Fat Cyborgs: Body Positive Activism, Shifting Rhetorics and Identity Politics in the Fatosphere

Home , Body positivity, Body shape, Fat acceptance movement, Tess Holliday

FAT CYBORGS: BODY POSITIVE ACTIVISM, SHIFTING RHETORICS AND IDENTITY POLITICS IN THE FATOSPHERE

Aimee N. Taylor

A Dissertation

Submitted to the Graduate College of Bowling Green State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

December 2016

Committee:

Kristine Blair, Advisor

Michael Arrigo Graduate Faculty Representative

Lee Nickoson

Aimee N. Taylor

Kristine Blair, Advisor.

“Fat Cyborgs: Body Positive Activism, Shifting Rhetorics and Identity Politics in the

Fatosphere” is a project that illuminates how activist groups intersect technology with their activism. I observe and investigate the ways that Fat Acceptance (FA) and Health at Every Size

(HAES) supporters and allies build and sustain an activist community online. I do this in order to understand how fat activists negotiate identity and the body online, a space often considered sans corpus. This project involves examining and extrapolating activists' literate and rhetorical practices for creating and sharing knowledge. I am most interested in understanding the ways in which fat activists use the Fatosphere to develop alternatives to oppressive and discriminatory discourses. I explore the issues that are raised by the FA movement, particularly in how FA and

HAES takes shape in a subversive way in an online environment. In doing so, I develop a critical skillset to talk about and negotiate the body and its relationship with technology, and in particular, the digital, personal/political heterotopias and affect more positive discourse. iv

In loving memory of Jeanne Holbrook, my grandmother and biggest supporter. v ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This dissertation project could not have been completed without support and encouragement from my mother, Kim, and my amazing family, friends, and mentors. vi

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

INTRODUCTION: CONTEXTS FOR DISCUSSING FAT BODIES ...... 1

Concerning Fat(ness) ...... 1

The Rise of Dominant Fat Rhetoric ...... 3

Fat Acceptance and Health at Every Size: Developing an Alternative Fat Rhetoric . 5

Fat Studies: Obesity Critique Enters the Academy ...... 7

Welcome to the Fatosphere: FA and HAES Online ...... 9

Rhetoric Online and the Call for Further Critique ...... 11

Doing the Work of Fat Studies and Considering My Own Biases ...... 13

(Cyber)Feminism in the Fatosphere ...... 15

Project Outline ...... 18

Toward More Positive Discourse ...... 20

ENGAGING WITH FAT RHETORICS: BODY-CENTERED SOCIAL, ACADEMIC, AND

TECHNOLOGICAL MOVEMENTS ...... 22

Being Fat in the World ...... 22

Defining Fat is a Sensitive Issue When You’re the Elephant in the Room ...... 23

Fat Studies: The Need for Continuing Critical Inquiry ...... 29

New Modes for Fat Studies: Exploring the Fatosphere ...... 39

The Fat Cyborgs are Coming ...... 45

BUILDING A METHODOLOGY FOR EXPLORING THE FATOSPHERE ...... 49

Being Lipoliterate: When Did You Know You Were Fat? ...... 49

Intervening Technologically ...... 50 vii

Entering the Fatosphere ...... 53

Researching with Purpose in the Digital Realm ...... 54

Adapting, Problematizing, and Questioning: Methodology as Bricolage ...... 56

Accepting Initial Big, Fat Failures ...... 58

Embracing Bricolaged and Hybrid Data ...... 61

Reading the Web We Weave: Analyzing Social Networks and Hyperlinks ...... 63

Reflective Practices and Ethical Bricolaging ...... 66

Journeying Forward into the Fatosphere ...... 68

CRITICAL ANALYSIS OF ACTIVIST PARTICIPATION IN THE FATOSPHERE……… 70

Tracing Ubiquitous Practice: Rhetorical Power in the Mundane ...... 70

Making Noise on the Web: Cyberactivist Uses for the Internet ...... 72

Digital Genres for Online Community-Building ...... 81

#RealTalk with a (Former) Fierce Fatty ...... 85

Fat Activists Go to Bed Angry ...... 89

ONLINE FAT ACTIVISM’S CONTINUING IMPACT ON BODY RHETORICS ………… 92

Changing the Way We See Fat Bodies ...... 92

Textual Markers of Online Fat Activism ...... 94

Breaking the Internet: #EffYourBeautyStandards and the New Fatosphere ...... 97

All Bodies are Bikini Bodies: The Importance of Normalization ...... 102

Beyond the Fatosphere: Body Positivity in Public Rhetorics and Pedagogies ...... 104

Changing the Way We See Ourselves ...... 106

WORKS CITED …………………………………………………………………………… 109

APPENDIX A: HSRB LETTER…………………………………………………………… 117 viii

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure Page

1 Activist Uses for the Web ...... 74

2 Interaction Buttons on Facebook...... 75

3 FFF after February 2015...... 89

4 Wordle Representing Language of the Fatosphere...... 92

5 Fatosphere's Common Language...... 95

6 Holliday's Response to Facebook...... 101

7 Substantia Jones' The Adipositivity Project...... 103 1

INTRODUCTION: CONTEXTS FOR DISCUSSING FAT BODIES

"Everyone is talking about fat people" (Kirkland 398).

Concerning Fat(ness)

When I was a young girl, around six or seven, I was called into my bedroom by my granny for a talking to—she was “concerned” about my weight. I was active for an asthmatic child with terrible allergies, playing baseball and fishing like all the other village kids that I knew. “Suck in your stomach” and “never wear pants with elastic waistbands” were her favorite phrases to say as I passed by her. “Walk on your tippy toes, stomping makes you sound heavy,” as she puffed away on her cigarette. While she tanned in baby oil with a tri-fold, metallic reflector, I hopped in and out of a flimsy, plastic pool in a one-piece bathing suit that was entirely too short for my torso. I could not have a two-piece bathing suit because, she said,

“bikinis ain’t made for your body shape.” At eighteen, she even encouraged me to smoke cigarettes to help curb my hunger. My granny’s concern grew into a years-long endeavor to keep me from gaining weight, which much to her dismay did not succeed. Before this time, though, I did not know that other people thought that I was unhealthy, other than, thanks to genetics, my weak lungs and itchy eyes and skin. I did not know that my body was ugly. I most certainly did not know that I was preparing for a lifetime of shame because I was, and am, fat.

Fat is a word that comes fully loaded with meanings. Defining fat is a complicated task because of the deeply political, social, and personal influences on, and impacts of, the term, but fat is always in reference to how a body (either real or imagined) looks. Stemming from the social constructionist notion that language shapes our reality, fat often evokes countless images from media, as well as the imaginer’s own construction of fat. A Google Image search for fat will produce miserable, frowning people, unflattering tabloid snapshots, weight-loss 2 advertisement before-and-after photos, fast food chain customers (often eating), and stills from documentaries and reality television shows. Academic database searches for fat produce studies on the “obesity epidemic,” critical discussions about media and advertising, and, only recently, a handful of articles and book reviews related to Fat Acceptance (FA). Fat immediately implicates a body housing living cells, but with an apparent excess of them. It is a pejorative term for people with too much visible adipose tissue, but also an insulting term for anyone, regardless of cell count. Fatness and becoming fat is a source of unadulterated fear for children, men and women, and a drive for billions of dollars to be spent on its loss and prevention. From my concerned granny, I learned that fat meant me, and so much of my identity has been tied to that designation.

This dissertation project carries with it the weight of my identity as a fat person, but also as an activist and rhetoric and writing scholar. Chapter one serves as the introduction to the project by setting the stage for the research location, findings and implications that will come in later chapters. In addition to providing a broad, general discussion of the current state of the issues surrounding fat and the fat experience, this chapter places the study of fat identity, body politics, and alternative fat rhetorics in the Fatosphere within the context of discussions of rhetoric online (Warnick and Heineman), cyberfeminism (Blair, Gajjala), and cyberactivism.

Here, I also establish my role as both an insider and outsider within the Fatosphere community, emphasizing my feminist stance. Key definitions and concepts, like the Fat Acceptance (FA) movement, Health at Every Size (HAES), and the Fatosphere will also be explained and contextualized. Finally, I provide an overview of the subsequent chapters that comprise this dissertation. 3

The Rise of Dominant Fat Rhetoric

In hindsight, my granny’s “concern” about my body did not stem from her being entirely evil, hopefully; rather, it was a product of the American idealization and commoditization of the thin body that began after the turn of the 20th century. According to Rothblum, Solovay, and

Wann, the predilection for the thin female body was a European remnant from 18th and 19th century popular culture, when the thin, consumption-ridden body was a sign of high class.

However, industrialization fostered a new American economic system, putting the poor to work and building a labor force that could spend money. Ultimately, the culture of mass production led to the mass production of culture. The rise of popular media in a growing, (now employed) literate population opened the door for advertising and the dissemination of cultural norms through newspapers and magazines, film, radio, television, and most recently, the Internet.

World War II and the propaganda strategies that made millions of citizens buy war bonds, also brought about the industrialization of fitness and dieting (LeBesco).

The development of the body mass index (BMI) and the stratification of all bodies based on height and weight led to the universalization of diagnosis and treatment of bodies labeled

"obese." Physicians and future physicians would be trained how to calculate and assess the BMI of a patient based on an arbitrary system. In the 1990s, the BMI categories were changed and people who were deemed "normal" weight suddenly became "obese" (Rothblum, Solovay and

Wann), and my granny’s obsession began. Insurance companies gained a means to limit or require additional coverage based on a patient’s weight and doctor’s diagnosis. The pharmaceutical industry discovered the profit to be made selling diet products, sparking further commercialization of health, beauty, food, and fitness. As an increasing number of citizens were found to be over the perceived "normal" BMI, alarmed medical and pseudo-medical 4 professionals in a growing healthcare system sounded a cry for help. Governmental funding of this system led to the proverbial "public health concern" and the development of organizations and programs designed to battle an "obesity epidemic." Meanwhile, fat citizens, now labeled

“obese,” were presented with the challenge of living everyday life with the knowledge that their bodies were not normal, which comes at a high cost.

Being a fat person involves more than rude and derogatory comments from classmates or not having to worry about hand-me-down clothing, as was once told to me growing up. The current consumerist, capitalist culture is not welcoming of or helpful to fat people (or other marginalized groups, for that matter). Incessant public health concern regarding obesity has made the blatant discrimination against fat people acceptable. What is a prescribed weight-loss plan for a fat person is a thin person's eating disorder, including liquid, low- or no-carbohydrate diets, and extreme caloric restriction (1300 or fewer calories per day). Not surprisingly, scholars have only recently begun questioning and studying the deep-seeded biases that prevent too many patients from receiving adequate health care in both medical and psychological practices.

Further, fat people, particularly fat women, face more difficulties finding jobs, earning less than normal-weight employees, and experiencing more bias during the hiring process (McHugh and

Kasardo). Frankly, weight discrimination, fat prejudice, and anti-fat bias, fat shame, indicates a negativity, disgust, and even hatred toward fat people. While fat shame is not automatically recognized as a form of oppression, currently, the existence of a “lipoliteracy” allows for assumptions about fat people to impact how they are viewed morally, physically, and mentally

(Graham). Amy Farrell explores the relationships between “body size and notions of belonging and social status” (3). Farrell urges scholars and laypeople alike to rethink and critique what we previously thought about the “obesity epidemic” in an ever fat-aware culture, and discusses what 5 it means (rhetorically speaking) to be fat in a culture that fears and loathes fatness. My goal here is an interrogation of the dominating frames claiming that to be fat, one must also be “lazy, gluttonous, greedy, immoral, uncontrollable, and lacking in will power” (Farrell 4)

Ironically, there are health "concerns" funded, circulated and perpetuated by governmental, medical, educational, and financial agencies, the same concerns expressed by my granny. Farrell sees a direct connection between size and citizenship, and this connection is that a fat person is not a whole citizen, claiming “fatness is a discrediting attribute, for which people will go to extraordinary extremes to eliminate” (6). Not only will fat people go to extremes to remove their fatness, there are also those who inflict violence on the fat body, or simply ignore it altogether, in an effort to make it disappear. Fat oppression and fat phobia are not only why fat people kill themselves to try to be thin, but also why thin people kill themselves to try to be thin.

The ramifications of fat shame are experienced by currently fat, formerly fat, average size, and thin people, and they pervade every facet of life: social media, politics, medicine, retail, entertainment, travel, school, work, etc. Separate clothing sections in catalogs and retail stores, extremist and pathos-driven reality television shows, expensive "wider" or double airplane seats, drastic weight-loss surgeries and diet plans, and government anti-obesity initiatives all establish a dominant fat rhetoric that sends the message that my size, and the size of millions of others, is a justifiable reason for me to hide and hate my body, starve and maim myself, remove, burn, or tie together my organs, and pay more when the bill comes.

Fat Acceptance and Health at Every Size: Developing an Alternative Fat Rhetoric

When oppressed people struggle, they find a way to tell their stories. For fat people, this began in the 1960s with the founding of the Fat Acceptance (FA) Movement, which sparked the creation of both the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance (NAAFA) and the 6

Association for Size Diversity and Health (ASDH), which also fight for fat individuals' rights.

Dickens et al. define the FA movement as "a consumer-based movement comprised of individuals from varying philosophical backgrounds who question the dominant discourse of health reporting and information about obesity [. . .]” (1681). At its core, the movement includes bodily acceptance and dismissal of the thin ideal. The mission of the NAAFA, founded in 1969, is "to help build a society in which people of every size are accepted with dignity and equality in all aspects of life" (NAAFA). Further, "NAAFA works to eliminate discrimination based on body size and provide fat people with the tools for self-empowerment through advocacy, public education, and support" (NAAFA).

The NAAFA and FA movement sought, and still seek, to end discrimination from a thin- obsessed culture and encourage renegotiation of fat body politics in the 20th century, one that appears, now in the 21st century, to be in a fever pitch. For example, on the June 2015 cover of

People’s Body Issue, social media icon Tess Holliday appeared with the tagline “The World’s

First Size 22 Supermodel: From Bullied Teen to Plus-Size Star.” Holliday was signed early in

2015 to MiLK Modeling, known for their diversity, becoming the first model of her size to possess an international modeling contract. Holliday’s career began on social media where she posted cosmetic tutorials and plus-size fashion photographs. As her popularity grew with the number of followers she had, she started a campaign called “Eff Your Beauty Standards,” which is now over one million “likes” strong. Along with Holliday’s success in the modeling industry, there has been both an outpouring of support and positivity as well as outrage. Recent articles also reveal the attitude that Holliday’s campaign and contemporary manifestations of what the

NAAFA and FA movement began are anti-exercise and anti-health, building a powerful, negative response to fat activists’ Health at Every Size efforts. 7

McHugh and Kasardo maintain that the basic premise behind the Health at Every Size

(HAES) ideal is that "health improvements can occur when individuals improve their health practices without any weight loss occurring" (618). HAES asks people to commit to honoring their bodies, maintaining healthy habits for own health's sake, rather than for the purpose of losing weight. As a frame for the diet and nutrition and healthcare industries, "a Health at Every

Size approach urges medical researchers to examine the health consequences of anti-fat bias, as the medical pathologizing of individuals creates discrimination for fat people across a variety of domains” (McHugh and Kasardo 618). HAES would have this frame adopted by all fields and industries, not just medicine. HAES values are outlined by McHugh and Kasardo, who write:

HAES’s holistic approach targets improving individuals’ emotional, physical,

and spiritual well-being. HAES encourages engaging in physical activities for

pleasure, not as regimented exercise routines. HAES also seeks to end weight

bias by recognizing that someone’s size or weight does not reflect the way a

person eats, a person’s physical activity level, or psychological issues.

(624)

The rise of FA groups, the development of HAES, and their subsequent organizational offshoots were direct responses to the overt social stigmatization of fat people that has an even longer history. More recently, the study of fat people and their lived experiences has found its way into the American and European academic landscape.

Fat Studies: Obesity Critique Enters the Academy

Until the late 20th century, there were few positive academic studies of the fat body; rather, medical studies sought the pathologization and erasure of fatness from view and from our very DNA. Researchers and scholars must critically examine such a pervasive issue as fat shame, 8 and this charge has been taken up in recent decades with the development of critical studies on obesity and the fat experience, mainly in the United States, simply dubbed Fat Studies. Fat

Studies has begun to carve space in academia by means of an interdisciplinary journal and a small bookshelf of texts that uphold that the fat body is not inherently ugly, immoral, or unhealthy (Rothblum, Solovay and Wann). While academic conferences sometimes include Fat

Studies in their discussions and body conferences are cropping up more in recent years, due to travel restrictions, limited access, mobility, and accommodation, and fear, many fat people are prevented from attending or presenting at these events. Doing the work of Fat Studies research contributes to a growing field of critical engagement about, with, and for fat people and the discourses surrounding the fat body.

In academia, the fat body, even more so the fat female body, is subject to criticism because of the tradition of the mind/body separation and its highly gendered associations (men are of the mind, women are of the body). In our analyses, interpretations, and arguments, as well as our daily practices as academics, the female-identified body carries extra “weight” and “by their association with the body, women take on the negative qualities with which we identify the body” (Fisanick 241). In the hallway, at committee meetings, and in the classroom, it is important that the fat, female academic maintains a level of “niceness, friendliness, pleasantness, and approachability” (Fisanick 243). These expectations are different for the male, particularly white, academic, but the standards are similar for women and other marginalized communities who have fought for space within the ivory tower. Fat men also face challenges in academia as scholars and teachers in classrooms, but even fewer discussions take place about these experiences. Unfortunately, there is also very little research about how fatness impacts the tenure 9 and promotion process; however, student evaluations, which often reveal students’ attitudes toward their instructors’ bodies, do impact the hiring and promoting of faculty (Fisanick).

Bordo proposes that discussions of fatness are absent from popular culture and academia because fat women, as we have seen how fat has been framed in American culture, are beyond an “acceptable” voluptuous shape and their appetites are sinfully ravenous and gluttonous.

Because of this, the fat woman’s body is a site of political struggle that exceeds the typical oppressor/oppressed model that we see most often in postcolonial and postmodern academic frameworks. Fat shame is systematically accepted and allows for weight discrimination to run rampant; thus, the fat body in an academic position is inherently subversive. The connections that Bordo, Rothblum, Solovay, and Wann, and Fisanick build between the female body and

Western culture, the “tyranny of slenderness,” puts the study of fat bodies and the rhetoric that surrounds them firmly into an academic context. A more detailed discussion of Bordo and other extant work on Fat Studies and fat’s role in academia will take place in subsequent chapters.

Welcome to the Fatosphere: FA and HAES Online

Everyday citizens whose lived experience is riddled with anti-fat bias and weight discrimination have found ways to promote body positivity and grassroots activism in support the ideologies of the Fat Acceptance (FA) and Health at Every Size (HAES) movements.

Harding and Kirby recall Bordo’s text, which led them to realize “the oppressiveness of our beauty ideals and the possibility of living happily in a fat body” (Harding and Kirby 179). In addition to calling a truce with one’s body, Kate Harding and Marianne Kirby invite readers to participate the online community called the Fatosphere. The impact of weight discrimination is now global as the American industries are exported and loathing of fat people spreads. Lessons from the Fat-O-Sphere: Quit Dieting and Declare a Truce with Your Body, is indeed, a self-help 10 book but at the same time, it provides useful insight regarding the online spaces for fat people who desire to share their experience. Harding and Kirby have a useful, albeit utopian, vision of the Fatosphere, as:

A smorgasbord of different takes on fat acceptance, body image, sexuality,

disability and self esteem [. . .]. The best thing about the Fatosphere is [. . .]

the sense of community. Most of the blogs encourage readers to comment,

and the discussions are sometimes better than the posts. By and large people

are incredibly supportive of each other which really helps to mitigate all the

pressure we get from family, friends, and perfect strangers to feel ashamed of

our bodies, and try to become thinner. (Harding and Kirby 183)

After reading this text, I began following people and communities within the Fatosphere, reading their stories, commenting on them, sometimes engaging in discussions with fellow readers. Some stories were drastically different than mine, but others were seemingly taken from my own life: stories of bullying, public shaming, internet trolling, violence, and discrimination.

