Observing weight stigma in the editing of UK factual welfare programming

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

The cutaway to the toilet: towards a visual grammar of spatial stigma in Factual Welfare Television

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 stigm

A Zika virus-specific IgM elicited in pregnancy exhibits ultrapotent neutralization

10.1016/j.cell.2022.10.023CELL185254826-