been liberated from the confines of gender (Gill, 2007; Gill &

Scharff, 2011). However, we have not shifted away from the body. If anything, the body has

become a neoliberal site of self-improvement where women can achieve success through a

never-ending practice of consumption (Camacho-Miñano & Gray, 2021; Gill, 2007). In the late

1990s and early 2000s, beauty standards, in combination with healthism in the era of

neoliberalism and postfeminism, created the perfect storm for the diet industry. However, the

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body positivity movement’s gentle resistance to thinness and traditional beauty standards has

allowed body positivity to become the new capitalist project. With its feel-good attitude and

inclusion of more women (read: more customers), body positivity has found a new market for

capitalism. By being more “diverse,” companies can sell to more people under the guise of

inclusivity (Houston, 2019; Mayorga-Gallo, 2019). The movement’s appropriation to suit

Western beauty standards has worked alongside the commodification of the movement to

achieve a new form of body positivity that looks very different from its origins.

Appropriation of the body positivity movement

The commodification of the body positivity movement discussed above has meant that

the most palatable parts of the movement have been taken up by popular culture. While body

positivity was once a radical movement that opposed beauty standards, fatphobia, and the thin

ideal, the movement has transformed to comfort thin, white, middle-upper-class women in their

minor and inconsequential flaws, such as stretch marks and cellulite (Cwynar-Horta, 2016). A

recent content analysis by Gelsinger (2021) found posts tagged with #bodypositivity and

#bodypositive were over-representative of women between the estimated sizes of zero to four, as

well as overrepresentative of women who were white, cisgender, able-bodied, and

conventionally attractive (blonde, tan, and muscular/lean). Gelsinger (2021) also found that

#bodypositivity was cross posted with other hashtags, such as #fitspiration and #fitspo, in an

effort for posts to gain popularity and for influencers to gain more followers.

Talking about body positivity in the focus groups conjured up memories from the mid-

2010s: Instagram posts of skinny white women with two photos side by side: one photo posed

and one photo holding their body slightly differently, showing off rolls or bloating (Figure 5).

The influencer here shows her body “posed” and then “unposed” and accompanies it with a

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quote which resists the disordered eating mentality, which would imply that if one was bloated or

feeling badly about their body, they should not eat that day.

Figure 5: @danaemercer on Instagram

Screenshot, taken August 8, 2023, at 11:43 a.m. by Olivia Scully

Figure 5 is a form of mainstream body positivity (Darwin & Miller, 2021) and serves a specific

population of thin white women. This content resonated with participants like Ella, Georgia,

Clare, and me. For us, body positivity was a space to “normalize” our bodies, focusing on details

such as stretch marks, bloating after eating, acne scars, and razor bumps (the use of the term

normalize here is ironic – as young, thin, white women, we are the idealized norm). Clare

describes how body positivity has helped her with her body image:

I’d say the pictures I would see is things that were natural, so like, body hair and rolls and

things like that, and also cellulite and stuff. So, it made me happy to see that. And it’s

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 definitely helped me as well, personally. So, I think seeing that, it’s definitely been really

helpful.

Clare is a thin, young, white woman. She is conventionally attractive and will likely not receive

discrimination based on her size in any form. Because of the negative impacts of the media in her

early years (Fardouly & Vartanian, 2016; Lazuka et al., 2020; Tiggemann & Slater, 2014), Clare

felt bad about her body even though she was the idealized norm. So, for her, body positivity

touted by other thin, white women who had some stomach rolls or cellulite was helpful to her in

terms of realizing her body was normal. This story was shared among other participants who

were also thin, white, and conventionally attractive. They could see themselves in this movement

as their experiences were immediately normalized and their bodies mirrored back to them.

As the body positivity movement has become white-washed and represents the most

privileged, the experiences of women who do not fit the idealized body have different

relationships to body positivity. Ekam rejected the body positivity movement altogether:

When I think of body positivity, it’s weird because I think of, like, skinny white women,

and so I guess I just didn’t pay too much attention to it. Or didn’t feel like I was

associated with it. I felt like maybe I was associated with other sorts of body acceptance

movements, but not body positivity.

The whiteness that is perpetuated within the appropriation of the body positivity movement has

meant that racialized participants like Ekam, Norah, Sofia, and Lana were not able to see

themselves in the movement in some form or another. As Ekam pointed out, the appropriation of

the body positivity movement has meant that it is not a space where she feels represented in any

way. She did state, however, that she follows content creators that use some of the concepts of

body positivity in conjunction with body acceptance that truly advocates against colonial and

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racist beauty standards; however, she had to curate her feed to reflect content that aligned with

her personally and politically.

Ella, a white woman, also discussed trying to curate a more diverse feed: “I’ve tried to

make my content more diverse. So, following more BIPOC [Black, Indigenous, and People of

Colour] creators, as well as disabled people, too. That’s another group that I think are really left

out of body positivity.” I was intrigued by the idea of curating one’s feed to reflect the content

one wants to see. While discussing the ins and outs of how algorithms work within social media

is out of the scope of this thesis, I do think it is important to note what Noble (2018) calls

“technological redlining” (p. 1), which states “… the power of algorithms in the age of

neoliberalism… reinforce oppressive social relationships and enact new modes of racial

profiling.” Noble argues that algorithms are assumed to be unbiased and objective since they are

mathematical equations; however, these codes are created by humans who innately hold various

biases (Noble, 2018). Consequently, algorithms created by humans hold these biases, like

racism, sexism, and ableism, among others, and they have power to include or exclude content

just as humans do. The appropriation of the movement by thin white women, and even women

who are using the hashtag to gain more popularity, is given credence through algorithms, making

it harder for racialized women like Ekam to find relatable content. It also prevents people like

Ella and other white participants from consuming diverse content that could teach people about

concepts they might not otherwise have encountered.

Mainstream body positivity as a postfeminist culture

The commodification and appropriation of the body positivity movement have meant that

those representing the movement perpetuate body ideals and emphasize that our bodies are still

the most interesting parts of being a woman. Camacho-Miñano and Gray (2021) emphasize that

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“in postfeminist cultures, the body is crucial for both the definition of femininity and the value of

women” (p. 727). According to Gill (2007), postfeminism has worked alongside neoliberalism to

intensify the focus on the self. Body positivity fails to question where normative beauty

standards come from and fails to discuss the fact that thinness is still upheld as the norm. Ella

critiqued body positivity for this reason:

Body positivity… for me, it was like, you love your body, ‘even though you’re...’, so you

have that statement of ‘even though you’re...’, it makes it still negative, but you’re loving

it. I think what’s really changed is we’re questioning like, why do we still get to hold

thinness as what it should be? And now we’re just saying it’s just like a spectrum of

human variation, really, like your body size. So that’s, for me, how it shifted is like, body

positivity still kind of held one body as the neutral or ideal body, but still said like, oh,

you can still love yourself, even if you don’t have that body.

Darwin and Miller (2021) argue that the body positivity movement “reinforces heteropatriarchal

values by encouraging women to self-objectify in the name of liberation, leaving hegemonic

power structures unchallenged” (p. 875). This analysis of the movement is to analyze Ella’s

quote: body positivity advocates for all bodies, but it is not critical about why we need the

movement in the first place. This is yet another example of how body positivity is a postfeminist

culture (Gill, 2007); women subjectify themselves and their bodies through the guise of self-

empowerment but fail to investigate why they continue to focus on their bodies.

Ella’s comment about holding thinness as the ideal sparked a conversation about the

harms of the body positivity movement. Participants felt like body positivity was harmful in the

sense that it does not allow for any feeling other than positivity about one’s body. I remember

feeling this way about body positivity, and I discussed this in one of the focus groups:

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 The body positivity almost feels unattainable. I always remember seeing people who

were like ‘I love my cellulite.’ And I was like, ‘how am I ever going to love it? I don’t

know how I’m ever going to love it.’ And then I kind of felt like a failure.

Georgia shared this feeling of being a failure:

Body positivity is very much like, I love my body no matter what, and that’s not, that’s

not real. I don’t think that’s realistic, you know? Some days, I love my body, some days, I

am not thinking about my body at all, some days I am, like, totally uncomfortable in my

skin.

As discussed previously, participants defined body positivity as feeling positive about one’s

body, no matter what. This extends to the idea that one should love every part of oneself or work

towards loving oneself. What happens when one cannot achieve that?

Body positivity can be categorized as a discourse of forced positivity or toxic positivity,

which Lecompte-Van Poucke (2022) argues is prevalent on social media due to the relatively

impersonal relationship between users. In Ehrenreich’s book Bright-Sided: How the Relentless

Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America (2009), she argues that forced

positivity discourses are a distinctly American way to skirt more significant structural issues.

Berlant’s theory of cruel optimism (2011) can also be helpful here to understand how body

positivity’s attachment to the body is ultimately harmful, as exemplified by the feelings of

participants who could never fully achieve body positivity. Berlant (2011) states that “cruel

optimism is the condition of maintaining an attachment to a significantly problematic object” (p.

24). Through attachment to our bodies, body positivity is a form of cruel optimism; we feel

optimistic about this shift towards body positivity, but it ultimately holds us down by keeping

our attachment to our bodies.

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 Sofia commented on the pressure to feel beautiful embedded within the body positivity

movement, which can be connected to the ad campaigns by Aerie and Dove, which claim that all

women are beautiful:

I did start a little bit more on the kind of, like, love yourself, embrace your body,

celebrate your body kind of idea. And I was never really fully in on the core concept.

Like, you have to basically assume you’re beautiful, or you’re hot, or whatever. Like, it

really didn’t connect with me 100%.

This comment reinforces the aspect of postfeminism that emphasizes the focus on women’s

bodies and their centrality to their femininity (Camacho-Miñano & Gray, 2021; Gill, 2007).

