Episode 27 - From Body Positivity to Fat Feminism (feat. Amelia Hruby)

Transcript

David: 0:07

Hi, I'm David Peña-Guzmán,

Ellie: 0:09

and I'm Ellie Anderson. Welcome to Overthink,

David: 0:12

The podcast where two friends,

Ellie: 0:14

who are also professors,

David: 0:15

put philosophy in dialogue with the everyday.

Ellie: 0:18

Because big ideas are within everyone's reach. Yeah.

David: 0:29

After being the first large black woman to appear on the cover of Vogue, singer Lizzo, whose fans are known as Lizzie's, which I just love, noted that the body positivity movement, which began as a way of combating the stigma attached to fatness, has been co-opted and it's been reduced to a hashtag that no longer supports the fat community. What are your thoughts about this Ellie?

Ellie: 0:56

I mean, I have lots of thoughts on the concept of body positivity and its limits, um, both as a concept and as a movement. And I think I see on social media all the time these photos of like totally conventionally attractive, mostly white women, oftentimes with surgical modifications being like, Love your body! You're perfect the way you are! You have to love yourself first! And it just strikes me as extraordinarily superficial and a way of getting income by associating oneself in particular with brands that have association with the body positivity movement, right? It's like, oh, give me a sponsorship because I'm wearing your bras and I'm part of this body positivity movement.

David: 1:43

Well, and this is precisely Lizzo's point, namely that the term no longer reflects the interests of what she calls the 18 plus club, ie women who wear a size 18 or higher. So it's suddenly these thin women who are jumping on the bandwagon and appropriating this concept typically to profit from it. And it means that the concept of body positivity is no longer doing the critical work that it once did. And it's no longer reflecting the self-identified fat community.

Ellie: 2:16

Yeah. And you know, I- I do want to say something a little bit later about why I think the concept of body positivity in and of itself doesn't hold that much promise, but I think the promise that it does hold should be in its ability for embracing a variety of different body types. And I certainly don't want to make it sound like, you know, I was, I was such a hater in my comment a moment ago, and it is very easy for me to go down that path when thinking about the thin white women influencers who are co-opting body positivity, but obviously I don't want to have a knee jerk negative reaction to women loving their bodies, right. And I, of-

David: 2:53

Elliot's pro body negativity.

Ellie: 2:57

No, no, no, not at all. And I mean, as a thin white woman myself, it's not like I'm trying to stand on some kind of moral high ground here, or I shouldn't be. And, but you know, at the same time, I just think alternatives to body positivity are where we actually need to be turning. And I'm thinking in particular about Sonya Renee Taylor, who has had a lot of social media campaigns around what she calls radical self-love and now has a book called The Body is Not an Apology. And for her radical self love is really an important alternative to body positivity because it is precisely radical, right. And it is about self-love not about this sort of like, Ooh, positive thinking type of thing.

David: 3:36

Well, in another alternative here that we should throw in the mix is the concept of body neutrality that is not exactly the same as body positivity, um-

Ellie: 3:45

Yeah, it's like explicitly in opposition to body positivity.

David: 3:48

Yeah, exactly. And I want us to return to both of these alternatives later, but it seems to me like the rise of these counter movements is evidence of the extent to which the language of body positivity has been appropriated by neoliberalism and by capitalism. Just a couple of years ago, the scholar Alexandra Sastre published an article in the journal Feminist Media Studies about this issue. She looked at leading body positivity websites and found that across the board, all these websites, rather than contesting neo-liberal models of subjectivity and embodiment and agency actually presuppose and in fact endorse those very same models. So these websites that people typically turn to for inspiration in relation to body positivity reinforced preexisting conceptions about what right bodies are. So there is not that much critical work happening there.

Ellie: 4:48

Oh, that's so interesting. And I'm thinking too about the fact that when I think about body positivity, I think about the brands that have started these really influential social media campaigns around different body types and embracing the beauty of all body sizes and shapes. And that's not to say that it isn't really important to have, you know, accessible fashion and visibility and representation for folks of a variety of different body sizes. I definitely don't want to contest that, but I am sort of wary about the fact that when I think about body positivity, I immediately go to corporations.

David: 5:20

Yeah, and I think this is the underside of representation, right, that representation for the sake of representation can have a dangerous dimension to it, especially when that representation is primarily motivated by capital and by companies' need to increase the bottom line. Okay. Today we're talking about body positivity and fat feminism.

Ellie: 5:48

What does it mean to love your body, especially when we live in a culture that perhaps doesn't?

David: 5:54

How have our beauty ideals evolved such that they have come to put white thin able-bodied bodies on a pedestal?

Ellie: 6:03

We speak with Dr. Amelia Hruby, a philosopher, author, and activist who works on radical self-love and fat feminism, including a social media campaign called Selfies for Radical Self-love. I feel like lately the concept of body positivity is starting to fall out of fashion. I mean it strikes me that this is sort of a kin to the way that positive thinking has fallen out of fashion too, right. It's like we thought, you know, in the nineties that it was all just about being positive all the time, and now we're realizing like, oh wait, that's extraordinarily toxic. And. I'm honestly happy that we're reassessing the concept of body positivity.

David: 6:48

Positivity more generally.

Ellie: 6:52

Because I do have worries about the movements rhetoric around the body.

David: 6:56

The worries are about the rhetoric in particular. So, I mean, I want to know what the concern here is.

