body image

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The Adipositivity Project

I’ve been aware of The Adipositivity Project for a number of years.  Most people who float around Fat Acceptance circles online are aware of it, but when I’ve shown it to friends who aren’t aware of FA, it’s always surprised them.  I thought, given the reading for our next class, this was at least visually on topic.  I’m also always a fan of activism through art and you can’t say Substantia Jones’ photographs aren’t beautiful or radical.   Many of the photographs are nudes, so beware if you decide to click through.  I’ve pulled some of the more modest ones to show the intent of the images.

Adipose: Of or relating to fat.

Positivity: Characterized by or displaying acceptance or affirmation.


MISSION: The Adipositivity Project aims to promote size acceptance, not by listing the merits of big people, or detailing examples of excellence (these things are easily seen all around us), but rather, through a visual display of fat physicality. The sort that’s normally unseen.

The hope is to widen definitions of physical beauty. Literally.

The photographs here are close details of the fat female form, without the inclusion of faces. One reason for this is to coax observers into imagining they’re looking at the fat women in their own lives, ideally then accepting them as having aesthetic appeal which, for better or worse, often translates into more complete forms of acceptance.

The women you see in these images are educators, executives, mothers, musicians, professionals, performers, artists, activists, clerks, and writers. They are perhaps even the women you’ve clucked at on the subway, rolled your eyes at in the market, or joked about with your friends.

This is what they look like with their clothes off.

Some are showing you their bodies proudly. Others timidly. And some quite reluctantly. But they all share a determination in altering commonly accepted notions of a narrow and specific beauty ideal.


 I love this project, especially considering the attempts by the media to include “real” bodies through the use of marketing like the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty and “plus size” (really a size 6-12) models, and how different these fat people look from those culturally approved fat bodies.  These aren’t the media portrayed idea of what is “real” (and how problematic is that word in regards to any person?).  These (mostly) women, according to the BMI (another problematic method of judgment!), are obese, or more likely morbidly obese (sometimes called Death Fat in the FA community).  Most of them probably weigh somewhere in the neighborhood of 200 or 300 or even 400 pounds – yet I don’t think they look like the stereotypical bed-ridden mordibly obese person most non-fats think of when they hear those numbers. Or maybe they do look like those ZOMG FAT people to you.

However you see them, these people are fat, but they have accepted the bodies they have and are living their lives in them.

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Summer, Sandals and Socialized Feet

So summer is swiftly approaching. The heat will of course cause a large shift in the way bodies are covered. Shorter and shorter skirts, barely there shorts, sleeveless tops and if your really hot, just bikinis all day! This of course horrifies the conservative sector of society that prefers woman cover up for moral reason. I however am concerned with a very specific body part that suddenly gets over exposed. FEET.

They are everywhere. There are flip-flops, peep-toe heals, strappy sandals and more, all overly exposing the foot to the population. I recognize this is not generally considered a big deal. I’m sure members of the foot fetish society community love this time of year. As for me, it is dreadful.

Here is why. All winter I had the luxury of socks and boots, fully protecting my feet from the public view. Now I have the added hassle of constantly preparing my feet for society. Painting my nails, making sure my heels and toes have lotion at all times, and making sure they have a generally attractive appearance. No one told me explicitly that I need to put the extra effort toward my toes. Yet I know, from the sexy models with the perfect feet in the DSW and Payless commercials. Every single one has toes painted with wonderfully bright colors, their toes fit perfectly in the shoe as if the designer tailored the shoe for that specific foot. Meanwhile, I have to pull of the same strappy sandal with my imperfect feet.  This may just be a personal dilemma, but I’m certain I’m not the only one who has noticed how even the barely noticed parts of our bodies have been subjected to socially constructed norms.Image

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A Strange Kind of Mirror

This post could be triggering for people who struggle with body image.

Or maybe not.  That’s the question.

My Body Gallery first appeared on the internet sometime around August 2011, judging by the number of posts written about it on other websites during that time (see: Jezebel, The Hairpin, NY Daily News, Yahoo, and more).  The basic idea is that women upload pictures of themselves and then categorize them based on their height, weight, pant size, shirt size, and perceived body type.  Other women can then search the site by their height and weight, and to see what that looks like on other women.  According to the website, the point is to allow “other women to see that the world is not a place of cookie cutters,” because women “are all different in our body shape and size as well as our place in our journey to loving our bodies exactly as they are, not as we (or others) think they should be.”