Sofia also discussed having difficulty finding body positivity influencers that represented a

different version of the movement. This version included both her ethnicity and more critical

discussions around body positivity:

I think it has been harder for me to find Spanish-speaking content creators that go beyond

just, like, the acceptance and beautification of body positivity. And that actually tried to

go beyond that and to start questioning bigger things, right?

Here, Sofia is describing wanting to find Spanish-speaking creators who discuss more radical

aspects of body positivity, like fat acceptance and a critical lens of dominant healthist discourses.

While she enjoys content that discusses fashion and beauty, she also craves content that goes

beyond the consumerist side of the movement. I turn again to the limits of body positivity as a

postfeminist culture to help explain that Sofia feels something is missing in this movement;

consuming content about beauty and fashion only gets her so far in healing her relationship with

her body. Unfortunately, buying new clothes will not make her love her fat body. Sofia

expressed that when she began to understand the harms of fatphobia, she began to follow people

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who are more critical of the larger discourses at play, such as learning about healthism. The

appropriation of the movement means that the most acceptable parts are taken: the parts that

allow the continuation of capitalism and consumerism. While having more inclusive sizing is

important, it falls under the guise that weight stigma does not exist. It perpetuates the myth that

including fat people in clothing ads fixes everything and this representation will fix the deep-

seated fatphobia in our culture. This, however, is not true, as we know that fat bodies experience

discrimination at a structural scale – especially within the medical field (Tomiyama et al., 2018;

Vartanian et al., 2014).

Due to body positivity’s failure to address larger issues, participants began to seek other

content such as body acceptance, fat acceptance, fat liberation, and body neutrality. These

different movements have roots in the body positivity movement, but they address dominant

discourses and attempt to tease them apart. There can be many crossovers among these topics,

with some creators still touting body positivity while discussing body neutrality. Darwin and

Miller (2021) identified that body positivity can be equivalent to fat positivity, where fat creators

make content that questions and criticizes the appropriation of the body positivity movement.

This content, however, does not fall into the mainstream body positivity content (Darwin &

Miller, 2021), meaning it can be hard to find or come across on social media – especially when

we consider how power is embedded into algorithms, as previously discussed (Noble, 2018).

This remains a problematic aspect of the body positivity movement: people create more radical

content, but their content is not circulated as readily. Sofia pointed out that some fat famous

women, such as Lizzo (@lizzobeeating) and Ashley Graham (@ashleygraham), repost content

made by other creators that is critical of dominant discourses but do not post it themselves. This

means their considerable number of followers (12.9 million for Lizzo and 21.4 million for

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Graham) will see more subversive content; however, they do not have to be held accountable for

stating these more radical ideas.

Conclusion

This chapter explored the effects of healthist discourses on participants’ experiences with

their bodies, which framed the need for body positivity as a reaction to diet culture messaging.

Healthist discourses frame health as a never-ending project of achieving perfect health, framed as

a project to improve the body. When losing weight is framed as the healthiest thing one can do,

there is no end to where that weight loss should stop. When this negatively affected participants

in the form of disordered eating, eating disorders, or poor body image, body positivity was a

refreshing and welcome conversation, leading to participants to think differently about health

and their bodies. Where body positivity was once helpful for participants, its weaknesses mean

that participants do not align with all parts of body positivity, namely, mainstream body

positivity (Darwin & Miller, 2019). The mainstream body positivity movement is embedded in

whiteness and thinness. The movement once meant for and created by racialized and fat women

as a way to resist white supremacist beauty standards has been co-opted by thin, white women as

a way to resist the unattainable beauty standards which call for a perfect femininity. Participants

discussed that over the past few years, their understandings of their bodies have shifted from

body positivity to body neutrality, which can be defined as a form of radical body positivity

(Darwin & Miller, 2019) which further critiques the postfeminist contradictions embedded in the

body positivity movement. I discuss body neutrality and participants experiences with it in my

next chapter.

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 Chapter 5

If not body positivity, then what?

Since body positivity has been largely critiqued academically and in popular culture,

participants were excited to talk about body neutrality. I was unsure of the popularity of body

neutrality and if my participants would be engaged with it, especially given that I used body

positivity as the keyword in my recruitment. Participants engaged more with body neutrality than

with body positivity, and I wanted to ensure that I gave space to these conversations as they came

up. Body neutrality is a relatively new term to the body positivity/acceptance movements,

meaning there is limited academic literature with which to engage. The most helpful literature on

this topic is the definition of body neutrality created by Pellizzer and Wade (2023). However,

there is also a large conversation about body neutrality in popular media. This chapter follows

three main sections: I first outline the shift from body positivity to body neutrality for my

participants and how it is reflected in the larger body positivity discourses. I then use participant

definitions to show how they conceptualize body neutrality, and why participants prefer body

neutrality to body positivity. Second, I bring in conceptualizations of health and how they relate

to body neutrality to engage with discussions of healthism in the previous chapter. This includes

discussing how participants practice body neutrality on a day-to-day basis. Finally, I critique

participants’ descriptions of body neutrality, discussing how it may fall into neoliberal tropes

surrounding self-help. I also argue how it can be used to further our understanding of power

relations and our bodies. This may be part of a larger shift from body positivity to body

neutrality, and ultimately to something larger.

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A shift from body positivity to body neutrality

When discussing body positivity, participants were quick to state that they aligned more

with body neutrality. While I suspected we would discuss body neutrality at some point, it came

up much more than I expected. All participants were familiar with body neutrality; most (5 of 7)

engaged with it and its practices daily. Body neutrality is a term and a concept that has been

floating around the Internet since 2015 (Pellizzer & Wade, 2023; Sreevinas, 2023) and is defined

by Darwin and Miller (2021) as a form of radical body positivity. The popularity of body

neutrality is arguably a reaction to the critiques of the body positivity movement (Darwin &

Miller, 2021) that were discussed in Chapter 4. Online accounts such as @beyondbeautifulbook

on Instagram post infographics to help define body neutrality and its distinction from body

positivity:

Figure 6: @beyondbeautifulbook on Instagram

Screenshots taken by Olivia Scully on October 4th, 2023, at 2:42 p.m.

[Link]

661e-44c3-a8e9-f2530599bd80&img_index=1

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These images are examples of how to think through typical body positive thoughts and rephrase

them to fit body neutrality, de-centring appearance and emphasizing mindfulness and non-

attachment to our bodies. Discourses like these are circulated through social media platforms

such as Instagram and TikTok in response to the popularity of body positivity (Hallward et al.,

2023; Seekis & Lawrence, 2023).

In recent years, various books have come out about body neutrality and its related practices,

such as:

• Anti-Diet: Reclaim Your Time, Money, Well-being, and Happiness Through Intuitive

Eating by Christy Harrison, MPH, RD (2019)

• The Body Joyful: My Journey from Self-Loathing to Self-Acceptance by Anne Poirier

(2021)

• More Than A Body: Your Body is an Instrument, Not an Ornament by Lindsay Kite, PhD,

and Lexie Kite, PhD (2021)

• Decolonizing Wellness: A QTBIPOC-Centered Guide to Escape the Diet Trap, Heal Your

Self-Image, and Achieve Body Liberation by Dalia Kinsey, RD, LD (2022)

• Body Neutrality: Finding Acceptance and Liberation in a Body-Focused Culture by

Eleanor Clark (2023)

• Body Neutral: A Revolutionary Guide to Overcoming Body Image Issues by Jessi

Kneeland (2023)

• I Am More Than My Body: The Body Neutral Journey by Bethany C. Meyers (2023)

These books are written by authors across various disciplines with different kinds of expertise

and levels of accreditation. Most of these books have been written by thin white women.

Kneeland and Meyers are both white and non-binary or genderqueer, and Kinsey is Black;

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however, I found Kinsey’s book to be the only one that genuinely unpacked the racist and

colonial underpinnings of diet culture. The online community has taken up the body neutrality

movement through social media (Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube), as well as through online

articles and blog posts (see: Alleva, 2021; Cowles, 2022; Gordon, 2020b; Haupt, 2022; Kessel,

2018; Khan, 2022; Lusengo, 2020; Noor, 2019; Raypole, 2021; Shruti, 2019; Sreenivas, 2023).

Novel academic research has been conducted in the areas of psychology and communications

(see: Brathwaite et al., 2023; Pellizzer & Wade, 2023; Perry et al., 2019; Seekis & Lawrence,

2023; Smith et al., 2023), but body neutrality, to the best of my knowledge, has not been

researched in qualitative terms.

Pellizzer and Wade (2023) developed a definition of body neutrality based on an analysis

of body neutrality content on 107 websites to create interventions for eating disorders in the

future:

… body neutrality recognises that: our feelings about our body change constantly

so are best mindfully observed without judgment; a central focus on what our

body allows us to do and appreciating this will lead us to respect and care for our

body; and acknowledgment that our self-worth encompasses body intrinsic

qualities and extrinsic passions and de-emphasises our appearance. (p. 439)

This working definition encompasses the messaging I observed through books, articles, and

online content discussing body neutrality. This definition is reflected in the following excerpts

from my data, and I have used this definition to think through the responses of my participants.

How do participants conceptualize body neutrality?

Because of the messiness of social media, body positivity can be seen as an umbrella

term for many different types of content, including body neutrality, body acceptance, fat

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acceptance, self-love, and more. Creators may claim one or more of these terms or tout

information that conflates or confuses multiple terms and concepts (Brathwaite et al., 2023).

While someone deeply entrenched in the space may be aware of the different nuances

surrounding the content, others may see body positivity as an all-encompassing term. Defining

body positivity allowed us to flesh out some of these nuances together and figure out what

definition best fits what we practice. Even my research participants used body positivity and

body neutrality sometimes interchangeably. In my data analysis, I could infer from our

conversations when a participant talked about body neutrality but referred to it as body positivity.

