Shame,Class,and Embodiment in the Catfish Universe

A Digital Self, Surveilled

Although enabled by online technologies, Angela’s deceit was not wholly technologically determined. Rather, technology was a tool she wielded to fulfill the normative expectations placed on her own embodiment. It is crucial to articulate how the internet intersects with the ideological underpinnings of Tiziana Terranova’s (2000, 64) “outernet” of lived experience: “the network of social, cultural, and economic relationships that crisscross and exceed the Internet.” The juncture of the inter- and outernet is where social and economic relationships intersect with readily available technologies to create a unique digital space that can simultaneously democratize and stratify its users.

Normative body expectations within the outernet demand that inappropriate bodies be reinvented as ideal: explicitly thin, sexualized, and cosmetically curated; implicitly white, monied, passive, and sexually available. Shayla Marie Thiel (2005, 181) states,

computer-mediated communication . . . becomes a site of identity play and experimentation . . . as both a “safehaven” for open expression and normalized communication among genders and conversely, yet another place where voices are often silenced through patriarchal discourses.

This dual function of digital identity space, which both frees and represses its gendered users, mirrors what Sarah Banet-Weiser (2011, 282) describes as “the paradox of how the dissemination of discourses about freedom and equality provides the context for the retrenchment of gender norms and traditional gendered relations.” Here, we glimpse the paradox around computer-mediated communication as liberatory nexus where the outer- and internet collide.

Angela’s use of digital space as a “blank canvas” for identity creation underscores how her own subjecthood was manipulated to “correct” her nonnormative body position. Angela alludes to this while discussing the multiple identities she constructed: “A lot of the personalities that came out were just fragments of myself. Fragments of things I used to be, wanted to be, never could be” (Catfish 2010). Her digital embodiment, manipulated by the internet, can be understood as a self-reformulation to better meet the standards the outernet assumes to be inherently normative and preferable.

Normative bodily preference—and Angela’s real-life inability to meet its standards—is reinforced when her hoax is revealed. When Nev and the filmmakers first meet Angela, they believe they are meeting Megan’s mother. As Nev recalls in an interview after the film’s release, his immediate reaction to Angela was directly related to her body: “Ok, so Angela isn’t the remarkably gorgeous, thin, mom that I thought she was” (20/20 2010, episode 42). As the men spend the rest of the day with Angela, it becomes clear that Angela is Megan. As the three friends leave Angela for the afternoon, they share the following exchange:

Henry: Angela is in love with you.

Nev: Angela is in love with me.

[Awkward silence]

Henry: Right.

Nev: Yeah.

Henry: You can see it.

Nev: Did you see how awkward it was when I was going to leave, and she was like, leaning on the car?

Rel: ’Cause she doesn’t think we are coming back.

Nev: Right.

Rel: Of course she doesn’t think we are coming back.

Henry: She was like “don’t go.”

Rel: No, no, most people wouldn’t go back.

Nev: So, I am ninety percent sure right now that Angela is the voice of Megan.

Rel: Yeah.

Nev: And that I’ve been texting and having this strange affair with this like weird forty-year-old woman.

Rel: Yeah.

All three smile and laugh. (Catfish 2010)

Regardless of any emotional and/or intellectual connection formed over the course of their courtship, when Angela reveals her imperfect self, any vestige of the Megan/Nev relationship collapses. The “weird forty-year-old woman” is positioned as an improper romantic partner for the young, handsome, upper-middle-class Nev, a point driven home by the laughter in the scene described above. Here, the body trumps all, particularly when its corporeality comes into direct conflict with the digital ideal grounded in an ocularcentric understanding of embodiment. Nev reinforces this in an interview when explaining his attraction to Megan: “I mean, obviously there was an image, there was a girl whose photos I had seen, who was beautiful. I was opening up to Megan in ways that I had not with actual girlfriends that I had had” (20/20 2010, episode 42). His emphasis on Megan’s beauty as primary becomes directly correlative to his willingness to be open and communicative with her. Considering the hyperemphasis on the body in digital worlds, Kelly Fuery (2009, 85) notes, “The visuality of the body is privileged, especially in its movement to illustrate the collapse of space and time constraints provided by new media technologies.” As digital technologies erase spatiotemporal limitations, online citizens turn to flexible, mediated images of the body to construct a normatively recognizable and preferential self.

