Includes bibliographical references (pages 167-183) and index.
Contents:
1. Introduction: Fat, the Media and a Fat Sensibility -- 2. The Matter of Fat -- 3. Fat Gets Melodramatic: The Obesity Epidemic and the News -- 4. Fat Finds Lifestyle: Introducing Reality Television -- 5. The Before: Fat Gets Ready for a Makeover -- 6. Sweat and Tears: Working at Redemption -- 7. Fat and on Benefits: The Obese Turn Abese -- 8. Conclusion: Fat Sensibility or Moral Panic?
Summary:
Our televisions bulge with weight-loss shows, as the news warn of the obesity epidemic. Fat is such a villain that larger people are stigmatized and we all are seduced by life-changing claims of a multi-billion pound diet industry. Yet, when we question if our bathroom scales can really tell us about our health, we start to ask just why and how fat holds such fascination. In this book, Jayne Raisborough explores interpretations of fat bodies from Palaeolithic Europe to Poverty Porn TV to argue that fats materiality makes it ripe for stigmatising associations. However, especially in a social context that presents health as a matter of choice, fat also emerges as an ideal redemptive substance to be pummelled and starved into submission. This book presents a fat sensibility to demonstrate how fat is helping us all become responsibilised healthy-citizens. It asks just what self are we being asked to diet ourselves into? Jayne Raisborough is Reader at the School of Applied Social Sciences, University of Brighton, UK. She is the author of Lifestyle Media and the Formation of the Self and co-editor of Risk, Identities and the Everyday. Her current work is an empirical, visual, exploration of womens negotiations of anti-ageing culture.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.