Class, corpulence, and neoliberal citizenship: Melissa McCarthy on Saturday Night Live

Abstract

Examining Melissa McCarthy’s performances as host of Saturday Night Live, this paper demonstrates how stereotypes of low social class are used to manage the seeming contradictions of obesity within contemporary US media culture. Despite the so-called obesity epidemic – in which obesity signifies moral and social decay – body image heroines such as the plus-sized McCarthy offer uplifting narratives of self-confidence and self-acceptance. These contradictory impulses, however, are simply two complementary modes of neoliberal self-governance, offering different forms of cultural citizenship based on self-transformation and self-promotion. McCarthy’s stardom reveals the role that social class plays in managing these neoliberal trajectories. McCarthy’s comic performances rely heavily on caricatures of vulgar, low-class obesity, and yet her public persona is that of a polite, middle-class everywoman. In this way, McCarthy’s persona indicates how the stereotypes of the obesity epidemic can be appropriated by middle-class audiences as indicators of confidence within the regime of neoliberal self-actualisation.

KEYWORDS:

• obesity
• neoliberalism
• Saturday Night Live
• gender studies
• social class

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. See Wingard (2013) for a detailed discussion of citizenship within neoliberalism, with particular attention paid to immigration and LGBTQ issues.

2. Guthman (2011) offers a detailed exploration of the ‘obesity epidemic’ as a social construction and the problematic science linking obesity to individual choices.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Russell Meeuf

Russell Meeuf is an assistant professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Media at the University of Idaho. His research focuses on popular media, celebrity and stardom, and issues of cultural diversity. He is the author of John Wayne’s World: Transnational Masculinity in the Fifties (2013, University of Texas Press) and the co-editor of Transnational Stardom: International Celebrity in Film and Popular Culture (2013, Palgrave Macmillan). He is currently writing a book on the negotiation of cultural citizenship in popular entertainment media, examining US film and television stars with non-normative bodies.