Fear, freaks, and fat phobia: an examination of how My 600 Lbs Life displays “fat” Black women

ABSTRACT

This article examines how Black women are represented on The Learning Channel’s (TLC) My 600 Lbs Life (M6L) and explores the racist, sexist, and ableist narratives that are used to incite fatphobia through the “enfreakment” of its participants. It is theorized that the combination of these narratives not only work to bolster the “white slender ideal” by reflecting societal attitudes that fuse anti-fatness with anti-blackness, but utilizes “freak-ish” images of “fat” Black women to validate race, sex, and disability prejudice and hierarchies.

KEYWORDS:

• Freak show
• fat phobia
• disability
• media
• representation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. In line with fat activism and fat studies, where I am able to, I use the term “fat” instead of “obese”. This language choice reflects the repositioning of “fat” within fat studies as a neutral size descriptor rather than a derogatory term that implies disease or pathology (see Abigail C. Saguy 2012).

2. How I denote “Black” is informed by Kimberle Crenshaw (1991, 1244) who states, “I capitalize “Black” because Blacks, like […] Latinos, and other ‘minorities,’ constitute a specific group and, as such, require denotation as a proper noun.” By the same token, I do not capitalize “white,” which is not a proper noun since whites do not constitute a specific cultural group.”

3. Because I was unable to ask the participants whether or not they identified as Black women, I relied on dominant phenotypes (i.e. brown skin, dark eyes, and the presence of breasts) to determine race and gender. I acknowledge the implications in doing so.

4. HULU is a subscription video on demand service.

5. Though the groundbreaking work of Kimberle Crenshaw’s (1991) intersectional analytic has illuminated the limitations of single-axis models of oppression, there is little scholarship that extends intersectionality into the identities that are investigated in disability and fat studies (Anna Mollow 2017).

6. Emmet Till was a 14 year-old Black boy from Chicago who was viciously murdered by the husband and brother-in-law of a white womaned Carolyn Bryant. Bryant falsely accused Till of sexually whistling and grabbing her, but decades later admits her story was false. (Timothy B. Tyson 2017)

7. In 1989, five young black and Hispanic men—Kevin Richardson (14), Raymond Santana (14), Antron McCray (15), Yusef Salaam (15), and Korey Wise (16)—were falsely accused of beating a raping twenty-eight-year old white woman, Trisha Meili, in Central Park, New, York. The real rapist, Matias Reyes, admitted to the crime twelve years later and the five men were exonerated (N. Jeremi Duru 2003).

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Notes on contributors

Tori Justin

Tori Justin, M.A is an interdisciplinary scholar whose scholarship examines the socio-historical production of knowledge about health, and how that knowledge constructs and impacts contemporary understandings of race, gender, and obesity. As being “healthy” is a normalized concept that often goes unquestioned, her research underlines the dynamic nature of the notion of health and its influence on self-identity. She can be reached at E-mail: [email protected]