Professor Jayne Raisborough

Although there has been recent attention given to the subject of mobile work, there has been less focus, within mobility studies, on the work of those who enable movement: the job of the transport worker. This article takes this incarnation of mobile workers as the basis for understanding the ways in which mobile work identities are pulled through into retirement. The article firstly proposes that transport workers, as movement enablers, have particular identities, and are an important and neglected topic of study within mobilities. Secondly, it suggests that the post-work identities of mobile workers are contingent on their experiences during their working lives and that these are particular to mobile work. The article is evidenced through data gathered during a mobile ethnographic study with two retired London Underground employees. The participants joined the researchers on a walking tour of a disused underground railway station in London, ‘Hidden London’, organised by the London Transport Museum and their experiences and emotional responses were recorded and analysed. Understanding post-work identities through the embodied and spatial experiences of the present, the research sought insights of the past and future; the continuity and fluidity of working identities that permeated through to post-work lives. This article argues that mobile work identities are specific identities that shape a distinct post-retirement identity.

Class is often overlooked in sociological studies of death, just as studies of class overlook death. The controversial media coverage of the death of Jade Goody provides a useful focus for exploring contemporary class-making. Recent sociological analyses of class representations in popular culture have demonstrated how denigration and humiliation serve as mechanisms which position sections of the white, working class (chavs) as repositories of bad taste. We argue that these are not the only (or even the most prevalent) affective mechanisms for class-making. In this article, we explore how cultural imperatives for ‘dying well’ intersect with what could be perceived as more positive or even affectionate representations of Jade to produce ‘good taste’ as naturalised properties of the middle class. As such, we demonstrate that the circulation of inequalities through precarious and dynamic cultural representations involves more complex affective mechanisms in class boundary work than is often recognised.

Risks, Identities and the Everyday focuses on the individual and the lived experience of everyday risks - a departure from the focus on risk from a macro level. The contributors look at risk and how perceptions of risk, risk taking, and risk assessment increasingly dominate our everyday lives and explore it in a variety of settings not previously associated with risk theory, including: plastic surgery, teenage sub-cultures, ageing and independent travel. The volume moves risk away from abstract theorising about what people may or may not fear about risks, to focus on how it actually materialises and operates in everyday 'real' social interactions and contexts. It also interrogates the rational self at the heart of macro social theories by thinking through the construction of risk choices and the socio-cultural dynamics that 'present' some risks as acceptable, appropriate and necessary. © Julie Scott Jones and Jayne Raisborough 2007. All rights reserved.

Most academic work exploring the makeover genre has argued that TV "experts" draw on a narrative of humiliation to push the participant to adopt more appropriate forms of feminine appearance. However, shows like How to Look Good Naked, while sharing the problematic logics of the makeover, are qualitatively different in tone and style from more aggressive shows. We extend emerging analyses which argue that makeover shows can be read as reflecting struggles for recognition by demonstrating that TV "experts" can also interrupt processes of mis-recognition by offering alternative symbolic systems of interpretation of the body by which the body can be recognised, visible and valued. We argue that humiliation is not the only point of affective engagement for audiences of these shows, while wanting to avoid the seductive illusion that this makes the shows more empowering or less malevolent. We conclude that in failing to embrace the wide variety of affective mechanisms by which we might be able to appreciate the popular appeal of reality TV, we do a disservice to female audiences and women participants, as well as limiting our own theoretical insights. © 2014 Taylor and Francis.

© Taylor & Francis Group, LLC. This article serves as a critical introduction to the genre of the “makeover show” as a way of encouraging the growth of a still nascent body of work. The article draws from a wider discourse analysis to argue that the makeover’s story of transformation not only enables but also depends on benevolent, sympathetic representations of fat individuals. Yet, an analysis of the makeover indicates the range and complexity of the cultural labors that continue to render fat a social and moral problem. This article concludes that fat has a current specificity within late capitalism, enabling the fat body to materialize as a key pedagogical site instructing all bodies in somatic, specifically active, citizenship in context of the “obesity epidemic.”

© The Author(s) 2014. This article responds to the claim that there is a critical neglect of age and ageing across media and television studies. It does so by arguing an exploration of the insights from the fields of critical gerontology/Age Studies and Media Studies allows critical scrutiny of the intersection between populist stereotyping of age, the pedagogic function of the makeover culture, and the prevailing public policy discourses that place responsibility on individuals, notably women, to hold back their old age. This article extends the argument that the pedagogical function of the makeover is to train us into culturally inhabitable bodies, to claim that age shapes what corporeal and cultural dwellings are currently intelligible.

Risks, Identities and the Everyday focuses on the individual and the lived experience of everyday risks – a departure from the focus on risk from a macro level. The contributors look at risk and how perceptions of risk, risk taking, and risk assessment increasingly dominate our everyday lives and explore it in a variety of settings not previously associated with risk theory, including: plastic surgery, teenage sub-cultures, ageing and independent travel. The volume moves risk away from abstract theorising about what people may or may not fear about risks, to focus on how it actually materialises and operates in everyday 'real' social interactions and contexts. It also interrogates the rational self at the heart of macro social theories by thinking through the construction of risk choices and the socio-cultural dynamics that 'present' some risks as acceptable, appropriate and necessary

Abstract

Facilitating a ‘good’ death is a central goal for hospices and palliative care organisations. The key features of such a death include an acceptance of death, an open awareness of and communication about death, the settling of practical and interpersonal business, the reduction of suffering and pain, and the enhancement of autonomy, choice and control. Yet deaths are inherently neither good nor bad; they require cultural labour to be ‘made over’ as good. Drawing on media accounts of the controversial death of UK reality television star Jade Goody, and building on existing analyses of her death, we examine how cultural discourses actively work to construct deaths as good or bad and to position the dying and those witnessing their death as morally accountable. By constructing Goody as bravely breaking social taboos by openly acknowledging death, by contextualising her dying as occurring at the end of a life well lived and by emphasising biographical continuity and agency, newspaper accounts serve to position themselves as educative rather than exploitative, and readers as information‐seekers rather than ghoulishly voyeuristic. We argue that popular culture offers moral instruction in dying well which resonates with the messages from palliative care.

This paper explores women's experiences of accessing serious leisure. It responds to a perceived tendency in contemporary feminist theories of leisure to celebrate women's ability to weave potentially empowering identities from discursive resources in leisure spaces and experiences. While this work creates much needed theoretical space for the exploration of women's agency and self determination within leisure, there is little critical attention given to how women may first negotiate the complexity of their gendered lives to gain access to these sites and experiences. By drawing on the accounts of forty women involved in the Sea Cadet Corps, a form of serious leisure, this paper argues that accessing leisure is still an important aspect of women's leisure experiences. Women cited here engage in active and conscious practices and performances to both justify their access to leisure and to enable their disengagement from demands associated with normative femininity. This paper concludes that to sideline questions of access serves to conceptually dislocate leisure from the wider patterns of women's everyday lives and limits our understanding of how women perceive, use and give meaning to their serious leisure participation. © The Editorial Board of The Sociological Review 2006.

Recent research in social psychology has identified a specific social representation, the ‘self-control ethos’, which is constituted through neo-liberal virtues of self-management, reliance and discipline. This functions to mark an ‘ingroup’ through its allegiance to core values and behaviours, from an ‘outgroup’, forged through a perceived ‘lack’ or rejection of those values and further, serves as a basis for the denigration of outgroups. However, recent developments in mainstream social psychological theories of stereotype content have developed a model of prejudicial intergroup relations as ambivalent, involving both negative and positive content. In this paper we maintain an emphasis on the self-control ethos but depart from an emphasis upon denigration to focus on a particular outgroup – the fairtrade farmer/producer. We argue that developments in social representations theory and mainstream social psychology can both contribute to a deeper understanding of this particular example of a cultural encounter apparently engendering social solidarity. Recent social psychological models of stereotype content contribute an important emphasis upon ambivalence based on perceived structural relationships in the representations of outgroups. However the self-control ethos allows an understanding of the visual, symbolic and affective work involved in making solidarity with a ‘distant’ outgroup a possibility. Finally we claim that although representations of fairtrade farmers/producers ostensibly become the vehicle for a progressive cultural encounter, the forms of solidarity it encourages require critical scrutiny.

This exploratory paper addresses prevailing conceptualisations of women's agency in leisure. It focuses on the reproduction/resistance framework characteristic of much feminist work. Realising the role of leisure in reproducing oppressive gender relations and the various ways that leisure can also resist them is vital to the continual politicisation of leisure, however we explore whether this framework can always adequately realise the complexities of women's lived relations to engendered power. We specifically focus on the conceptual relationship between empowerment and resistance. Using the illustration of one woman's auto/biography lodged with the Mass Observation Archive, we question whether women's empowerment is derived from a contextual repositioning to gendered norms and an agency which neither resists nor straight-forwardly reproduces gender relations. Copyright 2007 National Recreation and Park Association.

Abstract

Our everyday shopping practices are increasingly marketed as opportunities to ‘make a difference’ via our ethical consumption choices. In response to a growing body of work detailing the ways in which specific alignments of ‘ethics’ and ‘consumption’ are mediated, we explore how ‘ethical’ opportunities such as the consumption of Fairtrade products are recognized, experienced and taken‐up in the everyday. The ‘everyday’ is approached here via a specially commissioned Mass Observation directive, a volunteer panel of correspondents in the UK. Our on‐going thematic analysis of their autobiographical accounts aims to explore a complex unevenness in the ways ‘ordinary’ people experience and negotiate calls to enact their ethical agency through consumption. Situating ethical consumption, moral obligation and choice in the everyday is, we argue, important if we are to avoid both over‐exaggerating the reflexive and self‐conscious sensibilities involved in ethical consumption, and, adhering to a reductive understanding of ethical self‐expression.

We draw on ‘new’ class analysis to argue that mockery frames many cultural representations of class and move to consider how it operates within the processes of class distinction. Influenced by theories of disparagement humour, we explore how mockery creates spaces of enunciation, which serve, when inhabited by the middle class, particular articulations of distinction from the white, working class. From there we argue that these spaces, often presented as those of humour and fun, simultaneously generate for the middle class a certain distancing from those articulations. The plays of articulation and distancing, we suggest, allow a more palatable, morally sensitive form of distinction-work for the middle-class subject than can be offered by blunt expressions of disgust currently argued by some ‘new’ class theorising. We will claim that mockery offers a certain strategic orientation to class and to distinction work before finishing with a detailed reading of two Neds comic strips to illustrate what aspects of perceived white, working class lives are deemed appropriate for these functions of mockery. The Neds , are the latest comic-strip family launched by the publishers of children's comics The Beano and The Dandy , D C Thomson and Co Ltd.

This paper applies Joffe and Staerklé’s self-control ethos to cultural representations of the white working class. We initially follow their identification of three aspects of the self-control ethos — mind, body, and destiny — to show the explanatory value of the concept, before considering four possible avenues through which the self-control ethos may be developed: the extent to which it is the interrelationship between the separate aspects of the self-control ethos which lends them their visceral, emotional, and symbolic power; that gender differentiation is an important element in the specific content of stereotypes; that some stereotype content relates to issues of containment; and that a tighter contextualization is afforded to the self-control ethos by considering self and other relations in the terms of a consumer culture. These are offered as possible directions for the future development of a social representational approach sensitive to the contemporary cultural context.

In the context of a purported shift from humiliation to the benign exemplified by the marked contrast between How to Look Good Naked and What Not to Wear, this article examines the cultural work performed by the ‘space of the benign’. We identify three main mechanisms — body appreciation, synthetic friendship and suspended sexuality — which manipulate existing constructions of female friendship and homosexuality to produce the host as the ‘gay best friend’. As such, the host sidesteps the heterosexual scopic economy while seeking to re-place women within it, and avoids the censure frequently directed at female presenters. At the same time, by coaxing women towards an acceptance of their body as is, How to Look Good Naked provides a ‘feel-good’ sense of empowerment while preserving individualistic framings of body problems and solutions. We conclude that the show rehabilitates women within the heteronormative scopic economy, and reinscribes them as neo-liberal consumers.

A central defining feature of serious leisure is the career afforded to its participants. This paper adds to emerging challenges to prevailing conceptualizations of the career as linear and progressive by exploring the lived experiences of women involved in the Sea Cadet Corps (SCC). By focusing on the plays of gender relations within and beyond the serious leisure social world, this paper demonstrates that women's relations to their career are shaped by the overall meaning they give to their participation; gendered divisions of labor within the SCC; and by their successful distancing from the demands of normative femininity in other social worlds. Copyright 2007 National Recreation and Park Association.