For this reason, some participants may use the term body positivity in their definitions. To clarify

terms, the focus group questions used the term body positivity. However, I prefaced to the

participants that they should talk about the content they engaged with, whether it be body

neutrality, acceptance, or some other form of content.

When asked, “How do you define body positivity?” some participants answered with

definitions of body neutrality. After more discussion, we defined body positivity versus

neutrality. Body positivity was defined as appearance-based, toxically positive, and unattainable.

Once we established our critiques of body positivity and what they did not like about the

movement, participants began to discuss what did work for them. Many responses encapsulated

body neutrality practices and aligned with Pellizzer and Wade’s definition (2023). For instance,

Ekam stated:

What body positivity, or neutrality, I guess, means for me is not hyper-fixating on the

physical aspects of my body, like, not caring what I look like, like, be just existing, and

just chillin’ and vibin’ with myself, and feeling good about myself, feeling good about

what my body does for me, what like, as a canvas, I can do with my body.

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Ekam’s description here aligns with Pellizzer and Wade’s (2023) definition of body neutrality in

multiple ways: first, nonjudgmental acknowledgement of her body and its form; second,

appreciating what her body does for her and focusing on what she can do with her body; and

third, removing the emphasis on her appearance through removing hyper fixation on her body

and not caring what she looks like. Other responses to this question included that body neutrality

is “more about destigmatizing” than body positivity (Sofia) and aims to deconstruct hegemonic

discourses surrounding diet, health, and bodies. Ella’s comment shows how the content can be

productive in critiquing dominant discourses:

I think one thing that a connection that I may have made for myself is, like, stopping

thinking about what foods are good foods and what foods are bad… I tie that to body

positivity [neutrality] because it also stops you from, like, feeding into the idea that if

you, like, eat a certain way, your body’s going to look a certain way, because that’s just

not true. So, I think it counteracts that narrative for sure. And it also allows you more

autonomy in what to feed your body like as nourishment instead of as, like, something

that’s either gonna make you gain weight or help you lose weight.

Ella learned through body neutrality content that diet and body size are not always related, a

message which destabilizes diet culture’s discourse that assumes one’s diet is responsible for

one’s body size. This concept is not typically deconstructed through body positivity content.

Another common description of body neutrality included focusing on what our bodies

can do rather than what they look like. When discussing body neutrality, this was Clare’s

definition:

I do agree with the whole aspect of like, you know, your body allows you to do things…

like it allows you to move it, allows you to digest food, like, lots of different things that a

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 human does. So, I feel like that’s also a really positive aspect of it. Because again, it’s not

about the looks, it’s about what you can do with your body as well.

Centralizing our bodies’ abilities is a turning point from body positivity, where loving oneself

centers around loving one’s appearance. Body functionality, which I will discuss in a later

section, is a concept that encourages function over form (Alleva et al., 2016) and was included in

participants’ discussions as a helpful aspect of body neutrality.

Why body neutrality?

Participants described a general shift from body positivity to body neutrality. Participants

described feeling like body neutrality provides an alternative way of thinking (or not thinking)

about our bodies. For example, Norah felt burnt out from the body positivity content, explaining

that she did not engage with body positivity content anymore because of the extensive focus on

the body. Here, Norah describes a feeling of tiredness from thinking about her body:

I feel like I don’t want to be thinking about my body all the time. I think it’s just been so

many years that I’ve been seeing this content that I’m just like, I don’t care. I don’t want

to think about it.

She then explained that body neutrality allows her to remove the focus from her body altogether.

It’s nice to just take my mind off it and know that I don’t have to feel proud of my body

all the time. And I don’t have to feel bad about it all the time, as well.

Ella echoed this sentiment, stating that she felt healthiest when she was not thinking about her

body:

I just want it to be like, just something that, you know, that I don’t think about. That’s

when I feel, I guess, like most… I don’t know, healthiest, is when I’ve gone through a

phase, and I’m like, oh, I didn’t think about my body for, like, this amount of time. So, to

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 me, that’s what the big shift has been because I kind of started thinking less of this ideal

or neutral body.

Ella’s understanding of body neutrality falls under the first part of the definition by Pellizzer and

Lawrence (2023), where we observe our feelings about our bodies without judgment – perhaps

even observing that we do not have feelings about our bodies.

Ella, Lana, and I agreed that the body neutrality movement enables us to have emotions

about our bodies without attaching meaning to those emotions. Ella describes her understanding

of body neutrality like this:

So, I think it’s not so much focusing on being positive about your body. It’s just being,

existing in this system that’s trying to tell you that your body is bad. So, just letting you

do what you want with your body. Knowing that, you know, everything around you is

telling you that you should be hyper focused on it in way that, I guess, brings you closer

to being thin. So, yeah, that to me… I like that it gives space for those different emotions.

Ella’s comment made me think of distinguishing factors between body positivity and body

neutrality, one being that body positivity only allows for one emotion about your body:

positivity. Body neutrality, however, encourages emotions to come up and for folks to work

through those emotions, questioning why we might have them. In response to Ella’s comment, I

stated:

Then the neutrality thing is like, oh, I can just like it. It can just be there; I don’t have to

have any feelings about it. But I also think an important part of neutrality is that it’s also

okay to feel negative about things. So, I think that is like a distinction [from body

positivity] that I really like about it.

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This sentiment aligns with Pellizzer and Lawrence’s definition (2023), where we observe our

feelings about our bodies without judgment. Ella’s definition aligns with Kneeland’s definition in

their book Body Neutral (2023):

I define body neutrality as the practice of approaching your body through a clear,

unbiased, and impartial lens, attempting to see and deal with what’s objectively true in

the moment, without moral judgment, interpretation, projection, added meaning, or undue

significance (p. 35).

Lana resonated with this notion of body neutrality, repeatedly discussing removing any thoughts

or emotions about her body within her practice of recovering from her eating disorder:

I don’t think, like my opinion on my body can be very either positive or negative. So,

body neutrality, that will be more relevant to me. I just don’t want to have any emotion

attached to my body anymore. So that’s something that I’m trying to do.

Pellizzer and Wade’s definition of body neutrality (2023) may help in working towards creating

interventions for those recovering from eating disorders, like Lana. Novel research by Seekis and

Lawrence (2023) shows improved body appreciation and body satisfaction for women exposed

to body neutrality content over body positivity content. Improved body functionality and body

satisfaction are indicators of improving eating disorder behaviours (Alleva & Tylka, 2021),

meaning that body neutrality could be a promising intervention to treat those with eating

disorders and disordered eating. Additionally, a meta-analysis by Sala and colleagues (2020)

showed that mindfulness may be beneficial to those with eating disorders.

But what about health?

Talking about bodies inevitably brings up the topic of health. Our third session discussed

diet culture and health, where I asked participants how their perceptions of health have changed

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since engaging with body positivity and/or neutrality content. Participants discussed body size

and its correlation to health, stating that they previously believed that being fat is unhealthy,

aligning with popular healthist discourse (Crawford, 1980; Wright et al., 2006). Georgia’s

conceptions of health when she was younger were mainly correlated to her body size: “I didn’t

even think about health when I was younger, like that is so true. Like, my definition of health

was how slim I was.” Lana also discussed the fact that when she was in the throes of her eating

disorder, health was not something that she even considered:

So, health does not have any connection with how my body looks right now. That’s how I

understand health. But back in the day, I will say I need to look this way. But at the time I

didn’t even care about health. So, when I was younger, health was not a thing that I cared

about, but now I do.

These responses align with previously researched notions of health in young people, particularly

young women (Rail, 2012; Wright et al., 2006). We discussed how health is defined as

maintaining a healthy diet and exercising regularly and how we used those tactics to be “healthy”

and achieve or maintain thinness. Sofia discussed how her health has always been intertwined

with her size as she grew up fat:

It was such pressure on me to be like, oh, you have to be healthy. And especially I think I

started being questioned about my health since an early age… And then it’s like, I

questioned myself so many times. Like, yeah, like, I’m fat, and that means I’m not

healthy.

As the only fat participant, Sofia’s experiences with health were much more tied to her body size

than the thin participants. Others questioned her health – something that no other participant

discussed, presumably because the other participants experienced thin privilege. Thin privilege is

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the inherent privilege that thin people receive due to systemic fatphobia, such as being able to

find clothes in any store, fitting into seats comfortably, and access to unbiased healthcare

(Gordon, 2020a; Harrison, 2019) Thin participants felt the pressure to be thin but were able to

disregard being “healthy,” which Norah stated appropriately:

I think being in a skinny body in this world gives you the benefit of not having to think

about food as a way to, you know, as a way to change the way you look. And it gives you

that privilege of being able to think about your health in other ways.

Norah is critical of her own thinness in that she recognizes her thin privilege as a way that allows

a good relationship with food and that health can offer a different focus (van Amsterdam, 2013).

Healthist discourse makes personal health a guise for a desire for thinness, but as discussed

previously, is obsessing about our bodies, diets, and exercise healthy? For thin women, their

health is not questioned; they benefit from thin privilege (Harrison, 2019; Gordon, 2020a; van

Amsterdam, 2013). Fat women, like Sofia, feel the pressure to be thin in order to be healthy but

also to avoid body-based oppression (Gordon, 2020a).

Through body neutrality, participants were exposed to content that challenges the

dominant healthist discourse, which conflates body size and health. Norah discussed unlearning

healthist discourses of thinness: “I think it was a big deal for me to learn that, like, maybe fat

people are healthy, and skinny people are not healthy. I think that was huge for me to learn.”

