History of Feminism

tion is stripping White Women of that status as punishment for fatness. There is a way in which body positive movements both reject the notion of the body as object while reclaiming it as beautiful by dismantling the definition. Black women’s bodies have always been objects in the social sphere but never exalted as beautiful. The fat Black woman’s body has been rendered an object of service whether for food, advice, care-taking etc., but never has it been a thing to aspire to, at best perhaps to fetishize, but not a thing of beauty. The mammy, a stereotypical trope born out of slavery validated large Black women’s existence only through their service to White women and White families, think Gone with the Wind, Gimme a Break or The Help. Our society tells us fatness is not beautiful. Blackness is historically, not beautiful. So even while battling weight stigma and reclaiming size diversity as beautiful, the presence of Blackness complicates the narrative. We don’t deal well with complication. This often means we don’t deal with complications, particularly in the realm of race. We simply don’t tell those stories. It is this unwillingness to wade through the murky waters of race that make Black and Brown women invisible even in the places where we say we are trying to make people seen.