SkinnyTok has had many names. Pro-ana. Thinspiration. Now this. The goals have not changed, just the packaging. In this episode, Anshita and Suchi argue that SkinnyTok is a visual regime that turns hunger into a monster, thinness into a moral virtue, and women's bodies into a site of pure aesthetics while ignoring that this aesthetic was never race-neutral to begin with. They also get into the girly girl discourse, commodity feminism, and why self-care went from Audre Lorde's radical political act to a white woman's Stanley cup run. The episode title is a direct quote from a SkinnyTok creator. It tells you everything you need to know about what this movement actually thinks of the women it's targeting. Important Substacks for the episode: Performing the Digital Girly Lexicon Surviving the Academy Selling Rest Back to the Exhausted Assigned Readings: orgad, Shani, and Rosalind gill. Confidence Culture, Duke University Press, 2022, https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv24rgbjx.4. JSTOR. Maguire, Emma. 2018. Girls, Autobiography, Media: Gender and Self-Mediation in Digital Economies. Palgrave Studies in Life Writing. Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74237-3. McComb, Sarah E., and Jennifer S. Mills. 2021. “Young Women’s Body Image Following Upwards Comparison to Instagram Models: The Role of Physical Appearance Perfectionism and Cognitive Emotion Regulation.” Body Image38 (September): 49–62. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bodyim.2021.03.012. Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology, 13(1), 1–9. Hoffman, K. M., Trawalter, S., Axt, J. R., & Oliver, M. N. (2016). Racial bias in pain assessment and treatment recommendations, and false beliefs about biological differences between blacks and whites. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), 113(16), 4296–4301. Mulvey, L. (1975). Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. Originally published in Screen, 16(3), 6–18. (Source provided as a book chapter, pp. 57–68). Schwartz, A. (2020). Soft Femme Theory: Femme Internet Aesthetics and the Politics of “Softness.” Social Media + Society, 6(4), 1–10. Sturgis, M. (2020). Review of Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia by Sabrina Strings (New York University Press). Lateral, 9.1. Thomas, E. L., Dovidio, J. F., & West, T. V. (2014). Lost in the Categorical Shuffle: Evidence for the Social Non-Prototypicality of Black Women. Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology, 20(3), 370–376. Music Credits: Track: Disco Sunday — Audio Library Beats Group Music provided by Audio Library Plus Watch: • Disco Sunday — Audio Library Beats | Moder... Free Download / Stream: https://alplus.io/disco-sunday
