Taking Up Less Space

What the return of "heroin chic” shows us about who is expected to shrink.

Every few years, headlines appear announcing that “heroin chic” is back. The articles usually point to the same collection of cultural moments: impossibly thin celebrities, runway trends, conversations about weight-loss drugs, and women reflecting on what it was like to come of age the first time this body ideal dominated magazines in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Although the aesthetic is presented as something new, it rarely feels that way. It feels more like the return of a familiar cultural script.

As I found myself reading these articles over the past few months, I noticed that I was thinking less about fashion than about the phrase take up less space. At first, I wasn’t entirely sure why those ideas felt connected. One is about bodies and beauty standards. The other is about the way we move through professional and social environments. But the more I sat with the idea, the more I realized they seemed to share an underlying logic. Both are built on subtle messages about visibility, belonging, and the kinds of people who are rewarded for becoming a little quieter, a little more agreeable, and a little more accommodating to everyone else.

I remember feeling that instinct particularly strongly while I was completing my Master of Arts. It was a department where bullying was common enough that most students quickly learned who to avoid, when to stay quiet, and which conversations were safest to observe rather than join. No one ever explained these rules outright. They were simply part of the culture. Over time, I noticed that I had begun adapting to that environment in ways I did not fully recognize until much later.

I became more cautious about speaking in seminars unless I was certain I had the “right” answer (and I became increasingly less certain as time went on). I softened disagreements before expressing them. I reread emails several times to make sure they sounded agreeable rather than too direct. Even when I felt confident in an idea, I found myself weighing whether contributing was worth the possibility of becoming more visible than I wanted to be.

Looking back, I do not think I was responding to academia in general so much as to a particular institutional culture. Many departments cultivate generosity, curiosity, and intellectual risk-taking. Mine often felt defined by uncertainty about who might become the next target. In that kind of environment, taking up less space becomes less of a personality trait and more of a strategy. It’s difficult to contribute freely when you are also trying to avoid attracting the wrong kind of attention.

That experience has stayed with me because I have since noticed versions of the same instinct appearing in places that seem, at first glance, entirely unrelated. The conversation around the return of “heroin chic” is one example. Although it’s framed as a discussion about fashion or celebrity culture, it also reflects a broader expectation that many women have encountered in different forms throughout their lives: that there is value in becoming smaller. Sometimes that message is directed at our bodies. Other times, it is directed at our voices, our ambitions, or the amount of room we allow ourselves to occupy in professional spaces.

Academia, of course, does not tell women to lose weight. But it can reward another kind of shrinking. There is often an unspoken expectation that confidence should be carefully calibrated, that disagreement should be softened, and that ambition should never become too visible. Women and scholars from marginalized communities frequently describe walking a narrow line between being seen as knowledgeable and being seen as difficult, between advocating for their work and being perceived as self-promotional. These expectations are not written into policy, of course, yet they often become part of the hidden curriculum of academic life.

One of the ironies is that universities often imagine themselves as places where ideas exist independently of the people presenting them. We like to believe that evidence, rigour, and intellectual merit rise above the biases that shape the rest of society. Yet universities are still human institutions, and human institutions inevitably carry the assumptions, stereotypes, and power dynamics of the cultures in which they exist. Those dynamics don’t disappear simply because they are expressed through the language of collegiality or professionalism rather than fashion or beauty.

Taking a break from academia has made me realize how much of this instinct I carried with me. Even now, I catch myself apologizing before asking a question or softening an opinion before expressing it. These habits are remarkably persistent because they are learned gradually. They become ways of navigating a particular culture, and by the time we recognize them, they often feel less like strategies and more like parts of our personality.

Perhaps that’s why the conversation about “heroin chic” has lingered with me. It’s not because I think fashion trends and academic culture are the same thing. But they both reveal something about the kinds of behaviours our culture continues to reward. Whether we’re talking about bodies or ideas, women and marginalized people are often encouraged to become just a little smaller, a little quieter, and a little easier to accommodate.

I find myself wondering what would happen if we stopped treating that instinct as inevitable. What would academia look like if confidence did not need to be softened before it was expressed? What kinds of conversations might emerge if more people felt able to occupy intellectual space without first worrying about how much of it they were taking up?

Those questions seem far more interesting to me than whether one fashion trend has returned. The real issue has never been about clothing or body types. It has always been about who is permitted to take up space, and who is quietly (or violently) encouraged to disappear into the background.