Ellie: 7:03

The basic concern for me boils down to the fact that when we talk about positivity, we are talking about a value judgment of some thing. Basically, you have to objectify whatever you are considering to be positive or negative. And so a value judgment implies a separation between the valuer and what is being valued. Now because the risk of objectification is already so high when we're talking about bodies, I think it's particularly problematic, to offer a movement around embracing the body that has to do with positivity, because it still operates on this assumption that the body is an object from which we are distant, right. And so it's accepting the terms of positive versus negative objectification.

David: 7:57

Well, if the worry is about the objectification of the body through the creation of a judgment, right? Like my body is positive or the body is negative, then it seems like that risk would still be there even in discussions, for example, about body neutrality, where you try to step away from the body, where maybe you're not rendering a judgment, in fact, you're explicitly suspending judgment, but you are still stepping away from it, as a way of being neutral in relation to it. So I wonder whether the concern here is the creation of the judgment, or actually the stepping back from the body, because they're not necessarily the same.

Ellie: 8:38

Yeah. I mean, I think the act of judgment implies a separation between yourself and your body, but I think you're right, David, that that's not the only kind of separation we can have. So maybe let's talk a little bit about the body neutrality movement for a moment. What is body neutrality and why does it still involve this kind of objectification or separation from one's body?

David: 8:58

Yeah, definitely. So the body neutrality movement really emerged as an alternative of the body positivity movement and it really hinges on two main claims. The first one is that it's okay to be ambivalent about your own body and maybe even to dislike aspects of it, right. So you don't always have to be positive about the kind of body that you have about the abilities or impairments that that body brings to your life in light of the social environment. So it's okay to be like iffy about the body. No need to always put it up on a pedestal as if it's the greatest thing that ever happened to you. And the second claim is that the body positivity movement, despite its good intentions is still too much focused on appearance, on that which is seen and describing that surface of the body as beautiful. And so the body neutrality movement advocates will say, look, let's decenter the body altogether when we think about who we are, how we relate to ourselves, and our sense of self-worth. And my concern here is that the body neutrality movement assumes that we can adopt a position of full neutrality, almost disinterestedness in our body. So it creates that separation that we're talking about, that stepping out of one's own body as if we could step outside of it. And I think especially phenomenologists who write a lot about the relationship between lived experience and the body would say, That's precisely what we cannot do, right? We are never in a position to step back.

Ellie: 10:43

Yeah. You know, actually the way you've just described the body neutrality movement makes me think maybe that I agree with it more than I thought, because I think that second concept that you talked about, which is that we should decenter the body because we're too focused on appearance, I totally agree with that. I mean, I think a lot of the problem with the body positivity movement in its acceptance of the terms of what we might call body negativity, right? It's like, oh, you feel negative about your body, now you should feel positive about it is precisely that it's centering appearance too much. And also it's centering body image.

David: 11:17

Yes, that's exactly right.

Ellie: 11:18

Our body is not our body image. If we are obsessed with body positivity, we are still focusing too much on the image of the body because we are applying that we need to feel positive about our body. And that body is usually figured as a body that we see in the mirror rather than as the body we inhabit. But, you know, I do think that neutrality is still in the suspension of a judgment. It does still imply that separation. So I buy your point there, David, maybe we can talk a little bit about phenomenology here because that's a tradition that you and I are very steeped in. And this is like basically where all of my issues with the body positivity movement are coming from. According to phenomenology, which is a school of 20th century and contemporary philosophy, the body as we live it is not the sort of third-person appearance that we see in the mirror or that another person sees me as; rather, our body is what phenomenologists call the lived body. And this has roots in German with what's known as the krper-leib distinction. In German, there are two primary words for describing the body. One is the krper, which is related to the English word corpse. It's the body as seen from a third person perspective, as, you know, having parts, as being able to move and be moved. It's basically the body that your doctor sees when you go into the doctor's office.

David: 12:44

Yeah. Yeah. The scientific object body.

Ellie: 12:47

Yes exactly. The leib on the other hand is the lived body, the body as subject. When I reach for a door knob, I'm not thinking about my hand reaching for the doorknob. I am reaching for the doorknob, right? That is my body as a leib. It sort of falls into the background in my everyday experience. My body is the means by which I perform my everyday activities, not an object for me.

David: 13:13

And I liked the way that the French philosopher, Maurice Merleau-Ponty talks about the body. He was a student of Husserl.

Ellie: 13:20

The most famous phenomenologist of the body by far.

David: 13:23

Yeah. Yeah. In fact, his break from Husserl really hinges on their competing interpretations of the body. So very famously Husserl says, you know, I want to think about the life of consciousness and in order to do that, I need to bracket the reality of the world and just focus on the way in which things appeared to me. It's kind of like a thought exercise and Merleau-Ponty comes in and says, oh, Husserl, that's exactly what you cannot do. We are never in a position to bracket one aspect of the world, which is our body. And so this act of stepping back that Husserlian phenomenology presupposes, is foreclosed from the get go by Merleau-Ponty, who says the body is the soil of my experience of the world. It is that from which experience itself sprouts. And so I cannot reduce it as you say, to the third person perspective, which is the body as object. I must inhabit the body in the first person perspective, which is the body as subject.