The reconfiguration of the singular Angela into multiple flexible identities through online technologies can additionally be read as reactive to the function of surveillance and authenticity in genres of the real. As Rachel Dubrofsky (2011) has established through her work on reality television, genres of the real leverage surveillance as a tool for the verification of subject authenticity. She notes,

The point is that the action on RTV centers on verifying authenticity: One submits to surveillance as a means of verifying authenticity, the emphasis on how authentic or inauthentic one is presented as being. Surveillance is key in this setup because the more willing one is to submit to surveillance, the more able one is to appear “natural” under surveillance and the more seemingly authentic one becomes (Dubrofsky 2011, 117).

Traditional reality television, then, is predicated on the performance of authenticity. The most successful RTV subjects are those that perform their authenticity—their “realness”—in a believable way. However, in the Catfish universe, surveillance is first and foremost a self-imposed process that occurs off-camera and outside of the mediated gaze of the audience through a technological transformation of the corporeal body. Names are changed, idealized avatars stand in for true physical selves, and voices are altered to create a technologically “real” substitute for the failed physical body. This process does not occur before the mediated gaze of an audience, and therefore manifests self-surveillance as a biopolitical project of body management created and managed by the subjects themselves. The subject, then, is performing authenticity for their own self-surveilling gaze as structured by society’s normative expectations, as well as for the expected external surveillance by both the subject’s target (their online romantic partner) and a potential media audience.

Angela’s use of Facebook as a tool of identity re-creation removed from the limitations of time and space frees her from the boundaries of her corporeal body and allows her to reform her subjectivity into multiple flexible identities, each of which addresses—as noted above—fragments of her self. Making the link between Facebook, surveillance, and genres of the real, Dubrofsky (2011, 120) continues,

Facebook effectively situates users as the master of their own surveillance and as the producers of their self under surveillance. On Facebook, surveillance is a practice of the self, rather than the condition circumscribing one’s display of the self, as on RTV.

Unlike traditional reality TV, a driving force for key participants in Catfish is not authenticity, but rather a self-created subjecthood produced from rigorous self-surveillance against normative gender and bodily standards and created through the flexible space of online technologies.

Exposure, Humiliation, and Catharsis

The process of self-surveillance as mediated authenticity that Angela engages in through online technologies and social networking sites—the process that creates her multiple flexible identities—is the node that Catfish revolves around, as it brings her into contact with Nev, leading to her exposure. Exposure, constructed as a type of catharsis, is centralized in the Catfish universe. After the three friends meet Angela and perceive the deception she has been carrying out, they discuss how they will approach the topic moving forward:

Henry: I am feeling very conscious about, like, embarrassing her?

Nev: Right.

Henry: Like, I really don’t want to . . . hurt this family. Ya know?

Rel: Well she needs a wake-up call.

Henry: I know, but I feel like it’s just not malicious. It’s just sad.

Nev: Right. You know we are not here to be . . .

Henry: Ya know?

Nev: . . . to hurt her, we are here to help.

Rel: I think we deserve to shake the truth out of her.

Nev: Right. (Catfish 2010)

Several functions of cathartic exposure are signaled by this exchange. The first is the desire for cathartic exposure to serve as a type of “help” for the deceiver, a help born of pity. Second, Nev establishes himself as a neutral voice in the conversation. He agrees with what Henry and Rel say, even when those things are contradictory. The construction of Nev as “neutral” facilitator of cathartic exposure will become the template for his role in Catfish: The TV Show, a role that he establishes in the film to diffuse the tension between he and Angela. Once Nev meets Angela and understands that there is no Megan, he slips away from being the story’s protagonist to objective observer, distancing himself from the emotional investment he previously claimed. This helps to shield Nev from negative blowback around what Rel hints at in the conversation above as the third function of cathartic exposure: humiliation.

In her 2004 article “Humiliation, Subjectivity, and Reality TV,” Myra Mendible discusses the dynamics of humiliation on reality TV, noting that humiliation requires an interdependence of factors: “the object of humiliation must know s/he is being humiliated and the perpetrator must be willfully exercising that power” (Mendible 2004, 336). Cathartic exposure in the Catfish universe trades on this formula. This is thrown into sharp relief during the scenes that focus on Angela’s exposure, and her corresponding humiliation, at the willing hands of Nev.

