
On the popular YouTube series Hot Ones, Khloe Kardashian discussed a photograph taken of her for Complex Magazine's 2015, August-September issue. In it, Kardashian strikes an erotic pose—sultry pout, black bikini, butt foregrounded in front of a mirror. Hot Ones host Sean Evans asked her about the image. “Where does [it] fall in your pantheon of favorite Khloe Kardashian magazine spreads?” She answered,
I love that one…this was the first time I ever did a cover that I was… really sexy on…I don’t think I’ve ever done another cover like that especially with my butt being more forward than my face…but I loved it. I thought it was just a good, empowering cover for me. I felt really good and confident. (Nostra)
Kardashian’s language works to frame the spread in terms of personal empowerment. This is on script with the magazine’s presentation of the shoot. Describing it, Complex writer Lauren Nostro said it was a turning point in Kardashian’s self-conception, her body image a fraught aspect of her public persona. Though, “...her nerves were on high during the entire shoot,” (ibid) Kardashian told Nostra, “‘I don’t know if I’m ever gonna feel like daaamn, you look good…but I've never felt as comfortable in my own skin than I do now.”’ (ibid) In this way, Kardashian characterizes the chance to portray her body in sexualized terms—oiled abs, leather, and all—as personal improvement, a triumph over a sense of inferiority.
Indeed, the rhetoric of self acceptance and confidence substantiates Kardashian’s brand, an aspect of which is her clothing line, Good American. On the Hot Ones episode, Evans asked whether it's difficult to scale Kardashian’s designs from very small sizes to very large. Kardashian said that it is, and emphasized Good American’s refusal to sell to retailers who won’t buy the whole size range. “It costs more money,” she said, “but it's worth it.” This commitment is explicit on The Good American website. It says,
Every piece in our collection is shown on three size ranges of models, to eliminate the friction around finding your perfect fit. High-quality fabric, a relentless obsession with fit, and uncompromising attention to comfort help you feel sexier, curvier, and more confident—guaranteed.
“Friction,” “size range,” “curvier”—through coded language and photographs of plus sized models, Good American makes itself clear: any person can wear their clothes without downsizing their body or ego. Importantly, the language used to say this is the same Kardashian used to describe her liberating photoshoot, that which empowered her due to the way her body had come to fit a certain notion of sexuality which sells magazines. Thus, by citing confidence, self-empowerment, and feeling good, Kardashian’s language joins apparently contradictory points, resulting in a message fit for a wider consumer base. By framing her photoshoot in terms of self acceptance, she affirms women of all sizes simultaneously to the extent they accept their size; and, as women come to see themselves in the many body types imaged on the Good American website, the act of self acceptance becomes a service purchased for the price of jeans. As such, Kardashian’s rhetoric monetizes her own body, while monetizing the bodies of women whom she wants to buy her clothes.
But in this, Kardashian is not unique. Hers is typical of a broader ideology which has materialized in social media, that which results in an ironic use of feminism online. Despite, and in part, because of language developed during the second and third wave, users self commodify their bodies as they post, tweet, and scroll. Structured by the needs of the market, in espousing the virtues of all bodies, social media practice enforces standards of beauty at the expense of bodies which do not meet those standards. Tragically this, despite its rhetoric, manifests in the promotion of thinness and eros, quite traditional notions of beauty and femininity. Recent iterations of the Body Positive movement demonstrate this, making sense of Kardashian’s contradictory rhetoric. But it's when one realizes that this rhetoric has a history, one which has become ironic through the commercial structure of social media discourse, that a certain ideology makes itself known. It's an ideology of how women should understand their bodies—an understanding structured by a rhetoric of confidence and empowerment—arising from social media use, a fundamentally commercial practice that disseminates Body Positive language for the sake of capital.
