Precious Opportunities: Black Girl Stories and Resistance Pedagogies as Critical Race Feminist Responses to the Childhood Obesity Epidemic

Black girls have been featured throughout the "real" genre of televisual media as universal representatives of obese youth in America. Statistically, they are the youth population with the highest prevalence of obesity. Precious Opportunities is attentive to the treatment of black girls bodies within the "childhood obesity" visual narrative through a critical examination of commercial mass media. This dissertation is organized around four major areas: American consumer culture, feminist body theory, critical race theory, and resistance pedagogy. Using a critical race feminist framework, this project seeks to challenge the framing of "childhood obesity" within popular media. It also challenges neoliberal recommendations that individual youth simply "eat better" and "workout." The dissertation argues that the fiercening of capitalism and expansion of media conglomerates through acquisitions has significantly influenced individual decision-making and consumer choice. A multi-sited media ethnography, it begins with a content analysis of Too Fat for Fifteen: Fighting Back, the first televised reality series dedicated to "childhood obesity," followed by an interrogation of corporate actions by primary parent companies involved with the series. Precious Opportunities advances humanities-based responses to the framing of childhood obesity in a "pedagogy of mass consumption." The first response explores the treatment of black girls' bodies within black feminist literature as an alternative to televisual media. Using Sapphire's novel Push as a counterstory, it analyzes "childhood obesity" from the perspective of Precious Jones, a fat black girl protagonist. The second response engages youth directly in an eight-week summer camp, Camp Carrot Seed. As a "pedagogy for social change" it offered a group of black teenagers opportunities to develop multiple literacies including: organic gardening, grocery shopping, cooking, creative expression, and environmental stewardship in exchange for studying their decision-making regarding food and physical activity.