Risks, Identities and the Everyday focuses on the individual and the lived experience of everyday risks - a departure from the focus on risk from a macro level. The contributors look at risk and how perceptions of risk, risk taking, and risk assessment increasingly dominate our everyday lives and explore it in a variety of settings not previously associated with risk theory, including: plastic surgery, teenage sub-cultures, ageing and independent travel. The volume moves risk away from abstract theorising about what people may or may not fear about risks, to focus on how it actually materialises and operates in everyday ‘real’ social interactions and contexts. It also interrogates the rational self at the heart of macro social theories by thinking through the construction of risk choices and the socio-cultural dynamics that ‘present’ some risks as acceptable, appropriate and necessary.

This article critically considers the `fit' between FairTrade consumption and conceptualizations of the reflexive project of selfhood . By outlining the ways in which FairTrade products are marketed, we argue that a particular and partial reflexivity is invoked and mobilized. Following from recent class debates which apply a Bourdieusian analysis to explore the operations of everyday class distinctions, we explore what such an analysis can offer to the project of critically mapping out the dynamics of this particular reflexivity and ethical consumption. However, FairTrade's emphasis on `just' consumption and invocation of a deserving farmer/worker allows some scope for problematization here too. By turning to an emerging literature on the `moral economy' we reach past the homogenizing tendency in some `new' class analyses to suggest possibilities both for a psychosocial imagining of ethical consumption and for fleshing out the conceptualization of a `situated reflexivity' demanded by recent social theory.

Generating negative news of state has been as a to create for aimed to such provision. coverage welfare p rovision strategy designed public support radical To date of this kind has on and However, little is known about the complex relationship between media representations of specific events, and those of media representations in the lead up to these events, what we refer to as periphery representations. Drawing on a coding framework methodology, this paper analyses the frequency and intensity of peripheral representations of the National Health Service (NHS) in the British print media for one week a month before and for one week during three key events in recent NHS history: the official consultation period for the Health and Social Care Act (2012); the publication of Five-Year Forward View, and the first Junior Doctor Strike. This article finds that negative NHS representations in articles that are peripheral to particular topical issues of controversy evidence fluctuations, amplifications and intensities across time periods, depending on the particular context. The paper concludes by arguing that repetition of negative themes in news helps to build a sensibility of ‘inadequacy’ of vital services. We hope that this focus on the ways in which amplifications and de-amplifications in negative intensity of peripheral NHS representations across time and content, helps to contribute to debate about the complex interplay between public health services, media representation and policy consent.

Ageing is trouble for women: our longevity and a lifetime of gendered pay inequalities can leave us exposed to precarity and hardships in later life. Our bodies are thought troublesome as they sag from the registers of heteronormative attractiveness. Age is trouble too because it is the perfect site for the exercise of neoliberal cruel optimism; surveillance, monitoring, individualization and a increasing turn to the market for supposed solutions for the ‘problem’ of age. Can these ageing troubles be troubled and how? This paper applies a critical optimism to explore how older feminist- identified women make their aged-lives habitable in an anti-ageing culture. It discusses how feminism, as a changeable, mobile but mostly problematic resource because of its silence around ageing, nonetheless helped women (aged between 40 -101) articulate how their responses to anti-aging culture are formed and informed and shaped their ambitions for ageing on their terms. This paper concludes by making a case for us ‘age critically’ and explores what obligations and opportunities that places on us as POWES feminist researchers and scholars.

There has been a distinct neglect of dis/ability in socio-cultural analysis of poverty porn (Runswick-Cole and Goodley 2015). This paper applies framing analysis to reality TV documentaries that feature larger bodied, disabled, welfare claimants to examine how cultural literacies of fatness and ‘obesity’ are drawn upon to cast suspicion upon disability welfare claimants in so-called poverty- porn. With a focus on Channel 5’s Benefit Britain series, Bene£its Too Fat to Work we demonstrate that enduring and harmful representations of 'obesity' are put to the work of securing public consent for a post-welfare society in the UK

The Body and Society Cassandra A. Ogden, Stephen Wakeman. PREFACE The Issues in the Social Sciences series was conceived with the aim of bringing cutting-edge research in the Social Sciences within the purview of both ...

Be the best you can be' urge self-help books and makeover TV shows, but what kind of self is imagined as needing a makeover and what kind of self is imagined as the happy result? Drawing on recent sociology and psychology, this book explores the function of slummy mummies, headless zombies and living autopsies to creating an idea of self.

