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Using a multidisciplinary and intersectional approach, this book explores the social factors that influence the ways in which societal norms police fat bodies. Chapters examine the racist and colonial constructions of Western beauty norms as well as the evolution of anti-fat bias and fat liberation, before delving into the relationship between social media and body size activism, with a particular emphasis on social media companies censoring fat people. The authors draw on first-person narratives of artists, activists, and fat social media users to unpack how, these mostly women, have used their bodies to transform the negative social perceptions of fat people. This book will be of interest to scholars and students in Sociology, Gender Studies, History, and Media Studies who research body size activism and beauty norms.

In the second decade of the twenty-first century, the crusade against sugar rose to prominence as an urgent societal problem about which something needed to be done. Sugar was transformed into the common enemy in a revived ‘war on obesity'levelled at ‘unhealthy'foods and the people who enjoy them. Are the evils of sugar based on purely scientific fact, or are other forces at play?Sugar rush explores the social life of sugar in its rise to infamy. The book reveals how competing understandings of the ‘problem'of sugar are smoothed over through appeals to science and the demonization of fatness, with politics and popular culture preying on our anxieties about what we eat. Drawing on journalism, government policy, public health campaigns, self-help books, autobiographies and documentaries, the book argues that this rush to blame sugar is a phenomenon of its time, finding fertile ground in the era of austerity and its attendant inequalities. Inviting readers to resist the comforting certainties of the attack on sugar, Sugar rush shows how this actually represents a politics of despair, entrenching rather than disrupting the inequality-riddled status quo.

Fat Studies beschäftigen sich mit hohem Körpergewicht, ohne es auf die Wahrnehmung als Gesundheitsgefahr zu reduzieren. Sie fokussieren auf den gesellschaftlichen Umgang mit ›Übergewicht‹ als Ordnungs- und Herrschaftskategorie und analysieren, wie dicke Körper normiert und pathologisiert werden. International bereits weit entwickelt, sind die Fat Studies im deutschsprachigen Raum noch kaum bekannt. Die multidisziplinären und internationalen Beiträger•innen des Glossars präsentieren erstmals eine breite Palette zentraler Begriffe dieser jungen Disziplin: von A wie Aktivismus über I wie Intersektionalität bis Z wie Zucker.

2022 NATIONAL INDIE EXCELLENCE AWARDS FINALIST — HEALTH: GENERAL “It is exceptionally well organized and presented, making it an ideal and highly recommended addition to personal, community, college, and university library Health/Medicine collections.” —Midwest Book Review Nature puts a “survival switch” in our bodies to protect us from starvation. Stuck in the “on” position, it's the hidden source of weight gain, heart disease, and many other common health struggles. But you can turn it off. Dr. Richard Johnson has been on the cutting edge of research into the cause of obesity for more than a decade. His team's discovery of the fructose-powered survival switch—a metabolic pathway that animals in nature turn on and off as needed, but that our modern diet has permanently fixed in the “on” position, where it becomes a fat switch—revolutionized the way we think about why we gain weight. In Nature Wants Us to Be Fat, he details the mounting evidence on how this switch is responsible both for excess fat storage and for many of the major diseases endemic to the Western world, including heart disease, cancer, and dementia. Dr. Johnson also reveals the surprising link between the survival switch and health conditions such as gout, kidney disease, liver disease, stroke—and even behavioral issues like addiction and ADHD. And, most important, he shares a science-based plan to help readers fight back against nature. Guided by ongoing clinical research—plus fascinating observations from the animal kingdom, evolution, and history—Dr. Johnson takes you along on an eye-opening investigation into: What you can do to turn off your survival switch What we have in common with hibernating bears, sperm whales, and the world's fattest bird Why it's fructose (not glucose) that drives insulin resistance and metabolic disease The foods we eat that trigger the body to make its own fructose The surprising role salt and dehydration play in fat accumulation The surprising link between the survival switch and health conditions such as gout and liver and kidney diseases, and even behavioral issues like addiction and ADHD Dr. Johnson not only provides new recommendations for how we can prevent or treat obesity, but also how we can use this information to reduce our risk of developing disease. Nature wants us to be fat, and when we understand why, we gain the tools we need to lose weight and optimize our health.

