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Palgrave Macmillan

Lizzo’s Black, Female, and Fat Resistance

  • Book
  • © 2021

Overview

Authors:
  1. Niya Pickett Miller

    1. Howard College of Arts and Sciences, Samford University, Birmingham, USA

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    You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

  2. Gheni N. Platenburg

    1. School of Communication and Journalism, Auburn University, Auburn, USA

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    You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

  • This work acknowledges the prevailing ideologies around Black, fat females in traditional media and now within the social media age
  • The authors’ analysis demonstrates the value of studying popular culture, especially artifacts created by and exhibiting Black women
  • This work can be used as a primary or supplementary text for courses and research related to race, gender, and/or body size

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in (Re)Presenting Gender (PSRG)

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Table of contents (3 chapters)

  1. Front Matter

    Pages i-vi
    Download chapter PDF

  2. Introduction

    • Niya Pickett Miller, Gheni N. Platenburg
    Pages 1-21

  3. Fat Black Female Flaunting

    • Niya Pickett Miller, Gheni N. Platenburg
    Pages 23-49

  4. So What, It’s Lizzo?

    • Niya Pickett Miller, Gheni N. Platenburg
    Pages 51-58

  5. Back Matter

    Pages 59-72
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Keywords

About this book

Celebrated musician and entertainer Lizzo wowed audiences and left many “feeling good as hell.” Notwithstanding her collective—fat, Black female— identity she catapulted into mainstream success while redefining the social script for body size, race, and gender. This book explores a tale of two narratives: Lizzo’s self-curated, fat-positive identity and the media’s reaction to an unabashedly proud fat, Black woman. This critical analysis examines how Lizzo challenges fatphobia and reconstitutes fat stigmatization into self-empowerment through her strategic use of hyper-embodiment via social media, and the rhetorical distinctions between Lizzo’s self-curated narrative via social media and those offered about her in print media. In part, Lizzo’s bodily flaunting is argued as a significant rhetorical act that emancipates her identity of fatness and reframes the negative tropes of (fat) Black women typically curated in American culture.                                                       

Reviews

“What does it mean to flaunt a body which refuses to be shamed? This timely and important study explores the singer-songwriter and musician, Lizzo’s ‘flaunting’ as an emancipatory act. A central concern of the book is how Lizzo energises an intersectional space of Black, Fat, and Female through her hyper-embodiment: it addresses a serious shortfall of meaningful and sustained intersectional analysis without which any understanding of social justice and embodiment is dangerously lacking. A good read for scholars of weight, race, celebrity culture and those interested in new configurations of stigma.”
— Jayne Raisborough, Professor of Media and Cultural Studies, Leeds Beckett University, UK, and author of Fat Bodies, Health and the Media (2016)

Authors and Affiliations

  • Howard College of Arts and Sciences, Samford University, Birmingham, USA

    Niya Pickett Miller

  • School of Communication and Journalism, Auburn University, Auburn, USA

    Gheni N. Platenburg

About the authors

Niya Pickett Miller, Ph.D., is a public speaker and post-doctoral Assistant Professor of Communication Studies in the Department of Communication and Media at Samford University, USA. Her forthcoming edited book (2021) titled, #Verzuz and Club Quarantine: Sustaining Black Music and Black Culture During COVID-19 features curated studies of Black cultural expression and communication through live streamed music on Instagram during the COVID-19 pandemic. Her 2020 book, Deconstructing Albinism as the Other, explores the visual tropes of people with albinism in American popular culture.

Gheni N. Platenburg, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor in the School of Communication and Journalism at Auburn University, USA, where she teaches multimedia journalism courses. Her research interests primarily fall at the intersection of race and media. Her co-authored research has been published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Black Studies. Currently, she works as a freelance journalist for The Washington Post Talent Network.





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