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When was the last time you saw an overweight person in the mainstream media without them being ridiculed about their weight? The established expectations of body image projected by the media and popular culture not only praise weight loss culture, but continually stigmatise voluptuous, full-figured body types, determining what is deemed visually pleasant and unpleasant.
While it can be argued that the history of human representation in art displays quite the contrary, it is obvious that a thinner, leaner body type has become the face of mainstream visual culture. This has largely contributed to the social norms that are embedded in our daily lives, as well as to the notion of ‘image equals value and identity’. In this brutal equation, to be overweight is to be considered a walking example of surplus and waste.
A study released by Current Anthropology (2011) suggested that negative attitudes toward fat bodies are increasingly becoming a worldwide norm, perpetuating the stigma of both being overweight and the idealism of being thin. And yet, the fact that the average Australian woman is a size sixteen (Warrington, 2011) shows that we are getting bigger, but we are certainly not embracing it. Ultimately, any effort to speak out about the stigmatisation of being overweight is muzzled by the ‘common sense’ appeal to health, further perpetuating the pathologisation of ‘being overweight’. Indeed, through the media’s relentlessly negative portrayal of obesity (Aggarwal, 2013), ‘fat’ people are continually subjected to ridicule, shame and disregard. It is time to open up the conversation and celebrate the diversity of shapes and sizes that the body can take.
Two artists at the forefront of this discussion are British painter Jenny Saville and photographer... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline