Fatness and Femininity: Negotiating Narratives of Girlhood Online traces popular narratives of femininity, fatness, and body positivity available to girls on popular social media spaces Instagram and TikTok. Using rhetorical analysis of keyword searches, Jen Almjeld argues that social media positions successful femininity as fit, fashionable, agreeable, sexually alluring, and always striving and defines fatness as failure, specifically as unhealthy, lazy, irresponsible, unattractive, and humorous. With two decades of experience researching and working with girls, Almjeld argues that despite the promise of body positivity to resist such narratives, the movement has been co-opted and watered down and is now little more than another way to teach girls that their bodies are not good enough. While our culture has much to say about proper ways to be and do girl, there are few scripts available for acceptable ways to be fat, particularly in a body gendered feminine. This text encourages more open, critical conversation of fatness via a “fat girl gaze” to better understand ways girls and women in particular write and are written by identity narratives around them. This book challenges the socially constructed and consumerist notions of fatness that lead to fatphobia.

Jen Almjeld is professor of writing, rhetoric and technical communication at James Madison University.