Lizzo’s intersectional visibility politics: contesting colonial beauty standards and dismantling the white heteropatriarchal gaze

ABSTRACT

The body positive movement—which initially set out to positively represent, humanize, and liberate fat, nonnormative, and multiply marginalized bodies—has been co-opted, commodified, and depoliticized. For the movement to have any chance of returning to its radical fat activist roots, it must shift to center intersectionality in both the forms of rhetorical labor engaged by body positive rhetors as well as the bodies on and through which body positive rhetoric gains visibility. Using popular hip-hop artist Lizzo as a timely and illustrative example, this essay suggests that intersectional visibility politics are central to the political viability and decolonial worldmaking potential of body positivity. I analyze the ways in which Lizzo’s celebrity persona engages two forms of rhetorical labor that recenter the body positive movement back onto multiply marginalized bodies like hers and envision the possibility of a fat-positive world: (1) assemblaging the big butt and the fat, Black body, and (2) resisting dominant gazing and representational practices through performances of feeling herself. In doing so, I theorize intersectional assemblaging and feeling herself as two rhetorical maneuvers of intersectional visibility that reclaim power, agency, and humanity outside of the terms offered by coloniality and the white heteropatriarchal gaze.

KEYWORDS:

• Decolonial worldmaking
• body positivity
• popular culture
• fat activism

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Stacey K. Sowards and the anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful engagement with this essay during the revision process. I would also like to thank Tom Dunn, Katie Gibson, Nick Marx, and Maricela DeMirjyn for their feedback on an earlier version of this project. I would especially like to thank Suzanne Enck for her generous feedback and encouragement on this essay.

Notes

1 dy’ (@dammitdymond), “I Really Can’t Express How Much I Absolutely Love @lizzo Ya’ll,” Twitter (blog), August 27, 2019, https://twitter.com/dammitdymond/status/1166420612442742784.

2 Andrea Elizabeth Shaw, The Embodiment of Disobedience: Fat Black Women’s Unruly Political Bodies (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2006), 9.

3 Shaw, Embodiment of Disobedience, 9.

4 Li Zhou, “The Allegations against Lizzo, Briefly Explained,” Vox, August 3, 2023, https://www.vox.com/culture/2023/8/3/23819049/lizzo-sexual-harassment-lawsuit-dancers-hostile-work-environment.

5 Amber Cortes, “Lizzo Is the Body-Positive MC Who’s Healing the Nation,” The Stranger, November 8, 2017, https://www.thestranger.com/music/2017/11/08/25547024/lizzo-is-the-body-positive-mc-whos-healing-the-nation; Pearl Boshomane, “Lizzo on Being a Poster-Girl for the Body Positive Movement,” Sunday Times, October 22, 2017, https://www.timeslive.co.za/sunday-times/lifestyle/2017-10-21-lizzo-on-being-a-poster-girl-for-the-body-positive-movement/.

6 I use the term “multiply marginalized” as essentially synonymous with “intersectionally marginalized” and “intersectionally oppressed.” By each, I mean to represent the experience of bodies that suffer from systemic oppression on multiple axes (like, for example, fat, Black women who are oppressed on the axes of body size, race, and gender). I consider their oppression “intersectional” when anti-fatness, racism, and sexism/misogyny overlap and interact to produce unique forms of vulnerability, violence, and injustice that cannot be traced to or accounted for by a single axis of oppression alone. This choice of terminology is informed by Kimberlé Crenshaw’s critique of a “single-axis” framework/approach to understanding oppression. See Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics,” University of Chicago Legal Forum (1989): 139–68. Moreover, I draw from Crenshaw to use “intersectionality” more generally as an “analytic sensibility” or, in other words, a “lens through which you can see where power comes and collides, where it interlocks and intersects.” See “Kimberlé Crenshaw on Intersectionality, More than Two Decades Later,” interview by Columbia Law School, June 8, 2017, https://www.law.columbia.edu/news/archive/kimberle-crenshaw-intersectionality-more-two-decades-later.

7 Nadia Mehdi and Cheryl Frazier, “Forgetting Fatness: The Violent Co-Optation of the Body Positivity Movement,” Debates in Aesthetics 16, no. 1 (2021): 13–28; Jessica Cwynar-Horta, “The Commodification of the Body Positive Movement on Instagram,” Stream: Inspiring Critical Thought 8, no. 2 (2016): 36–56.

