“It’s my favorite kind of cake. Gigantic.”: healthism, postfeminist disruptions, and rhetorical “Othering” in The Mindy Project

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article examines the romantic situation comedy program The Mindy Project as a conventional site where popular discourse about healthism appears. Despite a woman of color as the lead actor in the postfeminist television series, the rhetorics of healthism in The Mindy Project nevertheless strengthen postfeminist thinking and disguise dominant logics of racism and sexism. The series moralizes health to “other” women of color using three rhetorical strategies: (1) the representation of model minority women vis-à-vis health, (2) the white savior narrative in an era of healthism, and (3) the gendered/raced nature of negative role modeling. Since healthist rhetorics uphold Dr. Mindy Lahiri as both a threat to and reinforcer of white supremacist and anti-Asian ideology, this analysis has important implications for how women of color perceive themselves in relation to their health choices. The essay also demonstrates how healthism in The Mindy Project invites new considerations of the model minority trope that is embodied by Asian and Asian American television characters acting in medical professional roles.