It is abundantly clear that Web 2.0 has provided a means to create an online, body positive, Fat Acceptance community where fat people can write or voice their concerns, issues, triumphs, and successes. More than a space for help dealing with obesity, Donaghue and

Clemitshaw explain:

[T]he Fatosphere is a set of inter-linked blogs in which proponents of FA

confront the personal and political elements of the pathologisation and

demonisation of fat bodies by sharing their thoughts, feelings, experiences,

and personal practices as they pursue fat acceptance as well as their

reactions to and analyses of public discourse concerning fatness. (417) 11

This online community is an interconnected web of blogs where fat people, researchers and scholars can begin to shift from responding to the fat stigma with conformity and perpetuation of dominating discourses regarding weight loss to resisting the fat stigma by promoting acceptance and reframing constructions of fat and the fat body (Dickens et. al.). Participation in the

Fatosphere allows fat people and fat supporters gain a feeling of acceptance, empowerment and belonging, but also a desire to maintain or improve their health in a way that makes sense to them. The reality that plays out here is not always so positive, as with all communities online and off.

Rhetoric Online and the Call for Further Critique

Critical studies of the Internet’s rhetorical spaces often focus on virtual locations where othered or marginalized people can find a voice and gain rhetorical power through daily practices and engagement with the features of the web space and its participants (Warnick and Heineman).

These "counterpublics can be understood as coming together of those individuals, ideas, and discursive 'exclusions' that cannot or do not circulate within a particular dominant public sphere"

(Warnick and Heineman 10). In the case of the Fatosphere, nearly a decade ago, there were many fat activist blogs by individuals as well as teams of bloggers whose mission was to build a community where fat people and their allies, similar to LGBTQ online communities, could discuss their experience in an accepting space, encouraging exchange of ideas in productive and understanding ways (Addison and Hilligoss, Hawisher and Sullivan). In recent years, however, many of the blogs that were once rather prolific, posting daily, no longer operating or have very little new content creation.

Where have the fat activists gone? Is the Fatosphere dead or dying? While the utopian vision of the community-building power of the internet holds, the participatory nature of the web 12 leads to an ebb and flow of participants in online spaces. The ubiquity of new media, the increase in access to advanced, personal technology, and the growing technologically literate global population have given rise to more connective and interactive venues than seemingly outdated blogs. While Lessons from the Fatosphere would have readers believe that the Fatosphere is a utopian space where fat people and allies can join in productive, subversive, and important discussion in a safe and encouraging environment, the reality that plays out in these spaces is quite different. Online communities are not utopias where participants “live” in perfect harmony.

Rather, Foucault’s notion of heterotopias is more applicable as a “metaphor for describing the active struggle that takes place in and shapes cyberspaces” (Wilson 148). Heterotopias, according to Foucault, are both real and imagined, or mythic, spaces that allow “for both idealized visions and the acknowledgment of conflict and crisis that arises in attempts to subvert dominant power structures” (Wilson 148). Addison and Hilligoss’ study of women’s experience on an online forum assists in my understanding of heterotopias as “countersites where culture is represented, contested, and inverted” (173). Foucault’s term works well providing a way to view the Fatosphere and the nature of the activity that takes place there. Conceptualizing the

Fatosphere and other FA/HAES online communal sites makes space the discussion of alternative discourses regarding fatness. This project seeks investigate the spaces where current fat activists are doing the work of their digital predecessors, ultimately asking:

o How are fat activists using the affordances of the internet to do their activist

work? More specifically, how are fat activists using new media to fulfill their

political and personal agendas?

o Given the disappearance of community blogs within the Fatosphere, how do fat

activists currently build communities online? 13

o How do they negotiate, not only "physicality" of the online spaces, but their

identities within community places?

o Finally, I seek to understand how fat activists online construct an alternative,

more positive rhetoric surrounding fatness to the dominating rhetoric of shame.

To answer these questions, I will perform an in-depth rhetorical analysis of self-selected blogs, social media, and other online spaces that comprise the Fatosphere. Additionally, interviews with writers in the Fatosphere will provide firsthand experience to support and triangulate findings from the rhetorical analysis.

Doing the Work of Fat Studies and Considering My Own Biases

For me to enter into Fat Studies, I must understand the reality of weight discrimination by exploring the ways that fat is framed. Kwan and Graves conceptualize a “critical obesity studies” or “fat studies” which “begins to destabilize so-called truths about body weight and to expose commonly held beliefs about the fat body that, upon closer examination, involve complex assertions by competing claims makers” (5). The authors reexamine Western constructions of fat, which instill the belief that fat is ugly, but even more so that fat indicates moral deficiency, medical disease, and social stigmatization. The work of fat studies, then, is to reframe the way that fat is viewed in order to deconstruct these Western meanings regarding the fat body. The main concerns that I have with exploring a topic such as this is that the discussion of fatness, but even more so, fat acceptance, will be both too personal, because I identify as a fat person, and too political, because the dominant discourses surrounding fatness and the fat body are embedded in American culture, and the American psyche. Through an investigation of my potential audiences in the fields of rhetoric and composition and fat studies, as well as feminist researchers, I see that this work has both academic and personal value. Because I am a fat person 14 speaking about the fat experience, some audience members may claim that there is no way that I can be objective. Regarding this, as made clear by my opening anecdote, I cannot claim objectivity. I am fat. I experience weight discrimination on a daily basis along with millions of others. It is wrong, and I want to stop it. I am emboldened by passion and the desire for justice, but at the same time, I am privileged, as a scholar, with access to resources that will allow me to situate myself within an important scholarly conversation regarding fatness.

Further, I am conscientiously doing the work of Fat Studies because this positionality allows me to maintain my “skepticism about weight-related beliefs that are popular, powerful, and prejudicial” (Rothblum, Solovay and Wann x). Fat Studies will help me to theorize a body- positive research project because it offers “an analysis that is in solidarity with resistance to other forms of oppression” (Rothblum, Solovay and Wann xxii). To do the work of Fat Studies, a researcher must question the current “knowledge” on weight. In the foreword to the Fat Studies

Reader, Marilyn Wann asserts:

If you participate in the field of fat studies, you must be willing to examine

not just the broader social forces related to weight but also your own

involvement with these structures. If you do fat studies work, you yourself

are always already part of the topic. [. . .] But if you undertake to do fat

studies work without also acknowledging and addressing your own position

in relation to weight-based privilege and oppression, you risk undermining

your ostensible efforts with your own unexamined and counterproductive

assumptions. (Rothblum, Solovay and Wann xi-xii)

Fat Studies is interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary as a field and invites an aggressive and rigorous critique of the dominating discourses regarding fat. Despite the pervasive public 15 concerns regarding the “war on obesity” and the cultural depictions of the unhealthy and immoral Fat American, “the voices of fat people are rarely heard” (Kirkland 399). While everyone might be talking about fat people, fat people often do not get to talk back. Through my interviews with Fatosphere participants, they will have an opportunity to do so. These participants, who come from various disciplines, fields, geographic locations, and cultures, are doing the work of Fat Studies as they critically analyze their own experiences and their consumption of popular media.

(Cyber)Feminism in the Fatosphere

It is immediately clear that researching online FA communities is a feminist endeavor.

While not all participants in the movement are female, the issues of body positivity, fat shame, disordered eating, etc. remain, in the dominant discourse, feminist issues. A feminist approach to any research project involves a great deal of patience, listening, and, above all, reciprocity. It is important when working with FA and HAES groups to maintain a position of body positivity and an ethic of care toward the community of participants. Kirsch and Royster’s Feminist Rhetorical

Practices reminds researchers that the goals of feminist research also involve looking:

“[. . .] at people at whom we have not looked before [. . .], in places at which we

have not looked seriously or methodically before [. . .], at practices and conditions

at which we have not looked closely enough [. . .], and at genres that we have not

considered carefully enough [. . .], and we think again about what women’s

patterns of action seem to suggest about rhetoric, writing, leadership,

activism, and rhetorical expertise.”

My project involves looking at literate and rhetorical practices of people who identify as “fat,” the majority of whom are women, whose online activity within the Fatosphere contributes to 16 changing rhetorics of fatness, fat identity, and the fat experience. To do this work requires strategic contemplation, which brings with it a number of affordances for the writing researcher talking about web spaces because it allows the researcher to “acknowledge her or his own embodied experiences while engaging in inquiries that permit the researcher to gain perspective from both close and distant views of a particular rhetorical situation or event” (Kirsh and

Royster). Observation and analysis of this kind can assist a researcher in understanding the scene, the space, the place, and seek out alternatives, suspend judgments, and take time to reflect and respond as a meditative process. Rhetorical practices are complex, and strategic contemplation makes space for the emergence of ideas out of silence and gaps that might not have been noticed otherwise.

I am both an insider and outsider to the Fatosphere. As an insider, I identify as a “fat” person and have experienced much of the same discrimination, and have periodically blogged about these experiences myself in a more “private” digital space. Nancy Naples’ Feminism and

Method suggests that there is a fluidity and constant shifting with an insider/outsider status.

Naples asserts that “how one recognizes and negotiates these shifting relationships can be greatly enhanced by the application of strong and dialogic reflective strategies” (48). Because of this particular position, I can reflect on my own embodied experiences reading about others’ embodied experiences, experiences my body also shares, an auto-ethnographic practice. Despite the closeness feel and the relationships already established within the Fatosphere, feminist research methodology allows researchers to step back and observe their literate and rhetorical practices for knowledge-building purposes. This “embodied perspective (one that is tied to particular social locations and particular positions in a community) emphasizes how researchers’ social positions [. . .] influence what questions we ask, whom we approach in the field, how we 17 make sense of our fieldwork experience, and how we analyze and report our findings” (Naples

197).

Blair’s “A Complicated Geometry: Triangulating Feminism, Activism, and

Technological Literacy” speaks to this dual positionality as both insider and outsider of the community of study. The Fatosphere, for the most part, archives the multiple perspectives of fat people who have faced discrimination and social stigmatization through narratives of their lived experience. Blair would also agree that the study of this group would constitute feminist research because it “has concerned itself with method and politics, attending to the social relations manifest in everyday activities and lived experiences” (65). But to take feminist research into the digital realm, a researcher can develop a technofeminist approach, which often involves researchers as “personally and politically connected to the groups they study, balancing their joint status as insiders and outsiders in ways that are consistent with participant-observer methods” (Blair 66). One of my key concerns with this project is the risk of involving both the political and personal; however, a feminist, and particularly, a cyberfeminist approach allows me to do that.

Radhika Gajjala and Yeon Ju Oh write, “cyberfeminism necessitates an awareness of how power plays not only in different locations online but also in institutions that shape the layout and experiences of cyberspace” (1). Marginalized people not only are using technology, with which technofeminists would be concerned, but also are finding new ways to gain rhetorical, social, economic, and political power through their interactions with digital technologies. With increased interaction, however, there are both risks and opportunities involved. More access to internet-ready devices and global internet coverage invites activist community-building, but also more violent online activity, as Hawisher and Sullivan discuss in 18 their study "Women on the Networks." Similar to participants in Addison and Hilligoss's

"Technological Fronts" who identified as lesbian and sought a safe digital space to discuss experiences associated with this identity, in the Fatosphere, participants are encouraged to "come out" as fat, showing their bodies by posting pictures, videos, and descriptions of their bodies.

Participants in Addison and Hilligoss and Hawisher and Sullivan's studies did not have the ability to post photographs in the spaces they were communicating; thus, their identities were tied to their descriptions. Given the diversity of social media and photo editing applications, there have been clear shifts in the ways that the body is rhetorically negotiated online.

Project Outline

With this project, I intend to perform a rigorous, valid, and meaningful examination of the rhetorical practices of fat people whose stories develop a counter-narrative to the dominating discourses surrounding fatness and their impacts on fat activism. I will perform a rhetorical analysis of the culture and of the discourse, the words, norms, and systems that form the dominant framing of fat and fatness, as well as the rising alternative rhetoric that serves to transform the perception of fat people and their treatment. Still asserts that “(r)hetoric is representative of and contributor to a complex, dynamic discourse of values, truths, and rules”

(2). Thus, a study of the meaning-making practices of fat people, fat activists, and fat allies in response to the dominant rhetoric regarding their treatment allows Fat Studies scholars to approach the pathologization, demonization, and discrimination of fat people differently than prior criticism, and also gain an understanding of “the forces at play that have shaped productive resistance to it” (Still 2).

Chapter two provides an overview of the dominant rhetoric surrounding the framing of fatness in Western, primarily American, culture, particularly those that perpetuate the belief that 19 fat is inherently unhealthy, immoral, and unattractive. This involves an extended review of the current literature related to fat studies and fat’s role in the academy. I also define concepts of virtual community, heterotopias, cyberactivism, rhetoric online, and further extrapolate on the ideas introduced in chapter one (FA, HAES, the Fatosphere, etc.). Here, my theoretical and conceptual framework for exploring the Fatosphere will be explained. Crossing multiple disciplines, I identify gaps in research regarding obesity and fat-driven industries (weight-loss, plus-size fashion, etc.).

In chapter three, I build the theoretical and methodological foundation for my project, beginning with a brief discussion of the research site and the connections I have made with it and my participants. Returning to my research questions, I contextualize my project, addressing its purposes, taking a stance as a methodological bricoleur, and borrowing research practices from humanism and feminism for data collection. Given the networked nature of the research site and participants within, data analysis also involves a layering and borrowing of methods from digital rhetoric, as well as sociology. I have grappled with ethical concerns working at this site and with these methods, including dealing with the challenges of working through trial and error, as well as experiencing what seemed like failures as a researcher.

In chapter four, I overview activist purposes of new media that I have observed in the

Fatosphere. I present the data gathered using the methodology and methods described in chapter three, including activists' responses to email interview questions regarding their participation with the Fatosphere. Additionally, I examine the data gathered directly from the Fatosphere, including IRB-approved observations of how the community engages with the internet for interactivity, activism, and community-building purposes, like archiving, networking, commenting, etc. Then, I explore and discuss several specific locations, or nodes in the 20

Fatosphere to demonstrate how these fat cyberactivists engage in new, hybrid genres to build heterotopic (Foucault) communities.

I conclude this project with a discussion about some textual markers of fat identity found in emerging communities across social media with the help of hashtags and fat-normalizing language. I explore how textual markers help to normalize the fat body and give people a language for talking about bodies that does not erase, silence, or discriminate against them. Most importantly for the field of rhetoric and writing, I assert that disseminating these textual markers, both online and off, makes way for more positive discourse about fat people to take place online, as well as in homes, classrooms, medical offices, and on our television screens. Ultimately, my aim is to illustrate a positive consideration, viewing, and representation of fat bodies, of all bodies rather, that continues to be a necessity in our academic, cultural, social, and rhetorical negotiations.

Toward More Positive Discourse

FA and HAES communities comprise the Fatosphere, a web of blogs, websites, and social media sites where users can support body positivity and promote the end of weight discrimination. I have found the opportunity to explore a community with which I have a connection, a profound one, that allows me to foreground my working with and through biases, as well as constantly reexamine my methods and methodology in order to build an ethic of care and respect for my fellow community members who will be the subjects and participants in my study. This research project illuminates, more broadly, how activist groups intersect technology with their activism, which also relates to rhetoric online and the political, social uses (and misuses) of new media (Warnick and Heineman). Writing researchers who are often engaged in discussions about technology and online activity are presented with a host of challenges in terms 21 of research methods and methodologies, data gathering and interpretation, ethics, and so on. As a feminist writing researcher with an interest in technology, activism, and community, I plan to observe and investigate the ways that Fat Acceptance (FA) and Health at Every Size (HAES) supporters and allies in the Fatosphere build and sustain an activist community online. There is a need for researchers to investigate such communities in order to further understand how fat activists negotiate identity and the body online, which is often a space considered to be sans corpus. This project involves examining and extrapolating activists' literate and rhetorical practices for creating and sharing knowledge.

Ultimately, I am most interested in understanding the ways in which fat activists use the

Fatosphere to develop alternatives to oppressive and discriminatory discourses. The goal is not to emphasize what needs improved, while much improvement is needed, because I, perhaps cynically, do not foresee an end to individuals’ deep-seeded biases toward fat people.

Nevertheless, I want to explore the issues that are raised by the FA movement, particularly in how FA and HAES takes shape in a subversive way in an online environment to “address political and epistemological grounds for the unity of” these movements “and their political and theoretical contributions to social justice” (Alcoff and Mohanty 4). In doing so, I will develop a critical skillset to negotiate the fat body and its relationship with internet-accessible technologies, and in particular, the digital, personal/political heterotopias that help them affect more positive discourse. 22

ENGAGING WITH FAT RHETORICS: BODY-CENTERED SOCIAL, ACADEMIC, AND

TECHNOLOGICAL MOVEMENTS

"The fat body, when read as disgusting, has been pushed to the margins of Western culture, but

the resources of abjection there make the fat body, performed as subversive, quite threatening to

comfortably held ideas about the social, political, and economic entitlement of those people

currently ascribed as natural, beautiful, and healthy" (LeBesco 98).

Being Fat in the World

It was apparent to me, at seven years old, that my fat body disobeyed the status quo, was abjected. This notion has been reiterated throughout my exploration of the literature that offers other options for thinking about bodies, including my own, rather than that it needed to be changed, shrunk, diminished, and erased. With this project, like Samantha Murray in The Fat

Female Body, I question existing rhetorics surrounding the social, psychological, and medical treatment of fat people based on public concern, or sheer panic, about obesity. Out of this questioning comes an investigation of "contemporary identity/body politics that have formed as a response to the pathologisation of 'fatness'" (Murray 2). In the 21st century, citizens practice politics in more places and spaces, especially computer-mediated ones, given increased access to mobile, internet-ready computing technologies. When human events occur, nowadays, we take to the internet to both voice and view reactions, responses, and repercussions to these events. The internet, like an infinite archive, collects, stores and disperses content and (mis)information almost at the speed of light. With that said, the fat body has been recreated and represented online just as it has been in popular media, medical studies, and in the everyday, offline lives of people, fat or not. 23

Further, the panic induced by the fear of fat as it is represented both online and off has brought us to this historical moment when it is possible, academically, socially, or otherwise, to reimagine and renegotiate definitions, representations, and hegemonic views of “the fat body,” and dare I say, my fat body. Fat women, in particular, have been targeted across social groups and communities, denied jobs and access to sufficient medical care, and unrepresented in multi- million dollar industries. Before attempting to investigate the experiences of fat people, particularly of fat activists on the web in subsequent chapters, it is important to first understand the discourses that drive their political activity and social engagement online. As this project will show, but what fat people already know, there are "dilemmas that form the experience of 'fat' bodily 'being-in-the-world'" (Murray 2). This chapter’s purpose is to foreground the ways that this being-in-the-world is being discussed, what fat people face, and have faced, from a historical and social perspective. In this chapter, I discuss who and what influences the naming and identification of fat people from the perspective of fat studies scholars who also are speaking back at the dominant views. What follows is a review of some of their critical work on our treatment of fat people and an overview of competing frameworks at play in regard to fat and fatness in US culture. Finally, I shift to the technologically-driven spaces where current activist community and scholarly work are taking place. Bringing forward a number of conversations at work in the multivocal field of fat studies, I begin to identify the various modes through which the fat body is represented.

Defining Fat is a Sensitive Issue When You’re the Elephant in the Room

For the majority of my life, fat was an insult. The word ranked with bitch, bastard, and stupid as heinous and ugly words. Granted, being raised by a poor Appalachian family, I did not know that there were other, more shocking words until we got cable television. Fat, however, 24 was a word that I cringed to hear. "You're fat!" was a phrase that filled my eyes with instantaneous tears. If being fat was not enough of a reason for my classmates to torment me, I was also the most studious, frequently breaking the grading curve and receiving top scores in every subject. If I could not be a cheerleader because I could not do a cartwheel or the splits, or a basketball player because I had asthma and could not run, or a pageant queen, I would be the smartest and most well-behaved. I achieved this, along with many other awards and honors, accumulating many more adjectives, but I was still fat, and I was not ever allowed to forget it. I tell this story because these experiences were deeply humiliating, but they are experienced daily in schools, workplaces, homes. Murray, whose feminist perspective helps understand how the dominant framing of fatness affects women and girls, articulates these "daily humiliations” that impact and shape the experiences of fat people. The Fat Female Body provides a number of additional experiences that:

“range from being 'politely' refused a job because 'you don't quite fit with our

image', spurned by a would-be lover because of the perceived repulsiveness of

one's 'fat' flesh, berated by a doctor who looks at the 'fat' woman before him with

barely concealed contempt, or being calmly told by a customer service

representative that 'larger passengers' are required to purchase two airline seats.