Norah went on to discuss the fact that now, it seems so apparent that health does not equal body

size:

I feel like, diet and the way that people look… I don’t necessarily see how they correlate

anymore. I think what you see in the media is that, like, people who like to eat

cheeseburgers every single day, and like sit on their couch, they’re like, these, oh my god,

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 like my 1000-pound life or something like that. It’s like, that’s not really the case. Like,

with what fat people eat and what skinny people eat. It’s usually like… it might even be a

similar diet. And so, I think, yeah, what I said before learning that different body types

can actually be healthy or unhealthy in different ways. And you can’t tell just by looking

at somebody… that was huge for me to learn.

Lana also described health as not being related to size:

I saw a lot of content about, like, being in a normal BMI does not necessarily

mean that you’re healthy. So yeah, okay, so some people might be really thin and

they’re really healthy and some people might be not thin, like, in a normal BMI

range and then not healthy. So… I don’t have to be a certain size to be healthy.

Harrison (2019), Kite and Kite (2021), and Kinsey (2022) discuss the ways that health and body

size have been conflated in society, breaking down the issues surrounding BMI and the lies that

fuel the diet industry.

Participants brought up these concepts and helped them understand what health does and

does not mean. Sofia described the nuances within beliefs of health and body size:

I think, particularly for fat bodies, we turn to a pathology, or like... [the belief that] having

a fat body definitely means you have pathology. And, in my mind, I will say that obesity

can be a disease, you can have a disease, obesity… that’s when you start having problems

with your metabolism, and it’s going to start affecting your blood pressure, your glucose,

your lipids… something is out of balance in your body and it is affecting you, that’s when

obesity becomes a disease in my mind… but fat doesn’t, in my mind now, doesn’t equate

obesity. So, you just can be living in a fat body that is perfectly healthy, or as healthy as it

can be without actually being obese.

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Health, for Sofia, is much more dependent on biomedical health markers such as blood pressure,

glucose levels, et cetera, rather than excess fat on the body. She then discussed her perception of

her health:

So, like, I know… maybe my body does have an excessive amount of fatness in it. But I

also don’t smoke, I also don’t drink, I don’t do drugs, I exercise regularly, if not daily. I

incorporate nutritious food into my diet every day, I do meditation to help my mental

health and take medication for my mental health. So, I do a lot of things to reach the state

of balance and wellness for me, and even if my body hasn’t changed as a by-product of

all of that, I think me accepting that realizing, okay, it’s okay that my body doesn’t

change.

Sofia understands that her body is the size it is despite her doing all the “right” things. Sofia’s

quote here falls into the “good fatty” narrative (Gibson, 2022). The “good fatty” is a fat person

who morally aligns as a thin, healthy person: they willfully exercise, they eat nutritious foods,

and defy the negative stereotypes that are embedded within obesity discourses (Gibson, 2022).

Sofia’s understanding of her health, and of obesity more generally, means that she is a “good

fatty” who has taken control of her health. In further discussion with Sofia, she described how

her health behaviours have shifted over the years: she used to lift weights and run despite hating

it because it promised health in the form of weight loss. She added that after engaging with body

neutrality content, she understands that sometimes her body needs rest, and she has shifted to

more gentle exercise like yoga. Sofia was also clear in our conversation that she does what feels

good to her body, showing the contradictions of the “good fatty” narrative with body neutrality

content. Sofia has to juggle these contradictory discourses in her life, especially as a fat person.

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 Diet culture tells us that exercising daily and eating nutritiously will make you a) lose

weight and b) get healthier. But what happens when you do the latter but not the former?

Tomiyama and colleagues (2018) argue that weight stigma itself drives poor health related to

obesity, as it targets weight loss and thinness rather than health markers such as heart health or

mental well-being. Weight loss is celebrated over any other marker of health, and weight gain is

almost always negative, even when one’s health improves through weight gain (Harrison, 2019).

A paper by Golden and colleagues (2016) suggest that health should focus on lifestyle rather than

weight, yet weight continues to be used as a health marker. Kite and Kite’s book (2021) has a

chapter titled Reclaiming Health and Fitness for Yourself (p. 206), where they discuss the health

and fitness industry’s weight- and appearance-centered nature. They discuss and advocate against

before-and-after photos and health and fitness goals related to weight or appearance. Instead,

they suggest making goals function-oriented (Kite & Kite, 2021). In the book, they recommend

fitness goals such as being able to do a certain number of push-ups or running a certain distance.

These goals are still very embedded in “fitness” – we could extend these functional goals to

being able to go for a run with one’s partner or to a yoga class with a friend without having to

track the exercise for calories burned, or to earn a treat meal.

Participants conceptualized health as dependent on the person. They defined health as

moderation, balance, and doing what feels good for one’s body. Sofia and Ella discussed how

body neutrality has changed their ideas around health and to whom health belongs. They

discussed how health may look different for people with chronic illnesses and disabilities.

So, for me, I guess my definition of health is, I think a big part of it is feeling... what’s the

word? I don’t want to use the word safe, but like comfortable, maybe? To show up, like,

as yourself and express yourself. That’s part of it. I worked with the disability population,

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 and I always rejected the idea that you can’t be healthy and disabled at the same time.

(Ella)

I had this more, like, biomedical model definition of the absence of disease meant health.

And eventually, true learning and being exposed to that content [body acceptance

content], I realized that health is such a broad thing… and that I will say that, even for

me, I will define it as a state of balance and wellbeing for a person. So, whatever balance

and wellbeing might mean for me might be different for you, right? (Sofia)

Sofia went on to give an example:

So, if I am an individual with a chronic disease, maybe for me, feeling healthy is

changing from feeling excruciating pain to tolerable pain, like it might not be healthy for

anyone else but it’s like okay, I was able to walk today and move out of my bed because

it wasn’t painful.

What Sofia is describing here is body functionality. Aspects of body neutrality, such as focusing

on functionality and mindfulness, have already shown a positive effect on treating eating

disorders and increasing positive body image (Alleva & Tylka, 2021; Pellizzer & Wade, 2023).

Body functionality is a concept that focuses on what the body can do rather than what the body

looks like (Alleva et al., 2016). Kite and Kite’s book (2021) uses functionality as their central

tenet of body neutrality and healing our relationships with our bodies, particularly with exercise.

Focusing so heavily on functionality in their form of body neutrality may not be applicable to

everyone, especially those whose bodies do not allow them to have the functionality they wish

they could have.

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 Ekam described a feeling of frustration with her body in that it does not do the things she

wants it to do as a result of suffering from multiple chronic illnesses. Nevertheless, focusing on

functionality may feel like a frustrating space to be when your body is unable to do some things:

But I also have a complicated relationship with that [body functionality], because

sometimes I feel so let down by my body. So, it’s difficult for me to also focus on the

ability of my body, it’s just easier for me to like, not think about my body.

Body neutrality’s focus on mindfulness and non-attachment may help people with chronic

illnesses or disabilities (Rice et al., 2021). For Ekam, body neutrality may help her not attach

emotion or meaning to the limitations imposed on her due to her chronic illness. Ekam pinned

her frustration down to being critical about her social determinants of health:

These chronic, mostly inflammatory diseases that I have, that I live with, are just

outcomes of the society that I live in, of who I am in the society that I live in, where

geographically… I lived in, I was surrounded by a lot of pollution where I lived. And

like, my body is just responding to that. And like, it’s actually, it’s inflamed because it is,

it’s just chronically inflamed because of responding to those stressors and polluted

environments and things like that.

Ekam understands that her health status is not a result of personal choices but rather the

situations she was in throughout her life. Body neutrality may be helpful here in that it can

relieve pressures of individual choices, revealing racist and colonial systems of oppression which

affect health (Marya & Patel, 2021). Body neutrality here reads as a contradiction: Ekam knows

that her health status is not her fault but rather the fault of racism, classism, and colonialism.

How, then, does she negotiate that she cannot improve her health through individual behaviours

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taught to her through neoliberal discourses of health? In the next section, I discuss body

neutrality practices, some of which help participants like Ekam.

What does practicing body neutrality look like?

Clark (2023) describes body neutrality as “a practice, not a destination” (p. 18), and she

aptly explains how our bodies change over time; thus, we have to adjust to the new shapes our

bodies become. Body neutrality practices are helpful throughout our lifetimes, as our bodies

carry us through our experiences (Clark, 2023). I asked participants how they practiced body

acceptance/neutrality in their lives, and we were able to have a productive discussion of some

practices to encourage body neutrality and help heal our relationships with our bodies. Where

body positivity practices might involve mantras such as “I love my body” or “my body is

beautiful” (Raypole, 2021), body neutrality touts more tangible and practices that one can do in

their day to day lives, including but not limited to joyful movement, intuitive eating,

mindfulness, mindful rest, not weighing oneself, and not squeezing into clothes that do not fit

anymore. At the end of the last session, I asked my participants to share some tangible practices

they do in their day-to-day lives to practice body neutrality, and we ended up having a very

productive discussion surrounding these practices.

