The 'Fat' Female Body

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The ‘Fat’ Female Body

Samantha Murray

The ‘Fat’ Female Body

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The ‘Fat’ Female Body Samantha Murray Macquarie University, Australia

© Samantha Murray 2008 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted her right to be identiﬁed as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2008 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–0–230–54258–7 hardback ISBN-10: 0–230–54258–1 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Murray, Samantha, 1978– The ‘fat’ female body / Samantha Murray. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 13: 978–0–230–54258–7 (alk. paper) 1. Obesity in women – Social aspects. 2. Obesity in women – Political aspects. 3. Body image in women. I. Title. RC628.M87 2008 362.196’398–dc22 10 17

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Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

For my parents, Pat and Talaat


Contents

Acknowledgements

viii

Introduction: The ‘Fat’ Female Body: Pathological, Political and Phenomenological Imaginings

1

Part I Pathologising Fatness: Medical Authority and Popular Culture

11

Chapter 1

Positioning ‘Fatness’ in Our Cultural Imaginary

13

Chapter 2

The ‘Normal’ and the ‘Pathological’: ‘Obesity’ and the Dis-eased ‘Fat’ Body

44

Chapter 3

‘Fat’ Bodies as Virtual Confessors and Medical Morality

69

Part II

‘Fat’ Backlash: Activism and Identity Politics

85

Chapter 4

Fed Up with Fat-Phobia: Coming Out as ‘Fat’

87

Chapter 5

Fat Pride and the Insistence on the Voluntarist Subject

Chapter 6

Fattening Up Foucault: A ‘Fat’ Counter-Aesthetic? 122

106

Part III ‘Fat’ ‘Being’: Rethinking the ‘Body-Subject’ with Merleau-Ponty

135

Chapter 7

Throwing Off Discourse? Questions of Ambivalence and the Mind/Body Split

137

Chapter 8

(‘Fat’) ‘Being-In-The-World’: Merleau-Ponty’s Account of the ‘Body-Subject’

147

Chapter 9

Embodiment as Ambiguity: ‘Fatness’ as it is Lived

169

An Afterword: ‘Fat’ Bodily Being?

181

References

183

Index

189 vii

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Associate Professor Nikki Sullivan (Department of Critical & Cultural Studies, Macquarie University) for mentoring me since the beginning of my doctoral project, and throughout the process of converting it into this book. I want to sincerely thank Nikki Sullivan for always encouraging me to push my ideas further, for her supervision that was always supportive, engaged, insightful and considered, and her friendship. I would also like to thank Associate Professor Joseph Pugliese, also of the Department of Critical and Cultural Studies at Macquarie University, for his support of my project, and belief in my work. Thanks also go to Jessica Cadwallader (Critical & Cultural Studies, Macquarie University) for her help with the preparation of this manuscript. I would especially like to thank my partner Joe Seisdedos for his unending patience and encouragement during the writing process, for his love and support, and for his uncanny ability to make me laugh at myself and my various (sometimes unflattering) idiosyncrasies. Most importantly, I want to thank my mother and father, who have been so patient with me, and have always given me their unconditional love and support. Thank you for giving me the occasional kick along when I needed it, for living through my moods, anxieties, fears and successes, and for being there for the good and the bad, every step of the way.

viii

Introduction: The ‘Fat’ Female Body: Pathological, Political and Phenomenological Imaginings

Writing in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 1924, Dr. James S. McLester summarized his generation’s view of obesity: “Overweight is a mar to beauty…An excess of fat destroys grace and delicacy. A fat face has a monstrous uniformity. No theatrical producer would hire a plump actress to mirror the real depths of the human soul” (Kersh & Morone, 2002, p. 166). Today…as standards of living continue to rise, weight gain and obesity are posing a growing threat to health in countries all over the world. Obesity is a chronic disease, prevalent in both developed and developing countries, and affecting children as well as adults. Indeed, it is now so common that it is replacing the more traditional public health concerns, including undernutrition and infectious disease, as one of the most significant contributors to ill health (World Health Organization Report, 2000, pp. 13–14). It is crucial for fat people to see themselves reflected in art – to see our struggles and our beauty. Dancing together, appearing in public, making speeches, reaching out, performing Cake Dances and sharing experiences with others creates culture and builds communities. When we stop mindlessly consuming culture and begin to actively participate in it, we craft and change our realities. We can imagine alternative ways of living and being (Mitchell in Kulick & Meneley, 2005, p. 224). We have relearned to feel our body; we have found underneath the objective and detached knowledge of the body that other knowledge which we have of it in virtue of it always being with us and of the fact that we are our body. In the 1

2 The ‘Fat’ Female Body

same way we shall need to reawaken our experience of the world as it appears to us in so far as we are in the world through our body, and in so far as we perceive the world with our body (Merleau-Ponty, 1962, p. 206). Consider the above four quotations. I have begun my discussion with these snapshots of attitudes towards ‘fatness’ and perspectives on embodiment precisely because it is these issues that lie at the heart of my investigation here. I am concerned with the questions that arise from, and the problems inherent within the recent medical ‘panic’ about ‘obesity’, and the contemporary identity/body politics that have formed as a response to the pathologisation of ‘fatness’. Out of this panic around the ‘fat’ body, a need has emerged to renegotiate dominant understandings of the ‘fat’ female body, and to investigate the problematics and dilemmas that form the experience of ‘fat’ bodily ‘being-in-the-world’. The first quotation presented above cites Dr. James McLester writing in 1924. This account of ‘fatness’, published in what was, and continues to be, the premier medical journal in the United States, is not concerned with curing an illness, or finding an aetiological cause for the alleged ‘disease’ of ‘obesity’. Most interesting about McLester’s comments is his tacit assumption that ‘fatness’ is inherently gendered. Dr. McLester regards ‘obese’ bodies as being most offensive and dangerous when these bodies are those of women. McLester suggests that, for example, a ‘fat’ actress could not possibly communicate to an audience “the real depths of the human soul”. In this way, Dr. McLester casts the ‘fat’ woman as less-than-woman, less-than-human; unable to truly access her ‘inner self’, or perhaps she does not even have a core, but is merely an assemblage of the worst indiscretions and shortcomings of woman. For McLester, however, the ‘fat’ female body is not diseased, but is nevertheless pathological. One might expect a doctor writing in an acclaimed medical journal to speak in terms of causes and cures, of statistics and science, of health risks and treatments. Quite contrary to this, Dr. McLester’s medical opinion of the ‘fat’ female is not that it is a ‘suffering’ body, but rather, that it is the source of suffering for others. At the heart of Dr. McLester’s attitude towards the ‘fat’ female body is that its threat lies in the aesthetic affront it presents to society. A ‘fat’ woman, according to McLester, is “a mar to beauty”; her ‘fat’ flesh “destroys grace and delicacy”. There is no mention in McLester’s account of ‘fatness’ in men, or of co-morbidities, or indeed of the disease of ‘obesity’ in men. The ‘fat’ woman, for McLester, emerges as a moral failure: a woman

Introduction: The ‘Fat’ Female Body 3

who has not managed her desires, who is appalling in her excesses, almost subhuman, and transversely, such moral failures are (re)presented as inherently ‘feminine’. You may be curious as to why I should choose to open my discussion with such a quotation, given its age. Surely, in the dimmer times of the early twentieth century, doctors could be forgiven for espousing illinformed, biased and decidedly ‘unscientific’ attitudes towards apparently ‘deviant’ bodies? While medical narratives now speak in the authoritative language of apparently objective science, it is my contention that despite the 80 plus years that separate my research from the musings of McLester, what underpins the current ‘panic’ over ‘obesity’ in contemporary Western culture is a moral anxiety about the preservation of fixed gender identities and normative female sexuality and embodiment. What is also imputed in McLester’s account of ‘fatness’ as aberrant is that ‘fat’ women’s bodies are the product of their own failures of will. McLester suggests, albeit tacitly, that ‘fat’ women are to blame for their own ‘deviance’, and that the task of normativity is one grounded firmly in a liberal humanist logic of individual responsibility, and this is an idea that continues to pervade accounts of ‘fatness’. You may have noted that I am using scare quotes around my usage of the term ‘fat’: I do this as it is a key task of this book to challenge the notion that ‘fat’ is an empirical fact that in turn reveals a universalising profile of the ‘fat’ subject. In this way, I would posit that the shift from the common usage of the term ‘fat’, to the medical label of ‘obese’, is significant in attempting to establish concrete parameters to ‘know’ what ‘fat’ bodies mean. In Western society, ‘fatness’ is not understood as a singular category, but rather is continually constituted and (re)constituted along a continuum of relativity that is governed by a series of gendered, classed, and raced imperatives for normative bodily being. The use of the term ‘obesity’ not only evokes a mode of scientific empiricism that offers measurements, weights and sizes that position subjects on either side of the healthy/pathological binary, but its now common usage has embedded ‘fat’ flesh in popular understandings as always already a virtual confession of pathology. This notion will be discussed in detail in Chapter 3. Given this, in marked contrast to the indulgent, emotive language deployed by Dr. McLester, the second quotation, taken from the World Health Organization Report (2000), Obesity: Preventing and Managing the Global Epidemic, speaks in the language we have popularly come to understand as that of medical authority. It is issued in the language of risk, of warning, and of impending doom. ‘Obesity’ is now framed as a


real ‘disease’, with the language of epidemic contagion being mobilised by the World Heath Organization (WHO) to signal the “growing threat” of ‘fatness’. The WHO Report does not make personal judgments about the ‘obese’, nor does it explicitly allude to any particular moral failure of ‘fat’ bodies. However, the medical narrative of authority that is deployed by the WHO serves to underpin the moral panic that we are experiencing currently in Western societies beset apparently by an ‘obesity epidemic’. This reframing of medical narratives about ‘obesity’ as a disease seems to shift the responsibility away from the individual. The ‘obese’ are officially positioned as victims of an affluent society, of increasingly sedentary lifestyles, of cheaper, mass-produced high calorie food. And yet, I would argue that beneath the authority of medical language, and the warnings of ‘obesity’ as a contagion, an epidemic, and a threat, lie the same anxieties about normative (particularly female) embodiment. The medical directives that are issued to the public almost daily with regard to ‘eating right’ and opting for a ‘healthy lifestyle’ serve to offer the public helpful ‘tips’ regarding the fostering of individual health and well-being. However, it would seem that ultimately, the choice to adopt ‘healthy’ behaviours such as ‘proper’ diet and exercise, is up to the individual. As I argue in the following chapters, it is here that we witness a new kind of medical normalisation: that of disciplinary medicine. As a ‘fat’ woman’, I am aware that my fat body is visibly marked in our society as a symbol of abject lack of control. However, my life has been mapped by control for as long as I can remember. From measuring food portions to measuring my waistline, from weighing out my meals to weighing up myself, I have been brought into being by these rigorous processes. Knowing that fat is offensive to the society I live in, I have practiced elaborate daily rituals, from shoving down a salad sandwich in a toilet cubicle to avoid being seen eating by others, to squeezing myself into control top underpants to try and ‘pass-as-thin’, and through this careful ongoing self-policing, I constantly resist my own flesh. So what actually constitutes this negative cultural knowingness about the ‘fat’ female body? The statements our society makes every day about ‘fatness’ reinforce a ‘knowingness’ of who the ‘fat’ female subject is. The ‘fat’ woman is lazy, not willing to commit to change or live up to the dictates of healthy living. She is a compulsive eater, she is hyper-emotional, she is a physical and moral failure. In short, then, the ‘fat’ body is a site where numerous discourses intersect, including those concerning normative feminine beauty and sexual-


ity, health and pathology, morality, anxieties about excess, and the centrality of the individual in the project of self-governance. However, I would suggest that all these discourses congeal in contemporary Western medical narratives, and in the ways in which medical authority is taken up and understood by the public more generally. These discourses serve to (re)produce popular anxieties about, and rejection of, the ‘fat’ female body. The ‘fat’ body is maddening: it will not fit, and yet the disciplinary imperatives of pathological discourses constantly reign the ‘fat’ body in, and scrutinise its being-in-the-world. We have heard the voices of medical authority and have heard the strains of moral panic over ‘fatness’ in their public health advisories. However, what is the lived experience of ‘fat’ women? Living ‘fat’ and female in contemporary Western culture is difficult: we are socialised to be ashamed of our bodies, and to engage in endless processes to alter them, to improve them, to normalise them. ‘Fat’ women are regarded as sexually unattractive, unclean, unhealthy, unintelligent, and unwilling to change. In light of this, ‘fat’ women are treated with suspicion, and often with quite unabashed hatred and disgust. Given these negative attitudes, it is reasonable to expect that at some point, ‘fat’ women in the West would be openly resentful of these kinds of mistreatment. The daily humiliations that shape the lived experience of the ‘fat’ woman might range from being ‘politely’ refused a job because ‘you don’t quite fit with our image’, spurned by a wouldbe lover because of the perceived repulsiveness of one’s ‘fat’ flesh, berated by a doctor who looks at the ‘fat’ woman before him with barely concealed contempt, or being calmly told by a customer service representative that ‘larger passengers’ are required to purchase two airline seats. These everyday interactions operate to ‘shame’ the ‘fat’ woman, to force her to ‘see’ her own abject(ed) body. After a lifetime of these experiences, ‘fat’ women have begun to speak out, to seek answers for the institutionally sanctioned ‘fat’-phobia rife in Western societies. The third quotation I present above is from the founder of Canadian ‘fat’ performance troupe Pretty Porky and Pissed Off. Allyson Mitchell is a fat activist, committed to the Size Acceptance movement, which originated in the United States, but now has branches throughout the West. Mitchell and her fellow troupe members advocate a hands-on, in-your-face activism, involving activities like scale smashings, cake dances and street theatre. Moreover, the core of Mitchell’s’ activism, and indeed of fat pride politics more generally, is the liberal humanist belief in individualism, and the staunch belief that possibilities for change lie with the individual. According to Mitchell, in changing one’s


