Hello, I\u27m Fat: Finding Myself in a Hulu Original

Fat women feel enormous societal pressure to be thin. The pressure, which is a result of society’s patriarchal expectations, conditions women to believe there is a standard of ideal beauty, and an important element of that standard is thinness. I am fat, and so I have never met the standard of beauty. Subsequently, I have spent my entire life feeling undeserving of love, or real happiness. My mindset of feeling less worthy of happiness has been exacerbated by the media, as most representations of fat women show characters who are disgusting, miserable, or comical. Not only do these portrayals affect my self-esteem, they also reinforce the problematic notion that fat people are not allowed to exist comfortably in the world. However, the 2019 Hulu original, Shrill, directly combats these fat-phobic representations. In my essay, I offer an autoethnographic critical media analysis of Shrill and its refreshing perspective of a modern-day fat woman. By exploring the ideas of body positivity and the effects of dominant American ideologies on beauty standards and conceptions of normalcy, I analyze the way fat women navigate a society that champions thinner bodies