Description
Book SynopsisWatching 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. Melissa Zimdars establishes how television shapes our knowledge of fatness and how fatness helps us better understand contemporary television.
Trade Review"Well-written and enjoyable to read,
Watching Our Weights evaluates the various ways that fatness is portrayed on television. It will make an important contribution to popular culture studies in general and television studies specifically." -- Esther Rothblum * coeditor of The Fat Studies Reader *
"Zimdars offers a gripping analysis of fat TV as a site for contesting meanings of health, fatness, and embodiment. Her examination of global trends in televising fatness is meticulously researched." -- Kathleen A. LeBesco * author of Revolting Bodies?: The Struggle to Redefine Fat Identity *
"Well-written and enjoyable to read,
Watching Our Weights evaluates the various ways that fatness is portrayed on television. It will make an important contribution to popular culture studies in general and television studies specifically." -- Esther Rothblum * coeditor of The Fat Studies Reader *
"Zimdars offers a gripping analysis of fat TV as a site for contesting meanings of health, fatness, and embodiment. Her examination of global trends in televising fatness is meticulously researched." -- Kathleen A. LeBesco * author of Revolting Bodies?: The Struggle to Redefine Fat Identity *
Table of ContentsContents
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
