El nuevo ritmo de la comunidad parroquial

Jackie was selected as suitable contextual material after consulting the British Library’s holdings of juvenile print media. My aim was to identify periodicals that spanned several decades and could therefore be used as an ongoing point of comparison with the fiction sample. It was also a necessary pre-requisite that the periodical contained rich and varied data pertaining to the fat child. Ideally, I wished to select only one

periodical. Coding several decades’ worth of material from just one periodical is highly time consuming; attempts to code additional periodicals could threaten the manageability of the project.

Selecting just one periodical would pose problems if I were seeking

representative, rather than relevant data. As when selecting the fiction, I wished to locate material that referred specifically and in a variety of ways to the fat child. The goal was not to select periodicals that represented a balanced range of body types. The goal was not to select periodicals that were representative of all periodicals in their construction of children’s bodies. Nor was the goal to select periodicals with an implied readership that reflected the demographic profile of the general population. The goal was to select material with rich, varied references to fat, and this goal could be met by selecting just one periodical.

The twenty longest-running juvenile publications held by the British Library all spanned at least twenty five years (see table 1). My search for academic psychology abstracts, which I was conducting simultaneously, yielded very few results until the second half of the twentieth century; those results increased steadily from the

nineteen-27 sixties onwards (see Section 3.4). To facilitate at least a decade of comparison between my print media and academic psychology samples, I discounted periodicals that had ceased circulating by 1970. I also discounted Hwyl! (1959-1989), a Welsh language comic in the list, as I am not a Welsh speaker. For each remaining publication I consulted the first volume of issues for every decade available, and noted the contexts in which fat was referred to, or in which fat people were visually presented. I used the list of

linguistic search terms—and the same pictorial search criteria of rounded torsos, faces or limbs—that I had deployed in the search for juvenile fiction.

Jackie referred to fat in the widest range of contexts (see table 1). The other listed publications were solely dedicated to comic strips, and the contexts in which they refered to fat were correspondingly less varied. The Beano (1938-Present) is a case in point: this running periodical contains rich data pertaining to fat in its portrayal of the long-term character Fatty Fudge. But The Beano’s data is not varied. References to fat are confined to the comic strip form. By selecting Jackie, which included comic strips

amongst its other content, my analysis could still encompass, but would not be limited to, how fatness is constructed in comic art. Although Jackie was not the longest-lasting periodical, with a twenty-nine year lifespan it covered a large enough period to enable the tracking of change over time. The publication’s chief shortcoming was that it ceased to circulate before the current decade, making comparisons between recent juvenile fiction and media more difficult. Indeed, there is no comparable noughties magazine with the same breadth and reach—possibly because the overall fortunes of print media have declined in the twenty-first century. Accordingly my analysis of contemporary fiction pays more attention to interactive visual media such as reality television; but it remains

28 that, up to and including the nineteen-nineties, Jackie offers the best combination of

longevity, rich data, and varied data on fat.

The breadth of content in Jackie arose from market competition in the early nineteen-sixties between comics and magazines. According to Mel Gibson (2003), Jackie sought to capitalise on the popularity of romance comic strips while cultivating a future readership for adult women’s magazines (“The Emergence” 91). Jackie was launched in a deliberate attempt to extend the reach of both romance comics and women’s magazines into a younger age range (90). The reach of advertisements and references to popular culture, which were previously associated with adult women’s reading material rather than children’s fare, was simultaneously extended downwards into juvenile media. How this influenced constructions of the fat child, if it did so at all, is a valuable line of

enquiry. By setting 1960 as the lower limit for my research period, I hoped to capture the effects of this media movement towards constructing children as consumers.

By identifying a supposed girls’ publication^vii as the richest and most varied source of references to fat, I seemingly leant support to the feminist argument I previously outlined: that, to re-quote Wolf (1990), fatness is “essentially female” and socioculturally constructed as a feminine concern. But Jackie refers to fatness as a female and as a male trait, despite the gendering of its readership; and fat children are present, as sources of pity, sadistic humour, or identification, in the listed comics for boys. If the contexts in which fatness appears are less varied throughout boys’ print media, that trend is not straightforwardly attributable to the perceived femininity of fatness. Rather, it is informed by the cultural construction of male authority, in which women and girls are encouraged to seek advice for problems, but admissions of ignorance are considered inappropriate for men and boys. Sara Mills (1995) points out

29 that magazines for adult women adopt an advice-giving tone that is wholly absent from magazines for adult men (153). I suggest that a similar distinction is at play in the gendering of juvenile media. Thus, while we might detect negative size stereotypes in boys’ publications—such as the characterisation of Fatty Fudge in The Beano—those stereotypes are not advanced as an opportunity to explicitly advise the reader. There are important distinctions between the advertorial, medical, and fashion references to fat in Jackie, but they all contribute to a “tone of advice” that Mills sees as characteristic of adult women’s magazines (153).

Having selected Jackie as contextual material, I had to determine the best way of sifting its content. Jackie was circulated on a weekly basis throughout its twenty-nine year run. The full back catalogue comprises over 1500 issues. Initially I selected December, April and August as appropriately even-spaced points to collect data. I

wished to capture any seasonal differences in how fatness was constructed—for instance, I was interested to see whether Christmas was implicated as a period of acceptable weight gain, and whether summer increased anxiety over the visibility of fatness as a purported bodily flaw. On further reflection, I thought January might offer distinctive data, despite its chronological proximity to December; my reasoning was that January was potentially a period of abstinence, particularly in relation to New Year’s

Resolutions. I therefore planned to select four issues from each year, taken from a week before Christmas, a week after New Year’s Day, the first week in April and the first week in August. This would produce a sample of 118 issues: thirty for January, thirty for April, twenty-nine for August and twenty-nine for December. While I did not intend to limit qualitative comparisons between Jackie and the fiction sample to just these issues, a

30 core of 118 data points could be used to establish quantitative trends in Jackie’s

construction of the fat child during my chosen months.

In practice, 114 issues were analysed. Three December issues and one August issue could not be obtained from the British Library holdings or through private sales.

This introduced the need for caution when comparing quantitative trends between months.