A resounding theme of body neutrality practices included listening to one’s body,

whether that be regarding appetite, diet, exercise, or rest:

I just listen to my body sometimes and what it wants. So, if I’m hungry, I’ll eat, if I’m

tired, I will have a nap. I try and listen to my body and what it needs and not really focus

on what other people sort of want me to do. (Clare)

More on a, like, daily basis, I think it’s just doing things that feel good for my body on

that day. I don’t think it’s realistic to say, like, eat whatever you want, like, you know,

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 don’t think about food at all, because I’m not going to eat like a ton of fried food and

cheese one day, because it’s going to make me feel terrible, you know? So, eating things

that are going to make me feel good, like, exercising in a way that’s going to make me

feel good and not like, destroy my joints, and tear my muscles apart. (Georgia)

I’m definitely starting to see food as like, how is it going to make me feel afterwards, you

know, like, instead of, instead of, you know what, what else would happen to me because

I eat this one thing. (Norah)

I allow myself to exercise because I enjoy movement, I enjoy putting my body to test, I

enjoy the experience, the feelings that it gives me. And I enjoy the fact that my body

allows me to do it. And, I also have to be mindful that to what point am I doing it,

because there’s still ideas that I might have on trying to shrink my body, and to shape it,

to create these, like, fit standards. (Sofia)

Clare, Georgia, Norah, and Sofia’s comments about listening to one’s body is a common practice

within body neutrality spaces (see: Harrison, 2019; Kinsey, 2022; Kite & Kite, 2021; Raypole,

2021). Georgia specifically discusses eating food that satisfies her and makes her feel good. This

concept is known as intuitive eating, created by dietitians Elyse Resch and Evelyn Tribole in

their book Intuitive Eating: A Revolutionary Program That Works (1995). Intuitive eating

includes eating to satisfaction, eating mindfully, rejecting diet culture, and listening to hunger

cues.

Ella was especially interested in applying this intuition to fitness:

It’s more about movement than, you know, like physical activity and fitness and, talking

about navigating movement spaces in larger bodies. I spent a lot of my life only thinking

of movement as, really, a way to avoid fatness. And so, trying to kind of counter that

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 narrative is most relevant to me. So yeah, that’s what the pages that I think I follow

mostly kind of deal with, is talking about fitness in a way that’s not encapsulated in

weight loss.

Exercising intuitively is tangential to eating intuitively and is touted by body neutrality advocates

such as Kite and Kite (2021) in their chapter about reclaiming health and fitness. Exercising

because it feels good is encouraged over exercising to change one’s body (Harrison, 2019).

Norah and Ella spoke about buying new clothes when their body changes:

Another thing that I’ve been trying to do more is like, when clothes don’t fit me, I just,

like put them in the goodwill bag, like I’m like, it’s okay, like, and I just go buy, if I can

just like, financially able to just try to buy, like, sizing up is not a catastrophic thing. So

really, I think the way I practice it is a couple really tangible things, but it’s really just

changing the way that I view food and my body. (Ella)

I was also gonna bring up the clothes thing. If something doesn’t fit me and it fit me

before, then I’m not going to hold out hope that I’m going to lose the weight so that I can

fit into this one day, I’m just gonna go get a bigger pair of pants… and so when I was

able to buy more clothes, that’s when I started feeling better, because I was buying

clothes that actually fit me. (Norah)

Buying new clothes for our changing bodies may not be tangible in every circumstance, as one

needs disposable income to afford new clothes. However, buying new clothes in a bigger size

actively works against the shame usually attached to having to size up. Kinsey (2022) offers the

practice of a closet clean-out to rid your home of anything that triggers feelings of needing to be

smaller. Online body neutrality content spreads messaging that size is just a number and also

shows the disparity in sizing in women’s clothing (Yates, 2020). Bishop and colleagues (2018)

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argued that women’s clothing sizes are “‘floating signifiers’ given their lack of consistency

within and across brands and the extent to which women engage in identity work and body work

in relation to them” (p. 180). Removing the significance of sizes and trying to fit into the

smallest size shows participants’ resistance to diet culture.

Ekam, and Clare discussed being mindful of their emotions about their bodies:

Instead of, like, wanting to give messages to parts of my body, whether they’re positive

or negative, I would just rather not view or perceive my body in that way. (Ekam)

I also really enjoy like meditation and stuff like that. And just mindfulness, like, I practice

mindfulness some days as well… it really allows me to just focus on my body how it is in

the moment, like, what it is and what I’m feeling in the moment. And I really enjoy that.

And that’s also really helpful. (Clare)

Mindfulness can be defined as the ability to be present with oneself without judgment of the

ongoing situation (Clark, 2023). Mindfulness is a part of Pellizzer and Wade’s (2023) definition

of body neutrality, where “our feelings about our body change constantly so are best mindfully

observed without judgment” (p. 439). Clark (2023) discusses mindfulness as a helpful practice in

not giving credence to feelings about one’s body that are connected to larger, more harmful

discourses such as weight stigma or fatphobia. Kinsey (2022) also discusses mindfulness as a

self-care practice, primarily through mindful eating. A meta-analysis by Sala and colleagues

(2020) found that practicing mindfulness can improve feelings of body dissatisfaction, improve

binge eating outcomes, and can help people act nonjudgmental towards their body. Being

mindful can extend to diet and exercise practices, allowing participants to resist diet culture

messaging and help them heal from diet culture.

Georgia discussed setting boundaries with people’s comments or dieting practices:

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 So, one thing that I do, I think, is setting boundaries. Like, with other people and their

comments, although I don’t do it well, like, if someone says something, like, self-

deprecating about their bodies, I’m not going to say, hey, would you mind not like

speaking about your body that way, because it’s actually very triggering for me. I’m

mentally going to block it out and maybe interact with that person a bit less. I think that

would only happen if it was like a consistent, like, thing with that person. And I have had

people in my life that were very negative towards their own bodies, or like, went on, like,

very extreme diets. And I did like, for myself, have to cut that out a bit.

Setting boundaries is another common practice in body neutrality spaces. Harrison (2019)

discusses setting boundaries to resist diet culture, which can include telling family members not

to discuss your body, weight, or appearance, or to not talk about dieting. Setting boundaries may

also look like unfollowing diet or wellness influencers on social media or standing up to weight

stigma. Kinsey (2022) also discusses setting boundaries by refusing to participate in diet culture

to protect oneself. Another boundary that Ella brought up, which body neutrality touts, is that of

not weighing oneself and refusing to be weighed at the doctor’s office:

A tangible thing I do, is I don’t weigh myself ever and if I go to the doctor, some people

actually request not to get weighed… so that’s something because that was huge for me,

like, I used to be like a multiple times a day weigh-er, which, with my education, I know

makes absolutely no sense because your body weight fluctuates so much every day. But

that’s something for me that I don’t do. I don’t do anything, like, weight related. (Ella)

Weight has been medicalized through the implementation of the BMI despite it not being a

reliable health marker (Gordon, 2020a; Kite & Kite, 2019; Strings, 2019). Body neutrality and

fat acceptance advocate for avoiding the scale as it holds so little credence when discussing one’s

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health (Harrison, 2019; Kite & Kite, 2019). This message has been circulating on popular media

as well (see: Lopez, 2022; Wheatman Hill, 2021; Wong, 2022). Winter and colleagues (2023)

investigated women’s refusals to be weighed at the doctor’s office and found that being weighed

is connected to negative effects on self-esteem and mental health. By setting boundaries such as

who we surround ourselves with (online and in real life), what conversations we choose to have,

and how we define our health, we can work towards a more body neutral world.

The practices shared with my participants are all common in body neutrality spaces

which focus on self-help or healing body image issues (Clark, 2023; Harrison, 2019; Haupt,

2022; Kite & Kite, 2019; Kneeland, 2023; Raypole, 2021). As seen above, practices include

eating intuitively, exercising in a way that feels good, mindfulness, not weighing oneself, buying

clothes that fit when other clothes stop fitting, and creating boundaries with friends and family

regarding language around dieting. These are all very individual practices; some create resistance

within healthist discourses, and others do not. Ekam, however, did state that body

positivity/neutrality to her means advocacy for others about the oppressive power structures

embedded within healthism and diet culture. Ekam’s statement is essential to note and critical to

act upon.

Does body neutrality go beyond the self?

My participants’ experiences with body neutrality practices reinforce previous findings

from psychological studies that have observed positive results in treating poor body image,

depression, and eating disorders through adopting a body-neutral approach (Seekis & Lawrence,

2023; Smith et al., 2023). Without taking away from the good that can come of these practices,

these improvements are on an individual scale and do not create structural changes for fat people

or change anti-fat bias more broadly. Thus, the following section offers my critique of body

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neutrality. I am curious as to how body neutrality fits into neoliberal self-improvement

discourses (Penny, 2015) and what scholars have called embodied neoliberalism (Cairns &

Johnston, 2015; Guthman & Dupuis, 2006). When searching for information about body

neutrality, I came across many self-help books, such as the books mentioned at the beginning of

this chapter (Clark, 2019; Harrison, 2019; Kinsey, 2022; Kite & Kite, 2021; Kneeland, 2023;

Myers, 2023; Poirier, 2019). When reading these books, I noticed that they all relied on practices

centring the individual, even though they no longer tend to center the body corporeally. Even the

book by Kinsey (2022), which acknowledges systemic issues, focuses on healing the self through

individual self-care and self-love practices. For example, her book has many sections for

“journaling breaks” to engage with the content.

Penny (2015) discusses how the wellness and diet industries thrive in a neoliberal

landscape of self-improvement and how this self-obsession distracts from larger, scarier realities,

like climate change and the failing economy. Body neutrality goes a step further than body

positivity in the self-help trope in that it removes the focus on the body, but does it usurp the role

of the individual and individualism? Yes and no. On the one hand, body neutrality can be (and

arguably already has been) taken up by the self-care industry to further reify the focus on the

individual. In a recent book by Spurgas and Meleo-Erwin (2023), Decolonize Self-Care, the

authors discuss these issues:

… today’s versions of self-care… further entrench existing and unequal structures of

power by emphasizing individualist solutions to what are ultimately systemic problems.

(p. 17)

Wiens and MacDonald (2021) are equally critical of self-care, arguing that it has been co-opted

from Black and Brown women to serve a white postfeminist agenda. Aubrey Gordon, a fat

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activist, author of two books, and host of the podcast Maintenance Phase, argues that body

neutrality is merely a practice to improve our body image rather than to oppose body-based

oppression: “body image refers to how each of us individually feel about our own bodies. Body-

based oppression is about how the world around us treats our bodies.” (Gordon, 2020b, para. 6).

