Negotiating ugly feelings: affect and body positivity in postfeminist times

Abstract

ABSTRACT While body positivity and its relationship to postfeminism has been readily explored and critiqued, what has been less considered is the everyday affective, embodied experience of body positivity for those who engage with it. Building on work which considers the feeling rules of postfeminist cultures, I explore the various affective entanglements that emerge between body positivity on Instagram and the people who engage with it, drawing on interviews with body positivity advocates recruited via Instagram. I show that while body positivity offers intense experiences of affirmation and togetherness, these feelings are often fleeting and brief and, along with the labour involved in engaging with body positivity on Instagram—posting, liking, commenting—often bring with them feelings of exhaustion and frustration. Accordingly, advocates become engaged in a difficult bind of negotiating frustration, exhaustion and “ugly feelings” with the opportunities body positivity affords—affirmation, community, and togetherness. I conclude by exploring how participants’ continued attachments to body positivity despite its insufficiencies make visible the uneven effects of body positivity, in ways that highlight the classed and gendered workings of postfeminism.