Spaces of Empire in Popular Culture: A Critical Analysis of "To the Bone"

• In Event: Challenging Gendered Spaces: Super/Heroes and Colonialism

Abstract

This paper analyzes how various popular culture media disseminate coded images that reinforce
and reproduce racialized stereotypes of physical normality. In the neoliberal era, obesity is
stigmatized as a failure to exercise one’s freedom responsibly, and thus, is essentially portrayed
as a failure to exercise the perceived privilege of managing one’s own body. Many popular
television shows and movies in the U.S. code thin and underweight—even emaciated—bodies as
white, and code bodies that exhibit excess weight as black. In an attempt to scrutinize these
connections, this paper will engage in a critical analysis of Netflix’s "To the Bone," as it is an
element of popular culture that centers on portraying how individuals cope with eating disorders. The main research question that this project explores is: in what ways does the film "To the Bone" reinforce and reproduce racialized stereotypes of physical normality, and in what ways, if any, does this film actively challenge these stereotypes? This paper draws upon Arturo Escobar’s notion of a “modernity/coloniality” research program, and examines if this film preserves and reproduces spaces of empire and colonial systems of power by continuously associating images of black bodies with obesity, physical shame, and indolence. More specifically, this paper interrogates how certain visualization technologies (namely, those perpetuated by the white cis-male apparatus of supremacy as well as remnant colonial systems of power) embed themselves in popular culture—in this instance, a Netflix film. Donna Haraway stresses that “only partial perspective promises objective vision,” and this analysis seeks to provide a feminist objectivity in examining a film that is explicitly concerned with the distorted perception of physical bodies, and analyzing whether the film, itself, continues to perpetuate certain “distorted” physical (and ideational) stereotypes.

Author

• Linea Lee Cutter, Virginia Tech