attitude about one’s situation, in changing one’s mind about one’s body, “we craft and change our realities”. Whilst this logic may appear to offer an empowering opportunity for body love and celebration, a closer examination of fat activism reveals a fundamental impossibility in the task of this individualist politics. What I will go on to show, is that in locating the ‘mind’ as the site of political change, and imagining identity as residing in consciousness, fat politics effects a ‘re-splitting’ of the mind and body. Given that ‘fat’ women have learned over a lifetime of humiliation to dissociate themselves from their bodies, to disavow their ‘fat’ flesh, the empowerment that fat pride offers them, then, comes ironically in a similarly limiting form. Fat pride may be about celebrating one’s body and accepting oneself, however, I argue that tacit in this project is the requirement of overcoming the body. It would seem that central to the project of ‘fat’ body love is loving oneself in spite of one’s ‘fat’ body. What the Size Acceptance movement fails to acknowledge is that our being-in-theworld is always already embodied. This leads me to the final quotation I offer at the beginning of this discussion. In The Phenomenology of Perception (1962), Maurice MerleauPonty insists on an embodied subjectivity as marking our lived experience and stresses the fact that we come to the world through our bodies, and make meaning from our interactions with others and a world through an embodied lived experience. Merleau-Ponty dissolves Cartesian logic via a recognition of the ‘withness’ of our bodies. Rather than conceptualising the body as a container that houses our consciousness, which in turn animates our flesh and permits us movement, Merleau-Ponty asks us to consider that “we are our body”. We cannot separate our subjectivity from our embodiment, precisely because our subjectivity is always already embodied. Moreover, Merleau-Ponty asserts the fundamental ambiguity that marks our lived experience in the world, where we are subjects ‘inourselves’, and subjects ‘for-others’. What is neglected in the individualist politics of the Size Acceptance movement, then, is the irrevocability of intersubjectivity in our being-in-the-world. We understand the world through our bodies and through our interactions with others, and we make meaning from these constant encounters. Consequently, one is never ‘free’ of others such that one can reinscribe one’s own selfhood as if in a vacuum. I have opened my discussion with a brief analysis of these four quotations because, in a sense, the issues raised in them mirror the structural turns of my ensuing argument which will engage with discursive formations of the ‘fat’ body, notions of subjectivity, fat pride and body


politics, and the enabling possibilities of a philosophy of ‘fat’ embodiment. What emerges in and through the following analyses is not only alternative understandings of subjectivity, body politics, public knowledge of ‘fatness’, and philosophies of embodiment, but also the possibility of new ways of (re)reading the ‘fat’ body of the ‘other’ that may in turn foster more productive social relations. Despite the plethora of work done on the body itself, there is a disturbing gap in academic scholarship and theory examining the ‘fat’ body. Much work is being done with regard to the socio-political status of the ‘fat’ body, as well as a glut of literature about the daily humiliations and prejudices that face the ‘fat’ woman in our society, but there is as yet very little research (if any at all) that attempts to theorise the experience of the ‘fat’ body in terms of philosophical and feminist conceptualisations of embodiment and corporeality. It is no secret that most of the discursive constructions of the ‘fat’ female body in Western society are negative and assume a failure of will and bodily ethics. Given this, in Part I of this book (which is structured in three chapters), I identify the discursive frameworks that position the ‘fat’ female body as a site of disease and failure, and contextualise this framework within the current moral panic that has given rise to the alleged ‘obesity epidemic’ sweeping Western societies. I engage closely with medical narratives and public health directives, particularly salient in the current Western ‘panic’ over the alleged ‘obesity epidemic’, and the co-implication of medical discourse and moral imperatives as feeding a fundamental social anxiety about ‘fat’ bodies and the aesthetic and ethical affront they present to a notion of ‘health’ and moreover, normative female sexuality. I look at precisely how medicine functions contemporaneously as a form of control and normalisation given its irrevocable situation in an anti-’fat’ cultural context. I argue that the medicalisation of ‘fatness’ through the promotion of the disease of ‘obesity’, serves as couching anti-’fat’ attitudes in a scientific logic, and thus legitimises anxieties over the ‘fat’ body. Via a close examination of Foucault’s theory of disciplinary medicine and the ways in which these imperatives of medical authority are sedimented in popular imaginings of ‘fatness’, I investigate the co-dependence of moral and medical discourses to argue that the fear of ‘different’ bodies is part of a larger project of normalisation under the rubric of ‘health’. I look closely at the liberal humanist logic that underpins the notion of individual responsibility as it functions in and through disciplinary medicine. It is against this background of medicalisation and pathologisation of ‘fatness’, and the (re)production of the ‘fat’ female body as a symbol


of immoral excess, disease, and a failure of the will, that I move in Part II (Chapters 4 to 6) to an investigation of feminist political responses to what has come to be known as ‘fat phobia’, and the kinds of political and activist movements that are dedicated to removing the cast of shame from the ‘fat’ female body. Specifically, I investigate the history of fat pride, primarily in the United States of America since the 1960s, but also its rise in the United Kingdom, which emerged as a backlash in the face of this negative public ‘knowingness’ about ‘fatness’. I deploy a close examination of the ‘fat’ acceptance activist movements in the West, and examine the possibilities and limitations of these political agendas. Instead of agreeing uncritically with the Fat Acceptance movement’s body politics, and indeed celebrating it, as much contemporary literature in the field of fat theory does, I am most concerned with an interrogation of the problematic model of subjectivity on which current fat politics is founded. In engaging with the kind of body politics and self-acceptance platitudes the fat pride movement promulgates, the humanist model of subjectivity this ‘pride politics’ insists upon and uncritically reproduces is problematised. I critique, for example, the assumptions the Fat Acceptance movement makes about the malleability of discursive constructions of the body, and I examine the kinds of discourses about, and conceptualisations of ‘fatness’ the movement relies on, and the assumptions its ‘counter-discourse’ makes. I argue that rather than effecting a real subversion of negative social discourses about ‘fatness’, fat pride simply reverses these discourses or hierarchies uncritically and unproblematically. In Part III (Chapters 7 to 9) I go on to suggest that liberationist politics reproduces a split between one’s mind and body, and I draw on the work of Merleau-Ponty to help respond to this split I assert is effected. I juxtapose a phenomenological model of ‘fat’ female embodiment with the medical and ‘fat’ pride model of subjectivity, and discuss the ways in which a phenomenal reading of ‘fatness’ opens ‘fat’ female embodied being to new possibilities, in terms of a (re)engagement with one’s body, one’s flesh, one’s ‘fat’. Through the lens of phenomenology, and specifically the work of Merleau-Ponty, I develop an alternative reading of embodied subjectivity, opening up (rather than closing down) the question of what ‘fat’ bodily being may actually be, and what possibilities it may afford. Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy, I argue, is haunted by what he insists is the fundamental ambiguity of our lived experience: our subjectivities are never singular or stable, and are always lived and embodied in multiple and contradictory ways. Even as I loathe the discourses that position my ‘fat’ flesh as pathological,


and wish to change them, they constitute my very being, and my desire to belong. My aim in this discussion is not to posit a new or better model for fat activism than is currently in place, but rather to make visible the discursive mechanisms and liberal humanist assumptions that inform not only disciplinary medicine, but also, ironically, identity politics and liberationist activism. What I am interested in exploring is the way in which the ‘fat’ body is constituted by medical narratives, morality and culturally specific expectations of normative feminine aesthetics, and the way the ‘fat’ body is enacted as a site of change and empowerment in the Size Acceptance movement in response to these negative understandings of ‘fatness’. The fundamental problem of a split between one’s mind and body in the enactment of the political ‘fat’ activist body is identified and critiqued here, and by mobilising the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty, the potentialities of ‘fat’ bodily being, an awareness of the multiplicity of our lived experience, and the constitution of our being are (re)considered.


Part I Pathologising Fatness: Medical Authority and Popular Culture

Often, I have sat before a doctor in an office, unable to locate the boundaries of my fat body. I want to be invisible to the doctor, to be microscopically small, but instead I feel my flesh expand and pulse, distorting the borders of my body, pushing me out of shape. In the doctor’s eyes I become vast and amorphous. Under his gaze, I feel myself ooze over the sides of the chair, my flesh drooping, dripping down the chair legs, pooling oleaginous on the floor before them. In his gaze, I am fatter than I have ever been. In that moment, I am immense. I feel diseased; the medical gaze makes it so. I know well the humiliation of being set on the scales: I feel so very heavy as I step onto the small square platform, before the numbers even quantify me. I feel as though my flesh is pulling outwards and downwards, hanging ponderously from me, and in those moments, I can’t find the edges of myself. I seem to spread and spread in the room, filling the corners of the office with my fat flesh. We both watch the small window of the scales, as the numbers whirl madly, on and on, higher and higher, moving quickly through ideal weight ranges, and into unhealth, pathology, revulsion. I know the moment of unease and disgust that passes over the doctor’s face, even though he attempts to carefully keep it neutral. I get up onto the examination table and I wince as I feel him reach for the waistband of my trousers, and he pulls away my clothes to look at more of my expansive flesh. I have so carefully bound myself up, and now he unwraps me, peels away my layers. I feel cold fingers sinking into the soft flesh of my belly. Lying there, I imagine my fat spilling down over the edges of the table, covering the doctor’s shoes, lapping around his ankles: I am a fleshy ooze. I pull myself away from his fingers in minute movements, trying to suck my belly back against my spine, away from judgements, away from the cold medical gaze.


1 Positioning ‘Fatness’ in Our Cultural Imaginary

Knowledge is an activity; it is a practice and not a contemplative reflection. It does things…Knowledges are a product of a bodily drive to live and conquer. They misrecognize themselves as interior, merely ideas, thoughts, and concepts, forgetting or repressing their own corporeal genealogies and processes of production. They are products of bodily impulses and forces that have mistaken themselves for products of mind (Grosz, 1995, p. 37). In fat-obsessed cultures we are all ‘lipoliterates’ who ‘read’ fat for what we believe it tells us about a person. This includes not only their moral character but also their health (Graham in Kulick & Meneley, 2005, pp. 178–179). Graham’s coining of the term ‘lipoliterates’ is a useful starting point. Indeed, like Graham, I would argue that we have a well-developed and readily deployed ‘literacy’ when it comes to reading bodies. However, what is most interesting about the practice of reading bodies and (as Grosz suggests) the (active) construction and (re)production of knowledges about certain bodies, is the material effects of these bodily “literacies” that constitute some bodies as normal, and others as deviant, aberrant or perverse. The logic that governs this ‘body literacy’ is, in some respects, a very tacit, fundamental and unspoken one. In the example of ‘lipoliteracy’ that Graham offers, he refers to the cultural meanings that we have come to attach, for the most part, preconsciously, to ‘fat’ bodies (and most interestingly to me, the bodies of so-called ‘fat’ women) in Western societies. However, many of these cultural meanings have become so familiar to us, they operate without question. For example, the ‘fat’ woman (is presumed to be) lazy, she is 13


out of control, she is a moral failure, she is unhealthy, she is an affront to normative feminine bodily aesthetics, she is a food addict, she cannot manage her desires, her level of intelligence is below average. Whilst we may not agree with these pejorative assertions, we nevertheless recognise them as being operative (to varying degrees) in Western societies as describing the ‘fat’ woman across a range of discourses and institutions. These range from medical/public health discourses, discourses of feminine beauty, and moral narratives. However, what interests me more is the tacit ways in which these assumptions are embodied at the level of perception, and therefore inform our reading of bodies, our constitution of them as ‘fat’ or otherwise. I want to explore this in more detail through a critical interrogation of the role that medical narratives play in producing a particular public perception about ‘obesity’ and ‘unhealth’. In the three chapters that constitute the first part of this book, I aim to demonstrate the ways in which ‘medical knowledges’ are intimately involved in disciplinary processes of pathologisation and the ascription of ‘deviance’. Further, I argue that these processes function not only in the domain of the clinic, but are (re) produced in wider social understandings of the ‘fat’ woman and the production of ‘truths’ about ‘obesity’. The core of my argument is that the negative constructions of ‘fat’ female embodiment that are articulated by our popular and medical ‘lipoliteracies’, are productive of ‘obesity’, rather than descriptive of it. This medicalisation of ‘fatness’ via the establishment of the disease of ‘obesity’ has entailed a collapsing of medical narratives/imperatives and historico-cultural discursive formations of ‘fatness’ as a moral failing and as an aesthetic affront. In making this claim, my intention is not to dismiss the presence of disease, and the concurrent importance of medical treatment. Rather, I aim to stage a challenge to medical discourse that constitute ‘obesity’, and to elucidate the power and authority of the medical voice in making some bodies intelligible as pathological and immoral, not simply to doctors, but to society more generally. Thus, I look specifically at the constructions of individual responsibility that are evident in medical narratives and discourses about ‘obesity’, and the effects of the ‘confession’ of a deficient self residing in a ‘fat’ body. In exploring the current moral panic over excessive bodies, the role of perception as something other than simple or neutral way of seeing the flesh of the world is investigated. Part I aims to reconceive the ‘fat’ body as a site of numerous discursive intersections, the effect of normative feminine beauty, health, gendered

Positioning ‘Fatness’ in Our Cultural Imaginary 15

(hetero)sexual appeal, self-authorship, moral fortitude, fears of excess and addiction. Moreover, as I will go on to show, medical narratives bring these normative discourses and assumptions together under the ontological umbrella of the ‘obesity epidemic’. It is here that anxieties about bodily difference are manifested as a ‘moral panic’: the threat that this ‘epidemic’ poses is constituted by medical narratives not simply as endangering health, but as fraying the very (moral) fabric of society.

‘Fat’ panic: the ‘obesity epidemic’ In The Birth of the Clinic, Foucault discusses the emergent phenomenon of the ‘epidemic’ in eighteenth century medicine. As he tells it, mass outbreaks of contagious diseases engendered the development of new forms of medical analyses, based on an observation of signs and symptoms. This patterning of disease and contagion required swift and multiple modes of close examination, intervention and supervision (Foucault, 2003, p. 28), rather than, as had previously been the case, the social exile and incarceration of the diseased that had marked medical practice. Thus, what Foucault maps is a shift in the eighteenth century from the medical treatment of individual complaints, to medicine as a mode of state governance “supplemented by constant, constricting intervention” (2003, p. 28). Foucault writes: …in the final analysis…, medical experience and the doctor’s supervision of social structures, the pathology of epidemics and that of the species are confronted with the same requirements: the definition of a political status for medicine and the constitution, at state level, of a medical consciousness whose constant task would be to provide information, supervision, and constraint, all of which ‘relate as much to the police as to the field of medicine proper’ (2003, p. 29). Here Foucault notes the politicised status of medicine, whereby medical practice becomes an arm of state governance, a mode of unprecedented scrutiny, social control and regulation. In the same way as Foucault formulates a critical analysis of institutions such as the asylum and the prison, he traces the emergence of a disciplinary medicine in The Birth of the Clinic. What interests Foucault then, and indeed, what is of interest to me, is the institutional discursive shifts that reveal the perpetuation of fundamental assumptions that construct and (re) produce us as (normal or pathological) subjects.


