Plus-Size Fashion Influencers and Disruptive Black Bodies

Abstract

This project examines the ways that Black plus-size fashion influencers disrupt normative beauty standards (thin, White, cis, able-bodied) through visual self-fashioning in the digital public. Because Black women’s bodies are inscribed with meaning by hegemonic systems that deem them ugly, lazy, angry, and therefore unworthy of respect, care, or safety, Black women are constantly working to rewrite narratives and ideologies regarding their lives. Fat Black women reclaim agency via their embodied rhetorical acts by forwarding Fat Black women’s ontologies into the digital public. Rather than attempting to conform to dominant standards that center White, thin, cis, able-bodied women and hope for acceptance into mainstream spaces, Black women create their own ways and spaces of being and knowing in the digital public that serve to transform those publics.

Fashion, beauty, and femme aesthetics have been a central part of my upbringing. I come from a family of women who take pride in their appearance and their beauty. Beauty rituals are important in my family and we are always paying attention to what each one is wearing, what new hair products we’re using, and whose manicurist has started slipping. As I graduated college and began to think about how to merge a more professional, pulled together aesthetic along with a body that had moved from right on the cusp to firmly within plus sizes, I looked to fashion blogs as a guide. How were women size 14+ dressing themselves? How were they finding clothes that allowed them to look youthful and fashionable in a landscape that wasn’t friendly to larger women’s bodies? In the late 2000s, I began following fashion blogs and getting updates on my Google Reader account. I marveled at these women’s ability to pull together amazing outfits despite the limited number of options available at the time. With few retailers providing extended sizes, fat women were forced to use primarily online retailers for their shopping. Since that time, fashion blogging and influencer culture have exploded. Instagram changed the game, and fat Black fashion influencers continued their transformative work on the platform. As I looked at these women and their boldness, their willingness to make themselves a visual object online to help other women, their willingness to wear bold colors, two-piece bathing suits, and form-fitting items that I would never be bold enough to wear, I wondered what impact this had on other fat, Black women like me.

In time I began to think more critically about how these visual acts were functioning rhetorically. It occurred to me that these fashion influencers were doing more than just posting pretty outfits on their social media feeds. Their embodied rhetorical acts in the digital public were subversive in their refusal to conform to expectations of fat Black womanhood. By being sexy, wearing brightly colored, form-fitting outfits, by refusing to hide themselves, they created a counternarrative of fat, Black womanhood. This project examines the ways that Black plus-size fashion influencers disrupt normative beauty standards (thin, White, cis, able-bodied) through visual self-fashioning in the digital public. Scholars like Strings (2019) have examined the ways that Black women’s bodies are inscribed with meaning by hegemonic systems that deem them ugly, lazy, angry, and therefore unworthy of respect, care, or safety, Black women are constantly working to rewrite narratives and ideologies regarding their lives. I argue that Fat Black women reclaim agency via their embodied rhetorical acts by forwarding Fat Black women’s ontologies into the digital public. Rather than attempting to conform to dominant standards that center White, thin, cis, able-bodied women and hope for acceptance into mainstream spaces, Black women create their own ways and spaces of being and knowing in the digital public that serve to transform those publics.

The politics of Black women’s bodies is one that is always a contentious space. In her essay “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book” Spillers (1987) argues that Black women’s bodies are the site for defining whiteness against the Other. The politics of naming for Black women and the ungendering that happens as a result of slavery result in a complete erasure of Black women as autonomous subjects with bodily agency. Black plus-size fashion influencers push back against this naming practice that marks the Black woman’s body as nonhuman. The insistence on a feminine beauty aesthetic is an act of resistance for fat Black women who have always been denied beauty. As Spillers argues, the naming of fat Black women as mammy and the ungendering and desexualizing of these women results in Black women working to reframe those narratives. She claims,

In order for me to speak a truer word concerning myself, I must strip down through layers of attenuated meanings, made an excess in time, over time, assigned by a particular historical order, and there await whatever marvels of my own inventiveness. (Spillers, 1987, p. 65)

Black women’s struggle to produce their own narratives of themselves outside of the names already given to them requires fighting via self-representation/objectification

