Body Curves and Story Arcs
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Body Curves and Story Arcs: Weight Loss in Contemporary Television Narratives ! ! ! Thesis submitted to Jawaharlal Nehru University and Università degli Studi di Bergamo, as part of Erasmus Mundus Joint Doctorate Program “Cultural Studies in Literary Interzones,” in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of ! Doctor of Philosophy ! ! by ! ! Margaret Hass ! ! ! Centre for English Studies School of Language, Literature and Culture Studies Jawaharlal Nehru University New Delhi - 110067, India 2016 ! Table of Contents !Acknowledgements !Foreword iii Introduction: Body Curves and Story Arcs Between Fat Shame and Fat Studies 1 Liquid Modernity, Consumer Culture, and Weight Loss 5 Temporality and Makeover Culture in Liquid Modernity 10 The Teleology of Weight Loss, or What Jones and Bauman Miss 13 Fat Studies and the Transformation of Discourse 17 Alternative Paradigms 23 Lessons from Feminism: Pleasure and Danger in Viewing Fat 26 Mediatization and Medicalization 29 Fictional Roles, Real Bodies 33 Weight and Television Narratology 36 Addressing Media Texts 39 Selection of Corpus 43 ! Description of Chapters 45 Part One: Reality! TV Change in “Real” Time: The Teleologies and Temporalities of the Weight Loss Makeover 48 I. Theorizing the Weight Loss Makeover: Means and Ends Paradoxes 52 Labor Revealed: Exercise and Affect 57 ! Health and the Tyranny of Numbers 65 II. The Temporality of Transformation 74 Before/After and During 81 Temporality and Mortality 89 Weight Loss and Becoming an Adult 96 I Used to Be Fat 97 ! Jung und Dick! Eine Generation im Kampf gegen Kilos 102 III. Competition and Bodily Meritocracy 111 The Biggest Loser: Competition, Social Difference, and Redemption 111 Redemption and Difference 117 Gender and Competition 120 Beyond the Telos: Rachel 129 Another Aesthetics of Competition: Dance Your Ass Off 133 ! IV. After the “After”: Three Trajectories 140 A. The Saga Continues 140 Plastic Surgery in the Weight Loss Makeover: Nina 141 Weight Loss in the Cosmetic Surgery Makeover: Botched 144 The Student Becomes the Master 146 ! Joining the Rebel Alliance 150 Conclusion 154 Part Two:! Comedy Of Reversals and Boomerangs: Comedic Genres and the Subversion of Weight Loss Makeover !Teleology 158 I. Sketch Comedy 160 ! Little Britain 166 II. Weight Change and the Sitcom 176 The Sitcom as Genre 179 Fat and the History of the Sitcom 184 Mike & Molly & Makeover Culture 189 ! Miranda 213 III. Grotesque Weight Change, Narrative Elasticity, and Sitcom Satire in Animated Series 224 Satirizing the Sitcom 227 Family Guy 230 ! South Park 239 !Conclusion 250 Part Three:! Drama !Lines and Curves: Feminism, Weight Loss, and Narrative in the Primetime Serial 254 !I. The Primetime Serial: Quality Television, Gender, and Storytelling 258 !II. The Self-Reflexive Image, or the Politics of the Signifier 262 III. Curves and Arcs: Individual Characters and their Weight Loss Plots 271 Mad Men and Fat Women: Weight Loss, the Body, and QTV Storytelling 271 “All of a Sudden There’s Less of You”: Peggy’s Weight Gain and Loss 275 That Incredible Closet: Betty’s Weight Gain and Loss 286 A Different Kind of Willpower: Huge and Transformation 296 Letters Home 300 Poker Face 304 “That’s the Big Improvement?”: Huge’s Ultimate Ambivalence 310 ! My Mad Fat Diary and the Alternative Journey of Body Acceptance 314 !Conclusion 327 Conclusion: The End of the Arc 332 ! The Future of Fat on TV 337 !List of Primary Television Series 339 !Bibliography 341 Appendix 357 ! Acknowledgements I would like to thank the numerous people who have helped me along the way in this program. First of all, I owe a large debt of gratitude to my primary advisor Saugata Bhaduri, who not only guided my research but also taught me in two M.Phil. classes, engaged me and my classmates in innumerable lively and thought-provoking debates, and helped me to quickly feel like a real JNUite and member of CES. Secondly, I have to thank Francesca Pasquali for taking me on as an advisee and giving her helpful and friendly feedback on my work, and Astrid Franke for her support as well. I would also like to acknowledge Ingrid Hotz-Davies for offering support in all situations, facilitating true intellectual exchange, and making incredibly incisive remarks that stick with me through the years. Likewise, I want to mention Elena Mazzoleni and her tireless work for Interzones. I also want to thank my friends and compatriots in the Interzones program for being a web of support in these crazy years of ours. To my friends and former flatmates Agnieszka, Tilahun, and Madi, thank you for sharing your space, your time, and your cooking with me so we could make a little Interzones home together. Sara, Sean, Iva, Milisava, and