Theoretically informed and empirically grounded, Rethinking Obesity invites readers to reconsider the medical and public health framing of population weight (gain) as a massive global problem, epidemic or crisis. Attentive to social values, scientific uncertainty and possible harms, the book furthers critique of the weight-centred health paradigm and world war on obesity. Building upon existing international literature from critical weight studies, fat studies and critical obesity research, the book advances scholarship with reference to body politics and health policy, epidemiology and obesity science, media reporting and weight-related stigma.The authors resist the common moralised narrative that ‘the overweight majority'are lazy, gluttonous, and personally responsible for their actual or potential ills and the solution ultimately necessitates individual lifestyle change. Critique is also extended to seemingly compassionate public health interventions that putatively avoid victim-blaming through an appeal to ‘the obesogenic environment', a consequence of modern living. Empirical case studies are grounded in women's repeated and often frustrating experiences of dieting and schoolgirls'encounters with fat pedagogy, which challenges dominant obesity discourse. Recognising that declared public health crises may become layered and cascade through society, this book also includes timely research on the COVID-19 pandemic response amidst concerns about lockdown weight-gain, heightened risk of infection and death among people deemed overweight and obese.Rethinking Obesity interrogates how social injustice is reproduced not only through cruelty but also through seemingly benevolent representations, pedagogies and policies. Alternative approaches and action, ranging from weight-inclusive health paradigms to broader social change, are also considered when seeking to foster collective hope in crisis times. This is valuable reading for students and researchers in medical sociology, social and population health sciences, physical education, critical weight and fat studies, and the social dimensions of the body.

A study that explores patients'perspectives on a life-altering surgeryBariatric surgery rates around the world have increased exponentially over the past decade. In Extreme Weight Loss, anthropologists Sarah Trainer, Alexandra Brewis, and Amber Wutich provide us with an inside look at how patients experience this medical procedure, as well as its far-reaching and complex personal implications. Drawing on patient interviews, survey data, and more, Trainer, Brewis, and Wutich explore why people decide to undergo bariatric surgery, and how that decision transforms their lives. They show, in painstaking detail, how the journey to weight loss is can be at once painful and liberating, dispiriting and self-affirming.Extreme Weight Loss explores questions about which bodies are treated as though they belong in modern societies, and which bodies are treated as unwanted. It considers how people challenge and manage these unfair standards, illuminating what it means to be large-bodied in America's diet-obsessed culture.

In this new edition of her accessible autoethnography of fat feminist activism in the West, Charlotte Cooper revisits and discusses her activism in the context of recent shifts in the movement. The new preface explores the impact of the Coronavirus pandemic on fat people and fat activism and how Black Lives Matter is inspiring new forms of activism. Cooper issues a call to action in Fat Studies and offers alternatives to current public health approaches to Diabetes. What is fat activism and why is it important? To answer this question, Charlotte Cooper presents an expansive grassroots study that traces the forty-year history of international fat activism and grounds its actions in their proper historical and geographical contexts. She details fat activist methods, analyses existing literature in the field, challenges long-held assumptions that uphold systemic fatphobia, and makes clear how crucial feminism, queer theory and anti-racism are to the lifeblood of the movement. She also considers fat activism's proxy concerns, including body image, body positivity, the obesity epidemic and fat stigma. Combining rigorous scholarship with personal, accessible writing, Fat Activism: A Radical Social Movement is a rare insider's view of fat people speaking about their lives and politics on their own terms. This is the book you have been waiting for.

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Public enemy. Crucial macronutrient. Health risk. Punchline. Moneymaker. Epidemic. Sexual fetish. Moral failing. Necessary bodily organ. Conveyor of flavor. Freak-show spectacle. Never mind the stereotype, fat is never sedentary: its definitions, identities, and meanings are manifold and in constant motion. Demonized in medicine and public policy, adored by chefs and nutritional faddists (and let's face it, most of us who eat), simultaneously desired and abhorred when it comes to sex, and continually courted by a multi-billion-dollar fitness and weight-loss industry, for so many people “fat” is ironically nothing more than an insult or a state of despair. In Hanne Blank's Fat we find fat as state, as possession, as metaphor, as symptom, as object of desire, intellectual and carnal. Here, “feeling fat” and literal fat merge, blurring the boundaries and infusing one another with richer, fattier meanings. Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.