When Angela is exposed, the film relishes contrasting her inappropriate corporality with that of Megan’s idealized body, established as the film crosscuts between pictures of the two. Megan is young, normatively beautiful, thin, and trendy. Angela is middle-aged, plain, and soft-bodied with an unremarkable wardrobe. Facebook Megan wears makeup and Angela does not. Megan circulates in the worlds of music and fashion. Angela is a stay-at home mother in a lower-middle-class family. Both have long hair, in Angela’s case past her waist. Whereas Megan’s hair is dark brown, sleek, and shiny with blonde highlights, Angela’s is a duller shade of brown, thin, untamed, and devoid of styling products. This visual contrasting of appropriately maintained long hair—a frequent marker of normative femininity—is an element in the film that reinforces the idea that one of these women is properly gendered and one is not.

However, when Angela is exposed, her harshest indictment comes from a comparison to Nev, not other women. During the film’s denouement, Angela apologizes to Nev while complimenting him, focusing on his smile and, importantly, his teeth. In giving him directions for his pose while she sketches him, she says, “Smile with a little teeth. You have nice teeth” (Catfish 2010). The camera repeatedly focuses on the pair’s mouths, highlighting their teeth. Angela’s teeth are faintly yellowed and crooked; Nev’s are pearly white and perfectly straight. The more Angela speaks, the more of her teeth we see. She again compliments Nev on his teeth—“beautiful teeth” (Catfish 2010)—as the audience is shown a close-up of her mouth. The film leverages conventional stereotypes of “bad” teeth, poor hygiene, and low economic status to emphasize Angela’s incorrect body. The focus on Angela’s teeth, the shaming of her body as incorrectly gendered and classed, is punishment through humiliation. Angela becomes reduced to her teeth only, a process of mediation that whittles her subjecthood down to a singular, disarticulated representation of herself. The visual construction on Angela’s teeth, then, highlights to the audience her failed class, gender, and body positions, underscoring the film’s belief that she cannot be an appropriate partner for Nev. It is a moment of high exploitation and intense ridicule of Angela and her physical self.

During this scene, Angela apologizes for tricking Nev into caring about her and expresses regret for hurting him, as she does her teeth overwhelm the image. Nev flashes his perfect smile, protesting that he had cared and denying that she or the deception had hurt him. As the viewer knows from Nev’s earlier admissions that he had developed intense feelings for Megan, his protestations come off as insincere, and his smile unmoving and continuously plastered across his face, condescending. He soon asks Angela to talk to him as Megan and, despite her professed hesitation, prods her into the imitation. It is a highly uncomfortable moment of humiliation for Angela that reinforces the condescension Nev’s smile has belied. Indeed, in commenting on that scene in a later interview, he makes his intentions clear:

I wanted her to be, to feel as uncomfortable as I did. I was really crazy about that person, Do you understand just how much that meant to me? That thing that you thought was easy and fun and was a game to you, wasn’t a game for me. So deal with it right now. You owe me that. (20/20 2010, episode 42)

Nev’s coldness toward Angela and his purposeful prodding of her into the vocal imitation, as described above, exemplify how the film’s final third section works hard to convince viewers that this plain, middle-aged housewife with bad teeth from rural Michigan could never emotionally damage the young, handsome photographer from New York City with the perfect smile. Indeed, the film cuts from the exposure scene to footage filmed at an earlier, unspecified time in Nev and Megan’s relationship. Nev, talking to the camera, says, “I don’t feel like realistically there is any way that Megan and I can go out or be together without her getting hurt. ’Cause I’m not getting hurt” (Catfish 2010). Nev’s insistence of his imperviousness to Angela’s manipulations underscore that the humiliation inherent in the process of cathartic exposure is specific to Angela only, despite the fact that the first two-thirds of the film rest on Nev’s emotional investment in the relationship.

Considering this intense humiliation and the negative experience normally associated with the act of public humiliation itself, the release of the film found many critics, reviewers, and audiences asking why Angela would have consented to the film’s release. In addition to humiliation, an ambiguous type of “helping” intervention is bound up with cathartic exposure in Catfish. Angela herself referenced this in the film as well as after its release as an intervention that served as a form of acknowledgment of her own subjecthood. Angela’s experiments in digital identity play appear to conceal a deep desire for liberation from her own reality. Her husband Vince came to their marriage with two twin sons who are severely mentally and physically handicapped, and it falls on Angela to provide them with twenty-four-hour care. This, combined with her domestic roles as stay-at-home wife and mother to their daughter, produces a life that is spoken for by others. She admits as much, through tears, in the film:

You know, when I met the boys, I knew I was making a sacrifice with my life. But I didn’t count the cost . . . of things that I was going to be giving up, sort of resigning for the rest of my life. (Catfish 2010)

After the film’s release, when asked why she began the charade, she bluntly explains, “I didn’t have anything else in my life. It was the only thing I had going for me” (20/20 2010, episode 42). The lengths to which Angela went to create Megan and the other identities can be understood as an expression of her desire to reclaim herself in her own life.