The history of Body Positive language began by rejecting ideologies that commodify female bodies. In the 1973 “Fat Liberation Manifesto'', feminists said, “we are angry at mistreatment by commercial and sexist interests. These have exploited our bodies as objects of ridicule, thereby creating an immensely profitable market selling the false promise of avoidance of, or relief from, that ridicule.” (Freespirit and Aldebaran) Framed in terms of the rejection of ideology, “Fat Feminism” as it came to be called, emerged from the “Fat Acceptance Movement” which deployed language of resistance to capitalist notions of body image. (Fletcher) It was the effort to change “fundamental social values which are seen as the root cause of all human laws” that led to the creation of organizations like“The Fat Underground” and the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance. (Golda Bracha Fishman) Karen Stimson summarizes the impetus of “Fat Feminism” in Vivian Mayer’s Shadow on a Tightrope, writing “‘Fat is not a feminist issue; fat oppression is.’ Fear of fat, programmed into women by a fatphobic and gynophobic culture, keeps all women, regardless of size, in a panic about the size and shape of our bodies.” (Stimson)
It would not be until the 1990’s that Body Positive rhetoric developed in publishing and print culture, as well as in the institutional organization of Third Wave Feminism. Radiant Magazine founded by Alice Anfield, sought to “support women of ‘all sizes of large’ in living proud, full, active lives, at whatever weight, with self-love and self-respect.” Following its underground predecessors, Radiant was published to subvert “fat-phobia,” especially that which was aimed at female children, emphasizing that chauvinist ideologies perpetuated multigenerationally. In 1989 the National Organization of Women initiated a Body Image Task Force aimed at “opposing size discrimination,” an effort which resulted in a quarterly newsletter in 1991. (ibid) It was then that “fat feminism” first appeared in syllabi and articles, seminally with Carrie Hemenway’s course on "The Politics of Women and Food as it Relates to Fat Oppression" at the University of Massachusetts, and her subsequent article "Weight Discrimination and the Law" in Directions in Applied Nutrition. Lynn McAfee’s paper on "Fat Women and Feminism" presented at a Women and Philosophy conference is further evidence that Body Positive feminism had gained a place in the institution of feminism more broadly. (ibid) Subsequently, a market developed catering to women interested in reinterpreting health and fitness discourses along “fat feminist” lines. Organizations like the Women of Substance Health Spa and Great Shape claimed to help women by encouraging reinterpreted notions of health “infused with positive affirmations and friendly reminders to be aware of body alignment, listen to body cues, drink water, and most important, breathe and have fun.” (Schuster and Tealer 324) Thus, third wave feminism saw body positivity introduced, not only to the print culture and institutions of feminism as such, but to commerce.
That feminist body positivity would, though begun as a counter to commercialized notions of the female body, use the market to spread its message is a trend that intensified with the advent of social media. The result has been to imbibe and proliferate capitalist ideologies of female bodies. Where formally body positive feminism sought liberation from capitalist ideology by asserting the legitimacy of nonconforming bodies, in the context of social media women are faced with the prospect of performing their subjectivity within a digital environment engineered for the sake of profit. Hence, despite efforts to subvert the aims of the digital environment, even body positive rhetoric is harnessed for the sake of commodifying the bodies it's designed to protect.
This is facilitated by the technology which structures online social practice. In 2013, Instagram transitioned its services to an advertising platform, explicitly converting their users into commodities, selling customer data to marketers, providing detailed information about their user’s activities, location, and habits—a model which other leading social media services have imitated. By commercializing the social environment, social media companies commodified social acts, inviting the user to participate in and profit from their own social interaction. As such, the user’s social self becomes structured by technological services—posts, tweets, hashtags, etc.—that which are engineered for the purpose of profiting by the performance of that self. Jessica Cwynar-Horta reminds us
that users form their virtual subjectivities on social networking sites, by constantly updating
their statuses and profiles, in order to remain legible…[they] engage in this form of labor due to the desire to count as a subject and thus become legible for recognition. However, while making themselves legible through their profiles, users make themselves legible to corporations who want to sell their products. (Cwynar-Horta 41)
In addition to making themselves legible to corporations, the user has been enabled to market their subjectivity directly in the form of goods and services. Moreover, social media is used to directly market goods and services to users, often with the assistance of influencers whom they already follow. Social media influencing is a 21 Billion dollar a year industry, (Statista) the business model of which involves users selling products, services, and advertising to their social media followers as a customer base. The result is a structuring of social performance for profit, “artificial images…not the real lives of influencers, but rather a branded identity…” Even when “... they are not endorsing products, users are still performing as audience commodities by creating the content…” (Cwynar-Horta 42) The presence of body positive influencers using feminist rhetoric on various platforms thus provides a means by which to harness the body positive message and sell products directly to consumers, which, in turn, disseminates images and language that enforces ideologies of womanhood to which feminism has previously been opposed.
