This is a self-archived – parallel published version of an original article. This version may differ from the original in pagination and typographic details. When using please cite the original. Taylor & Francis: This is an Accepted Manuscript version of the following article, accepted for publication in: JOURNAL NORA – Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research CITATION Kaisu Hynnä-Granberg (2022): Enduring Emotions. Fat Time and Weight Loss in the Finnish Body Positive Podcasts Jenny and the Fat Myth Busters and The Soft, NORA - Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research, DOI: 10.1080/08038740.2022.2139754 It is deposited under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ ) which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. 1 Enduring emotions. Fat Time and Weight Loss in the Finnish Body Positive Podcasts Jenny and the Fat Myth Busters and The Soft ABSTRACT: The article analyses two Finnish body positive podcasts, Jenny and the Fat Myth Busters and The Soft, zooming in on their way of discussing weight loss. Drawing on queer studies’ understanding of queer time, the article discusses fat time as a nonlinear temporality, which, as a product of fat-marginalizing culture, is hurtful yet characterized by a potential to resist. The article utilizes Sara Ahmed’s, Rebecca Coleman’s, and Sienne Ngai’s formulations of emotions and temporality. Based on a situated close reading, it argues that fat time is characterized by “ugly feelings that stay.” Even as the body changes, emotions such as anxiety and pessimism endure, making both the present and future fat. KEYWORDS: body positivity; fat; time; temporality; emotion WORD COUNT: 8238 2 Introduction Feminism has always had at its core a struggle for a better future (see, e.g., Coleman, 2013; Grosz, 2005). Imagining and creating a future undetermined by the past is not simply a theoretical challenge but a lifeline to groups such as fat and queer people, categorically pushed outside normative understandings of time. To question heteronormative temporality, queer studies scholars Lee Edelman (2004) and Jack Halberstam (2003; 2005) famously discuss “queer time” as a temporality that, while stemming from hierarchizing structures, disrupts and challenges normative understandings of a productive and happy life. In this article, I discuss “fat time” as a temporality that, despite its hurtfulness, can offer a way out from the discriminatory linear figurations of weight loss as a success story, as neoliberal diet culture defines it. To study the affectivity of fat time, I analyze Finnish women’s weight loss stories in body positive podcasts. Contemporary diet culture routinely associates fatness with attributes such as poor health, unproductivity, undesirability, laziness, lack of discipline, and low fertility (LeBesco, 2004). According to the logics of diet culture, fat people can only reach a future by losing weight (Hass, 2018; White, 2013). The interdisciplinary field of fat studies has since the 2000s (Harjunen and Kyrölä, 2007: 12–15; Wann, 2009: ix–x) paid specific attention to how fatness—a social and cultural category defined largely by context, not by the ratio of one’s weight to height (e.g., Harjunen and Kyrölä, 2007: 15)—affects a subject’s experience and how this experience is gendered; women are understood to be fat at a lower weight than men, and fatness affects women’s social status more so than men’s (Zimdars, 2019; Harjunen and Kyrölä, 2007). Scholars (e.g., Fox, 2018: 223; Hass, 2018: 172) have turned to the concept of “fat time” to explain the way that fatness is often experienced as a temporary way of being. According to Hannele Harjunen’s (2007) study on fat women’s experiences in Finland, fat people tend to imagine fatness as a liminal state—a passing characteristic of their body. Fat studies scholars (Kargbo, 2013; McFarland, Slothouber and Taylor, 2018; Tidgwell et al., 2018: 116–117; White, 2013) have also built connections from the concept of fat time to queer time and describe fat time as a temporality that defies social and political conventions. My understanding of fat time stems from a similar queer framework, and I define fat time as a cyclical temporality characterized by an affective presence of fatness. Herein, queer signals an epistemological and theoretical stance that critiques corporeal norms in general (see, e.g., Halberstam, 2005: 1–2). 3 This article reworks and expands ideas of fat temporality by investigating its emotional landscapes. I claim that focusing on the emotional register of fat time can further our knowledge of the way that time is corporeally experienced. I believe that talking about the affective persistence of fat can work as an antidote to the oppressiveness of the idea that fat is always transient; fat time becomes understood as affective, lingering from times when fat is materially present in the body to ones when it is not (see also Crawford, 2017). I zoom in on stories of weight loss in the Finnish body positive podcasts Jenny and the Fat Myth Busters (originally Jenny ja läskimyytinmurtajat, translation by the author, from henceforth JFMB) and The Soft (originally Pehmee, translation by the collective The Soft) that, through their wide-scale multi-media presence and popularity beyond podcasts, represent prevalent tendencies in the Finnish body positive discussion. I study the podcasts using my own corporeal history, present, and imaginable futures as analytical resources. Utilizing a method of situated close reading, I analyze the material