These everyday interactions operate to 'shame' the 'fat' woman, to force her to 'see'

her own abject(ed) body." (Murray 5)

For many, the word fat is insulting, and they fear fat because of its general association with the unattractive, grotesque, or despicable. Often, I want to ask how children come to know that fat can be used as a term to hurt someone; unfortunately, it is a question to which the answer is rather obvious. Regardless of the old adage about sticks and stones, words hurt, and they are 25 meant to hurt because of the social meanings they construct and the resulting social consequences of their meanings, including hatred and violence.

Murray claims that "we internalise all the statements made about certain bodies by our society and live them out. These ideals or discourses inform the ways we understand each other, and govern our experiences of, and relations with, the other" (32). Despite the endless taunting from classmates, parental concern over weight, extra pressure in athletics, and bombardment of popular cultural images, it is not easy for a young person to accept her fatness. Comments hurt because people tend to associate body size with personal worth, ability, beauty, value of life. The word’s implications, the violence and trauma that often accompanies being taunted, excluded, or bullied can do serious damage to a person’s emotional and physical well-being because there is nothing to make fat cells smaller or fewer fast enough to never be told again, “you’re fat.” Some of the best advice I received, when a boy pretended to fall off the end of the lunch table bench when I sat down, was to not be a crybaby; it was only a joke. The idea of getting a thicker skin, for me, shifted to sheer hardness and a matter of fact-ness about my size. After a time trying to deny that I was what my classmates said I was, I decided that I would embrace it. I began using a shield of comedy, being the first to acknowledge my fatness and laugh about it, so that no one else could have a chance to notice. On my own, I thought that I could steal their words from their mouths and use them like armor. Something very interesting began to happen; people told me that I was not fat. "You're not fat, Aimee, you're so proportionate," and "If you'd just work out, you have a great figure." While these comments did not quite feel like compliments, somewhere between the taunting, crying, denying and the acceptance, humor, and confrontation, my body changed from fat to proportionate, pretty, and curvy. Shifting meanings indicate the highly 26 rhetorical nature of fat. Fat, as a cell and insulator, is not rhetorical, but as an insult, a descriptor, a joke, a label, fat is highly rhetorical.

The terms and conditions that I used to define and identify myself were created and imposed on me by others, and once I learned to use those terms against “them,” the terms changed, but the shame never ceased. If I was not shamed for being fat, I was shamed for being vulgar, obnoxious, or too in-your-face about my fat body. Murray writes: “We understand the world through our bodies and through our interactions with others, and we make meaning from these constant encounters. Consequently, one is never 'free' of others such that one can reinscribe one's own selfhood as if in a vacuum" (6). So, I learned how to hide my body underneath baggy clothing from the boys’ and men’s department, flattening sports bras and a short haircut so I might be mistaken for a boy on the baseball team. I stopped wearing bathing suits; instead, I swam in t-shirts and shorts, and eventually stayed out of the water entirely. Finally, after years of disordered eating, I tried to eliminate all remnants of the fat, feminine body that plagued me, the body that I could not define, that I could not identify with.

Clearly, it is a difficult task for a person to define, for herself, what fat is because fat is always related to the way that one appears, in a reflection or representation, and the language that a culture has determined effective for communicating what it means to be fat, rhetorically.

Therefore, the definition of fat comes from the historically, culturally, and socially constructed terms and conditions. There is a tendency for dichotomous thinking when it comes to kinds of terms that stratify people. Certainly, I am not attempting to draw "the" line between thin and fat because, just as it is enormously difficult to define fat, it is as challenging to define thin. Again, these definitions are constructed and perpetuated by people over time in a culture. For the purposes of this dissertation project, and my current scholarly discussions of fat, I am defining a 27 fat as an apparent, visible excess of adipose tissue on a human body. As it has become clear in my own fat literacy narrative, being a fat person in the United States comes with a host of challenges as “we are socialized to be ashamed of our bodies and to engage in endless process to alter them, to improve them, to normalise them” (Murray 5). Samantha Murray’s summarization of the dominant framing of fatness in our culture, similarly emphasized by Kwan and Graves in chapter one, “'Fat' women are regarded as sexually unattractive unclean, unhealthy, unintelligent, and unwilling to change. In light of this, 'fat' women are treated with suspicion, and often with quite unabashed hatred and disgust" (Murray 5). While Murray's feminist perspective here seems to exclude the experience of fat men, it is undeniable that men face as much of the same discrimination, as well as uniquely fat male experiences. It is clear, though, that fat is a highly gendered topic.

Anyone who paid attention in science class should remember that, on the cellular level, fat works as insulator, and a protectant against harsh environmental conditions. Scientific studies, though, have mixed messages regarding the value of fat and the excess of it on the body, creating a confusing, yet influential medical narrative. In some reports, mainly those geared toward weight-loss, fat is said to be the cause of certain conditions, like diabetes, for example

(Fowler, Laditka and Laditka). Other studies suggest that those same conditions predispose the body to produce an excess of fat cells. At the same time, other reports say that fat on the body prevents some conditions and actually protects a person against death (Afzal et al.). Studies are interpreted by healthcare professionals, pharmaceutical and medical researchers, which influences the market where it is delivered to the masses. Also, patients are also consumers, which ties together the medical industry and the pharmaceutical companies’ profit objectives. If 28 enough people fear fat, they will buy products, have procedures, and take medications to prevent it. Fat, thus, is also a contested medical issue.

Truly, it was not until I opened the pages of Lessons from the Fat-o-Sphere that I knew that it was possible to question the one thing that had remained constant in my life for a quarter of a century, that my fatness was a problem. The problem penetrated all my relationships, encounters, behaviors, reactions because these are embodied, and my body was problematic.

Indeed, Kate Harding and Marianne Kirby sparked within me a deep desire to question “the relationship between fat and health, question the media reports on [the obesity crisis]” (xv).

Lessons taught me that even though I was fat, I was worth more than platitudes, insults and jokes. Harding and Kirby also introduced me to the Fatosphere (a.k.a. Fat-o-sphere), a place they paint as a community of acceptance and support. They write, “by and large, people are incredibly supportive of each other, which really helps to mitigate all the pressure we get from family, friends, and perfect strangers to feel ashamed of our bodies an try to become thinner” (183).

Faced with this same pressure and shame, and having the great fortune of being technologically literate, I turned to the internet with the hope of finding “my people,” a discourse community, academic or otherwise. There could be a new way of being in the world that I had never thought possible, that could allow me to be a better teacher, a better citizen, and a better person because my body was accepted, even beautiful. The book was well-worth the bargain price I paid as a struggling graduate student.

Self-help books might not often be accepted as a scholarly resource for an academic argument, but reading Harding and Kirby’s work introduced me to a community where I could belong where my size was not considered an offense or that I needed to be prodded, discussed, or diminished. Learning that communities are important locations for scholarly and civic activity 29 and inquiry within the field of rhetoric and composition, as a scholar, was my way of connecting with a community that was monumentally helpful and important to me, as well asking meaningful scholarly questions I have about (digital) citizenship and (personal, internet-ready) technologies for learning and knowledge-making. Thus, Lessons helped me discover a discourse community, the Fatosphere community, with its relatively brief history, its current political state, and its growing number of characters, stars, and scholars who keep it going. This project has allowed me to explore these connections and theorize how rhetoric and composition can benefit from hearing and telling stories from the size acceptance community and learning from their critical, (techno-, lipo-)literate practices.

Fat Studies: The Need for Continuing Critical Inquiry

In the introduction, I began to discuss the growing field of fat studies in academia; thus, part of my purpose in this chapter is to expand and connect some of the key critical discussions about fat and fatness that are taking place inside classrooms, at academic conferences, and in the media. There are several texts that provide perspectives on the fat body, some that are "fat studies" or critical obesity studies that do not necessarily take a positive stance toward the fat body. There are some that might not actually do the critical, ethical work of the new scholarly field that entered the academic conference scene in 2006. What this suggests is that fat studies encompasses more than fat acceptance and obesity. Fat studies, as I understand it, involves looking at the fat body critically, but also critically examining the ways we look at, represent, and treat fat bodies. There are competing narratives and contested views on the fat body, but the dominant ones carry negative and highly damaging implications. Where there is a convergence of language, culture, identity and knowledge, rhetorical scholars have an open invitation to join the fat conversation. 30

Susan Bordo writes, in Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body,

“the construction of body as something apart from the true self (whether conceived as soul, mind, spirit, will, creativity, freedom…) and as undermining the best efforts of that self” (Bordo

5). The fat, female body is looked at, perhaps even more, as “weighed down.” To be a fat woman is to be gross, disgusting, undesirable, unlovable, a worse sinner because of her gluttony and, invoking the very real violence that women face, fat women are more challenging to sexually assault. Indeed, often in popular culture, sexual violence against fat people, but particularly fat women, is used as fodder for comedy. Until recently, it seemed that fat shame and its implications were of no interest to academia. Bordo asserts that discussions of fatness are absent from popular culture because fat women, as we have seen in the multiple ways that fat has been framed in American culture, are beyond the culturally acceptable idea of voluptuousness and their appetites are immoral and sinful, ravenous and gluttonous. Because of this, the woman’s body is a site of political struggle that also is beyond the typical oppressor/oppressed model. Fat shame is systematically accepted and allows for weight discrimination to run rampant.

The hegemonic views at the heart of behavioral models or cultural practices also inform, whether implicitly or explicitly, the ways that healthcare professionals treat patients, employers review their job applicants, students evaluate their teachers, and legislators suggesting policies.

There are, as Kwan and Graves explain, "framing competitions-struggles over the production of ideas and meanings" and these "frames attempt to convince individuals (essentially the general public) that a given frame is, in fact, the best interpretation of reality" (3). Frames are based on embodied beliefs that impact, not only our emotional reactions, but also our physical actions, and they are powerful enough, by design, to spark social and political change by inspiring supporters to act and opponents to back down. An examination of the literature that calls into question and 31 speak back to this dominant rhetorical framing of fatness in American popular culture and media helps further contextualize and understand the discourses that perpetuate the belief that fat is inherently unhealthy, immoral, and unattractive. This dominant framing stems from historically, culturally, and economically situated places, and the resulting discourses take on a variety of different forms in the daily lives of those impacted by fat and fatness, what I will later discuss as

“lipoliteracy.”

There is a gap, Murray notes, in scholarly work and theoretical examination of the fat body. Early studies show relationships between fatness and socioeconomic and sociopolitical status, and there are books that focus on “the daily humiliations and prejudices that face the 'fat' woman in our society” (Murray 7). Only in recent years has there been a shift in research to philosophically and rhetorically consider theorizing the fat body in a ways that construct it positively, and not as “a failure of will and bodily ethics," or attempt to “position the 'fat female body as a site of disease and failure” (Murray 7). Jana Evans Braziel and Kathleen LeBesco, in their 2001 edited collection Bodies Out of Bounds: Fatness and Transgression, begin to discuss

"how to reconceptualize and reconfigure corpulence" (1). The authors question dominant views of fatness, asking how it is constructed in American culture versus others, across social and historical contexts. Braziel and LeBesco delve into how we, scholars, social activists, thinkers, can “transcend the restrictive constructions of corpulence within discourses [. . .] that have accumulated around the site of the 'fat body'” (1). Also, they uncover the paradoxical nature of these discourses, which are competing to construct, contain, and erase the fat body. The authors ask an important question that I have found to be at the heart of fat studies: “How can we begin to resist and deconstruct the discourses that place the 'corpulent body' under erasure, even as they demarcate its discursive terrain?" (Braziel and LeBesco 1). The essays in their collection analyze 32 the contradictory discourses that make the fat body such a contested site, including those that codify, contain, and diagnose the fat body. The authors in the collection also draw attention to the creation of these discourses and proposing “new ways of recognizing the power and politics of corpulence" (8). Further, the authors provide careful consideration of "the gendered constructions of corpulence, analyzing conceptions of masculinity and femininity, size and the literal occupation of space, media representation as related to visibility and invisibility, and social oppression" (Braziel and LeBesco 8).

“Fat studies,” first used as a category at academic conferences in 2006, was born out of the Fat Acceptance movement of the 1960s and the founding of the NAAFA later in that decade, the development of the Fat Underground and the penning of the Fat Liberation Manifesto in the

1970s, the queering of fat body in the 1980s, and contemporary issues of access, social discrimination, and civil rights. The fat studies timeline culminates with the publication of several critical works from Murray, LeBesco, Wann, Rothblum, Solovay, and others. Also, to solidify fat studies’ position as an academic field, The Fat Studies Reader was published in 2009 and the Fat Studies Journal was founded in 2012. As universities are making fat studies part of their academic conversations, the circulation of the reader and the growth of the journal, now in its fourth volume, have sparked other academic journals in recent years to publish special issues regarding fat studies and body positivity.

The Fat Studies Reader editors, Rothblum and Solovay, assure their readers that reading this collection will provide them with the concepts at the heart of fat studies. In particular,

Marilyn Wann provides a foundational overview of the social and historical constructions of fatness, Deb Burgard discusses Health at Every Size, Bianca Wilson speaks from a queer and racial perspective, and Paul Ernsberger addresses weight discrimination. The key issues related 33 to Fat Studies are broad; "including intersectionality (the intersection of oppressions), health, and international and legal issues, as well as history, literature, and popular culture." The editors also provide a brief history of the Fat Acceptance movement. What they intend to do is to introduce

"the broad scope of the field of fat studies in a manner that facilitates the reader's ability to suspend the dominant conception of fat to see the full picture, and recognizing fat as the historically dependent social construction that it is." Later, the book shifts to talking about the way fat is perceived, particularly, "fat as social inequality" and the need to reconsider notions of accommodation, fat as a subject of popular culture, and "coverage of fat people moving, dancing, and engaging in physical exercise." Even getting the reader published, they faced resistance from publishers who also had concerns about "the health risks of obesity" as they sought to question research about such concerns. That is what my project aims to do, and to shed light on the ways that other people are speaking back to those who are share in these anti-fat attitudes. The Fat

Studies Reader, with its multiple voices and perspectives, helps us to understand the connection between weight and health status in a way that does not reinforce the dominant notion that fat automatically indicates that a person is unhealthy. This connection is often made because of socioeconomic position. Many medical healthcare professional operate under “the assumption that poor people are often unhealthy because they are often fat” (Ernsberger). Frequently, in our culture, the poor, fat, unhealthy are often depicted or represented in a similar fashion, and assumptions about people who fit those representations are made and influence how they are treated. All too often, this treatment comes from a place of disgust, pity, shame, and discrimination.

Discrimination prevents fat people from moving forward, from progressing, from gaining their own capital, cultural or economical, or otherwise, and some fat people might be unhealthy 34 because they are also poor. Ernsberger reiterates that "poverty prevents access to quality health care," and that "poverty, stress, and prejudicial medical care" are the factors that cause the diseases that are often associated with obesity because these things impact the obese person.

However, "the driving force behind the concentration of fatness among the poor is social stigma and systematic discrimination, which deprives fat people of the opportunity to move up the social ladder" (Ernsberger). Ernsberger determines that "it cannot be health conditions that hold fat young people back, but only prejudice. Further, health problems are not the cause of this prejudice, because people with health problems do not suffer the same discrimination." Fat people are discriminated against simply because of the way that they look. Amy Farrell says that

"fat stigma is a problem" because "we are simply 'treating' people for the horror of a stigmatized identity, one that has little to do with real, physical health risks" (176). The medicalization of fatness through the promotion of the idea that the fat body, the "obese" body, is diseased, perpetuates and legitimizes the incessant public "concern" and anxiety regarding it. Murray continues: "where bodies are positioned as non-normative, difficult, unwilling to fit, medical science attempts to find physiological anomalies, congenital disorders, or infectious disturbance as reasons for bodily difference" (Murray 16). Fat people are using wider access to internet-ready technologies to speak back against this treatment. Further, fat people, driven by experiences in their doctor’s offices, emergency rooms, and counselor’s chairs, are speaking back against the biases and research and initiatives that influence their treatment, and demanding a Health at

Every Size approach.

The Fat Studies Reader expands on Harding and Kirby’s ideas about Health at Every

Size (HAES), and provides an "alternative to contemporary discourse regarding weight and health." Now, it seems that what we call, “body positivity” and its practices serve the purpose of 35 what HAES started conceptually in the 1970s. Notions of movement for its own sake, for the joy of movement, intuitive eating and anti-dieting, and also questioning of eugenics and industries.

Body positivity, like HAES, involves a rejection of several capitalistic notions. Burgard also discusses the myths related to HAES. Often, these myths are used to critique HAES and other body positive practices today. She offers a HAES model for medical professionals:

HAES is a model that reclaims the worth of our stigmatized bodies and

encourages subversive acts of self-care. We take it as self-evident that people take

better care of the body that they accept and love now than one that they are

punishing for being the source of their ill treatment at the hands of other people.

HAES takes the conventional demand for a 'correct lifestyle' to be worthy and

turns it on its head, demanding access to movement opportunities, compassionate

medical care, delicious and nutritious food, stigma-free environments, and the

right to show up as the unique individuals we are.

With this model, healthcare professionals might begin to rethink their interpretations of medical research and data that might be influenced by capitalistic motivation within industries and markets, their personal biases and opinions that might privilege heteronormative views of sexuality and standards of beauty. Above all, the HAES model seeks to change the generally adhered to approaches to caring for fat people. My project will show how fat rhetors use the internet to speak about their treatment as patients and encourage healthcare professionals to adopt more positive practices.

Another framing of fat in American culture is one based on morality. In such a fat- loathing society, Murray writes, fat people “find themselves in an impossible position, where one must 'transcend' one's body, but transversely cannot precisely control, moral weakness and a 36 failure of will. In other words, one's flesh always already speaks a confession of pathology. It is this conception of the 'fat' body as a 'virtual confessor'" (68). The fat person is commonly seen as one who lacks control, despite the fact that many of us who are fat are also well versed in calorie counting, portions, weights and measurements, due to our extensive experience with dieting and monitoring. There are countless weight-loss groups, organizations, and programs that require monitoring as part of daily rituals and routines. Here, health and the morality of the fat body intersect, especially apparent with the development of organizations that were founded to treat fatness through spiritual means, like Overeaters Anonymous.

Most prominently, the frames surrounding fatness impact what the American public, consumers, find aesthetically pleasing. In the past, scientific studies pointed to attraction in terms of hetero(normative)sexuality where the idea valued above all was procreation, but ultimately male arousal is the overall objective. Amy Farrell notes the 19th century beliefs that "males - whether animal or human - choose mate for feminine qualities like beauty, modesty, passivity, and domesticity" (Farrell 63). From this perspective, experts who possess the language to name things and the power to place things into categories, thereby influencing social values and public opinion, construct hierarchies of race and gender. Poignantly, Murray writes:

“[O]besity' is not a communicable infectious disease, and thus does not strictly

adhere to the medical definition of an epidemic. Nevertheless, due to the

increasing global numbers of 'obese' subjects, a panic has ensued. It has emerged

as a profound social infection, despite its non-infectious character. 'Obesity' then,

is less a biological infection of tissue and cells, than one of moral standards of

Western bodily aesthetics." (16) 37

Truly, this is exemplified in every grocery store checkout lane or television commercial, and by the multi-billion dollar fashion and beauty industry. Regarding American beauty ideals, prior to the industrial revolution, fat was a signifier of wealth and good health. The stabilization of food supply, industrialization and technological changes, and an emphasis on upward mobility fostered shifting views of body size. Thin was in, as a sign of high social standing by the 1920s.

As we saw earlier, the mid-20th century brought the medicalization of fatness, prescribed treatments and new diagnoses, leading to the stigmatization of fat patients by healthcare providers.

