Obesity: The Post Mortem: Reviving History and Dehumanizing Fatness via Televised Dissection

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Notes

¹ The Body Worlds exhibit has shifted these cultural norms slightly, but it has also has been extremely controversial.

² That said, there is a not a single piece of journalistic coverage, celebratory or critical, that points out Obesity: The Post Mortem is not an autopsy (H. Archer; Penny).

³ Laurie Penny’s “Obesity: The Post Mortem Shows Why Fat Is Still a Feminist Issue” does mention von Hagens’s autopsy.

⁴ There is a common misconception that fatness was associated with wealth or royalty in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Although this may have been true prior to the Enlightenment, by the time of freak shows, fatness was firmly associated with greed, avarice, primitivity, and grotesquery. For more on this, see Gilman’s Obesity: The Biography and Farrell’s Fat Shame.

⁵ We do not know Saartjie Baartman’s real name; this Dutch name was given to her by trader, Alexander Dunlop (Farrell 65).

⁶ As Magubane and Holmes discuss, Baartman was also displayed in English and French freak shows before her death.

⁷ Fatness was also used as an indicator of a broader racialized primitivity for many groups of African descent.

⁸ Additionally, in light of this history, we can understand why the first glimpse the viewer gets of the corpse is her unshaven mons pubis, immediately followed by the rise of her rounded abdomen. This fixation on “deviant” women’s genitalia is longstanding.

⁹ I have not been able to verify whether or not the woman dissected in Obesity: The Post Mortem consented to the film or not. However, since her left arm was given to her family for cremation pre-filming, it is likely that her family consented, which meets the guidelines set forth by the United Kingdom’s General Medical Council (“General Medical Council”). But just in case they did not, technically “the consent provisions of the HT Act do not apply to material that has been imported” (Code D, item 64).

¹⁰ It is also poignantly ironic that although this corpse could be brought into the United Kingdom, a fat person looking to immigrate or even fly internationally may not have the same advantage. Obtaining citizenship is increasingly predicated on health status and BMI and more airlines are requiring fat passengers to purchase multiple seats or risk expulsion from the plane, indicating again that fat bodies may have more value dead than alive. See Pausé’s “Frozen: A Fat Tale of Immigration” for more.

¹¹ Given this program’s connection to TV shows like NCIS, I do not think it’s a coincidence that Carla Valentine resembles NCIS’s resident hyperfeminine, “goth-punk” forensic scientist, Abby Sciuto, one of the most recognizable figures from this television genre.

¹² According to Penfold-Mounce, “the forensic gaze is intertwined with the language in its investigation (Pierson, 2010), contributing to the empowerment of the viewer. In popular culture representations of forensic scientists, they are shown verbally to record their observations about the victim and the crime scene. This is particularly well illustrated in shows such as Silent Witness and CSI where the pathologists or medical examiners continuously describe and discuss proceedings and findings using the language and jargon of science. The forensic gaze adds to the science-based lens that stands between the viewer and death as it softens and distances the viewer from the revulsion of dead flesh and aids the emergence of corpse and death as entertainment” (27).

¹³ One interviewee, Joey, does say that she started gaining weight after being diagnosed with epilepsy and put on a new medication. However, when we see her next, she is berating herself for the weight gain and needing a size 20 wedding dress.

¹⁴ By biopolitical, I mean the goals of the state to fortify the population through positive measures, in the classic Foucauldian sense of “make live.”

¹⁵ This is similar to what Deborah Lupton calls the pedagogy of disgust. For more, see her essay “The Pedagogy of Disgust: The Ethical, Moral and Political Implications of Using Disgust in Public Health Campaigns.”

¹⁶ In her chapter “Bypassing Blame,” Natalie Boero calls the obesity epidemic a postmodern epidemic, characterized by an obsession with everyone’s risk for becoming fat: “What makes the obesity epidemic unique is that we are all at risk for obesity; what varies is our degree of risk. Indeed, in an era of personal responsibility for health, one no longer need manifest any concrete symptoms to be considered at risk for any given disease (Clarke et al. 2003). Both this concern with risk and the divorcing of the concept of an epidemic from a traditional biomedical model are the true hallmarks of a postmodern epidemic like obesity” (308).

¹⁷ Watching this program as a fat person can be traumatic. Watching medical violence be committed against a body that looks like your own, supposedly in the name of your health, can take a massive psychological toll. I have watched Obesity: The Post Mortem countless times to write this article and doing so has absolutely harmed me.

¹⁸ See Levy-Navarro’s “I’m the New Me” for a more fleshed out discussion of the role of confession in dieting discourse.