This article was downloaded by: [Laurentian University]On: 04 October 2014, At: 10:13Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registeredoffice: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

Australian Feminist StudiesPublication details, including instructions for authors andsubscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cafs20

‘WE CAN CHANGE THE FACE OF THISFUTURE’Rachel KendrickPublished online: 02 Sep 2008.

To cite this article: Rachel Kendrick (2008) ‘WE CAN CHANGE THE FACE OF THIS FUTURE’,Australian Feminist Studies, 23:57, 389-400, DOI: 10.1080/08164640802263457

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08164640802263457

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the“Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis,our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as tothe accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinionsand views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors,and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Contentshould not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sourcesof information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims,proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoeveror howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to orarising out of the use of the Content.

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Anysubstantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing,systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms &Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

‘WE CAN CHANGE THE FACE OF THIS

FUTURE’

Television Transforming the Fat Child

Rachel Kendrick

Eight-year-old Chenise Hanson has just filched a pack of crisps from her grand-

mother’s stash in the kitchen. She eats them lying on her bed like Olympia, arms stretched

above her head, closing her eyes with pleasure as she savours each fattening bite. Her

mother, Stormy, tells the camera that, once, Chenise ordered and ate an entire rump steak

in a restaurant. ‘Like, I’m talking a rump steak’, she adds incredulously. Stormy does not

know how to handle her fat, energetic, whining, irrepressibly enthusiastic daughter, and

she fears Chenise’s fatness will make it impossible for her daughter to find a boyfriend

when she is older. Dr Anne Purcell, child development specialist, has harsh words for

Stormy. Stormy’s failings as a mother, which have allowed Chenise to become so

monstrously fat, are killing her daughter.

The first season of Honey We’re Killing the Kids (HWKTK) aired in Australia on Network

Ten between July and August of 2006, joining other popular body makeover reality TV shows

like The Biggest Loser, Celebrity Overhaul, The Swan and Extreme Makeover. Described by

network publicists as an educational reality series, HWKTK enlists parents to reform children’s

unruly, fattening, badly behaved bodies, part of a perceived ‘epidemic’ of childhood obesity.

To that end, the show employs a computer-generated image of what the child may be

expected to look like as an adult, based on current behaviours. This image is produced in

response to the results of biometric measurements taken from the participating children by a

company named Good Health Solutions, ranging from the measurement of lung capacity to

the measurement of body fat and blood pressure. The images produced from these

measurements are pivotal to the series, dramatically illustrating the bloated, fat, frowning

future that HWKTK insists these children will have if they, and their parents, do not reform

their ways. The computer-generated image of the fat adult is a visualisation of the death

suggested by the provocative title, and is used to drive home the importance of obedience to

the rules given by expert presenter, Dr Anne Purcell. After viewing the aged images parents

are given a set of rules, three per week for three weeks, that will, in Purcell’s words, change the

face of the children’s future. After three weeks of following Purcell’s rules parents are shown a

new fast-forwarded image of what HWKTK believes the children will look like at the age of 40.

Thanks to Dr Purcell, these new, healthier adults are clear-skinned, well-groomed, smiling

and, vitally, thin.

In this paper, I will interrogate those practices deployed by HWKTK to reform these

unruly, fat and fattening children and adults that the show frames as threatening the

nation’s future, particularly the processes by which they distinguish appropriate from

inappropriate eating and bodily practices. To begin, I will examine the technologies and

ideologies used by HWKTK to mark the bodies and bodily practices of participating

children and adults as abject, addicted and deviant, using the work of Julia Kristeva and

Australian Feminist Studies, Vol. 23, No. 57, September 2008ISSN 0816-4649 print/ISSN 1465-3303 online/08/030389-12– 2008 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/08164640802263457

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Lau

rent

ian

Uni

vers

ity]

at 1

0:13

04

Oct

ober

201

4

Helen Keane, and how this display of the abject may contribute to the visual pleasure of

the viewer. Using the work of Victor Turner on liminality and ritual, I will argue that HWKTK

can be considered a (televised) ritual of transformation, creating clean and proper bodies

out of abject ones. I will locate the participants as emblematic of an ‘epidemic’ of child

obesity and consider the pedagogical role of television in the context of such an

‘epidemic’, and how the visible deviance of the HWKTK families works to symbolically

create the responsible, enterprising, productive Australian family, a family with appropriate

bodily deportment and approaches to food and eating.