in a repetitive, minute manner, paying specific attention to temporality and emotions. This mode of analysis, taking place in the privacy and intimacy offered by my earbuds with podcasts as the medium (Spinelli and Dann, 2019: 3, 7–8), is deeply invested in the personal as political. The analysis is grounded in feminist understandings of the situatedness of the researcher as significant for research even when they aim to be objective (Haraway, 1988; Harding, 1986). Although discussing fat time by focusing on stories of weight loss may seem contradictory, I suggest that studying slimming and slimmed down bodies, besides fattening and fattened up bodies, helps to move past normative, linear understandings of time where the fat present and future become oxymorons, and losing weight is imagined as steady progress from a fat body to a thin one. For fat studies, weight loss is a highly controversial subject, and several fat activists argue that those who have either lost weight or are attempting to lose weight should not be allowed a voice within the community as their decision to lose weight represents anti- fat attitudes (see Maor, 2013). Yet, as Heather Brown and April M. Herndon (2020: 143) suggest, weight loss does not erase the memories of one’s experiences of being fat, nor does it necessarily alter their political commitments. Many people who have lost weight become allies to fat. Yet, others may start negating their past fat body or the fat bodies of others. When looked at from the perspective of the endurance of the emotions involved with fatness, fat time, despite the political attitudes of the weight loser, involves both people who are currently culturally understood to be fat and people who have been understood as fat before. 4 Since weight loss can significantly alter how one is treated by others, the latter inhabit privileged positions in relation to the former. Studying the emotions involved with weight loss is nevertheless valid and important since it offers a unique view into the affective resilience of fat time, which, much like queer time (see also Ahmed, 2011; McCallum and Tuhkanen, 2011), is circular in nature and made up of moments where the past, present, and future overlap. I argue that even in weight loss that is permanent or long-lasting, emotions such as anxiety, hope, and pessimism endure, making both the present and future fat despite one’s current body type. I start by conceptualizing fat time in relation to queer time, after which I introduce the method and material in more detail. The analysis is divided into three sections. The first section analyses weight loss as a process and looks at the way that temporalities entangle in discussions of weight loss and body positivity. The second section zooms closer in on the specific emotions discussed in the podcasts, investigating their temporal nature. The third section introduces the concept of “ugly feelings that stay” (cf., Coleman, 2008; Ngai, 2005). I suggest that through this notion, fat studies and feminist studies can better understand the relation of people of different sizes to body positivity. Conceptualizing fat time From childhood to old age, bodies grow, shrink, age, expand, and narrow—in other words, transform. Despite this ontological fact, media continues to be fascinated by swift changes to bodies and celebrate weight loss as well as express shock at weight gain. A central method for portraying fatness in the media has long been “before” and “after” images. Before and after images lock fat bodies in the past while representing the future as thin (Crawford, 2017: 448; Fox, 2018: 216, 222). The pictures ask the thin viewer to imagine fat as a threatening potentiality that needs to be actively rejected and managed while guiding the fat recipient to focus on a future where weight loss has fixed all problems. The possibility of living the fat body as it is now becomes an impossibility (Kyrölä and Harjunen, 2017). While before and after images continue to be part of tabloids, magazines, and ads, media scholars speculate that social media has shifted the cultural focus on the body toward a more processual one (e.g., Ryan, 2016). Social media influencers focused on health, eating, and 5 exercise in Finland and elsewhere increasingly comment on diet culture by supplementing the fat and thin before and after images with a third “healthy” image of a subject who exercises and eats nutritiously without taking the practices to the extreme. The healthy image implies that bodily change is more contiguous than presumed by the earlier two images while suggesting that weight loss can be destructive. Yet, the added image continues to imply that the fat body is a body that needs changing and negates the possibility of fat bodies “just existing.” Media’s approach to fatness encapsulates the Western neoliberal ethos in which fatness is understood as the causal result of harmful behavior (for scholarship on fat as a response to something, see Orbach, 1978). In 1997, the World Health Organization declared obesity a global epidemic, strengthening the already-widespread conception of fatness as a crisis-like situation, not an ordinary bodily form in which numbers of people live throughout their lives. The epidemic was seen to touch not only the rich welfare states of the North and West but, increasingly, also the Global South. Population was understood to be in danger of a “slow death” (Berlant, 2007), of wearing out because of its habit of overindulging instead of taking care of its health. Although obesity is treated as a