This critical study examines how TikTok content from body positive trends may influence power relations and reinforce female body negative discourses. The study takes its departure primarily in Michel Foucault. However, additional researchers were brought in to expand on Foucault’s ideas by e.g., introducing gender to Foucauldian theory. 30 TikTok videos belonging to two different body positive trends have been collected and undergone a Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis according to Foucauldian principals. Findings from the analysis illustrated how users acknowledged and heavily depended on societal body negative discourses to create body positive content. More specifically, this was illustrated when users self-categorised as plus size and pointed out body parts e.g., stomach rolls, that are seen as less desirable in society. Users furthermore directly engaged in behaviour, which was found to be body negative e.g., implying the existence of abnormal and imperfect bodies. Effectively, this behaviour was identified as performative and rooted in a fear of being seen as non-progressive and body negativeThe conclusive results of this thesis thus suggest that users inevitably produce and reproduce body negative discourses by relying heavily on the very same discourses in their TikTok communication. Essentially, the users are then contributing to the social and feminist problem of weight-based discrimination and marginalisation.

This thesis project is centered on the female body, specifically body image, in relation to Western, cultural images of women. This is a problem that has been around, essentially, since the beginning of Western art. While different scholars argue whether or not this problem has become worse, it is nonetheless problematic that we are still, in 2018, fighting patriarchy’s control of our bodies via body image. Grounding my project in Susan Bordo’s 1993 text Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body, this thesis explores Bordo’s argument that the female body is culturally produced through the lens of Jean Baudrillard’s theory of simulation and simulacra. Reading Bordo via Baudrillard allows us to explore this age-old problem at a new angle, giving us new reasons that explain why we are still stuck in patriarchy’s chains. Through this lens, I demonstrate how and why Third-wave feminist activism (I focus specifically on the Body Positive Movement) is failing in their attempts to reclaim the female body: the issue lies within Third-wave activism’s desire to portray othered bodies as beautiful and desirable. This becomes problematic in the era of simulacra: abject bodies do not resemble the (un)real ideal so they become “unreal” in the eyes of society. This attempt to represent abject bodies (obese, racialized, trans, disabled) as beautiful results in stigmatization and disgust towards said bodies, and thus the Body Positive Movement leaves out abject bodies because these abject bodies cannot be seen as beautiful in a society that deems them unreal. I argue that in order to reclaim the female body, we must first reclaim the mind side of the mind/body dualism before we can successfully reclaim our bodies. To demonstrate how this is possible, I use Margaret Atwood’s novel Lady Oracle as a case study that not only shows how the female body is culturally produced in the era of simulacra, but also allows us to see how reclaiming the mind side of the binary does allow the protagonist, Joan, to reclaim her past and body as her own, without shame. It is through fiction that reality is represented, and I conclude my thesis with my own personal anecdotes, showing how resistance via fiction can transcend into real life and point to a new, hopeful future.