8 Alysse Dalessandro Santiago, “Body Positivity in 2017: Examining Body Positivity with Plus Size Activists and Influencers,” The Curvy Fashionista, March 18, 2017, https://thecurvyfashionista.com/body-positivity-plus-size-activisits-influencers/.

9 Dan Brouwer, “The Precarious Visibility Politics of Self-Stigmatization: The Case of HIV/AIDS Tattoos,” Text & Performance Quarterly 18, no. 2 (1998): 119. See Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (London: Routledge, 1993) for a sustained critique of visibility politics.

10 Andrea Brighenti, “Visibility: A Category for the Social Sciences,” Current Sociology 55, no. 3 (2007): 339.

11 Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1, no. 1 (2012): 21.

12 See Athia N. Choudhury, “Genealogies of Excess: Towards a Decolonial Fat Studies,” in The Routledge International Handbook of Fat Studies, ed. Cat Pausé and Sonya Renee Taylor (London: Routledge, 2021), 240 for a discussion about how decolonizing fatness must go beyond “undoing Euro-centric beauty standards” to better account for the impact of the white settler state on marginalized peoples. See Walter D. Mignolo, “Colonial/Imperial Differences: Classifying and Inventing Global Orders of Lands, Seas, and Living Organisms,” in On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, Praxis, ed. Walter D. Mignolo and Catherine E. Walsh (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), 177–93 for an in-depth exploration of the creation of colonial and imperial differences through systems of ranking and classification (e.g., the emergence of “race” as a category of modernity, conceptions of “civilization,” slavery).

13 Lisa A. Flores, “Between Abundance and Marginalization: The Imperative of Racial Rhetorical Criticism,” Review of Communication 16, no. 1 (2016): 16.

14 Darrel Wanzer-Serrano, “Decolonial Rhetoric and a Future Yet-to-Become: A Loving Response,” Advances in the History of Rhetoric 21, no. 3 (2018): 328, emphasis in original.

15 I align myself with fat studies scholars Mary Senyonga and Caleb Luna who also read Baartman and Lizzo together in order to contend with “the racial past/present of Black fat bodies” (276). See Mary Senyonga and Caleb Luna, “‘If I’m Shinin’, Everybody Gonna Shine’: Centering Black Fat Women and Femmes within Body and Fat Positivity,” Fat Studies 10, no. 3 (2021): 268–82.

16 My argument that colonial logics of anti-fatness and anti-Blackness emerging in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries shape beauty standards and media representation today is not to say that conceptions of fatness and the fat body are the same today as they were then. I only wish to illuminate (1) the central role that anti-fatness played in the race-making projects of Europe and the USA as well as (2) the lingering rhetorical impressions of the colonial imagination. To be clear, fatness is far from a frozen-in-time concept, with both the meanings attached to the fat body and perceptions of what “counts” as a fat body shifting and evolving across different historical and geographical contexts. See Sabrina Strings, “Fat as a Floating Signifier: Race, Weight, and Femininity in the National Imaginary,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Sociology of Body and Embodiment, ed. Natalie Boero and Katherine Mason (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020), 145–63.

17 Zine Magubane, “Which Bodies Matter? Feminism, Poststructuralism, Race, and the Curious Theoretical Odyssey of the ‘Hottentot Venus,’” Gender and Society 15, no. 6 (2001): 817; Justin Parkinson, “The Significance of Sarah Baartman,” BBC News Magazine, January 7, 2016, https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-35240987.

18 Parkinson, “The Significance of Sarah Baartman.”

19 Sabrina Strings, Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia (New York: New York University Press, 2019), 6. The rise of Protestantism, which linked overeating to sin and moral turpitude, is the second historical origin of fatphobia.

20 Strings, Fearing the Black Body, 67.

21 Amy Erdman Farrell, Fat Shame: Stigma and the Fat Body in American Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2011), 59–81.