Objectification of the Black female body is a fraught act that is loaded with historical meaning, and a complex legacy of subjugation and oppression. Black women’s bodies have historically been sexualized and this sexualization has been the justification for sexual violence committed against them. However, a move to counteract that with the respectable does Black women a disservice because it still denies them any sexual autonomy. As a result, I am particularly interested in the ways that Black women engage in an embodied rhetorical self-fashioning that exercises agency over the body and shares themselves in the digital public. I take up a theory of self-objectification as outlined by McMillan (2015) in Embodied Avatars: Genealogies of Black Feminist Art and Performance. McMillan (2015) argues that Black women have used embodied avatars, or acts of self-objectification, as spaces for resistance and liberation. McMillan traces an intellectual genealogy of Black women’s performances in the public sphere and claims that these women performers assume alter identities or embodied avatars to fight to transform and disrupt the bounds of Black womanhood. McMillan implores readers to reimagine objecthood, not as a means of abuse and subjugation of Black women, but as a method for resistance. McMillan states, “I argue for rescrambling the dichotomy between objectified bodies or embodied subjects by reimagining objecthood as a performance-based method that disrupts presumptive knowledges of black subjectivity” (McMillan, 2015, p. 9). If objecthood or self-objectification becomes a method of resistance as McMillan claims, what does this mean for Black women in our internet era? I argue that Black plus fashion influencers engage in this self-objectification through their digital self-representation. They become objects of visual consumption online, but it is not merely a dehumanizing act. This objectification is an act of agency, a means of building community, and an act of embodied resistance.

Fat Black women started a wave of fashion blogs in the early 2000s. These women aimed to create spaces to reimagine the possibilities for dressing fat, Black, femme bodies in a digital landscape that aimed to ignore the existence of these women. The only space for fat Black women in the public sphere historically has been as the mammy figure or the sassy aunt. These stereotypes limit the possibilities for fat Black women to be beautiful or retain agency over their bodies outside of the expectations imposed upon them by anti-fat, anti-Black, and patriarchal systems of oppression. In the past decade, as fashion blogging and Instagram influencer culture have become a prominent part of our digital lives, fat Black women have cultivated supportive digital communities and allowed fat Black women to see themselves as modern, fashionable, and beautiful in mainstream discourse spaces. This has served to empower fat Black women to not hide themselves or feel shame or hatred for their bodies. They are able to see themselves in the beauty mainstream. Black plus-size fashion influencers (Gabi Gregg, n.d.) and (Chastity Garner, n.d.) began their respective blogs in 2008. Both women have since garnered large followings, with Gregg particularly, becoming one of the most recognizable plus-size fashion influencers in the United States. Through their visual digital self-styling, Black women fashion influencers like Gabi Gregg (GabiFresh), Chastity Garner (Garnerstyle), and many others, dismantle White female beauty standards by asserting themselves into the digital public. Presenting not just fat, but fat Black bodies in spaces that are dominated by White women breaks down the barriers of beauty, humanity, and domesticity that have worked to label Black women, and particularly fat Black women, as non/subhuman.

Black plus influencers represent and re-present disruptive Black bodies in the digital public as a subversive embodied rhetorical act. The visual space of Instagram encourages participants/creators to produce aesthetically pleasing highly curated visual content. These influencers do exactly that, but their physical embodiment as Black and fat inherently disrupts the visual space and the notion of aesthetics as they are deviant bodies against a White and thin universal beauty norm. These personal acts become political in the digital public because of the ways that fat, Black, women and femmes have historically been subject to violence. Daring to exist and be beautiful in this space creates a new or pushes the boundaries of what is beautiful. Because beauty is a form of social currency in our society, creating a space for other forms of beauty takes on more meaning. Black plus-size fashion influencers are working to publicly reframe conversations about Black women’s bodies and the marginalization that has historically defined their lives. Their self-objectification is a form of agency over the body and the way it is read in the public. These performances offer a model for an embodied liberatory rhetorical praxis. These acts of digital self-making are a form of resistance in the face of the erasure of fat Black bodies. Black women have always engaged in public acts of resistance, but the contemporary digital public allows Black women a wider audience and more ability to control their own content because of the increased accessibility of technology and the lack of mainstream media gatekeepers that previously existed.

Fat Black fashion influencers engage in the use of embodied avatars to provide a public presentation of the self as a means of rewriting narratives of Black womanhood and beauty. Despite the problems of beauty as a construct, a simple rejection and wholesale dismissal of beauty is complicated when considering Black women who have never fit within the frame. Beauty is not a neutral term. Tressie McMillan Cottom (2019) complicates the idea of beauty, and argues that we should reject beauty in general because it has only been a site of violence for Black women. Black women are used as the other whereby White women’s beauty is measured: “But I had also parsed that there was something powerful about blondness, thinness, flatness, and gaps between thighs. And that power was the context against which all others defined themselves” (Cottom, 2019, p. 44). As a result, the ways that whiteness and beauty are deployed toward the destruction of Black womanhood require a rejection of that construct. If Black women fight to be considered beautiful, in what ways are they contributing to their own oppression? To be beautiful by hegemonic standards is to reject Blackness and strive toward European beauty standards that are obviously meant to harm and is a standard that is impossible for Black women to achieve. Cottom argues, “Whiteness is a violent sociocultural regime legitimized by property to always make clear who is black by fastidiously delineating who is officially white. It would stand to reason that beauty’s ultimate function is to exclude blackness” (Cottom, 2019, p. 45). This becomes particularly fraught when White women take on a Black aesthetic. White women are then lauded for the same characteristics that have been the justification for Black women’s relegation to sub/nonhuman status. For example, Kim Kardashian has become the poster child for a White woman’s beauty standard that mimics Black women’s characteristics on a White body. Kardashian’s famously curvy figure is considered the peak of beauty, as evidenced by the swift refashioning of her own sisters’ and many other White women on Instagram bodies to match hers. While this body has opened doors for Kardashian, the Black women she mimics are viewed as indecent and their bodies are marked as deviant. If even Black beauty can be co-opted and weaponized against Black women, the term beauty is too loaded, too dangerous, to aspire to. For fat Black women fashion influencers, the idea of beauty is one that is inherently denied and automatically violent. For the fat Black body, beauty is never accessible. Beauty exists only insofar as the fat Black body can be the other that is rejected to legitimize beauty. For Cottom, this means that the idea of beauty should be rejected. Is plus-size fashion blogging an attempted revision of beauty? Is revision futile? The forced entry of Black plus-size influencers into the world of aesthetics and beauty creates a rupture that serves to rewrite beauty.