Lucía—it has been a pleasure to meet you in different places, to have our paths cross and crisscross again. The same goes for our other colleagues, from Amina to Zoran and everyone in between. To my many lovely classmates in JNU, thank you for always accepting me as one of your own in CES and for standing up to defend freedom of speech and academic expression in these troubled times. I am also especially grateful to three people who have accompanied me on different parts of the doctoral journey in these years—Benedict, Zakariae, and Vinayak. Each of you has given me your love and support and I would not be where I am today without you. And finally, I want to thank my family for always supporting me in my intellectual pursuits, no matter where they led. I thank my parents for giving me an intellectual space to grow, for listening enthusiastically to my ideas, and for contributing to my research in their own way, whether it was my mother noting her observations about The Biggest Loser or my father discussing politics. I also thank my siblings—Charlotte, Chris, Mathew, Joel, Anna, and Rachel — for inspiring me in myriad ways—by making art, performing, studying, fighting for the disenfranchised, and striving to support each other in the best and worst of times. I thank my brother Chris and my cousin Sara especially for allowing me to tell their stories in the foreword to this dissertation. ! Foreword For some people, the spark of intellectual interest in a topic comes from their personal experience, a search for a language to give life to something they have seen or felt. For me and fat studies it was the opposite—it began as an intellectual curiosity, when I happened to notice that the themes of body size and eating were central to the novels I was reading. After discovering Sander Gilman’s Fat, and subsequently The Fat Studies Reader, a new world opened to me. I had thought about different kinds of bodies before—gendered bodies, racialized bodies, etc.—but had not looked at texts through the lens of weight and social difference. Subsequently, I have discovered just how much my life and the lives of people close to me are permeated with issues of size and weight. I have cousins who have undergone bariatric surgery, others who are thin but hawk fitness and weight loss products online. Aunts and uncles who have gained weight over the years, and others who have spent their lives trying to keep it off. I myself have been lucky to have a mostly positive relationship to my body and my weight, which has always hovered on the border between “normal” and “overweight.” I have gained and lost weight at different times, but never drastically, and never felt the need to go on a diet. I have never been thin, and I have always been aware of this fact, but neither have I been very often labeled fat; for the most part, I have had the benefits of thin privilege such as being able to shop in regular sizes and not being shamed by others for my appearance. I am close to the “average” dress size in the United States (14), an average that is nevertheless much larger than the typical woman in media. So intentional weight loss has never been a part of my life. Since I started researching this topic, however, two people in my family have gone through processes of significant weight loss, and I share their stories here (with permission) to show what listening to them has taught me above and beyond my academic research, and how it has allowed me to think about both who I am writing about, and who I am writing for. Their stories share some similarities, particularly in the ways that their weight loss was met with praise from family and friends, often made public on social media, but they differ in their “twists.” The first is my cousin Sara. Over a longer period of a couple years, Sara lost a significant amount of weight the “right” way—that is, through a controlled diet and regular exercise. In the iii wake of the stress of her mother’s death, though, she found it increasingly difficult to maintain the weight loss. Instead of giving in to shame for regaining weight, Sara began to think about her body differently. Unknown to me, while I was researching fat studies, she was also discovering fat acceptance writings and arriving at the decision to stop monitoring her weight for the sake of her own well-being. Reflecting back on her thinner days from her current perspective, she sees that time as one of disordered eating and “orthorexia” rather than the healthy and successful makeover that others assumed it to be. She now reads and shares materials with me and others that question our cultural preoccupation with weight, insisting that, while it is not necessarily easy, it is possible for us to deprogram our minds of societal attitudes toward fat and the body.