“Our bodies do not exist to be beautiful, our bodies exist to be lived in” The construction of fat acceptance, body positivity and body neutrality content both on Instagram and as formulated by young female professionals

In societies nowadays, there exist a lot of pressure on both men and women to fit within a certain beauty ideal. Especially women are judged on the way they look, and these unattainable beauty ideals can lead to negative body image and body dissatisfaction. One main concept of these beauty ideals is the ‘thin-ideal’. Society celebrates ‘thin’ people, while ‘fat’ people experience discrimination based on their body size. However, different social movements try to increase the awareness of diverse bodies, in order to increase acceptance of diverse bodies. The three body acceptance movements that will be featured in this study are: fat acceptance, body positivity and body neutrality. The movements emphasize self-acceptance and raise awareness of diverse bodies by increasing the representation of these bodies in media. In recent years, these movements have gained popularity on social media platforms, such as Instagram. While the three movements share similar goals, it is argued that they all emphasize different aspects of diversity and self-acceptance. Due to social media, content-creators can construct their own meanings of the movements. Therefore, it is important to study how Instagram content of these movements is constructed. This is done through content analysis of 90 Instagram posts, 30 for each movement. The posts were located through hashtags. It is found that while there are overarching similarities, the movements all focus on a specific aspect more than others. In addition, since body neutrality is a recent movement, it is unclear how this movement’s content is perceived, especially compared with the other two movements. In order to study this, young female professionals were interviewed in order to study how they perceive this content. Both the interviews and the Instagram content were analyzed through thematic analysis. The interviews showed that the Instagram content helps young female professionals in defining the movements. Participants indicated that fat acceptance content predominantly focused on increasing awareness of ‘big’ bodies, by rejecting dieting or other negative reactions. Body positivity content included skin-related attributes such as stretch marks. Body neutrality content, participants indicated, focused mostly on mental health, and the emphasis of ‘functionality’. Participants also expressed criticism, especially towards fat acceptance and body positivity. For the former, health concerns were often mentioned, while the latter generated negative responses in terms of being used as a trend by brands and content-creators. Moreover, due to increased visibility of diverse content, participants recognized the importance of body acceptance, as increased awareness of diverse bodies and self-acceptance are argued to make people feel better about their own bodies.