Presently, medical practice, culturally constructed beauty ideals, and capitalism have converged upon the modern fat body. Doctors are trained in the practice of cosmetic and weight- loss surgery, doctors who are some of the highest paid medical professionals. Elective surgeries for aesthetic purposes are a lucrative business, as people are willing to pay millions to achieve a more culturally ideal figure or look. Marilyn Wann’s Fat!So? provides a timeline of the treatments for fatness since 1893. Over a century, people have been damaging, cutting, poisoning, smashing, slicing, and pulling their bodies apart for the sake of beauty. Because of the belief that women should be partnered sexually with males and males only partner with attractive mates, fat women, in particular, face an endless barrage of advertisements, articles, diets, products, and supplements that encourage them to reshape their bodies because their fat is repugnant to the opposite sex. The relationship between procreative sexual activity and romantic love is inextricably tied in contemporary culture; thus, the fat body is also seen as unlovable, unworthy of love, or incapable of love because of selfish, gluttonous appetites.

Kwan and Graves draw upon the critical obesity scholars Don Kulick and Anne Meneley, whose work Fat: The Anthropology of an Obsession provides differing Non-Western cultural 38 perspectives on the aesthetic value of the fat body. It might come as no surprise that some cultures idealize the fat body, even force-feeding girls until they are obese (according to

American standards). I think, here, however, it is important to note that forcing women and girls in any capacity to achieve a body size for marital or patriarchal systematic reasons does not represent a body positive rhetoric. Indeed, cultures read the fat body differently, but ones that impose body and beauty standards for purposes of heteronormative, violent, and oppressive treatment, of women and girls especially, are not to be seen as a hallmark or ideal. Such activity does equally as much damage as fat shame and anti-fat bias.

There is never a truly subversive model of beauty, according to Bordo, because there are

“acceptable” levels of ethnic, racial, or size diversity within American popular culture, like the fashion industry. For instance, just as most Black models are light-skinned and have Anglo features, plus size models still must be tall and have standard proportions. There are few obese models in the fashion industry, and there are very few obese female actresses in television and film who are seen as main characters, heroines, or romantic figures. The connections that Bordo builds between the female body and Western culture, the “tyranny of slenderness,” puts the fatosphere community writing firmly into context, as the marginalization of fat people is what users write about, ultimately, as they discuss recent news, personal experiences, advertisements, etc. Harding and Kirby reference Bordo in Lessons from the Fat-O-Sphere as what led them to realize “the oppressiveness of our beauty ideals and the possibility of living happily in a fat body” (Harding and Kirby 179). In an American framework of fat representation, fat bodies are scrutinized for their abundance and excess, and they are seen as the hyperbolized example of

American consumerism, scarfing down McDonald’s cheeseburgers with Diet Coke, sedentary lifestyles, and health problems. FA in academic inquiry works against such frames. 39

New Modes for Fat Studies: Exploring the Fatosphere

The use of the internet to create "virtual communities of support" (Still 36), activist spaces, and political movements, has given marginalized people some control of their own bodies, their conditions, and their identities. Brian Still acknowledges the limitations of the internet, but asserts that virtual meeting spaces allow marginalized people somewhere their identities as individuals and as a community can be constructed and nurtured. Still, like many rhetoricians, asserts that storytelling can be a powerful rhetorical act, particularly by those who have been silent and silenced. While the vision might seem utopian, in an online community, the reality is, people can share their stories and their stories are heard. Not only does it impact the person telling the story, but also the people with whom the story is shared. Still's work with

Online Intersex Communities shows how it is possible to perform ethical online research, which explains, or begins to explain, how virtual neighborhoods (Rheingold, too) help "create alternative rhetoric" (129), or different rhetorical options to support activist efforts, in my case, fat activism. Still remarks on the important nature of this kind of research because the rhetoric and the activism of marginalized groups “remains unsettled and requires additional discussion”

(129).

As we have seen so far, similar to intersex (queer, disabled, etc.), fat is a contested term and "[t]he controversy surrounding its definition, even how it should be named, illustrates its social construction and the struggle that occurs, one point at a time, in the constant flux that is that construction” (Still 131). Fortunately, the public discussions and heated debates indicate that fat people can, and will, be heard in the struggle to determine their own identity, story, and rhetoric. Poignantly, Still writes, “Over time, identity has been rearticulated, and as the culture changes, the identity changes, just as the changing of that identity, the contributions that come 40 from it, change the culture” (131). It is with this hope that I carry out this project, and the virtual communities that will be represented in the discussions ahead will be given thoughtful, respectful consideration as I explore the ways that they are working to make their own changes as scholars and activists in an online space, or cyberactivists. This begins with the reading of these communities for the ways that they use language to build identities and form communities because “identity has been a concern for digital rhetoric since the advent of networking technologies” (Eyman 77).

21st century academics are notoriously tech savvy, as it was they who first used their computers and the internet to connect with each other through email lists and discussion groups.

The earliest virtual communities formed out of academic discussions about the technology itself, personal connections with fellow academics, and the need to share and receive information. As

Howard Rheingold suggests, "virtual communities are social aggregations that emerge from the

Net when enough people carry on those public discussions long enough, with sufficient human feeling, to form webs of personal relationships in cyberspace" (5). For instance, in their chapter

“Technological Fronts: Lesbian Lives ‘On-the-Line’” in Feminist Cyberscapes, Addison and

Hilligoss discuss how it is important to talk about how people create identity online. Further reading the community spaces will show how fat activists use the affordances of the internet and the community space of the Fatosphere to construct a fat identity that is not constrained by the dominant framing we have seen here. It is even an act of empowerment to use the technology that is generally dominated by the same oppression of the real world. Activism, online, as well as off, is risky, but in a community/heterotopia, people do support one another, and while bullies and “net evil” cannot be prevented all the time, there are enough supporters to squelch the violence and administrators who have the ability to delete and monitor and remove people who 41 wish to harm others in those spaces. Addison and Hilligoss support that “to come out online is

[to] articulate an identity that our society works to render invisible” (38). When people are able to engage with body positivity, fat studies, fat acceptance, and fat activism, a shift in the destructive discourses surrounding fat can occur and new fat rhetorics can arise.

Rheingold believes that community formation online is a very natural evolution with people and their technologies: "whenever CMC technology becomes available to people anywhere, they inevitably build virtual communities with it, just as microorganisms inevitably create colonies" (6). Hawisher and Sullivan would liken the online community of the fatosphere to Foucault’s heterotopia, a countersite with multiple visions (of spaces and things). As we have seen, fat studies itself is multivocal, multidisciplinary, and situated online and off. In their chapter in Feminism and Composition Studies, the authors say that a well-formed community has an understandable form and function. Based on this definition, the fatosphere has had enough time and participation to have form and function, as subsequent chapters will explore.

Foucault’s notion of the heterotopic, in contrast to the utopic, space is valuable when justifying considering the fatosphere a community, thus a worthy site for exploration. A heterotopia is a site within a culture that forms at a particular time in a particular space, whether real or imagined. Considered a countersite, a heterotopia joins together diverse members, all joining for similar purposes. Foucault’s first principle of heterotopias insists that every society forms heterotopias, just as Rheingold suggests that communities are bound to form online.

Secondly, society shapes hetertopias to serve their functions. Like a stage, Foucault muses, “the heterotopia is capable of juxtaposing, in a single real place several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible” (6). Heterotopias are also closely related to Kairos, in that they are associated with moments, events, or “slices of time” (Foucault 6). Further, Foucault asserts that 42

“the heterotopic site is not freely accessible like a public space” (7). For my discussions online communities, Foucault doesn’t quite go far enough, here. Certainly, public places are not freely accessible to all people. Many people are shamed and discriminated against. Not everyone can enter all places. It is easier to enter the public space of the internet, particularly, what is kept public. Ethically, this is how I chose my spaces for exploration. No payment, or signing in is required to access the sites that I analyzed. To access the activist community of the fatosphere, one only needs an internet-ready device, which are growing in number, accessibility, and affordability.

Perhaps more so than Hawisher and Sullivan’s feminist e-spaces, the fatosphere’s activist spaces seem currently to fit Foucault’s definition. Technology allows us to enter the hetertopias

(as there are many at work, some fully developed in the way that Foucault would suggest, but also there are ones that are experimental from the early days of the internet. The internet, or society acting on the internet, has formed both kinds of heterotopias, and probably new variations that are specific to technology. For now, we can use Foucault’s idea as a way to understand the internet as a space where people can people can “live” where they “dwell” and where culture is represented and inverted. The fatosphere serves the function of Foucault’s heterotopia of crisis and deviation. Fat people are experiencing crisis in their daily lives, so they use the internet as a place to live openly with courage; even when those spaces are deemed unsafe, the utopia is clearly not possible. Further, in “real” society, fat people have been labeled as deviant through dominant narratives, so the heterotopic fatosphere provides the space for alternatives to be explored. The blurred lines between public and private spaces on the internet are a challenge to researchers, but activism is public and activist spaces are public and should be public, if they are to do the work that they desire. The fatosphere is a virtual neighborhood 43

(Rheingold), an online community (Still), a virtual heterotopia (Foucault, Hawisher and

Sullivan), and the internet is a place where people live, dwell, and make identities. Hawisher and

Sullivan show that these heterotopic e-spaces are multivocal, as they should be. With the availability of so many platforms and affordances, people can do the work of fat studies, fat activism, body positivity, etc. and help contribute to shifting or new fat rhetorics.

There are attacks online and off for fat people, but online, Hawisher and Sullivan call it

“net evil.” In later chapters, I analyze the very public activist spaces that enact several practices to combat this net evil as well as the evil they face, out in public and society. The fear associated with public gathering and the feeling of being shunned by society, many fat people have found the appeal of online life. Just as “feminists must harness the new technologies to serve their own just political and social goals” (Hawisher and Sullivan 193), body positive, fat activists, and fat studies scholars must also use their available technological means to achieve rhetorical and political empowerment, as well as social change toward a more positive discourse regarding the fat body. While not all fat people online are activists, and not all fat activists are online, the

Fatosphere is an available platform. These fat rhetors have no shortage of technological knowledge and skill with which to create, circulate, and recirculate information rapidly, what

Sheridan, Ridolfo and Michel call, “rhetorical velocity.” In subsequent chapters, I analyze online fat rhetors’ use of language, their access to technology, and their ability to create and adapt to new genres with technology.

Recognizing the fatosphere’s activist spaces as a heterotopia, and the political work that is done there as a countersite to real society could potentially help to develop more positive discourse surrounding fat and more positive fat identity. Whereas LeBesco characterizes "the physical setting of the on-line discussion groups presents as invisible, text-only space for 44 representing the fat body" (99), Web 2.0 provides spaces where fat activists can show their bodies. In subsequent chapters, I delve into the public spaces on the Internet where people are posting pictures and text to accompany them. They are able to use their advanced personal technologies to do this activist work. Social media, blogs, and other e-spaces still maintain conversations like those that LeBesco mentions: "from banter about where to buy specialty clothing and equipment, to discussions about the relationship of embodiment to sexuality, to exchanges of support for participants facing discrimination from employers or medical doctors.

Occasionally, the sites are used as advertising space for upcoming events of interest to many of the participants” (101). Before turning to these sites, chapter three provides an explanation of the methods and methodologies for performing online, rhetorical and social research.

LeBesco notes the use of code names between participants and the frequency of posts.

What I want to show is how this has changed or evolved to meet the rapidly transforming technologies. The dynamics of the spaces she investigates are rather dated. With my project, I intend to show how the advent of social media and new digital, rhetorical genres used and created by increasingly more people allow for exponentially more advanced, rapid communication. LeBesco discusses the fact that these "are not communities in the traditional sense" because of the asynchronous nature of posting and communicating. However, nowadays, the internet and the ubiquity of personal, handheld technologies with internet capabilities, communities are formed much faster with various practices. Now, more than ever, people have at their fingertips video recording devices, social networking, and media sharing websites that allow for instantaneous release of images and representations that have the potential to reach a wide audience. The shared experience of fat people who have encountered and felt the oppression of dominant discourse converging at this kairotic moment when questioning and 45 rethinking the meanings of fat in our culture has provided the “slice of time” that Foucault associated with the formation of heterotopia. The Fatosphere is such a heterotopia, as it is a network of fat rhetors, belonging to different ethnicities, cultures, sexualities etc., that have joined together digitally through the power they have gained through their digital devices.

Internet-ready technologies provide the power to enter into and participate in the virtual heterotopia of the Fatosphere in a variety of ways.

The Fat Cyborgs are Coming

As Foucault says, heterotopias form outside of actual society to perform a function for a certain number of people in need. Online, LeBesco writes that there is a "vital social function of these communities" because "users perceive themselves as outsiders of their regularly inhabited communities" (102). Offline, in real spaces, it can be uncomfortable for fat people to gather in public, believe it or not. People often ridicule, mock, and comment when fat people congregate.

While this is played off as comedy, the joke is never-ending. It should be no surprise that "the anonymity of cyberspace that is most attractive; the fact that they exist on-line only as words detached from their bodies frees them for less self-conscious reflection about the nature of their embodied experiences" (LeBesco 103). It is true that the internet provides this anonymity; however, in the next chapter, we will see how the heterotopia of the fatosphere has shifted its function to serve an activist and political function for the advancement of fat people and the movement to end weight discrimination.

In LeBesco's research, in the early days of the internet, the online list was "a safe space for exposing the contradictions that can be used against fat people by people who don't share their perspective of fat acceptance" (103). Today, blogs and other Web 2.0 affordances allow fat people to not only use text and language to reclaim and create a positive identity, but to change 46 the way that society views the fat body. As we will see, the activist spaces within the fatosphere indicate that “fat should be positively connoted but not watered down, not used to refer to bodies that really aren't fat” (LeBesco 105). Rather than asking what is an authentically fat body is or how the fat cyborg correlates to a real world body, I am more interested in understanding how the fat body is broadly created and represented online. In other words, I explore the world of the fat cyborg. Donna Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” coincidentally written the year I was born, frames the cyborg as a hybrid creature that is part animal and part machine. While visions of sci-fi films are evoked with this definition, Haraway’s cyborg provides a particularly helpful way of understanding contemporary rhetors, as “a condensed image of both imagination and material reality” (150)

What seems to perfectly describe active participants in the Fatosphere, Haraway writes: “The

Cyborg is resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity. [. . .] No longer structured by the polarity of public and private, the cyborg defines a technological polis based partly on a revolution of social relations [. . .]” (151). But how can a cyborg be fat? Haraway might contend that anyone who is on the web, nowadays, is a cyborg; thus, fat rhetors online are using their skills as cyborg for displaying, circulating, and engaging with bodies, which has been challenging historically, but has recently become possible through the growth of personal, mobile technologies. Using their power as digital rhetoricians and cyborgs, fat rhetors are renegotiating the fat body across multiple frames, conversations, and disciplines.

LeBesco asserts that "fatness can be reconfigured from a spoiled identity to a proudly inhabited one by using any number of strategies aimed at entering fat bodies into discourse proudly and publicly. This task, though, is never easy and is very risky" (107-108). Certainly, one cannot enter a heterotopia freely, and users must be able to use appropriate language and 47 symbols. However, fat should always be used to describe one positively. More body positive conversations and representations online are empowering and "effective forms of political action” (LeBesco 109). However, while “2007 was the Year of the Fat Blog” (Harding and Kirby

183), by 2012, the majority of the blogs that Harding and Kirby praised were no longer operating. Eyman notes the ephemeral nature of digital genres, which also pose challenges to researchers attempting to understand them. Certainly, any exploration of a virtual heterotopia like the Fatosphere would reiterate that “websites are not stable entities that are fixed, and many become inaccessible by ceasing to exist” (Eyman 111). The ephemerality of the Fatosphere provides anyone identified as fat with a space outside the challenges of living in their fat bodies where they can explore alternatives to their treatment, representations, and meanings. In later chapters, I discuss a few of these blogs, as well as the new FA communities within the fatosphere where activists are dwelling and writing. The community atmosphere is not as friendly or as accepting as first described, and, as we will come to see, this is due, in part, to the exponential growth of participants on the web. Regardless, online fat activism is growing, like the field of fat studies, and it is increasingly important to examine language communities that have active communication.

I have chosen online fat activist spaces because, like LeBesco in Revolting Bodies, as a rhetoric and composition scholar, I seek to understand “how agency works through language, though interaction, as a means for positioning an inhabitable subjectivity for fat people, and thus

I am most compelled to look at the ways in which they address themselves when speaking and writing" (3). By looking at the ways that fat people talk about and represent themselves, form communities, and work against dominating narratives of fatness, I can not only uncover

“alternative understandings of subjectivity, body politics, public knowledge of 'fatness', and 48 philosophies of embodiment, but also the possibility of new ways of (re)reading the 'fat' body of the 'other' that may in turn foster more productive social relations" (Murray 6-7). I hope to help develop, or contribute to knowledge of fat rhetorics, and the various spaces and places for discussing, in many different ways, what it means to be fat.

BUILDING A METHODOLOGY FOR EXPLORING THE FATOSPHERE

“This self exceeds language; its meanings overflow, and spill off of the computer screen. The

self in its plentitude can never be reduced to the traces on this screen. The self and its meanings

are always in motion.” (Denzin 10)

Being Lipoliterate: When Did You Know You Were Fat?

In chapter two, I brought forward a number of conversations at work in the multivocal field of fat studies, and began to identify the various modes through which the fat body is represented. These modes sometimes involve dominant, oppressive practices perpetuated by people and industries seeking to exploit the body: a social, historical, and cultural narrative of fat shame; counter-narratives to the systematic slicing and silencing of flesh; and the stories of fat individuals that encourage more positive discourse when representing, not only the fat body, but all bodies. Fat studies work is activist work, and as an activist researcher, I have revealed my own lipoliteracy narrative with the hope of contributing to changing the damaging and traumatizing ways that fat bodies (as well as colorful, oddly shaped, queer, and disabled bodies) are treated. It has become clear during my research that when people are presented with this project, they immediately tell their own story, or in some way reveal their own lipoliteracy.

The gaps in industry, medicine, psychology, and society that I identified in the first two chapters through the telling of my story represent, for many fat people, very real trauma and crisis. As Foucault theorized, in times of crisis, people within a culture will often create virtual communities that serve as supportive, albeit temporary solace, or heterotopias. Crisis heterotopias, according to Foucault, take on many forms, and are shaped by the participants themselves. These participants unify through shared experience; potentially, only a single shared experience can build a temporary community of support. For fat people, the crisis exists on 50 personal and collective levels, from daily humiliations to governmental campaigns against obesity, forcing them into the margins. From the margins, the metamorphosis of rhetoric begins.

Over time, as we saw in the timeline in chapter two, the manifestation of alternative fat rhetorics by rhetorically (and technologically) savvy fat people led to the public formations of the Fat

Acceptance movement, the NAAFA, and the Fat Underground in the 1960s and 70s, culminating into what, today, is a transnational movement toward positive body discourse and body positive practices.

In this chapter, I establish the theoretical and methodological foundation for my project, beginning with a brief discussion of the Fatosphere, my research site, and the (inter)connections I have made with it and the participants within it. Returning to my research questions, I contextualize my project in conversations about technology, history, and social justice. I also address my project’s purposes, as I see there are several. Taking a stance of a methodological bricoleur, I borrow research practices from humanism and feminism for data collection and analysis. Further, given the networked nature of the research site and participants within, data analysis, moreover, involves a layering and borrowing of methods from digital rhetoric, as well as sociology. In this chapter, I have additionally grappled with ethical concerns working at this site and with these methods, including dealing with the challenges of working through trial and error, as well as experiencing what seemed like failures as a researcher.

Intervening Technologically

Interestingly, the information age has brought about the body monitoring age, with the advent of the Fitbit, and even pill-sized computers that monitor the body internally and report data directly to a doctor’s computer. Faster, more affordable transportation results in the limiting of seat size and increasing costs for fat travelers. Smaller, more precise robotics result in more 51 surgical fat removal. The possibilities present a push and pull of opinions and, to be sure, there are tremendous, life-saving or life-enhancing benefits, but consequently, more effective and efficient technology means that we can more effectively and efficiently avoid becoming fat and make fat people disappear. Part of the questioning of dominant fat rhetorics should involve examining whether and how technologies assist medical professionals in silencing fat patients and denying them equal medical care due to anti-fat biases. Rhetorical studies of medical monitoring technologies are already being done, and I predict more will follow, on a range of topics from gastric bypass surgery to fetal ultrasound devices. For instance, in their 2013

Computers and Writing conference presentation, Haas, Frost, Arola, and Smyser-Fauble

“interrogate[s] how reproductive technologies and Facebook have changed the ways in which we compose and perceive our bodies and embodied experiences.” These studies reveal that there are much larger and contradictory implications where technology is concerned in the healthcare industry, which should be concerned with the overall health of citizens, but rather perpetuates patterns of oppression, erasure, silencing, eugenics, and violence.

