The Emotional Treachery of Digital Body Positivity

Is it anti-feminist to express negative feelings toward your body?

Is writing about your own low self-esteem detrimental to the cause of fat liberation?

Too often, feminism is collapsed into a set of personal rules that we are expected to parse correctly and to follow in order to prove our feminist credentials:

Are we decentering men enough? Are we buying from the right stores?Do we like or hate Taylor Swift?

While each of these fights I’ve seen play out across my social media feeds is grounded in legitimate feminist critiques of systemic oppression, the constant bickering about “doing feminism right” tends to focus too much on individual choices and not enough on communal dialogue about how to enact actual change.jez

I would argue that the way body positivity is argued about online has become another personal yardstick standing in for actual feminist action.

Body Positivity’s Negative Effects and Affects

If you’re a millennial who used to read Jezebeland now spends too much time on social media, you may have witnessed the discourse surrounding comedy writer Lindy West’s newlindest book, Adult Braces. While the travelogue-memoir-essay collection touched on West’s views on friendship, Hollywood, mental health, race, Americana, and economic precarity, the overwhelming online discussion that raged in the book’s wake focused primarily on West’s personal life. In particular, the debate centered on whether she and her partners are "doing polyamory wrong” and whether her approach to her own marriage is or isn’t a disgrace to her career as a popular and opinionated fat feminist writer and activist.

I’ve been reading West’s work since the early 2010s, and she is the subject of one of my dissertation chapters. Specifically, I examine how the media framing of West primarily as a feminist rather than as a comedian during the rape joke wars of the early 2010s positioned her as an outside enemy rather than an inside reformer. That framing mattered because comedy communities often police who gets to count as "a real comic” to attack any critiques as attempts to “destroy comedy” (and also, they use the framing to justify violent harassment). While the current controversy over her work isn’t coming from alt-right comedy bros, it’s still a form of gatekeeping. Are feminists not allowed to be messy?

Most people have moved on to other topics, but this one has stayed with me because it not only touches on my past research, but also recent research I’ve been doing about digital body positivity and our expectations of influential fat women who are labelled “body positive.” I’m interested less in body positive content than I am in reactions to these women when they inevitably let their fans and followers down by not living up to their expectations. One thing that stood out to me in the reaction to Adult Braces was the expectation that West project confidence, self-assurance, and ideological consistency. Fans seemed disappointed by the fact that she appeared vulnerable, conflicted, and insecure.

Bound up with much of the criticism of West’s agreeing to and eventually embracing polyamory in her marriage at the behest of her husband was an underlying critique that West was letting feminism and fat women down by “giving in” to her husband’s desires because she lacks self-esteem and prioritizes the feelings of the thin people in her life. One Goodreads reviewer described their experience with Adult Braces by arguing that, "it’s uncomfortable to read a book that's supposed to be persuasive from someone who has the self-esteem of an inanimate object."

I’m not coming down on one side or another; it doesn’t really bother me if people whose work I like have good or bad marriages. I am more interested in what this debate tells us about expectations around feminism, embodiment, and feelings about our own bodies. My research tends to be about popular discourse. What are people arguing about? What assumptions are embedded in those arguments? What do those patterns reveal about how we understand identity, power, and morality?

I would argue that body positivity, especially what I’ll call “late-stage digital body positivity,” has not only created another set of expectations that we’re supposed to live up to, but also encouraged endless social media discourse outrage cycles in which we debate what body positivity is and if folks are are are not living up to it.

There have been critiques of body positivity since its uptake into popular consciousness around 2012, namely that it centers individual psychological responses to our own bodies and beauty and waters down the more radical body activism enacted by fat, queer, and Black activists from which it sprang. Nevertheless, body positivity has become the backdrop against which we now talk about fat representation. And to our detriment, body positivity has added an additional emotional burden to the already fraught job of being fat on the public stage. Now fat women not only have to navigate an aggressively fatphobic society, one that seems to be backsliding toward increased fatphobia in the wake of GLP-1 mania, but they are also expected to perform attitudes about their bodies and take the brunt of the negative feelings we have about living in a fatphobic society.

The Burdens of Representation

Reading responses to Adult Braces alongside reviews of another recent release, Rainbow Rowell's Cherry Baby, I noticed similar themes. Cherry, Baby is a messy romantic comedy about a fat woman going through a divorce and reconnecting with a college crush. Because it’s narrated in first person, we hear Cherry’s thoughts about herself, which are frequently ambivalent about navigating the world as a fat woman.

While many readers enjoyed the book, critical reviews of Cherry Baby often complained that Cherry thinks about her weight too much, lacks sufficient character growth, or oscillates too often between self-loathing and self-confidence.

