Page 77 - Battleground The Media Volume 1 and 2

| Bollywood and the Ind an D aspora

(often describing foods in quasireligious terms such as “temptation,” “sin,” and
“guilt”), while simultaneously linking food (and even binge eating) to fantasies
of pleasure and indulgence. Food in advertising is often eroticized and linked
to sexuality and love. It is also linked to many other values, such as one’s ability
to be a good mother, to display status, to be cool or hip, or to be well liked and
admired.
Ironically, both an anorexic girl and an obese woman may in fact be starving
themselves to death, one by reducing nearly all calories, but the other by reduc-
ing those calories that supply the nutrients the body needs to be healthy. Media
images and advertising often profit from and are complicit in both acts.
see also Advertising and Persuasion; Dating Shows; Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual,
Transgendered, and Queer Representations on TV; Media and the Crisis of
Values; Representations of Class; Representations of Masculinity; Representa-
tions of Race; Representations of Women; Sensationalism, Fear Mongering, and
Tabloid Media; Women’s Magazines.
Further reading: Beardsworth, Alan, and Teresa Keil. Sociology on the Menu: An Invitation
to the Study of Food and Society. London: Routledge, 1997; Bordo, Susan. Unbearable
Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body. Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1995; Bordo, Susan. The Male Body. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999;
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Health Statistics, Na-
tional Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, Health, United States, 2002. http://
www.cdc.gov/nccdphp/dnpa/obesity/; Chernin, Kim. The Hungry Self: Women, Eating
and Identity. New York: Times Books, 1985; Chernin, Kim. The Obsession: Reflections
on the Tyranny of Slenderness, 1st ed. New York: Harper and Row, 1981; Counihan, Car-
ole M., and Steven L. Kaplan, eds. Food and Gender: Identity and Power. Amsterdam:
Harwood Academic, 1998; Critzer, Greg. Fat Land: How Americans Became the Fattest
People in the World. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2003; Kilbourne, Jean. Can’t Buy My
Love: How Advertising Changes the Way We Think and Feel. New York: Simon and Schuster,
1999; Kilbourne, Jean. Slim Hopes. Dir. Sut Jhally. Media Education Foundation, Na-
tional Institute of Mental Health. “Eating Disorders: Facts about Eating Disorders and
the Search for Solutions,” 2001. http://www.nimh.nih.gov/publicat/eatingdisorders.cfm;
Nestle, Marion. Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002; Thompson, Becky W. A Hunger So Wide
and So Deep: American Women Speak Out on Eating Problems. Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1994; Wolf, Naomi. The Beauty Myth. New York: Chatto and Win-
dus, 1990.
Jean Retzinger

Bollywood and the indian diasPora

With approximately 20 million South Asians, more than 30 million Chinese,
13 million Jews, and 300 million people of African descent living as migrant
populations, it has become difficult to sustain the idea that cultural identities
are tied to a particular place in the world. Multiple connections are developed
as immigrants forge and sustain social relations that link together their societies
of origin and settlement. Their embeddedness in more than one society, enabled