Neoliberal Bodies and the Gendered Fat Body

Hannele Harjunen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781472431400
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317130413
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

In recent decades the rise of the so-called "global obesity epidemic" has led to fatness and fat bodies being debated incessantly in popular, professional, and academic arenas. Fatness and fat bodies are shamed and demonised, and the public monitoring, surveillance and outright policing by the media, health professionals, and the general public are pervasive and socially accepted.

In Neoliberal Bodies and the Gendered Fat Body, Hannele Harjunen claims that neoliberal economic policy and rationale are enmeshed with conceptions of body, gender, and health in a profound way in contemporary western culture. She explores the relationships between fatness, health, and neoliberal discourse and the role of economic policy in the construction of the (gendered) fat body, and examines how neoliberal discourses join patriarchal and biomedical constructions of the fat female body. In neoliberal culture the fat body is not just the unhealthy body one finds in medical discourse, but also the body that is costly, unproductive and inefficient, failing in the crucial task of self-management.

With an emphasis on how neoliberal governmentality, in its many forms, affects the fat body and contributes to its vilification, this book is essential reading for scholars of feminist thought, sociology, cultural studies and social theory with interests in the body, gender and the effects of neoliberal discourse on social attitudes.

1 Introduction and personal prologue

10.4324/9781315583976-1

This book is the result of a long personal and professional interest in questions concerning gender, body norms, and the social construction of what is considered a “normal” (female) body. In particular, the body which exceeds the body size norm, and is variously named as the fat, overweight, or obese body depending on the discourse and context, has been a constant focus in my work.

Like many other researchers, my own experience and background first led me to this topic. Before I began to study fatness¹ academically, I already had some experience of the phenomenon from living in a fat body. I grew up as a fat kid, lost weight in my early teens, was a normative-sized teenager for a few years, struggled to keep the weight off for years, lost and gained weight by turns after this, and by the time I was a twenty-something university student, I was fat again. It could be said that because of my own experience of living in a body that was considered non-normative, i.e., fat, and also in a body that was normative-sized, I have had access to experiential knowledge of the social effects of body size. For example, in school, which is one of the key sites of learning about body norms and hierarchy (e.g. Harjunen 2002; Kosonen 1998), I learnt at an early age that not only does one's body size influence how people treat you, but that the experience of fatness is also gendered. In other words, it is considered especially undesirable to be a fat girl or woman. Lesko (1988), for example, has referred to this gendered learning about the body in school as the “curriculum of the body”. I also knew – from trying, succeeding, and failing – what research on dieting has confirmed over the years: namely that after losing weight, maintaining weight loss is a difficult feat to accomplish in the long run (e.g. Sarlio-Lähteenkorva 1999).

In addition to this self-observed knowledge of the effects of fatness in social relations and the social environment, I also gained first-hand experience on how one's body size becomes a site of medical intervention and a target of institutional efforts to control it already as a young child. The first time I was put on a diet suggested by a medical professional was when I was seven years old. After a medical check-up by a school nurse, I was deemed too heavy for my age according to the height/weight charts, and an appointment with a paediatrician and a dietician at the local hospital was booked. I do not remember much about the discussions that took place during that appointment, but I do remember that I was given a sheet of paper that contained a list of foods that I was not supposed to eat and what was recommended instead. I recall that there were some curious items and brand names on the list of recommended products such as diet soda called “Slim” and sugar-free biscuits that were meant for people with diabetes. As I did not yet understand what dieting was, or that you needed special products for it, the list was neither very useful to me, nor was I in control of my own diet.

Although I cannot recall any significant changes to my diet, I do remember that after that hospital appointment, my mother started to comment on my eating and tried to control the size of my portions during meals, which frequently led to tension and arguments between us. I did not lose weight then, as far as I can remember, so in that sense this was not exactly a successful intervention. However, this episode was significant, in that it was my initiation into the world of dieting, commercial diet culture, and weight monitoring as an integral part of life. At the age of seven I started to learn that my body was a problem, it was not the way it was supposed to be, and that it was my responsibility to do something about it. In retrospect, it is worth noting that I did not learn about the normality of thinness and undesirability of fatness from the media, nor from being exposed to unattainable feminine beauty and body norms and ideals from an early age – these are often named as the main culprits and the primary source of female body image issues – yet the message was clear.

Indeed, governing the body and learning about body norms takes place in everyday settings and everyday life (e.g. Harjunen 2002; Haug 1987).

I did not comprehend it at the time, but what essentially happened was that my body weight and size had not only become an issue of “biopower” and “biopolitical concern” (see Foucault 1990), but also a site for disciplinary action and punishment. My body was now under surveillance, my weight was monitored, and I learnt the art of self-regulation and self-governing. It could be said that I have lived inside of a biopolitical “weight panopticon” for most of my life (see e.g. Foucault 1979, pp. 200–201). Another way that I have learnt to see this is in terms of the notion of “biopedagogy” used in Wright and Harwood (2011) to refer to those normalising and disciplining practices that have been created to assess, monitor, and discipline fat bodies, or bodies that are considered at risk of becoming fat. The school environment is one typical site for biopedagogies, although obviously not the only one.

