Today I stumbled upon this site is “an oral, visual and written history project which seeks to be a humanizing force in body image activism. By collecting and sharing the many and varied stories of individuals of size, the Fat Experience Project® seeks to engage with, educate, empower and enrich the lives of people of size, our allies […]”
The site links to 1) ‘Size Qeen,’ an online clothing store and 2) a gallery of positive body images called ‘Bellies are Beautiful’.
I’m happy to make these discoveries.
Now that I’m starting to see the vast array of resources, I need to think about how I will differentiate my exploration of the body and this culture from these other efforts. While my exhibition space will highlight the materiality of embodiment, I think I also need to engage how the embodied experiences changes with size and size-acceptance.
Here I can tie in questions about thinspo to the questions I ask about reactions to portrayals in the media. I think I may even need to interview one of these ‘thinspo’ authors, because they identify fat on their bodies; and they can talk about their cultural-online formation around their bodies in ways that engage a basic question: how do people pursue visibility for their bodies and their bodies’ ideals.
