ABSTRACT
Fat black women have a paradoxical relationship with the beauty panopticon. It functions to exclude them from the beauty canon by encouraging self-surveillance and punishing where appropriate; however, the Panopticon has the converse effect when large black women manipulate and harness the sociological/psychological effects that underlie Bentham's original concept. Beauty pageants exemplify and epitomize the sociocultural phenomenon of erasure of large black women, who occupy a triple consciousness by virtue of their size, gender, and race. Blogging allows women to bypass the erasure that is characteristic of the mainstream media by providing a platform from which images that defy the status quo are directly accessible to anyone with access to the Internet, without an intermediary. Resistance through social media is an attempt to reshape and train a new gaze that acknowledges a multiplicity of body types, diversifying the beauty canon from which large black women were excluded.