The show follows a familiar reality TV structure of introduction, where the parents

view the first fast-forwarded image of their children, initiation, three ‘acts’, where the

family struggles with the process of transformation via Dr Purcell’s rules, and a final reveal,

where the family repents of their trash-eating ways and view the second fast-forwarded

image. Over five weeks, HWKTK introduces five very different families, and their very similar

problems, to Australia. Of these five, there are two nuclear families with both parents

present and involved, to a greater or lesser extent, in childrearing. These are the Turner

family from Sydney, with Jordan, 9, Mikaela, 11, dad Stuart and mum Lauren; the Marks

family, with retiree parents coddling Kim, 12, Andrew, 11, and Kirsty, 10. There is the very

large Peaufa family, notable not only because they are the only visibly non-white family in

the series (not that this is acknowledged in their episode), but also because they are the

largest family of the series. The Peaufas are mum Alison, dad Misi, Rico, 9, Ashleigh, 8,

Cailtin, 7, Mirabai, 6, Junior, 4, and a 6-month-old baby. Owing to the size of the family, the

program addresses only the three eldest children. There is also a blended family, the

Sainsburys, with mum Heidi, stepdad Steven, Deakin, 12, and Ayla, 9. There are two single-

parent families, both headed by women. One of these, the Kuytjes, headed by Trish,

includes the father intermittently throughout the episode, and the children, Jason, 13, and

Zac, 9, are shown spending weekends at their father’s house.

The other single-parent family, the Hansons, with mum Stormy and Chenise, 8, is

remarkable for a number of reasons. They are perhaps the most monstrous of the

monstrous families of HWKTK, and theirs is the only episode that includes extended family

in the form of the snack-hoarding grandmother Connie, the domineering and faintly cruel

great uncle Alec, and Stormy’s boyfriend, Dean.

If the parents of the HWKTK families are killing their children, they are killing them

through food. If the families of HWKTK are in crisis, that crisis begins and, through the

intervention of HWKTK, ends with food. If the children are not already fat, then the spectre

of the bloated fast-forwarded image of the adult child confirms that the child will become

fat if their deviant eating ways are not refined. The body of the HWKTK child is an eating,

fat-producing body, and the production of fat is facilitated by particular parenting

practices that the producers mark violently as pathological through the grotesque

speculation of the fast-forwarded image, the demands of Dr Anne Purcell, and the

intrusion of the camera into the families’ lives.

It is important to keep in mind that the families of HWKTK are presented in a social

vacuum. This is significant, as it locates the development of the child’s present and future

fatness in the private space of the home. Other meaningful social ties that might influence

the children’s physical activity and eating are ignored. The HWKTK camera moves through

a claustrophobic domestic world of bedrooms, kitchens and the interior of cars, as though

the families’ lives take place only in these private, domestic spaces, and it is in these spaces

that the families’ ‘crises’ are revealed to the camera. As will be discussed, the show’s

390 RACHEL KENDRICK

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Lau

rent

ian

Uni

vers

ity]

at 1

0:13

04

Oct

ober

201

4

reluctance to consider factors outside the home very much undermines its project of

defeating childhood obesity.

A key factor in HWKTK is the presentation of families in crisis. Indeed, Dr Anne Purcell

inevitably ends her opening monologue by noting curtly that her intervention is critical as

‘this family is in crisis’. The setting for this homily is the gleaming, glass-and-chrome offices

of Good Health Solutions (GHS), the company that provides the battery of health tests

administered to children in the beginning, as well as the fast-forwarded image created in

response to those test results. While each of the families is very different, the reasons given

for their ‘crisis’ are largely the same. According to expert testimonies by GHS employee

Trish Dakos, a child psychologist, and Dr John Lang, the director of GHS, the problem is

inappropriate diet, a lack of exercise and lack of appropriate family structure. Other

reasons for the family’s crisis, such as the three divorces implied by the single-parent and

blended families, do not even warrant a mention. Differences between the families, such

as socio-economic status, family structure and ethnicity, are erased.

This erasure of difference places the show’s focus squarely on the bodies and bodily

practices of its child participants, specifically their eating practices. In so doing, these fat

and eating children are marked as deviant, abject and addicted. The next section will

explore how the eating and other bodily practices of the HWKTK families are marked as

both abject and as signs of addiction, and how this abjection contributes to both the

pleasure of the viewer and to the families’ eventual reformation.

Pick Your Poison: Toxic Food, Abject Fat

As one commentator notes, HWKTK is part of a shift in lifestyle and reality television

where ‘programs about fixing our houses (The Block, Renovation Rescue, Changing Rooms,

Backyard Blitz) have been usurped by reality shows about dieting’ (McManus 2006). What

sets HWKTK apart from other body makeover shows, such as The Biggest Loser or Extreme

Makeover, or even shows about parenting such as Supernanny, is that in HWKTK it is

children who are called upon to monitor and control their bodies, behaviours and desires

in increasingly ‘adult’ ways.

While it is parents who make the decision to participate, and parents who offer their

children for scrutiny by medical experts, the camera and the viewing public, it is the

children who are ultimately called upon to respond to the ‘moral imperative [that] people

have to show that they are working on their own development, establishing value in their

own subjectivity, extending their cultural exchange-value’ (Skeggs 2004, 136). In doing so,

HWKTK opens up the family home, that sacred site for the private citizen, to uncomfortable

levels of private scrutiny. One reviewer notes ‘[t]he effects on the self esteem of these kids

after a show like this could be much more damaging than carrying extra weight’ (Normand

2006). This review, from a nutritionist and author of weight loss books, adds that much of

what happens within a family should remain private, or at least off camera: ‘Viewing the

indignities of this family, the children’s tantrums, the fights over food, the lack of

communication*surely these should be privately dealt with when young people are

involved?’ (Normand 2006).