massive problem, it is portrayed as something that could and should be changed through proper diet and exercise. Problematically, some feminist scholars, while critical of body norms in general, share this understanding (for overviews of such scholarship, see Crawford, 2017; Kyrölä and Harjunen, 2017). Lauren Berlant (2011), for example, discusses fatness as an embodied result of trauma that has driven the subject to eat. She analyzes fat and pleasure-eating as forms of lateral agency that do not involve a projection toward the future. In readings such as that by Berlant, fatness, especially in cases where the subject is not even trying to lose weight, comes to signal a “death drive” (White, 2012) or having “no future” (Fox, 2018; Hass, 2018; White, 2013). Fatness’s assumed complexity in relation to the future becomes apparent especially in readings of fat reproduction. Fat people are seen as less likely to marry than thin people, to devour rather than to produce to support their family and nation, and to be unlikely to conceive children. In cases where fat people do have children, they are assumed to be bad parents simply because they are fat (McFarland, Slothouber and Taylor, 2018; White, 2013). Much like queer people, fat people are claimed to disregard the continuation of population through “lifestyles” that do not aim toward reproduction (Halberstam, 2005: 1–5) but rather 6 toward self-indulgence and hedonism. Fat bodies’ treatment speaks not only of fat phobia but also of queer phobia. Since fat people are seen to jeopardize longevity and the continuation of population, fat panic can be seen as a form heterosexism (Crawford, 2017). Therefore, from the perspective of temporality and reproduction, queer readings of fatness are necessary and inevitable. Despite similarities between fat time and queer time, fat’s and queer’s assumed positionalities differ from one another. While sexualities are often understood to be stable, popular discourse represents fatness as erasable. However, sexual preferences, fantasies, and sexual identifications can change during a person’s lifetime (Paasonen, 2018b: 544–547; 2018a), while the quantity of fat in a person’s body is often difficult to change. In the case of weight loss, feelings of fatness may remain similar or even untouched. Queer time and fat time therefore often rub against logics of simple identity categories, while both temporalities are shaped by emotions (cf., Paasonen, 2018a; 2018b). Fat studies scholars (e.g., Crawford, 2017; Fox, 2018; McFarland, Slothouber and Taylor, 2018) have in the past few years paid increasing critical attention to normative ideas of a successful life. Several have turned to the works of Halberstam (2003, 2005) and Edelman (2004), who argue that instead of trying to keep up with normative tempo, one could embrace the messiness of standing outside paradigmatic markers of life. Tracy Tidgwell, May Friedman, Jen Rinaldi, Crystal Kotow, and Emily R.M. Lind (2018: 115, 121) define fat time as a time that “present[s] fatness as a communally binding, culturally important, and desirable way of living. [It] consider[s] pasts and presents and critique[s] the myth of progress, opening up visceral, lived desires of and for fat futures.” Majida Kargbo (2013: 162) and Francis Ray White (2013) similarly discuss fat futurity as one that refuses the position of abject and inserts the fat body with corporeal possibility. Lucas Crawford (2017) focuses on the fat present or presence, arguing that fat can be understood as a comforting and protective feeling that reoccurs and, as such, challenges normative temporalities. Continuing the line of thinking in these definitions, I suggest that fat time is a temporality that is grounded in the present yet highly open to other temporalities that affect the way that one perceives the now. While fat time imbues fat bodies with possibilities and is nurturing toward moments of regrouping, it is a construction based on the ugly experiences (see Ngai, 2005) of fat marginalization. 7 Methodology and data As weight loss and dieting are things that many people have experience with, whenever they are discussed in academic contexts, scholars tend to position themselves in relation to the practice. I, too, want to start this section by recounting my history with weight loss. By bringing my weight loss history into the light, I wish to make the analysis more transparent. As qualitative research is necessarily an “embodied communicative process” (Ellingson, 2017: 1), sharing my account of weight loss works as an important framework for my interpretations at the same time as it strengthens the understanding of the productive instability of all bodies. My experience with weight loss started when I was a teenaged girl, and the school nurse determined that I was “overweight” and suggested that I start dieting. Taking the suggestion close to heart, I slowly lost 25 kilograms through the rigorous management of eating. For the past 20 years, my weight has yo-yoed, sometimes going five kilograms up, sometimes five kilograms down. I have not been objected to routine forms of outside fat shaming since adolescence, yet I carry corporeal memories of it everywhere I go. I consider myself to be living in a fat time although, from the outside, I may not necessarily be categorized as fat. My experiences with fat form a vantage point through which I analyze the podcasts. I follow the method of “situated close reading” (see, e.g., DiPasquale, 2018), which acknowledges the situatedness of both the studied material and