Welcome to the 20th monthly installment of my Substack vertical, VOLUMINATI.
Body neutrality: a mindset that shifts the focus away from how your body looks and toward what it can do and feel. Instead of demanding that you love or hate your physical appearance, it encourages you to view your body as a neutral, functional tool that carries you through life.
I don’t identify with body neutrality.
As an HSP maximalist fat Brown girl with a history of trauma-rama, I feel neutral about literally nuh-thing.
I’ve got strong feelings about the correct way to store gum.
I will reorganize an entire room because a lamp is giving me a bad vibe.
I’ve been known to cry because the light hit a tree in a particularly beautiful way.
My relationship to my body - a deeply personal site of joy, pleasure, lineage, and cultural resistance - was just neh-ver going to be the thing I wasn’t going hard on. If I’m completely honest, neutrality just doesn’t come naturally to me, and it doesn’t land as the emotion I want to have toward my body.
Pride? Yes.
Protection? Yes.
Positivity? Also yes.
Still, I strongly believe there’s a broad spectrum of ways to relate to the body, and I don’t think there’s a universally “correct” one. Diversity is a good thing when it comes to bodies as well as philosophies about bodies. There’s just what works for you, and what doesn’t. That being said, body neutrality just doesn’t resonate with or work for me.
I’m a body love, self-love lady all the way.
Beyond my personal maximalist aesthetic, I think people often misunderstand self-love, hastily labeling it as a manifestation of toxic positivity without understanding its historical origins.
Body love politics originated in fat activism. “I love my body” is a reclamatory, political refrain adopted by people who had been taught to hate their bodies. In this way, fat activism was inspired by other liberation movements - like the Gay Liberation Movement, the Black Is Beautiful Movement and the Disability Justice Movement - who use(d) self-love language and frameworks as acts of collective defiance. Self-love (or body love) wasn't meant to be a demand made on the individuals who claimed it, but an act of protest against the systems that told oppressed people they were ugly and worthless.
Popularized around 2016 by body image coach Anne Poirier, body neutrality arose because the call to love one's body was taken literally (not politically) by both many proponents and critics. That version of self-love understandably felt unachievable and alienating to many. Ironically, however, I think the claim to