This reviewer touches on a key aspect of HWKTK’s appeal for audiences. The families

of HWKTK are undignified. They are by turns loud, indulgent, gluttonous and ignorant; and

if the phenomenon of reality TV has revealed anything, it is that the loud, gluttonous and

ignorant make for great TV viewing.

TELEVISION TRANSFORMING THE FAT CHILD 391

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Lau

rent

ian

Uni

vers

ity]

at 1

0:13

04

Oct

ober

201

4

HWKTK makes children, families, their bodies, what they eat and how, into a

spectacle. The viewer is witness to the tears and tantrums of sugar-addicted children as

cupboards are purged of all illicit foods, the struggles of parents to put those children to

bed at night, and children’s disgust and rebellion over the first healthy meal. They watch

parents’ distress at viewing the fast-forwarded images of their children, and the

transformative power these images have on the family. Indeed, in the last minutes of

the show, viewers see destructive, fat and fattening children transformed into happy,

healthy, polite, enthusiastic consumers of dietary fibre.

The perhaps titillating monstrousness of the HWKTK children resides in the way they

eat and use food. These children and their parents are presented as eating ‘bad’ food,

‘junk’, desiring too much of the wrong food and eating it at inappropriate times and in

inappropriate ways, such as in front of the television. Using Helen Keane’s definition of

addiction as ‘[u]ltimately . . . a state marked by caring too much about the wrong things,

and not enough about the right things’ (2002, 38), the children and parents of HWKTK are

food addicts, or food abusers. It is through eating junk food that the children and the

parents both become ‘junk’ in the HWKTK lens. The ‘junkiness’ of the food-abusing

Australian family is symbolised by the body of the fat child, a category implicitly and

significantly conflated in the show to include the eating child. Indeed, it is worth noting

here that, of the fourteen children who participated in the series, only five were visibly

overweight. Of these five only one, Chenise Hanson, was said by Dr Anne Purcell to have a

significant ‘weight problem’. Through the comments of Dr Anne Purcell, the voiceover,

and most obviously the fat fast-forwarded image, the show explicitly states that all

children involved will become fat, if not fat already, unless drastic interventions are not

made. This positioning sees the eating child as, potentially, the sickened, fat child. This

reinforces the idea of the child as a body (and subject) in progress, a human in the process

of becoming what could either be monstrous, abject and addicted (i.e. the initial fast-

forwarded image), or civilised, rational and enterprising (i.e. the second fast-forwarded

image). The child’s body-in-progress, an eating body, is the site of both horror and

possibility in the show.

In Powers of Horror (1982), Julia Kristeva explores the abject as a means of creating

the subject. In Barbara Creed’s words, Kristeva’s abject works as ‘a means of separating out

the human from the non-human and the fully constituted subject from the partially

formed object’ (1993, 8). Kristeva defines the abject as waste, that which is ejected from

the subject so that the subject might go on, as substances that violate the boundaries

between inner and outer, self and not-self. Kristeva describes food, those substances that

must traverse the body’s most intimate boundaries so that the body may go on, as

particularly prone to abjection. In the first chapter of Powers of Horror, she memorably

describes her own experience of disgust at the warm milk offered to her by her parents.

When the eyes see or the lips touch that skin on the surface of milk*harmless, thin as a

sheet of cigarette paper, pitiful as a nail paring*I experience a gagging sensation and,

still farther down, spasms in the stomach, the belly; and all the organs shrivel up the

body, provoke tears and bile, increase heartbeat, cause forehead and hands to perspire.

Along with sight-clouding dizziness, nausea makes me balk at that milk cream, separates

me from the mother and father who proffer it. ‘I’ want none of that element, sign of their

desire; ‘I’ do not want to listen, ‘I’ do not assimilate it, ‘I’ expel it . . . I expel myself, I spit

392 RACHEL KENDRICK

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Lau

rent

ian

Uni

vers

ity]

at 1

0:13

04

Oct

ober

201

4

myself out, I abject myself within the same motion through which ‘I’ claim to defend

myself. (1982, 2�3)

This vivid description of disgust at the exchange of food between parent and child is

provocative when read in light of HWKTK’s attempts to mark particular familial food

practices as disgusting and deviant. Here, through rejecting that which provokes disgust,

Kristeva establishes herself as a subject, defends herself from the horrific food substance

imposed on her by her parents’ authority. Kristeva describes food as polluting, inasmuch

as ‘orality signifies a boundary of the self’s clean and proper body’ (1982, 75). All food, she

argues, has the potential to defile, perhaps some food more than others. Food establishes

relations between self and other, particularly the mother, the object of the child’s fear and

desire. ‘Food’, Kristeva writes, ‘is the oral object (the abject) that sets up the archaic

relationships between the human being and the mother, its mother, who wields a power

that is as vital as it is fierce’ (1982, 75�76). This reading of food as a potential toxin and

defiler of boundaries has great significance for HWKTK in its project of distinguishing

between appropriate and inappropriate foods and eating practices. Indeed, a major factor

of the family crisis presented in the series is parents’ failure to distinguish between ‘junk’

food and ‘real’ food, and their willingness to allow their children to become addicted to

inappropriate foods.