Black plus-size fashion influencers are working to publicly reframe conversations about Black women’s bodies and the lack of acceptance. They are creating hashtags, fashion lines, partnering with brands to promote to plus women, CeCe Olisa and Chastity Garner have even come together to create CurvyCon in 2015 which is 3 days of fashion and beauty events to create a space for plus women similar to massive beauty events like BeautyCon. Through this labor they are helping to transform the ways that Black women’s plus-size bodies are viewed in the mainstream. African Americans deploy multimodal rhetorical acts in the public sphere as acts of freedom. As Banks (2005) claims, these performances are not always large explicitly persuasive acts, but can also take the form of smaller day-to-day subversive acts. The aim of “full participation in American society on their own terms” is vital to the advancement of Black women’s liberation. These Black women digital content creators take their embodied self and use their technology to mediate their image/self, and to speak back to oppressive systems that attempt to erase them. They subject themselves to the surveillance state as an object, as a subversive act. If they are going to be simultaneously invisible and hypervisible (which is the case for both fat and Black women), they do it on their own terms. They are not allowing themselves to be erased and ignored, but they are also claiming control over their hypervisibility. Objectifying oneself—engaging in embodied rhetorical acts—provides agency and autonomy to the Black female subject.

As digital technology and the internet increasingly become central means of communicating and participating in public discourse, Black women continue the work of using those spaces as sites of resistance and protest. In “Alter Egos and Infinite Literacies, Part III: How to Build a Real Gyrl in 3 Easy Steps” Johnson and Nuñez (2015) emphasize the significance of Black digital feminism: “For those us who are black and digital and feminist, there is no hard and firm separation between the creative work we do online, our intellectual production, and our IRL (In Real Life) selves” (Johnson & Nuñez, 2015, p. 47). As Johnson rightly explains, Black feminist rhetorical acts online are embodied. They are connected to the women’s real-world selves. The perceived distinction between virtual life and real life does not exist for Black women. Their public digital work is imbued with the physical self. It is connected to the body. This is exemplified in Gabi Gregg’s digital work. She brought her full, real-world self to the digital work she created. Her actual body was the central motivating factor for the cultivation of her digital community. Gregg has since become one of the most recognizable plus-size fashion influencers in the United States with her own fashion line Premme and her own lingerie and swimsuit lines.

Gabi Gregg does this work of self-representation through her Instagram account. With little to no representation in mainstream fashion and beauty communities, Gregg has worked to disrupt and subvert expectations for Black women’s bodily autonomy. If we are conditioned to hide the fat body, Gregg pushes against that. Her modeling of her lingerie and swimsuit lines along with other plus-size models exposes viewers to a sexualized image of the fat female body. Although Black women’s bodies have always been hypersexualized under a history of misogynoir, making the choice to take control of that sexual image is bold. To assert agency over the fat Black female body is in direct opposition to attempts to control the unruly fat body.

Black Bodies Under Surveillance

Black women fashion influencers dismantle thin, White female beauty standards by asserting themselves into the digital public. Presenting not just fat, but fat Black bodies in spaces that are dominated by White women breaks down the barriers of beauty, humanity, and purity that have worked to label Black women, and particularly fat Black women, as non/subhuman. Shaw Nevins (2006) argues,

The fat black woman’s body poses a dual challenge to the colonially inspired dominant aesthetic norms that are instituted as a political mechanism for control; these norms symbolize the hegemonic force from which they arise. Her fat black body resists both imperatives of whiteness and slenderness as an ideal state of embodiment. Her large size also insists that her presence be acknowledged since a pervasive effect of colonization has been the effacement of a black female presence through the dismissal of conflicts and concerns attendant to the displacement experienced by women of African descent. The fat black woman’s hyper-embodiment is also a metaphorical form of resistance to her negation from both white and/or male-authored bodies of literature as well as to hegemonic aesthetic imperatives. (p. 10)

