The Weight of Images: Affect, Body Image and Fat in the Media

The Weight of Images explores the ways in which media images can train their viewers’ bodies. Proposing a shift away from an understanding of spectatorship as being constituted by acts of the mind, this book favours a theorization of relations between bodies and images as visceral, affective engagements that shape our body image - with close attention to one particularly charged bodily characteristic in contemporary western culture: fat. The first mapping of the ways in which fat, gendered bodies are represented across a variety of media forms and genres, from reality television to Hollywood movies, from TV sitcoms to documentaries, from print magazine and news media to online pornography, The Weight of Images contends that media images of fat bodies are never only about fat; rather, they are about our relation to corporeal vulnerability overall. A ground-breaking volume, engaging with a rich variety of media and cultural texts, whilst examining the possibilities of critical auto-ethnography to unravel how body images take shape affectively between bodies and images, this book will appeal to scholars and students of sociology, media, cultural and gender studies, with interests in embodiment and affect.

Dr. Katariina Kyrölä is Lecturer in Media Studies at the University of Turku, Finland. Her current research involves the concept of body image in feminist scholarship, body activist media, pornography, difficult to watch or ‘triggering’ images, and queer indigenous studies. Her work has also appeared journals such as Sexualities, International Journal of Cultural Studies, lambda nordica: the Nordic journal of LGBTQ studies, and is forthcoming in Feminist Theory. She is the co-editor-in-chief of the Finnish Journal of Gender Studies.