Paul Blart and the Decline of White Working-Class Masculinities

The author examines the representation of fatness in the comedy Paul Blart and how anxieties about the decline of White working-class masculinities are played out on the fat male body. The film relies on the stereotype of the fat male as demasculinized and bases a large part of its comedy on this. Yet, due to a need to mollify anxieties of contemporary masculinities, the fat protagonist is allowed to transform his undervalued job into an honorable task and regain his masculinity, with the genre conventions of comedy providing room for irony and ambiguity regarding the representation of White male fatness

Aesthetics · Ambiguity · Art · Comedy · Irony · Linguistics · Literature · Masculinity · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Working class · Cinema and Media Studies · Decadence, Literature, and Society · Gender Studies · Law · Obesity and Health Practices · Philosophy · Psychology · Social Psychology