Cathartic exposure for Angela, then, may contain stinging humiliation, but it also affords acknowledgment. The camera is on her, the filmmakers are making a movie about her, the audience will talk about her. Interestingly, she seems to have been aware of the possibility of her exposé on film from the beginning of the deception, as evidenced by the following two noteworthy comments:

I guess in the back of my mind I knew this would happen . . . kinda had a feeling that you guys [the filmmakers] would maybe do something with this. (Catfish 2010)

When I first started interacting with them on Facebook, even though I knew it was all a lie, and all these people were fake, I was like “this would make a great film, I hope they are filming it.” And I had wrote something about, you know, “maybe somebody should be filming this.” And I didn’t know if they were or not, but I was hoping that they were. (20/20 2010, episode 4)

Of course, while the mediated nature of these statements cannot be overlooked, to dismiss Angela’s statements about her motivations simply because they are mediated runs the risk of undermining her selfhood, as the film does. Which is to say, this analysis of her actions and her stated motivations is not interested in a separation and evaluation of her mediated self from her nonmediated self. Rather, my goal is to articulate the film’s handling of Angela and Nev’s relationship as the template for the treatment of classed, gendered, and fat bodies in the mediated Catfish universe as a whole.

The film forms specific ideological foundations of the Catfish universe, including using online technologies as tools of normative identity reformation, self-surveillance as a form of mediated authenticity, and the catharsis of exposure. These three strategies form the baseline patterns for increased instances of shametainment on the television show; they are imported directly into the show’s form and function. However, because the television show has more instances of catfishing to profile in its many episodes, it adds dimension to the process of creating shametainment, including an intense focus on fat bodies and poverty. In the following section, I will address how these factors have been layered onto the existing organizing principles of the Catfish universe to further create entertainment from spectacularizing shame.

The Privilege of Doubt

One of the most significant changes from the film to the television show has to do with the process of reconciliation between online and offline identities. Each episode opens with Nev reading Max an e-mail he received from their next client, outlining the request for help, giving a brief history of the online relationship, and foreshadowing doubts. After an initial video chat, the hosts travel to the client’s home, gathering additional background information and leaving with a promise to investigate. Eventually, the cybersleuthing confirms that the online partner was dishonest on one or more occasion. Once these inconsistencies have been uncovered, Nev, Max, and the client travel to confront the catfisher. Clients are catfished by their online partner in degrees varying from the almost truthful to the maliciously false.

After Nev and Max leave the first in-person client meeting, they articulate their suspicion about both the story and the client. Most often these comments revolve around their disbelief that the client would accept their partner’s more fantastic statements and excuses for not meeting over video chat or in person. These doubts are grounded in common sense, certainly for the show’s technologically savvy audience, ⁴ and as such serve an important function in situating Nev and Max, rather than the client, as points of viewer identification.

This is critical, as the doubts they express mirror conventional wisdom in a globally connected context: who wouldn’t Google a stranger they met online; it’s more likely that someone is lying to you on the internet than not; what type of person could be that trusting? This implicit rhetorical questioning, embodied on the show through Max and Nev as viewer proxies, positions the client at best as naïve and unworldly, and at worst as an unintelligent rube. In contrast to the client, Nev and Max are constructed as properly skeptical and inquisitive while the client is positioned as pitifully naïve. The contrastive separation of the hosts from the clients makes visible the social hierarchies that shaming rituals expose (Mendible 2016, 11).