Black women create new means of liberation even under the most oppressive systems of constant surveillance as both hypervisible and invisible. By presenting themselves in the digital public and producing content even while under this surveillance, they are able to reimagine freedom. People who are marked as overweight or obese are under constant scrutiny and they are often offered “advice” under the guise of concern for one’s health. The private body becomes public fodder when the body is fat. Who and what gets to be beautiful is challenged by the presence of these women. Their refusal to hide themselves in shame and using digital platforms to share their images with thousands of followers that renders them both subject and object is an act of embodied resistance.

In Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness, Browne (2015) discusses how Black bodies are under constant surveillance, but that there are ways to resist even when under constant surveillance. Browne rightly claims, “with certain acts of cultural production we can find performances of freedom and suggestions of alternatives to ways of living under a routinized surveillance” (Browne, 2015, p. 8). Browne’s assertion that cultural productions under surveillance can provide new ways of being, provides a frame for understanding the potential for imagining the subversive potential of Black plus-size fashion blogs. Johnson and Nuñez claim, “Digital media-makers operate online without the leisure (or mistake) of separating thought from corporeality, text from non-text, personal from political, race from embodiment” (Johnson & Nuñez, 2015, p. 47). Black women online are inherently at risk through their participation in public discourse spaces. Their bodies are constantly policed, and they are subject to violent anti-fat, anti-Black comments. They choose to share themselves on these digital platforms which make them objects of scrutiny. However, their public embrace of themselves, of their subjectivity, is subversive and counterhegemonic. Thus, they’ve built these communities where nonstandard, marginalized bodies are welcomed, valued, and appreciated despite society’s dehumanization. The growth and widespread availability of these communities is not possible without social media and digital spaces.

Choosing to exist online is dangerous for fat Black women who already exist in a dangerous world. In the face of dehumanization, there seems to be something humanizing in the self-objectification that opens on social media. The ability to curate a digital idealized self in a world that attempts to deny you good, beauty, pleasure, or autonomy is disruptive. In Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism, Noble (2018) argues that internet algorithms misrepresent Black women and girls and reinforce negative stereotypes that serve to reify racist structures that harm them. The internet is an inherently violent space for Black women, and still Black women use this space to push back against these dehumanizing and silencing structures. The Black plus-size fashion influencers produce counternarratives that allow them to speak back to a digital culture that would be happy to continue to traffic in misogynoir.

Final Reflections

The explosion of plus-size fashion influencers on Instagram has been a gamechanger. Black plus-size women can see themselves represented in beauty culture that exists online. The work of these women has been transformative in the fashion industry and has been the foundation of a move to include more fashion options for women beyond straight sizes. Their calls for inclusion have pushed even high fashion brands to extend their sizes and include plus-size women in their fashion shows. For me, it has helped to reimagine beauty standards for myself and created a world where we are not all constantly striving to be a size 4. However, none of this exists beyond complication. The question remains, how is all of this wrapped up in the problems of capitalism? As Cottom (2019) argues in “In the Name of Beauty,” the only truly liberatory position is one of complete rejection of the beauty construct. There is no reforming or transforming a system that has been created primarily for the purpose of othering and marginalizing groups, particularly Black women. Fat Black women have never fallen under the construct of beauty, and there is no room within the construct to create a safe space for fat Black women. Cottom’s position is compelling, and one I’ve discussed at length with students and friends alike. Like with the dismantling of any construct, it requires a radical reimagining of the possible alternatives. This is exciting and scary. What would it mean to say we have no use for beauty? Would the work of these influencers even matter? Should it matter? My worry is that these women have only been granted this space because corporations see it as a way to sell us more things. Does all of this tell us that happiness (and freedom) is achieved through the purchasing of goods? It tells us that if we can buy fashionable clothes then we too can be happy and beautiful.

Despite all of my questions about capitalism and the problems with beauty, I still follow these women and seek out new ones on a regular basis. Ultimately, I find these images appealing and empowering. They remind me that we can be beautiful in fat Black bodies, and in a world that constantly tells you otherwise, receiving that message still feels good even when you are well versed in structural inequality and know that the world telling you to hate yourself is built into the system. When everything around you tells you that you aren’t deserving of affection or love, or even respect and basic human decency, it feels good even in superficial ways to see people that say the opposite. It’s empowering to see women stand up and demand better from a world that constantly seeks to harm. Instagram is a site full of images that tell fat Black women that their bodies are deviant and need to be fixed. In a world of flat tummy teas, organ crushing waist trainers, and “personal trainers” selling you on the newest regimen to build a bigger booty, it is empowering to see representations that say your body is fine just the way it is.