researcher. While I understand all close reading—the act of carefully dissecting the studied material into smaller parts and revisiting them repeatedly to decipher meaning (e.g., Brummet, 2019)—to be situated by character, I wish to emphasize situatedness by using the prefix. Research reflexivity is important since I am analyzing a mobile medium, which podcasts are (Lundström and Lundström, 2021). The consumption of podcasts, digitally formatted programs that can be downloaded and streamed from the internet, is not tied to any specific place or time. This can strongly affect a researcher’s engagement with podcasts. Since podcasts are an audio media, routine, visual ways of representing weight loss are not available to them. This makes descriptions of weight loss more processual and an interesting avenue for research. Both JFMB and The Soft were familiar to me before starting to work on this article. I especially remember listening to The Soft for the first time in the summer of 2019 while 8 going to the gym and hoping to lose weight. My previous engagement with the podcasts made me gravitate toward certain episodes and discussions that had affectively grabbed (see Senft, 2008: 46–47) me even from the very first listening. What made the analysis process particularly memorable was that I felt forced to stop on several occasions because something that was being said made me feel so anxious that I simply needed a break. I started to consider what my need to pause meant and how to take it into account in the analysis. I began to ask, what the relation of fat time to emotions is and what kind of temporality body positive podcasts and their weight loss stories convey. I listened to the material several times, sometimes at home, sometimes at the university, and sometimes on walks with my one-year- old child. I mostly listened to the podcasts through earbuds or through headphones, which, perhaps especially when I was in a public place, made the listening feel extremely intimate (Spinelli and Dann, 2019: 3, 7–8). The quotes analyzed in this article come from the parts of the podcasts that felt the most pressing to me. Thus, my reactions to the podcasts are the central building blocks of this article. In Finland, body positive and/or fat activist discussions are rather recent, affecting how the politics of size can be discussed in material such as the studied podcasts. In late 2010s, several body positivity campaigns and representations by various activists were launched in Finland (see Hynnä-Granberg, 2022; Puhakka, 2018), including the podcasts JFMB (2016) and The Soft (2018–), making body positivity known to the general public. Whereas in the US, fat activist organizations have been around since the 1960s and have built ground for the US body positivity to stand on, Finnish activists and body positive influencers have had to start almost from the beginning in introducing themselves and their audience to the topic. Therefore, while fat studies scholars (e.g., Cooper, 2016) often understand fat activism and body positivity to be significantly different from one another—most often, fat activism is discussed as the social movement by and for fat people and body positivity as an internet- based movement that emphasizes the beauty and worth of all bodies (on the definitions, see Brown and Herndon, 2020; Maor, 2013; Murray, 2008: 102–104)—in Finland, the term fat activism is seldom used. Instead, in the Finnish context, everything from general discussions on fat shaming to political work to improve the status of fat people in society is easily categorized as body positivity. JFMB and The Soft also utilize the term body positivity. While the hosts of The Soft identify as activists, the hosts of JFMB state that they wish to disentangle different myths related to fatness while attempting to lose weight. Although one might argue that the aim to lose weight makes JFMB’s relation to body positivity ambiguous 9 since the will to lose weight does not signal positivity toward one’s body but rather a wish to change it according to societal standards, I maintain that JFMB is symptomatic of Finnish body positivity still finding its form (see also Puhakka, 2018). While many podcasts are created by independent content creators, JFMB was produced by the Finnish Public Service Media Company Yle and originally broadcast on the Yle Puhe radio channel in addition to being shared on Yle’s audio service Audio Areena. The podcast’s connection to public service media gave it wide visibility yet arguably affected how radical a stance the program could take toward fatness. In the six episodes of the podcast, the two women hosts—white, fat-identified Yle journalist and media personality Jenny Lehtinen and white, fat-identified “recovering extreme dieter” Saara Sarvas—discuss fat marginalization but also weight management. The roughly one-hour-long episodes include interviews with people such as doctors, celebrities, and researchers who have experience in the discussed themes and often self-identify as fat. In 2017, Yle launched a nationwide campaign called Vaakakapina (Scale Rebellion) on its media outlets. Lehtinen was the figurehead of this campaign as well, coaching Finns toward lasting weight management instead of quick diets. JFMB can therefore be considered as a part of the Vaakakapina brand, which also includes a popular closed Facebook peer support group Kehomyytinmurtajat (Body Myth Busters, originally Jenny and the Fat Myth Busters), the television lifestyle show Jenny+ (2017–), blogs, and a website with articles and