“Nothing should jiggle while you’re moving”: Preparing the fat body for an American “plus-size” pageant

ABSTRACT

There is limited scholarly information about beauty pageants for fat women. Based on a larger study about how pageant participants define beauty and health, this paper examines the presentation of fat bodies in a plus-size beauty pageant, and how the pageant constructs, rewards, and reinforces specific types of fat performativity. Although the plus-size pageant is challenging traditional ideas of beauty in terms of body size, pageant participants are expected to be “good fatties”. The pageant teaches competitors the socially acceptable ways to eat and to dress for one’s body. Pageant competitors are taught that looking beautiful means to “discipline their corpulence”, while the pageant simultaneously delivers the messages of “big is beautiful” and that beauty comes from within. The paper concludes with implications of these findings on gender and femininity, and fat studies, and fashion studies scholarship.

KEYWORDS:

• Pageantry
• fat studies
• femininity
• docile bodies

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ariane Prohaska

Ariane Prohaska is an Associate Professor of Sociology in the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Alabama. Her research interests include gender, bodies, fat studies, and disaster sociology. She has recently published in Fat Studies, Critical Policy Studies, and International Journal of Mass Emergencies and Disasters. Direct correspondence to: Ariane Prohaska, Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice, The University of Alabama, Box 870320, Tuscaloosa, AL 35487-0320.