How does contemporary television represent disability, obesity, and ageing? Further, how do modern viewers participate in that landscape? These are the questions Rodan, Ellis, and Lebeck take up in their examination of television programs that feature narratives and characters who live with and through what are, arguably, some of the West’s most stigmatized embodiments: disabled, obese, and ageing. Not content to merely examine the representations themselves, however, the authors look to online forums to better understand how viewers participate in the meaning making around these complex and often contested embodiments. Wide ranging in its scope of representations and split across eight chapters, Disability, Obesity, and Ageing offers readers an opportunity to understand how three embodiments not usually discussed in tandem share important territory in modern media representations.
Although not often grouped together for analysis, the authors contend that disability, obesity, and ageing are connected in important ways, namely through being stigmatized and essentialized. As such, the book takes a social model approach to these embodiments. That is, the authors understand these embodiments to be important sites of power relations and symbolic meanings rather than objective states of the body. Throughout the analysis, the social model is employed, suggesting that some of the most significant barriers to those who are disabled, obese, or ageing are, in fact, social attitudes and issues rather than any medical conditions associated with particular states of the body.
The social model and its methodology of understanding the socially constructed nature of often despised embodiments is employed throughout the text as the authors examine television and its online forums, such as websites and chat rooms, as places where mainstream representations of these embodiments are visible but also as places where audience members are engaging in active meaning making. Far from representing television viewing as a passive act, the authors use the framework of ‘tele-participation’ to discuss the ways in which viewers go through complex processes of identifying and disidentifying with fat, disabled, and ageing characters and then creating their own meanings, some of which reify mainstream cultural understandings and others that create powerful alternate stories.
Although the text is separated into chapters that focus on particular televisual representations, the framework and methodology remain the same throughout, which is to examine the representations and audience reactions with an eye toward understanding how representations are constructed and re-constructed in popular media. For example, in their discussions of a wide range of popular television shows such as The Biggest Loser and The Voice, the authors maintain that embodiments often seen as distasteful can be made palatable when they are situated within certain frameworks; namely those that suggest the people living with and through those embodiments are somehow ‘trying,’ enabling the audience to identify with the characters. The Biggest Loser, for example, is discussed as a show that often features characters who are desperately trying to lose weight and bring their bodies in line with social norms, leading many audience members to identify with their struggles. Further, representations of people with disabilities on mainstream shows such as The Voice are shown to be palatable to viewers when the shows position them as ‘super crips’ who compensate for their disability through hard work or incredible talent. Conversely, narrative frames that position those who are fat, disabled, or ageing as somehow not trying (or not trying hard enough) often prompt a sense of disidentification among viewers. Regardless of identifying or disidentifying, Rodan, Ellis, and Lebeck suggest that audience members actively participate in the viewing process and are not merely passive receptors.
For scholars studying contemporary media, the book offers an opportunity to think outside the representations themselves and through the complex negotiations of how audiences interpret what they are seeing on television. Some of the richest analysis the text offers is in its assessment of comments and postings from an array of online venues; everything from the official websites for the television programs to activist websites for people with disabilities are analyzed as a means of understanding how viewers grapple with representations of these embodiments.
For scholars of stigmatized embodiments, the text brings together three embodiments that are increasingly the focus of television shows aimed at self-help and sets into stark relief the very similar underlying narratives of self-transformation and stigma. If the book has any weakness, it is a lack of some of the more nuanced discussions of embodiments from fields such as Disability Studies and Fat Studies that would have enriched the discussion of identification and disidentification by taking up more explicitly the ways in which fatness, disability, and age are categories all of us may eventually navigate and therefore are all the more tension inducing. Still, for scholars interested in contemporary television, stigmatized bodies, and discourse analysis, Rodan, Ellis, and Lebeck offer an important multidisciplinary framework for studying the complex interplay of meanings around the cultural construction of narratives.
Winona State University, Winona, MN, USA
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© 2015, April M. Herndon
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09687599.2015.1062219