I learnt more about the importance of controlling the body weight and body size when my weight became an issue again a few years later. One day at school, every child had to go for a check-up at the school's health centre. When my turn came to see the doctor, I was weighed and I remember actually being scolded by the doctor about my weight. During the visit to the paediatrician years earlier, my mother was with me and she was given advice on proper nutrition and exercise. This time I was on my own in the doctor's office. I was not given any advice on what to do or how to go on a diet, nor offered any type of support or supervision. I was simply told that I was too fat and needed to lose weight. I was very upset after seeing the doctor and I can remember the feeling of shame and rejection. It was primarily the doctor's words that prompted me to go on a diet for the first time on my own soon after. His “curing by shaming” method was in this sense effective, albeit unethical and abusive. On my wall at home, I put up a poster that displayed the calorific content of different foodstuffs, that I had found in some women's magazine, and started meticulously counting calories. I then went on to lose a significant amount of weight through a self-made diet that in hindsight was very restrictive and nutritionally inadequate for a growing pre-teen.

It seems evident that, considering current knowledge on the aetiology of eating disorders (and the prevalence and severity of various body image problems), the comments of the school doctor were particularly ill-advised. It has been well established that, for example, body-shaming comments can trigger eating disorders and encourage the development of dangerous dieting habits (e.g. Noll and Fredrickson 1998). But in all fairness, the doctor was not the only one who was thoughtless in his choice of words; awareness of body image issues was generally lower at that time. Nowadays, it would be considered worrying if a twelve-year-old girl went on a diet and lost about fifteen kilograms during one school year without any supervision. In hindsight, there was potentially a high risk for developing an eating disorder then and there. However, in the mid-1980s, no one expressed any concern over it, as far as I can remember. On the contrary, everybody (from friends and their parents to teachers) thought that it was great I was getting slimmer, and I received only encouragement and praise for my weight loss. In essence, I was shamed into dieting by an adult in a position of medical authority and then left to solve the problem in the only way that I could see was available to me – by going on a diet. Furthermore, I was socially rewarded for losing weight, even though it had happened in an unsupervised and probably unhealthy way. My experience is an all-too-common example of what happens when the mechanically applied medical paradigm of “fatness as health hazard” is combined with a narrow conception of the normal body, an emphasis on individual responsibility, and the social stigma of being fat. Unfortunately, research informs us that this is also generally representative of fat people's experiences regarding their treatment by medical/health professionals (e.g. Brownell and Teachman 2000; Harjunen 2009; Puhl and Brownell 2001).

When, as a graduate student, I started thinking about studying fatness in academic terms, I had already learnt from my own personal experience that fatness was both a medical and social issue. Furthermore, it was clear that fatness was a gendered experience with particular significance for women. However, this experiential knowledge of fatness as being something socially significant was not yet reflected in the academic literature in the mid-1990s. I first became interested in academic research of fatness then as an undergraduate student whilst writing a paper for a women's studies class on ideals of beauty and the body. While looking for existing research I soon became aware of the medical bias that existed, and how poorly fatness was understood as a social and sociological issue. At the time, there was no domestic (Finnish) and very little international non-medical research on fatness, on fat female bodies (or male for that matter), or the experience of being fat. I was quite surprised to discover that these subjects, never mind the experiences of fat people, were so under-theorised and under-researched. Most surprising of all was the seeming lack of interest in feminist academic circles in addressing the topic of fatness and the fat body, although there was already a mass of feminist critique dealing with oppressive body norms and the thin ideal (e.g. Bartky 1990; Bordo 1993; Orbach 1998 [1977 and 1982]; Wolf 1991). The fat body was in a way “present but absent” – always there in the background, but clearly not the focal point of feminist study on gendered body norms. Although I knew that there were feminist fat activists and a fat acceptance movement in the US and the UK, I had no access to them as an academic resource, and there was no organised fat activist movement in Finland. My academic work on fatness was thus initially motivated by the absence of the fat body and fat experience in both feminist studies and social research in general.

Since the mid-1990s a great deal has happened: fatness has become a global issue that is continually talked about in any number of forums. It is certainly not an invisible issue any longer. My active years as a researcher have, in fact, coincided with the rise of the so-called “global obesity epidemic” and accompanying “obesity epidemic discourse” (e.g. LeBesco 2010; Murray 2008, p. 15). Since the turn of the century, fatness and fat bodies have been debated incessantly in popular, professional, and academic arenas. In the media, fatness has been a topic of countless newspaper headlines, feature articles, internet forum discussions, documentaries, talk shows, and diet and makeover programmes. In the field of public health policy and health promotion, fatness has been the focus of numerous prevention and action programmes, conferences, awareness and weight loss campaigns, and the target of policies that are purely disciplinary in nature. In addition to these popular and health policy discourses, during the past decade or so there has been a notable upsurge of interest in the study of fatness in academia (see Saguy and Riley 2005). This “obesity epidemic rhetoric” has given a push, paradoxically, to both “obesity science” based on biomedicine (Gard and Wright 2005; Rail, Holmes, and Murray, 2010) and interdisciplinary critical and feminist fat studies that denounces it together with the medicalisation of fatness in general (see e.g. Rothblum and Solovay 2009). There is also a great deal of work that is somewhere between these two poles of research activity around fatness.