Ellie: 14:28

Yeah, and I think what's really underwriting this intervention of phenomenology as you're describing it, David, is a rejection of the idea that the mind and body are separate, right? Mind-body dualism is basically the origin, I think, of so many ills of our society. And one of those ills is precisely this idea that the body is an object. And I think this is part of the reason that I'm skeptical of some of the interventions of the body positivity movement. And I'm actually really curious to ask Amelia about this in the interview, because for instance, like this idea that selfies can be a way of affirming ourselves I'm a little worried about, because I tend to associate selfies precisely with this objectification.

David: 15:13

Well, and it seems like one of the worries that we share about the body positivity movement is this demand that we always have a positive relationship to the body even when that positivity is artificially sustained. Conversely, the worry here about the body neutrality movement might be articulated as follows: We cannot be neutral in relation to that which we are. Not fully neutral. So we have to figure out a way to embrace the body in a way that doesn't fall victim to this demand, that one always have only positive feelings in relation to it without assuming that we are disembodied beings. And it seems like maybe the concept that you introduced earlier of radical self love might be a third alternative here.

Ellie: 16:08

So, yeah, this concept of radical self-love has been formulated by the poet and activist Sonya Renee Taylor. And Taylor argues that we live in a society that is characterized by body terrorism. Fatphobia, racism, and other forms of oppression are all part of body terrorism. And she says, look, I know this is an extreme word. And some people have taken issue with considering something like fatphobia a form of terrorism, but no, I really think that fatphobia and the way that it polices bodies, especially bodies of color, especially the bodies of women of color and black women in particular, is a form of terrorism. And so she just doesn't think that something like self-confidence or body positivity or body neutrality is going to cut it when we are trying to take on the structure of body terrorism. For Taylor, radical self-love is precisely this practice of going down to the roots of our own shame about our body, embracing ourselves at every level, at every size, at every shape, and recognizing that our own body shame also negatively impacts those in our community. And so when we engage in a practice of radical self-love, we are also engaging with the community and changing communal conceptions of what beauty is. And so she's like, I want you to embrace yourself as beautiful, no matter what you look like. And that doesn't mean embracing just the image in the mirror, that means embracing the way your body moves, the way your body feels. I think it does get at this sort of subjective element of the lived body in phenomenology.

David: 17:51

I like the term terrorism. I agree with you that it seems apropos because when we think about terrorism, it's a strategy that is designed to strike fear at home and make people feel unsafe in their every day. And what is more the everyday than our very bodies and on top of that, it seems like one difference between Taylor's conception of radical self-love and body positivity is that it shifts the focus away from positivity for the sake of positivity, towards something like

healing: 18:25

healing the body and its relationship to other bodies in our community.

Ellie: 18:34

Enjoying this episode? Please rate and review us on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. We couldn't be more excited to have on the show today Dr. Amelia Hruby. Amelia is a feminist philosopher who is author of the book 50 Feminist Mantras and the creator of the podcast 50 Feminist States. She has led social media campaigns, such as Selfies for Radical Self-love, as well as a variety of other feminist practices that emphasize intersectionality and self-love.

David: 19:20

Welcome Amelia.

Ellie: 19:21

Welcome!

Amelia: 19:23

Thanks so much for having me. I am pumped to be here.

David: 19:26

We're super happy to have you with us because in your books, essays, and Instagram account, you talk a lot about what you call radical self-love as feminist practice. Can you tell us about what you mean by radical self-love and, in particular, how body positivity fits into it?

Amelia: 19:43

Yeah, definitely. So, thanks again for having me. Love talking about this and the opportunity to do that on like a philosophy podcast is extra cool to me. I think before I dive in to talking about radical self-love, one thing I do want to say is that in my work, I really am trying to understand what it means to practice intersectional feminism, which is so often talked about as just an aspect of identity. But as I am trying to do that, I always like to name that intersectional feminism emerges from the Black feminist tradition And that I am a white woman. So in that way, part of my work always has to be about lifting up the work of Kimberle Crenshaw, the work of Audre Lorde, the work of the Combahee River Collective and Patricia Hill Collins, who I think give us the sort of early- well, Kimberle Crenshaw gives us the term intersectionality. I think all those thinkers give us how to think about it or learn it.

Ellie: 20:36

And Amelia, you and I first met reading Kimberle Crenshaw together in London.

Amelia: 20:40

I know. Yeah. I loved that week. That was wonderful. Um, I want to be very careful not to colonize Black tradition through my own whiteness. And I think even just saying that out loud is something that people don't say enough and saying it isn't enough. Like I have to then figure out how to practice that as well. But I just want to name that. So when I talk about radical self-love, I'm really always thinking of the work of Sonya Renee Taylor, who wrote an amazing book called The Body is Not an Apology. And in this book, she really unpacks how each of our relationships to ourselves are reflected in our societal structures and the way that society is set up to value or devalue certain bodies. So I'm really interested in radical self-love as a practice that demands that we learn to relate to ourselves in more loving ways and in doing so then are always required to rethink all of the relationships in our lives and the way that relationships are structured in the world in which we live. The way that body positivity fits into this is that our relationships to our bodies in the white supremacist, patriarchal, late stage capitalist world we live in, we're often so alienated from our bodies. And particularly for people who are socialized as women, their relationship to the body is mediated by the societal narratives of thinness and whiteness and heteronormativity and cisnormativity, and those narratives really produce this strong sense of self hatred and self-loathing for so many people. And so if we're going to talk about radical self love, in so many instances, we're talking about the relationship between yourself and your body. And so body positivity is a movement that really works to help us cultivate more positive relationships to our bodies. I'll also say upfront, it's really been co-opted by like white, normatively attractive influencer culture. And I can also just share, like, there are ways that I think sometimes I might even be perceived that way, but I'm really always trying to promote or advocate for a radical self-love that's in touch with fat feminism and a real redefinition and revaluation of fatness in our society and how by learning to rethink fatness, we can heal so much of the harm done by the demand for bodies to be thin and particularly for women's bodies to be small. And so I think that feminism and radical self-love go hand in hand and I always like to talk about them together.