22 Strings, Fearing the Black Body, 97–8.

23 Strings, Fearing the Black Body, 129.

24 See, for example, Patricia Hill Collins, “Controlling Images and Black Women’s Oppression,” in Seeing Ourselves: Classic, Contemporary, and Cross-Cultural Readings in Sociology, ed. John J. Macionis and Nijole V. Benokraitis, 4th ed. (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1991), 266–73; Sonja M. Brown Givens and Jennifer L. Monahan, “Priming Mammies, Jezebels, and Other Controlling Images: An Examination of the Influence of Mediated Stereotypes on Perceptions of an African American Woman,” Media Psychology 7, no. 1 (2005): 87–106; Rupe Simms, “Controlling Images and the Gender Construction of Enslaved African Women,” Gender & Society 15, no. 6 (2001): 879–97.

25 Carol E. Henderson, “AKA: Sarah Baartman, The Hottentot Venus, and Black Women’s Identity,” Women’s Studies 43, no. 7 (2014): 949.

26 Cecilia Cerja et al., “Misogynoir and the Public Woman: Analog and Digital Sexualization of Women in Public from the Civil War to the Era of Kamala Harris,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 110, no. 1 (2024): 80.

27 Here, I draw on Saidiya Hartman’s notion of “fungibility” to expose how controlling images render the Black woman’s body “an abstract and empty vessel vulnerable to the projection of others’ feelings, ideas, desires, and values.” See Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 21.

28 Rachel Sanders, “The Color of Fat: Racializing Obesity, Recuperating Whiteness, and Reproducing Injustice,” Politics, Groups, and Identities 7, no. 2 (2019): 295–6.

29 Shaw, The Embodiment of Disobedience, 19.

30 Andreana Clay, “Keepin’ It Real: Black Youth, Hip-Hop Culture, and Black Identity,” American Behavioral Scientist 46, no. 10 (2003): 1354.

31 Kaila Adia Story, “Performing Venus ∼ From Hottentot to Video Vixen: The Historical Legacy of Black Female Body Commodification,” in Home Girls Make Some Noise: Hip-Hop Feminism Anthology, ed. Gwendolyn D. Pough et al. (Mira Loma, CA: Parker Publishing, 2007), 237.

32 Story, “Performing Venus,” 239; Henderson, “AKA: Sarah Baartman,” 951–4.

33 Story, “Performing Venus,” 245.

34 See Gwendolyn D. Pough, Check It While I Wreck It: Black Womanhood, Hip-Hop Culture, and the Public Sphere (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2004) for an in-depth exploration of Black women “bringing wreck” in and through hip-hop culture. See the following for discussions of “ratchet” hip-hop feminisms: L.H. Stallings, “Hip Hop and the Black Ratchet Imagination,” Palimpsest: A Journal on Women, Gender, and the Black International 2, no. 2 (2013): 135–9; Nikki Lane, The Black Queer Work of Ratchet: Race, Gender, Sexuality, and the (Anti)Politics of Respectability (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019); Robin M. Boylorn, “Love, Hip Hop, and Ratchet Respectability (Something Like a Review),” The Crunk Feminist Collection (blog), September 10, 2015, http://www.crunkfeministcollective.com/2015/09/10/love-hip-hop-and-ratchet-respectability-something-like-a-review/; Britney C. Cooper, “(Un)Clutching My Mother’s Pearls, or Ratchetness and the Residue of Respectability,” The Crunk Feminist Collection (blog), December 31, 2012, http://www.crunkfeministcollective.com/2012/12/31/unclutching-my-mothers-pearls-or-ratchetness-and-the-residue-of-respectability/; Bettina L. Love, “A Ratchet Lens: Black Queer Youth, Agency, Hip Hop, and the Black Ratchet Imagination,” Educational Researcher 46, no. 9 (2017): 539–47.

35 Theresa Renee White, “Missy ‘Misdemeanor’ Elliott and Nicki Minaj: Fashionistin’ Black Female Sexuality in Hip-Hop Culture—Girl Power or Overpowered?,” Journal of Black Studies 44, no. 6 (2013): 621; Marita B. Djupvik, “‘Working It’: Female Masculinity and Missy Elliott,” in The Routledge Research Companion to Popular Music and Gender, ed. Stan Hawkins (New York: Routledge, 2017), 126; Aria S. Halliday, “Envisioning Black Girl Futures: Nicki Minaj’s Anaconda Feminism and New Understandings of Black Girl Sexuality in Popular Culture,” Departures in Critical Qualitative Research 6, no. 3 (2017): 71.

