Fat Studies, Fat Stigma, and Citizenship in US Media

Bodies of Knowledge: Fat Studies, Fat Stigma, and Citizenship in U.S. Media Culture 157 Feminist Studies in English Literature Vol.20, No. 3 (2012) Bodies of Knowledge: Fat Studies, Fat Stigma, and Citizenship in U.S. Media Culture Dana Heller (Old Dominion University) In the summer of 2009, U.S. Fox television premiered a new series, More to Love, a dating competition show from the creators of The Bachelor and The Bachelorette. The difference in this case was that the female contestants competing for the heart of single guy, Luke Conley, were all plus‐size women. Conley himself, who stands at 6’3 and weighs 300 lbs., claimed that his ideal woman is “full‐figured and comfortable in her own skin.” According to Fox’s promotion, the series would feature “real women” in an effort to “prove that love comes in all shapes and sizes.” The series trailer emphasized the pride these women take in their size, and their refusal to see themselves as abnormal or unattractive. However, when the series aired it told quite the opposite story, as the female contestants, all of them professionally accomplished and articulate, came forward one by one to confess their miserable experiences of heterosexual vulnerability and humiliation, their perennial failures with diets and weight‐loss programs, and their most intimate struggles with 158 Dana Heller rejection and self‐hatred in a culture that encourages women to aspire to size.1 More to Love is indicative of a contradictory cultural turn in media culture that generates narratives of “fat acceptance” ― stories consistent with a burgeoning activist movement aimed at renegotiating bodily norms and changing social perceptions of overweight people, who are frequent targets of derision and discrimination. The problem is that these narratives of acceptance remain tethered to an ethos of disciplinary enforcement, medicalization, and emotional injustice that invariably reveal the dire consequences of violating aesthetic conventions of body size. As Amy Edrman Farrell observes in Fat Shame: Stigma and the Fat Body in American Culture, popular television shows such as More To Love (along with The Biggest Loser, Mike and Molly, Celebrity Fit Club, Bulging Brides, and Honey, We’re Killing the Kids) exist “within a cultural context that not only abhors fatness and the fat person as a sign of degeneracy, but also one that has made the degradation of fat people a media ritual” (119). Indeed, in a global media marketplace that continues to equate slenderness with Eurocentric ideals of glamour, sophistication and desire, fat is framed negatively by popular health and medical discourses and continues to be comically depicted in mainstream entertainment culture as a sign of gender non‐conformity, racial and ethnic otherness, and the comic slothfulness of the lower classes. However, with two thirds of all 1 Although FOX has not announced plans for a second season at the time of this writing, promotional copy remains accessible on the network’s sponsored website (http://www.fox.com/moretolove/). Bodies of Knowledge: Fat Studies, Fat Stigma, and Citizenship in U.S. Media Culture 159 adults in the United States now statistically considered overweight or obese, and with obesity rates continuing to rise in industrialized societies around the world, body norms ― in concert with the global food system ― are undeniably changing (Arnst). These changes are highly complex and have become the focus of scientific and humanistic inquiry, as scholars seek to analyze the causes of contemporary obesity, its effects on individuals and communities, and the public policy implications of what many have described in stark terms as a national crisis, one that is rapidly becoming a worldwide dilemma. However, as the number of people who can be classified as “obese” has increased, so to has popular resistance against the tendency to treat fat as stigma ― a problem to be eradicated. This resistance has begun to register, in the United States at least, in the gradual yet discernible uptick in images of plus‐size women in the mass media ― in cinema, television, pop music, and even the fashion industry. I want to be careful not to overstate this development, as depictions of fat women remain the exception rather than the rule. But these exceptional images, I will argue, are doing some important cultural work as they negotiate the legacy of fat’s century‐long association with shame and stigma alongside the populist impulse to rewrite that history as part of a critical project that challenges the imposition of disciplinary norms on bodies that have been deemed, for a variety of reasons, “other” ― including women’s bodies, queer bodies, the bodies of immigrants and non‐whites, and working‐class bodies. I want to focus in this essay on representations of fat female bodies, since they have emerged as salient flashpoints for debate 160 Dana Heller about gender, sexuality, and proper parameters of citizenship. In the iconography of the mass media, the fat woman is a site of palpable public anxiety about changes in the gendered economy and