Although Nev attempts to maintain the tone of neutrality and sympathy hinted at in the end of the film, Max is much more judgmental of clients’ behaviors, aggressively verbalizing his opinions. For example, when Nev reads an e-mail from Jeff, who had traveled to Texas to meet his online love Megan only to be stood up, Max yells at the computer “Then move on” (Catfish: The TV Show, season 3, episode 9). In the same scene, when Nev relays Jeff’s statement that he and Megan have never video chatted, Max throws up his hands in exasperation. In another episode, Nev reads Max an e-mail from Mike, who says he lives in the same city as his online partner Caroline, yet they have never met. Max, again looking exasperated, stares directly into the camera and addresses the audience, saying, “Time out. If you are talking to someone who lives in your city, and they don’t want to meet up with you, they are a catfish and you should run” (Catfish: The TV Show, season 2, episode 16). Later in the same episode, Max’s frustration with Jeff is still evident. After their face-to-face meeting, Max states, “She is just lying to him through her teeth and leading him on over and over. I can’t believe he keeps going back for more” (Catfish: The TV Show, season 2, episode 16).

The client’s assumed naivety and low intelligence are reinforced during the phase of cybersleuthing Nev and Max undertake. Their investigative efforts are comprised of Google image searches, phone calls, basic web searches, and checks of social media profiles—simple actions that would seemingly not be out of the realm of possibility for the client to have performed beforehand. The fact that they hadn’t, and that the show exhibits the work as easily and quickly accomplished by the hosts, is another indicator that the show questions the client’s intellectual capabilities. This focus on intelligence and common sense obscures one of the biggest contextual factors in the show: money. Client Joe has never video chatted with his online girlfriend Kari Ann. This is not because of over-trusting or a lack of common sense. Joe does not own a webcam and connects to the internet in his rural upstate New York home via a dial-up modem, making video chatting impossible. To Skype with Nev at the beginning of the show, he drives to a bookstore with free internet access and public computers. When Nev asks him what is stopping him from visiting Kari Ann and meeting her in person, Joe simply responses, “Money. Definitely money” (Catfish: The TV Show, season 2, episode 7). Nev and Max do not comment on this statement; they simply begin another line of questioning.

As Helen Wood and Beverley Skeggs (2004, 206) note, “on reality TV, class as a significant category endures.” This is especially true in the Catfish universe. Money, and the lack thereof, is a world-defining factor in many of the Catfish narratives. Joe is not alone in struggling with financial obstacles; many of the participants are lower middle and working class, usually in their early to mid-twenties. A number are single parents, many live with their parents or with extended family members, have low-paying jobs (e.g., McDonald’s or other fast-food service, factory, and/or warehouse work). Client Whitney, for instance, works at Wendy’s and is the sole earner in her household of six in Brooklyn. Whitney’s financial situation is so desperate that she and her online partner Bre pretend to be in a catfish scenario to try to trick Nev and Max into flying Whitney from Brooklyn to California to finally meet Bre in person. Many of the participants live in rural areas that do not offer significant education or employment opportunities and are looking to leave. As client Joe says of his home region of Upstate New York, “We have more cows here than people” and (when addressing his investment in his online relationship) “I am ready to start a life with [Kari Ann] and get out of this town” (Catfish: The TV Show, season 2, episode 7).

In some cases, the online couples have exchanged money, often as a result of the need to pay rent, bills, and so on. Indeed, Margaret Lyons (2013) notes,

One of the under-acknowledged facets of Catfish is how frequently poverty plays a role in one or both people’s lives. Homelessness and the threat of homelessness have come up on multiple episodes. The unspoken answer to “why haven’t you guys ever met?” is often “because neither of us could afford a plane ticket.” In a few instances, catfishers and –ees have given and received money, and Nev and Max treat these transactions with horror.

Financial insecurity is constructed as a transgression of the working class, to be identified and “called out” through Nev and Max’s performance of shock and disapproval. This is exemplified in season 2 with client Keyonnah. Keyonnah believes that she is in a relationship with the rapper/celebrity Bow Wow, in no small part because the person claiming to be Bow Wow had sent her US$10,000. Keyonnah—who works at McDonald’s—used the gift to cover car payments for her family, mortgage payments, and day care for her daughter. Nev and Max discuss the money obsessively—where did it come from, who would send that much money, and why would they do it? When it is revealed that Bow Wow is really a woman named Dee who borrowed the money from family and friends with no intention of paying it back, Nev is uncharacteristically stern, reacting more harshly to Dee’s financial transgressions than her manipulation of Keyonnah.

