I have revised and significantly expanded my book Fat (it is now double the length) for its second edition, due to be published mid-year. The book now includes much more material on new digital media and devices, and how they are used to contain, control and portray fat embodiment (often in very negative ways).
Here’s an excerpt from new material I have added to my chapter addressing the transgressive fat body, focusing on memes, GIFs and stock images.
My Google search for ‘fat memes’ found memes that not only stigmatize fat bodies, but are blatantly abusive and often cruel. Just some examples I came across include unflattering images of fat people with texts such as ‘I’m fat because obesity runs in my family. No-one runs in your family’, ‘I’m lazy because I’m fat and I’m fat because I’m lazy’ and ‘Sometimes when I’m sad I like to cut myself … another slice of cheesecake’. When I looked for ‘fat’ GIFs on the GIFY platform, here again were many negative portrayals of fat people, including cartoon characters like Homer Simpson as well as real people, again engaging in humiliating bodily performances. Many of these GIFs showed people jiggling their abdomens or dancing to demonstrate the magnitude of their flesh, belly flopping into swimming pools, eating greedily, smeared with food and so on. Here again, fat white men predominated as targets of ridicule.
Many companies now offer stock images for others to use to illustrate news articles, blog posts or reports. Searching for stock images online for ‘fat people eating’ returns a series of photographs and drawings that invariably depict the types of food consumed by fat people as archetypal high-calorie, fat-laden or fast food. Fat women, men and children are shown biting into or gazing at foods such as hamburgers, pizzas, French fries, fried chicken or cream cake, often with a look of greed on their faces and reclining on an over-stuffed armchair or sofa. Some of these people are scantily dressed or wearing clothes that reveal their large stomachs. One image even transposes a fat man with a hamburger, so that his body becomes the hamburger, topped with his head. Another depicts a hamburger as a hungry beast with a gaping maw consuming a man so that all that can be seen of his body is his legs. Some people are shown with links of sausages around their necks. The words used to describe these images are telling, as in these descriptions: ‘photo of a fat couch potato eating a huge hamburger and watching television’, ‘overweight woman greedily biting sweet cake’.
These types of images emphasize the enticements offered by foodstuff that are portrayed in popular and medical cultures as ‘unhealthy’ and ‘fattening’, pandering to greed and self-indulgence. These foods are depicted in some extreme cases as overwhelming human bodies, both in terms of expanding the size of bodies (and particularly of bellies) and in rendering humans helpless and devoured by their lust for these foods. It is as if these foods are controlling humans through the intensity of people’s desire to consume (and be consumed by) them.
Similar sentiments and images can be found in memes about food, regardless of whether the people represented in them are fat or not. These memes often display a high level of ambivalence about experiencing the desire for the ‘wrong’ foods, the pleasure of eating them and the guilt or self-hatred that may result from indulgence. Such food memes may depict large helpings of ‘junk’ foods with people viewing them with hungry expressions. Others dispense with any images of food itself, and simply show people looking eager or happy, and words such as ‘When people ask when I want to eat. Every day. All day. Anywhere. Anytime’, or ‘I’m on a seafood diet. I see food and eat it.’ Animals (especially cats) are used to stand in for people, as in the meme showing a cat desperately clawing its way through a venetian blind and the words, ‘Did somebody say food?’, and another featuring a close-up of a cat with its mouth stuffed with food, captioned ‘I regret nothing. Nothing.’ In these memes, whether or not food is shown, the dominant feelings that are expressed are the insatiable longing for food and the lack of control people have over their appetites, to the point that they are overwhelming.
This Sociological Life 