The notion of the ‘epidemic’ exemplifies the function of disciplinary medicine as Foucault understands it. It has powerful, productive implications, many of which remain tacit. If, for example, a community is in the grip of an infectious disease ‘epidemic’, it is expected and understood that all members of this community will take rigorous steps to protect themselves and their families from, and to prevent the spread of the pathogen that threatens not only their own bodies, but the body politic more generally. This is both a personal responsibility and a civic, public duty. This being the case, it is crucial to note that the irrevocable visibility of the ‘fat’ body as pathogenic marks bodysubjects positioned in this way as recalcitrant, without conscience or respect for their public duty of controlling their disease. However, ‘obesity’ is not a communicable infectious disease, and thus does not strictly adhere to the medical definition of an epidemic. Nevertheless, due to the increasing global numbers of ‘obese’ subjects, a panic has ensued. It has emerged as a profound social infection, despite its noninfectious character. ‘Obesity’ then, is less a biological infection of tissue and cells, than one of moral standards of Western bodily aesthetics. As Robison writes of the ‘obesity’ epidemic, “…its application…serves more as a scare tactic than as an accurate medical term” (Robison, 2003, p. 1). However, where bodies are positioned as non-normative, difficult, unwilling to fit, medical science attempts to find physiological anomalies, congenital disorders, or infectious disturbances as reasons for bodily difference. Just as medicine has tried to pathologise homosexuality in order that it might ‘cure’ it and normalise these ‘deviant’ bodies and the practices with which they are associated, so too does there seem to be a relentless search for causal explanations for ‘obesity’, particularly as we are gripped by a medically-sanctioned moral panic over the apparent ‘obesity epidemic’ in Western countries. As April Herndon asserts: Like inquiries launched to find the causes of homosexuality, the search for medical and/or psychological origins of fatness reveals the place [the ontological construction] of fatness, fat embodiment, and fat people within current epistemological rubrics (2002, p. 2). Despite ‘obesity’ being officially recognised as a disease, medical attempts made to uncover the causes for the ‘pathology’ of ‘fatness’ have proven slippery and difficult. It would seem that the immense panic that has surrounded ‘obesity’ for at least the past decade (particularly in the


West) is driven, at least in part, by the vague medical renderings of the actual causes of ‘obesity’ (genetics, environmental factors, lifestyle changes, compulsive overeating, personal irresponsibility, poor food choices, inadequate exercise), as well as the relative failure of medicine to ‘cure’ (that is to say, eradicate) ‘fatness’. This failure to pinpoint a cause has resulted in the development of drugs and other forms of medical interventions that have proven costly. For example, a number of recent weight loss drugs initially approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in the United States have had to be pulled from the market after many cases of cardiac stress and even death.1 Additionally, the popularity of surgical procedures such as gastric bypass surgery has increased greatly in the last decade. Gastric bypass procedures (and related weight loss surgeries) are generally performed by specialist bariatric surgeons on patients who have been clinically diagnosed as ‘morbidly obese’: that is, as having a Body Mass Index greater than 40 (the accepted ‘normal’ BMI range is between 20 and 25). Gastric bypass surgery involves dividing the patient’s stomach into two sections, consisting of a smaller upper pouch, and a larger lower section. A section of the patient’s intestine is then re-routed to the smaller upper pouch, thereby bypassing the larger stomach section (and the volume of food it can potentially hold). There are a number of surgical variations on gastric bypass surgery, depending on the method of intestinal reconnection. The result of this surgery then is to radically limit the amount of food a patient can ingest, thereby reducing the calories absorbed by the body, resulting in rapid and dramatic weight loss. However, these bariatric procedures have, in some instances, resulted in complications ranging from digestive distress (abdominal distress, nausea, diarrhoea, constipation), nutrient malabsorption and deficiencies, and even death.2 In light of these failures, greater attention has been focused on environmental factors in order to explain rising ‘obesity’ rates such as the shift in mass food production and processing, resulting in an over-abundance of available food in developed countries, and more sedentary lifestyles at work and at home. The problem with this shift, as I will go on to discuss in greater detail, is that it reproduces the notion of individual (moral)

1

For more information, please see the FDA website press releases on the banning of weight loss drugs Redux and Fem/Phen (http://www.fda.gov/cder/news/phen/ fenhenqa2.htm). 2 For more information about these bariatric surgeries and their potential complications, see Livingston, Edward H. (2002) “Obesity and its Surgical Management” in the American Journal of Surgery, 184: 2, pp. 103–113.


responsibility: the belief that if only the individual would comply with health directives for ‘health’ (eating the ‘right’ foods, exercising more), ‘obesity’ could, and would, disappear. Richard Barnett writes that the term ‘obesity’ comes from the Latin word ‘obesus’, which interestingly (and tellingly) has a dual meaning: “one who has become plump through eating [and]… ‘coarse’ or ‘vulgar’” (2005, p. 1843). Barnett claims that (arguably) the first use of the term ‘obesity’ in a medical context occurred in the seventeenth century in Thomas Venner’s 1620 work Via Recta (2005, p. 1843). Barnett establishes that Venner’s position on obesity was that it was an “occupational hazard of the genteel classes” (2005, p. 1843), and that a return to a balanced regimen could cure individuals of their acquired ‘fleshiness’. In the subsequent eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, writings on health preferred the term ‘corpulence’, and regarded this condition as a result of over-indulgence, and thus, as self-inflicted. Consequently, the onus was placed upon the individual to cure themselves (2005, p. 1843), as the ‘fat’ body became (re)situated not as a marker of wealth and status, but as a symbol of abhorrent excess and the pathology of obesity. Despite the fluidities of the meanings and standards attached to the norm/pathology binary over different cultural contexts and historical epochs, defining the origins of the ‘norm’ at any given time is a difficult proposition. As Sobal points out, “valid and representative data about actual body weight are rare for time periods prior to the mid1900’s, so conclusions about historical changes in actual weight prior to that time are problematic” (2001, p. 307). In terms of noting the body weights of a population, Sobal notes this is a relatively recent practice, asserting that “only with the advent of national nutrition surveys in developed societies beginning in about the 1960’s did solid prevalence data about weight become historically available…” (2001, p. 307). Sobal suggests that despite this uncertainty regarding the body weight in populations, it is generally accepted that the rates of overweight have been steadily increasing since the middle of the nineteenth century. It is known that before the beginning of the twentieth century in Europe and America, both continents in the wake of a number of infectious disease epidemics, “plumpness was valued as insurance against consumptive illness” (2001, p. 307). However, following the 1863 publication of William Banting’s pamphlet entitled A Letter on Corpulence Addressed to the Public, which detailed how he ‘cured’ himself of his own excesses, weight loss regimes increased in


popularity. Banting’s pamphlet went on to sell thousands, and as Barnett writes, “‘banting’ became a verb” (2005, p. 1843), where ‘doing’ weight loss became a populist pastime. The real turning point in attitudes towards weight loss appears to emerge at the beginning of the twentieth century, however, when weight loss strategies became more available and widely practised (Sobal, 2001, p. 307), but also attitudes towards corpulence as a marker of wealth and status begin to decline at this time. At the turn of the twentieth century, slenderness became prized and popular amongst the upper classes, who had the material capital to devote time and effort to the various regimes for the maintenance of one’s body. According to the 1995 National Nutrition Survey, 56% of Australian adults are deemed to be “overweight or obese” (Baur, 2001, p. 1), while in the United States (widely recognised as being the ‘fattest’ country on earth), “64.5% of American adults are either ‘overweight’…or ‘obese’” (Campos, 2004, p. 6). The constant use of these statistics by doctors, in diet books, public health experts, in magazine articles and television feature stories demonstrate an urgency, a fear and a panic over a public health situation that has stakes in so many social quarters, such as ‘health’, beauty, control, and so on. The current medical preoccupation with measuring and quantifying weight has seen the perpetuation of standards set by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, who developed the well- known height-weight scales to determine whether one falls in an ‘ideal’ weight range, is overweight, or obese (Ciliska, 1990, p. 21; Craddock, 1978). Louis Dublin, an executive for the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, developed the Height/Weight Tables in 1943, after a careful examination of information about the Company’s policy holders, to attempt to match up body size and mortality (Wann, 1998). The Height/Weight Tables demanded unattainably low weights for men and women taller or shorter than average height, and while the original 1943 tables have been revised to take into account the increase in weight and height of the general populace over time, they have remained unchanged since 1983, and are still used widely by medical professionals today (http://www.halls.md/ideal-weight/ met.htm). For example, on its Australian website, weight loss organisation Jenny Craig employs a Healthy Weight for Height Chart that draws on the model developed by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, as well as the more common Body Mass Index (BMI) Calulator. While the Height/Weight chart prescribes five weight ranges: very underweight, underweight, healthy weight, overweight and obese (one is deemed overweight at a height of 170 centimetres and weighing 75 kilograms, and as obese when one weighs over 90 kilograms, at the same


height (http://www.jennycraig.com.au), the BMI calculator requires one to divide one’s body weight by one’s height squared (Gard & Wright, 2005, p. 92). Doctors readily accept that a BMI of between 20 and 25 is within a healthy range; between 25 and 30, the individual is regarded as being overweight; a BMI higher than 30 means the patient is considered obese (Campos, 2004, p. 6). Despite the medical usage of the term ‘obesity’ since the nineteenth century (though the origins of the term date back much earlier), it was not until the 1990’s, the final decade of the twentieth century, that the World Health Organization (WHO) officially recognised the ‘condition’ of ‘obesity’ as a bona fide ‘disease’ (Vaz & Bruno, 2003, p. 280). Since then, the World Health Organization has developed a Global Strategy on Diet, Physical Activity and Health, which states: Effective weight management for individuals and groups at risk of developing obesity involves a range of long-term strategies…[that] should be part of an integrated, multi-sectoral, population-based approach, which includes environmental support for healthy diets and regular physical activity. Key elements include: * Creating supportive population-based environments through public policies that promote the availability and accessibility of a variety of low-fat, high-fibre foods, and that provide opportunities for physical activity. * Promoting healthy behaviours to encourage, motivate and enable individuals to lose weight (http://www.who.int/en). On the World Health Organization (WHO) website, in the midst of warnings about Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) and avian influenza, ‘obesity’ looms large on the agenda of global health crises. ‘Obesity’ emerges as a disease, yet a disease marked by a peculiarity: ‘treatment’ of the illness of ‘obesity’ is policed and carried out by the individual, to be administered by the medical establishment. As I said earlier, disciplinary medicine is key to constructing the very epidemic that it then attempts to eradicate. In keeping with the logic of disciplinary medicine, ‘obesity’ allegedly requires the monitoring of the population and the issuing of public health directives. The World Health Organization, for example, advocates public health policies concerned with making ‘healthy’ lifestyles more accessible, and in doing so, simultaneously acknowledges and indeed constitutes ‘obesity’ as a disease and as a condition that is the moral and the civic responsibility of the individual. Moreover, in designating ‘obesity’ as not only a disease, but as a ‘global epidemic’, the World


Health Organization (as the key international health authority) has mobilised a (moral) panic that surrounds an epidemic as an urgent imperative for citizens to lose weight.

Disciplinary medicine and the illusion of ‘choice’ In controlling a population, Foucault suggests it is most effective to promote a tacit mode of self-surveillance in its citizens. Disciplinary medicine relies on the individual’s belief in autonomy: whilst certain pronouncements may be made through public health discourse, the individual must believe that it is his/her own decision to ‘improve’ and ‘master’ him/herself via the knowledge available. Discipline, then, functions in an altogether different manner from punishment. Subjects are convinced of a respons-ability to ‘cultivate’ themselves, rather than being directly coerced by an external authority. As Howson writes, this disciplinary power functions by “[encouraging] individuals to monitor their own conduct and measure it in relation to dominant health discourses” (Howson, 2004, p. 128).3 In other words, citizens are subject to a range of ‘expert’ medical knowledges that offer authoritative advice regarding lifestyle, pleasures and dangers, and that constitute, in effect, “technologies of the self”. Further, these ‘expert knowledges’ are traded between ‘lay’ subjects, outside of the clinic and doctor’s rooms, and have taken on the status of a kind of currency. Medical discourses have permeated every aspect of popular culture, from the mass appeal of salvation from ‘fatness’ offered by self-help literature, to the commodification of weight anxiety via the extensive availability and consumption of ‘fat-free’ foods. Situated in ‘expert’ narratives of medical science, discourses of public health provide a kind of vérité in rendering the ‘fat’ body as one that does not engage with popular practices of a ‘healthy’ lifestyle. Consequently, subjects police themselves and one another through an internalised “clinical gaze”, or as Howson puts it: …the disciplinary techniques of the ‘late modern clinic’ encourage people to identify themselves with a particular moral position in the domain of health and regulate populations through enabling

3

David Armstrong defines this as “surveillance medicine” (Armstrong, 1995, p. 393).


techniques rather than restraining and coercive means (2004, p. 128). It is the function of disciplinary medicine, then, that connects the notions of self-policing, self-knowledge, self-transformation and moral responsibility. As I have explained, disciplinary medicine relies on the illusion of personal choice for all individuals, whereby each feels they freely choose to take up medical directives relating to ‘healthy’ lifestyles. In other words, the power of disciplinary medicine functions at a tacit level: the virtuous appeal of mastering one’s own body in line with dominant health strategies disguises the disciplinary effect of medical discourse. In The Obesity Epidemic: Science, Morality and Ideology, Gard and Wright demonstrate the sharp increase in panic about ‘obesity’ in the last decade in Australia, as evidenced by the glut of media reportage on the topic: Few readers will have escaped the avalanche of public comment about overweight and obesity in the last few years. A quick Internet search of newspaper articles shows that during 1990 the word ‘obesity’ appeared only twice in the headlines or lead paragraphs of three leading Australian newspapers. In 1999 this number was fourteen and in the twelve months to September 2003 it was seventy-three (Gard & Wright, 2005, p. 18). Clearly then, media interest has grown exponentially parallel to medical concerns about rising rates of ‘obesity’. The authority of medical concern has spilled over into popular anxieties about health, investment in ‘healthy’ bodily practices and the (re)production of normative bodies. Evidence of this permeation of medical anxieties about ‘obesity’ has manifested itself in numerous self-help books, television programs detailing weight loss successes, and consumer interest in low-fat or fat-free processed foodstuffs. The appeal in engaging with these forms of ‘popular’ medicine and self-improvement, is the belief in one’s autonomy and own self-knowledge in mastering one’s body. As Vaz and Bruno assert, public health directives effectively take “the form of advice on healthy lifestyles” (2003, p. 283, my emphasis), rather than appearing as commandments for subjects to follow. Beyond the walls of the clinic, a kind of ‘mythic’ choice is offered to lay subjects in mastering their own health and bodies,


