This document discusses sociological perspectives on human fat and obesity. It summarizes various viewpoints, including the orthodox anti-obesity position that views obesity as a disease leading to health issues. It also discusses academic challenges to this view from fields like fat studies and critical obesity studies. These challenges examine fat through lenses like social determinism, medicalization of fat bodies, and sociocultural meanings assigned to fat. The document also maps how understandings of fat as an embodied experience have been explored using frameworks such as phenomenology, governmentality, feminism, and queer theory.

1. THE SOCIOLOGY OF FAT
Deborah Lupton, Department of Sociology and
Social Policy, University of Sydney

4. Model of human fat: „a shocking but strongly
motivating attention getter‟

5. Body fat as „thing‟ that must be „burnt off your
body‟

6. Fat body vest: feel what it is like to be fat!

7. „Obesity is suicide‟: dietary fat as dynamite

8. Soft drink as fat

9. The „Measure Up‟ campaign: „Do you measure
up?‟

10. Toxic fat, toxic bodies: the LiveLighter campaign

11. Fatty food turning into body fat

12. The headless fatty

13. The fat body as unsightly and repellent

14. Nigella Lawson: “I‟m a great believer in fat”

15. Dietary fat as gourmet delicacy

16. Fat activism

17. The Adipositivity Project

18. „Freedom from shame‟: Health At Every Size
movement

19. Orthodox anti-obesity position
• obesity is a disease and leads to other diseases such as diabetes,
cardiovascular disease and some types of cancer, and as a result,
early death
• fat bodies are pathological
• there is an „obesity epidemic‟ that must be contained
• fat bodies are an economic burden on society
• fat people should therefore attempt to lose weight to conform to
the „normal‟ BMI

20. My study of number of obesity articles in the Sydney Morning
Herald and the British Medical Journal, 1995--2011
0
50
100
150
200
250
300
SMH
BMJ

21. Academic challenges to the anti-obesity position
• Fat studies
• Critical obesity studies/critical weight studies
• Drawing on sociology, anthropology, critical psychology, cultural
geography, literary studies, media and cultural studies, gender
studies, queer studies, critical disability studies

22. Political economic approach
• fatness as linked to sociocultural disadvantage, obesogenic
environment, consumerist culture
• anti-obesity discourse and medical power
• drug companies, diet product producers, bariatric surgeons
profiting
• fat discrimination issues
• fat as a feminist issue

23. Obesity map of the USA: evidence of social
determinants of body weight

24. Sociocultural meanings of fat
• textual analysis (of media representations, public health
campaigns, medical journals, interview data etc)
• historical perspectives
• cross-cultural perspectives

25. Sociocultural meanings of fat as a dietary
substance
• once a luxury, sought-after foodstuff
• now reviled in many contexts
• represented as a health risk, toxic to the body: „fat makes you fat‟
• portrayed as disgusting
• some (expensive) fat privileged as part of gourmet cooking

26. Sociocultural meanings of body fat
• fat bodies as ugly and repulsive
• fat people as lacking self-discipline, lazy, ignorant
• fat bodies encroaching into others‟ space
• the fat body as grotesque
• the fat body as diseased
• fat bodies as inferior
• body fat as toxic

27. Fat bodies/selves
• fatness as spoilt identity/stigma: Goffman
• phenomenology of fat embodiment: Merleau-Ponty
• the civilized body: Elias
• fat bodies as assemblages: socio-technical/Deleuzian perspective

28. Foucauldian perspectives
• the government of fat bodies
• biopolitics and biopower
• practices of the self

29. Feminist philosophy
• fluidities, femininities, leaky uncontained bodies: Grosz, Shildrick
• the abject body: Kristeva

30. Queer theory: queering fatness
• cultural construction of embodiment/identity
• embodiment and identity as unstable and performative
• the challenging of normativity

31. Fat activism
fat
activism
feminism
queer
politics
disability
politics
Health
At Every
Size
fat
studies