Sweat and Tears: Working at Redemption

Abstract

The fat sensibility speaks to varied, yet patterned representations that attend to the cultural knowingness of the fat body. This book argues that there are two mutually supporting forms of fat stigma: hostility and benevolence. The last chapter started to unpack some of the ways ‘hostile’ representations present the fat body as abject through multiple failings of self-control. This chapter suggests that makeovers cannot proceed without an escape from the abject and that this is achieved by a narrative shift to benevolent representations. I explore how benevolence increases as a particularly defined personhood materializes in place of the fat body as the foci of concern in the show. I frame this discussion of makeovers, with particular attention to Fat: A Year to Save My Life (broadcast in 2013), through Kenneth Burke’s (1954) cycle of redemption. Burke offers a useful frame as he allows a continuity of this book’s concern with prevailing social values and norms. More specifically, social values are at the fore of his argument that guilt and shame are socially produced and are followed by social rituals of purification and redemption. I argue that the makeover enlivens and dramatizes these rituals. For Burke, however, guilt and redemption are in an endless, ongoing cycle, and I question what this means for our reading of new subjectivity modelled in the final ‘reveal’.