| Abstract: | Big Sexy (2011), a television mini-series on TLC, tells the story of five “larger than life” Manhattan women working in the fashion industry. In comparison to dozens of reality television programs that emphasize weight-loss, Big Sexy critiques the idea that all fat individuals need to lose weight, or should even want to lose weight in the first place. This resistant message of fat acceptance exists in a carnivalesque televisual space, creating a site for the interplay of competing, yet increasingly co-present discourses of the body despite the dominance of “obesity epidemic” rhetoric. Ultimately, Big Sexy necessitates a different theoretical lens than the one often applied to reality television, namely neoliberalism in relation to governmentality, shame, and self-discipline, in order to make sense of its uniqueness within this continually expanding genre. |
