Watching Our Weights : : The Contradictions of Televising Fatness in the “Obesity Epidemic” / / Melissa Zimdars.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter EBOOK PACKAGE COMPLETE 2019 English
• VerfasserIn: Zimdars, Melissa,
• Place / Publishing House: New Brunswick, NJ : : Rutgers University Press, , [2019]; ©2019
• Year of Publication: 2019
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (206 p.) :; 15 b-w images

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.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- 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 Positivity -- Conclusion: The Decline of The Biggest Loser -- Acknowledgments -- Notes -- Index -- About the Author