Fat and on Benefits: The Obese Turn Abese

Abstract

The makeover is not the only reality genre in which larger people and issues of fat and weight are overrepresented. This chapter shifts this book’s interest in reality television from the transformative tales of the makeover to weight-focused shows. These are reality fly-on-the-wall documentaries, featuring an off-camera narrator, that purport to explore the lived realities of obesity from different angles and perspectives. By interviewing larger people and charting their daily lives (often by following people around) weight-focused shows offer an intimate viewing encounter: the audience has immediate access to the homes, lives, thoughts, and habits of the show’s characters. This feeling of intimacy is enhanced by the absence of the ubiquitous expert, their clinical settings, and the transformation narrative that mediates and motors the makeover programming. This chapter is interested in a recent spate of weight-focused shows in the UK concentrating on larger people seeking paid employment and/or who are in receipt of benefits. It makes two suggestions: the first is that these shows can be usefully considered as the latest addition to a range of reality programming that has been described as ‘poverty porn’ (Allen et al. 2014; Jensen 2013), and thus be considered as providing a symbolic function in a wider political project to effect a transition from a welfare to a post-welfare society (Jensen and Tyler 2015). The second suggestion builds from Imogen Tyler’s (2013) arguments that neoliberal rationalities depend and progress through the making abject of certain social types. Tyler’s work highlights the processes of denigration and associations of disgust that are central to the production of abject others. To capture the always and already abject nature of medicalized corporeality that seems intensified in our current economic crisis, I am referring to the fat body in this context as the ‘abese’. Yet, I suggest that cultural labours of Othering also take the form of more benevolent representations. In an extension of the argument developed in Chap. 3, I chart benevolent representations in weight-focused shows and discuss how these may offer more palatable ways of securing public consent for policies that threaten to radically reshape the UK welfare system and the ideals of social democracy.