the social contract. The fat woman, one might say, is an embodied contradiction, on one hand seeming to rearticulate body norms, while on the other hand suggesting that she simply lacks the discipline or the inspiration to perform her proper gender role, since what woman would not prefer to be thin if she could? And while fat women can claim themselves to be comfortable with their weight, they are simultaneously mocked ― as More To Love brutally demonstrated ― and induced to lament their elimination from the marriage pool, their erasure from the fairytale of heterosexual love and romance that every woman ostensibly dreams of. Such compelling contradictions are the focus of fat studies, an emerging, interdisciplinary field of scholarship that draws on feminist and queer theories in order to critique the discursive construction of fat and fatness while taking into account the fact that the fat body cannot be wholly reduced to a product of language, symbol, or discourse. Fat studies thus bridges health and medical concerns ― the inescapable materiality of the body ― with the politics of language, visual representation, and cultural knowledge about bodies. And clearly one of the more salient questions facing feminist and queer fat studies scholars is how corpulence came to be regarded as a problem related not only to aesthetics (or the culture’s preference for super‐skinny bodies) and not only to health and medical concerns, but to politics. For indeed, as feminist and queer studies scholars have long observed and sought to analyze, the body Bodies of Knowledge: Fat Studies, Fat Stigma, and Citizenship in U.S. Media Culture 161 ― in its material and symbolic permutations ― constitutes a field of volatile and contradictory political struggle over proper contours of sexuality, citizenship, and social capital. Homophobia and misogyny can be argued in the abstract; however, they have very real consequences for women and for LGBT people in a wide range of contexts ― in employment, in housing, in health, and in education, just to name a few. Similarly, as fat scholars point out, what medical experts and the multi‐billion dollar diet industry tend to frame as a “war on fat,” in fact often amounts to a targeted, discriminatory war on fat people. Scholars working at the intersection of fat studies and media studies tend to highlight the ways in which that “war” translates into fat narrative and to address the knotty question of whether these narratives are helpful or hurtful to the project of reframing fat as one of many physical differences that we can accept in ourselves and in others. Fat studies, like queer studies, thus challenges some of the most common beliefs about bodies and their social meanings ― beliefs to which people in the United States and elsewhere uncritically subscribe even in the face of evidence that contradicts negative stereotypes of fat people as “other” ― or as unhealthy, immoral, lazy, gluttonous, and dumb. Like gender and sexuality studies, fat studies has a biological as well as discursive dimension that situates lived, embodied experience in dialogue with cultural representations. Moreover, like these “interdisciplines,” fat studies, as an academic field, retains a historical connection to the revolutionary anti‐ capitalistic social movements of the 1960s ― the civil rights movement, women’s liberation, gay liberation, and in particular the 162 Dana Heller activist movement for “size acceptance” that in the United States can be traced back to the 1960s creation of the Fat Underground. As a product of that history, fat studies retains at its core a socially progressive narrative of liberation that tends to be politically left‐ leaning and philosophically utopian in its aims. However, unlike these fields to which it is undeniably related, fat studies is the relative newcomer to the academy. It has not yet fully acquired the institutional legitimacy and clout that women’s studies, race and ethnicity studies, and LGBT Studies have acquired, albeit in their own hard‐won and on‐going struggles for resources and resilience against perpetually hostile political tides. However, fat studies is well on its way to institutional legitimacy, having recently consolidated its disciplinary identity through the establishment of a dedicated scholarly journal, Fat Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Body Weight and Society and the publication of an omnibus reader, The Fat Studies Reader (Rothblum and Solovay). Nevertheless, because it challenges such commonplace contempt for fat people, and because it seeks in part to consolidate fat as a political identity ― as opposed to a health or beauty problem ― fat studies elicits a good deal of skepticism and derision. After all, why would anyone want to normalize fat? And how can fat studies avoid the trappings of an outmoded and discredited politics of identity that would render fat as moral or biological essence, to the occlusion of other critical vectors of subjectivity that make fat people ― or fat women ― impossible to lump together as one and the same.

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