This dissertation combines feminist and queer issues of embodiment, fat, and clothing by investigating how fat fashion bloggers make meaning through their dress practices in ways that are rhetorical, material, and embodied. In this project I argue for a methodology of “ethical reading” where a viewer must acknowledge their own positionality, and engage with bodies both materially and rhetorically. I enact this methodology by interviewing three self-identified fat fashion bloggers in three different countries. My research participants demonstrate how meaning can be made through clothing and the fat body itself in order to embody “fat” in diverse ways, including radical, queer, traditional, and heteronormative. This work contributes to notions of material and visual rhetoric by drawing from theories of dress that include body fat and clothing and extends work from fat studies, dress studies, and gender studies by engaging them in rhetorical analysis.
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