Many critiques of both works are grounded in an expectation that fat women provide “good” representation to counteract the lack of fat representation. Peter Feng refers to this phenomenon as the "burden of representation," arguing that "it is a terrible irony that those of us who infrequently see ourselves represented on the screen often attack artists from our own communities."

When we rarely see ourselves represented, the few examples that do exist become responsible for doing the work of many. Marginalized creators are often expected to perform an impossible balancing act. They must be complex but never in ways that reinforce stereotypes. They become stand-ins for all the representation audiences have been denied.

Feng is writing about Asian-American sitcoms, specifically Fresh Off the Boat, but the phenomenon extends across marginalized identities. This doesn't mean criticism is never warranted. It’s more that most criticism doesn’t take into account that the creators are stuck in the oppressive system with the rest of us. They’re subject to marginalization that not only affects their psyche, but also constrains economic prospects, controls the kind of content they can make, and forces them to bear the brunt of backlash for the dearth of representation the system has created. Feng reminds us that "it is easier to attribute sentiments and assign blame to individuals than to acknowledge the systems that constrain what individuals can say and do in the first place."

What’s interesting to me is not just that readers expressed disappointment about representation, but the specific critique that West and Cherry failed to perform confidence, happiness, and high self-esteem.

Scholars who study social media have observed that influencers have to balance aspiration with relatability in their content. I would argue that body positivity on social media has created an obligation for fat influencers to perform aspirational confidence. Because fat bodies aren’t aspirational in the same way thin ones are, confidence becomes the cultural currency of public-facing fat women. Combine this with the ways algorithms reward controversy, outrage, and opinion-having and you have an environment rife for tearing down fat women who don’t live up to expectations.

Feeling Rules and Emotional Labor

I find sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild's concept of "feeling rules" particularly useful to think through this phenomenon. Hochschild is best known for popularizing the term “emotional labor” in her groundbreaking book The Managed Heart, but she also argues that emotional labor depends upon socially shared “feeling rules” governing which emotions are appropriate in particular situations.

If you've ever thought, "I should be happy," or "I don't have the right to be upset," you're invoking a feeling rule. Some feeling rules seem obvious. We mourn at funerals and celebrate at weddings. Others, like how we are supposed to feel about ours and others’ bodies, are far less stable and so become the kinds of things we argue about on social media (or what academics might call ‘a site of struggle’). Hochschild argues that feeling rules are shaped by ideologies that tell us what emotions we ought to experience. When an ideology is in flux, then, the feeling rules are also in flux. What emotions are considered morally acceptable, and who gets to decide? I’m interested both in the ambivalence and confusion folks feel, but also their outrage when they see others expressing emotions that they see as breaking body positivity’s feeling rules. If body positivity has taught us that confidence is a feminist act, then insecurity becomes a feminist failure.  

Body positivity was supposed to challenge the shame surrounding fatness. Instead, it seems to replace rules of bodily discipline with rules of emotional discipline. The expectation is that we aren’t just expected to control our bodies (through eating well, exercising, and putting all sorts of goop on our faces) but also to control our feelings about our bodies.

Because so much of the fat representation many millennials grew up with was cruel, it makes sense that audiences want visible fat women who are joyful, resilient, and confident. We all want examples that make another future imaginable. The problem is that society has not actually become a place where it is easy to be a happy, confident fat woman. Becoming comfortable in a body that the culture treats as a moral failure requires psychological work. The burden of representation therefore falls on women like West. Because she is funny, outspoken, politically engaged, and publicly fat, she becomes responsible for representing the correct emotional relationship to fatness.

Similarly, one of the most common criticisms of Cherry Baby was that Cherry thinks about her weight too often. But in a first-person novel, that seems unsurprising. Many fat women think about their bodies constantly because society constantly tells them to. The novel even includes a scene in which Cherry admits these feelings to a thin friend, who responds with discomfort. Cherry realizes she had been protecting her friend from those emotions all along.

Thin people are often uncomfortable confronting fatphobia directly, while many fat readers desperately want role models who have already transcended it. Both desires become projected on to the few fat women who manage break through. They are expected to perform confidence on behalf of everyone else so as not to make anyone uncomfortable.

That expectation reflects body positivity's focus on individualism and competition. Rather than directing anger toward industries that profit from body dissatisfaction, medical systems that pathologize fatness, or patriarchal beauty standards, the movement increasingly asks individuals to regulate their own emotions and to police the emotions of others. Social media then intensifies this dynamic because outrage over emotional "failure" generates engagement.

It would be wonderful if everyone felt confident all the time, and it is valuable to seek out media that offers hopeful representations. Believing in feminist politics does not require perfect psychological health. You do not lose your feminist commitments because you sometimes hate your body. Individual emotional experience, even when it happens in a public forum, is not the same as structural political action. I think it’s reasonable to express disappointment that self-hatred is the outcome of our system, but I’d encourage us to avoid aiming our righteous fury and anger at individual women.