information packages around the topic. The Soft is part of Ruskeat Tytöt Media (Brown Girls Media), an independent online publication dedicated to “centering and normalizing the perspectives of Brown women and people with underrepresented genders in Finnish and Nordic media” (Rusket Tytöt Media website, 2021). It is hosted by two Brown, fat queer artists and media workers named Caroline Suinner and Meriam Trabelsi. The podcast is made in collaboration with Radio Helsinki, a commercially funded radio station. Due to the overwhelming whiteness of the body positive discussion (Johansson, 2020; Williams, 2017), Suinner and Trabelsi started the podcast to bring fat, Brown bodies to the center. The podcast includes interviews with guests, and the sections “The Song of the Week,” “Rant,” and “FIT Girl” (Fat It Girl), the last of which introduces fat people such as media influencers, artists, and scholars to the audience. Besides the podcast, which now has two seasons with varying lengths of episodes, Suinner and Trabelsi curate, host, and create body positive content on several media platforms. On 10 The Soft’s Facebook and Instagram accounts, Suinner and Trabelsi share images of themselves and the FIT girls. While my analysis includes the entirety of the published seasons of JFMB and The Soft, I herein zoom in on one episode of JFMB and two episodes of The Soft. I chose the episodes because they focus explicitly on weight loss and because their discussions are representative of the podcasts as a whole. JFMB’s episode “The slowest loser in Finland” interviews two white women who have lost a significant amount of weight but in different ways: Ina Jantunen, 33 years old, participated in The Biggest Loser, Finland (2006–) in 2010 and won second place in the competition with a 42-kilogram weight loss. In the podcast, she talks about the extreme methods that she used both during and after the television show, and how these negatively affected her life. Lotta Backlund, aged 36, has lost 30 kilograms over seven years by making one small change after another. In the episode, Backlund is jokingly referred to as the slowest loser in Finland. In the case of The Soft, I focus on episodes four and five from season one. In the around 30-minutes-long episodes, Suinner and Trabelsi talk with Javiera Marchant Aedo, a 34-year-old Brown human rights activist and journalist. The discussed topics include eating disorders, bariatric surgery, and internalized fat phobia. The entangled temporalities of weight loss In popular contexts, body positivity is often imagined as an anti-diet attitude. Yet, body positive communities’, organizations’, and activists’ attitudes toward weight loss vary depending on the context and method of the weight loss. In the US, many body positive activists and influencers argue that while people’s wish to lose weight is understandable, they should first and foremost try and find happiness in their body as it is now. Other, more radical activists and influencers maintain that weight loss is never acceptable and that people who have lost weight represent toxic values (Darwin and Miller, 2020). While some US body positive actors find weight loss through food-containment and exercise understandable, they are critical of bariatric surgery. In a study on fat gay men’s attitudes to weight loss surgery, Jason Whitesel and Amy Shuman (2016) found that members of Girth & Mirth, an organization calling attention to weight discrimination among the gay community, are often personally against the surgery yet accepting of others who may feel the need to undergo it. As Girth & Mirth celebrates personal choice and condemns medical intervention, its members tend to occupy tenuous positions regarding the operation. 11 In Finland, where the medicalized voice on fatness has long been the sole voice gaining spread in the mainstream media, the necessity of weight loss is arguably even more underscored than in the US. While Finnish activists, influencers, and supporters of body positivity may seem undecided on whether they themselves wish to be thin or not, their ambivalent views reflect a strong controversy in discourses on fatness in Finland (Puhakka, 2018: 61). Finnish supporters of body positivity often critique quick diets but are more positive about weight management and slow weight loss. JFMB and its host Jenny Lehtinen are examples of Finnish body positivity that does not contest weight management. The Soft, by contrast, argues that the aim to lose weight is never a body positive one. Yet, like members of Girth & Mirth, The Soft is careful not to judge subjects who try to lose weight. Suinner and Trabelsi acknowledge that the society puts great pressure on the individual to constantly improve themselves and that no one is immune to these messages or always able to resist their pull. Despite having varying views on weight management, both JFMB and The Soft suggest that fat people are almost always previous dieters. According to existing research as well (e.g., Tomiyama, Ahlstrom and Mann, 2013), fat people have often dieted multiple times since diets seldom lead to permanent weight loss. In The Soft, Marchant Aedo discusses the way her body has changed over her lifetime. First her weight went down as much as 60 kilograms, after which it went up by the same amount. A few years prior to the interview, Marchant Aedo underwent bariatric surgery, and her weight dropped 60 kilograms again. In JFMB, Backlund describes her body’s history and says that she is currently on a weight management journey that she started seven years ago. She is aiming to reach a weight that would put her in the category of having a normal body mass index. Jantunen discusses her past as a dieter and the extreme weight loss methods that she used for The Biggest Loser: I weighed 72 kilos in the final. Or I did get it down to 70. […] I would probably have gotten the weight even lower if I had managed to stay in the sauna for longer the previous night. I went in for five minutes and then fainted. (Jantunen, JFMB) Jantunen concludes that the weight lost on the show did not stay off for long and that currently, she is looking for slower and more lasting ways to manage her weight. 