COOKIE PIECES HAVE NO CALORIES: DIET HUMOR AS WOMEN'S RESISTANCE TO DIET CULTURE

by Debbie Iancu-Haddad

Synopsis

Do broken cookies contain calories? Can we have our cake and joke about it? This study focuses on women's humor about dieting in a culture where women are expected to diet. Participant observation in an Israeli Weight Watchers group, interviews with female dieters and qualitative text analysis on a wide variety of humorous texts about dieting were used to generate themes relating to the variety of ways in which diet culture affects women's lives. The appearance of diet humor is viewed as resistance to the power diet culture tries to exert over women. Findings show that resistance is weakest in regard to the basic ideological concepts of diet culture and its expression through consumer culture. Resistance is more evident when diet culture causes conflicts with the dieter?s social network and attempts to change eating habits and exercise patterns. Since they can?t have it both ways, diet humor enables women to eat the cake and joke about it.

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Release date: May 1, 2009

Publisher: VDM Verlag

Print pages: 88