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.
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