Fat Activist Quotes Essay

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Feminist Consumerism and Fat Activists:
A Comparative Study of Grassroots Activism and the Dove Real Beauty Campaign
February 6th, 2014

1. ...Dove launched its Campaign for Real Beauty in 2004 using feminist critiques and concerns about beauty ideals to revitalize the Dove brand...The campaign, which started in the United Kingdom and quickly spread to North America, is now a major feature of Dove’s global marketing.

2. Frustrated with ill-fitting clothing options for plus-size women, a group of artists and activists from women’s studies and queer activist communities formed PPPO in 1996.

3. The Dove models range in dress sizes from 6 to 12. While larger than the average fashion model (size 4), they are still smaller than the average American woman, who is a size 14. (942, footnote)

Even larger women have nice figures
Hip to butt ratio is equal
Have hourglass figure
Airbrushed (no cellulite or stretch marks)

4. We use the term“feminist consumerism” to emphasize its origins in consumerism’s focus on commodity purchase and acquisition as a primary means to assert an identity, achieve a common good, express ethical (feminist) principles, and seek personal pleasure and social approval. - Ethical choices merge with shopping choices

5. ...not every fat girl wants to be thin and that fatness is experienced in a variety of ways betwixt stereotypes of the asexual obese woman and the fat femme. (945)

Removed from heterosexual market
Stripped of sexuality because of their weight
Curvy “luscious” women can become over sexualized

6. Consumerism puts forward a worldview in which consumption is “at the center of meaningful existence” (Sklair 2001, 5) and shopping is the ideal form of participation in struggles for social change. Shopping is the core of a meaningful existence
Shopping becomes the way you make ethic and socially involved decisions
Buying something pink for breast cancer makes you feel like you have done something by going shopping, even though that company probably gives a very small portion to breast cancer research, we don’t know how much they really donate

7. The ability of corporations to accommodate and capitalize on social dissent and alienation suggests the need to be skeptical of consumer-based strategies for social change.

Anything can be capitalized on
You can’t take for granted that consumerism is all good
This may lead to alienation (depression, sadness, the pressure to fit it, etc…)

8. ...it was not simply that [PPPO] wanted corporations to produce larger sizes; they also wanted to create opportunities to resist consumerism, while recognizing the gender and class implications of fat bodies. (950)

Challenges capitalism

9. “Campaign for Real Beauty” launched in September 2004 (951)

10. [Billboards] provided a space to debate feminine beauty ideals and was a win-win situation for Dove: it could promote its products as beauty solutions and at the same time express concern with narrow beauty ideals. (952)

Dove can advertise, but they are also selling their products
There may be positive outcomes to that, but it is still an advertising campaign

11. ...corporate spokespersons speak plainly and consistently about their dual goals: to make women feel more beautiful and to sell more Dove beauty products. (952)

“You’re beautiful the way you are, but our products will make you more beautiful”

12. Given the extent to which these images of models affect women’s self-perceptions, it may come as little surprise that Dove’s own multinational beauty survey, for instance, found that only two percent of women describe themselves as beautiful. (953)

The media makes you feel like you aren’t beautiful the way you are
But if a woman says that she is beautiful, it looks like she is full of herself & self centered

13. Seth Stevenson: “When I first saw one of these smiley, husky gals on the side of a building, my brain hiccupped....Here I was, staring at a ‘big-boned’ woman in her
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