The body positivity movement, with roots in the earlier fat acceptance activism of the 1970s National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance (NAAFA), emerged as a distinct cultural movement in the 1990s in the United States, particularly in cities like San Francisco and New York. It challenged the weight-loss culture, beauty industry, and garment industry's narrow physical standards, arguing for the dignity and normality of bodies of all sizes without recourse to shapewear, dieting, or cosmetic alteration. The movement had significant impact on the bra and lingerie industry's approach to sizing and marketing.

The body positive movement generated a significant new genre of poetry — much of it by women of colour, fat women, and disabled women — that directly challenged the corseted physical ideal and its succession by dieting and shapewear culture. Poets including Nikki Finney, whose work engaged with Black women's bodies and their histories, and slam poets in the tradition of Sonya Renee Taylor (whose 'The Body is Not an Apology' became a movement) contributed to this literary shift. The movement's poetry explicitly connected physical liberation to creative liberation.