Another aspect of this important technological questioning requires an unveiling of the underlying power of the almighty dollar, particularly in a capitalistic system, one where politics, power, and profit are inextricably tied. Often, industries build marketing relationships around particular demographics of people, like fat people, for instance; and through the power of advertising, visual rhetoric, and mass marketing, the general public is swayed. This can be seen particularly in the diet and fitness industry, with investments in fashion, media, and entertainment industries. Billions of dollars circulate within an industry whose message is that a thin, tone, tan—yet white—body is perfection, with even more billions invested into advancing technologies to recreate that body, physically and digitally, surgically and “naturally,” textually 52 and visually. My aim with this project is show how fat people are recreating themselves using the technologies available to them.

Donna Haraway’s cyborgian theory helps to shed light on the relationship between the body and technology. Particularly in this contemporary time of ubiquitous computing, or what

Hirst calls “the Digital Sublime,” and internet-capable technology, the lines between online and offline, flesh and fantasy, private and public, are blurred if not erased altogether, for some users, resulting in a continuum of human existence in hybrid digital and “real” spaces. Increased availability and affordability of internet access and ease of use of computer technologies have given rise to an enormous number of participants on the Web. Rather than corporations, academics, and coding-specialists having reign over the internet, Web 2.0 provides users with a near limitless space for communication, connection, and collective action for infinite purposes and causes. People inhabit the internet, as they do neighborhoods, building communities, constructing identities, and performing political and social activities; thus, “technology and social relations dance with and around each other, taking turns to lead” (Hirst). Mirroring familiar societal formations, the internet provides cyborgs, those of us with deep connection to technology, the space to develop heterotopias reconceptualized digitally.

Contemporary technologies and technological advancement are theorized beyond determinism and relativism. Hirst writes: “A technological expansion of individualism – mobile- computing and continuous access to continuously scrolling information – is also an expansion of alienation and a further embedding of commodity fetishism into our daily lives.” Rather than viewing technology through one lens or another, it is important to recognize the dialectic that is occurring between society and technologies, a push and pull of ideas, shaping and reshaping of the social world. Hirst’s notion of “Mutual Constitution” or “Multiple Determination” recognizes 53 that this social world “is complex and lies in the actions of one force or another that is also pushing back in both a linear and nonlinear fashion.” Regardless of how technology is viewed theoretically, I understand technology as a complicated, nebulous tool, a means, but its uses are as vastly different as its users, and technology can become embodied within the user.

Entering the Fatosphere

Like the intersex patients in Brian Still’s Online Intersex Communities, I see fat people using technology to speak back, a practice that I have participated in myself. The internet provides a platform for the telling of their stories and constructing identities as individuals and as

Fatosphere community members. Participating in the movement toward alternative fat rhetorics involves the telling of one’s lipoliteracy narrative, as I have done in the previous two chapters, and continue to weave into the following chapters. Storytelling produces “new truths, often not heard before, that resonate beyond where they occur, no longer hidden but available now via a simple search, a suggestion from someone who tells someone else to go to a specific site, that there are answers there or others that will understand and offer support” (Still 36-37). Web 2.0 technologies make space for new media, like websites, blogs, and social media that fat people are using to show the very real gaps in dominant discourses surrounding the body in the media, medicine, and culture. However, the push back against dominant narratives is not always well- received face-to-face. The ubiquity, yet ephemerality of the internet provides instantaneous audiences for fat people (and allies) to be heard. Those who participate there are activists either intentionally or accidentally as they engage in the continuation of discussion about the fat body.

So is the nature of cyberactivism

In chapter one, I introduced the Fatosphere, what I now theorize as a digital heterotopia within the larger, networked communities of the internet where alternative fat rhetorics are 54 currently being created, disseminated, and archived. To access this heterotopia, one merely needs access to the internet and some experience related to fatness, but also the knowledge of where to look. Participants within the Fatosphere confront oppressors or “haters” with new “truths,” and reactions to them suggest “that we need to pay closer attention to other dimensions of subjectivity and their role in political struggle” (Uzelman 25). The Fatosphere is the digital manifestation of the greater Fat Acceptance movement that is occurring in “real life.” The

Fatosphere becomes Fat Rhetorics’ connection to technology, to the internet, and, thus, is my research site.

Researching with Purpose in the Digital Realm

Warnick and Heineman propose that “[s]tudying rhetoric online requires grappling with new technologies and with ongoing changes in how people communicate with one another, form collectives, participate as citizens, and use rhetorical processes to shape a worldview” (29). The overarching purpose of my research is to gain understanding, first and foremost, of the diverse ways that people can use the internet and their relationships with technology to build and maintain transnational, activist fat acceptance communities when the very nature of the internet is liminal, always changing, transitioning, and flowing. To perform this research, I have to maintain an open mind and genuine curiosity. Markham writes:

Our understanding comes in moments, fragments, glimpses. We may shift our

interpretation based on any number of things that happen outside the context we

study or long after we have collected our data – conversations that spark new

ideas, scents on the wind that provoke particular memories, dreams. The fields we

live in as we interpret and write our research overlap with the fields of inquiry in 55

meaningful ways, a fact that we should neither ignore nor deny. We make

choices, consciously or unconsciously, throughout the research process. (157)

The very personal purpose for this project is to learn from people who are at various points in their own lipoliteracy narrative and stages of accepting their bodies. I do this to also continue developing my own narrative, and making more positive changes within my body acceptance journey.

Nancy Naples writes that a feminist researcher should always be enacting reflective and dialogic practices, as “these interrelated processes are especially useful for making conscious what’s at stake for use as feminist researchers [. . .]. In order to render visible what is at stake in the knowledge production process, reflective practices provide valuable tools through the research and writing process” (32). Consequently, as an insider to the community, I am aware of the dangerous and unstable atmosphere (real or virtual) can be when fat body enters, or when more than one fat body enters the scene. As a writing and rhetoric scholar and researcher, however, my purpose is to learn, observe, and reflect upon the ways that a community uses literate activity in tandem with their political activity.

To fulfill these purposes, I ask:

o How are fat activists using the affordances of the internet to do activist work?

More specifically, how are fat activists using Web 2.0, new media, to fulfill their

political and personal agendas?

o How do fat activists currently build communities online?

o How do fat activists negotiate, not only "physicality" or materiality of the online

spaces, but their identities within community places? 56

o Finally, how do fat activists construct alternative, or new representations of fat

that promulgate more positive rhetoric surrounding fatness; rather than

perpetuating the current rhetoric of shame?

Asking these questions, I have invited a number of different disciplines, scholars, activists, and audiences to join me in my exploration of just some of the ways that fat people are using their access to technology, which would systematically be used at every juncture to erase them, to speak back against the social imaginary of fat shame, and to replace it with one of acceptance.

Additionally, I have employed mixed methods of interviews, data mining, and distant reading to help me answer my questions.

Adapting, Problematizing, and Questioning: Methodology as Bricolage

Denzin encourages the researcher working in online environments to become a bricoleur, one who uses adaptive methods and allow the problems and questions that arise from the investigation guide the research in its next steps. Denzin writes:

A methodological Bricoleur, the online research becomes adept at performing a

wide range of tasks, from online interviews, to conducting virtual focus groups, to

lurking to doing discourse analysis of conversational threads. The online bricoleur

is theoretically sophisticated, able to move back and forth through multiple

theoretical spaces, from feminism, to critical and queer theory, to Marxism and

cultural studies. The research-as-bricoleur theorist works between and within

competing and overlapping perspectives and paradigms. (3)

Online researchers must be flexible. My methodology for this project is as complicated, multidisciplinary, and multivocal as Fat Studies itself. The conversations I see at work are complex, layered ones that are present across several scholarly realms. At the heart of the 57 methodology is rhetoric, which I understand as systems of practices for living, acting, and knowing. Within these systems are all the ways of making meaning, communicating, and persuading. Continued use of these systems forms discourse communities. Exploring the discourse community of the Fatosphere, or the digital/online life of the Fat Acceptance

Movement, for me as a bricoleur, has involved feminist, communitarian and humanist approaches, which lend themselves to mixed methods for data collection and analysis.

I draw from humanism as I work at the intersection of history, memory, and personal identity. Subsequently, I place importance on human experience as a marker of ethos for my participants, as well as how I support my own ethos. Humanism also situates participants in a social world of collaboration. Participants’ stories and interaction become the data I collect to help answer the questions I have asked above. Additionally, feminism helps me justify the view that the personal is political, not only in my topic choice, but also in the data I collect. In addition, feminism also makes space for discussion of alternative narratives and places value on the voices coming from the margins. In previous chapters, I determined that fat is a feminist issue, because the female body (cis, trans, identified) is under attack by systems of domination, particularly the bodies that do not appeal to the standards of beauty preferred by the heteronormative, (cis) male gaze. At the heart of feminist inquiry are the social inequalities and economic inequities that plague fat people.

I have already written extensively about the importance of technology where my project is concerned, but in terms of methodology, I have worked under the assumption that technology serves as both a methodological apparatus for locating participants, as well as the research site and the devices for gathering and analyzing data. Just as rhetoric touches all parts of this project, technology, particularly computers and internet-ready devices, plays an essential role. Because of 58 this, words like cyber, online, and techno- can be attached to each of the methodological approaches and research paradigms that I am putting to work here. Web 2.0 has provided the location, the affordances, and the space for virtual communities and for my online social research of them through new media and social media. Eyman writes that digital rhetoric “should take into account the complications of the affordances of digital practices, including circulation, interaction, and the engagement of multiple symbol systems within rhetorical objects, and its methods need to explicitly engage those complications and affordances” (93). What ties (techno) feminism, (cyborg) humanism, technology and (digital) rhetoric together for this project is

Cyberactivism. Frequently, in rhetoric and composition, scholars are concerned with issues of agency, social change, and representation, each of what I associate with the politics of activist work. The field strives to make space for marginalized voices of participants and scholars, but rarely is the voice of the fat activist, the fat student, the fat teacher heard at our conferences or in our publications. While some scholars might identify as fat and chose not to address issues related to fatness in their scholarship, there are others who are opting to make their fat bodies the subject of their work and topics of their conference talks, like Katie Manthey, a writing center administrator and cyberactivist, with her website Dress Profesh. Picking up with Manthey’s recent work, I explore sites within the Fatosphere with a desire to understand how we, scholars, activists, writers, writing teachers, can use the internet for positive change, personal agency and rhetorical power.

Accepting Initial Big, Fat Failures

The initial sites for this exploration were chosen based on a Google search for Fat

Acceptance three years ago after reading Kirby and Harding’s Lessons from the Fat-o-sphere. At that point in my doctoral work, as a first-year student, I was taking a course on community 59 literacies, and was curious about online communities, and into the Fatosphere I ventured. With my first project, I was simply interested in proving that there was an online community of fat people, and that they enacted practices to sustain that community. Googling FA in 2012 produced a much different set of results than today. Very early on in the results, perhaps below the Wikipedia entry for FA, was the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance (NAAFA).

However, there was very little of what I thought of as community happening. There was no interaction, no connection, or, at least, none that I could see at that time. Early studies of virtual communities (Rheingold) reveal that online, people can join together for a short or extended time, in a combination of synchronous and asynchronous activities, allowing them to participate in a variety of ways. Also, as an internet user, I was familiar enough with the notions of interactivity, comment features, and replying. Expecting more interactivity, I became disheartened by the lack of commentary from readers on the NAAFA website because I was seeking some assurance that people actually supported this way of thinking, that I wasn’t alone.

Taking a page from Kirby and Harding’s book, I modified my search to include the term fatosphere, which produced drastically different results. Kirby and Harding presented the

Fatosphere as a utopian, supportive space where I would learn to love my body and find my people, but by the time that I found the blogs they discussed, they were no longer posting.

Instead, I followed the Fierce, Freethinking Fatties and Dances with Fat, both blogs that I found through my Google search of fatosphere, the name the people who were writing, working, and collaborating in the space gave to it themselves. This idea would not become as significant until I realized the importance of group identification and the assemblages (Latour) that form when we converge with technologies. In 2013, these blogs were prolific, releasing posts nearly every day, and it was exciting to a new online social researcher. In the time that I had that semester, I 60 attempted to compare the blogs, individually, to “real” communities, giving an abysmal treatment of Gee’s affinity spaces, and so-and-so’s digital turn in narrative studies. I soon realized that this was a fruitless endeavor because blogs simply cannot be communities.

Regardless of how I tried to make Fierce, Freethinking Fatties fit the description of community, the blog continued to look less and less like one, and I looked like a fan girl rather than a scholar.

Hall, Frederick and Johns write that “[c]laiming the title of an online researcher indicates that one has had extensive interaction with an online community, and that one’s identity and purpose are known and accepted by the members of the community” (248). The time spent sitting with the community, listening to them through observations and interviews, and the critical reflection on their work, had not yet happened, and I certainly had not come to terms with my own lipoliteracy. Once I could identify when I first realized I was fat, and the implications of that realization over time, I could participate in the space, becoming an insider to the community

(Naples).

What I also failed to understand with that early project is that inside the looking glass of the internet, the notion of community, like the notions of identity, education, and economy that relate to “real world” events, activities, and interactionns, is distorted. While the digital realm is no less real, it operates within its own reality. In the three years since this project began, I have also gained a deeper understanding of the vastness and fluidity of the networked web. The

Fierce, Freethinking Fatties, then, I could visualize as a node, as one part that could not be necessarily separated from the larger Fatosphere, and unable to sustain an entire activist community on its own. My view of the Fatosphere was too narrow because the Fatosphere that

Harding and Kirby knew in 2009 had changed, drastically. As an internet genre, a practice of

Web 2.0, blogs, I realized, are only one aspect of the community-building power of the internet. 61

Embracing Bricolaged and Hybrid Data

Becoming a methodological bricoleur, I have employed mixed methods to gather both qualitative and quantitative data. The qualitative data that I have gathered are the stories and the lipoliteracy narratives that activists are telling online. These stories help to answer how fat activists are currently building community. Through the feminist, discursive methods of searching, reading and listening, I look back to observe former practices, and to map shifting practices, and see the inception of new practices over time. Critical listening and looking help me to see commonalities in the texts, communal and community activities, like interactions, communication, events, live chats, and a myriad of other modes. For example, when a FA blog I was researching was suddenly shut down, I had no access to its archives; however, after searching on the blog’s social media profile, I was able to locate an affiliate page that held old posts. Writing, posting, and archiving contribute to the Fatosphere community, and these

“[r]hetorical acts [. . .] such as telling stories or offering advice, can be called materials, the metaphorical nails, wood, and concrete that construct and maintain productive rhetoric enabling logos, pathos, and ethos necessary for rhetoric, including the rhetoric [. . .] to be effective and powerful” (Still 63-64). Analyzing these texts, later in chapter four, helps to answer my questions regarding fat activists’ negotiation of online identities, as well as how they are creating new representations of fat and fatness.

In addition to the stories that I have been finding, reading, and gathering, I reached out to bloggers from the Fatosphere who publicly provided their email addresses as contact information for interviews over email. Interviewing participants helps to triangulate the data that I collected from observation and continued questioning. Interviews have allowed me, as a researcher, to ethically and truthfully represent the voices of fat activists when I ask them how they negotiate 62 identity and are working to represent fat differently. Because interviews are certainly edited and interpreted through the researcher’s lens, I also use them as a way that makes sense of my observations. Selfe and Hawisher write that interviewing participants, particularly involved with literacy studies, allows researchers “to assemble more-direct information of personal literacy values, more-intimate glimpses into what literacy means in the lives of individuals, and more- meaningful ways of testing our theories about language use against the realities of peoples’ literate practices and their understandings about these practices” (45). Asking fat activists to tell their stories, I have been able to glean a deeper understanding of their individual lipoliteracy narratives as they represent themselves online, but also how their narratives relate to other narratives represented within the Fatosphere.

Accompanying the textual data, data mining allows the internet researcher to observe and track the occurrences of new internet genres like hashtags, posts, reposts, comments, blogs, reblogs, tweets, retweets, etc. Mining data of this nature helps me answer my question of how activists are using the affordances of Web 2.0, new media, social media, including textual content of qualitative data, and numeric qualities in the form of frequency of occurrences, dates of origination, number of reposts or retweets, and others depending on the site. These genres allow users to create hyperlinks, like the days of old, without the requirement of coding knowledge. Hyperlinks become the connection from a site to the greater virtual community, and as Brian Still discovered with his intersex participants, the community “continually grows through hyperlinking” (70). In Still’s research intersex people did not only link “to other group and personal intersex sites, but also to those offering research, news, or supporting regarding intersex-related subjects” (73). Hyperlinking is a ubiquitous practice, and through my data collection, I have been able to see how fat activists are implementing hyperlinks, and newer 63 internets genres that function like hyperlinks to help potentially understand how “users gain a greater awareness of who they are and the community to which they belong, which also helps build a sense of community” (Still 73).

Feminism and Composition’s position on hypertext is that it “offers a particularly good opportunity for writers to represent the multiple-especially the traditionally marginalized— positions a writer can adopt as well as explore how those positions are functions of context and community” (241). I would also argue that newer genres, like hashtags, provide the same opportunity, as a genre for community-building. Particularly on social media, “[h]ashtagged discussions emerge without being controlled by any one organization or user” (Bruns, Highfield, and Burgess 87). That is, once a hashtag is created, it can be used freely by any and all users, regardless of proximity to the event. Halavais and Garrido pinpoint precisely why mining this kind of data is valuable, stating that hashtags “represent an important and effective way of constraining discussions to a particular topic over a particular period of time” (120). Studying this genre acknowledges the various levels, from micro- to macro-, of engagement, or user interactivity. Establishing a hashtag, or other hyperlinking practice, “is a conscious social act executed by the author of a web site,” or social media profile, “we may assume that some form of cognitive, social, or structural relationship exists between the sites” (Garrido and Halavais

173). Because “[d]igital writing research takes a cyborgian view and a networked view of human communications” (McKee and DeVoss xv), later chapters will explore these relationships as I see them developing, changing, and potentially ending within the Fatosphere.

Reading the Web We Weave: Analyzing Social Networks and Hyperlinks

My analysis of activist use of Web 2.0 affordances, social networks, hyperlinking, and their newer genres, and focusing on “the activity of the writer or the context (and its conditional 64 affordances for composing) allows a view that collapses system-centric and user-centric activity”

(Eyman 96). In digital contexts, the act of hyperlinking builds layers of interconnectedness, which poses a challenge to the online researcher in term of collection, as we have seen above, but also in data analysis. Eyman’s treatment of the method of “distant reading,” though, encourages researchers to examine “text as one among many and considering a much larger corpus whose contexts and relationships give rise to different forms of meaning” (95). Read alone, hyperlinks or hashtags carry personal and political meaning to the creator and an individual user; however, when hyperlinks and hashtags are read distantly, they can, and do, represent social movements, new schools of thought, and consumer trends. In this project, I have observed how participants in the Fatosphere utilize hyperlinks and hashtags for activist, community-building, and rhetorical purposes.

In chapter four, I discuss what this looks like in the Fatosphere as well as exhibit data visualizations to portray how, during my data collection period, the genres, the content and contexts, shifted over time. Eyman writes that data visualizations of distant reading methods, clouds, maps, trees, respectively, tend “to dramatically alter the scales at which readers encounter texts” (95). In addition to data visualizations, social network analysis helps to focus on

“patterns of relations among people, organizations, states—in other words, human relationships, but rarely human/nonhuman interactions or relationships” (Eyman 103). Visualizing blogs, hyperlinks, hashtags, etc. as nodes on an enormous web, they “represent the individual actors within networks; ties represent the relationships shared by those actors—these relationships (also called ‘strands’) can be described in terms of content (the resource that is exchanged), direction, and strength” (Eyman 104). This kind of analysis, according to Eyman, is particularly beneficial for researchers questioning “digital economies and circulation.” 65

Garrido and Halavais’ use of social network analysis shows how the method “seeks to describe networks of relations, trace the flow of information through them, and discover what effects these relations have on people and organizations” (172). Historically, this method could be used to discover exchange patterns and understand group relationships, but in the epoch of new media and digital communications, social networks have become further networked through hypertext. Hypertext Network Analysis (HNA) “looks at the nodes and ties of digital texts as instantiated in websites and web links. The key distinction between social network analysis and hypertext network analysis is that the websites themselves are considered actors within the networks being investigated” (Eyman 104). Here, Eyman calls upon the work of Bruno Latour.