HWKTK, then, deploys food and the eating child in multiple ways. Food is framed as

an object of desire and pleasure for the child, a pleasure frequently imbricated with

maternal love. At the same time, food pollutes the child’s body, defiling and fattening an

incomplete body in the process of becoming a ‘complete’ adult. Food is also a sign of

appropriate parental authority, and the newly imposed authority of Dr Anne Purcell. In the

introductory montage for each family a particular food vice, their ‘drug of choice’, is

named as the camera hovers around children and parents shamelessly eating. For the

Kuytjes it is potato scallop sandwiches from the take-away shop run by mum, with a

dinner of unspecified take-away in front of the television at night. For the Sainsburys, it is

skipping breakfast and lunch, then binge eating on what the rather sarcastic voiceover

calls ‘all the worst take away and junk food’. At the Marks family the children live on a

steady diet of frozen pizza and other convenience foods; son Andrew is served breakfast in

bed every morning, eating an entire packet of biscuits with coffee. The Turner family

appears to subsist on a diet of chocolate and pizza, and Misi Peaufa gives his six children a

packet of lollies each per day.

Of all the excessive bodies in HWKTK, Chenise Hanson’s is presented as the most

grotesque in its display of childish excessive appetite. The voiceover sarcastically explains

at the beginning of their episode that, for Chenise, it is ‘more biscuits, more snacks, more

anything you like because Mum just can’t say no. Around here food is the way to a young

girl’s heart.’ When Dr Purcell arrives at the Hanson household to investigate, she finds

three fridges stuffed with frozen pizza, chips, ice cream and so on. Indeed, a close-up shot

of Chenise, slumped on a couch eating macaroni and cheese, was used to promote the

show. In this shot Chenise is in a dark room, save for the bluish glow of the TV, cardboard

3D glasses perched on her nose. She eats from a plastic container held beneath her

incipient double chin. In the promos, Chenise is made into an icon of the dread future of

Australian children: fat, slow, gluttonous, and addicted to food and screen entertainment.

In the show, Chenise’s appetite knows no bounds and makes no distinctions. Unlike the

other children, she does not screamingly reject the first ‘healthy meal’ served up; instead,

TELEVISION TRANSFORMING THE FAT CHILD 393

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Lau

rent

ian

Uni

vers

ity]

at 1

0:13

04

Oct

ober

201

4

she declares the tuna and sweet corn pasta ‘so yummy’ and goes back for three more

servings. It appears that Chenise’s mouth and rapidly expanding body can never be

satisfied.

Throughout the episode, Chenise’s fatness is linked to her family home, itself

depicted as chaotic, hostile and dysfunctional. One cannot be fixed without also attending

to the other. Chenise’s excessive eating is read by Dr Purcell and the GHS experts as an

attempt to satisfy a frustrated longing for affection and approval. Such a reading is

influenced implicitly by feminist work on women and eating disorders that distinguishes

between a ‘real’, bodily hunger and a ‘false’ neurotic hunger, a hunger produced by

unconscious needs and desires frustrated by ongoing psychic trauma (Orbach 1982; Keane

2002; Bordo 1993). Indeed, when Dr Purcell gives Chenise and her mother Stormy the first

set of rules, she urges Chenise to make that distinction for herself, saying ‘When you feel a

hunger pain in your tummy, I want you to think about what you’re really hungry for.’ Such

a reading is applied to the hunger and eating of the other children on the program also,

nudging these children into the category of the eating disorders. In doing so, as Helen

Keane has observed in her book on discourses of addiction, the deviant eating exhibited

by the HWKTK child discursively creates the normal appetite of the normal child:

Since everybody has to eat, and because hunger is not regarded as under the control of

the will, a recurring, irrational desire for the substance cannot define food addiction.

Distinguishing between use and abuse, the normal and the addicted, requires the

categorization of styles of eating and reasons for eating. Disordered bodies, desires and

eating styles of food abusers are constructed against the idea of normal hunger and

normal eating. Therefore the notion of healthy natural eating is as constructed and as

culturally encoded as the food rituals of the anorexic and the bulimic. (2002, 112)

Indeed, the comments of the voiceover throughout HWKTK constantly remind the viewer

that what they are seeing are examples of addictive behaviour. For instance, when Jordan

Turner is shown eating sausages, the voiceover naggingly reminds the audience that ‘with

his diet of chops, snags and more snags Jordan is eating 8 times more protein than he

should at his age’. The voiceover then adds, sarcastically, ‘it has to change, Jordan’. Later,

in a memorable scene, big, plump Jordan, rather immature for his age, discusses the role

food had in his relationship with his mother. Speaking with a clipped, plummy British

accent, Jordan fidgets, prone on his bed, still in his school uniform. Speaking directly to the

camera he says: ‘She buys us sweets, chocolate, crisps, all kinds of stuff, and that’s how I

love her.’ Jordan later complains that now his family is participating in HWKTK he will no

longer be able to eat the fat on a steak, one of the many foods he’ll describe as his

‘favourite’.

