Watching Our Weights
Regular price
€132.99
A01=Melissa Zimdars
Author_Melissa Zimdars
Category=JBCT
Category=JBFN
Category=JBSF1
Category=VFD
eq_bestseller
eq_health-lifestyle
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
fat
health
health policies
media
obesity
popular culture
television
weight
weightloss
Product details
- ISBN 9780813593555
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 07 Feb 2019
- Publisher: Rutgers University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
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.
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.
MELISSA ZIMDARS is an assistant professor of communication and media at Merrimack College in North Andover, Massachusetts.