Ellie: 23:24

Absolutely. And I want to ask you more about fat feminism in a bit, um, for now I'm thinking about what you're talking about in terms of radical self-love and how that can be practiced. And one of the ways that you practice it is through your project called Selfies for Radical Self-love, which you also encourage others to undertake through social media campaign and workshops. You state that selfies are a way for you to shape your self image on your own terms and sort of stop comparing yourself to others. And I'm curious about this because I've seen some concerning research that's associated selfie taking with negative mood and body image, so a way that selfie taking might actually encourage self objectification, comparison, and that sort of thing. So can you tell us a little bit about how selfie taking can be a radical feminist practice of self-love that discourages that kind of comparison?

Amelia: 24:14

Definitely. So I kind of think of selfies as an artistic practice. That's really my way into Selfies for Radical Self-love. I think that there are so many selfies out there that are about the glorification of normative ideals. They're about creating a standard for what bodies should look like, um, you know, and when I think about that, I really think about like- the Kardashians are the first people who come to mind who, whose selfies and have literally reshaped the way that young people shape their bodies. Like they've created a totally new standards. They've influenced a lot of plastic surgery and, with their beauty lines and all sorts of things, they can really reshaped the way that people desire to look in our society. And I'm not here to necessarily critique that or say there's something wrong with it. But I do think that so many people see these incredibly altered and Photoshopped and amplified selfies and then try to make their real life physical material bodies look like those things. And as a result, we get exactly what you're talking about, Ellie, like these incredibly negative body images. And I think again, I mean, I always really say like self-loathing and self-hatred, I think it really does produce that relationship to yourself. And so the reason I like talking about Selfies for Radical Self-love is because I don't think that it's the selfie itself that's doing that. The same way that I don't think that it's portraiture itself, even though we can look at art history and look at the ways that portraits are also complicit in the dehumanization of women and many populations, you know, we can look at that, but I'm not sure it's the portrait itself. I'm not sure it's the selfie itself. I think it's the way that the selfie is utilized and weaponized in our society. When I come across like a modality like that, I'm like, Can we flip this? Can this selfie become the opposite of what so often happens with it? Can it be a space for learning to love and adore and cherish ourselves and care for ourselves? And so really the writing and workshops and selfies that I share are about trying to flip what a selfie has often meant on its head and understand how, through a selfie, you can reconstruct how you see yourself, and you can get to know parts of yourself through your own image. Really, where I started with this is I started in a really horrible relationship with my body and I took selfies to try to see myself in a different way. And it took time. I started in this place of taking a selfie and being incredibly critical and always like moving through the societal lens of how I should want to change it. And once I could kind of name what was happening, then I could work to undo that. And that practice has served me so powerfully, being able to name where a harmful societal narrative is happening in my head and in my body instead of my own voice. And I think that, that's really the power of this practice. You get to take a lot of badass selfies, but then also it permeates into your self image in all areas of your life.

David: 27:42

Yeah. And I think in some places, as a society, we are beginning to recognize those corrosive effects that you're talking about from these controlling images on notions of self-worth, self image. For example, some European countries now require that whenever ad campaigns use pictures that are photoshopped, they have to include that in the image, right? This picture has been doctored and I've seen some people make similar demands in relation to celebrities like the Kardashians, right? If they're going to release an image that is likely to tilt the way in which young women in particular see themselves, maybe it should be made clear that that's not a transparent image of who they are. I'm just wondering what you think about that requiring that disclosure.

Amelia: 28:28

What you're saying is reminding me of not even just the images, but I think to the way that- I'm not remembering which Kardashian, cause I don't keep up with them, pun intended.

David: 28:37

With the Kardashians.

Amelia: 28:40

Ah!

Ellie: 28:40

Sidebar, the person who did our music for the podcast, Samuel P.K. Smith also does the incidental music for Keeping Up with the Kardashians.

Amelia: 28:48

Uh, we're- we're so close to famous. Um, you know, I'm just thinking too of the incidences in which they've promoted things like diet teas as part of the way that they get their body shape and constant denials of any plastic surgery, which I also want to say, I have no problem with plastic surgery, but I think that when it is a part of how you craft your aesthetic, and then you deny that over and over, it does produce this idea in other people's minds that they should be doing that, which has led to really harmful things like the Kylie lip challenge and stuff like that that happened on the internet. Um, so I mean, all of that I think is wrapped up in your question of like, should people be required to disclose the images have been altered? I think it's a tricky question. Normally I think the line between that and like sorts of censorship that happen in our online realms and our political communities can be kind of a fine line. So it, like, I'm not sure that regulation is the answer, but I do think that we all have to cultivate an ability to view and receive images really critically. And that's hard. That takes time. You have to learn how it's the opposite process of how I want people to look at their own selfies, right? Like I want them to look at images they see on Instagram and pause and say, what's happening here? What were they trying to portray in this image? How am I feeling when I look at it? I mean, there's so often that I'll see a selfie and still my first thought will be like, Wow, how does their body look like that? Should my body look like that? Um, and then very often I'll be like, Hey, like, it doesn't matter. I mean, I have all my kind of narratives that helped me pull out of that, but sometimes one of them is, This isn't real. That is not a body that exists in the material world. So I don't need to treat it as such. I need to think of it like I would a painting or something that's totally constructed.