Today, the discussion on fatness seems positively omnipresent, and in most cases it is still seen through the lens of biomedicine. Fatness is approached firstly as a biomedical issue: it is considered as a problem, threat, and danger to the public and the individual's health. This problem-centred approach to fatness has been promoted especially by proponents of the so-called “obesity epidemic discourse” (OED) that has dominated reporting, research, and debate on fatness since the early 2000s. The obesity epidemic discourse rests on the assumption that fatness is a disease-like condition that is spreading through the world at an uncontrollable pace and in epidemic proportions (e.g. Boero 2012; Gard and Wright 2005; Oliver 2006).

Concern over public health is certainly at the heart of this globally declared “war against obesity” (e.g. Biltekoff 2007; Herndon 2005; Kyrölä 2007). However, not only has it had the effect of stepping up the search for solutions and/or policies to make people fitter and healthier; it has also led to the demonisation of fatness and fat people. Talk of an obesity epidemic intensified the moralising manner in which fat bodies and fat people were already being discussed. Among other things, fat people have been blamed for destroying public healthcare systems and the public economy; fat bodies are continually shamed and ridiculed in public; and fatness has been used as a sign of individual and general moral decay in society (e.g. Farrell 2011; Kyrölä 2014; LeBesco 2011). The obesity epidemic discourse and the moral panic that has ensued have undoubtedly contributed to further stigmatisation of fatness and fat people.² For instance, Farrell (2011) and LeBesco (2010) have aptly referred to this combination of moral panic mixed with talk of an obesity epidemic as the “fat panic” (Farrell 2011; LeBesco 2010).

This “fat panic” has proved particularly harmful, as it has enforced the fat stigma by linking the fat body to an individual moral failing – widely seen as a choice and the individual's own failure to control their body. The assumed “choice” to be fat (out of moral incompetence) is then used to justify the discrimination and shaming of fat people. The obesity epidemic discourse has made the stigmatisation of fatness more widespread, public, and socially acceptable. Public monitoring, surveillance and outright “policing” of (fat) bodies by the media, health professionals, and even the general public is pervasive. It has helped to construct fatness as one of the most talked about medical, social, political and moral issues worldwide and made fatness a personal characteristic that is very stigmatising (e.g. Boero 2012; Herndon 2005; Saguy 2013; Skeggs 2005).

I have previously written about the social construction of fatness, fatness as a social issue, and Finnish women's experiences of being fat. I have drawn particularly from feminist research and Foucauldian thought on the body, biopolitics and biopower and focused on the “powers” that construct the fat body³ (in this case the medicalisation, stigmatisation, and liminalisation⁴ of fatness), and biopolitical efforts to normalise the fat female body. The biopolitical control of fatness may certainly have been on the public health promotion agenda before there was any talk of an obesity epidemic, but the discourse clearly turned the issue into a new kind of all-round problem in the public consciousness (Harjunen 2009).

The obesity epidemic discourse constructs obesity as a health risk and a disease, but it has also forcibly promoted it as a social problem (LeBesco 2011), a moral threat (Gard and Wright 2005), and most of all as an economic issue (Ayo 2012; Guthman and DuPuis 2006; Harrison 2012). It seems that the obesity epidemic discourse really took off after the year 2000; and the reasons given for the need to “manage” or “govern” fatness have since then become increasingly economic. At the centre of the obesity epidemic discourse is the assumed economic cost of fatness and the stereotype that fat people are morally corrupt, lazy gluttons, and that the fat body is the result of excessive over-consuming. The relationship between the economy and fatness, however, is not this straightforward or one-dimensional. Today, it seems that economic rationale organises the matter of fatness in a more profound way. A complex meta-level discussion in which fatness and the economy have become closely intertwined with each other can thus be identified.

This book is called Neoliberal Bodies and the Gendered Fat Body; and as its title suggests, fatness, gender, and neoliberal thought are at the centre of my investigation. I claim that neoliberal economic policy and rationale are enmeshed with conceptions of body, gender, and health in a profound way in contemporary Western culture. I am particularly interested in the relationships between fatness, health, and neoliberal discourse and the role of economic policy in the construction of the (gendered) fat body. Against the backdrop of the dominant political economic rationale of neoliberalism (Harvey 2007), the fat body has been ranked as an “expensive” body, but not just that; it is almost as if the fat body is constructed as a kind of “anti-neoliberal” body that is unproductive, ineffective, and unprofitable. Furthermore, in the neoliberal imagination, fatness, gender, and socioeconomic class seem to be bound together materially, symbolically, and morally.

The “war against fatness...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Routledge Research in Gender and Society
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction and personal prologue
• 2 Neoliberalism, governmentality, and the body
• 3 The biopolitics of weight and the obesity epidemic
• 4 The economisation of health and the fat body
• 5 Healthism and individual responsibility
• 6 Money for your fat! Moral credit for disappearing fat
• 7 Postfeminism, fatness, and female body norms
• 8 Conclusion
• References
• Index