which effects a disciplinary, or surveillance medicine in all public and private spaces: between partners, in families, kitchens, workplaces and between friends. As Jennifer Terry and Jacqueline Urla explain: Knowing one’s origins, one’s environment, one’s proficiencies, and one’s weaknesses constitute the modern technologies of the self, which, to a large extent, are animated by scientific advice and expertise in the public sphere (1995, p. 15). The popularity of ‘self-help’ television programs, books and programs demonstrate a keen desire for self-authorship and self-transformation in the popular consciousness. The desire to ‘know’ is an all-consuming desire, and to frame knowledges about one’s body and self in terms of a medico-scientific logic, the authority of such knowledges is revered. As Gard and Wright claim, this is the appeal of an “obesity science for the people” (2005, p. 126). Lyndel Costain and Helen Croker narrate a similar tension in their (somewhat patronisingly titled) article ‘Helping Individuals to Help Themselves’. The authors begin by stressing that while “…individuals are ultimately responsible for their own and their children’s health” (2005, p. 89), medical professionals need to contribute to finding a solution for ‘obesity’ by “engaging these individuals in looking after their health” (2005, p. 89). What is implied here is that despite the onus being on the individual to solve the ‘problem’ of ‘obesity’, health professionals need to administer the choices individuals make about their life-styles. In addition to widespread public health campaigns, the intimate relationship between doctor and obese patient is often located in this debate about ‘personal responsibility’. Costain and Croker stress the importance of individuals caring for their own health and successfully losing weight, particularly via the action of ‘self-monitoring’, via the practice of keeping a strict food and exercise diary, which the authors argue, “…is a key part of successful behaviour change” (2005, p. 93), and given this, go on to suggest that while: Many individuals find self-monitoring challenging…it is a key indicator of motivation and engagement in a programme, and can keep up motivation in the longer term. This approach may help to explain why those who manage to self-monitor in some


way are more likely to be successful with weight loss and weight maintenance (2005, p. 93). Herein lies the very core of disciplinary medicine, which is dependent upon the individual’s belief in their own autonomy: in the face of edicts from public health authorities, the individual is convinced of their own choice in authoring themselves and maintaining their own health. In keeping a food and exercise diary, the individual is responsible for recording one’s behaviour. However, even in the absence of an health professional scrutinising each diary entry, the individual is aware of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ choices and practices in living a ‘healthy’ lifestyle. As Foucault asserts, managing citizens through self-surveillance perpetuates this belief in individuals. In Croker and Costain’s work, there is a shift from a more explicit punitive treatment of ‘obesity’, but despite this, the ‘surveillance medicine’ (as Armstrong suggests) is present to discipline ‘obese’ subjects. While ‘obesity’ is now recognised as a disease, one might suggest that modern treatment(s) of ‘obesity’ via a ‘surveillance medicine’ tacitly include moral judgements about the nature of ‘fatness’, and the role of the ‘obese’ individual in their own ‘illness’. In the above quotation by Croker and Costain, a system of reward and punishment is established in the model of selfmonitoring they posit for weight loss. If one regulates oneself, monitors one’s food intake and exercise patterns, one will be rewarded with weight loss and move closer to the normative body. However, if one does not properly self-monitor, one’s attempts at weight loss will fail. The significance of the system of reward/punishment operates under the assumption from the individual that they are making their own choices with regard to their health practices. With respect to current public health warnings about ‘obesity’, and concurrent advice pertaining to necessary rigours involved in a ‘healthy lifestyle’, food and its consumption become tools of self-authorship, of becoming an ethical citizen, of fulfilling the responsibilities of the rational, autonomous humanist subject. In fact, the whole philosophy of the ‘diet’4 is founded on the humanist belief in self-transformation, the power of the individual to master the body in and through rational choice, and this self-authoring/self-mastering constitutes one as a

4

It should be noted however, that in recent times in Western societies, the term ‘diet’ has gone out of fashion in favour of supposedly less value-laden labels like a ‘healthy eating plan’.


moral and medical success. As Nikolas Rose claims, “The triumph of reason is, at the same time, the triumph of the principles of health over sickness and virtue over vice – in short, the triumph of a social morality, the morality of the normal man” (1994, p. 66). He writes: Our present is suffused with the ethic of the humanist, the ethic of the normal social person, which is intrinsically an ethic of the healthy body. All aspects of our care for ourselves are to be judged in terms of a logic of health and reorganized in terms of a quest for normality (1994, p. 67). At this point, it is important to clarify one salient point: I am not suggesting that medicine as a mode of inquiry or as a means of healing pain or illness is inherently punitive, dangerous or damaging. Rather, as I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, I am concerned with demonstrating the way medical discourses function in popular Western culture, and the phenomenon of the authority and power of medical advice hailing one particular model of ‘health’ as a requirement for all subjects. The authority of medical discourse coupled with the desire for self-authorship and autonomy effects a self-policing of individual subjects, as well as the surveying of others. As Thomas Osborne argues, it is problematic to suggest that medicine is an “allenveloping instrument of social control in our societies” (1994, p. 532). Rather, he contends (in the same way I have outlined above) that, …medicine has participated in a more general transformation in modes of expertise and conceptions of government. The case of person-centred medicine [that is, recognising the autonomy of the patient] is interesting in so far as it seems to possess points of alignment, though not of course identity, above all with a neo-liberal political rationality, employing the principle of maximum autonomy of individuals who, rather than being directly subject to moral control are administered by a form of expertise that seeks to govern, so to speak, ‘at a distance’ (1994, p. 532, my emphasis). One thing that particularly interests me about this quotation is Osborne’s use of the term ‘administers’: this seems to be a particularly effective way of describing the mode of disciplinary power medical discourse effects. To ‘administer’ a process suggests a distance, a general overseeing that is not intrinsically interventionist or invasive. In this way, I would argue that regarding medical discourse as an ‘administrator’ pre-


serves the encouraged conviction of individual autonomy, even as the individual functions in accordance with ‘administrative’ imperatives. Herein lies the ultimate obstacle to unconditional humanist autonomy and self-governance that lies at the core of much dominant public health discourse. In The Obesity Epidemic: Science, Morality and Ideology, Michael Gard and Jan Wright suggest: Health promotion strategies locate the responsibility with all individuals to monitor their behaviours and those of others in keeping with desired health outcomes. In doing so, the specific social, cultural and material conditions of people’s lives are ignored…the strategies that are often employed in these programmes assume that individuals are free to make decisions and choices in relation to health…This means that people who do not exercise their ‘freedom’ to choose in ways that are productive to health, can be categorized and stigmatized as lazy, undisciplined, lacking in will-power or just downright ‘bad’ (2005, p. 183). Here, Gard and Wright draw attention to the fundamental humanist logic that informs contemporary public health strategies, and that marks disciplinary medicine. In devising public health edicts, it is expected that individuals adhere to the lifestyle imperatives they detail. Given this, health directives have an equalising effect that elides the raced, classed, gendered and sexed specificities of subjects, by constituting subjects simply as moral successes or failures. Although the term ‘obesity’ itself has a long history, its usage as a ‘descriptor’ of a pathological body in medical discourse (an understanding that has also informed and shaped popular attitudes towards ‘fat’ bodies) is a relatively recent phenomenon, as I noted earlier in reference to the World Health Organization. Medical science is preoccupied with measuring and quantifying bodies, establishing ‘cut-off’ points for bodies to slip over into pathology (take, for example, the equations I outlined above concerning weight ranges as understood by the Height/Weight Tables and the more widely used Body Mass Index). The visibility of ‘fatness’ means that long before the results of any blood tests or ultrasounds or ECGS, the ‘fat’ body bears the mark of not only as diseased body, but a moral failure in medical narratives. This would not be the case were it not that particular ideas about the body-subject have become naturalised as to function tacitly, in particular, the idea that the body is an external


expression of an inner self. This knowledge informs our reading of all bodies, and it is this, as well as specific pathological (and popular) ideas about ‘fatness’ that need to be made visible. There remains the need to conflate ‘fatness’ with disease, with pathology, not purely because of scientific knowledge, but because of these tacit body knowledges that have interpreted ‘fatness’ negatively. So what exactly are these ‘knowledges’ then? To say they simply demonstrate an intertwining of medicine and morality in imagining the ‘fat’ body as ‘slothful’ does not go far enough. Rather, the fact that we ‘know’ a ‘fat’ body as ‘slothful’ for example, is constructed by deeper, more unspoken and fundamental knowledges that have come to be part of our practices of perception. As Annemarie Jutel argues, “[t]he focus on weight in contemporary health care is buttressed upon a desire to quantify wellness and to locate health in a model of precise normalcy” (2001, p. 2). However, in thinking about ‘obesity’ as I have demonstrated above, there seems to be a less than unified medical belief about whether in fact ‘obesity’ is a disease or a result of personal irresponsibility. I would argue that this tension signals the symbiotic relationship seemingly ‘objective’ medical science has with dominant cultural (and co-extensively, moral) attitudes towards ‘fatness’. Indeed, as I discussed earlier, the designation of ‘obesity’ as a disease (and an epidemic) by the World Health Organization, and the strategic plans issued by Western public health authorities about ‘fighting’ ‘obesity’, serve to formalise and legitimise these knowledges about pathology and normalisation.

Disciplinary directives: dealing with ‘obesity’ At this point, let me look more closely at the directives that constitute public health discourse. In the summary report of Acting on Australia’s Weight released in 1997 by the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC), a strategic plan, similar to that presented by the World Health Organization, is put forward. The NHMRC positions ‘obesity’ as a disease that has reached epidemic proportions, and is threatening the lives of Australian citizens. The report responds to the moral panic over ‘fatness’ which medical discourses have inspired via their release of statistics demonstrating sharp increasing of rates of ‘obesity’ in the Western world, and focuses on a strategy to combat the disease. However, the Report addresses the problems posed by the “complexity of inherited characteristics, aspects of lifestyle, such as diet and activity, and psychosocial factors” (1997, p. 3) that all contribute to the disease of ‘obesity’, and thus admit that “…it is difficult,


if not impossible, to ascertain or assign a single aetiological theory in all causes of overweight and obesity” (1997, p. 3). This is interesting, as the inability to ascertain a single cause for ‘obesity’ presents a conundrum for Western crisis-intervention medicine. Without a clear reason for ‘obesity’, the possibility of a cure becomes a maddening enterprise. Taking this into account, the Report constitutes a shift in focus from curative to preventative measures. The authors stress that “…while the treatment of people who are currently overweight or obese should continue” (1997, pp. 4–5), it emphasises the need to address broader lifestyle factors, such as diet, exercise, major changes in processes of food production whereby food is easy to obtain, relatively inexpensive and mostly high in fat, as well as increasingly sedentary lifestyles. Given this, strategies for prevention aimed at lifestyle rather than the individual psyche lie at the core of the goals of this Strategic Plan. In other words, while (largely unsuccessful) ‘treatment’ of ‘obese’ subjects is still encouraged, the emphasis primarily is on reducing rising rates of ‘obesity’ by urging citizens individually, as well as systemically and institutionally to follow the precepts of a ‘healthy lifestyle’. The model which the research council adopts for the strategic plan is as follows: “The model proposes that the three main influences on body fat equilibrium are biological, environmental and behavioural, and that these factors are mediated through fat-energy expenditure and fat-energy intake” (1997, p. 5). The authors are interested in making macro changes to food production and supply, and work/home environments more generally: The model proposes a supportive macro-environment as the main public health strategy and the development of programs that aim to influence behaviour and the micro-environment of target groups (NHMRC Summary Report, 1997, p. 5). This functions precisely in the way Foucault suggests is constitutive of a disciplinary medicine. A model of ‘health’ is to be promulgated by medical authorities via a range of public health campaigns that offer subjects the option of living a healthy, happy life: We concluded that action to reduce the weight and waist measurements of Australians has to focus on changing the macro-environment to make it easier for people to undertake physical activity and to make healthier food choices…In implementing this strategic plan, with its


focus on the population as a whole, we are attempting to take the focus away from the individual and reduce some of the social blame that has tended to be levelled at overweight or obese people (1997, pp. 6–7, my emphasis). However, the irony that is ignored by the authors in their strategy is that responsibility remains at the level of the individual, even as the directive is issued to the population as a whole. That is, in articulating strategies that allegedly offer ‘alternative’ choices to individuals, the authors fail to recognise that the ‘knowledges’ they reproduce are already operative in lay society. I would suggest that as a result of years of public health campaigns regarding ‘proper’ nutrition and exercise routines to be integrated into daily life, there are few Australians (and indeed, residents of other Western nations) who have not had some exposure at least to medical directives about what constitutes healthy eating and exercise. Given this, it is my contention that rather than simply offering new and informed choices to citizens to govern their own lives and monitor their own health without invasive intervention from institutional bodies, this kind of report effects a renewed application of disciplinary medicine. In other words, the NHMRC report advocates an administering of the population, which, as I discussed earlier, effects social control at a distance. Indeed, its very effectiveness depends on the fact that it appears to afford autonomy to subjects themselves. Far from removing responsibility from the individual by instituting a macro-approach to ‘health’ (as the authors of the NHMRC report claim), the strategies they articulate are (re)constitutive both of the individual and of individual responsibility. In other words, despite the assertion that the focus of the plan is on the ‘population as a whole’, the ontology of individualism that pervades the strategic plan produces goals that undermine the NHMRC’s social vision. Thus, it is individuals who will ironically be responsible for changing the ‘macro’ environment that is supposedly conducive to reducing alarming rates of ‘obesity’ in Australia. At this point, the authors of the NHMRC report go on to propose further macro changes to the environment at the level of workplace policy, which similarly reproduce the logic of a disciplinary medicine, by calling for the “recognition of physical activity and diet as part of occupational health and safety policies and practices” (NHMRC Summary Report, 1997, p. 8). What is evident here is the establishment of a tacit institutional enforcement of the strategic plan, whereby exercise and ‘healthy’ food becomes a civic duty fulfilled by employer, but


which must then be taken up by the individual employee. Similarly, the authors also call for a radical remodelling of the layout of urban and public spaces to force exercise and to insist on the cultivation of normatively ‘slender’ bodies: “…environmental planners need to find ways to increase physical activity through the design of towns, transport systems and public recreational facilities” (1997, p. 8). Given the concerns outlined above, it is important to question at this stage whether in fact the goals of the plan are ultimately normalising in both the assumptions that underpin the strategies, and the effects they will produce. As well as identifying agencies responsible for implementing these strategies, the authors of the report claim that it is essential that “people in positions of influence within the community becoming familiar with the contents of the plan and acting as advocates for its adoption” (1997, p. 8). The ‘authority’ of the ‘expert’ and a tacit assumption about the moral superiority of people in “positions of influence” emerges here, whereby members of the community who occupy higher positions in the social hierarchy must become mouthpieces for the strategic plan, but more specifically, are rendered as incorruptible, infallible and as paragons of virtue. The moral undergirding of public health campaigns and discourse is revealed here, demonstrating the tacit assumption that a ‘healthy’, ‘slender’ role model embodies morality and an ethical lifestyle, thus relegating ‘obese’ subjects to the position of immoral, irresponsible citizens. I will return to the notion of the ‘expert’ in a later chapter, in order to critically interrogate the role that this figure plays in the constitution of identity and difference in dichotomous terms. One could argue then that the NHMRC report on strategies to ‘fight’ obesity is in itself a ‘call to arms’, and this is reflected in a similar report produced by the American Obesity Association, that states: First, we must mount a social-change campaign that will, over time, provide necessary political will and social and economic incentives to build an environment more supportive of healthy lifestyle choices. People must be given strategies and tools to resists the many forces in the environment that promote weight gain (AOA cited in Shortt, 2004, p. 7). The language used here to describe a reaction to the ‘obesity epidemic’ is one of retaliation, framing ‘fatness’ as a clear and present danger that threatens the social body. This warlike ‘campaign’, then, is not only


launched in order to combat ‘obesity’, but is also a campaign against those individuals whose very corporeality is read as a refusal of the precepts of ‘health’. Clearly such an imperative fails to recognise the social, cultural or economic situations of individuals who are always already positioned differently in relation to this very imperative. Inevitably then, this refusal or failure to ‘resist’ the ‘forces’ that supposedly promote ‘fatness’ position ‘obese’ individuals as moral failures, whose bodies are by definition both the site and confession of moral decay. Thus, despite claims to the contrary, the disciplinary character of these medical interventions continue to function at the level of the individual: they are, in fact, to use Foucault’s term, mechanisms of individualisation.