The result is the rhetoric demonstrated by Kardashian, one which speaks of bodily acceptance and confidence regarding a body (hers) which conforms meticulously to the standards of the market. This ideology enforces that women be thin, free from blemish, and sexualized in order to be confident and self assured. The range of this irony is demonstrated by the advent of plus sized models—examples of which are found on the Good American website. Though their use by corporations is accompanied by body positive rhetoric, their presence has come to be criticized as just another, albeit new, body standard to which women must adhere and thus facilitate more efficiently the purchasing of products. Not only are plus sized models like Ashley Graham “closer to the normative ‘ideal’ body….” (ibid), their bodies are unrealistic, their images often edited by “photoshop to remove cellulite, stretch marks, and other imperfections.” (ibid) As Marcy Cruz, the blog editor for Plus Model Magazine points out, "Body positivity…means promoting body love to everyone and all bodies, not just ones that the media pushes, which seem to push the message that plus size means a size 14 and that's it.” (Dalessandro)
That the “media” is taken to be responsible for the promotion of bodies which contradict the premises of body positive feminism, despite its rhetoric, is symptomatic of the market in which that rhetoric is deployed. The result is an ideology Ariel Woodson, a plus sized social media influencer, has labeled “defanged fat activism…suitable for corporate use and coddling the feelings of thin, able-bodied, cisgender, white women.” (ibid) That the “corporate use” of body positive rhetoric performs a narrowing function in which ideologies of appearance are given is picked up by Kath Read, a self titled “fat activist” and industry watcher, who says, “I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve seen supposed 'body positive warriors' promote the old 'as long as you’re healthy' rhetoric, or even suggest that 'nobody wants to see that' in reference to very fat bodies, particularly if they’re comfortably exposing those bodies.” (ibid)
Examples of body positive advocates, undermining their message with the performance of their body on social media are legion. Echoing Kardashian, Australian influencer Karin Airby, @karinairby (1.2 Million followers), established her brand with a body positive message resulting in clothing lines Moana Bikini and The Moana Smile Club. However, when her photographs were discovered to be photoshopped, her clout fell on the basis of hypocrisy. In defense, she deployed the rhetoric of body positivity, emphasizing her “journey,” “self love,” and visual “acceptance” (Longhetti) resulting in her follower count remaining steady. Trends in social media influencing continue to demonstrate such contradictions arising from the corporate use of “fat feminist” language. This is the case with Jessamyn Stanley, @mynameisjessamyn, a body positive yoga influencer who has been known to teach yoga in a corset, joining a groundswell of body positive influencers who sell products which conceal and hold-in the female form. In both cases, while rising in popularity by way of body positive language, both Airby and Stanley succumb to the pressures of the market to maintain their social media business.
The rise of Ashley Graham, @ashleygraham (20.6 Million followers), a plus-sized supermodel, fits this pattern. Becoming an icon of the plus sized model movement with her 2016 Sports Illustrated cover photo, Graham’s popularity has been fueled by her advocacy for unconventional bodies. For example, in her TED talk in which she argued for bodily self acceptance, she stood before a mirror, “having a friendly chat with her body parts: “Back fat, I see you popping over my bra today. But that’s all right. I’m gonna choose to love you.” (Glamour) However, as her popularity grew, Graham’s clout fell as it came out that she too had used photoshop in her images. (Hardy) Eventually, Graham would lose weight, and appear on the cover of Vogue magazine photoshopped, posing with six traditionally sized models. However, this too was couched in body positive language. Graham said,
Sixty-seven percent of the women in America wear a size 14 or larger. Sixty-seven percent. Maybe you could ignore those consumers before, but now, thanks to social media, they're making their voices heard…Women are demanding that brands give them what they want. And what they want is to be visible. Designers aren't the only ones pushing fashion in an all-embracing direction.” (Extra TV)
Here Graham efficiently joins the aims of body positive rhetoric with the marketplace. While presenting her body by traditional tropes of femininity—hourglass shape, long tanned legs, beach atmosphere—Graham reframes the magazine image as advocacy for bodies unrepresented by it. It's important to note that Graham rose to prominence as a size 16 model, slimming down to size 14, that new size becoming the standard of her political representation. By moving the goalpost, Graham appropriates body positivity for service in capitalist ideologies. This is evidenced by her invocation of market share, linking her politicized body to the sale of products.
This is why commercialized feminist language about female bodies on social media results in the promotion of what Stimson called the “fear of fat, programmed into women by a fatphobic and gynophobic culture…” That which “...keeps all women, regardless of size, in a panic about the… shape of our bodies.” (Stimson) This is produced by the capitalized structure of social media, making normative female images which sell products and advertising time. Ideologies produced through participation in the marketplace are therefore corrosive to feminist rhetoric, ironically subverting it for its own sake. Therefore, to the extent that social media is a means of communication in society, capitalist ideologies will continue to structure feminist discourse. Because of this, the ironic structure of body positive rhetoric shows no sign of normalizing.
Works Cited
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