La discrimination, les oppressions et les préjugés que subissent les gros et les grosses restent aujourd'hui parmi les formes de stigmatisation les plus banalisées. Au nom de la santé, les personnes grosses sont marginalisées, ridiculisées, condamnées, isolées. Renforcées autant par les médias, les productions culturelles ou un certain discours médical, les déclarations grossophobes circulent aujourd'hui librement en ne provoquant que de rares réactions, sinon des rires. Mais est-il inéluctable que les caricatures de Gaétan Barrette concernent uniquement son poids? Les personnes grosses ont-elles toujours le diabète? A-t-on besoin d'abdominaux pour changer le monde? Peut-on vraiment aimer un corps gros? Entre témoignage, analyse sociale et discours militant, La vie en gros propose un regard sur ces violences diverses et quotidiennes qui se manifestent autant dans la vie professionnelle que dans les relations amoureuses, dans les transports en commun ou à l'hôpital, sur la couverture d'un magazine ou au grand écran. Mickaël Bergeron part de cette idée que si l'on se préoccupait vraiment de la santé des personnes grosses, on les aimerait avant de les rabaisser.

Fat: such a little word evokes big responses. While ‘fat'describes the size and shape of bodies, our negative reactions to corpulent bodies also depend on something tangible and tactile; as this book argues, there is more to fat than meets the eye. Fat: A Cultural History of the Stuff of Life offers a historical reflection on how fat has been perceived and imagined in the West since antiquity. Featuring fascinating historical accounts, philosophical, religious and cultural arguments, including discussions of status, gender and race, the book digs deep into the past for the roots of our current notions and prejudices. Three central themes emerge: how we have perceived and imagined obesity over the centuries; how fat as a substance has elicited disgust and how it evokes perceptions of animality; but also how it has been associated with vitality and fertility. By exploring the complex ways in which fat, fatness and fattening have been perceived over time, this book provides rich insights into the stuff our stereotypes are made of.

Winner of the 2020 Gourmand Awards, Food Writing Section, USA​ Watching Our Weights explores the competing and contradictory fat representations on television that are related to weight-loss and health, medicalization and disease, and body positivity and fat acceptance. While television—especially reality television—is typically understood to promote individual self-discipline and expert interventions as necessary for transforming fat bodies into thin bodies, fat representations and narratives on television also create space for alternative as well as resistant discourses of the body. Melissa Zimdars thus examines the resistance inherent within TV representations and narratives of fatness as a global health issue, the inherent and overt resistance found across stories of medicalized fatness, and programs that actively avoid dieting narratives in favor of less oppressive ways of thinking about the fat body. Watching Our Weights weaves together analyses of media industry lore and decisions, communication and health policies, medical research, activist projects, popular culture, and media texts to establish both how television shapes our knowledge of fatness and how fatness helps us better understand contemporary television.