Corporeal knowledge and deviant bodies In light of the claims made in the above discussion, it seems appropriate to turn now to Linda Alcoff’s account of the role of perception in the constitution of identity and difference, normalcy and pathology. In her article “Toward a Phenomenology of Racial Embodiment”, Alcoff looks at the primacy of perception in the formation of bodies of knowledge, bodies of flesh, social bodies, and the relations between them. Specifically, Alcoff investigates the way bodies are read and positioned as the ‘Other’ based on their ‘visible’ non-white bodily markers. She argues that the way we see, the way we perceive other bodies is not simply a result of our vision, but of the sedimented knowledges we embody, and body forth. She writes: …the realm of the visible, or what is taken as self-evidently visible (which is how the ideology of racism naturalizes racial designation), is recognized as a product of a specific form of perceptual practice, rather than the natural result of human sight (2001, pp. 268–269). Just as Foucault argued that discourses do not simply describe the conditions of one’s existence, but rather are productive of it, Alcoff suggests that perception produces the very objects it traditionally is assumed to simply process. In other words, perception emerges as a discursive effect, rather than as a purely biological function. Perception, she insists, is a learned process in and through which seeing and knowing are intimately interwoven in historically and culturally specific ways. She writes “…perception represents sedimented contextual knowledges…there is no perception of the visible that is not already imbued with value” (2001, p. 272). Alcoff presents us, then, with the concept of ‘tacit body


knowledges’, which she suggests are “carried in the body” (2001, p. 272). She says, “Our experience of habitual perceptions is so attenuated as to skip the stage of conscious interpretation and intent. Indeed, interpretation is the wrong word here: we are simply perceiving” (2001, p. 276). In other words, ‘knowing’ is not primarily a cognitive function. Tacit body knowledges are intercorporeal ways of knowing and ordering the meanings of our various ways of being and our interactions: they are constitutive of our bodily being-in-the-world. When we perceive a body, be it ‘fat’, ‘aged’, or ‘disabled’, we constitute it in accordance with the bodily knowledges that provide a backdrop for our perception. However, Alcoff makes the point that these knowledges are indeed tacit. By this, she suggests that these ways we have of perceiving and understanding each other are hidden and unspoken. They are inferred without being directly expressed; they are habitual and embodied without any conscious decisions made about deploying them at any given moment. We respond to others on a visceral level: we know their bodies implicitly, and what they mean to us. We see a ‘fat’ woman, and we know her as lazy, greedy, of inferior intelligence. We may still address her more or less normally, we may smile at her, we may eat lunch with her, or go shopping with her, but somewhere within us these kinds of understandings, these knowledges, of what her ‘fatness’ means to us are stirred and brought to the surface in unconscious ways. As Alcoff asserts: Visible difference, which is materially present even if its meanings are not, can be used to signify or provide purported access to a subjectivity through observable, ‘natural’ attributes, to provide a window on the interiority of the self (2001, p. 268). In short, we internalise all the statements made about certain bodies by our society and live them out. These idea(l)s, or discourses, inform the ways in which we understand each other, and govern our experience of, and relations with, the other. In this historical epoch in Western society, ‘fat’ bodies are dominantly read negatively. We manage our identities through perception – we believe we can come to know the essence of a person through the way they appear to us. These bodily knowledges are unspoken, habitual, and are therefore difficult to analyse, and yet a discussion of this ‘knowingness’ about certain kinds of bodies is imperative, and deserves critical attention, precisely because these knowledges inform and shape our interactions, and provide an insight into why we marginalise some bodies, and regard others as normative.


Insofar as perception is bodily, it inscribes simultaneously the very being of the seen and the seer. In this way then, perception enfleshes, such that “…visible markers on the body…are made visible through learned processes” (2001, p. 279, original emphasis). As Alcoff insists, “[v]isible difference is still the route to classification and therefore knowledge” (2001, p. 268). Let me explain this point by turning to Nikki Sullivan’s discussion of a story, cited in Montag, and drawn from a 1774 diary entry by Janet Schaw, in which she tells of an experience while en route to her hotel in Antigua: …a number of pigs ran out at a door and after them a parcel of monkeys. This not a little surprised me, but I found that what I took for monkeys were Negro children, naked as they were born (Schaw in Montag, cited in Sullivan, 2003, p. 75). What is interesting to Sullivan here is what Schaw’s “(mis)reading of racial difference” (2003, p. 75) might tell us about the ways in which Enlightenment ideals structure our perception. Sullivan writes: …Schaw’s (mis)interpretation is less a perceptual error, or a moment of perceptual confusion that is quickly rectified once she realises that the figures that crossed her path are really children, and more a mode of perception which (like all perceptions) is already imbued with historically and culturally specific values, fantasies, desires, aspirations, fears, and so on (2003, pp. 75–76). In other words, Schaw’s error is less an effect of a conscious prejudice, than it is of historically and culturally specific tacit body knowledges. What this anecdote shows us is that we make meaning for ourselves according to the ways in which these culturally specific tacit knowledges are embodied by us and deployed constantly in our interactions, observances and understandings of others. Further, it illustrates Alcoff’s claim that there is no distinction between the mind (as the keeper of cognitive faculties) and the body (as a vessel for consciousness). Rather, as she insists, we are embodied beings who move in the world and make meaning primarily at the level of (inter)corporeality. Different bodies always mean something to us, and the bodily knowledge we carry with us always structures our relationships with the bodies of others and with our own bodies. These complex systems of knowing (about certain bodies) seem ‘natural’, unquestionable. We embody these knowledges: we live them out and interact with each other based on the visibility of


particular bodies and the ‘knowingness’ we glean from those bodies. However, “this perception occurs, for the most part, at …a subliminal or pre-conscious (bodily) level” (Sullivan, 2003, p. 76). Thus, Schaw’s reading of the Negro children as monkeys can be understood as an effect of (and reproduction of) tacit knowledges about what constitutes the ‘human’ in a particular historico-cultural context. Sullivan suggests that there is an equation in Schaw’s perception where “whiteness” equals “humanness” (2003, p. 77), and in her response to the children who ran out in front of her, the function of whiteness as a hegemonic discourse of being is revealed as a tacit body knowledge Schaw carries with her. These knowledges, Alcoff argues, are naturalised and structure our perception so as to provide a “necessary background…[that] makes up a part of what appears to me as the natural setting of all my thoughts” (Alcoff cited in Sullivan, 2003, p. 77).5 It follows, then, that the same kinds of tacit body knowledges are at work in our ‘lipoliteracy” (to use Graham’s term) about ‘fat’ women. Just as “whiteness” equates to “humanness” in Schaw’s account, I would suggest that normative thinness constitutes the ‘universally feminine’. It is useful to think about a normative ‘slender’ body as not only occupying a space of power and influence, but as a means of projecting onto our perception a kind of ‘backdrop’ of normalcy that structures our readings/constitutions of certain bodies as normative or aberrant. In their article “Mapping Embodied Deviance”, Jennifer Terry and Jacqueline Urla note the epistemological force of medical discourse, in terms of its reliance on, and reproduction of such sedimented knowledges. Terry and Urla affirm the primacy of bodies, and argue that it is at the level of the bodily that we perceive and read other bodies, and it is at the level of the body that other bodies are intelligible to us. As Terry and Urla claim, “The power of empirical observation lies primarily in its ability to render information visible, thus offering a means for controlling deviance through the clinical gaze” (1995, p. 10). The authority of medical discourse acts as a legitimising force in surveilling and marginalising bodies of difference, and reaffirming the power of the normative body, that is still fundamentally an immaterial body. In both medical and popular accounts of ‘proper’ and ‘improper’

5

In the instance of Schaw’s anecdote, Sullivan notes that “Whiteness, then, is rarely spoken as such, but nevertheless functions – in hegemonic and some antihegemonic discourses – as the (embodied) ‘principle of perfection’” (2003, p. 77).


bodies, we find what Terry and Urla describe as “the somatic territorializing of deviance”, which, they argue: …since the nineteenth century, has been part and parcel of a larger effort to organise social relations according to categories denoting normality versus aberration, health versus pathology, and national security versus social danger (Terry & Urla, 1995, p. 1). Despite this popular belief in discrete polarised entities, Terry and Urla note that “the spectre of the normal body, be it a white, heterosexual, healthy, or male body, is always simultaneously present – even if in shadow form – is discourses of deviance” (1995, p. 5). This ‘spectre’ of normativity as Terry and Urla describe it, gives form to the assertion that Alcoff makes about the ‘background’ that tacit bodily knowledges set up in our perceptions of the world and others. We are then, in a sense, haunted by a normativity that is nowhere concretely to be found: yet the epistemological force of this normativity weighs on us heavily, effecting a range of behaviours such a self-surveillance, and an acute awareness of the coding of certain behaviours as indicative of a tacit agreement to aspire to this ‘normative body’. If we imagine the spectre of normativity as a figure of desire and fear, it makes sense that we are driven by a fear of deviance, a fear that is supposed to position us carefully on the ‘proper’ side of the normal/deviant binary. Knowledges and discourses rely on binary structures, which are always haunted, and brought into being by the presence (or absence) of their correlative term. Dichotomous logic constitutes the body of the ‘other’ (the ‘fat’ body, which stands at the heart of the current moral panic over the ‘obesity’ epidemic) as that which we claim to simply perceive. Terry and Urla speak about ‘embodied deviance’, which they argue “is the term we give to the scientific and popular postulate that the bodies of subjects classified as deviant are essentially marked in some recognisable fashion” (1995, p. 2). Drawing on the work of Foucault, Terry and Urla assert that “what matters is that scientific and popular modes of representing bodies are never innocent but always tie bodies to larger systems of knowledge production and, indeed, to social and material inequality” (1995, p. 3). Terry and Urla are especially interested in the effect medical narratives have on social relations, and the enthusiasm with which medical binaries have been taken up and made inseparable from a public consciousness about ‘proper’ and ‘improper’ bodies. Indeed, this is what is most salient to my argument in this chapter: the complex


entanglement of medical science and popular perceptions of the body, and the ways in which these seemingly discrete arenas are always inflected by each other. These perceptions cannot remain separate, and because of this, they constantly draw on each other for power, authority and veracity. Given this, Alcoff’s conception of ‘tacit body knowledges’ could aptly be applied to what I, following Foucault, have referred to as the clinical gaze. Certainly a doctor is trained to look for disease, indeed the Hippocratic oath all doctors must take is committed to preserving life and giving quality of life. However, when a doctor examines a patient, does he simply perceive a ‘patient’, a ‘diseased body’, or is his gaze complicated by the same multiplicity of cultural meanings as we are all subject to? Alcoff’s work has demonstrated that there is no such thing as ‘simple perception’, understood as the unmediated processing or absorption of visible/visual data. Perception is a knowledge-making process. Perception is productive, and it is necessarily a function of power/knowledge. The doctor’s gaze is always already structured by the world in which his subjectivity is constituted. This subjectivity is not pre-cultural: it does not exist prior to one’s immersion in-the-world, subsequently to be changed by one’s intersubjective experiences.

Regarding ‘fat’: the clinical gaze As I have suggested, perception is never simply a neutral or natural mode of absorbing empirical data. Rather, perception as an effect, and a technology of systems of power/knowledge constructs corporeality and (inter)corporeality in historically and culturally specific ways. Consequently, whilst the clinical gaze is presumed to stand outside of power, to be unaffected by the discourses that construct us all as bodysubjects, it too is necessarily implicated in the reproduction of dominant ways of knowing and being. As Foucault notes, the clinical gaze is structured by what he calls a ‘fine sensibility’. In other words, in assessing a patient, a doctor must rely on his or her perceptions to ‘know’ the patient: via the touch of fingers, the ‘observation’ of lesions or (ab)normalities, the ‘sounds’ of inner bodily functions: the medical ‘expert’ positions the body of the ‘other’ as either ‘healthy’ or ‘pathological’. As Foucault writes: …The medical gaze embraces more than is said by the word ‘gaze’ alone. It contains within a single structure different sensorial fields. The sight/touch/hearing trinity defines a perceptual configuration


in which the inaccessible illness is tracked down by markers, gauged in depth, drawn to the surface… (2003, p. 202). Though the notion of a diseased body as a sign of a deeper internal pathology is an ancient one, it can be argued that this conceptualisation still underpins and guides contemporary medical practice and diagnostics. Foucault claims that the eighteenth century establishment of a ‘pathological anatomy’ was pivotal. He discusses the formulation of a nosology of disease at this time, developed from dissecting corpses in order to allegedly make visible the inner workings of bodies and their various pathologies. Foucault argues that this new ‘nosology’ of disease, working as part of the ‘observing gaze’, represented the beginnings of disciplinary medicine as we know it, and suggests that the move towards an “anatomo-clinical gaze” (2003, p. 179) signifies the cataclysmic moment in the birth of modern Western medicine. The dominant function of the “clinical gaze” was, claims Foucault, to “record and totalize” (2003, p. 149), to ‘perceive’ and make disease intelligible “with the purity of an unprejudiced gaze” (2003, p. 241, my emphasis). However, as I have argued, the insistence on medical objective distance embraced by disciplinary medicine is a cultural fiction, which as Foucault notes, reproduces dominant modes of seeing, knowing and being. In other words, the medical professional as the subject of disciplinary medicine both occupies the position of the ‘sovereign’ humanist subject who possesses a knowledge marked by rationality, and reproduces this ideal. As Foucault argues, this ‘fine sensibility’ characterises affectively a medical expertise supposedly marked by an absence of prejudice or subjective investment. In other words, Foucault’s account of sensibility foregrounds the affective condition of perception, and calls into question the hegemonic understanding of medicine as a pure objective mode of inquiry that provides access to unbiased and deeply buried truths (Diprose, 2002, p. 107). As Cabanis’ writes in Du Degré de Certitude: Since everything, or nearly everything, in medicine is dependent on a glance or a happy instinct, certainties are to be found in the sensations of the artist himself rather than in the principles of the art (cited in Foucault, 2003, p. 149, my emphasis). Let me provide an illustration here. On more occasions than I care to remember, medical practitioners have diagnosed the various maladies from which I was suffering as a direct result of what they perceived as my ‘fatness’. Mobilising their ‘fine sensibilities’, and applying various


