Fat-Talk Nation

Susan Greenhalgh

Description

In recent decades, America has been waging a veritable war on fat in which not just public health authorities, but every sector of society is engaged in constant "fat talk" aimed at educating, badgering, and ridiculing heavy people into shedding pounds. We hear a great deal about the dangers of fatness to the nation, but little about the dangers of today's epidemic of fat talk to individuals and society at large. The human trauma caused by the war on fat is disturbing-and it is virtually unknown. How do those who do not fit the "ideal" body type feel being the object of abuse, discrimination, and even revulsion? How do people feel being told they are a burden on the healthcare system for having a BMI outside what is deemed-with little solid scientific evidence-"healthy"? How do young people, already prone to self-doubt about their bodies, withstand the daily assault on their body type and sense of self-worth? In Fat-Talk Nation, Susan Greenhalgh tells the story of today's fight against excess pounds by giving young people, the campaign's main target, an opportunity to speak about experiences that have long lain hidden in silence and shame. Featuring forty-five autobiographical narratives of personal struggles with diet, weight, "bad BMIs," and eating disorders, Fat-Talk Nation shows how the war on fat has produced a generation of young people who are obsessed with their bodies and whose most fundamental sense of self comes from their size. It reveals that regardless of their weight, many people feel miserable about their bodies, and almost no one is able to lose weight and keep it off. Greenhalgh argues that attempts to rescue America from obesity-induced national decline are damaging the bodily and emotional health of young people and disrupting families and intimate relationships. Fatness today is not primarily about health, Greenhalgh asserts; more fundamentally, it is about morality and political inclusion/exclusion or citizenship. To unpack the complexity of fat politics today, Greenhalgh introduces a cluster of terms-biocitizen, biomyth, biopedagogy, bioabuse, biocop, and fat personhood-and shows how they work together to produce such deep investments in the attainment of the thin, fit body. These concepts, which constitute a theory of the workings of our biocitizenship culture, offer powerful tools for understanding how obesity has come to remake who we are as a nation, and how we might work to reverse course for the next generation.

Sujets

• Sociologie, société et politique
• USA
• Biological anthropology
• États-Unis

Informations

• Publié par: Cornell University Press
• Date de parution: 16 novembre 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780801456442
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

FatTalk Nation

FatTalk Nation

The Human Costs of America’s War on Fat

Susan Greenhalgh

Cornell University Press Ithaca and London

Copyright © 2015 by Susan Greenhalgh

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850.

First published 2015 by Cornell University Press Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Greenhalgh, Susan, author.  Fat-talk nation : the human costs of America’s war on fat / Susan Greenhalgh.  pages cm  Includes bibliographical references and index.  ISBN 978-0-8014-5395-3 (cloth : alk. paper)  1. Weight loss—United States. 2. Weight loss—Social aspects— United States. I. Title.  RC628.G743 2015  613.2'5—dc23 2014048582

Cornell University Press strives to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the fullest extent possible in the publishing of its books. Such materials include vegetable-based, low-VOC inks and acid-free papers that are recycled, totally chlorine-free, or partly composed of nonwood îbers. For further information, visit our website at www.cornellpress.cornell.edu.

Cloth printing

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Preface

Contents

Part 1. The Politics and Culture of Fat in America 1. A Biocitizenship Society to Fight Fat 2. Creating Thin, Fit Bodies: The View from SoCal

Part 2. My BMI, My Self 3. “Obese” 4. “Overweight” 5. “Underweight” 6. “Normal”

Part 3. Uncharted Costs and Unreachable Goals 7. Physical and Mental Health at Risk 8. Families and Relationships Unhinged 9. Does Biocitizenship Help the Very Fat?

vii

1 3 39

73 75 99 127 153

179 181 211 237

v i C o n t e n t s

Part 4. What Now? 10. Social Justice and the End of the War on Fat

Appendix Notes References Index

265 267

289 295 305 315

Preface

“Tiger Mom puts 7-year-old on drastic diet!”

“Chris Christie had secret weight-loss surgery.”

“Good news? AMA declares obesity a disease.”

