Moving Subjects, Feeling Bodies: Emotion and the Materialization of Fat Feminine Subjectivities in Village on a Diet

Abstract

In this paper, we conduct a critical feminist-informed poststructural analysis of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's reality weight loss series, Village on a Diet (VOD). We argue that the “problem of obesity” is felt into reality through the cultural work of emotions as represented in VOD. We further situate VOD as one node in a more expansive, interwoven network of discourses, sites, and technologies. In so doing, we argue that the felt force of “obesity” discourse is magnified as it circulates relationally throughout this network, materializing the felt “truth” about fatness (e.g., that it is unhealthy) and fat subjects (e.g., that they are unhappy, unsexy, bad parents). In this way, VOD serves a (bio)pedagogical function as it instructs—indeed, necessitates—that villagers and viewing Canadians alike work on and transform their bodies into leaner, supposedly more healthy forms as a means of striving towards the promise of a better life.

Keywords:

• affect
• fat
• femininity
• obesity
• reality tv

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The authors would like to thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, and Concordia University for funding their collective research programme.