‘Slim-thick’: desires and pressures in pre-service female students’ account of body ideals

In recent times, the slim-thick body ideal, based on a slim waist and curvaceous hips and buttocks, has gained prominence shaping how young women conceptualise beauty standards and heterosexual desirability. Yet we know little of how female pre-service teachers make sense of this body ideal. Drawing on qualitative interviews with 30 pre-service female teachers at a South African university, we show how gender, bodies, race, cultural norms and digital media come together to shape young black women’s engagements with the slim-thick ideal. The findings illustrate how racialised historical legacies, heteropatriarchal gender norms and digital beauty cultures assemble to structure young women’s desires and self-perceptions. While young women ascribe power to the slim-thick aesthetic, they also experience pressure to conform to unattainable standards based on normative ideals andself-surveillance practices. We conclude by arguing for the importance of integrating critical engagement with digital beauty norms into teacher education programmes, to address gendered and racialised body ideals, the inequalities that it sustains whilst advocating for more expansive bodily possibilities in education.