12 In the previous stories, temporalities overlap as Jantunen, Backlund, and Marchant Aedo navigate through their experiences of their past, present, and future possible bodies. Multiple temporalities are, in other words, present at the same time (Coleman, 2013: 94). The entangling of temporalities questions heteronormative and thin understandings of a linear view of time, where a permanently thin body always follows the weight loss. The weight losers’ descriptions paint a picture of always-returning fat or fat that is difficult to shed (Crawford, 2017: 459). While there have been periods in life when Jantunen, Backlund, and Marchant Aedo have been thin or thinner, fat has usually come back. Fat’s persistence contrasts with normative understandings, where fat is discussed as the result of over-eating, not a primary way of being (Crawford, 2017: 453). Since fat defies change, fat can be argued to be the weight losers’ “true” form instead of the thin body that they strive toward or have previously striven toward. As fat stays or comes back, the thin futures that the weight losers have imagined escape from reach. Studies (e.g., Adami et al., 1998) suggest that obtained weight loss is often experienced as insufficient by the weight loser and that weight loss goals change and become more ambitious during the process. Even when the weight loser is happy with the number of kilograms shed, the other results of the practice may leave the weight loser locked in thinking of the past, such as in the case of Marchant Aedo. While Marchant Aedo has kept her weight mostly off since the bariatric surgery, she is forced to continue to manage her eating. One of the results of the surgery is that she needs to count calories in order not to eat too much and feel extremely sick as a result. As thin and happy futures seem to elude weight losers, and fat and happy futures are painted as impossibilities by the existing discourse (Fox, 2018; White, 2013), the weight losers in the podcasts increasingly put their hopes in the present. Also in several other body positive discussions and representations, body positivity is greeted as a way of staying more grounded in the present (e.g., Hynnä-Granberg and Kyrölä, 2019; Murray, 2005). While the past and future are largely defined by diet culture, the present is more flexible and open for interpretation. Yet, since the present as well is shaped by other temporalities, a permanent affective conversion toward appreciating one’s body may not be possible (e.g., Hass, 2018: 172–173). As Marchant Aedo puts it: “Fat phobic thoughts stay in one’s head, there is no getting rid of them, but one learns to approach them as something other than as facts.” In JFMB and The Soft, body positivity is discussed as an orientation rather than as a permanent 13 change toward one’s body (see also Hynnä-Granberg and Kyrölä, 2019; Puhakka, 2018). For the hosts and interviewees of the podcasts, body positivity is an aim to minimize bad feelings, even if just momentarily. In JFMB, in the Finnish context, where body positivity is still finding its form, this minimization of feeling bad is interpreted to include weight management. For The Soft, body positivity translates to the attempt to escape body norms and try to resist the diet culture, including in its slower, weight managing forms. Weight loss and emotions: Happiness, hope, and anxiety In the media, culture, and healthcare, weight loss is generally discussed as a happy object. Ahmed (2011, 162–163; 166–167) defines a happy object as a thing that is expected to affect a subject in a good way. Rather than giving happiness in the present, a happy object is a means of bringing happiness in the future. While according to Berlant (2011), fatness signals a weak orientation to the future; sociological study (e.g., Harjunen, 2007) suggests that experiences of fatness are animated by imaginings of thin futures. In contrast to Berlant’s argument, then, fatness is often lived as a strong orientation to the future (see Coleman, 2013: 94, 10, 9; Crawford, 2017: 448). Yet, since neoliberal culture represents fatness as a controllable quality (Cain, Donaghue and Ditchburn, 2021: 27), practices of weight loss simultaneously strive toward abolishing fatness and the fat experience. Fat subjects’ forced orientation to weight loss as a happy object becomes apparent in the following quote by Marchant Aedo, where she recounts her experience with bariatric surgery: People think that, once they have lost enough weight, a new life begins. And that everything is easier. Everything is better. And that one can start to enjoy things. And one can love oneself. And one can give themselves the permission to do all those nice things that they always wanted to do. But this is an illusion. And what comes after the surgery, on top of not recognizing one’s body anymore, on top of not being able to eat normally. One has to eat vitamins for the