Supersize vs. Superskinny: (Re)framing the freak show in contemporary popular culture

While the freak show once dominated western stages and was, as scholar Robert Bogdan notes, one of the most popular forms of entertainment for nearly a century, the increasing concern surrounding the political, ethical and moral implications of gazing openly upon abnormal bodies cemented the eventual decline of its popularity in the early- to mid-twentieth century. However, as scholars have noted, the eventual decline of the freak show did not necessarily signal the end to the public’s fascination with looking at anomalous or extraordinary bodies. Instead, this fascination was reconfigured within contemporary culture to sites such as reality television, tabloid publications and medical documentaries. Within this article, I focus on the popular Channel 4 reality documentary series: Supersize vs. Superskinny (2008– 2014). The programme, which spans seven series, follows two pairs of participants with disparate body sizes and ‘extreme’ diets as they swap their usual meals with one another for one full week in an attempt to challenge their current relationship to food and diet. Like the freak show – a complex performance practice that extends beyond the sideshow or carnival stages to include modes of looking at bodies that included medical theatres and lectures, ethnographic displays, and museums – Supersize vs. Superskinny is a hybrid of spectacle, entertainment and medical clinic, and thus, has emerged as a prime case study of these aforementioned contemporary socially sanctioned sites of gazing upon Othered bodies. In this article, I intend to conduct a close reading of two episodes from within the series as a means of not only exploring the aesthetic and narrative similarities between the programme and the historic freak show, but to explore how the programme, in its framing and presentation of exceptional bodies, implicitly reinforces the moral, political and cultural superiority of the so-called ‘normate’.