Abstract: “This is Healthy”: Body-positivity Images as Mediated Biopolitical Tools of Slow Death

◆ Samantha Gillespie, University of Nebraska - Lincoln

In February 2021, Cosmopolitan featured social media influencer and yoga instructor, Jessamyn Stanley, a plus-sized, Queer-femme, and woman of color. In the cover story, Stanley posed for Cosmo to illustrate the issue’s theme on body-positivity, tilted ‘This is Healthy’. Stanley’s photo represented the new definition of a healthy body who defies mainstream health norms. Upon the release of Stanley’s cover story, she became the subject of a Twitter controversy targeted at Cosmopolitan’s framing of Stanley as “healthy”. The Twitter debate spanned across multiple digital media spaces including the popular social media app TikTok and online news sites. At the crux of the opposition was a backlash to the central argument of the body-positivity movement, which works to change current beauty standard norms and demands acceptance of all types of bodies including fat or plus-sized. In this Twitter war, Cosmo’s choice to run the feature story was articulated as the main focus, yet it was Stanley, who became the target of body-shaming tweets. Many Twitter users created parodies of Stanley, replacing her body with a skeleton, zombie, or corpse with Cosmo’s ‘This is Healthy’ title. The rhetorical purpose of these memes positioned obesity as a “death-wish”. Some also argued it was irresponsible for Cosmo to promote obesity, which health officials say is a deadly comorbidity for those with COVID-19, during a pandemic. In my analysis, I argue that Stanley’s photo is used as a rhetoric of caution, which perpetuates knowledge meaning-making regimes of black, fat bodies as a lesson to avoid, not imitate. That is to say, the framing of Stanley’s body is rhetorically assembled as a biopolitical specimen that functions as a disciplining mechanism, rather than an object of desire. In this rhetorical event, Stanley’s image transforms from body to flesh. To achieve this result, both mediated channels, the gaze of the photographic lens, and the uptake of the artifact through digital space, reimposes Stanley’s subjectivity of personal empowerment into a knowledge-power text that re-signifies her image as a biopolitical tool of slow death. I see the connection between my paper and the conference theme, ‘Communication Strategies to Promote Comprehensive Well-being’, in my discussion of how audiences negotiate Cosmo’s intention for Stanley’s body to serve as a representation of health, which undermines current health norms and logics. However, due to neoliberal, capitalistic systems functioning under a biopower regime, the invested meaning of Stanley’s cover photo and its circulation on Twitter, rhetorically animating the theory of slow death. Berlant’s (2007) term ‘slow death’ is a concept that reinterprets the functionality of sovereignty under a biopower regime, which articulates the visibility of sovereign power by way of the ubiquity of biopolitics and contemporary capitalistic systems in everyday life. They (2007) argue slow death functions through affective infrastructures of biopolitical technologies that shapes disposable populations slowly across time and space. This means that the power-knowledge apparatus that disciplines and alienates bodies through capitalistic structures are reified in the public consciousness as an ideology of making live and letting die.