Watching Our Weights

The Contradictions of Televising Fatness in the “Obesity Epidemic”

Melissa Zimdars (Autor)

Buch | Softcover

200 Seiten

2019
Rutgers University Press (Verlag)
978-0-8135-9354-8 (ISBN)

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Explores the competing and contradictory fat representations on television that are related to weight-loss and health, medicalization and disease, and body positivity and fat acceptance. Watching Our Weights establishes both how television shapes our knowledge of fatness and how fatness helps us better understand contemporary television.

Winner of the 2020 Gourmand Awards, Food Writing Section, USA

Watching Our Weights explores the competing and contradictory fat representations on television that are related to weight-loss and health, medicalization and disease, and body positivity and fat acceptance. While television—especially reality television—is typically understood to promote individual self-discipline and expert interventions as necessary for transforming fat bodies into thin bodies, fat representations and narratives on television also create space for alternative as well as resistant discourses of the body. Melissa Zimdars thus examines the resistance inherent within TV representations and narratives of fatness as a global health issue, the inherent and overt resistance found across stories of medicalized fatness, and programs that actively avoid dieting narratives in favor of less oppressive ways of thinking about the fat body. Watching Our Weights weaves together analyses of media industry lore and decisions, communication and health policies, medical research, activist projects, popular culture, and media texts to establish both how television shapes our knowledge of fatness and how fatness helps us better understand contemporary television.

MELISSA ZIMDARS is an assistant professor of communication and media at Merrimack College in North Andover, Massachusetts.

Contents

1          Televising Fatness

2          Competing Understandings of Fatness

3          Does TV Make You Fat?: Television as Causing and Solving the “Obesity Epidemic”

4          The Globesity Epidemic: Adapting Weight-Loss Television Around the World

5          Exercising Control and the Illogics of Weight-Loss Television

6          Spectacle, Sympathy, and the Medicalized Disease of “Obesity”

7          Celebrating Large Bodies on the Small Screen: From Fat Visibility to Fat

Acceptance

8          The Decline of The Biggest Loser

Acknowledgments

Index

Erscheinungsdatum	14.01.2019
Zusatzinfo	15 b-w images
Verlagsort	New Brunswick NJ
Sprache	englisch
Maße	152 x 229 mm
Gewicht	283 g
Themenwelt	Kunst / Musik / Theater ► Theater / Ballett
	Sachbuch/Ratgeber ► Gesundheit / Leben / Psychologie
	Sozialwissenschaften ► Kommunikation / Medien ► Medienwissenschaft
	Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie
ISBN-10	0-8135-9354-9 / 0813593549
ISBN-13	978-0-8135-9354-8 / 9780813593548
Zustand	Neuware