Like Latour’s trudging ant, I am “carrying the heavy gear” of technofeminism, cyberactivism, and cyberhumanism, “in order to generate even the tiniest connection” (25). Latour says that

“following the natives” is important. As an insider, or at least claiming that status as a researcher,

I can use much of my own journey through the internet and my connections that I have made as data. While Latour claims that ANT offers a sociology to nonhumans, I would say that it provides a sociology for cyborgs, certainly: “In order to trace an actor-network, what we have to do is to add to the many traces left by the social fluid through which the traces are rendered again present, provided something happens in it” (133). Everything, every share, like, post, comment, then, becomes data. Latour writes, “information technologies allow us to trace the associations in a way that was impossible before. [. . .] [T]hey make visible what was before only present virtually” (207). ANT offers a way to examine the fatosphere as an assemblage, and I follow the activists through their interactions with it by tracing their steps as they share, create, and link their personal spaces.

Reflective Practices and Ethical Bricolaging

McKee and Porter write: “research on and with Internet technologies raises distinctive ethical questions, ones that are often quite different from what researchers would encounter doing traditional print-based textual scholarship or conducting person-based, face-to-face research” (245). In my project, for instance, I chose to perform e-mail interviews with several bloggers from the Fierce, Freethinking Fatties because face-to-face interviews would have been physically and financially impossible. E-mail interviews also gave my participants time to consider my questions and prepare thoughtful responses, as they would if they were writing a blog post. Additionally, I carefully considered where I would focus my observations, though the internet is certainly unpredictable and vast. While there are some spaces that require subscriptions to participate, I have selected public blogs, social media profiles, and other websites that I consider public, activist spaces.

It might be redundant to say that this kind of research methodology and methods for data collection and analysis come with no shortage of limitations. Firstly, the communal and activist activities on the internet can not only be connected to each other through hypertextual practices, but they are also connected to “real world” events, experiences, communities, activism, and activists. The spillages of the virtual into the real and the real into the virtual illustrates the complex relationship between the real and virtual. For instance, an event or presentation at a national conference can result in live-tweeting, liking, and sharing instantly, and the ease in which people become users lends itself to an enormous amount of data. Using the methods of

SNA and Latour’s ANT, I can follow the activists as they converge with their technologies to carry out social and political activities. The Fatosphere is constantly changing, for spaces, like the Fierce, Freethinking Fatties converge, then diverge, at points through time, as social realities 67 play out, and the fat body becomes visible, or invisible, as young cis and trans women with smart phones learn that their bodies are fair game for ridicule, negotiation, and violence. Because I simply cannot be present online consistently and constantly, I am only able to capture data as I experience it, and to store a small percentage of the data that is actually available, and I draw upon methodological practices that make sense to me. I used my own social media as a mode for observing the sites because many of them are connected to Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. I was able to actively read new work of Fat Studies scholars and fat activists, new arguments and critiques of the Fatosphere, and emerging writers, thus encountering a multitude of scholars working at the intersection of technology and activism.

Another ethical consideration is within the ephemeral nature of internet information.

Administrators of blogs, websites, and profiles might have the ability to remove or delete posts, comments, or conversations, edit pages, etc. This is the power of the administrator, and that information should certainly be off-limits as it is no longer meant to be public information.

Embracing these limitations, I have seen opportunities for capturing meaningful snapshots and discussions of lipoliteracy, fat identity, cyberactivism, virtual community building, and storytelling. To address institutional ethical concerns, I have received approval by the Human

Subjects Review Board to perform interviews with willing bloggers from the Fatosphere, which will help to triangulate the data that I gather from observations, data mining, and following the fat, cyborgian activists across the network. Performing interviews across the web poses some risk in terms of data security, but the only identifying information available, the screen-names of the interviewees, have been kept confidential. Data mining poses no threat to users because I am only looking for textual phenomena across a network that is made public through their new 68 community-building genres, such as hyperlinking, hashtagging, posts, comments, blogs, and reblogs on public sites and profiles.

Journeying Forward into the Fatosphere

Not all participants in the Fatosphere are fat activists, but those that I identify as activists participate in the Fatosphere in very specific and important ways. Brian Still’s work with online communities of intersex people and their allies insists that in order for the community to be productive, “they must create a sense of belonging, a feeling among their participants that common values, if not viewpoints, are shared there, along with common experiences, as told often through stories, which bond them together” (Still 64-65). Beyond the sense of belonging, activist communities also “contribute to how meaning is represented in culture, they must also be able to produce and disseminate alternative meanings” (Still 65). Therefore, I must examine the ways that fat activists bond, disseminate information, and confront dominant discourses, practices that I understand as culturally and rhetorically productive. I carry the methodological paradigms and practices with me along the journey, drawing upon them recursively as I observe respectfully, question critically, reflect broadly, and write descriptively. In the next chapter, I explain how I make sense of the rhetorical acts that fat activists, or in their own right, fat rhetoricians, are making from their marginal positionalities within the virtual heterotopia of the

Fatosphere. Warnick and Heineman assert that “counterpublics can be understood as a coming together of those individuals, ideas, and discursive ‘exclusions’ that cannot or do not circulate within a particular dominant public sphere” (Warnick and Heineman 9-10). The Fatosphere offers fat people, fat activists, and fat cyborgs who might not otherwise be able to meet one another in “real life” the opportunity to “come forward and interact with each other” (Still 68). 69

Fat people bonding with each other, building knowledge together, and circulating their knowledge online is a brilliantly subversive act, which I explore next. 70

CRITICAL ANALYSIS OF ACTIVIST PARTICIPATION IN THE FATOSPHERE

“[M]ovement participants are recognizing and expressing grievances, and organizing resistance, through the information and communication technologies that are now widely available, portable

and participatory” (McCaughey 2).

Tracing Ubiquitous Practice: Rhetorical Power in the Mundane

Determining the rhetorical effectiveness and social affectivity of the Fatosphere has involved a methodological bricolaging of available theoretical and rhetorical practices. The

Fatosphere’s effectiveness in changing the discourses surrounding the fat body is quite difficult to measure quantitatively. Clearly, these discourses also manifest offline, across technological, cultural, and social boundaries, representing an immeasurable gamut of body positivity, FA, and alternatives to weight and size-related stigma, shame, and discrimination. However, throughout this project, I have been able to observe the extent to which body positive activists have used the internet, given their savvy, cyborgian positionality for their important rhetorical work. Following these actors, as Latour has recommended, a researcher can become swept up in the swift current of virtual networks. Like its own cosmos, at this moment, the internet is host to billions of interactions, but only a small part of that online activity is what I would call “activist” in nature.

In this chapter, I illustrate activist purposes of new media that I have observed in the Fatosphere, present my findings, and examine the data gathered directly from the Fatosphere, including responses to IRB-approved interviews with fat activists and field observations from within the

Fatosphere. Then, I explore and discuss several specific locations, or nodes in the Fatosphere to demonstrate how these fat cyberactivists engage in new, hybrid genres to build heterotopic

(Foucault) communities. Overall, I reflect on how the community engages with the internet for 71 interactivity, activism, and community-building purposes, like archiving, networking, commenting, and hyperlinking.

Digital spaces, like the Fatosphere, can connect internet users to one another and to endless information. We have seen in the last quarter century the exponential growth of the internet and its affordances, as well as increased wired and wireless access to the internet, and affordable, mobile, internet-ready, personal technologies. This growth, ideally, invites oppressed people (though, oppressed people with access or connection to the internet) to join the world wide web, providing rich opportunities for research spaces, as well as near infinite data. Internet users join through various processes, like invitation, logging on, logging in, subscribing, liking, or following. Once the user has joined, the level of participation on and within the internet fluctuates depending upon the desires of the user. In her chapter in Cyberactivism on the

Participatory Web, Gurak posits:

Today, social media in all of its ubiquity and simplicity is the standard approach

for online activism. Gone are the days when organizers needed to understand how

to code in HTML or run a listserv. A few simple keystrokes, and organizers are

able to create blogs, Twitter feeds, or Facebook pages, which are easy to use and

require no special technical knowledge either for the organizer or users who want

to participate. (7)

Inside the Fatosphere, the participation that I have been interested in (while that of general users, administrators, and, of course, internet trolls is intriguing and worthy of further study) is the participation of fat activists. Particularly, I am trailing bloggers, microbloggers and hashtaggers who utilize part of the privilege of their internet access for body positivity, HAES, and FA.

These movements, in addition to the activists’ own world views, levels of comfort with online 72 presence and visibility, and technological literacy, help to shape the content of online texts.

Because Web 2.0 affords users with the possibility for both textual and visual composition, researchers have observed textual and multimodal phenomena on the internet, and how their content, contexts, and composers tweet, blog, and post narratives for individual and collective identity formations, creating belonging and community, and negotiate with new literacies.

Further, because online textual phenomena occur within a matrix of computer code and electricity, they leave digitally tangible traces that link within the vast network. The nodes, as

Eyman calls them, that make up the Fatosphere network consist of individual and group blogs, social media profiles, websites, forums, chat rooms, wikis, etc., with new sites forming, changing, and disappearing continuously. The simplicity of Web 2.0 allows internet users to easily link from one node to another through the practice of hyperlinking to give the user access to public, or even private, digital content. If the user wants to capture the link, she can simply create her own hyperlink, or utilize the same one she discovered, and place it in her own digital space. This allows users who visit her space to discover and click on the hyperlink as well, transporting them throughout the Fatosphere. On the surface, the process of hyperlinking is mundane for frequent users of the internet, or cyborgs, like me. However, the banal practice of hyperlinking can be a tremendously powerful rhetorical act, ultimately, as chapter five will explore, helping to create changes in the ways that we treat marginalized people by making their stories and their bodies visible.

Making Noise on the Web: Cyberactivist Uses for the Internet

Cyberactivism is inextricably tied to a very real world offline. In fact, Haraway’s 21st century cyborgs, live in a continuum of online and offline existence. Generally, internet users enter into virtual environments where there is a wide variety of practices that they can enact, and 73 for an even wider variety of purposes. Not all of the purposes of online activist are activist in nature; however, the role that activists play in the Fatosphere, as I have maintained throughout this project, is to perpetuate the philosophies and ideologies of the historical FA movement,

HAES philosophies, and more recent body positive discourses. Cyberactivism in the Fatosphere involves bridging between online and offline activities, events, gatherings, etc. For instance, the blogger Atchka began in 2009:

Analyzing research was not part of my plan when starting this blog. I wanted to

explore HAES and figure out what the truth was about weight and health, but the

idea of reading peer-reviewed research to get a direct read on what was going on

was so foreign to me. [. . .] (A)fter reading books like Rethinking Thin and even

Good Calories, Bad Calories, I felt like mainstream interpretations of weight loss

research was so distorted from the reality that I had to investigate for myself. I’d

read a story about how Jenny Craig was so effective that people lost twice as

much weight, and I’d think ‘What does that mean?’ Then I’d read the actual study

and find that after one year, Jenny Craig clients were losing 5 pounds instead of

2.5 pounds, and it fascinated me that technical terms like “significant” gave so

many weight loss charlatans cover for their disappointing results. In fact, you

can’t swing a dead cat in peer-reviewed weight loss research without coming

across the phrase “clinically significant weight loss,” which means 5-10% of

starting weight. But take that term out of context and suddenly Bob’s Diet Pills

have a “significant” weight loss effect despite subjects losing just 5 pounds after a

year. 74

Atchka’s offline experience and curiosity about HAES and FA led him to investigate the obviously contradictory and problematic research on weight loss and matters of health. Atchka’s way into the Fatosphere was his frustration with these contradictions and a desire to share his discoveries with others who might be confused or feel isolated by the constant barrage of weight- loss advertisements, programs, and initiatives. Often, an event will lead to the discovery of the

Fatosphere, and with a single act of providing an email address to subscribe, or “liking” or

“following” an activist on social media, a user can become an activist.

As I learned from listening to Atchka, sometimes, discovery is brought about by a person’s desire to search for information, perhaps on a search engine, like Google or Bing.

Search engines do not automatically filter body positive content from shaming content, but resources provided by a search can lead to activist spaces, if the user can discover a way in.

Discovery of the Fatosphere, like mine for instance, can come about through reading books and articles about FA, or seeking out information through more scholarly means. Earlier, I discussed the results of an academic database search for FA, which, at the start of this project four years ago, yielded limited results for many body positive studies. A database search today looks quite different with a growing number of academic journals picking up the Fat Studies conversation.

The internet provides a means to discover, identify, interact, connect, publish, and disseminate activist communities and ideologies. In the figure below, these processes are seen as a continuum of online activity sparked at the moment of discovery. From that point, activists can choose to participate in ways that are meaningful and productive to them, and in ways that might not be solely online or offline. 75

Figure 1: Activist Uses for the Web

The role of identification in the Fatosphere is for others (users, administrators, and trolls) to recognize a fat activist. Ultimately, what shows others that the person is a body positive activist and working to fight the shaming discourses that surround fat bodies? Fat activists identify themselves to others within the Fatosphere by creating screen names on forums, starting blogs, building social media profiles, sharing their own photographs, and developing avatars, or photographic/animated thumbnails. Visibility through identification is usually the initial activist practice after discovering the fatosphere. In the screenshot below, Tess Holliday identifies herself quite obviously, using her own name and a thumbnail picture of herself attached to her post. Later, I will discuss how visibility and identification help to change the rhetoric surrounding the fat body. For now, however, identification, or “the degree to which you reveal it 76 to others through various means determines your subject location within the group" (Blair and

Takayoshi 21). Locating group members helps establish routes of communication between them.

Figure 2: Interaction Buttons on Facebook

The internet invites users to interact with one another, and as I stated above, billions of interactions are occurring at any given moment on the web. Online interactions, like using avatars, screen names, and profiles to converse and to share experience with others, allow fat activists to speak to one another without needing to experience the awkward process of “coming out” as a fat activist. Being able to interact by simply clicking the “like” button or “save” a post for personal use and as a resource is a tremendously powerful for new activists or non-activists who might not have the courage or means to build their own blog or website. Rheingold remarks that in the early days, virtual community members would interact by subscribing to email newsletters, participating in discussions and forums and listservs. Historical discussions of virtual communities (Rheingold) determined this to be the extent to which community could be formed online. Interaction is important for rhetoric and writing scholars to consider as audience response to an online rhetor is paramount for rhetorical effectiveness. As we can see in the screenshot above of a recent post on fat activist and supermodel Tess Holliday’s Facebook 77 profile, users can interact with her by hitting the “like” button below the post, as 13,000 others did, comment on it, or share it. Rhetoric and writing is interested in rhetorical interplay across communities, platforms, and boundaries:

Because of the hypertextual and connected quality of the Web, these kinds of

activities, which mark much of users’ online experiences in communities across

the Internet, are frequently carried over to those areas of the Web where we see

forms of political engagement. The ubiquity of ‘play’ across the Web cannot be

underestimated when considering any Web site, no matter how ‘serious’ it

portends to be. (Warnick and Heineman 19)

Individual spaces interact with a larger network as well as create opportunities for new interactions. Nonetheless, not all interaction of an activist is necessarily for activist purposes.

Jordynn Jack writes that “a superficial form of interaction tends to happen among bloggers, since individuals post comments mainly to advertise their own blogs and attract more visitors” (335).

Interaction is a form of internet social capital that helps online activists to build their own popularity; however, recent developments in internet technologies allow activists to interact in even deeper ways, forming connections that strengthen the community bonds between marginalized people.

Deep connection, or what Brian Still calls bonding, is another important activist practice in the Fatosphere. Connections form through continued communication with others, which seems to involve a more personal investment than mere interaction. Moving beyond the “like” or

“share” buttons, fat activists begin to start building goals, agendas, and objectives that become visible through their use of digital text and new media. Later in this chapter, I will discuss two specific sites, Tess Holliday’s Facebook page and Substantia Jones’ Adipositivity Project, whose 78 work illustrates the ways that fat activists can create bonds with people virtually through their highly visible and shared purposes, which are reinforced through their blog and microblog posts.

The act of bringing people together, as these virtual spaces do, provides people in the Fatosphere a sense of continuity, as well as inviting others to become activists, “and keeps them active members and thus contributors to a virtual neighborhood” (Still 69). Deep connection also helps to build trust, which, according to Gurak, “is a major factor in what drives participation” (16).

Solidarity amongst marginalized people often leads to the publication of the ideas of the group and individual activists. Expressing their solidarity in a manifesto, or even coming together within a single space, assist in creating collective ideologies. Fat activists, I have found, are prolific writers who have created their own genres for activism, as well as genres for community building. While later in the chapter I will talk in more detail about the textual phenomena that activists utilize to build communities and form activist identities, here, it is important to talk about publication and its role in helping shape the online activist community.

For instance, the Fierce, Freethinking Fatties used their page “Philosophy” to situate the Fierce

Fatties amongst other FA sites in the Fatosphere a features blog’s mantra: “Fat Acceptance is not just for the advocates. Fat Acceptance is not just for the scholars. Fat Acceptance is not just for the choir. Fat Acceptance is for the fat. And the Fierce, Freethinking Fatties is home of the fat.”

Publication of a community’s purpose alongside the rhetorical moves made to state their purpose helps to craft the invitation for others into the community, deciding who is part of the community and who is not. It is important to add that exclusion, whether explicit or implicit, intended or unintentional, is not uncommon in community life. Particularly for a heterotopic community like the Fatosphere, exclusion is a matter of safety. A heterotopia, if we recall from the previous chapter, is a sort of space within a space, a community that is both fully situated in a society, but 79 also functions outside the social realm that people create as a response to a crisis, collective need, or, in the case of the Fatosphere, overt discrimination.

Moreover, online publications have the added benefit of being easily archived. On social media, publications can be tagged or hashtagged with searchable words or hot-button words, or simply saved chronologically on a blog. The movability and shareability of online texts allows them to be spread rapidly across multiple sites, media, and devices. Forming community and disseminating an idea online can be done through quite simple practices, but sustaining an activist community online involves an intimate knowledge of hyperlinking and hashtagging, as well as rhetorical prowess in creating the text of the hashtag or hyperlink, the visual and textual content of a blog or tweet, or the message of a YouTube video. The cyborg activist understands search engine optimization (SEO), or can hire one who does, which allows the words associated, or tagged, with a post to be populated at the top of search engine results. SEO, a marketing term, represents the rhetorical power of actual search terms and an activist’s ability to reach more potential readers, subscribers, or followers. For activists who might not be skilled with SEO or creating their own videos, they can also upload or hyperlink video, pictures, and audio to accompany posts. For instance, Atchka says that “in day-to-day posts, I include an image that is evocative of the subject and I encourage our bloggers to use audio and visual content to illustrate their writing. I see our blog as a canvas and mixing media can really bring a post to life.” After publication, it is the activists’ hope that their ideas are picked up and carried forth.

Dissemination is the culmination of the discovery, interaction, connection, and publication for activists in the Fatosphere. Caiani and Borri, whose work with social movement scholarship helps broaden definition of community, assert “that the web is used as an arena for the sharing of norms and values among different individual and groups” (187). The 80 dissemination of FA and HAES as ideologies is the most important aspect of the Fatosphere’s collective action. Those who participate in the Fatosphere as activists act as “authorities, producing alternative representations of themselves as well as alternative information on methods of treating” fat people (Still 97). Chapter five will continue this discussion, illuminating the ways fat activists online are contributing to the changing and more positive rhetorics surrounding fat and fatness in American culture. While it might seem challenging to measure dissemination of FA, HAES, and body positivity within the Fatosphere, on activist sites, the one extent of the its reach can be observed in the number of “shares” a post receives. For instance,

Holliday’s Facebook post was shared 106 times before I captured the screenshot.

