Fat as Natural Beauty: Construction of Fat Embodiment among U.S. Second Wave Feminist Fat Activists

In: Beauty: Exploring Critical Perspectives
Author:
Amy Erdman Farrell
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This chapter explores how second wave U.S. fat feminists drew from ideas about naturalness to lay claim to the pleasures and beauty of fatness. This concept has been resoundingly criticized by later feminist, queer, and postmodern critics who analyse the ways that it reinforced essentialist, and usually white, ideas about womanhood, femaleness, and heterosexuality. It is useful at this point, however, for us to return to the earlier arguments, to see the ways that activists drew on ideas of natural beauty to resist what they saw as the colonisations of patriarchy, racism, technology, and corporate greed.

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