technological apparatuses aimed at enhancing their perception (blood pressure monitors, stethoscopes, x-rays, ultrasounds and so on), these so-called ‘experts’ were forced to conclude (albeit somewhat disappointedly) that my blood pressure was in fact ‘normal’, my lung capacity was ‘good’, and my internal organs were in working order. Nevertheless, under the medical gaze, the eminent visibility of my ‘diseased’, ‘obese’ body functioned as a signifier of pathology, my ‘bodily being’ was perceived by those concerned, as a negative, ‘problematic’ mode of embodiment. I was repeatedly advised to lose weight as a matter of urgency, despite my otherwise apparently good ‘health’. In other words, as Frederik Svenaeus notes, these encounters did “…not take place in a context-free clinical setting separated from the rest of society, but [as] part of its social reality and its structure” (2000, p. 44). Medicine, Svenaeus writes, “is such a value-laden activity since it involves the entire social and psychological dimension of the individual person seeking help and not only his biology” (2000, p. 54). In other words, the function of the clinical gaze in these, and in fact, in all clinical encounters is, I contend, altogether different from the way in which society generally understands it, that is, as a mode of pure scientific observation unfettered by personal bias, and thus possessed of an unquestionable authority. It is this understanding and concurrent functioning of the clinical gaze that preserves the authority of medical discourse and permits a widespread disciplinary operation. At this point, let us further examine (via a number of examples) the kinds of effects the clinical gaze has on the body of the patient perceived as ‘obese’. In doing so, I will not only further critique the problematic notion of ‘objective distance’ (in order to demonstrate doctors are unable to consciously leave their embodied being, their own culturally constructed (tacit) understandings of (‘fat’) bodies and selves, normalcy and pathology, behind when treating their patients), but will also gesture towards the fact that the body of the clinician is also (re)constituted in and through this encounter in accordance with the normative criteria he or she assumes. In their article “The Effects of Obesity on the Clinical Judgements of Mental Health Professionals”, Young and Powell detail an experiment that they conducted in order to ascertain the attitudes of mental health professionals towards ‘obese’ female clients. The authors are interested in investigating the number of ‘obese’ women in therapy compared to those of a ‘normal’ weight. Medicine often amplifies the understanding of the pathology of the ‘fat’ body, by asserting the presence of a psychological disturbance that serves to explain the reason why ‘obese’


subjects maintain their ‘fat’ bodies. However, in addressing the question of ‘obese’ individuals who seek mental health assistance, Young & Powell suggest that rather than there being an inherent psychological disturbance that causes obesity, it is because ‘obese’ patients are aware of the negative responses their ‘fat’ bodies elicit (henceforth embodying these responses), “[accepting] the discriminatory treatment of them as appropriate and just” (1985, p. 234), that there may reasonably be a higher number of ‘obese’ patients seeking psychiatric therapy. Given this, Young & Powell examine the assumptions made about the mental health of ‘obese’ individuals, and the way a client’s weight may affect clinical judgement. It is worth noting here that the authors’ critique is not directed at what they see as the prejudicial ‘erroneous’ beliefs of some medical practitioners, beliefs that potentially could be replaced with ‘correct’ diagnoses. Instead, their concern is with the damaging material effects that assumptions about normalcy and pathology produce in relation to those perceived as ‘obese’. In other words, the authors’ analysis is subtended by the thesis that I have elaborated in this chapter, that ‘pathologising’ perceptions are never purely descriptive, but indeed are constitutive of (ill) ‘health’. Citing Allon’s (1979) investigation of health professionals’ attitudes towards the treatment of patients perceived as ‘obese’, Young and Powell note that: …doctors expressed a preference not to advise and/or treat the extremely overweight patient in part because the physicians viewed obesity as an indicator of several undesirable qualities, including lack of control (1985, p. 234). They further substantiated this finding via a study of mental health professionals, male and female, whom they presented with a case history of a middle-aged white married mother of two, who was severely depressed, and felt resentful and aggressive towards her family (Young & Powell, 1985, p. 237). Accompanying this history was a photograph of the female subject. However, the photograph had been doctored to produce three different versions of the same woman: one depicted a woman of ‘average weight’, one of a woman ‘slightly overweight’, and the last of an ‘obese’ woman. The mental health professionals were split into three groups, each of which was given a different photograph. Thus one group believed the case history described a woman of ‘normal’ weight, one believed it described a ‘slightly overweight’ woman, and the


last group believed they were dealing with an ‘obese’ subject. Young and Powell evaluated the different responses of the mental health practitioners in each group and asserted that the “findings indicate that diagnosis is affected, or confounded, by the weight of the client” (1985, p. 233), and that “obese clients are evaluated more negatively than are their normal weight counterparts” (1985, p. 241). They state: …as long as the woman remains within an acceptable range from best weight…mental health workers will not view her as psychologically deviant. Only when she exceeds the latitude of acceptable weight is her weight viewed as causing problems (1985, p. 241, my emphasis). Moreover, Young and Powell found that female mental health professionals were more critical than their male counterparts of those women they perceived as ‘obese’, rating them “more harshly for a variety of symptoms, including addiction, antisocial behaviour, inadequate hygiene, and sexual dysfunction” (1985, p. 241). The expectation of a stringent maintenance, regulation and control of women bodies constructs a particular bodily awareness amongst women in the West. The pressure to present a body that proclaims its adherence to the feminine standards of beauty and sexuality means that the very presence of another female body that is ‘fat’ and therefore is clearly transgressing these ‘norms’ is an affront, a defiant symbol that can elicit anger, disgust and resentment. Young and Powell conclude that, These negative evaluations [of the obese client]…are less a function of objective clinical judgment based in theory and research than a function of societally stereotypical images of the obese woman (1985, p. 242). The medical responses Young and Powell cite are clearly informed by fundamental gendered notions of normative female appearance. Moreover, the differing responses of male and female medical practitioners indicate that the gendered being of the health professional is always already implicated in every clinical encounter at a tacit level. The ‘clinical gaze’ then, as a particular mode of perception, is inevitably intercorporeal: it does not simply function to constitute the ‘other’, but is also fundamental to the reaffirmation of the ‘self’, and the idea(l)s on which the self is founded.


Let me continue this interrogation of the ways in which perception is gendered and (en)genders by turning to a rare candid autobiographical account by psychotherapist Irvin Yalom, who tells of his own anti-‘fat’ prejudices as a medical practitioner. Yalom recounts his encounter with Betty, whose body presents an immense obstacle for him in fulfilling his medical duties in treating her. Yalom finds it extremely difficult to be in the same room as Betty, finds her conversation banal, and cannot disguise his disgust in the face of her ‘abject’ body. He writes: I have always been repelled by fat women. I find them disgusting: their absurd sideways waddle, their absence of body contour – breasts, laps, buttocks, shoulders, jawlines, cheekbones, everything, everything I like to see in a woman, obscured in an avalanche of flesh….How dare they impose that body on the rest of us? (2005, p. 184). The real question Yalom asks is, “What right does Betty have to exist?”, given that her very being is a source of utter revulsion. The tacit body knowledges that constitute Yalom’s being absolutely overwhelm his being in Betty’s presence. The encounter with Betty’s flesh does not simply obscure Yalom’s clinical gaze, or blind him to his role as medical practitioner, but rather illustrates my claim of the inextricability of the medical gaze from popular understandings of gender impropriety. Yalom continues: …When I see a fat lady eat, I move down a couple of rungs on the ladder of human understanding. I want to tear the food away. To push her face into the ice cream. ‘Stop stuffing yourself! Haven’t you had enough, for Chrissakes?’ I’d like to wire her jaws shut! (2005, p. 185). Failing to recognise the immediate, tacit and affective dimensions of this encounter, Yalom asks (somewhat belatedly) “how could I relate to Betty? To be frank, she revolted me” (2005, p. 189). More pressing than the question posed by Yalom is the question of why Betty’s body so repulses and threatens him. Despite Yalom’s claim that it is Betty’s body that disgusts him, I would suggest that it is the affect engendered by the tacit body knowledges that are fundamental to Yalom’s very being that undermine his position as an objective medical practitioner. The anger her body allegedly elicits in Yalom threatens his own


self-control, compromises his position as the authoritative, rational and objective subject, and thus impels him to position her as the abject ‘other’ to his ‘proper’ self. In doing so, Yalom reinstitutes a necessary distance between himself and the ‘other’ that both haunts and threatens his very sense of self. Ironically, Yalom’s hysterical response to his encounter with Betty undermines his attempt to deny the intercorporeal nature of identity and difference, and foregrounds the fragility of his own allegedly ‘proper’ body. What is interesting about Yalom’s account of his encounter with Betty’s “fat flesh” is that it is an encounter that you would expect to find outside of the clinic, because it is not objective, rational or unbiased. We might generally expect these negative, violent responses to ‘fat’ bodies in the street, and I myself (as a ‘fat’ woman) have been the object of this kind of disgust regularly beyond the clinic. However, it is inside the walls of the clinic that these ideas about normalcy and pathology are authorised, formalised and given credence. The kind of medico-scientific readings of the body presented in this section of the chapter are embodied by Western ‘lay’ society, and deployed in every social space. Foucault describes this ‘collective’ clinical observation as the “unity of the medical gaze,” and goes on to suggest that this phenomenon continues to be supported by: …not the perception of the patient in his singularity, but a collective consciousness, with all the information that intersects in it, growing in a complex, ever-proliferating way until it finally achieves the dimensions of a history, a geography, a state (2003, p. 33). Within this repetitive deployment of medical knowledges and discourses of health in the form of a disciplinary gaze, discursive power and authority is effected. The policing of ‘improper’ bodies mobilises medical narratives and imperatives beyond the walls of the clinic into everyday intersubjective spaces and corporeal exchanges that are always discursively mediated by the authority of medical expertise and the concurrent moral value attached to maintenancing one’s body to attain/maintain health and normativity. Foucault describes this as a “generalized presence” of medical practitioners, “whose intersecting gazes form a network and exercise at every point in space, and at every moment in time, a constant, mobile, differentiated supervision” (2003, p. 35). At this point, it must be stated that the ‘collective’ clinical gaze only functions in accordance with a discursively constructed understanding


of the system of reward/punishment that operates alongside the classification of bodies using the binary distinction between ‘norms’ and ‘pathologies’. In this way, all bodies can be made intelligible (within the walls of the clinic, and beyond them in every intersubjective space) via their ‘processing’ and ‘reading’ through the perceptual lens of the ‘healthy’ and ‘pathological’. This binary system of ‘health’ and ‘pathology’ will be the subject of my inquiry in the following chapter.

2 The ‘Normal’ and the ‘Pathological’: ‘Obesity’ and the Dis-eased ‘Fat’ Body

As a word, ‘normal’…acquired its present most common meaning only in the 1820’s…The normal was one of a pair. Its opposite was the pathological and for a short time its domain was chiefly medical. Then it moved into the sphere of – almost everything. People, behaviour, states of affairs, diplomatic relations, molecules: all these may be normal or abnormal (Hacking cited in Osborne, 1998, p. 269). …the prestige of the sciences of life in the nineteenth century, their role as model, especially in the human sciences, is linked originally not with the comprehensive, transferable character of biological concepts, but, rather, with the fact that these concepts were arranged in a space whose profound structure responded to the healthy/morbid opposition. When one spoke of the life of groups and societies, of the life of the race, or even of the ‘psychological life’, one did not think first of the internal structure of the organised being, but of the medical bipolarity of the normal and the pathological (Foucault, 2003, p. 41, original emphasis). Fundamental to Foucault’s analysis in The Birth of the Clinic is his discussion of the new ‘politicisation’ of medicine in the eighteenth century, and his detailing of a shift from a guiding interest in health, to normality in nineteenth century medicine (Foucault, 2003, p. 40). As described in the above quotation, Foucault claims that in the nineteenth century medicine became not only a mode of treating/curing illness, but rather was politically situated as a field of knowledge that was responsible for establishing standards and models for living. Key to the methodological foundations of this new clinical medicine was the establishment of 44