rest of their life, and then there are other kinds of physical consequences. Like in my case, my pancreas is too active, it produces too much insulin. There are all these kinds of things. But most of all, there is the depression that comes from realizing that one’s life did not become perfect in one day after all. One’s not instantly thin. Everything is not great from now on. There is no magic wand. Instead, the thing that did happen is that someone tampered with your internal organs, and you will never be the same again. (Marchant Aedo, The Soft) 14 Ahmed (2011: 166–167) suggests that at the moment the subject realizes they are not made happy by a happy object, they become affect aliens. Disappointment leads to feelings of self- doubt and anger. Being let down by a happy object can also result in pessimism about the future (see also Coleman, 2016). Affect aliens do not direct their hopes at happy objects but turn to other things in anticipation of fulfilment. Since Marchant Aedo does not believe that weight loss can bring happiness but suggests that it inevitably leads to physical and mental suffering, she has become an affect alien. While doctors and nurses had promised Marchant Aedo that the surgery would improve her life quality and chances of getting pregnant, in the end, she was left coping with massive physical pain and disappointment. Many other bariatric surgery patients similarly describe their post- surgery life as a living “in the gap between the surgical promise and reality” (Whitesel and Shuman, 2016: 50, 46). Even in cases where the surgery leads to permanent weight loss, which is not always the case, the results of the surgery require a significant amount of commitment and coping with bodily changes. While JFMB criticizes quick diets, the podcasts is premised on the hope that slow weight management can be combined with body positive endeavors and appreciating one’s body and its needs. Unlike Marchant Aedo then, JFMB’s interviewees and hosts are not necessarily affect aliens. JFMB discusses Backlund’s weight loss as an inspiring example of slow body positive weight management that, in opposition to Jantunen’s quick diet in The Biggest Loser, does not cause anxiety or pain. Backlund argues that her weight management journey has never caused any stress and that she is much happier now than before starting it. Although Backlund talks about weight management as a kind of “second nature” or “keeping on living” (Coleman, 2013: 94), it is something that inevitably demands commitment: This takes a thorough planning of one’s life. The first thing that I think about in the morning is when and where to get food. (Backlund, JFMB) If you wish to lose weight, you have no other choice than to…well, not count calories but you do have to stay on your toes to not eat too much. You cannot treat yourself every day. (Backlund, JFMB) Backlund’s ideas of weight loss and weight management as life-long processes follow the logic of neoliberalism that emphasizes individual responsibility and hard work as keys to success (Banet-Weiser and Portwood-Stacer, 2006). Since fatness is represented as 15 controllable, it is the responsibility of the neoliberal citizen to “stay on their toes” and manage their weight (Cain, Donaghue and Ditchburn, 2021: 27). Quick diets, by contrast, are argued to be doomed to fail because there are no short-cuts to happiness. One does not come across happy objects by accident; acquiring them requires abundant work (Ahmed, 2011: 162–163). Measuring, counting, and managing, which seem to be part of Backlund’s weight management as well as all of the quick-diets discussed in the podcasts, produce an image of a future of both fear and hope (see Coleman, 2013: 109–112). Backlund admits that at one point during her seven-year weight loss period, she got so tired of watching her weight that she decided to take a break: “Watching every last thing that you eat does get hard at some point.” Instead of attempting actively to reach her goal weight, she decided that staying at her current weight was enough. Backlund’s exhaustion does not necessarily mean that she was never happy. Rather, as Ahmed (2011: 173, 160) suggests, hope, happiness, and anxiety have an intimate relationship to each other. Hope involves anxiety because the hoped-for does not necessarily always happen. Happiness, alternatively, can entail anxiety since it is something that can be lost in the course of time. Ugly feelings that stay While anxiety is generally regarded a negative emotion, hope and happiness are understood to be positive emotions that have enabling effects for the individual. Yet, distinctions between negative and positive emotions are not necessarily clear-cut. According to Ahmed (2006: 134–135, 154), feelings of discomfort and anxiety can sometimes open up new worlds much more so than feelings of comfort, happiness, and hope (see also Kyrölä, 2017). Sianne Ngai (2005: 2–3, 6–7) similarly discusses the way that so called ugly feelings, such as anxiety, allow resistance although seeming to ensue from a situation of restricted agency. Ugly feelings, in which I also include hope, pessimism, and “hopeful pessimism” (Coleman, 2016; discussed later in this section), lack a clearly definable object and appear as larger configurations of the world. Since ugly feelings endure over time, it is through them that a past event characterized by a certain emotion may become linked to a present one, where the emotion resurfaces (cf. Coleman, 2008). 