36 Mecca Jamilah Sullivan, “Fat Mutha: Hip Hop’s Queer Corpulent Poetics,” Palimpsest 2, no. 2 (2013): 209.

37 William T Hoston, “We All Came from a Woman: Rap Music and Misogyny,” in Black Masculinity in the Obama Era: Outliers of Society (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 47.

38 “WAP” is the title of Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion’s 2020 hit single and is an abbreviated version of the term “wet ass pussy.”

39 Nikki Lane, “Ratchet Black Lives Matter: Megan Thee Stallion, Intra-Racial Violence, and the Elusion of Grief,” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 31, no. 2 (2021): 295.

40 Stacy Lee Kong, “What the Megan Thee Stallion Discourse Is Missing,” Friday Things (blog), July 31, 2020, https://www.fridaythings.com/recent-posts/megan-thee-stallion-tory-lanez-shooting-transphobia.

41 See Lil’ Kim’s 2019 song, “Go Awff” (“Yeah, you know my waist snatched, face beat, hair laid”); Trina’s 2011 song, “Waist So Skinny”; Nicki Minaj’s 2010 song, “Muny” (“’Cause I keep a bad bitch, booty big and the waist thin”) as well as her feature on A$AP Ferg’s 2017 song, “Plain Jane” (“My body shaped like Jeannie, booty dreamy, waist is teeny”); Cardi B’s 2018 song “Money Bag” (“Wig be laid, waist snatched, ass fat, straight facts”); and Megan Thee Stallion’s hit 2020 single, “Body” (“Body crazy, curvy, wavy, big titties, lil’ waist”).

42 Some of the guiding tenets of fat activism include reclaiming the word “fat” as a neutral descriptor and positive collective identity; affirming the inherent dignity and worthiness of fat people; exposing the violence and harm of both diet culture and “obesity” discourse; and advocating for rights for fat people, especially around issues of healthcare and equitable access to public space. See Charlotte Cooper, Fat Activism: A Radical Social Movement (Bristol: HammerOn Press, 2016) for an overview of fat activism’s guiding assumptions and strategies as a social movement.

43 Carolyn Bronstein, “Fat Acceptance Blogging, Female Bodies and the Politics of Emotion,” Feral Feminisms, no. 3 (2015): 110–12; Adwoa A. Afful and Rose Ricciardelli, “Shaping the Online Fat Acceptance Movement: Talking about Body Image and Beauty Standards,” Journal of Gender Studies 24, no. 4 (2015): 458.

44 Mehdi and Frazier, “Forgetting Fatness,” 14.

45 Mehdi and Frazier, “Forgetting Fatness,” 14

46 Jade D. Petermon, “Black, Brown, and Fa(t)Shionable: The Role of Fat Women of Color in the Rise of Body Positivity,” in MeXicana Fashions: Politics, Self-Adornment, and Identity Construction, ed. Aída Hurtado and Norma E. Cantú (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2020), 178.

47 Petermon, “Black, Brown, and Fa(t)Shionable,” 184.

48 Anna Johansson, “Fat, Black and Unapologetic: Body Positive Activism beyond White, Neoliberal Rights Discourses,” in Pluralistic Struggles in Gender, Sexuality and Coloniality: Challenging Swedish Exceptionalism, ed. Erika Alm et al. (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), 137.

49 Mehdi and Frazier, “Forgetting Fatness,” 18, emphasis in original.

50 Hailey Nicole Otis, “Intersectional Rhetoric: Where Intersectionality as Analytic Sensibility and Embodied Rhetorical Praxis Converge,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 105, no. 4 (2019): 375.

51 Shammara Lawrence, “Lizzo Isn’t Just Part of a Movement. She’s a Movement All Her Own,” Allure, March 6, 2019, https://www.allure.com/story/lizzo-cover-interview-2019.

52 Phillip Picardi, “Lizzo Is the Sex-Positive, Twerking, Gospel-Singing Artist the World Needs,” Teen Vogue, June 15, 2018, https://www.teenvogue.com/story/lizzo-music-issue.

53 Lizzo (@lizzobeeating), “Keep Changing the World,” Instagram, March 8, 2019, https://www.instagram.com/p/BuwIsn-AAHP/.