Gordon explains that body neutrality may allow a fat person to feel better about their bodies, but

it does not affect the way that the world will treat them. Body neutrality as a personal practice is

not to be dismissed – and Gordon does not want it to be – but should be considered one part of a

larger fight against the oppressive systems of fatphobia and anti-fat bias more broadly. For

instance, Ella’s refusal to be weighed at the doctor’s office may be an action that forces doctors

to think through what health markers other than BMI can be used to assess a patient’s health.

While aspects of body neutrality may be co-opted by corporations to sell self-help tropes,

on the other hand, body neutrality can be used as a stepping-stone and a potential connection

point for social movements. Because of body neutrality’s connections to fat acceptance and

liberation content, dis/ability content, and its centring of racialized people and queer people, it

has the potential to question and decenter neoliberal and healthist discourses, which are rooted in

anti-Black and racist ideologies (Kinsey, 2022; Strings, 2019). An article by Mayorga and

colleagues (2019) calls for decolonizing higher education, stating, “in order to build a future

outside of this reality, we must first survive it” (p. 98). This quote encompasses the complicated

and contradictory relationship that marginalized groups have with self-care: self-care will not

improve structural and systemic issues that affect their health, but in an attempt to survive in the

current state of the world, self-care such as rest, food, regular exercise, and other practices are

needed (Spurgas & Meleo-Erwin, 2023). The following quote encompasses Gordon’s argument

that body neutrality may help with the personal needs of negotiating healthist discourses.

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However, it is not the final form of the body acceptance movement. Ekam stated that she

envisioned body neutrality as a stepping stone to something bigger:

I feel like we’re in an in-between stage, where so much violence and harm has been

inflicted on people’s bodies, specifically [cis] women and trans women’s bodies, that like,

we’re at the stage where we kind of have to adopt this neutrality for us to get to the other

side where we can then have relationships with our bodies that we want to have… like it

doesn’t feel like this is going to be a forever for me, but it’s what I need to heal and what

we all need maybe to heal.

Despite the books I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter being “self-help” books,

some of them (particularly Anti-Diet by Harrison and Decolonizing Wellness by Kinsey) do an

excellent job of unpacking the harmful discourses surrounding diet culture, the diet industry, and

healthism. As discussed in Chapter 4, body positivity fails to unpack why thinness is the ideal

body. Body neutrality, however, emphasizes that healthism and diet culture have racist roots and

further perpetuate oppression (Harrison, 2019; Kinsey, 2021; Kite & Kite, 2021; Strings, 2019).

Sofia, who is deeply involved in the body neutrality community, expressed that body neutrality is

much more about destigmatization. Body neutrality content tends to cross over into other

categories of content, such as anti-colorism content, body hair acceptance, gender neutrality

content, and fat liberation content. Body neutrality has the potential to stretch to these other

forms of content to begin to resist dominant healthist discourses and other dominant discourses,

such as the whiteness of beauty standards.

When discussing the type of content participants engaged with, multiple participants

discussed engaging with content which falls under the umbrella of body neutrality but focuses

more on combatting beauty standards, especially questions discourses surrounding race and

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colonialism. For instance, Ekam engages with anti-colorism content, as well as content which

normalizes body hair, especially for South Asian women. Ekam’s definition of health includes

physical, mental, spiritual, intellectual, and financial well-being, which all work together to

provide her with comfort. Ekam also discussed the importance of her religion in accepting her

body:

I grew up in a spiritual religious household appreciating what God gave me. And I’ve

really been blessed to be on this earth with the family that I have with the culture and

community that I have, and to just be able to reckon with some, you know, trauma that

we might hold intergenerationally and in my current lifetime, and like, just be okay with

it, and just, you know, like, really exist and thank my body for what it does for me, and

what I can do with it.

Although no other participants discussed religion, I want to emphasize the importance of religion

to Ekam. Healthism and beauty standards are deeply engrained in racism and colonialism,

meaning that if we are to use body neutrality as a movement to oppose these discourses, we have

to enable spaces where people can connect with more than just their bodies but also their cultures

and spiritualities.

Gordon calls for a movement of body justice in her book What We Don’t Talk About

When We Talk About Fat (2020a). For Gordon, body justice is a movement which includes full

autonomy over our bodies and the destruction of oppressive power structures:

… the movement for body justice understands that each system of oppression needs to be

understood on its own terms, and as part of an interdependent web of oppressions that

impacts all of us. This movement knows that we cannot attain and preserve body

sovereignty by broad platitudes and whitewashing the differences between our

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 experiences. Instead, it is honest about power and privilege, and it is thoughtful and

diligent in dismantling the systems of oppression that keep our bodies out of our own

control. It is a hub of community-led movements, not a substitute for them, and it does

diligent work to provide the most effective, desired, and meaningful support it can to

marginalized communities. Its organizing is tender and relational, making space for

holding the traumas caused by our oppression, for building a broad and brave vision for a

more liberated world, and for driving toward it with anger and joy. (p. 156)

To get there, we need movements like body neutrality to begin to undo and unlearn healthist

discourses. We also may have needed body positivity as a stepping stone to get to body

neutrality. Through digital and physical resistance, I believe we can keep imagining the world

that Gordon wishes for here.

How can we begin to work towards a body neutral world? How can we resist dominant

healthist discourses? While looking for forms of collective action surrounding body positivity

and neutrality, I had a difficult time finding physical spaces which are not based in online spaces

and social media. Additionally, the physical spaces I did find are steeped in capitalism and are

highly commodified. For example, Vancouver has a fitness studio called cmmn grnd, Toronto has

a group called Body Positive Fitness, and Nike and Dove have collaborated to create Body

Confident Sport, which all try to shift popular notions around exercise and bodies. These

programs are examples of individual solutions to shifting our perspectives to body neutrality in

exercise spaces.

A group out of Toronto called Body Confidence Canada are an organization dedicated to

“uplifting bodies and amplifying voices” (Body Confidence Canada, n. d.). The organization

advocates for “equitable and inclusive images, messages, practices and policies supporting body

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diversity” (Body Confidence Canada, n. d.). They organize events such as Curvy Catwalk, a

fashion show which raises money for the National Eating Disorder Information Centre, and the

Bite Me! Film Festival which emphasizes and represents different identities of girls and women.

While these are initiatives more geared towards individual solutions, they also work towards

making structural change. They spearheaded a movement called #sizeismsucks which aims to

add size and appearance as protected under the Human Rights Codes across Canada and in the

Canadian Human Rights Act. #sizeismsucks is Canada-wide, and petitions started ten years ago.

The bill was last debated in 2018 and there have not been updates since. Additionally, the

Ontario Dietitians in Public Health have a group called Ontarians Against Weight Discrimination

(Ontario Dieticians in Public Health, n. d.). They have a petition which is calling for members of

the provincial government of Ontario to introduce a bill to make body size and appearance to be

a protected ground in the Ontario Human Rights Code. This petition is newer, and was posted in

November of 2023. Actions like these are fighting body-based oppression at a structural level.

Conclusion

Body neutrality is a concept that has helped me in my personal journey with my body,

and so I was very keen to discuss it with my participants. Given the infancy of this concept,

engaging with literature meant looking for aspects of the movement, such as body functionality

and mindfulness and how those can positively affect our relationships with our bodies. Body

neutrality is a form of radical body positivity (Darwin & Miller, 2023) which seeks to undo some

of the harmful discourses that body positivity perpetuates, namely, the focus on the body and

beauty as important aspects of being a woman. Health was a concept we discussed in the

framework of body neutrality, and we discussed how health means something much different

than what healthism would lead us to believe. Body neutrality helped participants frame health as

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a feeling, a balance, and not necessarily the absence of disease; rather, being okay with the body

in whatever form it is at the moment.

Body neutrality does have its critiques, particularly from fat activists like Aubrey Gordon,

who claim that body neutrality’s individual focus perpetuates individual solutions to structural

problems (Gordon, 2020b). Through engaging with Gordon’s arguments, I could frame my

thoughts on body neutrality: that it perpetuates self-care and self-help that is popular in

neoliberal thought. While body neutrality does better than body positivity by way of critiquing

colonial and racist underpinnings of healthist beliefs surrounding fatness, it is limited by not

calling for larger structural change towards how fat people are treated in our society which

privileges thinness. I recognize that this chapter frames body neutrality in a contradictory way;

that it is an alternative to body positivity and also falls into the same tropes. Through exploring

body neutrality with both my participants and the literature, I juggled the nuances of this. I argue

that body neutrality has the danger of being co-opted by corporations, but also that if used

correctly, can teach us about structural discourses. It can also eventually take the focus off of

bodily appearances altogether: true body neutrality would mean that we do not think about our

appearances at all.

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 Chapter 6

Conclusion

“The coalition emerges out of your recognition that it’s fucked up for you, in the same way that

we’ve already recognized that it’s fucked up for us. I don’t need your help. I just need you to

recognize that this shit is killing you, too, however much more softly, you stupid motherfucker,

you know?” (Fred Moten, as cited in Marya & Patel, 2021, p. 330)

In this thesis, I have explored the effects of the body positivity movement qualitatively. I

have sought to understand, learn, and engage with my participants to have somewhat structured

conversations about our relationships with our bodies and the ways that counterdiscourses to diet

culture such as body positivity and body neutrality have manifested in our lives. Through writing

this thesis, I have engaged with literature that has broadened my knowledge about how race and

fatness have become maligned (Sanders, 2019; Strings, 2019). Engaging with this literature has

given new meaning for me to body acceptance movements and has helped me question and

reflect on my own whiteness and thinness. Reflecting on my experiences with an eating disorder,

disordered eating habits, and poor body image, I realize that the solutions to the individual

problems that I sought were individual in nature as well. The mainstream body positivity

movement is all about loving oneself, but it does nothing to teach one how to love others, too.