Ultimately, whether an academic route or otherwise, the way into the Fatosphere might be different for everyone, particularly because of the intention with which an internet user turned activist explores it. After entering the Fatosphere, there is a compendium of online practices that activists can perform. At any point, activists can connect with offline activity, or even leave the

Fatosphere altogether. The practices are not necessarily cyclical; though, one practice may spark or create the opportunity for others. My observations of activist participation in the Fatosphere, research on virtual communities and cyberactivism, and IRB-approved interviews with fat activist bloggers from the now disbanded Fierce, Freethinking Fatties have shown that activists continually engage in the practices of identification, interaction, connection, publication, and dissemination. These practices help to extend the Fatosphere from a digital web of activists, administrators, casual users, and trolls to a larger realm that joins FA, HAES, and other body positive movements.

Digital Genres for Online Community-Building

Divergences and convergences of users within the complex web of the Fatosphere represent part of a societal flow, or the mirror of one, that is converging and diverging just as often with offline social events. In chapter one, I discussed the ways that fat people are prevented from gathering for social events, like academic conferences, because of travel restrictions and the ever-present fear of ridicule. While the internet is certainly not free of ridicule, fat activists on the web can have not only a strong sense of community and solidarity, but also a sense of transnationalism due to the global reach of internet. McCaughey writes: “movements are hybrids of online and offline activity, and one does not cause, or prevent the other. We therefore can no longer simply ask whether or not Web 2.0 impacts protesting or people’s likelihood to end up in a face-to-face protest” (2). Activists in the Fatosphere, with the help of Web 2.0, their technology savvy and their participation in the continuum activist practices above, bring people together into, albeit temporary, communities, or heterotopias as Foucault calls them, where they can meet and promote body positivity. The Fatosphere allows body positive activists to act individually, while at the same time gathering with other fat activists, allies, curious, and interested to build communities and networks engaged in positive body discourses from within their own homes, on park benches, inside dorm rooms, and in classrooms and schools.

Disseminating body positive rhetoric online involves utilizing key, digital community- building genres like blogs and microblogs, “Likes” and “Shares,” comments and replies, and hashtags and hyperlinks. Following fat activists has proven a rich endeavor as each like, share, reblog, or retweet can be tracked on the network to measure their reach and depth within the

Fatosphere as we will see below. The Fierce, Freethinking Fatties (FFF), for instance, is the first

FA blog that I encountered after performing a Google search for fatosphere as prompted by 82

Harding and Kirby in Lessons. Immediately, I was astounded by the amount of writing the bloggers were producing and posting daily, as well as the number of subscribers the FFF had. In

2013, that number had reached over a thousand. Email subscription provides activists a means to connect with their readers in a discreet way. Subscribers receive email messages that include hyperlinks to recent posts, advertisements for real and virtual events in the community, opportunities for more community-building, and announcements about community concerns.

Participants can engage with activists via email, which promotes connection, interaction, and dissemination as activist purposes. S.J. Sloane writes: “Rhetorical forms and features of electronic mail reiterate contemporary cultural patterns of idiom, content, and conversational turn-taking, patterns complicated by their layered presence within a particular information delivery system” (44). Early email listservs functioned as forums and the formed online communities. While there are still underground listserv groups, the practice feels archaic given the speed and networked nature of social media platforms.

Like the Fierce Fatties, FA blogs also use social networking sites to build connections with more potential subscribers, and to share their posts on a wider network than their blog would generally reach. FFF asks readers to “Spread the Love!” on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest,

Tumblr, and others, and to “Like” on those social networking sites. Connecting with social networking sites, like Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr, further extends the reach of the community and opens up more opportunities to advertise and promote their blogs. Some internet users might find keeping up daily with blog daunting or unappealing, but they use social networking, perhaps from their smart phones, more regularly. The availability of the daily blog posts on a social media application can provide people who have smart phones access on a reading platform with which they feel comfortable. Participating in multiple modes of literacy 83 online simultaneously is common, even amongst novice users. Activists, as I have already expressed, are savvy, and use social media to build an arsenal of knowledge, support, and spaces to exchange it. Additionally, pages like “Press Room” on FFF links readers to interviews with other media outlets like, NBC News, BBC News, Jezebel, and the Huffington Post further building the community.

The Fierce Fatties, and countless other blogs, websites, and social media use interactive features to foster a sense of community amongst themselves and for the readers who join them.

Thus, only can FA blog readers interact with a page by subscribing, liking it or sharing it, but they can interact with the writers and other readers in a more personal way by commenting on and replying to posts. These features allow for readers to become active participants by making space, both figuratively and literally, for verbal interaction with the contributors, other participants, and, on occasion, internet trolls. Comments range from questions about a blog post, to personal stories relating to a particular theme or topic, to arguments about best practices.

Comment and reply features encourage the conversational aspect that early email groups sought, but in a more public and visible location. Because of the communitarian nature of the

Fatosphere, often bloggers, or their administrators on a site, will set rules and practices that must be followed in these spaces in order for participants to engage with the community.

“Diet Talk” sets the rules for engagement on the site or “guidelines for what kinds of

‘diet talk’ are permitted both on Fierce, Freethinking Fatties, as well as on the FFFFeed.” Here there are two sections called “Forbidden diet talk” and “Permitted diet talk:” “In order to allow more difficult conversations about these subjects, I decided to put a policy in place, where each post would be assigned a two-letter rating (e.g., WL for weight loss, DT for diet talk)” (Atchka).

Often, this is what sets the Fierce Fatties apart from many fat activists because of their stance on 84 the discussion of weight loss. Whereas some activists, like Marilyn Wann, for instance, do not condone the discussion of weight loss or permit it on their websites or within community space, the Fierce Fatties allowed it. By allowing people to discuss weight loss in a safe way, the Fierce

Fatties opened up their community to a portion of the FA movement who felt silenced by the rest of the Fatosphere because of their desire to actually lose weight, or at least discuss their thoughts about weight loss. The FFF’s positionality on weight loss is important to this project, in particular, because I have been interested in the ways that fat activists build communities with each other and situate themselves within the greater Fatosphere community. The very topic of weight loss may have set FFF apart from other Fatosphere activist sites; however, within FFF, the sharing of weight loss stories, both successes and failures, brought interested readers and bloggers together.

To help promote body positive conversation within the Fatosphere, activists also enact rhetorical practices that aid administrators, subscribers, general readers, and internet trolls to understand the site or community’s purpose and rules of engagement. As a feminist practice, participation in the community is regulated to maintain equality and protect people who have joined with the expectation of a safe space. On FFF, the group adopted a system of trigger warnings for posts, comments, and replies, to help warn readers of potentially emotionally triggering topics before they keep reading:

Trigger warnings are there to inform people of problematic content. We have a lot

of readers who have struggled with eating disorders, body dysphoria, body

shaming and all kinds of issues. For some people, reading about a subject like

weight loss, exercise or dieting can trigger an emotional or physical reaction that

may lead to self-destructive thoughts or behaviors. For me, trigger warnings are a 85

courtesy to our readers to give them a heads up on any content that may be too

strong for some. It gives our readers an idea of what’s ahead so they can decide if

they can deal with it or if they need to skip that day’s post. (Atchka)

Meaning, blogs monitor comments and replies, and not all are welcome. However, there are ways to manage discussion by hosting “Let It Out,” which is an open forum, so to speak, for people to “vent about issues that affect us as fatties, as people, as frustrated bystanders.” There have been over two hundred comments in response to the open call for “venting.” Certainly, there are blogs that promise that “you are in control of the information, we allow people to walk the path at their own pace” (Fierce Fatties). Here, the use of the word you indicates the inviting nature of the community, but with the overtone that the content of the blog is monitored, which is often the critique of the Fatosphere, from without and within. Throughout this project, I have sought to observe the ways that activists use the affordances of the internet and their access to it to carry out their activist work, as well as create and utilize genres for community building. I have discovered that permitting venting and allowing people to participate in discussion with varying perspectives on taboo topics in the Fatosphere both strengthened the bond between those in the community and weakened the Fatties’ ties to the Fatosphere.

#RealTalk with a (Former) Fierce Fatty

Over the last decade, the conversation about fat people online and off has exploded.

Every day, there are new ways we find to erase fat, but there are also always new ways fat people are making themselves visible. The internet has provided that for the activists, scholars, writers I have mentioned in this project. Earlier, I asserted that fat activists can have a strong sense of community and solidarity in the Fatosphere; however, not all activists feel at home with their fellow activists in “community” spaces. I first entered the Fatosphere with a utopian vision 86 of a space where people could discuss and share their experiences and all views would be valued because we were all fat. Rather than representing an ideal, utopian community as I initially endeavored, the Fierce Fatties showed me that their blog was much more complicated as a representation of their individual activist purposes, as well as their collective mission to challenge the rest of the Fatosphere. Often, these agendas clashed, exposing the complex nature of the community. To illustrate, I was fortunate enough to interview the editor-in-chief of the

Fierce Fatties, Atchka, who founded the Fierce, Freethinking Fatties after several months blogging for none other than Kate Harding and her then popular blog Shapely Prose in 2009. “At the time,” he says, “I was pretty much the only man blogging about these issues.” Some feminists might appreciate this fact because, as we have determined, fat stigma and weigh discrimination often impacts the lives of women in a much deeper way. However, critique of the

FA movement is that FA is advantageous for white women, and is increasingly exclusory of men and people of color. Atchka notes that he had a challenging time finding a sense of community in the Fatosphere because of his lack of knowledge of and comfort with feminist discourse:

I had a hard time fitting into the Fatosphere (the official newsfeed of FA blogs). I

had an abundance of privilege and little exposure to feminist theory, so I found

myself stepping on toes on a weekly basis as I tried to contribute to the

discussions that were happening. My behavior was grating on the Fatosphere and

the perpetual shitstorms I triggered made the Fatosphere grate on me. Finally, I

posted an interview I did with my wife about her experiences growing up as a fat

girl. During our discussion, we discussed weight loss and on my blog, I

commented that if I were to go on a heart-healthy diet (due to a family history of

heart disease), I would probably lose weight. Due to the Fatosphere’s strict “No 87

diet talk” rule, I was kicked off, which infuriated me, as only an incredibly

privileged man can be infuriated. I threw a tantrum and burned a bunch of bridges

and withdrew from blogging.

During Atchka’s hiatus from the Fatosphere as he knew it, he was determined to a community that would help him learn more about FA, HAES, and body positivity, while also being patient when he made mistakes. He was interested in engaging in dialogue to further understand, not only how to be an effective activist online or more about FA, but also why certain talk was forbidden in a space that supposedly valued diverse perspectives. He found people who helped him do just that by creating an FA blogging group that positioned itself differently and more flexibly on taboo topic within the Fatosphere. Together, they formed the FFF in February of

2010, with Atchka maintaining the role of “Chief Fatty.”

On FFF, I saw bodies like mine that were not being degraded or shamed; rather, they were celebrated for all of their shapes and sizes. Within a few minutes of my exposure to the site,

FFF showed me there is the potential for a community where fat people have allies and speak back to those who shame them. At the time, however, I was unaware of the extreme tensions between them and the rest of the Fatosphere community because of their continuance of diet and weight-loss-related conversations, as well as their stance on including potentially triggering topics. When asked if he characterized FFF as a community, Atchka was hesitant. He asserted that he used to think of FFF as a community, but after years of functioning in the margins of the

Fatosphere, FFF became its own space for subversive thinking, its own heterotopia of crisis.

Whereas I expected a harmonious and family-like connection with the rest of the Fatosphere,

Atchka says: 88

FFF has always felt like a subculture of FA, which is itself a subculture. Over the

years, I got into so many fights with so many people in Fat Acceptance that our

blog became notorious within the Fatosphere. We were there doing some

incredible work and really pushing the boundaries of discussions around HAES

and FA, and as a result we drew a significant readership that ranged from 30,000

on a slow month to 50,000 at our peak. People were reading, but it seemed like

we weren’t really included in FA events or activities. And even when we would

participate in events, our role was diminished or ignored. (Atchka)

After being excluded from discussions and successes of the Fatosphere, despite significant contributions made by the FFF, Atchka finds that the only real sense of community that he feels is with the blog’s regular readership and his fellow bloggers and contributors.

The Fatosphere, however, has not been as welcoming of the boundary-pushing Fierce

Fatties. The blog sustained for five years, but on February 23, 2015, Atchka posted what would be the last post of the FFF. He ended that post with this:

After five years of searching and probing and questioning and doubting and

deconstructing and rabble-rousing, my entire philosophy on weight and health can

be summed up as follows: if you want to be healthy, know thyself: who you are,

what you need and what you can achieve. Also, know what the science says. Use

that knowledge as a kind of guidepost for your journey. Perfection is not the goal,

self-actualization is. And if you’re as encouraging and compassionate with

yourself as you are with your friends and family, then you’ll have no problem

building and sustaining good metabolic health. 89

For over a year, FFF blog appeared as a black screen, as seen in the figure below. The countless posts, comments, and discussions archives were inaccessible on the fiercefatties.com domain.

However, while the site was unavailable, the social media platforms and affiliate websites, like

Tumblr and PeopleofSize.com, were able to keep the content of the FFF public. Atchka claimed that the site was going through changes in leadership, and as the Fierce Fatties would change hands, changes would be made to the infrastructure, rules, appearance, and bloggers. The site is no longer plagued by the black screen, but there have been no new posts since February 2015.

Figure 3: FFF after February 2015

Fat Activists Go to Bed Angry

In online activist communities, “there is a commonly recurring theme of a counter- discourse that resists the mainstream discourses” (Koerber 221), which users see as dominant frames of looking at the fat body, or fat bodies. In the context of a capitalistic system, the fat body is burdenous, unattractive, unlovable, and unhealthy, rather than a source of beauty, 90 sexuality, and strength. Fat people are seen as immoral and slovenly, which leads to a host of situations where discrimination results, including medical and clinical situations, as well as social and professional. The Fatosphere’s purpose is to provide fat people and their allies with a space to speak back at dominating frames with the hope of shifting the rhetoric used to discriminate against them. The sites within the Fatosphere are diverse, as are the users who visit them, and Haraway’s "world-changing fiction[s]" are produced by fat cyberactivists who wake up and go to bed with their smartphones in their hands, and their fingers on the Twitter and

Facebook applications. They are increasingly college educated and privy to the concerns of feminism and humanism, and, as Atchka discovered, they are angry.

Fat activists are creating an online world where they can be visible and heard, while the world they are changing is the offline one that has consistently made them feel less than worthy of love, sex, children, jobs, and a life free of ridicule. In the process, however, activists can often become complacent with marginalization that is happening within their own communities. For example, some self-identified body positive activists in discourses that shame thin men and women, those with eating disorders or are naturally thin, as well as formerly fat people who have become thin. While Atchka says that he feels optimistic about being fat today and in the future, there is still a lot of work to be done within the FA community to include the voices of all fat people, particularly those who desire to lose weight, formerly fat people, fat men, and fat people of color. Fat Acceptance has been called by some “a white woman’s game,” similar to past feminist movements, because the majority of the bloggers, activists, and visible members of the movement are white, fat women. Recent scholarship, though, is beginning to acknowledge experiences of fat women of color and queer fat people within the FA movement and their intersectional positionalities in fat activism (Daufin, McCalphin and Tango). However, 91 representations of fat people are increasingly diverse as the Fatosphere grows as a network and community, and more activists set out to normalize fat bodies. Stokes posits: “If, as Bordo suggests, we read the body as a text, then the fat body is an embodiment of the manifesto, and representations of the fat body utilize its apparent excess to make declarative statements which are ideologically infused and which serve to constitute a collective fat activist identity” (61). In the final chapter of this project, I discuss the textual markers of fat activism that activists use to represent themselves, both individually and collectively, and how those representations help shift the rhetoric surrounding the fat body. In doing so, I hope my readers will reconsider utilizing more body-positive language for representing fat people and talking about bodies. 92

ONLINE FAT ACTIVISM’S CONTINUING IMPACT ON BODY RHETORICS

"The way we view our bodies impacts the way we participate in the world" (Baker 10).

Figure 4: Wordle Representing Language of the Fatosphere

Changing the Way We See Fat Bodies

Throughout this project, I have shown how fat activists use the internet to connect, communicate, and form deep bonds with fellow activists and their readers, in addition to how they enact practices to keep these spaces safe. The communities that they formed might not always be harmonious, but the purpose they serve is not, I discovered, to construct a utopia, or even a community of like-minded individuals. Rather, like the FA movement, NAAFA, Fat

Underground, and Fat Studies, the Fatosphere is a space where the fat body is being brought to the forefront of political, social, and cultural conversations in ways that do not perpetuate the dominating narratives of fat that I outlined in chapter two. Represented in the world cloud above, the rhetorical process that fat activists enact to view and represent fat bodies clearly demonstrates how activists work against damaging and discriminatory lipoliteracies. In fat-accepting spaces, 93 adipose tissue on a body is not a reason for concern, an abnormality needing removed, a sinful display, or a side-show act. Atchka remarked that while life for fat people has improved, there is still a great deal of work left:

Mexico and Puerto Rico are both proposing a bill that will punish fat people,

either financially or legally. We still have to be on guard against the assault on our

civil liberties. But when it comes to the way the media treats fat people, it seems

to have gotten significantly better. It’s no longer a given that you can dehumanize

a fat person and everyone will just smile and nod. There’s a good chance that if

you’re an asshole to fat people, you can expect a loud and angry response from

more than just the activists.

Atchka’s position that the media is much kinder represents a narrative of progress for fat people, but one that is embedded in a long history of denigration. Fat bodies are celebrated in some communities for their diversity, softness, and abundance, while they are questioned extensively and scientifically in others; however, with a FA or body-positive lens, fat people are not seen as inherently immoral, unattractive, or unhealthy.

Changing marginalizing dominant discourses related to standards of health, beauty, or morality requires, in part, a changing of language. In chapter one, I discussed the term fat and its rhetorical metamorphosis, from a cell or excess of cells to a pejorative name and insult, to a nationwide epidemic, and, finally, to a reclaimed expression of individual and collective identity.

In this chapter, I discuss the textual markers of fat identity found in emerging communities across social media with the help of hashtags and fat-normalizing language. No longer are internet users bound to a “language-only space where nobody can see your hips, your belly, your legs” (LeBesco 182). Credentialing fat, or identification as a fat person, goes beyond “anecdotes 94 about fat oppression suffered at the hands of fat haters” (LeBesco 182). Alongside other textual elements, such as images and videos of fat bodies performing, smiling, and living fulfilling lives, written and spoken, or performed, textual markers help to normalize the fat body and give people a language for talking about bodies that does not erase, silence, or discriminate against them.

Most importantly, though, disseminating these textual markers makes way for more positive discourse about fat people to take place online, as well as in homes, classrooms, medical offices, and on our television screens. Ultimately, positive consideration, viewing, and representation of fat bodies, of all bodies rather, continues to be a necessity in our cultural and social discussions and rhetorical practices.

Textual Markers of Online Fat Activism

Observing the global reach of hashtags through social media makes examining the language that composes them and accompanying texts quite simple. Together, activists’ writing helps to normalize fat bodies, making it easier to talk about them in a positive way and emphasizing the importance of positive talk. In the figure below, I identified some of the most commonly used terms that I observed across the Fatosphere. The numbers in the figure are based on a single snapshot of the homepages of four popular fat activist sites: the NAAFA website; the

Fierce, Freethinking Fatties blog; Ragen Chastain’s Dances with Fat; and, Jes Baker’s The

Militant Baker. The website for the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance (NAAFA) provides resources for ways to get involved in the FA movement, including monetary donation, conferences, and news. Dances with Fat is a blog maintained by a controversial activist and author and editor of several books related to FA. The Militant Baker acts as a personal blog, public profile, and self-help guide for Jes Baker, the author of Things No One Will Tell Fat Girls.

Finally, the FFF, which I discussed extensively in the previous chapter, is a community blog 95 where the bloggers see themselves as relative outsiders to the Fatosphere and give their perspectives on weight-loss. I selected these sites specifically because of their differing views on several divisive issues, such as the weight-loss, beauty, and fashion industries, while they all uphold a body-positive lens.

