Plus-Size Fashion, Fatness, and Disability
In the search for my own liberation as someone who identifies as fat, I find that fat empowerment ideals that are reliant on aesthetic beauty fail to account for the diversity and complexity of the bodies, opinions, and preferences of fat people. Empowerment for the fat community is overwhelmingly entrenched in fashion and beauty. Despite the important discourse put forth by fat women in particular that challenges societal norms—such as the unapologetic reclamation of the F word, fat—empowerment through beauty alone stops the body positivity movement short of all that it could challenge and limits our ability to imagine new avenues of empowerment that problematize not only the west’s fixation on beauty, …show more content…
A PhD candidate at the Centre of Fashion Studies at Stockholm University, Lauren Peters addresses her colleagues in her piece, You Are What You Wear: How Plus-Size Fashion Figures in Fat Identity Formation. She uses three “sartorial biographies” of plus size women to examine how fat identities are formed through “self-fashioning” as well as shopping and fashion blogging (Peters 46). Peters examines case studies through the lens of fashion rather than feminist studies. With this piece Peters explores how the plus size fashion industry goes ignored and how plus size women form their identities through fashion (48). Ultimately she finds that the three women who were interviewed were only aware of their weight when they had to engage with plus size fashion, which is telling of the plus size industry’s approach to bodies and …show more content…
As both illuminate the ways in which fatness and disability are linked by bodily control. Gruys and Peters’ pieces about fashion center around the idea that within fashion, women’s fat bodies are something that they must always have control over. Linking this idea to disability studies reveals how in both fields, people’s bodies are not in control and that disabled and fat people are looked down upon for the exact reason that they appear to have lost control over their bodies. Here, Afful’s and Ricciardelli’s piece on fat bloggers comes into play when fat bloggers challenge the idea that this lack of control over one’s body should mean that they themselves are a morally inferior
In the search for my own liberation as someone who identifies as fat, I find that fat empowerment ideals that are reliant on aesthetic beauty fail to account for the diversity and complexity of the bodies, opinions, and preferences of fat people. Empowerment for the fat community is overwhelmingly entrenched in fashion and beauty. Despite the important discourse put forth by fat women in particular that challenges societal norms—such as the unapologetic reclamation of the F word, fat—empowerment through beauty alone stops the body positivity movement short of all that it could challenge and limits our ability to imagine new avenues of empowerment that problematize not only the west’s fixation on beauty, …show more content…
A PhD candidate at the Centre of Fashion Studies at Stockholm University, Lauren Peters addresses her colleagues in her piece, You Are What You Wear: How Plus-Size Fashion Figures in Fat Identity Formation. She uses three “sartorial biographies” of plus size women to examine how fat identities are formed through “self-fashioning” as well as shopping and fashion blogging (Peters 46). Peters examines case studies through the lens of fashion rather than feminist studies. With this piece Peters explores how the plus size fashion industry goes ignored and how plus size women form their identities through fashion (48). Ultimately she finds that the three women who were interviewed were only aware of their weight when they had to engage with plus size fashion, which is telling of the plus size industry’s approach to bodies and …show more content…
As both illuminate the ways in which fatness and disability are linked by bodily control. Gruys and Peters’ pieces about fashion center around the idea that within fashion, women’s fat bodies are something that they must always have control over. Linking this idea to disability studies reveals how in both fields, people’s bodies are not in control and that disabled and fat people are looked down upon for the exact reason that they appear to have lost control over their bodies. Here, Afful’s and Ricciardelli’s piece on fat bloggers comes into play when fat bloggers challenge the idea that this lack of control over one’s body should mean that they themselves are a morally inferior