The ‘Normal’ and the ‘Pathological’: ‘Obesity’ and the Dis-eased ‘Fat’ Body 45

norms, set against an increasing ‘literacy’ in the category of the pathological, both within medical discourse itself, and in lay society. In this way, clinical medicine was elevated from the treatment of illness to a branch of state governance and a mode of social control that involved surveillance and discipline, both internal and external to the subject. Foucault suggests that central to this control of the population and the rise of scientific rationalism in the nineteenth century, was a new interest in categorising bodies in a binary structure of ‘normal’ versus ‘pathological’. Foucault argues that following this socio-political shift, modern medicine was required to expand its approach beyond the application of a simple set of curative therapies, towards the formation of “a knowledge of healthy man, that is, a study of non-sick man and a definition of the model man” (2003, pp. 39–40). Thus, medicine shifted to a mode of governance that required it to formulate systems to order human subjects. In doing so, medicine “assumes a normative posture, [authorising] it not only to distribute advice as to healthy life, but also to dictate the standards for physical and moral relations of the individual and of the society in which he lives” (2003, pp. 39–40). Medicine could be said then to surpass its previous role as a crisis intervention, through the establishment of a discourse of ‘health’. That is, medicine did not simply respond to outbreaks of disease or contagion, but rather cultivated and endorsed a model of health and normality with a view to ordering society. Indeed, public reception of contemporary medical discourse has made ‘health’ and ‘normality’ interchangeable terms. As Foucault claims above, the establishment of these models of ‘health’ and ‘normativity’ imbued medical discourse with an unprecedented authority to dispense advice and information to subjects to cultivate themselves in accordance with this normative model, thus changing the function of pathology from a marker of disease, to a marker of moral failing and social stigmatisation. Foucault’s work is heavily informed by the writing of Georges Canguilhem, whose influence, as Thomas Osborne notes, “haunts every page of The Birth of the Clinic” (1994, p. 32). Canguilhem’s work was foundational in Foucault’s archaeology of the history of ideas, particularly his most famous work On the Normal and the Pathological. Here, Canguilhem discusses the shift in usage of the diagnostic notion of the ‘norm’ to a more generalised account of ‘normalcy’. He writes: We could say of the two concepts of Norm and Normal that the first is scholastic while the second is cosmic or popular. It is possible for the normal to be a category of popular judgement because their


social situation is keenly, though confusedly, felt by the people as not being in line, not ‘right’ [droite]. But the very term ‘normal’ has passed into popular language and has been naturalized there… (1978, p. 145). In other words, the notion of the ‘norm’ as a diagnostic standard against which variations are measured, comes to operate more widely as a popular understanding of what is ‘proper and ‘correct’. However, Canguilhem goes on to show that the notion of the ‘norm’ that gives rise to the idea of the ‘normal’ is itself normalising, and functions as a means of social control. He writes: The normal is then at once the extension and the exhibition of the norm. It increases the rule at the same time that it points it out. It asks for everything outside, beside, and against it that still escapes it. A norm draws its meaning, function, and value from the fact of the existence, outside itself, of what does not meet the requirement it serves (1978, p. 146, my emphasis). What this demonstrates is the fact that as the ‘norm’ is mobilised as a ‘rule’, it necessarily is imbued with a moral value. Moreover, the norm can only function as an instrument of power as long as it is able to be brought into being continually as a model of everything it is not. That is, the norm draws its power, and its cultural meaning/value, from a constant reassertion of the boundary between normality and ‘pathology’, between what is rewarded and what is punishable. In this definition, ‘pathology’ is understood as everything that occupies a space outside of/external to the ‘norm’: these exterior positions are only positioned as such because of a perceived ‘refusal’ to take up the modes of being required by the model of the ‘norm’. Here again, it is evident that underpinning the disciplinary social function of this binary is a complicated humanist logic. By this I mean that simultaneously, subjects are being ‘administered’ by the value attached to this binary, while being instructed that they have a ‘choice’ to meet the ‘requirements’ of the norm. The irony is that body-subjects are always already positioned along this binary prior to the making of any personal ‘choice’ about the space they wish to occupy. In a quote that uncannily references Yalom’s encounter with Betty discussed in the previous chapter, Canguilhem claims: Every preference for a possible order is accompanied, most often implicitly, by the aversion for the opposite possible order. That


which diverges from the preferable in a given area of evaluation is not the indifferent but the repulsive or more exactly, the repulsed, the detestable (1978, p. 147). As I noted in my discussion of Yalom’s existential crisis, the function of the norm/pathology binary within the individual is mediated by deep, fundamental anxieties about the spaces one may occupy in society. Here, Canguilhem supports my claim that it is at a tacit level that subjects perceive that which is not (ab)normal, not simply as a variation, but rather characterised as a repulsive positionality. The positioning (or desire to be positioned) as normal is not simply a veneration of a standard model, but is fundamentally constructed by an anxiety and repulsion of difference. In other words, this process of being positioned and taking up a position in relation to others, and to a world, functions as a mode of normalisation. Thus, we might ask whether “…we should stop wondering about the grounds of medicine’s definitions of normality and the question as to whether these are justified and instead focus on their effects” (Mol, 1998, p. 280).

‘Fat’ as pathology: ‘obesity’ in the 20th century In order to think through the normalising effects of the pathologisation of ‘fatness’, it is now useful to turn to an examination of the shifts in medical constructions of ‘obesity’ in the twentieth century. Chang and Christakis’ article “Medical Modelling of Obesity: A Transition from Action to Experience in a 20th Century American Textbook” would seem a particularly apt place to begin, since they provide a close examination of the shifts that occur over five editions of the key medical reference text, the Cecil Textbook of Medicine (1927, 1947, 1967, 1985, and 2000). Here, the authors critically engage with the shifting of “the process by which certain behaviours or conditions are defined as medical problems…and medical intervention becomes the focus of remedy and social control” (2002, p. 152). They posit a clear shift from the construction of the ‘obese’ patient as a “societal parasite” to a “societal victim” (2002, p. 155). For example, Chang and Christakis note that, in the 1927 edition, ‘obesity’ was characterised as a result of “aberrant individual activity” (2002, p. 156), and it was generally held that “...it suffices to know simply what an individual does or does not do in order to understand the causes of obesity” (2002, p. 161). In the 1947 edition, the notion of hereditary factors emerges, thus lessening the responsibility of the ‘obese’ individual for


their condition by introducing genetics and behaviours that are “increasingly more involuntary in nature” (2002, p. 157). By 1967, the authors argue, a greater focus is placed on factors external to the ‘obese’ patient: for example, patterns of overeating set up by parents during childhood that can potentially impair an ‘obese’ subject psychologically and affect their eating behaviours, changes in consumerist culture such as the mass processing and production advances in the food industry, and so on. Thus, Chang and Christakis suggest that responsibility for ‘obesity’ begins to shift more towards social institutions and cultural changes. Surprisingly, despite the inclusion of the term ‘obesity’ in medical textbooks since the beginning of the twentieth century, it is not until the 1985 entry that ‘obesity’ is conceptualised as a ‘disease’, although at this point, its exact status is the stuff of debate. Chang and Christakis outline the debate mentioned for the first time in the 1985 textbook entry pertaining to the ongoing discussion over whether in fact ‘obesity’ is a ‘disease’ or a “common clinical manifestation of a group of disorders” (2002, p. 158). Whilst ‘obesity’ was named as a common disorder of the metabolism, thus giving it a “disease-like character” (Chang & Christakis, 2002, p. 158), it was not concretely referred to as a disease in this 1985 entry. Finally, in the 2000 textbook entry, ‘genetics’ appears as a new means of talking about the ‘hereditary factors’ raised in the 1947 edition. This is accompanied by a focus on the significant socio-cultural changes in Western lifestyles mentioned in previous entries, such as increasingly sedentary work and home environments (Chang & Christakis, 2002, p. 160). The authors conclude that the shifts outlined in their analyses of the various editions of the Cecil Textbook of Medicine illustrate that by the end of the twentieth century, “individual behaviour has receded as a site of both explanation and accountability” (2002, p. 165). Chang and Christakis go on to argue that: When a socially deviant status is medicalised, there typically occurs a concomitant change in imputed responsibility… Under a biomedical as compared to a moral model, individual responsibility is diminished, and the social response is characterised by a therapeutic rather than punitive cast, rendering the medical model a potentially more humanitarian approach, though the cast of abnormality can be retained (2002, pp. 152–153). While Chang and Christakis’ analysis is valuable, I would argue that alongside the shifts they identify, there is a shift in the technique


employed by the medical establishment in responding to the ‘problem’ of bodies perceived as excessive. Indeed, as I will further elaborate in due course, in shifting focus away from the ‘individual’ in public health directives, disciplinary medicine functions more effectively to bestow the concept of personal ‘choice’ in citizens regarding their own engagement with a ‘healthy’ lifestyle, rather than deploying explicitly punitive edicts about ‘obesity’. Despite Chang and Christakis’ contention that one model of ‘obesity’ has been replaced by another more medicalised model that intends to remove responsibility from the individual, I want to suggest that this shift is not simple, but rather introduces a new tension between popularised beliefs and discourses about excessive bodies as sites of immorality and indulgence, and medical insistence on ‘obesity’ as a disease beyond the control of the ‘fat’ individual. In developed nations where infectious disease has been lessened and controlled by medical technologies and increased standards of living, ‘obesity’ has emerged as a “disease of civilisation” (2002, p. 170). However, even if ‘obesity’ is constituted as a disease of civilisation, the ‘civilised’ world is nevertheless presumed to be made up of individuals, who must ultimately all take responsibility for the collective ‘condition’. This logic is clearly apparent in Chang and Christakis’ claim that: The diet, fitness and beauty industries [which] are certainly subtended by, and dependent on, a discourse of individual agency… obesity continues to be a highly stigmatised state with prejudice and reprobation against obese persons widespread within medicine and society at large (2002, p. 171). What Chang and Christakis’ work illustrates, then, is less an unproblematic shift from individual responsibility to disease in medical attitudes towards ‘obesity’, than a disciplinary shift in ‘treating’ ‘obesity’ whereby individual responsibility is now couched in terms of selfknowledge and ‘healthy’ and ‘positive’ self-authorship. Their work raises the question of what the concept of medicalisation actually means. They note the similarities this description of alcoholism has with ‘obesity’, and note that “the medicalisation of obesity is subject to important doctor and patient constraints” (2002, p. 167). The authors note the difficulty of a fixed definition for medicalisation, and the moral inflections the term invokes, questioning whether in fact medicine is a scientific or a moral


affair, or indeed whether it is a problematic mixture of both these approaches: While some would view the invocation of a lifestyle model as evidence of medicalisation, others would argue that the lifestyle model is opposite to medicalisation, because it ‘turns health into the moral’, while medicalisation is properly conceptualised as that which ‘turns the moral into the medical’ with the proposition of biomedical causes and interventions (Chang & Christakis, 2002, p. 167). What emerges in Chang and Christakis’ investigation of a century of entries on ‘obesity’ from a key American medical textbook is that the privileged humanist position of medicine as a ‘pure’ unbiased scientific mode of inquiry is threatened by its investment in moral and social values, whereby ‘pathology’ as a concept is informed by moral understandings of deficiency and defection that is not simply about a physiological disturbance. Given this, what is revealed is that medical discourse and moral responsibility always inform and legitimise each other in constructing a working model of medicalisation. Chang and Christakis acknowledge the uncomfortable system of exchange that conceptualising ‘obesity’ as a disease effects. The process of medicalisation, the authors insist, simultaneously relieves as well as exacerbates the notion of personal responsibility in being ‘obese’. Medicalisation, then, can be understood as a form of disciplinary medicine. The shift towards disciplinary medicine fosters a sense of personal autonomy in being given ‘tools’ to manage and control one’s own health and one’s own body free of external coercion, and in doing this via public health campaigns, veils an institutional and systemic urging of behavioural imperatives in order to regulate and order society. As discussed earlier, by presenting healthy ‘lifestyle models’, modern medical discourse refrains from explicit and/or coercive intervention into the lives of subjects, yet simultaneously draws on the authority of the medical ‘voice’ to govern citizens ‘at a distance’, with the expectation that medicine’s rendering of ‘health’ is a ‘proper’ and ‘moral’ means of living an ethical life. In terms of the debate regarding individual responsibility for one’s health, Chang and Christakis propose that: …the implication of a social model of health depends, first and foremost, on whether the ‘social’ denotes emphasis on (and targeting


of) individual behaviours or the structuration of such behaviours by socio-political organization (2002, p. 168). By this, Chang and Christakis ask the important question of whether the ‘lifestyle model’ put forward by medical discourse is actually focussed on the individual or on building organisation to structure individual behaviours. In response to this, I would argue that the success of health campaigns regarding weight illustrates the intermeshing of these two ideas, whereby the individual feels they are being offered tools to manage themselves, while simultaneously medical discourse organises society via the authority of its narratives to structure one’s individual response to their own health in line with dominant medical renderings of health and body size.

Pathological ‘being’: analysing the fat subject I want to turn now to Stanley Schachter and Judith Rodin’s book Obese Humans and Rats, in order to examine the struggle to determine the cause of ‘obesity’, and thus, to answer the question of where responsibility lies. Given the wealth of contemporary medical literature available on ‘obesity’, you may wonder why I should choose to include a discussion of a text written in 1974. I have included Schachter and Rodin’s work as it presents research from a period in the twentieth century where the shift towards a medicalisation of ‘fatness’ becomes foregrounded, and offers a bizarre, but compelling example of the turn towards a biomedical search for the causes of obesity, whilst struggling with the historical tensions that position obese subjects in particular ways: as lazy, devious, compulsive, out of control. In this way, it demonstrates Chang and Christakis’ claim offered above that presents the shift towards a medicalisation of obesity as always already haunted by the question of personal responsibility, and thus maintains the “cast of abnormality” (2002, pp. 152–153). At the same time, this text’s value lies in its poignant illustration of the ways in which ‘scientific observation’ constitutes the bodies involved in its processes, that is, the bodies of both the objects of enquiry, and the practitioners who carry out the ‘observations’ central to it. Stanley Schachter, an influential psychologist, co-wrote Obese Humans and Rats with Judith Rodin, a student studying under him at the time (Pool, 2001, p. 54). The two authors devised a series of peculiar experiments designed to track similarities in behavioural responses of obese humans and rats affected with lesioned hypothalami. Schachter and


Rodin concluded that in 13 out of the 15 experiments that comprised their research project, obese rat and human behaviours were comparable (Pool, 2001, p. 55). Extrapolating from their experiment data, Schachter and Rodin suggest that the obese human hypothalamus must also be flawed or defective in some way.6 Given this, Schachter and Rodin developed the “externality hypothesis” (Pool, 2001, p. 56), which suggests that due to a problem with the hypothalamus, obese humans are more sensitive to external cues and stimuli than those of human of a ‘normal’ weight. As Robert Pool writes in his book Fat: Fighting the Obesity Epidemic: For the obese, the externality hypothesis was a mixed bag. It sure beat being told they were gluttons with no self-respect or willpower, and it was an improvement over being labelled a candidate for the psychoanalyst’s couch, but the new picture of obesity had its own negatives…Compared with people of normal weight, they were hypersensitive and liable to be pushed around by whatever emotional currents were swirling around them. But they couldn’t help it, any more than the rats could. It was just their nature (2001, p. 56). For subjects already positioned as being deficient in the popular imagination, obese individuals were now reduced to their biology, but this merely served to reproduce the most negative understandings of the ‘fat’ person. By 1977, Rodin had rejected the externality hypothesis, and Schachter’s research moved on to other questions, but the ongoing medicalisation of the disease of ‘obesity’ remained complicated by dominant understandings of fat people as weak and hypersensitive, thus in some way, still responsible for their ‘disease’. As mentioned above, in Obese Humans and Rats, Schachter and Rodin run parallel experiments between ‘obese’ humans, and rats that have been afflicted with hypothalamus lesions and have become “immensely fat” (1974, p. 1). Schachter and Rodin designed a strange spectrum of

6

Certain diseases of the hypothalamus do exist which disrupt eating patterns, such as Prader-Willi syndrome, where patients are unable to experience the sensation of being full, and thus continually eat. This disease however, is not shared by all clinically obese people, and only accounts for a small percentage of the population. For more information on Prader-Willi syndrome, please refer to the following websites: http://www.pws.asn.au; http://www.pwswusa.org; http://www.pwsa.co.uk.