This note describes the conceptual importance of ‘serious’ leisure while highlighting its theoretical weaknesses when speaking both to and from the experiences of women in the Sea Cadet Corps (a uniformed youth organization). I claim that although women’s experiences challenge some of the assumptions made by serious leisure, the concept of serious leisure remains, as yet, a positive framework in which these experiences may be grounded. It is, however, my contention that Stebbins (1982) concept is in need of a politicizing and critical analysis, and that this is provided by a feminist critique of engendered power relations.

Our televisions bulge with weight-loss shows, as the news warn of the obesity epidemic. Fat is such a villain that larger people are stigmatized and we all are seduced by life-changing claims of a multi-billion pound diet industry. Yet, when we question if our bathroom scales can really tell us about our health, we start to ask just why and how fat holds such fascination. In this book, Jayne Raisborough explores interpretations of fat bodies from Palaeolithic Europe to Poverty Porn TV to argue that fat’s materiality makes it ripe for stigmatising associations. However, especially in a social context that presents health as a matter of choice, fat also emerges as an ideal redemptive substance to be pummelled and starved into submission. This book presents a ‘fat sensibility’ to demonstrate how fat is helping us all become responsibilised healthy-citizens. It asks just what self are we being asked to diet ourselves into?

This chapter engages directly with the discourses of rights and responsibilities that have shaped and structured the ways in which the contemporary gun debate, and particularly firearm marketing initiatives, have interfaced with gender and with feminist traditions of thought. The chapter introduces conceptions of choice and intersectionality to these discussions, even as many of these ideas: choice, freedom, bodily integrity, health and safety originated in respect of feminist campaigning around the landmark Roe v Wade Supreme Court judgement from 1973, which decriminalised abortion (but which was recently repealed). The irony by which radical and transformative feminist values became flipped to advocate a ‘fem-vertised’ gun ownership within an aspirational ‘lifestyle politics’ premised upon ‘fighting fire with fire’ and refusing to be a victim. This new promotional culture of firearm ownership is wedded to the modern, de-collectivised, conception of the Second Amendment, which eschews the ‘militia’ component or the necessity of having ‘well regulated’ firearms in favour of an entirely personal and individualised conception of carrying arms. This gendered conception of firearm ownership was then reproduced throughout firearm advertising copy, projecting the ‘well armed women’ as responsible and rights-bearing: the ‘good gal with a gun’. At first, the marketing was trite and often patronising-pink guns-but soon ‘shrink it and pink it’ gave way to promoting responsibilised-armed empowerment (albeit, as we will suggest later, rather false empowerment), by which a new armed feminist subject was produced through highly individuated choices and privatised and marketised solutions to problems of crime and safety.

This article reports on Creative Pause: a pilot research project funded by Research England that explored creative responses to lived experiences of menopause and measured the effects on well-being. Menopause is a major part of the life course, yet its well-being implications remain poorly understood and this leads to negative impacts on lives. Despite recent media attention, there is a lack of understanding of lived experience and a lack of visible stories about menopause in literary texts and the arts. With creative workshops in poetry, dance, drawing and another embodied writing techniques, the project identified that workshops can support the well-being of people navigating this obscure stage in the life course. This collaborative, autoethnographic article, co produced by workshop participants (equally valued as researchers) and the research team uses dialogue, creative and reflective writing to explore the lived experience of menopause. It will show how creativity, specifically storytelling through writing, image, speaking and listening, or movement, can help not only navigate this transitional life stage but also raise awareness and consequently understanding. We argue that supporting people to tell and share stories that draw on lived experiences of the menopause can support them to navigate this liminal space

In traditional gerontological terms, adaptation is usually understood as the production of physical aids to mitigate the impairment effects caused by age-related disabilities, or as those alterations organisations need to make under the concept of reasonable adjustment to prevent age discrimination (in the UK, for example, age has been a protected characteristic under the Equality Act since 2010). This article will be the first to examine ageing in relation to theories of adaptation within cultural studies and the humanities. It is thus an interdisciplinary intervention within the field of cultural gerontology and cultural theories of adaptation. Adaptation studies in cultural studies and the humanities have moved away from fidelity criticism (the issue of how faithful an adaptation is to its original) towards thinking of adaptation as a creative, improvisational space. We ask if theories of adaptation as understood within cultural studies and the humanities can help us develop a more productive and creative way of conceptualising the ageing process, which reframes ageing in terms of transformational and collaborative adaptation. Moreover, for women in particular, this process of adaptation involves engagement with ideas of women’s experience that encompass an adaptive, intergenerational understanding of feminism. Our article draws on interviews with the producer and scriptwriter of the Representage theatre group’s play My Turn Now. The script for the play is adapted from a 1993 co-authored book written by a group of six women who were then in their 60s and 70s, who founded a networking group for older women.