Nev and Max’s horror at monetary transactions between relative strangers is, by proxy, a horror at their client’s precarious financial positions, which are pinpointed as failings of the show’s participants. Nev and Max’s reaction to the socioeconomic status of the participants is to simply avoid discussing it, unless in an extreme case as in the example above. This avoidance forms the show’s passive address around class status. Participants attempt to raise financial and class issues, but Nev and Max’s refusal to comment in any significant manner—if acknowledging the issue at all—elides substantive progressive discussions on poverty while highlighting it as a source of shame. The silence around class that Nev and Max perpetuate only intensifies its formative role in the show. ⁵

Failed Fat Bodies

As in the film, cathartic exposure acts as the “payoff” to the mystery of each episode. This exposure reveals, more often than not, that one of the primary motivations for the catfisher’s actions is that they are fat. ⁶ Fatness, like class, is a core element of the show that is passively addressed by both participants and hosts. When questioned about why they lied, the fat catfisher will speak to their fatness without specifically naming it. For example, when catfisher Matt (who is fat) is confronted about his lies to Kim (who is also fat, although less so than Matt), he explains his actions by saying, “As you can tell, I am a pretty big guy, and that’s, you know, a big reason why I’ve been nervous to meet with you” (Catfish: The TV Show, season 1, episode 3). Fat catfisher Kristyn explains similarly: “I needed a mask. And that [the fake profile] was my mask” (Catfish: The TV Show, season 2, episode 7). These statements are typical of the series’ revelations of fatness. By passively addressing fatness, the show invests in contemporary pejorative stereotypes of fat bodies. Kathleen LeBesco (2004, 1) explains,

Aesthetically, fat is the antithesis of the beauty idea of the day: tight, lean, and toned. Viewed, then, as both unhealthy and unattractive, fat people are widely presented in popular culture and interpersonal interactions as revolting—they are agents of abhorrence and disgust.

Talking around fatness constitutes a refusal to explicitly name it, which feeds into the idea of fat bodies as unlovable and asexual, something the fat catfishers attempt to overcome through the digital reformation of their bodies in online spaces according to normative bodily standards. The success of their romantic deception as self-surveilled mediated selves only serves to reinforce the primacy of the corporeal image in online communication. As Mike states to his fat catfisher Kristyn after she admits to lying about her name and what she looks like, “those are two pretty important things that were completely based on a lie, which is why I was in this in the first place” (Catfish: The TV Show, season 2, episode 7). With this, Mike pinpoints the primary motivations for entering romantic relationships as normative physicality and the promise of interaction with desirable bodies. Lyons (2013) expounds,

We’re told as children that it’s what’s on the inside that counts, but anyone with a body that does not confirm to contemporary standards of beauty knows that’s bullshit. Of course people on Catfish lie about their bodies. And while the show reminds us over and over that it’s bad to lie, it also subtly confirms that most of these people were right to: Nearly all of the catfishes, when confronted with the information that their catfishers were overweight, changed their tune about how in love they were.

The double standard Lyons references here—lying is wrong unless it is to conceal something undesirable—speaks back to the catfisher’s initial impulse for self-surveillance and digitally perfected bodies. As with Angela and Nev, embodiment and normative bodily standards trump emotional intimacy and psychological connection as the primary connective tissue in these relationships. Lying about one’s body, then, can be construed a reasonable way to fulfill unmet intimacy and emotional needs.

The passive address to fatness has become such an integral part of the show that cohost Max noted in an interview: “There are people who call our show Fatfish, because it’s all about people who are ashamed of being overweight” (L Weber 2014). The correlation of fatness with catfishing, shame, and entertainment has become a defining characteristic of the Catfish universe. Fatness and its embodiment as “a spoiled and sexually undesirable identity” (Sukhan 2012, 196) thereby become a central node within the function of shametainment. Fat bodies are thereby constituted as deserving targets of derision, as the shame and humor associated with fatness in the Catfish universe have become the pervasive cultural dialogue around the show. National Public Radio (NPR) pop culture critic Linda Holmes quipped, “If you wanted an alternative title for this show it could be ‘Loveable or Size Twenty-Four’” (NPR Pop Culture Happy Hour Podcast, episode June 27 2014). Although there may be an urge to take this comment ironically particularly because Holmes is a self-professed feminist and progressive, what follows the comment on the podcast is a round of laughter from the other panelists, no further discussion of the comment itself, and a general bashing of the show. If there is irony present it is not readily apparent. Holmes, like the show’s hosts, sees these two vectors (lovable and fat) as mutually exclusive, and the implications of the two working in tandem as humorous. In this way, the show gleans entertainment from the spectacle of fat bodies as sexualized.

