Surveilling the Fat Disidencia: Policing the Bodies of Plus-Size Black Women on Instagram

Instagram has shaped how we network and share content with others, making interactions far more accessible for everyone who uses this platform daily. Unfortunately, it has also given space to some surveilling mechanisms that tend to police and norm how users and their bodies should present themselves to the rest of the world. The body can be understood as a manifestation, a presence, and a performance. As Judith Butler argues, the body is also a political space where ideas of resistance and vulnerability take place, and I will understand the body as a combination of the physical manifestation of it and the many unsaid layers that gender, race, and socio-cultural expectations represent. This present research combines a feminist analysis of digital studies, race, and gender by taking a closer look at how the non-conforming, dissenting bodies of plus-size, Black women interact on Instagram. Invoking Black studies concepts and Latin American theories of disidencias, I propose that plus-size Black women on Instagram represent resistance to White and European canons of beauty, challenging the ways we understand issues around health, fat fetishism, and the overall experience of what it’s like to live in a fat (and proud) Black body