Week 13 Mind Map
Guthman Reading
The scientific tools and techniques used to understand the 'obesity epidemic' in America are intricately linked with 'artifactual contructivism'
Studies and results obesity are directly influenced by subjective understandings of fatness, illness, and obesity that contribute to improper testing/study methods
The obesity epidemic is epistemically constructed rather than solely a product of constructivism
These tools and techniques paint the picture of obesity in a way that can over-dramatize some parts, under-specify others, and push out the possibility of different solutions.
These tools wrongly co-produce the relationship between size and illness
Main problematic tools and techniques:
Measuring obesity through BMI
Categorizing and communicating BMI increases
Establishing excess deaths
Conflating size with pathology
"assumptions about the nature of obesity as a problem have been folding into efforts to measure it, also helping bring the object of study into being"
LeBesco Reading
There is a larger cultural landscape in America where the healthy body has come to signify the morally worthy citizen.
Nomenclature of the 'obesity epidemic' is a relatively recent phenomenon
How we think about fatness (fat people make bad consumption and moral choices) is concomitant with the shift to a neoliberal form of governmentality described by Foucault
The obese body is a new form of deviance
Self practices, while supposed to seem voluntary, are "'proposed, suggested, and imposed'" by culture, society, and social groups
The state often does not need to actively govern disobedient bodies because we have created a surveillance society where citizens self-govern and voluntarily govern others. Foucault calls this the hegemonic character of healthism
Hypervisibility of fat bodies leads to assumptions about how well fat people are self-governing
Public health interventions that work on the population level aim to divide and conquer by preventing, containing, and eliminating abnormal
We are expected to both consume less and be skinny but also consume a ton with our money. Super contradictory and is a trap for almost everyone
And yet we have seen increasing legislation as of late where the state tries to pass legislation granting them greater authority to govern the bodies of others
Policing fatness on health grounds actually endangers the wellbeing of fat people