Ellie: 30:40

David, you used the term controlling images, which I associate with the work of sociologist Patricia Hill Collins and Collins talks about controlling images as an alternative to something like stereotypes, because controlling images not only control us, but we have some modicum of control over them in sort of reproducing them. If we see ourselves as always being active participants, even when we're receiving selfies, then that leaves some room open for us to change our ways of interacting with them. You know, for myself, I'll be influenced to buy an item of clothing on Instagram, and then after I buy it, I will put it on and look in the mirror and sort of mentally match up how it looks on me to how it looked on whoever I was influenced to buy it from. And that kind of comparison, even when it's sort of like, oh, look how nice this also looks on me, it's totally part of the problem, even when it's like positive affirmation, because it's still a comparison. And that seems really different from what you're talking about, Amelia, of this way of crafting your self image through selfies, where you're looking at yourself, but not comparing yourself to others.

Amelia: 31:50

Yeah. exactly. How do I remove that comparative nature of the lens through which I look at this picture of myself. It almost feels like physical grooves that images can create. Like, as we see it, something over and over again, it's like erosion and it's like a little, this like little trickle of one image. We see them over and over, and then there's like a river. Or an ocean. And when you see images, I think they do that to your desires. I think they do that to your perceptions. So often that happens subliminally and it takes a lot of work once you've dug that Grand Canyon to get out of it. And this is why I talk about how like, media is so pervasive, the beauty culture that I grew up with, Britney Spears pop stars and super low rise jeans and very curveless bodies, growing up in that era of Tyra Banks on America's next top model telling size four models.

Ellie: 32:49

On the OC.

Amelia: 32:50

Yeah. Like the groove created in my identity was so deep and it took a really long time to pull out of those controlling images and recognize them as controlling images. And I think some of the ways that I've worked on doing that were one, I just fill my life with different images. So I seek out Instagram accounts or publications or clothing lines that put clothes on all sizes of bodies and that are really inclusive, whether we're talking about gender, race, ability, body size, or shape, and that changes it. And I think too, like when I see an expansive variety of bodies, I am much less likely to compare myself to anyone. But when I only see one ideal type, all I do is compare myself to that. So it's been really important for me to open up that kind of field of vision.

Ellie: 33:50

Such a good point.

David: 33:51

Yeah, and I love this image that you have of the groove and the idea that repetition creates these valleys in our modes of perceiving the world, interpreting the world, occupying the world. It does remind me of a lot of recent work in what is called neuroplasticity that suggests that our brain learns to process certain things in light of the grooves that they've created in us for a very long period of time. And this speaks to the importance of cultivating a more critical sense of visual literacy, a more active way of relating to the things that we receive through the senses, and one thing that I really like about your work, especially your work on selfies, is that you connect it to feminist work on the male gaze. The male gaze objectifies women, treating women as objects to be looked at rather than as subjects who do the looking, and it encourages women to objectify themselves. But you note that there is also the female gaze and an oppositional gaze. Can you tell us what these gazes mean to you and how they can be employed in selfie taking?

Amelia: 34:59

Yeah, definitely. Thanks for asking. I love talking about The Gaze. G A Z E for people listening. Sometimes when I say this, people think I'm talking about something very different than what I am talking about.

David: 35:12

The oppositional gays. Present!

Amelia: 35:17

Favorite kind. But, yeah. So this is the G A Z E gaze. So I think your description of the male gaze is spot on. I first learned about the male gaze when I read John Berger's Ways of Seeing in college. And I was so struck by the piece about the internalization of the male gaze. And as I read, you know, Foucault and other things, what I learned to identify is just this constant self policing that I was doing 100% of the time, particularly in relation to how I dressed and presented my body in the world. And not only that, but like how I forced myself to exercise to stay thin or how I would only eat certain things in certain places, because I was worried about how people would perceive me. Like it was so pervasive, this self policing that I was doing. And I was really struck by the fact that there was a word that could describe that to me. I mean, this is why I- I studied philosophy eventually and really loved feminist theory was it helped me understand all of these frankly like really painful and harmful things in my life. Articulating them gave me power over them so I didn't feel so stuck. And then as I did more research, the female gaze and oppositional gaze are concepts that I learned from different philosophers. So the female gaze has been theorized actually by a lot of people. But I think Laura Mulvey's kind of psychoanalytic version is one of the most popular, and she really goes into some of the different modes of it from a psychoanalytic framework. But the way I like to think of the female gaze is really just changing who is the subject. So if the male gaze is about saying that men get to see and objectify, I think the female gaze largely says that women get to see and objectify, but I think the movement from the male gaze to the female gaze doesn't actually change what the gaze itself does so much. Like the gaze is still the same between the two of them on my reading. It just still stays in this binary of male and female that I'm not really interested in. And when I think about what I want to do in my selfies, I'm not just trying to make myself the subject in the image, I'm really trying to rethink what it means to look at myself, as we've talked about a little bit. So then I'm really interested in the oppositional gaze. The oppositional gaze is a concept and term coined by

