ABSTRACT
The chapter about fat in the media will provide an overview of how fat bodies have been addressed in the media across various media genres and media technologies. Why do fat bodies seem to appear more often in certain genres, such as comedy and reality television, more often than in others? What characterizes news publicity around fatness, and what is fat’s appeal in pornography? How does televisual fatness differ from cinematic and online fatness? While introducing key research in the field of media studies, body norms and fat corporeality, the chapter pays particular attention to how fat in the media intersects with and participates in the production of gender, sexuality, race, and class. Furthermore, the chapter examines and evaluates the potential subversive power of various genres and media technologies to challenge or even unravel body normativities in terms of intersectional politics of size. The chapter argues that Fat Studies scholarship must focus not only on analyzing media representations but also their affective appeal and how viewers of various sizes perceive different images. Although it may seem like media images of fat bodies are largely marginalizing, anxiety-ridden and represent fatness as undesirable, this is also a matter of where we look and how we look. In the contemporary media culture, radical fat activist politics are gaining more ground, even if this development is also fraught with controversies.