La obesidad ha llegado a ser un grave problema de salud pública mundial. Siempre ha habido personas obesas y ya Marañón, en 1926, con su Gordos y flacos (alque este libro pretende rendir un modesto homenaje), se ocupó de la obesidadcomo un problema clínico. Pero estaba aún lejos de convertirse en el gran problema al que todas las agencias de salud pública del mundo intentan poner remedio. En la segunda mitad del siglo XX la mayor parte de la investigación científica estuvo dirigida a la fisiopatología y más adelante a la biogenética de laobesidad. Había la esperanza de encontrar un tratamiento individualizado paralas personas obesas. Hoy ya sabemos que la historia del tratamiento farmacológico de la obesidad es la de un gran fracaso. Ya en la última década del siglo XX los estudios epidemiológicos que comenzaron a publicarse hicieron que setomara conciencia de los determinantes sociogénicos de la obesidad. La obesidad comenzaba a ser considerada como el prototipo de lo que se han llamado enfermedades por desajuste (o disevolución), a la consideración de la pandemia de obesidad como una enfermedad'histórica'que aparece en un momento (el siglo XX) en el que los cambios en los estilos de vida asociados a la occidentalización e industrialización ponen a prueba a una biología (a un genoma) que, salvo ligeros cambios, sigue aun en el Paleolítico. Es el momento en el que se plantea la necesidad de cambiar los'estilos de vida'de las personas y de la sociedad. Pero los hábitos dietéticos y la sedentarización se han mostrado más resistentes a los cambios de lo que se esperaba. De hecho, todas las ingentes inversiones que se hacen tanto públicas como privadas para cambiar los estilos devida no están sirviendo demasiado para detener la imparable pandemia de obesidad en el mundo. En este libro se cuestiona la obsesión por cambiar los estilosde vida. Los estilos de vida no son más que un epifenómeno, el síntoma de unmodelo determinado de sociedad. Es el marco de referencia, representado por elmodelo de desarrollo capitalista, industrial, tecnificado, el que condicionaunos estilos de vida que no pueden ser modificados caso por caso, aunque hayaalgunas personas que puedan hacerlo, pero son muchas más que las que no lo hacen, manteniéndose así el incremento de la pandemia. Pretender que es posible solucionar el problema de la pandemia de obesidad cambiando solo los'estilos de vida'es un ejemplo de reduccionismo científico y una muestra de la impotencia de los sistemas sanitarios a los que les resulta más fácil predicar la buena nueva de los'estilos de vida'que cambiar el modelo de sociedad. Un modelode sociedad que está generando cambios muy importantes en la ecología de todoel planeta. Unos cambios planetarios asociados al modelo de desarrollo que nosllevan en este libro a establecer unos vínculos ecológicos entre la pandemiay el cambio climático. Y es de estas cosas, utilizando a Marañón como punto departida, de las que habla este libro.

This book explores and analyzes the ways fat acceptance activists have advocated through language and tactical action. Using Anthony Giddens'concept of Structuration in the make-up of ideology, the book identifies how fat acceptance activists use signification, domination, and legitimation to strengthen their cause. Thus, their actions are both rhetorical and tactical.Fat—considered a descriptor and not a negative label among activists—is highly stigmatized for arbitrary reasons in various areas of life ranging from the fashion industry to health care. This books shows how fat acceptance activists work to remedy this situation.

ONE OF NPR'S BEST BOOKS OF 2019 A “warm and funny and honest…genuinely unputdownable” (Curtis Sittenfeld) memoir chronicling what it's like to live in today's world as a fat man, from acclaimed journalist Tommy Tomlinson, who, as he neared the age of fifty, weighed 460 pounds and decided he had to change his life.When he was almost fifty years old, Tommy Tomlinson weighed an astonishing—and dangerous—460 pounds, at risk for heart disease, diabetes, and stroke, unable to climb a flight of stairs without having to catch his breath, or travel on an airplane without buying two seats. Raised in a family that loved food, he had been aware of the problem for years, seeing doctors and trying diets from the time he was a preteen. But nothing worked, and every time he tried to make a change, it didn't go the way he planned—in fact, he wasn't sure that he really wanted to change. In The Elephant in the Room, Tomlinson chronicles his lifelong battle with weight in a voice that combines the urgency of Roxane Gay's Hunger with the intimacy of Rick Bragg's All Over but the Shoutin'. He also hits the road to meet other members of the plus-sized tribe in an attempt to understand how, as a nation, we got to this point. From buying a Fitbit and setting exercise goals to contemplating the Heart Attack Grill in Las Vegas, America's “capital of food porn,” and modifying his own diet, Tomlinson brings us along on a candid and sometimes brutal look at the everyday experience of being constantly aware of your size. Over the course of the book, he confronts these issues head-on and chronicles the practical steps he has to take to lose weight by the end. “What could have been a wallow in memoir self-pity is raised to art by Tomlinson's wit and prose” (Rolling Stone). Affecting and searingly honest, The Elephant in the Room is an “inspirational” (The New York Times) memoir that will resonate with anyone who has grappled with addiction, shame, or self-consciousness. “Add this to your reading list ASAP” (Charlotte Magazine).

