An anti-corpulent corpus : excess, ethos, and embodiment in health and nutrition documentaries

This dissertation uses the Aristotelian concept of ethos alongside analysis of scientific discursive tools to consider how six North American health and nutrition documentaries from the 21st century contribute to a kakoethos, or a present anti-ethos, for fat people. I highlight how the filmmakers’ ability to persuade their audiences to trust them and their dietary advice is contingent upon their ability to present fat people as the antithesis of healthy, responsible citizenship. Scientific discursive tools provide a veil of legitimacy and epistemic rigour, enabling other arguments that hinge on questions of selflessness, discernment, and virtue to be presented within narratives that purport to help fat people. Chapter 1 examines two films that present pseudo-experimental narratives, Morgan Spurlock’s Super Size Me (2004) and Joe Cross’s Fat, Sick and Nearly Dead (2010), to consider how their embodied experiments demonstrate their eunoia, or goodwill, while simultaneously suggesting that fat people are unable or unwilling to sacrifice for the greater good. Chapter 2 focuses on films critiquing industry corruption, namely Stephanie Soechtig’s Fed Up (2014) and Kip Andersen and Keegan Kuhn’s What the Health (2017). I examine how these films exclude fat people from expertise, simultaneously implying that fat non-experts do not possess the practical wisdom, or phronesis, to sort through nutrition debates. Chapter 3 examines two films advocating for veganism/plant-based eating, Marisa Miller Wolfson’s Vegucated (2011) and Lee Fulkerson’s Forks Over Knives (2011). I argue that, to counter perceptions of these diets as emotionally driven approaches to nutrition, both films mobilize empirical evidence while simultaneously presenting fat bodies as emblematic of immoral, irrational consumption. Chapter 4 builds from these insights, attempting to reread the performances of fat people and fat on screen to consider how fat’s inherent instability, expansiveness, and excess can undermine attempts to circumscribe what fatness means. Ultimately, I seek to advocate for bodily ambivalence. Rather than attempting to cement our relationships to fat and our bodies, I argue that we should learn from the qualities of the substance we so often culturally abhor, understanding our bodies and our health as always in process and produced by complex intersections of agencies.