The first thing we watch Plum Kettle (Joy Nash) do in “Dietland” is look in a mirror. She is blunt about how she sees herself: “Fat. It’s O.K. I’m allowed to say it.”

“Dietland,” a volatile feminist satire on AMC on Mondays, is about a lot of things: sexism, media, body shaming, terrorism, self-hatred, self-discovery, revenge. But it is also, throughout, about perception — about the various ways Plum sees herself and is seen by the outside world.

Sometimes she’s invisible. Other times, she’s visible in a bad way, taunted, objectified or pitied. She visualizes herself, sometimes, as a cartoon blob shuffling around a drab existence; other times, as “Alicia” (her given name), the imagined, thinner version of herself she hopes to become after gastric bypass surgery; other times as a child, remembering the taste of chocolate when it was a pleasure unadulterated by others’ judgment.

Plum works in the perception industry, for a teen-oriented fashion magazine named Daisy Chain, where she ghostwrites an advice column for the imperious editor, Kitty (Julianna Margulies). The mailbag is a catalog of everyday atrocities: cutting, eating disorders, sexual abuse.