The Weight of Images explores the ways in which media images

can train their viewers’ bodies. Proposing a shift away from an

understanding of spectatorship as being constituted by acts of the

mind, this book favors a theorization of relations between bodies

and images as visceral, affective engagements that shape our body

image—with close attention to one particularly charged bodily

characteristic in contemporary western culture: fat.

The first mapping of the ways in which fat, gendered bodies are

represented across a variety of media forms and genres, from reality

television to Hollywood movies, from TV sitcoms to documentaries,

from print magazine and news media to online pornography, The

Weight of Images contends that media images of fat bodies are

never only about fat; rather, they are about our relation to corporeal

vulnerability overall.

A ground-breaking volume, engaging with a rich variety of media

and cultural texts, while examining the possibilities of critical

auto-ethnography to unravel how body images take shape

affectively between bodies and images, this book will appeal

to scholars and students of sociology, media, cultural and

gender studies, with interests in embodiment and affect.