According to Catherine Connell, “the internet has increased both the diffusion and the democracy of fashion discourse” (210). Fashion blogging in particular has the potential to “disrupt normative fashion discourse” because of its participatory nature. Fat fashion bloggers (self-identified fat people who post their daily outfits on sites like Tumblr, Instagram, and personal blogs) occupy a unique space in the realm of fashion blogging. Sitting at the intersection of digital culture, dress studies, gender, and consumerism, their posts “illustrate practices of dressing up, self-portrait and…commentary as well as discussions relating to the trials and tribulations of dressing a fat body fashionably in a marketplace that tends to exclude and condemn it” (Gurrieri and Cherrier 279). Drawing on the work of dress studies, queer studies, and rhetoric, this speaker will discuss how fat fashion bloggers work to create a transgressive feminist rhetoric that makes space in mainstream popular culture for a broader definition of beauty and discuss the implications for how we talk about fashion.
| manthey_fatshion_intervention_cw15.pdf |
