The best diet is a living hell: internet users and TV spectators share accounts of humiliation, suffering and overcoming toward the accomplishment of weight loss and self-esteem (original) (raw)

Moving Subjects, Feeling Bodies: Emotion and the Materialization of Fat Feminine Subjectivities in Village on a Diet

In this paper, we conduct a critical feminist-informed poststructural analysis of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's reality weight loss series, Village on a Diet (VOD). We argue that the "problem of obesity" is felt into reality through the cultural work of emotions as represented in VOD. We further situate VOD as one node in a more expansive, interwoven network of discourses, sites, and technologies. In so doing, we argue that the felt force of "obesity" discourse is magnified as it circulates relationally throughout this network, materializing the felt "truth" about fatness (e.g., that it is unhealthy) and fat subjects (e.g., that they are unhappy, unsexy, bad parents). In this way, VOD serves a (bio)pedagogical function as it instructs-indeed, necessitates-that villagers and viewing Canadians alike work on and transform their bodies into leaner, supposedly more healthy forms as a means of striving towards the promise of a better life.

‘My anorexia story’: girls constructing narratives of identity on YouTube

Cultural Studies, 2016

The phenomenon of pro-anorexia ('pro-ana') communities has attracted extensive academic attention over the last 15 years, with feminist scholars fascinated by the political complexities of such cultures. But the internet has also enabled a range of eating disorder recovery cultures to emergewhether organized around blogs, Facebook, Instagram or YouTubeand such spaces have been largely ignored by feminist scholarship which has fetishized the apparently more resistant and controversial discourses of pro-ana. As such, this article explores a set of videos posted on YouTube under the title of 'My anorexia story' which present narratives of recovery, or efforts to recover, from anorexia. Primarily produced by white, Western, teenage girls, these videos are effectively slide shows made up of written text and photographs, with selfies of the body sitting at their core. The conceptual and political significance of self-representation has been seen as central to the construction of subjectivity within the digital media landscape, with particular attention paid to the ways in which such practices compare, speak back to, or challenge the existing representational discourses of 'dominant' media and wider relations of social power. In this regard, this article explores questions of agency in gendered self-representation, examining what kinds of selfnarratives the girls are producing about anorexia. In doing so, it examines how the stories seek to 'author' and regulate the meanings of the anorexic body; how these constructions intersect with dominant constructions of anorexia (such as those offered by medical discourse and the media); as well as the implications of the aesthetic strategies they employ. In considering how the narratives visualize, display and 'expose' the anorexic body, I draw upon a growing area of work which examines the selfie in relation discourses of surveillance, visibility and selfhood.

The Discursive Production of Subjectivity in Television News: Reflecting the Other on the Obese Child's Body

2005

In this paper, I expand on poststructuralist and feminist theories of the body, gender, and subjectivity through an analysis of media discourse on childhood obesity. Through textual and narrative analyses of news segments on childhood obesity, I demonstrate that the obese child's body, as an abnormal body, is represented as a text of the 'abnormal' conditions in which that body is produced. Thus, the single-mother family structure and/or non-white and working class families-families saturated with the excessive, out-of-control subjectivity of the Other-are visible on the excessive, out-ofcontrol body of the obese child. I will argue that the discourse surrounding childhood obesity is indicative of a moral panic, where children's bodies are used to express a fear of the destabilization of the normative family structure and a fear of an irrational, excessive, over-consuming society saturated with the subjectivity of the Other.

