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.