In contemporary neo-liberal cultures, fat and larger-than-normative bodies are often viewed as bodies in need of change. Due to constant pressure to transform, there is limited space available for the larger-than-normative subject to “simply feel” their body and its feelings. This article-based dissertation studies the affective connections of Finnish media users’ bodies to body positive digital media. The study asks how body positive media allows subjects to feel their bodies instead of treating them as objects. The study shows that body positive media moves its audiences in multiple ways, making its users sense their bodies’ affective rhythms and the embodied nature of digital media.

The qualitative multimethod study utilizes affect inquiry and affective methodologies to form an understanding of the relationship between media users’ bodies and mediated bodies. Through an analysis of affect as a bodily intensity and a relation between bodies and technologies, I zoom in on how material bodies are sensually and vividly felt in relation to their surroundings when in contact with body positive media. Affective methodologies refer to the choices that I have made during the study process: formulating research questions in unexpected ways, combining representation analysis or interviews with methodological choices seldom utilized, and using my own body as a resource for study. Affective methodologies create possibilities to analyze the affective pull of body positive media and the ways in which users become invested in body positive media in both normative and unexpected ways.

The dissertation focuses on four well-known cases of body positive media mostly in Finland: body positive blogs inviting their users to “simply feel” their bodies, a body positive campaign encouraging people to produce selfies of and with their larger-than-normative body, the media discussion around a fat activist theatre monologue, and body positive podcasts discussing weight loss practices and diet-culture. All four case studies showcase the multifaceted entanglement of mediated body representations, technologies, and the bodies of media users.

The dissertation argues that (digital) body positive media negotiates space and time for the larger-than-normative subject to feel under the barriers of fat-phobic cultures. The dissertation suggests that for a larger-than-normative subject in particular, the experience of “simply feeling” is highly important. The separate cases show how bodies are continuously transformed through the affective flow of their existence in the media and in their surroundings. To emphasize these connections, the dissertation introduces the concept of the feeling body in the media.

In the mediatized society, bodies are increasingly lived and felt in the media with the media shaping understandings of the body and the body shaping understandings of the media. Making bodies aware of their feelings, as body positive media often does, can help to question widespread ideas of larger-than-normative embodiment, increase the understanding of our relationship with our bodies, and make room for more accepting relations.