Making and Breaking the Weighted Body: a poststructural reading of obesity discourse

This research emerged through my growing discomfort with the escalating attention given to the current obesity "crisis". I was worried that, with the growing number of agencies, government task forces, fitness groups, and educators rallying to fight obesity, research within physical education attending to the social effects of the (re)production of obesity as a health crisis may have been subordinated to other agendasnamely obesity prevention and reduction. Therefore, the aim of this thesis was to interrogate the possible effects the proliferation of obesity discoursedefined as the knowledge and practices surrounding and underpinning obesity reduction initiatives (re)produced in scientific literature, popular culture and public discourse as health information-may have for the ways in which bodies, behaviour and the self are known. Two New Zealand-made reality television programmes -Eat Yourself

Stories that matter: subverting the before-and-after weight-loss narrative

2013

Contemporary scholarship does not pay enough attention to stigma in relation to its temporal status; i.e. whether the stigma is temporary and changeable, or is it permanent? The present article links the study of sociology of time, of destigmatization strategies and of narrative resistance, through a case study of individuals who are stigmatized on the basis of an attribute perceived as temporary and changeable Á fatness. Conducting a comparative analysis of Before-and-After weight-loss articles appearing in an Israeli online health magazine, I examine how these narratives marginalize fat people by presenting fatness as temporary and changeable. I then compare these narratives to life narratives produced by Israeli-Jewish women, who self-identify as fat. Participants subvert mainstream narratives in two ways: (1) assigning the fat body to ''After,'' thereby challenging the temporary and transient status of fatness and (2) subverting other discursive characteristics of Before-and-After Weight-Loss Narratives. As a result, participants produce valid knowledge and social criticism from a stable fat subject position.

Working with 'obesity': lessons from reality television

In this paper I interrogate one of the seldom examined resources that children and adults alike have available to draw on when trying to make sense of obesity imperatives - reality television. I offer a brief analysis of the key messages, strategies and affects evident in two New Zealand fat-busing programs - 'Downsize Me' and 'Eat Yourself Whole'. I conclude by suggesting that these programs, troubling as they are, may well be regarded as a powerful pedagogical resource for teachers who are trying to engage their students in socially critical inquiry around bodies, health and weight.

Weighing in on YouTube: Two women's experiences of Weight Loss Surgery

2011

Weight loss surgery (WLS) is an increasingly popular ‗choice' and/or ‗solution' to the avowed problem of ‗obesity'. This thesis explores two women's encounters of WLS alongside and against a variety of theoretical resources including Foucauldian feminist accounts of ‗fat', bodies and subjectivities, and theories of embodiment. I draw on narratives derived from Thebandinme and Divataunia's YouTube vlogs (video blogs) to examine what WLS offers as a mode of being in the world through discourse analysis. In these vlogs, the women have kept a record of their ‗journey' both pre and post-WLS. These testimonies afford multifaceted and rich insights into the lives and ‗selves' of these women. I examine the meanings WLS holds for the women and the ways in which my chosen subjects take up, rework and negotiate the operating discourses around what it means to be a subject, in ‗control' and what is ‗normal'. The testimonies highlight the women's nuanced negotiations of discursive formations and describe the ways in which WLS contours embodied subjectivity. The embodied, ‗new', controlled and normal subjectivities that WLS facilitates for Thebandinme and Divataunia across their WLS journey are the focus of this thesis. I draw on the notion of embodied subjectivity to explore the way weight shapes the subject positions the women occupy across their WLS journeys. I interrogate the idea of control and healthism, and its neo-liberal roots, and examine the ways in which the women understand what it means to be in and out of control. The various ways the binary of normal and abnormal is employed by the women in their vlogs as well as by other people, medical institutions and existing norms such as clothing size are considered. These subject positions are fluid, meaningful,

Lifestyle television and diet: body care as a duty

Abstract: The formats of makeover and lifestyle television are an evolution of the reality television genre. The function of this type of format is to give instructions and examples that are functional to correct lifestyles. Through their “diagnostic eye” experts, who are the protagonists of these programmes, supply advice and knowledge about every sphere of life. In makeover programmes in comparison to lifestyle ones, the process of transformation to which the participant is submitted and of which the spectator becomes witness is more accentuated. The makeover format, above all when it concerns transformation of overweight bodies, puts the transformation of the Self on show. For this reason, in certain literature, makeover shows may be seen as technologies of the Self. In this paper two makeover television programmes will be analysed that deal with overweight adolescents and their families. The aim is to track down and analyse the discursive repertoires around the work on bodies and on their boundaries as a repair of the identity disorders of adolescents.