Enacting ‘Reality’: Fat Shame, Admiration and Reflexivity

Abstract

Reality television makeover programmes present themselves as being able to make ordinary people famous and give them the opportunity to do ‘amazing thing[s]’. However, some commentators argue that they operate instead by selecting participants and staging situations that are already at some distance from ordinary life or the ‘normal’ (Bondebjerg, 2002). One such example is the reality television show The Biggest Loser. This show, and the meanings around fat, body image and selfhood critical to the subjects produced on it, is the focus of this chapter. As we will argue, the show generates new forms of the ‘normal’ self: specifically, a self preoccupied with, and unapologetically in search of, admiration and renown through weight loss and related goals of health and beauty. We ask: How does The Biggest Loser enact contemporary understandings of vanity through its deployment of the ‘makeover’ and values of self-improvement? More broadly: How does makeover television reconfigure the relationship between self, other, the proper reflexive subject and vanity? To what extent and in what ways does neoliberalism’s ideal of the reflexive self mitigate the anxieties about narcissism often evident in commentary on the show and its ilk? We consider these questions through an analysis of the most recent Australian programme, contextualising our observations against a discussion of media coverage of the US and Australian shows, and the burgeoning critical literature on reality and makeover shows (Heller, 2007; Lancioni, 2009; Weber and Spigel, 2009).

Host: ‘Well you look absolutely extraordinary.’

Biggest Loser contestant: ‘I am definitely a different person. I really like what I see now. And I like what I see inside and out. I’ve never been so confident in my life.’

Host: ‘Well I think you give hope to many people, and you’ve done an amazing thing so well done.’