Nowhere does it question why we do not love ourselves, or why we have engrained beliefs about

what fatness means.

As Moten states in the quote above, marginalized people know that they are

marginalized. Fat activist groups have been resisting diet culture for decades, yet thin people

continue to live within diet culture and frame it as “health.” Yet, we see that diet culture is

harmful to everyone. The cooptation of the body positivity movement by white, thin women

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proves that healthist discourses are harmful to everyone. However, thin white people continue to

live within their own harms, while other groups have always known this harm. The sooner that

we centre the most vulnerable and work towards changing larger systems, the better it will be for

everyone.

Where neoliberalism forces us to think about ourselves, only ourselves, all of the time, I

wonder what a world would look like if our body shape or size truly did not matter. I turn again

to Aubrey Gordon who imagines a world for body justice which is led by questioning power,

privilege, and systems of oppression (2020a). This means paying attention to the structural ways

in which fat people, and further, racialized fat people, are treated. The moralization and

racialization of fatness is deeper than what health means, or how someone feels about their body.

It is rooted in racism and white supremacy. My participant, Ekam, stated:

I’ve like learned to not view these discourses, like diet, exercise, and health discourses, as

so innocent, but actually, like, really targeted for mass manipulation of people and like, a

manipulation of their bodies and surveilling people’s bodies.

Where these discourses may seem on the surface like a way to make people healthier, they are in

fact a way to control people through self-discipline and biopower (Foucault, 1977; 1978). As

Sanders (2019) states, anti-fatness perpetuates racism, and further, the obesity discourse

perpetuates structural racism in the form of healthcare. Sanders (201) argues that “anti-racist

anti-obesity discourses must expose obesity as an embodiment of structural racism and promote

structural transformation” (p. 287). Body justice, as coined by Gordon (2020a), is more than

justice for all body sizes. It is about justice for people based on how their bodies are perceived in

the world. Throughout this thesis, I have explored people’s experiences based on their body size,

but also based on their race and gender. Fat activism should include overthrowing the current

106
systems which only continue to further marginalize people who do not fit the norm. This

includes recognizing how anti-fat bias is deeply embedded in the colonial and racist labeling of

bodies. As I explored in Chapter 2, Strings (2019) shows that the assumptions of a few white

men have had far-reaching implications for how we categorize bodies both medically and

societally. Further, Sanders (2019) takes a more radical argument in stating that not only is anti-

fat bias embedded in racism, but the obesity epidemic is a continuation of a racial project which

controls and maintains power over racialized bodies.

My thesis was guided by three research questions. My first question asks how individuals

take up body positivity content and how their identities affect their navigation of body positivity

content. In Chapter 4, I analyzed our conversations around body positivity. I referred to Gill’s

(2007) notion of postfeminist sensibilities as a way to explain the contradictions which arise in

body positivity, like the emphasis on the body and the commodification of the movement. In

response to how individuals take up body positivity content, I argue that the body positivity

movement’s vastness means that individuals engage with parts of the movement which they

align with. For white, thin participants like Georgia, Clare, and Ella, they engaged with body

positivity as a way to feel better about their bodies, as they saw themselves in mainstream body

positivity (Darwin & Miller, 2021). For racialized participants, the mainstream body positivity

movement is a project of whiteness, leading to its seamless integration into our culture. This

meant that participants like Ekam and Sofia engaged more with other forms of body acceptance

content which specifically resists colonial and racist beauty standards. Alternatively, in Chapter

5, I explored conversations around body neutrality, which can be defined as a form of radical

body positivity (Darwin & Miller, 2021).

107
 My second question asked how consumption of and interaction with body positivity

content shaped individuals’ constructions of health, which was discussed in Chapter 5.

Participants discussed how health once meant being thin, no matter the cost. However, through

engaging with body positivity and neutrality content, they began to question the fact that fat

people cannot be healthy. Body size and health for participants no longer aligns. Six of seven

participants are thin or straight-sized, while one participant, Sofia, is fat. The straight-sized

participants stated that their health was never questioned, but it was more of an internal pressure

to lose weight to feel healthy. Sofia claimed that her health as a fat person has always been

questioned, despite being physically active her whole life and eating “healthy.” Participants also

discussed that their understanding of health now does not mean that they are not sick, rather that

they feel okay in their bodies. Participants like Ekam, Sofia, and Ella commented on the fact that

chronically ill or disabled people can be healthy, too, which reframes the way that we understand

health contemporarily.

Third, I wanted to explore if body positivity provides a counternarrative to diet culture.

Throughout this thesis, and particularly in my analysis, I argue that it does. Mainstream body

positivity, as discussed in Chapter 4, does challenge forms of diet culture which emphasize

thinness as healthiness and shame fat bodies through moralizing thinness. It challenges the idea

that only thin women can wear certain clothes, as seen with content such as plus-sized try-on

hauls. It also challenges the idea that perfect femininity is achievable, specifically through

challenging small imperfections such as cellulite, stretch marks, and acne scars. However, this

assumes that women are all white and middle-class, effectively excluding racialized and poor

women. Where mainstream body positivity does not challenge diet culture, however, is in its

failure to question why we hate fatness and maintain the thin body as the ideal. Mainstream body

108
positivity also promises that solutions to poor body image can be purchased, which is a main

feature of diet culture. Radical body positivity in the form of body neutrality (Darwin & Miller,

2021) can effectively create a productive counternarrative to diet culture. Body neutrality

removes the focus on the body and questions the focus on beauty as a defining aspect of

womanhood. Participants discussed how body neutrality helped heal their relationships with their

bodies particularly through being mindful of hunger, fatigue, and energy. Body neutrality may

fail to create a productive counternarrative, however, as it tends to focus on self-care practices.

Overall, a counternarrative to diet culture would include questioning oppressive systems of

sizeism and racism to change the way that we engage with healthism and diet culture more

broadly.

In completing this thesis, I set out with two goals. First, to use this project for social

change. I used focus groups and journaling to help provide participants with a space to discuss

these topics in a somewhat structured way. To gather with others in a space to discuss the same

topic you are interested in is somehow healing in itself – at least, it was for me. Topics like

fatness, bodies, diet culture, body image, and disordered eating are personal and are not generally

topics we discuss with others freely. To provide a space where people could speak about these

things while knowing that others are also interested or may share their experiences was important

to me and is something I hope to be able to foster in the future with friends. Another way that I

hoped that this project would foster social change by having participants feel like they could

share these conversations with friends and family, further spreading the counternarratives that

body positivity teaches. Second, I wanted to ensure that in writing my thesis, I represented my

participants as holistically as possible, given the limits of a written thesis. In paying attention to

identities such as race, ethnicity, gender, class, and religion, I could express how each person’s

109
experiences with diet culture, body positivity, and body neutrality differed based on their lived

experiences.

With any research comes limitations. Given the nature of qualitative research and the fact

that I am the sole researcher, my project had a very small sample size, meaning that the findings

may not be widely generalizable. Additionally, the limitations of the length of a Master’s thesis, I

believe there could have been more explorations into this topic, but I did not have the space to do

so. I also have a limited outreach in terms of gathering participants, meaning that my participants

were more likely to have reflected my positionality as educated and middle-class. While I did

have some lower income participants, they were all in post-secondary education. Five of seven

participants were in graduate studies or already had a graduate degree. This means they may

better understand critical thinking, pushing them to engage more with critical content. In moving

forward after completing this project, I intend to continue to engage with body neutrality and fat

activist content and show up for fat activism and body justice where I am asked. I can also

ensure that I am continuing to talk to friends, family, and even strangers about these topics, and

recommend books and other forms of knowledge. I also intend to publish findings of this thesis

in relevant journals, and potentially translate these ideas in popular media as well. In sharing this

thesis with my participants, I also hope to invite them into more conversation around these

topics.

Completing this thesis was a large accomplishment on my part, for more reasons than just

that I wrote a very long paper. From the proposal, to ethics, to recruitment, data collection, and

beyond, I have been exposed to so many opportunities to (un)learn. Universities are sites of

knowledge production, and the knowledge produced by universities and academics is prioritized

in our society. I have produced knowledge here with this thesis, and I also produced knowledge

110
through organizing and running focus groups, where due to my use of RDA, we were able to

(re)produce and share our own definitions, thoughts, perspectives on the topic of body positivity

and body neutrality. Writing a thesis can be a lonely process, but I felt a sense of solidarity and

community with my participants due to the conversations we had in our focus groups. I also felt

a sense of responsibility to share their perspectives on these topics, which motivated me to

continue to write. So many of my participants shared outlooks that I would never be exposed to,

due to race or ethnicity, and allowed me to understand body justice from a much broader

perspective.

In terms of future directions for research of this kind, I would like to see how body

neutrality specifically affects gender diverse people – particularly people of non-binary genders.

Gender diversity and fatness has been explored (see: Grimm et al., 2021) but I would be

interested to see if body neutrality is helpful to gender diverse people in understanding their

bodies more within the context of the white supremacist cisheteropatriarchy. Further, I want to

see body neutrality used as an intervention for eating disorders, particularly for queer and

racialized people, as it may help them to understand the larger power structures which have led

them to their eating disorders. Another area of research that may help create structural changes

would be to teach accurate histories of fatness, race, and health. Whether it be in nursing schools,

medical schools, kinesiology programs, or even in high school biology, teaching these concepts

to the broader public will right some wrong history while potentially improving health outcomes,

specifically for fat racialized people. These are large goals with hefty price tags, but they feel

doable if we begin to pay attention to social determinants of health in a serious way.