To return to Keane’s definition of addiction as a state of caring too much about the

wrong things, HWKTK makes the case that food has taken the place of many things in

Jordan Turner’s life; indeed, is the only thing for which he is shown to have any

enthusiasm. He is addicted to food and, with his sister, he cries, screams and whimpers his

way through an enforced withdrawal. His visible addiction, his fatness and his behaviour,

creates disgust in the viewer. To touch on a theme that will be returned to later, his

parents’ failure to notice or intervene in their son’s addictive and abject relationship with

food is a violation of the late capitalist imperative to maintain a healthy, non-addicted self.

In Keane’s words:

394 RACHEL KENDRICK

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Lau

rent

ian

Uni

vers

ity]

at 1

0:13

04

Oct

ober

201

4

In the name of longevity, productivity, balance and freedom we are enjoined to examine

ourselves and others for signs of addiction, for evidence of impaired control, imperfect

authenticity and compromised autonomy. (2002, 189)

In this section I have explored how the HWKTK frames its participants as abject eaters,

consumers of and addicts to junk, and how the category ‘addict’ feeds into the concept of

the abject. Both the concept of the abject and the category of the addict highlight cultural

anxieties about food, consumed substances and the violation of the body’s clean and

proper boundaries, and it is necessary for HWKTK to establish that some eating practices

are abject and deviant in order to correct them. In the following section I will consider how

HWKTK then works to reform the food-addicted, abject children and their failed parents

through the ritual of reality television.

Ritual Television, Ritual Therapy

As has been discussed, the parents and children of HWKTK are, through their use of

food, marked as abject and deviant, but their deviance is framed by the knowledge that

expert knowledge will reform them. Polluting dietary practices will give way to healthy

restraint; parents will learn to wield appropriate and productive authority; and the family’s

very future, represented by the near-mystical fast-forwarded image of the child produced

by GHS, will be transformed for the better. HWKTK is more than a titillating display of

tasteless and abject families. It is a ritual, an instructive ritual, where parents and children

are transformed and elevated into objects of worth.

In this section I will turn to Victor Turner (1969) and his work on liminality,

communitas, structure and anti-structure, to unpack the ritual techniques employed by

HWKTK to transform families. In his major work, The Ritual Process, Turner examines the

symbolic structure, semantics and social properties of rituals of passage and initiation,

specifically amongst the Ndembu of northwest Zambia, elaborating on Arnold Van

Gennep’s analysis of ritual progression. Van Gennep and Turner’s ritual progression

consists of three stages, which are:

. . . separation from the everyday flow of activities, involving a passage through a

threshold state or limen into a ritual world removed from everyday notions of time and

space; a mimetic enactment of some dimension of the crisis that brought about the

separation, in the course of which enactment the structures of everyday life are both

elaborated and challenged . . . and a re-entry into the everyday world. (Abrahams 1995)

I suggest that HWKTK can be considered a ritual of status elevation. The initial pollution

and abjection of the participating families*particularly that of the parents, who are visibly

falling in their task of creating healthy, well-disciplined citizens*is evidence of their low

status. The order and nutritional hygiene of the family presented at the end of the ritual is

a potent metaphor for their transformation from ‘use-less’ subjects to subjects of value

(see Skeggs 2004). In order to achieve this transformation, however, the ritual authorities

of HWKTK have to emphasise to parents and children that ‘in themselves they are clay or

dust, mere matter, whose form is impressed upon them by society’ (Turner 1969).

Using Turner’s three-stage theory of ritual as a loose guideline, each episode of

HWKTK unfolds in three clear stages or acts. In the opening sequence, the viewer is

introduced to each family and their problems via a montage of the family’s everyday

TELEVISION TRANSFORMING THE FAT CHILD 395

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Lau

rent

ian

Uni

vers

ity]

at 1

0:13

04

Oct

ober

201

4

routine. They are then separated from the regular flow of their lives through their first

encounter with, and submission to, the expert authorities of GHS. This separation begins

with the voiceover in the opening montage identifying possible sources of the family’s

chaos, typically beginning with diet, moving on to the use of screen entertainment, and

a lack of structure at bedtime. This identification of problems is the first stage in

reconstructing the rhythm and structure of the participating family’s regular life. Following

this is a sequence in the GHS offices, where children are measured and experts Trish Dakos

and Dr John Lang give their opinion on the state of the family. Following this, the parents

are ushered into a set resembling a windowless, brightly lit chamber, containing only Dr

Purcell and a flat-screen TV. Here, Dr Purcell addresses the parents and shows them the

pivotal fast-forwarded image of their children. This image is the impetus for parents to

submit to Dr Purcell. It is the most potent image of her authority, making clear her power

to see what the family cannot and predict what they cannot imagine.

