I was a guest on a body-positive podcast when the lightbulb went off: Not everyone in this work identifies as feminist.



1. Viewing Bodies Socioculturally Is Rooted in Feminist Theory

2. Body-Based Oppression Exists On Intersecting Axes

3. Fat Acceptance Is Being Diluted

There I was, sitting on my couch, my iPhone earbuds in, staring at the empty Skype screen in front of me, while the host asked me the most basic questions about what liberation from patriarchy looks like in practice. I can't raise one eyebrow (hell, I can't even wink). But if I had the skill, one eyebrow would have been raised in suspicion.Maybe I had been naive before. Or maybe because my forays into both social justice and body acceptance had happened simultaneously, there was obvious overlap for me. But it hadn't occurred to me that it was possible to talk about body oppression without an explicitly intersectional feminist lens.The truth is: You can't.But the longer I'm involved with this work, the more I notice how frequently people (and, unsurprisingly, usually the most privileged folks) support the former without the latter – and how fuckingthat is.And yet, I (and others, especially more marginalized people) receive a lot of pushback from quote-unquote #bopo babes when I engage with them on this. Whether they explicitly believe that feminism and body acceptance are unrelated or more implicitly just don't infuse their body positivity with justice-oriented values, these folks feel offended, attacked, bullied, or called out when they're approached about this misalignment.So I want to be clear: If you're doing body-positive work, you're borrowing directly from feminism. And if you're not owning that and practicing its inherent values, your body positivity is useless.Here are three reasons why.I'm honestly confused about folks who can talk all day about tools of patriarchy – like narrow beauty standards and advertising media – without ever actually using the wordThere's a clear understanding within the #bopo realm that women are culturally conditioned to hate our bodies and that our approximation to beauty is what defines our social value. The conversation about how we're not born with self-hatred, but taught it through propaganda, is there.But, like, where do you think those ideas came from?The concept that our bodies are imbued with socially constructed meaning – and that we need to unpack that to get at the core of the problem – isn't new. It's been the foundation of various feminist theory for, like, ever.The idea of body acceptance is rooted in a structural evaluation of the world. And every watered down thing you say about women and bodies comes from a much more complex history of feminist analysis.Need a place to start? Try Susan Bordo'sListen: Body-based oppression is a social justice issue. More to the point: It's anissue. It's not something that only affects women (or "men, too!"); it's not even something that only affects people on the axis of a/gender. Body-based oppression is an inherent part of all marginalization.Racial profiling is body-based oppression. Discrimination for disability is body-based oppression. Lack of access to healthcare, nutritious food, and shelter is body-based oppression. Fetishization of queer women is body-based oppression. The murder of trans women is body-based oppression. Fat stigma is body-based oppression.Intersectionality – a term coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw , and a concept discussed previously by many Black feminists, including Audre Lorde and Patricia Hill Collins – is the idea that we are all constellations, not single stars. I am not only a woman or only queer or only white or only cisgender. I am all of those things at once. And all of those identities together affect my experience within my body – and society's experience of it.We can't leave this shit out.Body positivity has to be feminist because it has to be intersectional.And if you're ready to learn more about that (please! please be ready!), start perusing The Body Is Not an Apology