The Before: Fat Gets Ready for a Makeover

Abstract

The makeover offers a fertile site to discuss the representational repertoire that constitutes the fat sensibility because its movement—the propulsion from a ‘before’ (the untransformed state) to the ‘after’ or ‘reveal’ (the transformed state)—depends on a shift between different ‘sets’ of representations. Although the relations of hostile and benevolent fatism are more muddied than the discrete narrative bookends of ‘before’ and ‘after’ suggest, these bookends enable discussion of these ‘sets’ at their most starkly drawn. The ‘before’ and ‘after’ then can be approached as the modelling of a dysfunctional and ideal selfhood, respectively, an approach that encourages our critical interrogation of what/who is imagined as needing a makeover and what passes as the successful result. Over this and the next chapter I follow the trajectory of the makeover: this chapter concerns itself with ‘before’; the next examines the often neglected ‘middle’ and the ‘after’. These chapters suggest that the pedagogical function of these shows lies not in weight loss but in a celebration of a new ‘healthy’ subjectivity and guidance around its shape and performativity. As such, these chapters support the central concern of this book to think about what representations of fat achieve: the fat sensibility not only charts the patterns of repeated representations of fat but, more crucially, thinks about how these offer up new subjectivities, the contours of which flow into the terraforming ambitions of various neoliberal projects. In this chapter, we can start to see how a new subjectivity is forged from the abject nature of the old.