The parents’ trauma at the sickly fast-forwarded images of their children completes

their initiation and signifies their passage into what can be called the liminal stage of the

HWKTK ritual. This stage begins with Dr Purcell introducing the children into the white

chamber and handing down the first set of rules. During the next three weeks the families

are beyond their former state, but they are not yet fully reformed. Food is rejected,

children whine, scream and complain, parents are stricken with migraines and sneak treats

to quiet their children. The omnipresent cameras, continually forcing parents and children

to interrogate and justify their behaviour, turn the private space of the family home inside

out. The most intimate aspects of family life are exposed for scrutiny. Indeed, the

producers even place night vision cameras in the hallways to catch children sneaking out

of their rooms at night while they are supposed to be sleeping.

Turner describes liminal entities as betwixt and between, neither here nor there.

During phases of liminality, ‘all attributes that distinguish categories and groups in the

structured social order are here in abeyance; the neophytes are merely entities in

transition, as yet without place or position’ (1969, 103). Families in HWKTK completely

submit to the ritual authority of Dr Purcell and the producers, an authority that is, in

Turner’s words, ‘nothing less than that of the total community’ (1969, 103). During this

stage, families are taken apart and rebuilt. They are made anew by an authority that acts

on behalf of the television-watching nation.1

Re-integration occurs in two stages. In the final week of rules, Dr Purcell gives the

families a ‘family fun day’, an opportunity for producers to gather footage of a newly

healthy, functional family engaged in some kind of wholesome activity, ranging from

horse riding to circus school. The newfound ‘healthiness’ of the family is underscored by

the voiceover, which inevitably reminds viewers that such a feat of filial togetherness

would have been unimaginable only weeks before. Afterwards, Dr Purcell takes the

parents into her white chamber for one final time to reveal the second fast-forwarded

image, a clear skinned, thin, smiling future made possible by compliance with the

transformative ritual of reality TV. The family is revisited by the cameras four weeks later, to

illustrate the impact that the ritual of HWKTK had on their lives.

Turner’s theory of ritual is useful for analysing the performative aspects of HWKTK’s

process of reforming the fat child and their parents, and suggests how the new, expertly

administered regime of clean food and clean living gains its power. There is, however, one

important way in which the transformative ritual of HWKTK does not entirely fit Turner’s

theory, and that is the lack of communitas experienced during the liminal stage of the

396 RACHEL KENDRICK

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Lau

rent

ian

Uni

vers

ity]

at 1

0:13

04

Oct

ober

201

4

program. For Turner, communitas is the unstructured, deeply felt communal bond

experienced by initiates during a ritual of initiation or status elevation. This is an

experience of egalitarian social belonging, a sentiment of ‘humankindness’ that marks the

liminal phase of ritual as holy. Communitas is experienced when the social structures of

society are broken down or weakened. In Turner’s words:

Communitas breaks in through the interstices of structure, in liminality; at the edges of

structure, in marginality; and from beneath structure, in inferiority. It is almost

everywhere held to be sacred or ‘holy,’ possibly because it transgresses or dissolves

the norms that govern structured and institutionalized relationships and is accompanied

by experiences of unprecedented potency. (1969, 129)

Turner argues that ‘men are released from structure into communitas only to return to

structure revitalized by their experience of communitas’ (1969, 129). The families of

HWKTK, on the other hand, are unstructured not by a ritual authority but by their own

complacency and supposed ignorance. It is an overt message of HWKTK that each family’s

crisis is of their own making, and it is only through the intervention of an expert that they

are ‘saved’. Instead of experiencing fluid, egalitarian social belonging, the disparate

families of HWKTK are restructured into the embodiment of a utopia of health imposed by

an expert authority.

The ritual of HWKTK elevates once polluted and deviant families, their children

embodying the possibility of a fat future for the nation, to a new status as productive,

functioning units of society. Yet the one-size-fits-all lessons of HWKTK are not simply

directed at those families on screen. The next section will examine how HWKTK addresses

viewers at home.

Teaching Slender Citizenship

Fat excites. It elicits fresh interpretation, it permits direct commentary on the

embarrassment of public embodiment, it allows conjecture about desire, it brings

perversity and compulsion into an unthreatening realm of conversational play. Fat is so

powerful and so social that it overwhelms the proper place of the person, whose fat takes

over the place where personality usually resides. (Berlant 1999, 91)

HWKTK is part of a range of programs that educate viewers on how to become who

they want to be. Writing about the pedagogical function of TV cooking shows, Isabelle de

Solier argues that such shows provide their viewers with both practical and ideological

knowledge. Viewers learn not only the techniques of cooking but also learn what food is

tasteful, elegant and desirable for an ideal citizen. Watching cooking shows, then, ‘can be

understood as a form of productive leisure, as viewers invest their free time in the ‘‘work of

acquisition’’ of culinary cultural capital, as a means of improving the self through food

knowledge’ (2005, 471). Similarly, Liz Ferrier argues that home makeover shows such as

Backyard Blitz demonstrate to viewers what it is to be a good citizen. Ferrier argues that:

The choice of recipient in Backyard Blitz indicates a great deal about the program’s

construction of the ideal and exemplary Australian citizen: they are benevolent, hard

working, practical, self-sacrificing and self-sufficient . . . Individuals in the Blitz team also

embody these admirable national characteristics, and are depicted as caring not only for

the recipients but also for the ‘family’ of the team . . . Benevolence is presented as a

TELEVISION TRANSFORMING THE FAT CHILD 397

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Lau

rent

ian

Uni

vers

ity]

at 1

0:13

04

Oct

ober

201

4

desirable and ‘natural’ national characteristic, as Australian as the belief in ‘a fair go.’