54 Otis, “Intersectional Rhetoric,” 371.

55 Elena Romero, “The Butt Remix: Beauty, Pop Culture, Hip Hop, and the Commodification of the Black Booty,” QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking 4, no. 3 (2017): 190; Wendy A. Burns-Ardolino, “Jiggle in My Walk: The Iconic Power of the ‘Big Butt’ in American Pop Culture,” in The Fat Studies Reader, ed. Esther D. Rothblum, Sondra Solovay, and Marilyn Wann (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 275.

56 Romero, “The Butt Remix,” 190.

57 Maria Fisher, “15 Lizzo Belfies That Prove Her Booty Is Work of Art,” Revelist, May 18, 2018, https://www.revelist.com/internet/lizzo-belfies/12812.

58 Kelly C. Johnston, “Assemblaging Communities: Looking at How Communities Work for Enacting Critical Literacies Pedagogy in the Classroom,” English Teaching: Practice & Critique 19, no. 1 (2019): 123.

59 Audre Lorde, “Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference,” in Sister Outsider (Berkeley: Crossing Press, 1984), 116.

60 Feeling herself is, indeed, a play on lyrics from Lizzo’s 2016 hit song, “’Scuse Me,” which repeat the line: “’Scuse me while I feel myself.”

61 Tricia Crimmins, “Why Lizzo’s Latest Music Videos Are on a Winning Streak,” Study Breaks Magazine, July 9, 2018, https://studybreaks.com/culture/music/lizzo/.

62 Crimmins, “Lizzo’s Latest Music Videos.”

63 Cecilia Hartley, “Letting Ourselves Go: Making Room for the Fat Body in Feminist Scholarship,” in Bodies Out of Bounds: Fatness and Transgression, ed. Jana Evans Braziel and Kathleen LeBesco (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001), 67.

64 Choudhury, “Genealogies of Excess,” 242.

65 Lizzo, “Fitness,” directed by Quinn Wilson, March 29, 2018, music video, 2:41, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yzsh-PDF30.

66 Ashley R. Hall, “Slippin’ in and out of Frame: An Afrafuturist Feminist Orientation to Black Women and American Citizenship,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 106, no. 3 (2020): 347.

67 Lizzo, “The Black History of Twerking—And How It Taught Me Self-Love” (TED Talk, TEDMonterey, September 30, 2021), https://www.ted.com/talks/lizzo_the_black_history_of_twerking_and_how_it_taught_me_self_love.

68 Hall, “Slippin’ in and out of Frame,” 347.

69 Alice Marwick and danah boyd, “To See and Be Seen: Celebrity Practice on Twitter,” Convergence 17, no. 2 (2011): 147.

70 Cat Pausé, “Express Yourself: Fat Activism in the Web 2.0 Age,” in The Politics of Size: Perspectives from the Fat Acceptance Movement, ed. Ragen Chastain, vol. 1 (Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2015), 2; Staci M. Zavattaro, “Taking the Social Justice Fight to the Cloud: Social Media and Body Positivity,” Public Integrity 23, no. 3 (2021): 282.

71 Lisa A. Flores, “Between Abundance and Marginalization: The Imperative of Racial Rhetorical Criticism,” Review of Communication 16, no. 1 (2016): 16.

72 Flores, “Between Abundance and Marginalization,” 17.

73 Flores, “Between Abundance and Marginalization,” 16.

74 Otis, “Intersectional Rhetoric,” 370; Lisa A. Flores, “Towards an Insistent and Transformative Racial Rhetorical Criticism,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 15, no. 4 (2018): 335.

75 Flores, “Between Abundance and Marginalization,” 17. See Noor Ghazal Aswad and Matthew Houdek, “Radical Rhetorics at/and the World’s End: Epistemologies, Ontologies, and Otherwise Possibilities,” Quarterly Journal of Speech (2024): 5 for a discussion about the relationship between radical hope, worldmaking, and abolitionist/decolonial imaginaries. This essay’s commitment to radical hope reflects a common thread across queer, decolonial, and Black feminist theories. See, for example, José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: NYU Press, 2009), 1–18; Chela Sandoval, Methodology of the Oppressed (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 7, 105; bell hooks, Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope (New York: Routledge, 2013), iv–xvi.

76 Combahee River Collective, “A Black Feminist Statement,” 1977. https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/combahee-river-collective-statement-1977/

77 Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 11.