Communities of Empowerment: Exploring the Discourse Practices of Plus-Size Fashion Bloggers

This doctoral dissertation explores the interactions that take place within an online community of plus-size fashion bloggers. Specifically, it focuses on the linguistic and discursive practices that these bloggers use to build community, to construct identities and to establish a sense of empowerment. The group of bloggers under investigation in the dissertation consists of 20 UK-based women who identify as plus-size and author fashion-focused blogs. Methodologically, the dissertation combines the qualitative discourse analysis of blog texts and comments with a quantitative, corpus-based investigation of a larger blog corpus of roughly 4.2 million words. In addition to textual blog material, questionnaire responses collected from the bloggers on two occasions (in 2015 and 2017) were studied using methods of thematic analysis.

Plus-size women have been marginalized in the field of fashion for several decades. They are offered less clothing options than smaller women and ostracized in fashion imagery. Fashion blogs, however, have enabled people who have not had a voice in traditional fashion media to express their sense of fashion and to build relationships with similar others. This dissertation adds an important linguistic perspective to the existing literature on plus-size fashion blogging by addressing the variation within this sub-genre of fashion blogs through detailed linguistic and discursive analyses.

The results reveal that there is more variation within the plus-size fashion blogging genre than previous studies have indicated. While earlier research has highlighted the activist aspects of plus-size fashion blogging, the results of this dissertation show that even though some bloggers identify strongly with the fat acceptance movement and have adopted a fat-activism-driven approach to blogging, others focus on more general fashion-related content, or blog about a wider variety of topics. However, despite these in-group differences, normative practices and behaviors can be observed within the community of plus-size fashion bloggers, and these practices are constructed through and reflected in the language the bloggers use. For example, using specific terms to describe plus-size women’s bodies functions as a way of constructing social identity within the blogging x community. At the same time, linguistic and discursive means are also used for maintaining the boundaries of the community by highlighting the differences between group members and outsiders.

In addition to an in-depth investigation of one specific community of bloggers, the four articles included in this dissertation contribute to building a theoretical and methodological model for studying online interaction within other groups. In particular, the dissertation provides a new framework for studying the online interaction of groups that are marginalized in the mainstream media and society. The results show that when it comes to the study of such communities, combinations of different types of data (qualitative and quantitative), as well as several methodological approaches, are needed. This dissertation also illustrates that when researching marginalized groups, researchers should not focus merely on the relationship between a specific group and the societal structures and hierarchies that marginalize this group – the inner dynamics of the community of marginalized people also need to be investigated in detail.

As digital communication has become a part of modern everyday life, communities that are formed on the internet no longer necessarily stay within the online realm, separate from our offline relationships. The findings presented in this dissertation illustrate how a community that starts out as an aggregate of people interacting on a particular digital platform can evolve into a complex, layered and multi-faceted network where individuals communicate through a variety of media, using a variety of shared resources. This type of community development may benefit marginalized individuals both online and offline. For many of the plus-size women investigated in this dissertation, blogging has functioned as a steppingstone to psychological, societal and financial empowerment.