(2005, 21)

HWKTK similarly positions its participants as exemplars of a national ‘type’ and, through its

choice of fat and fattening child participants, constructs the Australian child citizen as

physically active, uncomplaining, detached about food and appropriately distanced from

their parents. Through reforming the deviant child and parent, HWKTK vividly demon-

strates what the Australian family is, as well as the techniques and knowledges needed to

produce it. The families chosen to participate are archetypes. Viewers at home can identify

those problems they have in common with the families on screen, and take note of the

methods used to fix them. Indeed, viewers were explicitly addressed, both as parents and

as adult citizens, through the National Parenting Quiz, a promotional tie-in produced by

GHS. During the first episode of HWKTK questions were inserted during ad breaks, with

answers found on answer sheets published in national and regional newspapers. Using the

quiz, viewers at home could assess their own parenting competence according to GHS’s

standards. The parent at home, like the parent on screen, is taught by the expert authority

of HWKTK, learning that the producers, GHS and Dr Anne Purcell have access to a much

greater knowledge of ‘best practice’ parenting.

John Hartley (1999) notes that television functions as a teacher of identity. HWKTK,

like all television programs, ultimately addresses viewers as citizens, a homogeneous,

unifying category, and this mode of address both erases and celebrates difference. As

Hartley argues:

Television has an important bearing on this historically complex and ‘mottled situation’

[of citizenship], because it is no respecter of differences among its audiences; it gathers

populations which may otherwise display few connections among themselves, which

may otherwise display few connections among themselves, and positions them as its

audience ‘indifferently,’ according to all viewers the same ‘rights’ and promoting among

them a common identity as television audiences. (1999)

All parents, regardless of differences between them, are called upon by HWKTK to improve

themselves and, by extension, their children. HWKTK is explicit in what it expects the role

of a parent to be, what it is to parent well, and what the results of good parenting will be.

In the world of HWKTK, the hallmark of the good parent is constant vigilance of a child’s

body weight and eating habits in order to prevent childhood obesity. For parents on

screen and parents at home, the spectre of child fat is used to drive messages of good

parenting home. Through the use of the fattened, fast-forwarded image of the child,

HWKTK establishes that, unless parents conform to the version of parenting promoted by

the show, all children are at risk of pathological fatness, a fatness which is a synecdoche for

the personal and moral degeneracy displayed by participating families in the show. As Dr

Purcell said to the Sainsbury parents, ‘your children have shown us that being slim or

slender doesn’t necessarily mean healthy, because this [fatness] is where the children are

going to end up’.

HWKTK exists within, and capitalises on, a growing discourse of an obesity ‘epidemic’

that, like television, gathers populations and erases difference. I put ‘epidemic’ in inverted

commas here to indicate that the term is not necessarily an accurate description of the

phenomenon of increased obesity in the population. The inverted commas also

acknowledge that there is conflicting research in the fields of medicine, epidemiology,

398 RACHEL KENDRICK

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Lau

rent

ian

Uni

vers

ity]

at 1

0:13

04

Oct

ober

201

4

public health and nutrition about the prevalence of obesity and its effects on health.2 In

obesity epidemic discourse, the figure of the child holds a unique and prominent place.

Indeed, HWKTK dramatises and visualises many implicit assumptions in the growing

discourse of epidemic child obesity. The fat child is visible evidence that the sins of the

parent will be visited upon the child even, and especially, when the child is not yet fat.

There are several pertinent issues with which I do not have the room to engage

here: whether childhood obesity is or is not reaching epidemic levels in Australia; whether

Australian children are or are not largely ignorant about the ‘true nature’ of what they eat;

or whether Australian parents require the kind of teaching that HWKTK offers. What is

relevant is that HWKTK is part of a broader discourse on childhood obesity that makes the

fat child emblematic of a range of individual, national, ethical and moral failures. Moreover,

by presenting children and their parents in social isolation and prescribing a ‘one-size-fits-

all’ approach to parenting, HWKTK sabotages its own project of preventing child obesity.

Obesity is a complex, culturally contingent, deeply political phenomenon which cannot be

‘cured’ by the simplistic application of expert knowledge. Yet health education, public

health and policy interventions continue to be developed using HWKTK’s reasoning: that

childhood obesity is the result of ignorance and complacency on the part of parents and

children, and the solution is better education. As one nutritionist observes, writing in

frustration on such programs:

That the conclusions should then unanimously call for better trials, better behaviour

change skills, better-not-rewrite the question is flabbergasting. Untold numbers of

people have participated in weight loss trials and acted on dietary advice given in clinics

to no good avail. What is it that happens to smother their stories or render them absurd?

