Mad/Fat/Diary: exploring contemporary feminist thought through My Mad Fat Diary

Abstract

My Mad Fat Diary profiles young people falling in and out of love, fighting with their parents, experimenting with drugs and alcohol, and testing limits. Yet the show offers a fresh look at tired tropes by ignoring dramatic conventions that suggest that ugly truths or non-normative bodies should remain out of view and instead sheds light on ignored, but common, teen experiences and identities. In doing so, this television program engages with complex feminist concepts such as intersectionality and narrative instability and renders these concepts intelligible to audiences with varying degrees of theoretical familiarity. This analysis considers how My Mad Fat Diary explores complex feminist concepts and identities. In particular, the show considers the ways that both fat and madness can be viewed as identities which are often stigmatized, but which may also morph into sites of pride through body acceptance work, aligned with fat activism, and a rejection of sanist discourses, in line with emergent work in the field of mad studies. In both its intersectional presentation of teenage experiences and identities and the multifaceted nuances of truth-telling and narrative arc, the show portrays an instance of contemporary feminist grappling with embodied identity, sanity, and complicated and intersected subjectivities.