Abstract
The makeover is not the only reality genre in which larger people and issues of fat and weight are overrepresented. This chapter shifts this book’s interest in reality television from the transformative tales of the makeover to weight-focused shows. These are reality fly-on-the-wall documentaries, featuring an off-camera narrator, that purport to explore the lived realities of obesity from different angles and perspectives. By interviewing larger people and charting their daily lives (often by following people around) weight-focused shows offer an intimate viewing encounter: the audience has immediate access to the homes, lives, thoughts, and habits of the show’s characters. This feeling of intimacy is enhanced by the absence of the ubiquitous expert, their clinical settings, and the transformation narrative that mediates and motors the makeover programming. This chapter is interested in a recent spate of weight-focused shows in the UK concentrating on larger people seeking paid employment and/or who are in receipt of benefits. It makes two suggestions: the first is that these shows can be usefully considered as the latest addition to a range of reality programming that has been described as ‘poverty porn’ (Allen et al. 2014; Jensen 2013), and thus be considered as providing a symbolic function in a wider political project to effect a transition from a welfare to a post-welfare society (Jensen and Tyler 2015). The second suggestion builds from Imogen Tyler’s (2013) arguments that neoliberal rationalities depend and progress through the making abject of certain social types. Tyler’s work highlights the processes of denigration and associations of disgust that are central to the production of abject others. To capture the always and already abject nature of medicalized corporeality that seems intensified in our current economic crisis, I am referring to the fat body in this context as the ‘abese’. Yet, I suggest that cultural labours of Othering also take the form of more benevolent representations. In an extension of the argument developed in Chap. 3, I chart benevolent representations in weight-focused shows and discuss how these may offer more palatable ways of securing public consent for policies that threaten to radically reshape the UK welfare system and the ideals of social democracy.
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Notes
- 1.
Claims that these case studies were fabricated caused the DWP leaflet to be removed in August 2015.
- 2.
As a recent example, the online retail giant Amazon has been accused of creating physical and mental illnesses in those working in its distribution centres. The Guardian reported that employees’ work and personal lives were tracked and quantified.
- 3.
The participants’ real names were used on the show and their homes were identifiable. There was little privacy afforded to the participants and this failure helped to fuel the personalized nature of the vitriolic press and social media coverage that followed the show. To use the participants’ real names here reproduces that objectification and exploitation: as the shows are heavily edited and framed, it is more accurate and ethical to regard participants as characters, and thus the use of pseudonyms helps foreground their constructed presence.
- 4.
There is, of course, a latent misogyny at play here (Dykewomon 2014).
- 5.
‘Campaigners demand welfare overhaul after statistics reveal 2380 people died between 2011 and 2014 shortly after being declared able to work’, reported the Guardian on 27 August 2015 (Butler 2015).
- 6.
Anna Mollow (2015) recently argued that the disability studies social model could benefit fat studies scholarship and called for a closer working relationship between the two bodies of scholarship.
- 7.
This reproduces ‘low recognition of the existence of racial health disparities’ (Gollust et al. 2012: 1549).
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Raisborough, J. (2016). Fat and on Benefits: The Obese Turn Abese. In: Fat Bodies, Health and the Media. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-28887-5_7
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