bell hooks in Black Looks: 37:43

Race and Representation. And there what hooks does that I think is so brilliant is relocates the pleasure in the gaze. So in the male gaze and the female gaze, pleasure is really about identifying with what you're seeing. Like that's the source of the pleasure is like seeing yourself kind of mirrored outside of you. And that, like, I keep making this like, circular movement with my hands. Like the pleasure kind of comes in that motion of self recognition and what hooks talks about is because Black women were only negatively depicted and film for so long, they could not gain pleasure through self-recognition. And so when they would go to view a film, it wasn't available to them because of the horrible stereotyping and the way it's that their genuine feelings, desires, bodies, dreams, struggles, successes were not on the screen. So what hooks says is that black women had to find pleasure in a different way, which was by seeing these representations of themselves and then reconstructing themselves in opposition to it. And the pleasure came in the 'I'm not that, that's not me because I am this.' And in a sort of- I think, I really think like a self-empowerment that allowed them to recognize themselves on their own terms, because the terms they were seeing in front of them on the screen, because all of this comes out of art history and film theory, those terms were so degrading and sexualized in really negative ways and horrible portrayals. So I think that there's so much in the oppositional gaze to think about when we're taking selfies, but that's always what I'm trying to take up is this sort of oppositional relationship to the idealization of the body and media and creating something different. We see that in film too in the ways that Black filmmakers and Black women in film have created totally different types of films in order to insert themselves into society in many ways, but also their own lives and their own self image and selfies to me, you know, it's just like a snapshot instead of a film.

Ellie: 39:56

Absolutely. I want to talk about fat feminism. You point out that deconstructing fatphobia is a key component of feminist politics and you've mentioned that in passing earlier. You also suggest that fatphobia is tied to ableism and racism. So can you share with us why resisting fatphobia is so crucial for an intersectional feminist politics?

Amelia: 40:17

Yeah, definitely. I mean, anyone who is wondering about this should go read Virgie Tovar's book, You Have the Right to Remain Fat. It's very short, very concise, and so compelling and really answers this question beautifully. Anything I'm saying is really just kind of coming out of having read that and it just reopened my relationship to my fat body. You know, I think that so often feminism itself also reproduces the sort of normative beauty politics of our society, um, the many, the tropes, you kind of get societally about feminism where either you have like the feminist who is very beautiful and can be accepted as a woman in society, you know, maybe a la like Gloria Steinem, who really tries to resist this image I think herself sometimes, but it definitely gets it from everyone else. Or you have the trope of the like bra burning, angry lesbian, who was like really butch and doesn't fit into that beauty trope so visually, and honestly, when I think of those two types in my head, they're still both thin. Um, and I think that a lot of that being projected onto feminism, but in my experience with feminist organizing, there is often not a consideration of body size. And I think fatphobia and ableism and racism are intertwined in really complicated ways. In the spaces that I've been in, even the ones that work to counter ableism or racism, they very rarely mentioned fatphobia. So I think that fighting fatphobia is absent from so much contemporary organizing and it's important to address because it is a component of ableism and of racism. And it's a sign of oppression in its own right. So often the reason people are dehumanized is because they're fat, and ableism and racism don't name that specifically. It's why we have to have, as you said in your question, like an intersectional approach, because you can be white and able-bodied and be fat, and you'll have these sites of privilege and these sites of oppression. And if that phobia isn't named, then it's not considered. And I think this is so apparent in the lives of many, but even in my own life, when it comes to health and medical care and the way that fat people are treated in medical settings. Um, I mean, I have personal stories of like going to try to get a doctor to look at a mole on my back and getting a 30 minute lecture about how I needed to lose weight, um.

Ellie: 42:50

Oh my God.

Amelia: 42:51

It's just so pervasive and so frustrating and every fat person I know has this experience. And so I think that resisting fatphobia has to be a part of intersectional feminism.

David: 43:02

Yeah. And I think it speaks to the fact that we still lack, as a community, a political interpretation of fatness. We have moral interpretations of fatness. We have medical interpretations of fatness. But we don't have a sense of fatness as a category around which a political community that is unified in oppression or in being oppressed organizes.

Ellie: 43:23

Which seems important especially because the medical and moral interpretations of fatness are coded and possibly even constituted by political forces like colonialism, racism, ableism.

David: 43:34

Yeah, and I think medical and moral interpretations of fatness, they present themselves as apolitical. So I remember when I worked a couple of years ago at Johns Hopkins University at the School of Public Health. And I learned, for example, one of the biggest categories of misdiagnosis for fat patients are knee injuries. Uh, you know, somebody will fall, have a knee injury. They go to the doctor and the doctor cannot see anything but the fatness. Talk about that groove that you talked about earlier in that perception, in the interpretation just coming to the fore.

Amelia: 44:07

Yes, I've experienced in my own life talking about knee pain and being told to lose weight when in actuality with some help of some physical therapy friends, I just realized that I had a really tight certain muscle in the back of my leg and that I stretch, I literally stretch it to solve all my problems. And instead the doctor was like, here's a diet plan that should solve this for you. And here's all of this intense exercise you can do that would have only exacerbated my problem.

