Watching Our Weights

Melissa Zimdars

ISBN 10: 0813593557 / ISBN 13: 9780813593555

Published by Rutgers University Press, US, 2019

About this Item

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.

Seller Inventory # LU-9780813593555

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Watching Our Weights
• Publisher: Rutgers University Press, US
• Publication Date: 2019
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0813593557
• ISBN 13: 9780813593555
• Binding: Hardback
• Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

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.  

About the Author

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