My research seems suited to being (re)presented in a performative forum for a number of reasons: my participants daily doing, displaying and performing their bodies; their preoccupation with looking and watching; and their doing of identity as they talked. However, I am motivated to explore ethnodrama for four other reasons.
First, as has been mentioned with respect to performative social science generally, an ethnodrama about losing weight could pointedly challenge long held beliefs and taken-‐for-‐granted views around slimming, health, attractiveness, and success. There is a general assumption with slimming that anyone who is determined enough can lose weight, and keep this weightloss off, even though evidence would suggest that this achievement is unusual (Crawford et al., 2000; Elfhag & Rossner, 2005; Jeffery et al., 2000). My participants too believed that long-‐term weightloss was very achievable. At times they even revealed a quiet intolerance, or impatience with women who had failed, where they themselves had succeeded.
By all accounts, losing weight and successful slimming were indeed hard fought. It required considerable effort and sacrifice, despite my participants’ keenness to pass off their practices as easy and effortless. Suggestions of effortlessness around losing weight have implications for women who struggle with their weight and reinforces the view that women who are fat are simply unprepared to make even the slightest effort to lose weight, which, as research has shown, is not the case (Ikeda, Lyons, Schwartzman, & Mitchell, 2004). Notions of ease and effortless endeavour paint a distorted picture of successful weightloss, which in reality, is very difficult to achieve. As Crawford et al. (2000) point out, women who fail at losing weight do not need intolerance or impatience; they deserve empathy and understanding.
An idiom of painting oneself into a corner is a helpful analogy here. Imagine a woman has painted herself into the corner of a room. She is fat. She has her back against the wall and cannot escape the fat body that encapsulates her. The popular perception is that she has recklessly inflicted fatness on herself, despite helpful advice from the lucrative food and weightloss, health, and beauty industries. These industries are the pots of paint she dips her brush into; they have helped her paint herself into the corner. Rather than become yet another pot of paint for this woman to dip her brush into, which a lot of weightloss research seems to be, I would like to create a hole in the wall behind the woman and make a window for her to climb out of. I want to give her, and the audience, something different: a new perspective. I believe that putting fatness, and particularly weightloss, on a stage will be a breath of fresh air for trapped women who struggle to lose weight and stay slim. It will provide a new perspective and
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understanding of what weightloss involves, and how very difficult it is. A desire to help women who struggle with their weight was what motivated most of my participants to take part in this research. My aim is to find an effective forum to reach and educate, and
change long held beliefs about fatness, weightloss and successful slimming.
The second reason concerns emotions surrounding obesity and weightloss. By focusing on disease rather than the person, a lot of research on health issues has “back-‐ staged the patient’s experience” (Morse, 2011, p. 402). Obesity and weight are constantly in the media, and the emotive terms like alarm, battle, combat, crisis, epidemic, explosion, and fight are frequently used and are not innocuous (O'Reilly & Sixsmith, 2012): they depict a war zone and an enemy requiring eradication. Language such this fuels anti-‐fat rhetoric and discrimination, and an inevitable “war on fat people” (O'Hara & Gregg, 2012, p. 41). The television programme, “The Biggest Loser”, is a war zone where fat people are humiliated and abused: they are fat freaks served up to a judgemental audience.
All my participants talked about discrimination and abuse that they experienced when they were fat, and how much it affected them emotionally. During interviewing, a lot of emotional pain came to the surface. However, the intensity of these emotions was less noticeable when I listened to the recordings of interviews, and less again when I read what I have written about them. In its textual form, my participants’ pain had been
diluted. Written words can keep a participant and her emotions at a distance: they fall short when conveying emotion. I suggest that a better forum to represent the intensity of my participants’ emotions is to see them embodied in an ethnodrama. The very visceral experience of emotion is a noted feature of performative social science; it better represents passion and elicits compassion. It makes experience, and hence emotion, more real and therefore more likely to make an impact and be remembered. Embodying and foregrounding discrimination and stigma will help separate a war on obesity from a war on fat people, and give fatness a face.
Thirdly, with participant selection criteria focusing only on long-‐term weightloss, the participants who took part in this project were all very different from one another. They had lost different amounts of weight, had maintained their weightloss for different periods of time and currently had quite different BMIs. Successful weightloss was not only about a BMI below 25, or even more stringently, a BMI between 20 and 22. These differences were interesting and an emphasis on diversity was important particularly with respect to the notion of health at every size (Bacon & Aphramor, 2011). Two participants, Diana and Ismene, were proponents of this position without being aware of the paradigm’s existence. Other participants like Heidi and Charlotte could not accept that anything other than a BMI below 22 was healthy and desirable.
Also, even though two participants may have had similar beliefs with respect to body size or health, their views and practices around food and eating, while sometimes similar, were also quite different and even polarised. This was also the case for individual participants themselves too: in some situations they were relaxed and flexible, but in others they were stubbornly rigid. Equally, while some practices seemed to be well thought out and rational, others appeared entirely based on whimsy or superstition, and in some cases could be considered extreme or even bizarre. These multiple layers of contradiction and difference speak to the complexity of weightloss. While discursive analysis draws attention to difference and contradiction, performative writing, especially if using satire and humour to embellish characterisation, can highlight and accentuate difference and contradiction, making them even more obvious to an audience. Hopefully, this will help douse the general perception that successful weightloss is simple: a trite calories-‐in versus energy-‐out equation.
The fourth reason has grown out of using creative methods to collect research data about everyday experience. Exploring creativity in this way has kindled a desire to look at nonconventional forms of research representation. More particularly, I wanted to find out if performative social science had something to offer research about fatness, weightloss, and successful slimming: a topic as yet not examined using ethnodrama. Embarking on this endeavour is no mean feat: I needed to become a playwright12. Being
a road less travelled, the production of a play is risky for a piece of scholarly work such as this thesis. But as a social constructionist I would agree with other authors (e.g., Denzin, 2010; M. Gergen & Gergen, 2011; Richardson, 1997), who argue that no one mode or method of (re)presentation is privileged or more authoritative than any other method. The methods I have chosen suit my research questions and agenda. I also suggest that my close involvement with my participants; familiarisation with the data; knowledge of the literature; my participants wish to help other women; and a desire to explore the value of performative social science, all provide a rationale for my analysis and how my findings are represented. I will now discuss how the setting, characters, and dialogue for the play were created and developed.
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