Stark raving fat

Celebrity, cellulite, and the sliding scale of sanity

Dados Bibliográficos

ID12259425
AutoresBrenda R Weber (Indiana University Bloomington, autor correspondente)
Ano2012
Volume22
Fascículo3
Páginas344-359
Data de publicação2012-05-15
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessSim
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoFeminism & Psychology (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 0959-3535 • E-ISSN: 1461-7161
EditoraSAGE Publishing (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1177/0959353512445355
OpenAlexW2096838451
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas9
Referências citadas21

Britney Spears offers a particular case study that makes visible a larger cultural mandate: a woman’s slender body correlates with both her moral fiber and her mental well-being. Thus, thin-ness is read as a signifier of both impulse control and sanity. These metaphorical ties reinforce the pathology attached to the fat body, indicating that the thin body is seemingly one step closer to a Western ideal of empowered rational individualism, whereas the fat (or in Spears’s case, slightly chubby) body is made all the more abject through a madness brought on by a bodily disorder that culminates in an alienation from the self. Critical to this dialectic around (Spears’s) selfhood, cellulite, and sanity is the matter of mediated appearance, since, as a celebrity, Spears’s ‘health’ is tied to images of wellness as articulated through the fit and flab-free body. Neither wellness nor selfhood can exist, the logic indicates, in a state of crisis where one does not photograph ‘well’. Acknowledging the biases that are part of fat oppression and celebrity, this article also accounts for the way in which the female celebrity’s image has some, albeit limited, potential to fulfill broader objectives about gender and selfhood

Aesthetics · Alienation · Art · Dialectic · Epistemology · Oppression · Political science · Politics · Psychiatry · Psychoanalysis · Sanity · Sociology · Body Image and Dysmorphia Studies · Diversity and Impact of Dance · Law · Obesity and Health Practices · Philosophy · Psychology