Figure 5: Fatosphere's Common Language

Predominantly, fat was used most, particularly in context with the words people and person. This is not surprising because the majority of the participants in the Fatosphere and the subjects of conversation are, needless to say, fat people, and using that language undoubtedly identifies the audience. However, referring to fat people does not automatically suggest body positivity or that the space where the discussion is taking place is part of the Fatosphere. On a cultural level, personhood is frequently a secondary or tertiary feature for a fat person who is told, or systematically taught, to believe that if she loses weight, she can be healthy and live a happy life. Even in death, fat people are repeatedly stripped of their humanity during post- mortem examinations. Nevertheless, in the Fatosphere, there is the ever-present layer of 96 positivity that ignores neither the human or its body. In fact, body was used most in context with the words positivity, image, and positive. Body image simply refers to the cognitive act of seeing the self, either the image in a mirror, or as one thinks of oneself. Reflective of underlying philosophy of the Fatosphere, body positivity and the act of being body positive is the key identifier of fat activists. Sastre writes:

Body positivity could [. . .] be premised not on particular visual and discursive

formations, but on a critical and conscientious engagement with the ways we are

expected to understand, perform, and be our bodies. The key might be

reimagining body positivity not as a prescription for corporeal resolution, but as a

provocation, a call to reject the very notion of any regulated engagement with the

body’s physical and ideological construction. Radical body positivity should

challenge us to envisage and share, as we see fit, the complexities of our bodily

experiences [. . .]. (941)

To see images of fat bodies and references to them as fat people, while seemingly mundane, was a deeply moving and illuminating experience as I searched the Fatosphere. Thoughtful consideration and respect for fat people as valuable subjects and audience members, nonetheless, was quite surprising, specifically because contexts for discussing or representing fat people regularly involve a pathos-driven spectacle, the urgent need for weight-loss, or miraculous, life- saving medical intervention.

There were certainly some surprises in the ways that fat activists use language, also. For instance, weight, a term that is a source of contention for people in the Fatosphere, is used most often in context with loss. Sites are split, however, in the ways that they talk about weight-loss.

For instance, some sites in the Fatosphere talk about the horrors of weight-loss surgery and 97 methods that are damaging and deadly. Because of this, trigger warnings about discussions of weight-loss and bariatric surgery pervade the Fatosphere, and many sites have outright banned talk about weight-loss. Most significantly, though, rather than discussing dieting or diets, fat activists use the phrase weight-loss, sometimes including journey, to indicate that a person is attempting to positively achieve a goal that will directly impact her immediate health. Likewise, health and size were closely connected because HAES is one of the major principles behind the

FA movement and contemporary fat activist work. As a trend in the Fatosphere, identifying as a person of size as one would identify as a person of color might seem cringe-worthy to some critics (it certainly gave me pause) because size has taken on many of the same derogatory meanings as fat. Somewhere in my lipoliteracy (Graham), as in so many others’ experience, size became a shameful descriptor. The mission of many sites in the Fatoshere, as even the name suggests, is to reclaim the term fat, using it freely and openly. Interestingly, though, in other sites, I observed a shifting away from fat as the term that individuals permit others to use as they view and discuss their bodies. Rather, they have replaced fat with the phrases of size and plus size. As expressions like this gain popularity on social media, in academic discussions, and in social situations, our lipoliteracy vocabulary expands. On the other hand, terms that have historically been used in the spirit of being politically correct, like heavy-set, big-boned, obese, and husky, are pejorative.

Breaking the Internet: #EffYourBeautyStandards and the New Fatosphere

As with so many human rights movements, the ensuing organizations, subcultures, and areas of academic study are natural progressions in the movement’s cultural narrative. Rhetoric and writing researchers explore these narratives in order to map shifts in human language use as cognitive behavior and cultural practice. With that said, the Fatosphere gives digital life and 98 space to FA and its constituents. As a heterotopia (Foucault), an outlying, virtual community within a culture, the Fatosphere transforms as the number of actors in the network expands

(Latour) and as the needs of its participants are made public. The Fatosphere that Harding and

Kirby experienced, that I experienced for the first time four years ago, is not the same space that exists today. The internet, as an archive, allows us to access documents, posts, and feeds from earlier days; however, the heterotopia’s appeal is that it is malleable and fluctuating, and throughout this project, I have observed transformations in language, expectations, and relationships amongst activists.

The functions of networked technologies in activism are to help people organize, take collective action, and shape public narratives (Halavais and Garrido). I have remarked at length on the affordances of Web 2.0 and their importance in the online activist movements throughout this project. The ability to embed audio, video, and other visual forms on blogs, social media, and websites has presented internet users, regardless of their technological savvy, with opportunities to represent themselves and their communities in ways unheard of even ten years ago. While fat activists often accompany their stories with photos and videos, formation of the fat identity can still happen without them. The Fatosphere, like other virtual and hypertextual environments, allows for the creation of identities that are “fluid and metonymic,” as Warnick and Heineman assert. The fluidity of the internet is conducive to heterotopia-building as

“digitality affords the possibility of abrupt change, erasure, and creation of identities new and old as situations and events necessitate” (Warnick and Heineman 44). Given these perspectives on online identity-formation, I intended to investigate the ways that fat activists use language, and what language they use, to identify themselves as activists and to represent themselves individually and collectively. 99

Identifying or “coming out” as fat, commiserating, and sharing stories were, and are, important rhetorical functions of the Fatosphere; nonetheless, in the early days of the Fatosphere, as with initial internet forums and email groups, community spaces were created by academics and people privileged enough to have access to computers and the web. Historically, then, the limited perspective and scope of the Fatosphere a decade ago potentially reinforced systematic sexism and racism because of the lack of representations of fat people of color, indigenous people, fat members of the LGBTQ community, and fat men, as Atchka discovered. Amy Farrell writes:

Facing extreme hostility-from cruel childhood taunts and catcalls on the street, to

insults from their own family doctors and laughing dismissal of their issues by

lawyers, journalists, and academics- fat activists have nonetheless persevered in

their quest both to change the powerful ideas about the dangers and ugliness of fat

and to find full acceptance in a society that has for the last hundred years fully

stigmatized and rejected fat people. (138)

Subsequently, due to the global reach and accessibility of the internet in recent years, the

Fatosphere’s growth and diversity support a true acceptance of bodies and FA’s overall message for all fat people to “seek freedom from the endless cultural and personal criticism about the inadequacy of their bodies” (Farrell 136). This important work, when created and disseminated by the cyborg fat activists I discussed in the previous chapter, has contributed to significant shifts in the rhetoric surrounding fat bodies and directly impacted how we see and discuss them.

Rhetoric scholars are interested in defining identity and identification processes, and in conversation about fat people, there is a great deal at stake in the language used to represent their identities (LeBesco). In the previous chapter, I discussed identification as the practices that 100 activists enact to help identify themselves to others. For instance, some people use photos of their faces or bodies as avatars, images of fat bodies or body positive messages, or they say outright that they are fat. In this chapter, identification shifts from a rhetorical practice to a complicated process integral to identity construction. Online, in particular, the process of identification “emphasize[s] shifts in mental patterning that correspond to the interactive, hypertextual, mediated representational practices that denote digitality [. . .]” (Warnick and

Heineman 44). From a feminist perspective, textuality is important for fat people because the discourses about them, the very language used to discuss them, have highly discriminatory and damaging material effects. Fighting these effects “must be similarly grounded in the linguistic realm of textual practice” (LeCourt 157). LeCourt writes that “a resistant form of textual feminism would create a space for speaking multiple and contradictory subject positions within a single voice” (159). Indeed, the multivocality of the Fatosphere, as it is today, allows for fat activists to have and perform identities that challenge the control of their fat bodies by industries, doctors, and concern-trolls.

The #effyourbeautystandards phenomenon, for instance, illustrates one way that fat people and a number of activists are using language to defy dominant discourses surrounding their bodies and the impossible standards of beauty in American culture that marginalize them.

The group appeals to women, first, with their “Girl Gang,” insisting that “being fabulous isn’t limited to the size you wear!” The internet empowers fat people who normally have very little opportunity to claim their own identities to be active participants in “the ‘stylization’ of their identities” (Still 97), and “[a]lthough they may not agree, [they] have a voice in determining their designation, their authenticity, or their truth” (Still 131). Tess Holliday, the first plus-size model signed to an international modeling campaign, started the #effyourbeautystandards (EYBS) 101 movement in 2013 when she created the hashtag, which was used millions of times and spread like wildfire across social media. First appearing on Holliday’s Instagram, which now has

314,000 followers, EYBS is also a popular group on Facebook, seen below, with nearly 81,000 members. EYBS’s growth as an online movement and well-established realm of the Fatosphere is a reflection of the rhetorical power that it provides its creator and disseminators. Holliday’s response to a lifetime of bullying and denigration became her battle cry as she landed a modeling deal and was presented with numerous platforms from which she could be more visible, and more scrutinized, but also poised to make a change in a notoriously marginalizing industry.

Figure 6: Holliday's Response to Facebook

EYBS, #bodypositive and #celebratemysize are some of the most widely used hashtags across social media platforms, and of the hundreds of thousands of people who have clicked the follow button on Instagram, many of them post images of themselves wearing clothing that they 102 would normally be told was not appropriate for their bodies. Fat women wearing crop tops, fat men wearing tight suits, and fat people wearing swimsuits, showing their arms and thighs, donning bold prints and colors, and baring their flesh can be seen alongside #effyourbeautystandards. This is not to say that they have not come under fire from internet critics, trolls, and even administrators of social media sites. Recently, for instance, Holliday’s professional modeling photos were removed from Facebook, and her personal account was suspended because her photos were reported to be in violation of Facebook’s health and fitness standards.

Clearly seen in figure 7 above, while Facebook apologized to Holliday, she was certain to make the entire situation known when her account was reinstated. Her fans shared their outrage, and took to social media, illustrating, again, the rhetorical power of the fat activist cyborg and the emerging communities of support that can be formed by hashtags.

All Bodies are Bikini Bodies: The Importance of Normalization

Normalization of fat through a body-positive lens is the next important leap in the greater

FA movement, and one of the most significant contributory effects of the Fatosphere. Brian Still, whose work with online intersex communities also reflects the need for body normalization, remarks “over time, identity has been rearticulated, and as the culture changes, the identity changes, just as the changing of that identity, the contributions that come from it, change the culture” (Still 131). Certainly, identities are not formed over a short period of time, and as I discussed in the second chapter of this project, there is a long history of cultural construction of the ideal, cis-gender, able-bodied, heteronormative, male and female bodies. These representations of good, healthy, beautiful bodies have marginalized all of us who do not quite fit that mold. Rather than questioning the ideals behind the representations, many of us question ourselves, our basic instincts, and our own identities. Slowly, through the tireless efforts of 103 activists, online and off, through their efforts to make visible the rolls, cellulite, wrinkles, stretch marks, and scars that are, indeed, exceedingly more normal than thigh-gaps, contoured faces, and six-pack abs. As we see bodies without the assistance of photo-editing software and talk about them as they are, not as money-making industries would have us wish they were, the cultural conversation begins to turn. In a recent presentation on her book at Shawnee State University,

Jes Baker expressed the importance keeping fat bodies visible, saying that we need to put fat people on our social media profiles “to make it less weird.”

Figure 7: Substantia Jones' The Adipositivity Project

Substantia Jones’ The Adipositivity Project represents another way that the online body positive movement is attempting, digitally, to make the fat body more common, visible, and acceptable. Rather than calling upon language to do this, Jones positions herself as a photo- activist whose intimate portraits of fat people are showing normally invisible, previously forbidden and taboo, aspects of fat life. Shared online, as seen in the figure above, The

Adipositivity Project “aims to promote acceptance of benign human size variation and encourage 104 discussion of body politics [. . .] through a visual display of fat physicality.” Jones’ photographs seek to confront the definitions of beauty that have become normal in Western culture by offering new interpretations and representations of bodies. Maor writes:

Fat acceptance strategies and tactics, or performances that emphasize the positive

and glamorous aspects of fat embodiment, are essential to the fat acceptance

movement. [. . .] (I)n a cultural climate of fat hatred, declaring that beauty lies

outside the body is simply not enough to enable empowerment for fat women.

Only explicit valorization and assertion of fat bodies' beauty and grace can lead to

significant fat acceptance. (19)

Jones’ models consist of cis-gender, queer, trans, multiethnic, differently-abled, and size, race and age-diverse people. Most often, the models are nude and photographed in moments of pleasure and joy, sexually aroused and intertwined with a lover. The project has earned Jones several awards and acclaim in popular media, but the rhetorical power of Adipositivity stems from Jones’ engagement with a visual and virtual subversive discourse.

Beyond the Fatosphere: Body Positivity in Public Rhetorics and Pedagogies

Given the scarcity of scholarship focusing on FA, HAES, and body-positivity issues outside of Fat Studies, it is not surprising that teacher-based research with direct pedagogical implications is lacking. Because the American educational system is an integral part of social and cultural lives of its children, teachers are particularly entangled in complicated negotiations with students’ body image that warrant further scholarly attention. In a 2011 issue of Feminist

Teacher, Petra Mohr offered teaching resources for teachers and scholars who were interested in

Fat Studies. Feminist teachers, she posits, should: 105

[F]amiliarize themselves with resources that combine alternatives to mainstream

ideas of physical fitness with the realities of people living in a society fueled by

fat phobia. It is not just students who may benefit from some of the following

resources but family, friends, and colleagues as well. The idea is to encourage

people of all sizes to feel empowered and comfortable in their bodies and to help

them discover the incredible bodies they already have. (Mohr 168)

Certainly, teachers should be engaged in reflection on and conversations about body-positivity, especially teachers in subjects where students’ bodies are the focus, like health, science, and physical education. For instance, a 2013 study revealed that physical education teachers and college majors had strong, implicit anti-fat bias toward fat students, associating them with laziness, obesity, sadness, and lack of energy. These biases are “likely to manifest as subtle negative attitudes toward students who are obese. Taking as example discriminatory behavior derived from implicit attitudes in other contexts, we speculated that physical education teachers may subconsciously be less friendly toward or interact less frequently with students who are obese” (Fontana et. al. 26). Despite these findings, the study was not written from a HAES or

FA perspective, which is clearly demonstrated in the ways that the authors presumptively state that obese students do not wish to participate in physical activity, that they have “an excuse not to participate in a swimming lesson,” and warn teachers they may have make adaptations to increase engagement with obese students. Unfortunately, there is seemingly no body-positive scholarship related to physical education or other school subjects.

Through the efforts of the FA movement, the field of Fat Studies, and networked

Fatosphere, public discourse and pedagogies are beginning to take up more positive approaches; however, these efforts cannot cease because a small amount of headway is made. Researchers, 106 scholars, and educators in rhetoric and writing are interested in the body as it relates to the ways human beings make meaning, compose arguments, learn language, and practice culture. In the writing classroom, for instance, my students often choose to write about the “freshman fifteen” as problem on campus. As a body-positive writing instructor, I can encourage my students to think more broadly about healthy food consumption and bodily movements for health’s sake as an important alternative to fear of weight gain. As I have demonstrated in this project, fat people in American culture have lived experiences that shape their meaning-making, argumentative, linguist, and cultural practices negatively. Negative practices have been, and continue to be, systematically reinforced, which should be of great concern to activist scholars and teachers who work at and with disciplinary intersections (Marcus, Swami). Farrell asserts that fat-hating biases also work “in complicated ways to reinforce the existence of racism, sexism, homophobia, and all other processes by which our culture categorizes and oppresses people through bodily hierarchies and stigmatization” (136). Weight discrimination and fat bias pervade the academic world, from college admissions, financial aid, and professor expectations to faculty hiring, tenure and promotion, and teaching evaluations (Fisanick).

Changing the Way We See Ourselves

What we think we know about ourselves and our identities, not just gender and sex, but the body, too, “is grounded in the discourses that produce them, and those discourses are, in turn, produced by the processes, patterns, theories, and conceptions derived from different disciplines, from historical and social formations, and from events” (Still 8). Recalling the seven-year-old me sitting in my bedroom at my grandparents’ home, I know that my grandmother’s telling me that I couldn’t wear a two-piece bathing suit because I was too “heavy-set” was not the only event that contributed to my problem-filled lipoliteracy. Indeed, it was the start of a lifetime of awkward 107 conversations, concern-fueled statements, and hateful jokes. In my daily life, however, I watched comedies that forced me to laugh at fat characters who were portrayed as dumb, slovenly, gross and clumsy, and dramas that taught me to pity the fat person stuck in their house, or that the smart, fat friend would never find love. Fat actors were never in lead roles, and they certainly were never the object of sexual desire or romantic interest. Fat sex scenes were few, and fewer still were fat people seen having pleasure other than eating. Talk shows and health specials informed me that my “obese” body was going to kill me, causing diabetes, heart attacks, and cancer. The food I consumed was damaging my organs and creating pockets of disgusting, excess flesh. The clothing that I wore cost more, had fewer fashionable styles, and was located in the back of department stores away from other women’s clothing. Every bite of food that I took was weighed, counted, watched, and measured in programs like Weight Watchers and Atkins.

My body was weighed and measured publicly in group meetings where I was taken from my preteen years onward.

For many women, especially, the learned practices of weighing and measuring become part of our daily routine, and a source of anxiety when numbers on the scales change, too many carbohydrates are consumed, or when clothing fits tightly. In Things No One Will Tell Fat Girls,

Jes Baker invited Virgie Tovar, the creator of #LoseHateNotWeight, to write a guest essay. Here,

Tovar reveals her own lipoliteracy and the embodied rhetoric that she practiced in order to be normal:

"[D]ieting was my way of communicating my understanding that my fat body was

unacceptable and shameful. It was my way of communicating that I understood a

woman's role is to be small and totally obsessed with how little space and

resources she could take up. Dieting represented a way I could create meaning in 108

my life, but the problem is you can't create meaning by obsessing about kale or

calories or what the tag on your pants says." (27)

Incessant self-monitoring and criticism was also my “normal” until I picked up Lessons in 2009, read The Militant Baker in 2013, and saw Tess Holliday on the June 2015 cover of People.

Scrolling through FA and body positive social media profiles, websites, and comment threads, it became clear that body positivity “can and should reflect not the truth of the body through its measured contours, but the imaginative, affective, anxious truth of continual self-making”

(Sastre 941). These texts introduced me to new lipoliteracy sponsors who, unlike my granny, gave me the courage to wear clothing that represented my personal and professional identity, as well as the language to discuss my body and my lived experience that did not diminish my existence or force me to apologize for taking up space on furniture, in a meeting, or in my classroom. Immersion in the Fatosphere presented me with the opportunity to learn how to talk about fat bodies and strip away the years of shame.

109

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Stamford: Ablex Publishing, 1999. 133-151. Print. 12 APPENDIX A: HSRB LETTER

DATE: December 1, 2015

TO: Aimee Taylor FROM: Bowling Green State University Human Subjects Review Board

PROJECT TITLE: [667478-3] Live from the Fatosphere: Activism, Literate Practice, and Community-Building Online SUBMISSION TYPE: Continuing Review/Progress Report

ACTION: APPROVED APPROVAL DATE: November 25, 2015 EXPIRATION DATE: November 24, 2016 REVIEW TYPE: Expedited Review

REVIEW CATEGORY: Expedited review category # 7

Thank you for your submission of Continuing Review/Progress Report materials for this project. The Bowling Green State University Human Subjects Review Board has APPROVED your submission. This approval is based on an appropriate risk/benefit ratio and a project design wherein the risks have been minimized. All research must be conducted in accordance with this approved submission.

Please note that you are responsible to conduct the study as approved by the HSRB. If you seek to make any changes in your project activities or procedures, those modifications must be approved by this committee prior to initiation. Please use the modification request form for this procedure.

All UNANTICIPATED PROBLEMS involving risks to subjects or others and SERIOUS and UNEXPECTED adverse events must be reported promptly to this office. All NON-COMPLIANCE issues or COMPLAINTS regarding this project must also be reported promptly to this office.

This approval expires on November 24, 2016. You will receive a continuing review notice before your project expires. If you wish to continue your work after the expiration date, your documentation for continuing review must be received with sufficient time for review and continued approval before the expiration date.

Good luck with your work. If you have any questions, please contact the Office of Research Compliance at 419-372-7716 or [email protected]. Please include your project title and reference number in all correspondence regarding this project.

This letter has been electronically signed in accordance with all applicable regulations, and a copy is retained within Bowling Green State University Human Subjects Review Board's records.

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