Educate yourself! Exploring feminist politics and self-development in Danish online fat activism.

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Abstract

This article explores Danish fat activism and feminist politics on Instagram. Based on a 6-months ethnographic and digital fieldwork among Danish fat activists on Instagram, the article investigates the social implications of challenging normative body ideals online. Through ethnographic examples, the article illustrates how learning about fat acceptance through a fat accepting community is a liberating, deeply personal and transformative process. It is however also a social process taking place within a particular digital community with certain expectations on how to enlighten, educate, and understand oneself as a political subject. In the process of becoming a fat activist online, one is encouraged to appropriate new knowledge on feminist body politics and a feminist language for the social oppression of, among others, fat bodies. We argue that, contrary to popular transformation journeys on TV and social media, the goal for Danish fat activists is not outward bodily change but instead to develop the abilities to recognize social injustice and translate it into a social and feminist critique. Ironically, this inwards process towards feminist enlightenment simultaneously situate the Danish fat acceptance movement within an individualized neoliberal cultural logic of self-development as imperative.
Original languageEnglish
JournalFeminist Media Studies
VolumeLatest articles
Number of pages17
ISSN1468-0777
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 10 Jun 2024

Keywords

  • Digital activism
  • Fat activism
  • Feminism
  • Neo-liberalism
  • Self-development
  • Social Media

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