Headless Zombies: Framing the Fat Body

Abstract

There’s a figure lumbering through the pages of this book so far that now demands attention. It’s haunted the margins of previous chapters just as it’s haunted the margins of Meredith Jones’ makeover culture and Zygmunt Bauman’s consumer culture; it’s the figure of the living dead – the zombie. For both authors the monstrous living dead serve as a dire warning for those tempted to stand still in a social world morally underpinned by the movement of self-betterment. If the previous chapter was successful in arguing that rehabilitation was a necessary movement in the orchestration of transformation, then the zombie physically and symbolically marks the reach of those orchestrations: the zombie is one who won’t rehabilitate or, for the reasons this chapter explores, can’t.

‘The moral … is this: if you put very little in, you get very little out.’ (Sonnenschein, 1973: 405)

You have a BMI of 51.5. You are at a very, very high risk of death from your weight. So it is serious.

Dr Christian Jessen in C4’s Supersize vs. Superskinny

They kill for one reason they kill for food. They eat their victims. That’s what keeps them going.

Dr Foster in Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (1979)