51: The Death of Body Positivity with Jade Elouise

Today I'm talking to the brilliant Jade Elouise, fat liberationist and mental health practitioner. Jade explores body image through their art, writing and poetry, and is the co-founder of Fat Lib London, an inclusive community space for people in fat and otherwise marginalised bodies.

In this episode, we cover:

👉 The death of the body positivity movement - we talk about what attracted Jade to the BoPo movement in the first place, and discuss how it has been co-opted by capitalism and no longer represents a safe space for fat bodies

👉 The difference between body positivity and fat liberation and the intersections with other liberatory politics

👉 How Jade and their co-conspirators Simran and Niki are creating a safe and nurturing community for fat folks through Fat Lib London

👉 Plus, as always, what we're snacking on atm

Enjoy the episode!

Episode Transcript

Intro

Laura: Hey and welcome to the Can I Have Another Snack? podcast where we talk about food, bodies, and identity, especially through the lens of parenting. I’m Laura Thomas, I’m an weight-inclusive registered nutritionist and I also write the Can I Have Another Snack? newsletter.

Today I’m talking to Jade Elouise (she/they), a fat, Black, queer, neurodivergent fat liberationist and mental health practitioner, who explores body image through their art, writing and poetry. In 2023, Jade cofounded Fat Lib London with the aim of providing an inclusive community space for people in fat and otherwise marginalised bodies.

In this episode, Jade and I are talking about the death of body positivity; a movement that was ostensibly created to dismantle body hierarchies but ultimately entrenched conventional beauty standards and normative bodies. We start out by talking about what attracted Jade to BoPo and how at first it felt like a welcoming and inclusive space that seemed to be challenging the idea that there’s one right way to have a body. But then, over time, Jade noticed the ways the body positivity movement was being co-opted by capitalism – we’re looking at you Dove – and started centering the people who frankly needed it the least. We talk about how BoPo was no longer a safe space for fat bodies, and as we’ve entered the age of oz*mpic it has become clearer that, for some people at least, body positivity was all about the trend and not about liberatory politics. So you’ll hear us talk about the difference between body positivity and fat liberation and the intersections with other liberatory politics. And how the death of body positivity has galvanised Jade and their co-conspirators Simran and Niki to create a community that is safe and nurturing for fat folks. 

So we’ll hear from Jade in just a second, but while I have you here, I wanted to say that if you’ve been enjoying the podcast and wishing that you had even more in your life, then have I got news for you. Once a month, myself and CIHAS podcast editor Lucy Dearlove sit down together and answer your burning questions in a bonus All Of The Snacks episode. We tackle important issues like: why are men so mad about intuitive eating? And, are emulsifiers really that bad for you? And does Tim Spector have any nutrition qualifications? If you’d like to know the answers to these questions, plus loads of other zeitgeisty nutrition topics, then head to canihaveanothersnack.com and upgrade to a paid membership. It’s £5 a month or £50 for the year. As well as those great bonus eps, you’ll get access to my Dear Laura column, the Discord server and our weekly Snacky Bits posts. There’s a link in the show notes if you’d like to sign up and thank you to everyone who's already supporting this work financially, it really means a lot.

Alright team, let’s get to today’s conversation with Jade Elouise.

Main Episode

Laura: All right, Jade, can you start by telling us a little bit about who you are and the work you do?

Jade: Yeah, absolutely. So my name is Jade Elouise. My pronouns are she and they. I'm so used to describing myself as a body positive advocate. That's gonna take me a while to stop. But I'm a fat liberationist, a body liberationist. My day-to-day work, I'm a mental health practitioner, mostly focusing on low intensity support using CBT based interventions.

But my kind of side work in the areas that I've been in for the past 10 years or so, have all been about body image, the way that we perceive bodies in society and trying to make changes to, I guess, the inequalities around body image.

Laura: Mmm. And you, you kind of alluded to it a little bit there, in, in what you were saying in terms of moving away from using the framing of 'body positive advocate'. And I'd really like to get into kind of what that evolution has been like for you, but I wonder if you could, first of all, just to kind of set the scene, tell us a little bit more about why you gravitated towards BoPo or body positivity in the first place. Like, what was it that attracted you to that space and got your foot through the door in the first place?

Jade: Yeah, absolutely. So I think like most people, I really struggled with how I perceived myself growing up, I had quite a negative self-perception, particularly around body image. I'd been placed on diets from about two years old. All the way through. 

Laura: From two?! 

Jade: Yeah, from two. I had a condition when I was, yeah, when I was younger, and it basically made me go through puberty really early, from toddler years. So overnight my body shape changed and instead of it being looked at through a medical lens of how can we support this young person, make sure that they're as healthy, as happy as they can be in the body that they are. Instead, unfortunately, medical professionals went, diets are what needed, what are needed. So most of my upbringing was dieting, various diets. And that led to a really negative self-perception, particularly because no matter what diet I did, my body was still bigger than everybody else's. And there was a lot of shame around that, I think for me. 

And then when I got to about 16, I remember just reaching a point where I was like, I'm so fed up of this. I'm so fed up with feeling so awful about myself all of the time. It's just not sustainable. And I just thought to myself, if I continue this way, I'm just gonna be miserable for the rest of my life.

So, it was mostly through social media that I came across body positivity. I initially started looking on things like self-love hashtags. The Eff Your Beauty Standards Movement by Tess Holliday was quite big at the time. 

Laura: Yeah. I remember that. 

Jade: So that was sort of my gateway into realising that there were people out there in bigger bodies who were happy, who weren't punishing themselves for being fat. And that maybe I didn't have to either. So that was very much my realisation of body positivity and it, it did a lot for me at the time.

Laura: Mm. What did you, what did you get from it, do you think?

Jade: I think I just, I got the freedom of realising I didn't have to hate myself, and actually that hating myself was never gonna make me thin and it was never gonna make me happy. And that happiness didn't have to come from being smaller. And there was so much representation back then in body positivity of various body sizes of people of different ethnicities, particularly Black women, which was really affirming for me, being a mixed race Black woman myself.

So it was really liberating to see people taking up space and that was what I really needed at that young age.

Laura: Hmm. So yeah, it is interesting that you have kind of, yeah, spoken to that point that like when body positivity first sort of like -for want of a better expression- blew up, it was a more inclusive, accessible space. It felt welcoming, it felt safe. There was diversity in terms of bodies. What do you think? Like, what, what went wrong?

Jade: Yeah...