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Abstract
My Mad Fat Diary profiles young people falling in and out of love, fighting with their parents, experimenting with drugs and alcohol, and testing limits. Yet the show offers a fresh look at tired tropes by ignoring dramatic conventions that suggest that ugly truths or non-normative bodies should remain out of view and instead sheds light on ignored, but common, teen experiences and identities. In doing so, this television program engages with complex feminist concepts such as intersectionality and narrative instability and renders these concepts intelligible to audiences with varying degrees of theoretical familiarity. This analysis considers how My Mad Fat Diary explores complex feminist concepts and identities. In particular, the show considers the ways that both fat and madness can be viewed as identities which are often stigmatized, but which may also morph into sites of pride through body acceptance work, aligned with fat activism, and a rejection of sanist discourses, in line with emergent work in the field of mad studies. In both its intersectional presentation of teenage experiences and identities and the multifaceted nuances of truth-telling and narrative arc, the show portrays an instance of contemporary feminist grappling with embodied identity, sanity, and complicated and intersected subjectivities.
Notes
1. Published as My Mad, Fat Teenage Diary (Rae Earl Citation2007), it is important to note that Earl’s “true” experiences, or at least the experiences detailed in her teenage diary, differ considerably from those portrayed in the show. While the show thus uses Earl’s writing and experiences as a jumping-off point for the analysis of mad and fat identities, it is only loosely based in her life and life writing.
2. As per Jennifer Poole et al., “sanism describes the systematic subjugation of people who have received ‘mental health’ diagnoses or treatment” (Citation2012, 20). Importantly, sanist discourses explore stigma as a symptom of sanism itself rather than as a distinct manifestation of oppression toward mad people. Morrow and Weisser suggest that “diagnoses and labels of mental illness themselves constitute a form of inequality” (Citation2012, 29). These ideas guide my analysis.
3. In using the word “mad,” I am referring, as per Jennifer Poole and Jennifer Ward, “to a term reclaimed by those who have pathologized/psychiatrized as ‘mentally ill,’ and a way of taking back language that has been used to oppress” (Citation2013, 96). Borrowing from the mad pride movement and emergent scholarly work in the field of mad studies, “mad is frequently used as an umbrella term to represent a diversity of identities, and it is used in place of naming all of the different identities that describe people who have been labeled and treated as crazy (i.e., consumer, survivor, ex-patient)” (Shaindl Diamond Citation2013, 66; see also Brenda LeFrancois, Robert Menzies, and Geoffrey Reaume Citation2013).
4. It is notable that the character of Rae was played by someone with an inarguably fat body. Rae’s alienation from her body did not require this choice; indeed, many of her internal struggles with her fat body could have been credibly voiced by the type of body that is typically cast as “fat”—the young woman who is gently rounded and 20 pounds beyond the coltish “ideal” for young femininity.
5. This tension obliquely considers the impact of medication as a form of chemical incarceration (Fabris Citation2011), suggesting that the line between “good” and “bad” drugs is much more indistinct than is generally presented in popular culture.
6. It is dismaying, although perhaps unsurprising, that other aspects of Rae’s identity such as her race and class are virtually unremarked upon in the context of the show; there are lost opportunities here, particularly when set against the social context of Karim, the sole non-white character.
7. While Season 3 definitely marked the end of this iteration of My Mad Fat Diary, there is a possibility the show will be recreated in an American context (Kay Taylor Citation2014). It remains to be seen whether the feminist dimensions of the show can be successfully reproduced in an American context.