Ellie: 44:32

Oh my.

Amelia: 44:32

Um, and I just want to name too at this point, within fact communities, there's a spectrum of fatness and I am small fat, which means that I, in my day to day life, don't generally have to experience overt discrimination. And most often I can do the things I want to do in the world because my body will fit into the literal spaces that are available to me. And so here, like name that even I have had these experiences, but they are only amplified intensely for people who are in even bigger bodies than mine, especially at the other end of the spectrum is a super fat community who really does name the intense discrimination that they experience everywhere. There's an interview on my podcast with a woman named Rebecca Alexander, who started an app called AllGo, that's kind of like Yelp for fat people that's meant to be a review site for the fat accessibility of spaces. And one of the things that Rebecca mentioned is like this desire for like a fat political base. There's some really amazing fat liberation groups out there. There's one I follow on Instagram called @fatlibink that I admire, so I don't want to present it like it's not happening at all. It is. It's just definitely not getting- I didn't want to say mainstream, like I'm not even seeing it in the niche, grassroots communities, like taking it up yet, so.

David: 45:56

Yeah.

Ellie: 45:57

A lot of people still have the false idea that thinness correlates with health.

Amelia: 46:02

Oh yeah. That's so pervasive. Dr. Sabrina Strings' Fearing the Black Body. That book is the argument for how fatphobia emerges from white supremacy and racism, which I think is an argument I don't need to make because it has been made so perfectly there. And there are, in media culture, some other really great things. So I've been listening to a podcast called Maintenance Phase, which is hosted by a writer who's most known as your fat friend on the internet and another writer whose name I'm forgetting but wrote a huge piece on quote unquote obesity last year that really did try to lay out a lot of the things we're talking about today about the hugely problematic reality of connecting health and thinness in our society. And as Virgie Tovar points in her book, and I think the article does too, like that is also deeply related to trying to police women's bodies. And the thin ideal is a tool to control women's bodies that's connected to racism, to sexism, the moral hatred of fatness. And while fatness is in no way itself a disability, I would say, it does produce different needs in bodies. And so in that way, it is very connected to ableism because when anybody needs something differently than the norm, quote unquote, at my experience ableism in society dehumanizes them.

David: 47:37

Yeah. And what unites a lot of your work is precisely that desire to bring about a truly intersectional feminism that does justice to that interweaving of different threads. And to that end, you have created an illustrated journal for developing feminist consciousness called 50 Feminist Mantras. Where did the idea for this project come from? And why an illustrated journal?

Amelia: 48:04

50 Feminist Mantras came out in October, 2020, but I originally self published a version of the book in October 2017. So this has been a really ongoing project for me. The idea came from a desire I had to bring a lot of what I was learning in grad school to my general community who were not academics. And I decided that the way I wanted to do that was to write mantras that would be really short phrases and explain how they relate to something about feminism. It was often a feminist value that would help them unthink a patriarchal or white supremacist or capitalist influence in their lives. And so I started sharing those on Instagram every Monday. I love alliteration. So Feminist Mantra Monday, what made sense to me. And I did that for a year and then I self-published the book. And then honestly I sold a few hundred copies myself and it sat on my website until a publisher contacted me about reprinting it in summer of 2019. And it, it really was the dream.

Ellie: 49:07

No, that's so great. Highly recommend it to our listeners. And I mean, in general, just so many good reading recommendations.

Amelia: 49:16

You can find me online at ameliahruby.com. I'm on Instagram at @50feministmantras.

Ellie: 49:23

Awesome.

David: 49:25

Thank you so much for joining us.

Amelia: 49:26

This has been so wonderful. I appreciate it.

Ellie: 49:35

One thing I want to talk a little bit more about now, David, is the racial origins of fatphobia because that's something that Amelia mentioned. She talked a little bit about Sabrina String's book Fearing the Black Body. And I think it's really important to kind of highlight just how fatphobia is inextricable from anti-black racism in the US.

David: 49:55

Yeah. And I think especially getting clear about that history matters because often we can make the connection between two forms of oppression, abstractly, without really knowing how those concepts have co-evolved over time.

Ellie: 50:08

Yes. So in her book, Strings argues that fatphobia is the product of 18th century race science, which basically tried to articulate natural innate differences between different races, associating the white body, especially the body of Northern Europeans, with a kind of thin ideal and the Black body of those of African descent with fatness. And what's really important to note here is that this association was racist in the very beginning. Like it's not as if there was some sort of objective assessment of what different body types look like. Strings shows that these associations of the Black body with fatness had to do with moral expectations around self-control, which have to do with the Protestant ethics. So the Protestant ethic says don't enjoy food too much, don't enjoy bodily pleasures too much. And that was set up as being in contrast to an imagined Black Other.

David: 51:10

I- presumably a Black Other that is incapable of controlling base animal desires, like the desire for food that gives into instinct.

Ellie: 51:19

Yes. And so this association of morality with thinness is reliant on racial pseudoscience, as well as on the sort of vaunting of a Christian ideal. And what's really important to note here is that this was, in particular, a way of policing women's bodies, because women are the gender who has historically been associated with their bodies, as well as the fact that the thin ideal does not originate in the medical field. In fact, Strings very powerfully opens her book with all of these quotations from 19th century American doctors talking about how American women are unhealthily thin, and they need to gain weight because they are not eating enough.