By way of conclusion, I would like to state my main arguments regarding body positivity

and body neutrality. First, that mainstream body positivity is a postfeminist culture which makes

111
small and palatable changes to the ways we think about bodies, body size, beauty standards, and

health. Body positivity does nothing by way of critiquing larger discourses, and particularly fails

to recognize the ways in which fatness has been racialized and the implications that has on how

racialized people experience the world. Second, that body neutrality has potential to lead to

larger social movements through teaching how larger discourses and structures affect the way

that we think about our bodies. However, body neutrality also has the potential to fall into tropes

of self-care and self-help, which perpetuate neoliberal ideologies of individualism and self-

improvement. To make steps towards body justice, to reference Gordon (2020a), we must

organize, continue to resist healthism and diet culture in our own lives, and discuss these

concepts with our friends. We must push for health to be measured by legitimate health markers,

rather than by weight and BMI. We must set boundaries around what kinds of conversations we

will have about our bodies and others’ bodies, and commit to thinking of other people, people

who are most vulnerable to body-based oppression. I hope my project has made a small

difference in making connections among these concepts, and that it will make others make these

connections as well.

112
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 Appendix A: Focus Group Questions

First Session: Learning About Body Positivity

1. Where did you first learn about/hear the term “body positivity?”

a. How long have you been engaging with body positive content on Instagram?

2. What was it about body positive community that pulled you in?

a. Is there a particular individual/account that you like more than others?

b. What is it about specific individuals that makes you follow them/engage with

their content?

3. Do you have your own definition of body positivity?

a. Where did your definition come from?

b. Has it changed over time?

4. Have you come across the term body neutrality?

a. What does that term mean to you?

Second Session: Identity

1. How do you feel your identity/identities have affected the ways in which you consume

body positivity?

a. Do you feel as though there are people that you relate to in the content that you

consume?

b. Do you seek out content creators that look like you?

2. How has/have your identity/identities affected how you navigate through diet culture?

3. Is body positivity something that you practice?

a. What does that look like for you?

Third Session: Health and Diet Culture

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1. Has consuming and/or engaging with body positivity content changed the way that you

view your body?

a. Do you think differently about dieting, exercise, and/or health?

b. Where do you see diet culture in relation to body positivity?

2. Does body positivity create a counternarrative?

a. Do you feel that you can identify diet culture more easily?

3. How has body positivity affected your definition or understanding of health?

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 Appendix B: Journaling Follow-Up Questions

Post-First Session

1. What are your thoughts on the body positivity movement on Instagram?

2. How do you define “body positivity?”

a. Is it different to body neutrality or body acceptance?

3. How does the body positivity community make you feel?

a. How have your thoughts and opinions changed over time since you began

engaging with content on Instagram?

Post Second Session

1. How have your personal identities affected the way you navigate the world of diet

culture?

2. Is body positivity something you practice?

a. If so, how? If not, why not? Do you want to?

3. Has engaging with body positivity content changed your relationship with your body?

Post Third Session

1. What does diet culture mean to you?

a. How has it affected you?

2. Do you feel that engaging in body positivity content has created a counternarrative to diet

culture?

135
Appendix C: GREB approval

136
137
 Appendix D: Recruitment poster

CALL FOR
PARTICIPANTS
DO YOU FOLLOW BODY
ACCPTANCE/POSITIVITY
INFLUENCERS ON INSTAGRAM?
IF YOU:
-ARE 18 YEARS OLD OR OLDER
-IDENTIFY AS A WOMAN, TRANS, NON-
BINARY, OR GENDER-NONCONFORMING
-FOLLOW AT LEAST 3 BODY
POSITIVITY/ACCEPTANCE CONTENT
CREATORS ON INSTAGRAM
YOU CAN CONTRIBUTE TO
RESEARCH ON BODY
BIPOC AND LGBTQI2S+
POSITIVITY AND DIET
ARE ENCOURAGED
CULTURE!
TO PARTICIPATE

Email [Link]@[Link] for

more info!

138
 Appendix E: Letter of information and consent

Study Title: Redefining Health on Instagram: Exploring the Effects of the Body Acceptance Movement

Name of Principal Inves9gator: Olivia Scully, School of Kinesiology and Health Studies, Queen’s
University
Name of Supervisor: Dr. Courtney Szto
Supervisor Email: [Link]@[Link]

What is this project about?

My project is focused on exploring individuals’ experiences with the body acceptance movement on
Instagram and its influence on their understandings of health and its relationship with their bodies. I am
inviting people who identify as woman, femme, trans, non-binary, and gender non-conforming who
follow at least three body positivity influencers on Instagram to participate in my project.

What is involved?
The study will be three months long, involving participation in 3 focus groups as well as reflective
journaling throughout. The focus groups be 60-90 minutes long with up to 3 other participants over a
Zoom meeting and will be facilitated by me. The recurring meetings will be with the same participants
every time. Reflective journaling requires no minimum amount of writing. I will provide question
prompts to help you with your journaling. You may journal through any format you choose, whether
through writing, video, audio recording, or another creative format of your choosing. Your journals will
be confidential with only myself and my supervisor having access to them.

Your participation in this study is completely voluntary. You can decline to participate in the research
without penalty. You may decline to answer any question during the focus groups. You may withdraw at
any time during the study or up to one month after the last focus group by contacting me (Olivia Scully,
[Link]@[Link], 403-975-8954) or my supervisor (Courtney Szto, [Link]@[Link]).

Withdrawal from the study has no penalty. If you do choose to withdraw, your journal entries will be
destroyed. Due to the conversational nature of focus groups, data from focus groups may not be
withdrawn if it compromises information provided by other participants.

What are the benefits?

There are no direct benefits to you as a participant. Your participation will help to create new knowledge
in the fields of gender studies, fat studies, health studies, and cultural studies.

What are the risks?

As this study will involve the discussion of personal experiences regarding diet culture, there is a chance
that interviews may lead to psychological or emotional distress related to disordered eating and eating
disorders. If you experience distress during or after the focus groups, please reach out to one of the
following resources: National Eating Disorder Information Centre at 1-866-633-4220 (Toll-free) or 416-
340-4156, or Wellness Together Canada at 1-866-585-0445. Participation is voluntary and you can
decline to participate in the research or any aspect of the research at any time without penalty.

Due to the nature of focus groups, there is a risk of a breach of confidentiality by other participants. I,
the researcher, can assure their own confidentiality of information, but I cannot guarantee that privacy
139
will be maintained by the other participants.

How will your confidentiality be protected?

Your confidentiality will be protected to the extent permitted by applicable laws. I will do this by
replacing your name with a pseudonym in all publications and a study ID number in all study records.
Once your personal information is anonymized, all your personal information will be destroyed. All
anonymized study data will be stored on my Queen’s University OneDrive account. Focus groups will be
audio and/or video recorded using the Zoom recording function. If you choose not to have your focus
group participation video recorded, you can turn off the camera in the Zoom meeting. Audio recording is
mandatory for participation. The recorded files will immediately be transferred to the OneDrive and
deleted from my personal computer following the focus groups. Focus group recordings will be removed
from the OneDrive once they have been transcribed. You will receive a copy of your transcribed focus
group for review, which will be shared via email using a secure OneDrive link. Anonymized data will be
stored in a secure folder on OneDrive for a minimum of 5 years. My supervisor, Courtney Szto, will be
responsible for the study data should I no longer be affiliated with Queen’s during the 5-year period,
after which study data will be permanently erased.

Access to non-anonymized study data is limited to the Principal Investigator. The Queen's General
Research Ethics Board (GREB) may request access to study data to ensure that the researcher(s) have or
are meeting their ethical obligations in conducting this research. GREB is bound by confidentiality and
will not disclose any personal information.

Funding and conflicts of interest

This research is funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. There are no conflicts of
interest to declare.

What will be done with the data?

I plan to publish the results of this study in academic journals and present them at conferences. The
results of this study will also be a part of my thesis. I will include quotes but will not use any personally
identifying information from the interviews when presenting my findings. I will never include any real
names with quotes. I will do my best to make sure quotes do not identify participants. During the
interview, please let me know if you say anything you do not want me to quote.

Concerns?
If you have any ethics concerns, please contact the General Research Ethics Board (GREB) at 1-844-535-
2988 (Toll free in North America) or [Link]@[Link]. Use 1-613-533-2988 if outside North
America. Please note that GREB communicates in English only.

This study has been reviewed for ethical compliance by the Queen’s University General Research Ethics
Board.

If you have any questions about the research, please contact me at [Link]@[Link], or my
supervisor, Courtney Szto, at [Link]@[Link].

This Letter of Information and Consent Form provides you with the details to help you make an
informed choice. All your questions should be answered to your satisfaction before you decide whether
or not to participate in this research study.

140
You have not waived any legal rights by consenting to participate in this study.

Participation in this study is voluntary and requires your active, full consent.

You will need to provide verbal consent to the following before participation:

I have read the informaion presented in the lejer of informaion about the study being conducted by
Olivia Scully in the School of Kinesiology and Health Studies at Queen’s University. I have been given the
opportunity to ask any quesions related to this study.

Yes No

I understand that I am not obliged to answer any quesions that I find objecionable or which make me
feel uncomfortable.

Yes No

I understand that I am able to withdraw from the study during or up to 30 days aker the last focus group.

Yes No

I agree to have my focus group session video recorded.

Yes No

I agree to have my journal entries transcribed, should this be transcribed if necessary (i.e. audio/video
recording).

Yes No

I agree to the use of anonymous quotaions in any publicaion that comes out of this research.

Yes No

With full knowledge of the above, I agree, of my own free will, to paricipate in this study.

Yes No

141