Initially, though I recognized that the site obviously had its problems, and that it could be difficult and triggering for people who already had a history of or an inclination to compare themselves to others, I found the site interesting.  It could be helpful for people who have an “ideal” weight to see that their ideal might be different in reality.  There are not a lot of people of my height and weight, on this website or otherwise, especially considering the number of people that uploaded pictures for, say, 5’5″ and 120 pounds.   I like knowing that there are other people who look like me (and, notably, all of the people in that category appear to be white).  If sleeves are never long enough and pants are rarely made in your size (and, when they are, they’re never labeled “regular”), or if you have to order your shoes from a niche company who makes them large enough, or you have to shop in a “special” store, or you’re always hitting your head or ducking, or you’re not tall enough to ride the roller coasters, it can be comforting to know that you’re not the only one.  But good luck if you’re 5’5″ and 360 pounds.  Apparently, there is no one else like you.

So that, then, is one of the problems.  Even if the site continues to exists for several more years, even if people continue to submit their pictures to it by the thousands, it will never encompass the entirety of bodily experience.  It is possible to search for any weight by an interval of ten pounds between 100 and 500 pounds.  That’s a decent range, but there are not many people in the larger or less frequent categories.  They are possibly the people who would benefit most from knowing that there are others with similar bodies.  On the other hand, seeing that there are no pictures in your category- but plenty that are 5’5″ and 120 pounds- only reenforces those feelings of deviance.

Then there’s the fact that the pictures are almost entirely of white people, which in part reflects the general whiteness of representation on the internet.

And the fact that, even though women are not “cookie cutters,” they’re still trying to categorize women into categories of weight, and more tightly into categories of “body type,” which is apparently limited to pears, apples, bananas, and hourglasses.  I have never personally met anyone shaped like a banana.  If you do identify as banana-shaped, I certainly don’t want to deny your experience, but I imagine it would be hard to stand, and harder to walk (Have you ever tried to stand a banana up?  All you get is bruised bananas.).

"Flagging a photo should only be done when it is: 1. clearly miscategorized (by which you judge to be 100 lbs. or more) 2. not a woman 3. unviewable 4. more than one person 5. a duplicate 6. "inappropriate," which means full nudity

Are people uploading pictures of dogs?

And then there’s the thing that bothers me most.  This site is for “real women.”  The is an alarming amount of shaming of skinny people within the “body positivity” movement, and plenty of dialogues that replace current beauty standards with other beauty standards- for example, that “real women have curves.”  Worse, the site appears to be only for women, and since whether or not a picture is of a woman is decided by how other members “judge” it, I worry that the site is only for ciswomen.

So, what do you think?  Is this more helpful than harmful?  Do you plan to upload your picture?

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Get Naked to Fight Negative Body Image!

My sister, Lisa, goes to Northwestern University and put the poster to the right on her facebook page. I glanced at it, and immediately loved the idea. A student organization “Active Minds” is asking average students at the University to submit pictures of themselves with their clothing off (without showing anything inappropriate) and without showing their faces to put a cute slogan on a whiteboard or paper and say something positive about that part of their body. I asked her if there were more pictures like the one in this poster. She said yes, go HERE. So I did.

The pictures on this blog are the ones I found on that website. I loved the clever ways people wrote about their bodies and that everyone seems comfortable in their own skin. In a way, it reminds me of the POST SECRET website where people anonymously send in secrets about themselves they’ve never told anyone, and they are viewable publicly on the internet. But unlike PostSecret, this community is just college kids and they’re saying that instead of giving in to the public perception of how bodies “should” be, this is simply the way they are and they’re proud of that and they’re willing to put it in a public place.

I can’t wait to see the kinds of pictures people post, and am also curious to see if anyone will send in a picture of a scar they’re proud of, or if people will send in pictures of their tattoos or piercings like what we’ve discussed in class. I am going to continue to follow this project even after I post this blog and I encourage you to do the same.

The goal of this project by Northwestern University’s “Active Minds” is that they will have lots of pictures of average people who like their bodies the way they are and they will be displayed at the university for National Eating Disorder Awareness Week at the end of March. I couldn’t be happier with this idea.

As a child, I was a ballet dancer, and I was severely underweight. But I thought I looked great because the standard in that environment was, and is, that you are not supposed to have excessive body weight, even in areas like your hips and breasts where you should be gaining weight at puberty. I was exposed to eating disorders at a very young age and know several people who have suffered and nearly died from them.I really like the idea that they’re promoting eating disorder awareness and simultaneously promoting a positive body image. In fact, I like the idea so much I want to start something like this at UMBC. So my question is, if I did, would you join me, and do you think other people would join in?