Fatness and Civilization

Obese bodies are simultaneously conceptualized in a variety of paradoxical ways: good consumers who are bad at consuming, too much weight and too little health, disabled bodies that can be “cured” with a shot or pill, identities that should be respected or the symbol of privileges we should eradicate, and agents without the right kind of agency. This paper, like the bodies under discussion, is multifaceted; it ranges from notions of neoliberalism and governmentality, to consumerism and a history of obesity, to healthism and morality. I draw from disability studies, insofar the object of disability studies is a set of social, historical and cultural practices that “regulate and control the way we think through the body” (Davis, 1995, p. 2). Existing as a liminal node, where health, citizenship, and disability collide, obesity provides fertile grounds for interrogating these hermeneutics of life, and in doing so, sheds light on the regulation and control of the body. Specifically, I will interrogate obesity in three ways: first, as a “health” issue, drawing primarily from the normative model, in order to critique the “naturalist” and biostatistical models of health; second, from neoliberal model of consumerism and citizenship, leading into the third interrogation: “obesity” as a health category for bodily regulation and control.