Why are people getting fatter in the United States and beyond? Mainstream explanations argue that people simply eat too much “energy-dense” food while exercising too little. By swapping the chips and sodas for fruits and vegetables and exercising more, the problem would be solved. By contrast, The Neoliberal Diet argues that increased obesity does not result merely from individual food and lifestyle choices. Since the 1980s, the neoliberal turn in policy and practice has promoted trade liberalization and retrenchment of the welfare regime, along with continued agricultural subsidies in rich countries. Neoliberal regulation has enabled agribusiness multinationals to thrive by selling highly processed foods loaded with refined flour and sugars—a diet that originated in the United States—as well as meat. Drawing on extensive empirical data, Gerardo Otero identifies the socioeconomic and political forces that created this diet, which has been exported around the globe, often at the expense of people's health.Otero shows how state-level actions, particularly subsidies for big farms and agribusiness, have ensured the dominance of processed foods and made healthful fresh foods inaccessible to many. Comparing agrifood performance across several nations, including the NAFTA region, and correlating food access to class inequality, he convincingly demonstrates the structural character of food production and the effect of inequality on individual food choices. Resolving the global obesity crisis, Otero concludes, lies not in blaming individuals but in creating state-level programs to reduce inequality and make healthier food accessible to all.

Beth A. Dixon explores how food justice impacts on human lives. Stories and reports in national media feature on the one hand hunger, famine and food scarcity, and on the other, rising rates of morbid obesity and health issues. Other stories-food justice narratives-illustrate how to correct the ethical damage created by the first type of story. They detail the nature of oppression and structural injustice, and show how these conditions constrain choices, truncate moral agency, and limit opportunities to live well. With stories from national media, food and farming memoirs, and scholarly ethnographies, Dixon reveals how different food narratives are constructed, and enable identification of just solutions to issues surrounding food insecurity, farm labor, and the lived experience of obesity. Drawing on Aristotle's concept of ethical perception, Dixon demonstrates how we can use narratives to enhance our understanding and ethical competence about injustice in relation to food. Food Justice and Narrative Ethics is a must-read for students of food studies, philosophy, and media studies.

Heavy Burdens: Stories of Motherhood and Fatness seeks to address the systemic ways in which the moral panic around “obesity” impacts fat mothers and fat children. Taking a life-course approach, the book begins with analyses of the ways in which fatphobia is enacted on pregnant (or even not-yet-pregnant) women, whose bodies immediately become viewed as objects warranting external control by not only medical professionals, but family members, and even passers-by. The story unfolds as adults recount childhood stories of growing up fat, or growing up in fear of being fat, and how their mothers'relationships with their own bodies and attempted weight-loss experiences shaped how food, exercise, and body management were approached in their homes in sometimes harmful ways. Finally, the book concludes with stories of women who have since become mothers, examining the ways in which having their own children altered their views on their own bodies and their perceptions of their mothers'actions, and working to find fat-friendly futures via their own parenting (or grand-parenting) techniques. This book contains the artwork, stories, and analyses of nearly 20 contributors, all of whom seek to change the ways in which fatness is perceived, experienced, and vilified. It is the editors'hope that these works will compel readers to reconsider their negative views on fatness and to retain softness toward every mother and child who are simply fighting to exist in the face of fatphobia.

In contemporary western societies, the fat body has become a focus of stigmatizing discourses and practices aimed at disciplining, regulating and containing it. Despite the fact that in many western countries fat bodies outnumber those that are thin, fat people are still socially marginalized, and treated with derision and even repulsion and disgust. Medical and public health experts continue to insist that an ‘obesity epidemic'exists and that fatness is a pathological condition which should be prevented and controlled.Fat is a book about why the fat body has become so reviled and reviewed as diseased, the target of such intense discussion and debate about ways to reduce its size down to socially and medically acceptable dimensions. It is about the lived experience of fat embodiment: how does it feel to be fat in a fat phobic-society? Fat activism and obesity politics, and related controversies, are also discussed. Internationally-renowned sociologist Deborah Lupton explores fat as a sociocultural artefact: a bodily substance or body shape that is given meaning by complex and shifting systems of ideas, practices, emotions, material objects and interpersonal relationships. This analysis identifies broader preoccupations and trends in the ways that human bodies and selfhood are experienced and practised.The second and much expanded edition of Fat is twice as long as the original edition. Lupton incorporates the very latest current critical scholarship and research offered in the humanities and social sciences on fat embodiment and fat politics. New updated material is presented in every chapter, including substantial additional sections on new digital media. Fat is a lively, at times provocative introduction for the general reader, as well as for students and academics interested in the politics of embodiment and health.