“Fitness Crazed”

This is not another book about how to lose weight or become ît. In my search for a publisher, I encountered one literary agent after another who told me that on the topic of obesity, the only thing people would read is a book on how to shed pounds. My book would not sell, they said—and the headlines above, which are daily fare in our fat-phobic culture, seem to suggest as much. Yet I am reluctant to agree. From my conversations with Americans of many ages and backgrounds, I sense a hunger for new ways to think about the troubling epidemic of obesity and related disor- ders, which seems to grow ever more dire as a medical crisis, even as it stubbornly resists solution at the individual or societal level. I sense a long- ing for a way to push back against the well-worn narrative in which Amer- ica is facing a “childhood obesity epidemic” so threatening to the nation that it must be fought no matter the cost—an account so pervasive that it has become the cultural common sense about obesity and virtually the only way to understand the problem and how to address it. This book responds to the yearning for fresh insight into the vexed issue of weight in America. It asks how the war on fat works; how it has

v i i i P r e f a c e

recruited all of us to îght fat by lecturing, badgering, and shaming fat people into shedding pounds; and how it has come to weave itself so deeply into the fabric of our society that it has remade who we are as a nation— our culture, our relationships, our economy, our science and technology, and even our politics. In all the talk about fat in America, there is one voice that is almost never heard: the voice of those targeted in the îght against excess pounds. How do heavy people feel being the object of such visceral hatred, verbal abuse, and outright discrimination? We do not know, and they cannot tell us without risking further abuse.FatTalk Nationgives voice to people who have been shamed into silence. It tells the human story of today’s war on fat in the voices of its main objects of bodily reform: the young. Featur- ing 45 in-depth narratives of personal struggles with diet, weight, and “bad BMIs,” it shows how the war on fat has produced a generation of young people who are obsessed with their bodies and BMIs, and whose most fun- damental sense of self comes increasingly from their size. It shows that no matter whether obese, overweight, normal, or underweight, almost every- one is miserable about their bodies and almost no one is able to lose weight and keep it off. This book shows that the war on fat, which is supposed to rescue America from obesity-induced national decline, is itself damaging the bodies of the young and disrupting families and intimate relationships. The human trauma caused by the war on fat is disturbing—and it is virtu- ally unknown. By exposing what the war has wrought, this book aims to change the conversation about weight in America today. In telling the stories of those targeted for bodily reform, this book turns the war on fat itself into the object of inquiry. It argues that fatness today is not primarily about health; more fundamentally, it is about morality and political inclusion/exclusion or citizenship. To unpack the complex dy- namics of fat politics today, I introduce a cluster of concepts—biocitizen, biomyth, fat-talk, biopedagogy, bioabuse, biocop, and fat subjectivity— and show how these biophenomena work together to produce so much hype and such deep investments in the attainment of the thin, ît body. I draw on scholarly work in fat studies, medical anthropology, biopoli- tics, and medicine and public health, and I aim to contribute to the con- versations in those îelds. Yet because the obesity issue affects virtually all Americans, and because the stakes in how we understand and address it are so high for us as individuals and as a nation, I also aim to reach a wider general public. In particular, I aspire to reach the young people who are the

P r e f a c e i x

primary targets of the war, as well as those charged with their upbringing, from parents and doctors to teachers and coaches. To reach that broad readership, I keep scholarly trappings to a minimum and draw only selec- tively on the literature. For those wanting a comprehensive review of the burgeoning writings on fat politics, the reference list contains citations to numerous helpful sources. Many books on the cultural politics of fat reect, at least in part, ef- forts by their authors to come to terms with the fat oppression they have endured throughout their lives. This book has a different and rather un- likely genesis. It was born in a classroom on the leafy campus of the Uni- versity of California, Irvine, in the heart of sunny, body-obsessed southern California. As I taught my students in “The Woman and the Body” about the rise of this new “epidemic” and the launch of the national war on fat, they taught me, through their essays about their own lives and the lives of those close to them, about the dynamics of weight in their daily existence; about their struggles, mostly futile, to lose pounds and keep their weight within “healthy BMI” levels; and about the trauma they experienced as they watched their happy childhoods or promising athletic careers vanish, lost to the struggle to drop weight. I had no idea until reading their essays of the extraordinary suffering young people endure simply because their bodies carry extra pounds. Their essays left me stunned and saddened. Why are fat people berated and stigmatized while thin people are treated like health heroes, when their body weights are due more to genetics and the environment than to any bodily virtue on their part? Reading my stu- dents’ essays made me see the war on fat as a problem of social (in)justice and compelled me to undertake this project to make their stories part of the national conversation about the war on fat and how we have fought it so far. It is to these young people, and especially to the roughly 600 students in “The Woman and the Body” classes of 2010 and 2011, that I dedicate this book. Beyond sharing their powerful stories, my students have contributed to this project in countless other ways. In California, Leticia (Lety) Sanchez and Laura Stipic served both as able research assistants and as mentors on the body culture of their generation. On the other side of the country, in Cambridge, MA, my Harvard students have deepened my understand- ing of how the war on fat plays out in parts of the country outside south- ern California. Through critical engagement in the classroom and close readings of my work-in-progress, undergraduates Helen Clark, Marissa