(Aphramor 2005, 318)

In this paper I have sought to problematise HWKTK’s project of saving Australia’s children

from potential fatness, and the practices it uses in doing so. HWKTK radically

decontextualises the fat or would-be fat child and their family, reduces them to consumers

of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ foods, physical activity, and parenting techniques. In the process, the

show implies that the only solution to a supposed epidemic of childhood obesity is

individual compliance with expert authority. If we are to believe that there is an epidemic

of childhood obesity in Australia, such approaches will not work. As such, the only effect

that HWKTK has on Australia’s children is to traumatise those involved and place children’s

bodies under needless and potentially damaging scrutiny.

NOTES

1. It is worth noting that visible body fat itself can be considered a liminal tissue, a tissue

that demands continual efforts to un-make it. To quote Samantha Murray:

. . . the fat body exists as a deviant, perverse form of embodiment and, in order to be

accorded personhood, is expected to engage in a continual process of transformation,

of becoming and, indeed, unbecoming. The fat body can only exist (however

uncomfortably) as a body aware of its own necessary impermanence. Consequently,

in experiencing my fat body there is a sense of suspension, of deferral, of hiatus. One

is waiting to become ‘thin,’ to become ‘sexual,’ waiting to become. (2005, 155)

TELEVISION TRANSFORMING THE FAT CHILD 399

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Lau

rent

ian

Uni

vers

ity]

at 1

0:13

04

Oct

ober

201

4

2. For more on conflicting accounts of obesity’s prevalence, health effects and possible

solutions to obesity, see Mitchell and McTigue (2007); Campos (2004); Campos et al.

(2006); Oliver and Lee (2005); and Gard and Wright (2005).

REFERENCES

ABRAHAMS, ROGER D. 1995. Foreword. In The ritual process: Structure and anti-structure, edited by

V. Turner. New York: Aldine de Gruyter.

APHRAMOR, LUCY. 2005. Is a weight centred health framework salutogenic? Some thoughts on

unhinging certain dietary ideologies. Social Theory and Health 3 (4): 313�40.

BERLANT, LAUREN. 1999. The queen of America goes to Washington City: Essays on sex and

citizenship. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

BORDO, SUSAN. 1993. Unbearable weight: Feminism, Western culture and the body. Berkeley:

University of California Press.

CAMPOS, PAUL. 2004. The obesity myth. New York: Gotham Books.

CAMPOS, PAUL, ABIGAIL SAGUY, PAUL ERNSBERGER, ERIC OLIVER, and GLENN GAESSER. 2006. Lifestyle not

weight should be the primary target. International Journal of Epidemiology 35 (1): 55�60.

CREED, BARBARA. 1993. The monstrous-feminine: Film, feminism, psychoanalysis. London and New

York: Routledge.

DE SOLIER, ISABELLE. 2005. TV dinners: Culinary television, education and distinctions. Continuum:

Journal of Cultural Studies 19 (4): 465�81.

FERRIER, LIZ. 2005. Benevolence and gift-giving in Backyard Blitz. Journal of Australian Studies 85:

12�25.

GARD, MICHAEL, and JAN WRIGHT. 2005. The obesity epidemic: Science, morality and ideology.

London and New York: Routledge.

HARTLEY, JOHN. 1999. Uses of television. London and New York: Routledge.

HONEY WE’RE KILLING THE KIDS (HWKTK).

KEANE, HELEN. 2002. What’s Wrong with Addiction? Melbourne: Melbourne University Press.

KRISTEVA, JULIA. 1982. Powers of horror: An essay on abjection. New York: Columbia University

Press.

McMANUS, BRIDGET. 2006. A balanced approach. The Age (Green Guide), 7 November:

MITCHELL, GORDON R., and KATHLEEN M. MCTIGUE. 2007. The US obesity ‘epidemic’: Metaphor,

method, or madness? Social Epistemology 21 (4): 391�423.

MURRAY, SAMANTHA. 2005. (Un/Be)coming out? Rethinking fat politics. Social Semiotics 15 (2):

153�63.

NORMAND, ARLENE. 2006. Killing the kids*and dishing up a side order of guilt. Herald Sun, 17 July.

OLIVER, J. ERIC, and TAEKU LEE. 2005. Public opinion and the politics of obesity in America. Health

Politics, Policy and Law 30 (5): 923�54.

ORBACH, SUSIE. 1982. Fat is a feminist issue 2. London: Hamlyn.

SKEGGS, BEVERLEY. 2004. Class, self, culture. London: Routledge.

TURNER, VICTOR. 1969. The ritual process: Structure and anti-structure. The Lewis Henry Morgan

lectures. New York: Aldine de Gruyter.

Rachel Kendrick is currently completing her PhD thesis at Melbourne University on

obesity, surgery and visceral intimacy. Her research interests include technocultures

and the body, science studies, nutrition and agriculture.

400 RACHEL KENDRICK

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Lau

rent

ian

Uni

vers

ity]

at 1

0:13

04

Oct

ober

201

4