This paper draws on cultural gerontology and literary scholarship to call for greater academic consideration of age and ageing in our imaginations of the future. Our work adds to the development of Critical Future Studies (CFS) previously published in this journal, by arguing that prevailing ageism is fuelled by specific constructions of older populations as a future demographic threat and of ageing as a future undesirable state requiring management and control. This paper has two parts: the first considers the importance of the future to contemporary ageist stereotypes. The second seeks potential counter representations in speculative fiction. We argue that an age-aware CFS can allow us not only to imagine new futures but also to reflect critically on the shape and consequences of contemporary modes of relations of power.

It is expected that the Covid-19 lockdown will have increased physical inactivity with negative impacts for older people, who are at greater risk of health complications from the virus. This paper draws on customer evaluation questionnaire of a Pilates class aimed at people aged over 50 years old, which transitioned from a studio setting to online classes via Zoom at the start of the lockdown in England. The paper aims to (i) evaluate the shift of exercise services to online and (ii) examine how engagement with online services has influenced people’s reaction to Covid-19 and unprecedented confinement to their homes. Our analysis shows that experiences of exercise in the home are dependent on prior exercise engagement, particularly a sense of progress and competency in exercise movements, trust in the instructor and socio-economic privileges that enable participants to love and appreciate their homes. This paper argues that online classes have had positive impact on participants’ ability to cope with lockdown: routine, structure and being seen by others all proved important well-being aspects.

Cultural gerontology has developed critical work around cultural representations of age and ageing and their role in the reproduction of ageism. However, the cultural industries as producers and disseminators of representations remain under researched. This paper draws on a focus group with four older women actors to argue that workforce allocation and assumptions about audience demographics intersect with cultural attitudes around women’s ageing to impact on older women actors’ career opportunities. We argue that ageism within the cultural industries is limiting our ability to develop diverse and non-ageist cultural representation of women’s ageing.

Representations of place and space in Factual Welfare Television (FWT) are under-researched, contributing to neglect of spatial stigma in austerity culture. In this paper, we combine agnotology – the study of manufactured ignorance – with visual grammar methods to examine Channel 5’s Britain’s Benefit Blackspots (2017) to address why FWT is spatially significant. We argue that televisual representations of the abject ‘welfare claimant’ in Britain have a spatial dimension, evident in repeated camera shots of derelict, deindustrialised, litter-strewn outside spaces and large sofas, overflowing ashtrays and dusty corners inside homes. We conclude that FWT’s representations serve two functions: firstly, they obscure the spatial inequalities inherent in austerity policies by reducing social problems to constructed social types and their places and ways of living and, secondly, they enable sets of socio-spatial assumptions that become unquestioned ways of reading and understanding disadvantaged and disadvantagised spaces of residence.

Editing techniques used in Factual Welfare Television (FWT) in the UK undermine narratives of hardship and structural inequality in representations of the living places of welfare claimants. This research identifies the affects of a televisual syntax – or ‘visual grammar’ – of spatial stigma in FWT. Using original data generated in a study of Channel 5’s documentary series On Benefits (2015-19), we conduct a Visual Grammar Analysis to argue that cutaway editing, which inserts camera shots of toilets, canine excrement and fly-tipping into programmes, undermines potentially sympathetic representations of poverty communicated via narrator voiceovers and/or verbal testimonies of participants. Our findings show that cutaway editing is a significant feature in the production of On Benefits and is oppositional to the articulated narrative. The research concludes that cutaway editing in FWT generates disgust towards the living places of benefits claimants, which is productive of a powerful visual grammar of spatial stigma

Media representations of fat and weight play a central role in the circulation of weight stigma. However, the production practices involved have received little attention. This paper focuses on the editing techniques deployed in a UK reality television documentary series, On Benefits. Our analysis of cutaway shots suggests a quantitative and qualitative difference between an episode featuring “‘obese”’ people claiming welfare, compared to the rest in our sample. We examine the cutaways to show how weight stigma intersects with welfare stigma on the grounds of self-control. We conclude that images of bodies, food, and medical aides mobilize weight stigma to overdetermine welfare claimants as underserving while casting suspicion about the purpose of State welfare in the UK.