This book examines the so-called War on Obesity as an example of a cultural complex, how that complex shapes the way fat is treated in psychotherapy, including the classical Jungian approach to fat, as written by Marion Woodman. It looks at the experience of being fat as an ongoing trauma.

What is'too fat'? what is'too thin'? Interpretations of body weight vary widely across and within cultures. Meeting weight expectations is a major concern for many people because failing to do so may incur dire social consequences, such as difficulty in finding a romantic partner or even in locating adequate employment. without these social and cultural pressures, body weight would only be a health issue. while socially constructed standards of body weight may seem immutable, they are continuously recreated through social interactions that perpetuate or transform expectations about fatness and thinness. Written by sociologists, psychologists, and nutritionists, all of the chapters in this book focus on how people construct fatness and thinness, examining different strategies used to interpret body weight, such as negotiating weight identities, reinterpreting weight, and becoming involved in weight-related organizations. Together these chapters emphasize the many ways that people actively define, construct, and enact their fatness and thinness in a variety of settings and situations.

The average size of human bodies all over the world has been steadily rising over recent decades. The total count of people clinically labeled “obese” is now at least three times what it was in 1980. Fat Planet represents a collaborative effort to consider at a global scale what fat stigma is and what it does to people. Making use of an array of social science perspectives applied in multiple settings, the authors examine the interplay of weight, wealth, history, culture, and meaning to fat and its social rejection. They explore the notion of symbolic body capital—the power of non-fat bodies to do what people need or want. In so doing, they illustrate the complex and quickly shifting dynamics in thinking about fat—often considered personal yet powerfully influenced by and influential upon the broader world in which we live.

Many people consider their weight to be a personal problem; when, then, does body weight become a social problem? Until recently, the major public concern was whether enough food was consistently available. As food systems began to provide ample and stable amounts of food, questions about food availability were replaced with concerns about ideal weights and appearance. These interests were aggregated into public concerns about defining people as too fat and too thin.Social constructionist perspectives can contribute to the understanding of weight problems because they focus attention on how these problems are created, maintained, and promoted within various social environments. While there is much objectivist research concerning weight problems, few studies address the socially constructed aspects of fatness and thinness.This book however draws from and contributes to social constructionist perspectives. The chapters in this volume offer several perspectives that can be used to understand the way society deals with fatness and thinness. The contributors consider historical foundations, medical models, gendered dimensions, institutional components, and collective perspectives. These different perspectives illustrate the multifaceted nature of obesity and eating disorders, providing examples of how a variety of social groups construct weight as a social problem.

This book addresses the obesity epidemic from a political, economic and social perspective. Examining the populations that suffer the greatest from political and economic decision-making associated with obesity prevalence, this book utilizes a contemporary framework to discuss obesity. While it does examine the behavioral risks associated with rising obesity rates, it also explores the political level, by evaluating theories in social justice and the political economy that foster or restrict at-risk behaviors. It considers the economic context through rising income inequality levels in the US. It also critiques the actions of higher institutions, including transnational corporations, as social contributors to this epidemic. Finally, it compares global and national challenges of the epidemic.

A growing sense of urgency over obesity at the national and international level has led to a proliferation of medical and non-medical interventions into the daily lives of individuals and populations. This work focuses on the biopolitical use of lifestyle to govern individual choice and secure population health from the threat of obesity. The characterization of obesity as a threat to society caused by the cumulative effect of individual lifestyles has led to the politicization of daily choices, habits and practices as potential threats. This book critically examines these unquestioned assumptions about obesity and lifestyle, and their relation to wider debates surrounding neoliberal governmentality, biopolitical regulation of populations, discipline of bodies, and the possibility of community resistance. The rationale for this book follows Michel Foucault's approach of problematization, addressing the way lifestyle is problematized as a biopolitical domain in neoliberal societies. Mayes argues that in response to the threat of obesity, lifestyle has emerged as a network of disparate knowledges, relations and practices through which individuals are governed toward the security of the population's health. Although a central focus is government health campaigns, this volume demonstrates that the network of lifestyle emanates from a variety of overlapping domains and disciplines, including public health, clinical medicine, media, entertainment, school programs, advertising, sociology and ethics. This book offers a timely critique of the continued interventions into the lives of individuals and communities by government agencies, private industries, medical and non-medical experts in the name of health and population security and will be of interests to students and scholars of critical international relations theory, health and bioethics and governmentality studies.

