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.

About the Author

Susan Greenhalgh is Professor of Anthropology at Harvard University. She is the author of Under the Medical Gaze: Facts and Fictions of Chronic Pain, Cultivating Global Citizens: Population in the Rise of China, and Just One Child: Science and Policy in Deng's China. She is coauthor of Governing China's Population: From Leninist to Neoliberal Biopolitics.

Reviews

As Greenhalgh asks in the final pages, 'if one comment can destroy a child's life, what should we do now?' (p. 284) She offers some concrete and worthy initiatives that include dispelling biomyths, discouraging fat-talk, and banning fat-bullying (pp. 286-287). These are important suggestions that have the potential to change behaviours.

* biosocieties *

Her [Greenhalgh's] argument against the fat industry, presented in a Foucauldian manner, is extremely strong, particularly in the context of existing patriarchal hegemony.

* Choice *

In Fat-Talk Nation, Greenhalgh argues that the war on obesity is harmful to people of all sizes. Effectively appealing to logos, pathos, and ethos, she presents a range of negative effects (i.e. the human costs) the war is having on young people in the United States through weaving empirical evidence with autoethnographic essays.

* Sociology of Health & Illness *

Greenhalgh focuses her keen ethnographic eye on the personal narratives and the local moral worlds her students shared with her about their bodies and their struggles with fat. In a down-to-earth, accessible style, this book systematically details the many costs and unintended consequences of America's 'War on Obesity.'... Greenhalgh's smart, accessible text can be read by multiple audiences. Her formulation of fat talk, biobullying, and biomyths, etc. gives us an easy, clear vocabulary that can be used dynamically to problematize the war on fat in the public sphere and in public health.

* Anthropological Quarterly *

Fat-Talk Nation clearly underscores the ways in which America's war on obesity has really become a war on fat people.... Greenhalgh provides a vivid account of the intense physical and emotional suffering experienced by young people raised in an aggressively fat-phobic society, making her book a noteworthy contribution to the literature.

* American Ethnologist journal *



Book Information
ISBN 9780801453953
Author Susan Greenhalgh
Format Hardback
Page Count 336
Imprint Cornell University Press
Publisher Cornell University Press
Weight(grams) 907g
Dimensions(mm) 229mm * 152mm * 25mm