Apocalyptic public health: Exploring discourses of fatness in childhood 'obesity' policy (original) (raw)
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Doctoral Thesis, 2020
The broad assumption that a person’s weight has a direct link to their overall health and wellbeing is pervasive in Western cultures. In particular, there is grave public concern over the potential link ‘obesity’ has with other ailments such as hypertension, diabetes and cardiovascular disease, and a focus on reducing rates of ‘obesity’ on the premise of lowering the incidence of these other diseases. As such, governments, non-governmental organisations, and various industries have funnelled billions of dollars into researching, controlling, and attempting to tackle the global ‘obesity epidemic’. These factors have made it difficult to have ‘health’ as a fat person. Indeed, the contemporary framing of fatness as a disease manifested through poor lifestyle choices reduces many conversations about health and fatness to the effective elimination of fat people through weight-loss. This thesis examines the complex relationship between discourses of ‘obesity’ and experiences of health and fatness through a fat studies lens. Drawing on eighteen interviews with self-identifying fat people living in Aotearoa/New Zealand, issues of fat identity, fat as deviance, fat ‘health’ and healthcare are critically examined using discourse analysis. These narratives demonstrate that ‘obesity’ discourses play a dominating role in the ways in which fat people construct their identities, understand their health, and experience healthcare. A preoccupation with the moral meanings ascribed to fat labels, bodies and identities, and thus a commitment to a ‘healthy lifestyle’ as a way to subvert harmful fat stereotypes, was common among the people interviewed. In addition, dominant beliefs about ‘obesity’ contributed towards combative healthcare experiences and disrupted fat people’s access to (quality) care. This thesis contributes to the fields of fat studies and the sociology of medicine by providing a critical examination of fat health in Aotearoa/New Zealand, and by generating novel theoretical insights regarding the ways that fat people navigate and negotiate their identities in terms of deviance, stigma and liminality.
Undesirable Consequences? Resignifying Discursive Constructions of Fatness in the 'Obesity Epidemic'
chapter in: Fat Studies in the UK (eds C. Tomrley & A. Kaloski Naylor, p69-81), 2009
October 2007 saw the publication of the UK government’s Foresight report ‘Tackling Obesities: Future Choices’ which attempted to draw parallels between obesity and climate change and in particular stated that, for both ‘crises’, “failure to act at an early stage is already having significant and undesirable consequences” (p72). One immediate undesirable consequence emerged in the publicity surrounding the report’s publication, which was dominated by Health Secretary Alan Johnson’s claim that obesity in the UK is a, "potential crisis on the scale of climate change." His statement is indicative of a turn in the discursive construction of fatness whereby it no longer signifies a mere individual failing, but is constituted as a fundamentally anti-social state. The link between obesity and climate change has subsequently become one of the dubious ‘truths’ of obesity epidemic rhetoric. This chapter examines the press coverage of the Foresight report and subsequent UK news stories which have reiterated the link between obesity and climate change in order to understand how the link is framed and how/whether counter-discourses are articulated. The analysis is approached through Judith Butler’s theories around the resignification of discourse (1990, 1993, 1997). Her framework is particularly appropriate given that both the hegemonic framing of obesity as an ‘epidemic’ and strategies employed by fat activists/academics (e.g., Wann, 1998; LeBesco, 2004) hinge around resignifying the meaning of fatness for differing political ends. However, using the climate change example I argue both, that the discourse of the obesity epidemic is dynamic and contested (Butler herself states that resignification is never final), but that this is happening within extremely narrow confines. The absence of fat activist voices in the media suggests that some resignifications are more successful than others, making resignification for fat activists potentially liberatory and yet subject to undesirable consequences.
In an act of defiance, I argue that the medicalization of fat bodies has adversely affected people’s ability to reflect on their own embodiment. This is particularly true amongst vulnerable populations, most notably, children. While the discourse surrounding adult obesity is meant to establish a sense of blame upon the sense, messages regarding childhood obesity have the intent of taking a more protectionist route. However, due to the globalization of anti-fat discourse, children are bombarded with messages that have the intention of promoting a “healthier” lifestyle, while at the same time shame them, and disregard the sheer variety of narratives that health can be actualized. Along the line, the miscommunication has led to an internalization of neoliberal responsibility, where children have been forced to self-regulate their own bodies. This is all occurring at the detriment of their own construction of identity and their place in the world around them.
2019
The authors investigate bodily pressures targeted at mothers through parenting magazines in a neoliberal cultural context. Theoretically rooted Foucault's framework of biopower, the authors applied Foucauldian critical discourse analysis to examine messaging related to food and weight in Parents magazine. Findings highlight three key problematic discourses: (a) food practices are moral, physical, and emotional decisions made by mothers; (b) women-including mothers-have a moral obligation to seek a thin, fit body and to model weight/body maintenance activities for their children; and (c) fat children are inherently unhealthy and at risk of becoming fat adults. These discourses are critically assessed within the context of present literature related to mother blame, with layered analyses of race and gender.