The current'obesity epidemic'has been at the top of the national and, increasingly, global public agenda for the last decade, the subject of extensive and intensive concern, scrutiny, and corrective efforts from various quarters. In the United States, much of this attention is predicated on the'official'discourse, or story, of obesity-that it is a matter of personal responsibility, specifically to the end of monitoring and ensuring appropriate caloric balance. However, even though it continues to have cultural presumption, that discourse does not resonate with the populace, which may explain why efforts of redress have been notoriously ineffective. In this book, Helene Shugart places obesity in cultural, political, and economic context, arguing that current anxieties regarding obesity reflect the contemporary crisis in neoliberalism, and that the failure of the official discourse of obesity mirrors the failure of neoliberalism more broadly: specifically, to account for authenticity, a powerfully resonant cultural concept today. She chronicles a number of competing discourses of obesity that have arisen in response to the failed official discourse, examining and evaluating each in relation to the idea of authenticity; assessing the practical and behavioral implications of each discourse for both obesity incidence and redress; and establishing the significance of each discourse for negotiating neoliberalism in crisis more broadly.

What is Fat Activism and why is it important? Charlotte Cooper, a fat activist with around 30 years experience, answers this question by lifting the lid on a previously unexplored social movement and offering a fresh perspective on one of the major problems of our times. In her expansive grassroots study she: Reveals details of fat activist methods and approaches and explodes myths Charts extensive accounts of international fat activist historical roots going back over four decades Explores controversies and tensions in the movement Shows that fat activism is an undeniably feminist and queer phenomenon Explains why fat activism presents exciting possibilities for anyone interested in social justice Fat Activism: A Radical Social Movement is a rare insider's view of fat people speaking about their lives and politics on their own terms. It is part of a new wave of accessible, accountable and rigorous work emerging through Research Justice and the Para-Academy. This is the book you have been waiting for.

In recent decades the rise of the so-called'global obesity epidemic'has led to fatness and fat bodies being debated incessantly in popular, professional, and academic arenas. Fatness and fat bodies are shamed and demonised, and the public monitoring, surveillance and outright policing by the media, health professionals, and the general public are pervasive and socially accepted.In Neoliberal Bodies and the Gendered Fat Body, Hannele Harjunen claims that neoliberal economic policy and rationale are enmeshed with conceptions of body, gender, and health in a profound way in contemporary western culture. She explores the relationships between fatness, health, and neoliberal discourse and the role of economic policy in the construction of the (gendered) fat body, and examines how neoliberal discourses join patriarchal and biomedical constructions of the fat female body. In neoliberal culture the fat body is not just the unhealthy body one finds in medical discourse, but also the body that is costly, unproductive and inefficient, failing in the crucial task of self-management.With an emphasis on how neoliberal governmentality, in its many forms, affects the fat body and contributes to its vilification, this book is essential reading for scholars of feminist thought, sociology, cultural studies and social theory with interests in the body, gender and the effects of neoliberal discourse on social attitudes.

This book sheds new light on the political battle to define and construct obesity as a policy issue. Through a rich analysis of the debates in Australia and the UK, it develops a nuanced analysis of the competing narratives that actors rely on to make sense of and argue about this issue, and documents how and to what effect they draw on scientific evidence to support their accounts. The real'war on obesity', it demonstrates, has always been over the meaning and nature of this public health crisis. This insightful work will interest scholars of interpretive policy studies, critical public health and science and technology studies.

Die'Adipositas-Epidemie'gilt als eine der größten gesundheitspolitischen Herausforderungen der Gegenwart und zunehmend auch als politisches Problem. Die Studie untersucht den Prozess der Etablierung dieser, zwar nur temporären, aber dennoch wirkmächtigen Wahrheit über dicke Körper und ordnet sie in ihren gesellschaftspolitischen Kontext ein. Dabei wird auch auf Gegendeutungen eingegangen; etwa auf die Forderung, dicke Körper als gleichberechtigten Teil gesellschaftlicher Vielfalt anzuerkennen. Anschließend wird analysiert, wie sich die politischen Maßnahmen gegen die'Adipositas-Epidemie'in Deutschland, den USA, Großbritannien und der Europäischen Union in den Paradigmenwechsel vom fürsorgenden zum aktivierenden Sozialstaat einfügen.

