Tag body positivity:

The Health of Others, or: How to Be a “Good Fatty”

Posted on by Evangelia Kindinger

In the October 2018 issue of UK’s Cosmopolitan, “one of the busiest working models today,” Tess Holliday, was featured on the cover (Farrah Storr). The image of Holliday caused quite a stir, because this “Cosmo girl,” an iconic figure who has since the 1960s defined ideals of female beauty and attractiveness, is a white, fat woman who is shown blowing a kiss at her readers while wearing a green bathing suit. The image displays her full body, accompanied by the headline: “A Supermodel Roars: Tess Holliday Wants Her Haters to Kiss Her Ass.” Inside the magazine, writer Farrah Storr teases the article by listing that Holliday “weighs 300lbs.,” “grew up in a trailer in Mississippi,” has “suffered abuse,” and “cried just minutes” before the…

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The Subversive Potential of Fat in Sarai Walker’s Dietland

Posted on by Joyce Huff

In the era of the “obesity epidemic,” fat has become a politically charged topic. It thus often provokes an overtly politicized response from writers of fiction. One such novelist is Sarai Walker, whose 2015 book Dietland links cultural attitudes toward women’s eating and body size to other feminist political concerns ranging from rape culture to domestic violence to gender gaps in employment. In Dietland, the restrictions on the amount of space that women take up become a metonymy for all of the restrictions placed on women’s lives in a patriarchal culture. When the main character, Alicia (nicknamed Plum), begins to understand the connection between diet culture and other forms of patriarchal oppression, she is able to let go of her…

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