Fat in the Media (original) (raw)

2021, The Routledge International Handbook of Fat Studies, edited by Cat Pausé & Sonya Renee Taylor

In feminist and other critical media studies, scholars have long been interested in the role that media imagery plays in deeming some bodies desirable, acceptable, or 'normal', others threatening, shameful, or excessive. Most bodies we see in the media are slim or normatively sized. Many classic studies on how gendered body norms and beauty ideals take shape and transform in and through the media have focused on just that, what we mostly see: normabiding, idealized, dieting, or eating disordered bodies (e.g. Bordo, 1993; Wolf, 1991). However, the categories of 'normal' or 'desirable' are at least as much produced through what constitutes their outside, what is understood as 'excessive', 'too much', or 'over'-all things that fat is claimed to be. When we examine images of fatness and fat people in the media, we are therefore not only analyzing fat but also the very boundaries of corporeality and 'normalcy' overall. Thus media images of fat unavoidably entangle with the production of gender, sexuality, class, race, and ability, while they also deserve to be a research focus in their own right. Fat bodies are relatively invisible in the body-scape of popular culture (e.g. Kent, 2001; LeBesco, 2004). When fat bodies do appear, they tend to appear in rather specific contexts: in particular genres and modalities (Kyrölä, 2014). Why does fatness appear so often in comedy, reality television and so-called 'trash TV' (Raisborough, 2014), but much more rarely in televisual or cinematic drama? What characterizes news publicity around fatness, and what is fat's appeal in pornography? Even though the cultural limitation of fat bodies to certain genres rather than others is a testament to how fat people are still not seen capable of representing the whole spectrum of humanity, these genres are not without subversive potential to challenge, or even unravel, body normativities. 2 In scholarship about fat in the media, fat bodies' relationship to 'normalcy' has been a fraught one. On one hand, scholars and activists have called for a broader range of roles and characteristics for fat actors, so that they would not have to be limited to being defined first and foremost through their fatness, or to the roles of, for example, funny sidekicks or emotionally damaged binge-eaters (Jester, 2009; LeBesco, 2004). A call for 'normalcy' in fat representation in the media is, at the same time, a call for fat people to be seen as fully human, good as well as bad, complicated as well as superficial, sympathetic as well as annoying, exciting as well as boring (Cooper, 1996; Mosher, 2001.) On the other hand, fat studies scholars have also seen subversive, revolutionary potential in the excess and indeed the abjection that fat has come to signify in western culture (Braziel, 2001; Kent, 2001; Kyrölä, 2014; LeBesco, 2004). Why aim for normalcy, when the whole category of the 'normal' is already so oppressive? A better strategy might be to refuse and dismiss the notion of 'normalcy' altogether and embrace the excess and danger to bodily boundaries that fat has come to stand for, similarly as queer theory aims to do with the concept 'queer' (LeBesco, 2004, p. 5; Kent, 2001, pp. 136-137). Media images furthermore participate in producing understandings of what counts as 'normal' or fat overall, how we are expected to feel about such definitions, and how other categories of difference, such as gender and race, intersect with fat. In contemporary Hollywood, actors are considered 'fat' at much lower sizes than in the surrounding world, and such standards easily seep into everyday lives. Sensationalistic celebrity journalism observes actors' bodies in minute detail, and weight-gain as well as weight-loss are targets of keen and fully normalized speculation. Actors' weight fluctuations for roles are praised as signs of dedication, but otherwise strictly condemned. For example, American actress Reneé Zellweger as Bridget Jones (Bridget Jones's Diary, 2001; and Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason, 2004) may have looked simply average-sized in the role, but her 'incredible' weight gain was still highlighted, as well as her difficulties losing the weight. Many celebrities, such as Oprah Winfrey, Britney Spears, and Monica Lewinsky, have also fluctuated in weight repeatedly, and have thus come to embody the fraught relationships between weight, wealth, race, sexuality and gender in the public eye (Farrell 2014, pp. 121-127). Given the key role of media in defining and redefining fat, it is not surprising that many fat studies writers have addressed the media at least in passing. Academic writing on fat bodies in the media has become a rich field during the 2000s and 2010s, addressing images of