How do the media represent obesity and eating disorders? How are these representations related to one another? And how do the news media select which scientific findings and policy decisions to report? Multi-disciplinary in approach, Obesity, Eating Disorders and the Media presents critical new perspectives on media representations of obesity and eating disorders, with analyses of print, online, and televisual media framings. Exploring abjection and alarm as the common themes linking media framings of obesity and eating disorders, Obesity, Eating Disorders and the Media shows how the media similarly position these conditions as dangerous extremes of body size and food practice. The volume then investigates how news media selectively cover and represent science and policy concerning obesity and eating disorders, with close attention to the influence of pre-existing framings alongside institutional and moral agendas. A rich, comprehensive analysis of media framings of obesity and eating disorders - as embodied conditions, complex disorders, public health concerns, and culturally significant phenomena - this volume will be of interest to scholars and students across the social sciences and all those interested in understanding cultural aspects of obesity and eating disorders.

Cultural anxieties about fatness and the attendant stigmatisation of fat bodies, have lent a medical authority and cultural legitimacy to what can be described as'fat-phobia'. Against the backdrop of the ever-growing medicalisation, pathologisation, and commodification of fatness, coupled with the moral panic over an alleged'obesity epidemic', this volume brings together the latest scholarship from various critical disciplines to challenge existing ideas of fat and fat embodiment. Shedding light on the ways in which fat embodiment is lived, experienced, regulated and (re)produced across a range of cultural sites and contexts, Queering Fat Embodiment destabilises established ideas about fat bodies, making explicit the intersectionality of fat identities and thereby countering the assertion that fat studies has in recent years reproduced a white, ableist, heteronormative subjectivity in its analyses. A critical queer examination on fatness, Queering Fat Embodiment will be of interest to scholars of cultural and queer theory, sociology and media studies, working on questions of embodiment, stigmatisation and gender and sexuality.

The consumption and distribution of food, as well as its production, has become a major public policy issue over the past few decades; what we eat is no longer merely a private matter but carries significant externalities for wider society. Its increasing significance within the public arena implies a dissonance regarding the boundaries of food; where do we draw the line between food as private and food as public? What are the rights of society to impinge upon individual food consumption, and what conflicts will ensue when this boundary is disputed? The Consuming Geographies of Food explores these multiple issues of food across different regions of the world from the consumer's perspective. It uniquely explicates the factors that lead customers towards certain typologies of consumption and towards certain types of retailing, offering a comprehensive review of the obesity problem, the phenomenon of food deserts and the issue of exclusion from a healthy diet. It then considers the effects of food on the consumer, the dynamic relationship between food and people, and the issue of food exclusion before concluding with possible futures for food consumption, from low-technology projects to high-technology scenarios. Based on original research into food access, ethics and consumption in both developed and less-developed countries this book will be of interest to students, researchers and academics in the fields of geography, economics, hospitality health, marketing, nutrition and sociology.

A number of economic, cultural, and contextual factors are driving urban America's obesity crisis, which can create chronic health conditions for those least able to manage them. Considering urban obesity through a social justice lens, this book is the first to help social workers and others develop targeted interventions for effective outcomes. The text dissects the problem of urban obesity in populations of color from individual, family, group, community, and policy perspectives. Beginning with a historical survey of urban obesity in communities of color, anti-obesity policies and programs, and the role of social work in addressing this threat, the volume follows with an analysis of the social, ecological, environmental, and spatial aggravators of urban obesity, such as the food industry's advertising strategies, which promote unhealthy choices; the failure of local markets to provide good food options; the lack of safe exercise spaces; and the paucity of heath education. Melvin Delgado reviews recent national obesity statistics; explores the connection between food stamps and obesity; and reveals the financial and social consequences of the epidemic for society as a whole. He concludes with recommendations for effective health promotion programs, such as youth-focused interventions, community gardens, and community-based food initiatives, and a unique consideration of urban obesity in relation to acts of genocide and national defense.