Subaltern and marginalized

fat women and fashion on the covers of Donna magazine

Abstract

The objective is to analyze the inclusion of fat women on the covers of Donna magazine whose theme is fashion based on intersectionality, which considers gender crossed by the categories of race, class, sexuality, age group, aesthetics and disability. The corpus consists of ten Donna covers published in 27 years. As main findings are the fact that there is also, in the universe of representation of fat women, obedience to an aesthetic pattern, reproducing what is already naturalized in the universe of thin women: fat women are white, young, with smaller bodies. Thinking about a place of speech is essential to understand the space authorized by the magazine for fat women to occupy and what they are allowed to talk about. The analyzes reveal that in 80% of the covers, the place of speech of a fat woman implied the way in which she was portrayed as a reason for her presence, that is, the fat woman was due to the fact of being fat and was related to fashion in three main aspects: (a) specific fashion rules for their bodies, guiding what can and cannot be used; (b) the plus size fashion market, when there is a breach of previous rules related to traditional fashion and a celebration of the fat woman in fashion and, finally, (c) themes related to self-acceptance and self-love, not to mention plus size fashion - there is also the breaking of rules, but the centrality is not the fat nor the fashion, the latter appears as an important aid in the process of self-esteem.