“I’m Supposed To Be Thick”: Managing Body Image Anxieties Among Black American Women

Abstract

Prior literature on Black women’s body image heavily relies on comparative studies to confirm Black women’s greater body satisfaction relative to white women. Collectively, these studies argue that “cultural buffers” exempt Black women from the thin ideal and instead, encourage women to embrace thickness as a mark of racial pride. And while the literature largely establishes Black women’s preference for a curvaceous figure, I take a different approach by examining women who describe failing to embody thickness and how they reconcile this conflict. Thus, this article asks how women negotiate body dissatisfaction when violating racialized bodily ideals. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 31 Black American women of diverse body sizes and shapes, I demonstrate how women rely on discursive frameworks such as healthism and the “strong Black woman” ideology to reconcile their self-image. While these discourses enable women to defend criticisms of violating thickness, they also participate in stigmatizing other forms of embodiment in their attempts to assuage body dissatisfaction. Overall, these findings reveal Black women’s agency to challenge idealized–and essentialized–notions of thickness that weighed heavily on their body image. Lastly, I discuss the broader implications of my findings within the literature of body politics and offer suggestions for future research.

Longitudinal Stability of Disordered-Eating Symptoms From Age 12 to 40 in Black and White Women

“…Previously, it was widely accepted that Black women were protected from thin idealization because of cultural norms that favor fuller-figured bodies (Williamson, 1998). Although it is reasonable and there is evidence to suggest that Black women do not value thinness as highly as white women do (e.g., Gluck & Geliebter, 2002), this does not suggest that Black women are then immune from the mainstream societal norms that throughout history have sought to negate their physical qualities as representative of beauty (Hughes, 2021). Our results support this idea: First, no significant differences in drive for thinness emerged between Black and white women, and for both groups, drive for thinness in adolescence influences adulthood drive for thinness; however, examining the magnitude of these estimates suggests that Black women may value thinness to a lesser degree.…”

Prevalence of Obesity and the Factors Associated with Low Obesity Awareness among Urban Adolescents in Harare, Zimbabwe

“…Further research is warranted to shed more light on this area. Interestingly, our finding that a greater proportion of girls had low obesity awareness makes sense within the wider African socio-cultural context, where bigger women are considered more attractive by men [ 5 , 56 , 57 , 58 , 59 ]. Our results confirm this notion, where only 13.1% of adolescents thought that obesity is a problem in Zimbabwe.…”

#BodyPositive? A critical exploration of the body positive movement within physical cultures taking an intersectionality approach

“…Even the now-desirable “curvy” or thick/thicc body was born out of the need to recognize, represent, and celebrate Black bodies that were too often made invisible or worthless because of sizeism ( 16 ) and racism ( 20 ). The mainstreaming of thickness/thiccness ( 76 ) in itself is a maneuver to coopt a movement that privileges and promotes white voluptuousness over Black thickness, and the accompanying practices for body augmentation needed to acquire the various iterations of body ideals. The incessant and historical erasure of Black fat activists' radical and global lens on oppression is an integral aspect of body positivity's gentrification.…”