Aberrant consumers: Selfies and fat admiration websites

ABSTRACT

In contemporary consumer culture, the healthy body acts as a sign-value for success, a strong work ethic, and self-control; it is viewed as a productive resource and medium for creating “bodily capital.” But there is a conflict at the heart of consumer culture, between the imperative to work hard and delay gratification, and the consumer dictum of instant pleasure. Health demonstrates the individuals’ ability to balance the opposing forces of production and consumption. Overtly fat and thin bodies signify an inability to balance the conflict. In this article, the author compares different forms of self-presentation on social networking sites and online platforms to explore sign-values of the body in contemporary consumer culture. Websites such as Fantasy Feeder offer advice on how to gain social security benefits and use fast food industry “bundling techniques” to maximize calorie intake with minimal cost, suggesting that fat admiration participants are disruptive to social and economic ideals. The author uses Marxist and psychoanalytical theories to interpret photographs of “unhealthy” bodies to build a theoretical model for potentially disruptive figures in capitalist society.

KEYWORDS:

• Capitalism
• consumer
• fat fetishism
• health
• selfie
• thinspiration

Notes

1. This study takes place in an Eating Disorder Clinic in America.

2. Similar photos to this have been online since the late 1990s. But their volume and accessibility is unprecedented. One survey shows that between 2006 and 2008 alone, the number of such sites had increased by 470%.”

3. This research refers to readers of magazines such as Loaded, FHM, and Esquire in the United Kingdom and Maxim and Stuff in the United States. The authors note two main features of the magazines; the importance of heterosexual success and negative comments in relation to bodies that do not resemble the muscular ideal. The research found that lack of heterosexual success was attributed to inadequate muscularity of the body.

4. Out of the first two hundred photographs that appeared in the “pics” section, ninety-five were of male bodies. (Obesity and Social Security).

5. The stigmatizing criteria are disproportionately emphasizing a fat person’s abdomen or lower body, portraying a fat person’s abdomen without clothes, featuring a fat person with their head cut of the image, portraying a fat person with inappropriately fitting clothing, portraying a fat person eating/drinking unhealthy food/drink, or portraying a fat person engaging in a sedentary activity.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Dawn Woolley

Dawn Woolley is a visual artist whose practice encompasses digital video, installation, performance, and photography. In 2008 she completed an MA in photography at the Royal College of Art in London. Recent exhibitions have included “Basically. Forever” Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography and “Recollection” Ruimte Morguen Gallery, Antwerp (2014). Solo exhibitions include “Visual Pleasure,” Hippolyte Photography Gallery, Helsinki, Finland (2013) and “Visual Pleasure,” Vilniaus Fotografijos Galerija, Lithuania (2012). She is currently undertaking PhD (by project) research at the Royal College of Art. The broad aim of the research is to articulate the pathologies of capitalism. She explores the relationship between people and objects, and the impact of images as disseminators of sign-value. The practice-based research centers on still life photography as a type of portrait suggestive of different consumers. She is a lecturer in photography at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge, United Kingdom.