5. Staying Fat The Queer Futurity of Digital Fat Feminist Anti-Resolutions

Abstract

Resisting contemporary gendered expectations of slenderness is challenging, with many fat women feeling out of sync with hegemonic body standards. Cultural size norms for women have trended increasingly thinner in the current “Ozempic era” (Oswald 2024), reviving Y2K thin body ideals for women (Grose 2022).

One notable site of protest is the wave of fat feminists online who have loudly rejected the cyclical New Year’s resolution mandate to perform a desire for weight loss. Expressing themselves in mediums from selfies to comics, many fat content creators like Mollie Cronin have begun proclaiming a future-focused anti-resolution: they are “Staying Fat In [Year]”. This serves as a visible “coming out” (Sedgwick and Moon 1993) and a meaningful counter to pro-diet content that often overwhelms social media algorithms at year’s end. We use Critical Technocultural Discourse Analysis (Brock 2020) to situate how these creators’ interventions use Instagram to intervene in capitalist diet rhetoric on social media.

We draw on theorizations of fat temporality to argue that by rejecting size-based standards for heteronormative desirability, these creators queer “straight time” (Muñoz 2009), which assumes that all women are pursuing a “straight” linear temporal trajectory toward straight sizes as they continually strive to be seen as heteronormatively attractive. Fat feminist strategies like anti-resolutions work “against progress” (Fox 2018) to embrace a fat temporality where alternative futurities for our diverse embodiments are not only possible but valid (Yingling 2016). By publicly choosing sustained fatness, feminists are using their digital presences to visibilize new queer horizons.