16 Marchant Aedo talks about the way that keeping a close eye on what she eats, as is demanded of previous bariatric surgery patients, assembles with her previous life with an eating disorder. The eating disorder becomes not something that has happened to her but something that she is still going through (cf. Coleman, 2008: 93). The anxiety of not having the future that Marchant Aedo hoped for collapses into her past experiences of disordered behavior: As an eating-disordered person, one of my dreams is that there will be a day when eating is simple. That I can eat when I am hungry, and I can stop eating when I am no longer hungry. Or because I don’t want any more crisps or something. That would also be fine. But now I don’t think that that day will ever come. Because now I will always have problems with eating. It’ll forever be a thing that I pay attention to. As someone who used to have an eating disorder, I have trapped myself into a situation where I think about eating much more than anyone actually should. (Marchant Aedo, The Soft) Jantunen and the hosts of JFMB similarly discuss their failed diets and suggest that they might be happier but also thinner now if they had never dieted. All four continue to connect happiness to (the size of) their bodies, feeding into the common understanding that having a “good” body signals a good life. For all four, happiness resides somewhere other than where they are now (Ahmed, 2011: 160), at other once-possible presents. While Marchant Aedo is more pessimistic about her future than Jantunen and the hosts of JFMB are, hope and anxiety co-exist in thoughts of presents, pasts, and still attainable futures. Marchant Aedo’s current hope is directed toward body positivity and what it can do for her well-being. While completely ridding oneself of fat-phobic thoughts seems unlikely, she suggests that body positivity offers at least some shield from the thoughts (see also Whitesel, 2014: 55–57). For example, standing in front of the mirror has become easier for Marchant Aedo, and she is able to “more easily see the nice and beautiful things in herself” instead of being overwhelmed by internalized fat hate. Marchant Aedo’s approach to the future can be termed as what Coleman calls “hopeful pessimism” (Coleman, 2016). Although pessimism is often imagined as having a flattening atmosphere, it can manifest itself in diverse ways. It can make the subject more alert and active in a situation. Marchant Aedo talks with regret about how she will always have to manage her eating, yet she is highly involved in body positive and anti-racist work. Hopeful pessimism, then, does not entail only flattening emotions but is also a way to keep on living (Coleman, 2016). Although Marchant Aedo is pessimistic about tomorrow, she expresses hopefulness that body positive work will allow for alternative ways of living in the future. 17 Conclusions In this article, I have analyzed temporalities of weight loss as they are discussed in two Finnish body positive podcasts, JFMB and The Soft. I have discussed fat time as a theoretical and political concept that challenges normative understandings of fatness and time as linear. As the guests and hosts of the podcasts talk about their weight loss histories, problems of weight management, and hopes of body positivity, the past, present, and future entangle. Thinking about one’s future body or one’s more body positive self produces a sense of “the future being drawn into the present” (Coleman, 2013: 100–101). Similarly, in discussions of one’s changing body, the past becomes a part of the present. In this circularity, emotions play a crucial role. Looking at the emotions of weight loss highlights the incongruity of how becoming smaller in size is “supposed to” make one feel and how one is actually feeling. Here, fat time resembles queer time, where “strange temporalities, imaginative life schedules, and eccentric economic practices” (Halberstam, 2005: 1), as well as a certain pessimism about the future (Ahmed, 2011: 160), prevail. The study indicates that pessimism, and anxiety, are not necessarily alien to body positivity but rather recurring emotions when fat and slimmed down bodies navigate in time and space. As such, the study contradicts the critique of forced optimism that body positivity has faced (e.g., Gill and Elias, 2014; Murray, 2008; 2005) and sheds new light on the emotional register on which the movement operates. Body positivity does not mean a demand for optimism in a bad situation. Rather, the movement focuses on a wide spectrum of emotions, from anxiety and pessimism to hope and happiness, all unavoidable. The existence and endurance of emotions, such as anxiety, does not have to be counterproductive to the project (see also Hynnä-Granberg and Kyrölä, 2019; Puhakka, 2018). Rather, as Ahmed (2011: 161) suggests in relation to queer time, we do not always have to choose between optimism and pessimism: “We can explore the strange and perverse mixture of hope and despair, optimism and pessimism, in politics that critiques the world as it is, yet believes that it can be different.” The podcasts that I study try to find hope for a brighter fat time while grappling with the anxieties of diet culture. 18 In a neoliberal society, fat people’s orientations toward the future are continuously put to question. Berlant (2011) argues that the current culture is characterized by a stretched-out present, where nothing ever arrives. Yet, as Crawford (2017) suggests, there is considerable power in understanding fat as a present quality and a way of being. 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