David: 52:02

Well, and this is something that the fat study scholar, Laura Frazier, talks about. She says, if you look at the Victorian ideal of femininity, it is that very voluptuous woman with the big breast and big hips and it's actually not until the closing decades of the 19th century and the opening decades of the 20th century that you see the rebirth of that older ideal of thinness and femininity originating in racialized science. So according to Frazier, for most of the 19th century, the ideals of beauty, especially in the United States and in parts of Europe, were not associated with thinness, but then something happens at the end of the 19th century that tips the scale the other way around.

Ellie: 52:52

Yeah. And one of the things that happened is the influx into America of a lot of new ethnic groups from Europe, including Irish and Italians, and Strings argues that that time was actually a really important watershed moment where American beauty ideals shored up the notion of whiteness and its association with a Northern European concept of thinness by enlisting that already existent racist idea that Black women were fat and white women were thin. And so white women who lived in the United States were able to further distance themselves from people we would now consider as white, but who were not considered white at the time, namely Irish and Italians, by saying, look, these people are large. They're more similar to Black Americans than they are to the white Americans that we consider beautiful.

David: 53:41

That's right. And one thing that we should add to this discussion is also the evolution of food production. So according to Frazier, the other thing that happens is that food production moves from an agricultural to an industrial model. And that means that whereas in the past, being heavier was a sign of class status because it was expensive to get all the food that maybe you needed, suddenly food becomes not just more available, but also more affordable. And so that means that the lower classes start putting on more weight. So suddenly the upper echelons of American society are looking for a new way to distance themselves from the lower classes. It becomes chic and it becomes a marker of class status to have a different kind of body. And that's where according to Frazier, you see the evolution of three models of femininity. You go from that Victorian model of the voluptuous woman to then the Gibson girls, which is a reference to figures of womanhood that were athletic, but still voluptuous until you get to the third model of femininity in the 1920s, which is the flapper, and what defines the flapper is of course that the flapper is typically thinner and flat-chested. So it embodies the new, dieting American woman.

Ellie: 55:04

And medical doctors were extraordinarily concerned about the ideal of the flapper. There's all this stuff from early 20th century medical literature saying like this is unhealthy for a lot of women. Another thing to put in the mix here is the establishment of insurance companies. Health insurance companies, which started to crop up in America around 1900, needed a way of basically assessing somebody's risk factor. And so it was insurance companies, not the medical field, who came up with the concept of a normal weight. I think that concept is so important to underscore. It's the insurance companies and not the medical field who come up with this idea of normal weight. And they developed these ideal weight tables that basically talked about like how much you should weigh based on your height. And of course, these were based on the average American worker, who at the time was white and male, then much later in the 20th century, you get the revisiting of those and saying actually like ideal weight tables, don't work at all. What we need is a new metric and that new metric became BMI, or body mass index. And ironically, body mass index was invented as a way to sort of correct the problems of the ideal weight tables. But as a lot of us know, BMI really is also extremely problematic when it comes to associating weight. Yes, exactly. And BMI is one of the main reasons for a lot of fatphobic treatment that folks who are actually pretty healthy receive in the medical establishment.

David: 56:36

No that's right. And I mean, aside from the fact that BMI is complete pseudoscience, I'm- I'm very anti BMI, by the way.

Ellie: 56:42

I mean, I think a lot of folks are nowadays. And one of the many ways in which it's racist is that bone mineral density tends to be higher among Black Americans than among white Americans, which means that they tend to have a higher BMI. And when we associate BMI with poor health, we are making a giant leap, but a leap that ends up disadvantaging particularly Black women in the medical establishment.

David: 57:05

And this speaks to a much larger issue, which is an ambiguity in the term normal, um, something that the French philosopher Georges Canguilhem talks about. He says that when the term comes into scientific vogue, especially in the late 19th century with the rise of statistics, there are two concepts of the normal that we fail to differentiate. There is the normal as that which is perhaps typical, most common, and that's a purely descriptive claim. And then there is the norm as the normal, a normative assessment of that which is good or ought to be aspired to. And he says most late 19th century and early 20th century science fails to make that distinction, and people rely on the normative conception of the norm when they think that they are relying purely on the descriptive one. And that's where you get these claims that not only let's say is X, Y, or Z the average, but it's that which everybody should aspire to. That's the move that is introduced.

Ellie: 58:08

I think that like at least body neutrality is a hell of a lot better than some of the other options, right. Because it permits us to dissociate those two notions of normal, where we're conflating the statistical norm with the normative good. But I don't know, I'm more taken by this idea of radical self-love that we get in Taylor and that Amelia also was discussing.

David: 58:30

And for me, the takeaway from this episode is that it's so hard to think about the body and self-worth without being molded and shaped by these very long histories of oppression that fall on all these axes that interact in order to bring about a ton of shame around the body. And that's probably one of the deepest, most difficult forms of shame to uproot. We hope you enjoyed today's episode. Please rate and review us on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts.

Ellie: 59:16

You can email us with questions, feedback, or even request for life advice at dearoverthink@gmail.com, as well as connecting with us on Facebook, through our page or group.

David: 59:26

You can also find us on Instagram and Twitter at @overthink_pod. We want to thank Anna Koppelman, our production assistant, Samuel P.K. Smith for the original music, and Trevor Ames for our logo.

Ellie: 59:38

Thanks so much for joining us today.