Making and Breaking the Weighted Body: a poststructural reading of obesity discourse
This research emerged through my growing discomfort with the escalating attention given to the current obesity "crisis". I was worried that, with the growing number of agencies, government task forces, fitness groups, and educators rallying to fight obesity, research within physical education attending to the social effects of the (re)production of obesity as a health crisis may have been subordinated to other agendasnamely obesity prevention and reduction. Therefore, the aim of this thesis was to interrogate the possible effects the proliferation of obesity discoursedefined as the knowledge and practices surrounding and underpinning obesity reduction initiatives (re)produced in scientific literature, popular culture and public discourse as health information-may have for the ways in which bodies, behaviour and the self are known. Two New Zealand-made reality television programmes -Eat Yourself
Representations of fatness inParentsmagazine: A critical discourse analysis
Fat Studies, 2019
The authors investigate bodily pressures targeted at mothers through parenting magazines in a neoliberal cultural context. Theoretically rooted Foucault's framework of biopower, the authors applied Foucauldian critical discourse analysis to examine messaging related to food and weight in Parents magazine. Findings highlight three key problematic discourses: (a) food practices are moral, physical, and emotional decisions made by mothers; (b) women-including mothers-have a moral obligation to seek a thin, fit body and to model weight/body maintenance activities for their children; and (c) fat children are inherently unhealthy and at risk of becoming fat adults. These discourses are critically assessed within the context of present literature related to mother blame, with layered analyses of race and gender.
Mothers at large: responsibilising the pregnant self for the "obesity epidemic"
Maternal obesity' has recently been linked with poor childbirth outcomes and health effects on the developing fetus and future person. These studies have been sensationally reported in the Australasian news media, resulting in a reorientation of public health policy toward the management and prevention of 'risky' fat pregnant bodies. This article draws on Foucauldian governmentality theory and intersectional analysis to argue that the framing of 'maternal obesity' as a public health crisis represents a gendered, raced and classed biopolitical technology of governance with implications for fat women who reproduce, and for social justice in health more generally. It concludes by arguing for the potential of the intersectional concept of reproductive justice to provide a more complex and socially just view of the relationship between maternal body weight and reproductive health outcomes.
The language of 'nudge' in health policy: pre-empting working class obesity through 'biopedagogy'
Focusing on a long-running health campaign, this paper examines the UK government's use of a policy technique known as 'nudge', which draws on behavioural economics in order to shape civic behaviours towards more desirable ends. Public health campaigns tend to be immune to critique because of assumptions that their goals are laudable and that they are 'unproblematically' educational. Here I argue that the use of 'nudge' tactics helps legitimate a narrowing of the sphere of governmental responsibility for this complex and classed social problem by pathologising working class lifestyles as inherently 'irrational'. I use critical discourse analysis to explore the textual strategies through which a corpus of TV cartoon adverts enacts a 'biopedagogic' discourse and shapes 'self-disciplinary' subjectivities, targeting children in particular. Through subtle semiotic markers (register and regional accent) these adverts target a northern English, working class demographic, and shift responsibility onto certain individuals while glossing over the deeply entrenched and escalating forms of social inequality which lie behind the problem. In light of the increasing prominence of 'soft' governance techniques like nudge, I argue for a close dialogue between detailed linguistic analytical methods and a Foucauldian analytics of power.
"When Does Fat Matter?" Obesity, Risk and the Politics of Futurity
The “obesity epidemic” has become one of the most divisive public health issues of our time. It divides us politically by creating factions: those who believe immediate intervention is necessary to scale back obesity rates to pre-millennial levels struggle to communicate productively with those who dismiss governmental measures to combat obesity as attempts to resuscitate the “nanny state.” Those who believe being overweight or obese is the effect of an irresponsible individual’s lifestyle choices give little credence to advocates of a more structural critique emphasizing free market capitalism’s establishment of parameters that compel people—and, in particular, economically disadvantaged people—to make unhealthy choices. In this essay I align with the 1 group of critics who identify as obesity sceptics: scholars who read any ideological formulation of the obesity problem with irreverence and do not concede the veracity of the “epidemic” without some reservation. My focus here is on the rise of a certain state paternalism in response to obesity and what this shift in risk-perception suggests about the role of belief in creating the conditions for a public health emergency. The crucial factor here is potentiality: while dangers are concrete situations that imply a requisite reaction, risks represent emerging and often contentious threats. Rather than reducing the politics of obesity-fighting projects to cost/benefit analysis, then, I seek to find a language that re-opens the problem and complicates the diverse assumptions about individuals, structures and temporalities informing the epidemiology of obesity.