The spectacle of sexualized fat bodies as entertainment speaks to the socially sanctioned practice of fat discrimination. Fat bias and discrimination are intimately linked to the neoliberal rhetoric of consumer choice as a form of appropriate subject formation created through bodily hypervigilance and self-discipline (Guthman 2009). LeBesco (2004, 55) explains,

People’s beliefs about whether or not fat can be controlled (and thus whether or not a fat person warrants insult) are linked to their more fundamental social ideologies. The endorsement of a Protestant ethic ideology leads one to view stigmatized people as willful violators of traditional American values such as moral character, hard work, and self-discipline.

Fat bias, then, is socially acceptable because fatness is treated as volitional (LeBesco 2004), as a moral failing, as independent of mitigating factors, and as alterable if the individual had the personal control—the will—to manage their own body.

The emphasis on choice and personal responsibility within the mediated landscape of the Catfish universe flattens the imbricated social and economic factors bound within embodiment. As Gareth Palmer (2014, 301) explains, “Being ‘fat’ has profound and complex structural determinants. But while a variety of factors might explain the rising incidence of obesity, what television does is simplify the issue.” In this way, neoliberal blame laid at the feet of fat individuals on the show obscures the socioeconomic conditions of fatness.

The failure of the fat body is popularly considered as a failure to achieve a position within the dominant socioeconomic class (LeBesco 2004), and as such fat becomes a constant, visible marker of class (Sukhan 2012). In this way, food choice and its bodily repercussions become separated from the economics of consumption and are instead located within the rhetoric of choice, material consumption, and social progress. The class-based factors of fatness, then, are simultaneously obscured by the show while directly correlating fatness with accusations of poor choice and irresponsibility. Max’s comments in an interview exemplify this idea: “Most of the people on our show are dealing with image issues. Instead of actually eating right and actually working out, they take a shortcut to that and pretend to be someone who is in shape” (L Weber 2014).

The idea of “fixing” fatness through personal responsibility and bodily management is not unique to Catfish. Indeed, a number of reality television shows, most notably The Biggest Loser (2004–present), focus on overcoming fatness by reinventing failed bodies along normative standards through expert intervention and large-scale lifestyle changes. The focus in these narratives is on overcoming failed bodies through education, hardwork, and perseverance. Although the previous personal choices of the contestants are criticized and blamed for their corporeal failure, they are also protected from derision by their willingness to change, that is, by their appearance on the show. Discussing The Biggest Loser, Palmer (2014, 309) notes, “we are prevented from mounting too hard a critique of the contestants in lifestyle formats because they have accepted the common judgment that they are/were gross and need to change.”

However, Catfish is uninterested in change or correction around the bodies of its participants. Rather, it uses their spectacularization to create the cathartic exposure fundamental to its shametainment narrative, and in this way invites critique of fat bodies. Its passive address to class and fatness—which simultaneously ignores and highlights these critical factors within the Catfish universe—reifies harmful stereotypes about classed and fat bodies with material implications. Studies have shown that poverty-based fatness is linked to “limited resources for health, medical care, nutrition, and exercise, as well as discrimination and poorer services from medical and mental health professionals” (Fikkan and Rothblum 2012, 634). In addition, a recent study conducted in four countries found that fatness was the primary motivation for childhood bullying (Puhl et al. 2016). Indeed, the social consequences—both internal and external—heaped onto fat individuals are severe. LeBesco (2004, 88) expounds,

There is a self-fulfilling prophecy at work in the denigration of fat people that can lead to disturbances in their interpersonal and sexual relationships. Because the social environment fails to support the idea of fat as personally and sexually appealing, the continuous insults to which they are subject may do psychic damage to fat people.

Fatness, and the prevailing social acceptance around its stigma, produces serious psychological, medical, social, and economic repercussions.

By spectacularizing fat bodies as failed bodies without the contextualization of the social and economic factors that help to construct fatness, the Catfish universe endorses shame around fatness, as well as the exposure of that shame for entertainment purposes. The alignment of neoliberal choice, personal responsibility, and failed normative class and body positions serves to showcase vulnerable populations in the Catfish universe as worthy targets of scorn in shametainment. As Lyons (2013) concludes,

The cases depicted on Catfish, as well as both participants in these somewhat fraudulent relationships, reflect some of the most damaging messages of American culture: Don’t be fat. Don’t be poor. Don’t be lonely. And if you are, for God’s sake, don’t tell anyone about it.