experiments, ranging from an examination of eating behaviours, emotional disturbance through exposure to traumatic stimuli, and the use of electric shock to determine pain sensitivity. The authors conclude from the data extracted from these experiments that there are behavioural similarities between the obese rat and the obese human, but more importantly, the authors compile a list of behaviours that define the ‘obese’ subject as distinct from a ‘normal’ subject. The pathological behaviours they identify primarily focus on eating patterns, but also on avoidance techniques and emotionality. The authors begin their book by asserting: Of all human frailties, obesity is, perhaps, the most perverse. The penalties are so severe, the gratification so limited, and the remedy so simple that obesity should be the most trivial of aberrations to correct. Yet, it is among the most recalcitrant. Almost any fat person can lose weight; few can keep it off (1974, p. 1). It is interesting to break this statement down, and to consider the implications of its assertions. ‘Obesity’ is constituted here as a ‘frailty’, a weakness that is apparently easy to fix, but is still, infuriatingly, causing Western medicine so much angst. On a subtextual level, one may concede that Schachter and Rodin do not mean to suggest that ‘obesity’ itself is a frailty, but rather the weakness is inherent in ‘fat’ people themselves. It is this weakness of ‘will’ that perpetuates the ‘problem’ of ‘obesity’. It could be suggested, then, that this medical rendering of ‘obesity’ merely disguises a prejudicial attitude and presumed ‘knowingness’ of the ‘weak’ character of a ‘fat’ subject. Schachter and Rodin claim that ‘fatness’ is ‘perverse’: it displays an obstinate refusal by an individual to conform to acceptable healthy body codes and more disturbingly, to accept responsibility for oneself. In highlighting the relatively simple means of ‘correcting’ the pathology of ‘obesity’, the authors apparently assume that ‘fat’ people are feebleminded: after all, who in their right mind would choose to be ‘fat’ when it is clearly such a curse, and moreover, one that can be cured so easily? Further, the authors suggest that such is the depth of character flaws in ‘obese’ people (such as weakness, and ill-health), that even if one chooses to rid oneself of one’s ‘fat’, it is unlikely that the ‘obese’ person will be able to maintain their new ‘thinner’ ‘normative’ bodies. At this point, it is crucial to note the fundamental humanist logic that underpins Schachter and Rodin’s thesis. Overlaid with the reportage of scientific evidence for ‘obese’ behavioural traits, there seems beneath


this research a tacit assumption that the problem of ‘obesity’ could be solved simply by behavioural changes through rationality on the part of the ‘obese’ patient. The humanist assertion of the centrality of the human mind to all endeavours undergirds the authors’ argument, whereby they suggest that what is most frustrating about the condition of ‘obesity’ is that it could quite simply be resolved through a triumph of reason and will over the body, a separation of the body from the mind, an overcoming of the flesh. Schachter and Rodin make explicit their tacit assumption of weakness as intrinsic to the personal character of the ‘obese’ subject in the reportage of their experiment data. They make the claim that the ‘obese’ human (and indeed the obese rat) will most often bypass wholesome food to consume more palatable foods: “the obese eat more good tasting food than do normals” (1974, p. 39). Further to this, eating habits too are consistent between the human being and the rat; namely ‘obese’ subjects eat fewer meals, but consume more than regular intake, and eat more rapidly. Schachter and Rodin claim that ‘obese’ subjects are apparently less receptive to feeling full than normal subjects, and will then overeat: “[Obese subjects are] unresponsive to internal satiety cues” (1974, p. 26). Schachter and Rodin also conclude that there is a link between emotionality and ‘obesity’ (1974, p. 18), in that ‘obese’ subjects are more sensitive to traumatic information, following an experiment, which tested ‘obese’ subjects by having them listen to audio tapes of detailed personal accounts and experiences from the Hiroshima disaster. This seems a truly bizarre experiment to undertake, given that most human subjects would find stories of traumatic experiences emotionally disturbing. What is more interesting to me is that this experiment is premised on a gendered view of the ‘obese’ subject as a ‘hyper-emotional’ woman, who is situated in a Humanist logic of a woman fundamentally irrational and (especially as an ‘obese’ woman), out of control. In light of the data gleaned from these experiments, a few interesting concurrences with popular cultural attitudes to ‘fatness’ emerge. First of all, it is assumed that ‘fat’ people only want to eat food that tastes good. Interestingly, the authors suggest that food that tastes ‘good’ to ‘obese’ subjects is necessarily unhealthy, unwholesome food. This notion not only reaffirms popular discursive constructions of ‘fat’ people as weakwilled and indulgent, but reveals classed assumptions in the interpretation of the authors’ data. Given that inexpensive, fast food alternatives are the least nourishing food, to suggest that ‘obese’ subjects are more interested in eating food that is ‘unhealthy’ reveals that the authors may have certain beliefs about the socio-economic backgrounds of those ‘sus-


ceptible’ to ‘obesity’. The experiments also suggest that ‘obese’ subjects eat more food, and eat it more quickly than ‘normal’ subjects, thus supporting popular conceptions of the ‘fat’ subject as gluttonous and unmanaged. Further, in the description of the findings from the experiment designed to test responses to emotionally arousing stimuli, the data are particularly interesting when we think about cultural perceptions of the ‘fat’ woman. Women traditionally (and generally) have been cast as emotional creatures, lacking the reason that defines their male counterparts. In looking at Schachter and Rodin’s experiment data, not only as a woman is she assumed to be hysterical and highly emotional, but also her ‘fat’ compounds her emotionality, thus feeding her pathology. The ‘fat’ woman is deemed unable to think and reason above the desires of her flesh, desires that ensure her ‘fat’ body grows and expands, becomes evermore repulsive and pathological. The ‘fat’ woman thus represents the worst of the woman – unmanaged, out of control, her desires overtaking her reason. The central point here is as follows: the very questions that concern Schachter and Rodin and drive their experiments reaffirm, and are symptomatic of, problematic assumptions and ways of thinking about ‘fatness’. What is displayed here is the tension noted earlier in the discussion of Chang and Christakis’ research, where medical narratives that designate ‘obesity’ as a disease (thus reducing the focus on individual responsibility) are still beset, informed by, and in a position of authority that necessarily reproduces negative imaginings of ‘fat’ subjects and their allegedly deviant behaviours that mark their bodies as pathological. For Schachter and Rodin, there is a clear causal link between ‘obesity’ and overeating. The ‘obese’ are ‘obese’, they argue, because they simply eat more than normal subjects. To demonstrate this notion further, the authors undertake a study of the kind of cutlery ‘obese’ people use in a Chinese restaurant. Their findings show that ‘normal’ subjects are more likely to use chopsticks when eating in a Chinese restaurant, whereas ‘obese’ subjects will opt for silverware, presumably in order to eat food faster and more efficiently. They write: …When faced with food, the obese eater will go about his job quickly, efficiently, and without fooling around with foreign implements….The indications are consistent and strong, then, that when faced with a prominent food cue, the obese will choose the quickest and most efficient means of eating (1974, p. 64). This claim is interesting, as it throws into high relief the Eurocentric approach of the authors, and their essentialising, raced assumptions:


clearly these are Western researchers, and it appears that their tacit assertion that silverware is more efficient for eating than ‘fooling around’ with so-called ‘foreign’ chopsticks suggests that there is, as Linda Alcoff would suggest, a ‘perceptual background’ evident here. This also reaffirms not only that ‘fat’ subjects are overeaters, but are also fundamentally lazy and want to use implements that enable them to consume as much food as possible, as quickly as possible. This Eurocentric experiment emerges, then, as particularly telling, as the ‘scientific logic’ employed by Schachter and Rodin is revealed as anything but objective. Rather, the authors mobilise the potent ‘authority’ of medico-scientific discourse to support and reproduce popular Western discourse about the repugnancy of the ‘fat’ body, and (recalling Alcoff), the centrality of whiteness as one form of ‘normalcy’.7 The authors are clearly disturbed, yet somehow satisfied by the findings of their experiments: that ‘obese’ subjects (particularly ‘obese’ women) are lazy, feeble, gluttonous, and overemotional, confirming society’s ‘knowingness’ about ‘fat’ people. The conclusions of Schachter and Rodin’s research demonstrate that any experimentation is always already influenced by culturally specific beliefs, values and attitudes and the observation of phenomenon is never neutral. As mentioned earlier, the privileged position that ‘objective’ scientific inquiry occupies is always informed by subjective interpretations of data that are shaped by culturally and historically specific knowledges about ‘proper’ and ‘improper’ bodies. By this, I mean that these specific cultural knowledges always construct in us a ‘perceptual background’ that imbues our view of the world, and indeed other bodies, with the idea(l)s circulating in society.

‘Fat frailties’: pathologising the subject Following my latter discussion, it is evident that Schachter and Rodin’s construction of ‘obesity’ as the most ‘perverse’ of human ‘frailties’ is informed by a range of tacit knowledges about ‘proper’ and ‘improper’ bodies. In particular, the authors’ assertions highlight a cultural obsession with self-control (particularly with reference to ‘obese’ bodies). What immediately comes to mind here in relation to ‘fatness’ is the

7 Returning to the discussion of the World Health Organization’s Global Strategy on Diet, Physical Activity and Health, what is problematic is the Eurocentric negative positioning of the obese body globally along Western bodily imperatives. This rendering of a slim ‘healthy’ global body neglects and obscures the differing cultural values across cultures and societies outside the West.


practice of eating: a practice around which public anxieties surrounding self-control and excessive desires abound. In popular and medical narratives about ‘obesity’, food is simultaneously perceived as the primary cause and cure for ‘fatness’. Nowhere is this more evident than in Leslie Cannold’s comment on Dawn French’s alleged penchant for chocolate: “I’m not squeamish about fat people eating – I know they had to get fat somehow” (Cannold in Liddelow, 2002, p. 48). The notion of compulsive eating is subtended by a fundamental fear of excessive desires. There is a moral panic about excessive desire (particularly in women), about a refusal to regulate one’s needs and impulses. Historically, this notion of excess has been associated with the feminine, and thus eating practices are lived and understood in genderspecific ways. For example, even a cursory look at advertisements for food demonstrate that whilst men are expected to consume food heartily, women are required at all times to exercise control and restraint around food and eating, and indeed around desires more generally. It is rarely considered appropriate for women to be subjects of desire. For a woman to allow her desires to run unchecked evokes a fear of addiction. It is these culturally sacrosanct and deeply sedimented knowledges about gender (im)propriety and bodily maintenance that inform all women’s eating practices (particularly those of ‘fat’ women). Let me explain. In being perceived and positioned as a ‘fat’ woman myself, I have a hyperawareness about what I am eating at all times, although the food itself is not of paramount importance to me. Rather, I am interested in the perceptions of others as they watch me eat. Whilst this anxiety may be one that is shared by women more generally (at least in affluent societies), it is nevertheless possible to identify a difference in the experience of public eating for the ‘fat’ woman. Given that ‘fatness’ is so often associated with overeating, it is not unsurprising that many ‘fat’ women refuse to eat in public, or at least find ways of negotiating their public feeding performance, for example, eating a sandwich in a car, or eating at home, rather than in the presence of others. Dawn Zdrodowski further illustrates this idea in her study, ‘Eating Out: The experience of eating in public for the overweight woman’ (1996, p. 661). Zdrodowski interviews a number of ‘fat’ women regarding this issue, and cites the following: Rose: I always choose healthy meals with plenty of veg…it depends on if people can see me when I am eating as to whether I have a sweet. Ella: I don’t mind having fattening food such as pastry but I couldn’t be seen to be eating cake or fried foods such as chips.


Val: I have vegetarian meals because they look healthier…I’d rather have steak or chicken, etc. but often they come with chips and I feel as if everyone is looking at me (1999, p. 661). These admissions raise the question of what exactly the ‘fat’ woman is ingesting when she eats. It would seem that every time the ‘fat’ woman hides her eating from others, or furtively slips something into her mouth in public, she is really eating other people’s disgust at her body. She is eating her shame, and others’ disgust. Central to Elspeth Probyn’s account of Carnal Appetites: FoodSexIdentities (2000) are the questions of where, how, and with whom we eat. What she, like Zdrodowski shows, is that the shame-filled performance of eating for the ‘fat’ woman irrevocably displays an identity constituted by food and her relationship to it. Given this, one might suggest that the erasure of shame associated with eating could be regarded as a liberatory, feminist move. However, this is not the proposal Probyn makes. Rather, in claiming that shame and disgust are irrevocably linked to tacit body knowledges, Probyn raises the question of whether in erasing the shame/disgust response we surrender our access to these knowledges? In supporting her thesis, she cites Sedgwick and Frank, who assert that: Without positive affect, there can be no shame: only a scene that offers you enjoyment or engages your interest can make you blush. Similarly, only something you thought might delight or satisfy can disgust. Both these affects produce bodily knowledges: disgust, as spitting out bad-tasting food, recognizes the difference between inside and outside the body and what should and should not be let in; shame as precarious hyperreflexivity of the surface of the body, can turn one inside out – or outside in (1995, p. 22). At this point, it is worth returning to Irvin Yalom. Despite one’s initial desire to silence him once and for all, Yalom’s invective (and perhaps even the feelings of shame it may have invoked in Betty) tells us much about the tacit body knowledges that inform contemporary understandings of identity and difference, in particular as they are constituted in terms of normalcy and pathology. Yalom’s claims elicit a myriad of affective responses in me, such as anger, shame, resentment and hurt. However, without these modes of affect, I would lose the productive access to the tacit body knowledges that, as Alcoff has argued, operate at a pre-conscious level, making them difficult, yet imperative, to address.


Whilst I value the move that Probyn makes in her analysis of eating practices and shame, I would argue that what she ignores is the seeming inevitability of the conflation between ‘fatness’ with overeating, and this is an issue I now want to address. As mentioned earlier, one of the ways in which the ‘fat’ woman attempts to circumvent negative responses to her body and its practices, is by eating in private. However, ironies arise out of hiding one’s feeding performance from public eyes, since this is then interpreted as addictive behaviour, an isolated and perverted indulgence. A paradox emerges between public and private: the private ‘fat’ body that eats is constituted as engaging in addictive behaviours and permitting the fulfilment of excessive desires, and yet the public ‘fat’ body is reviled, and the feeding performance is seen as a display of wanton desires, lack of control and disregard of social codes of feminine restraint. As I have argued, the basic assumption that society makes about ‘fat’ women is that they are not in control of their desires, and that they are constantly indulging these desires. In light of this, it is interesting how few ‘fat’ women think they are ‘fat’ because they are compulsive eaters. Most ‘fat’ women complain it is their glands, or their ‘fat’ genes, or the legacy of having children. Kerry Greenwood talked about her experience of eating and being ‘fat’ in Women of Substance (Jackson & Wallace, 1998, pp. 53–54). She contested the notion that as a ‘fat’ woman, she was necessarily obsessional about food. “...it doesn’t occupy my waking thoughts…I haven’t got a real talent for being obsessional about food. I like food and I eat when I’m hungry. I don’t eat vast quantities, like eight éclairs in a row. I don’t know what that sort of eating is about” (1998, pp. 53–54). Despite this, Kerry Greenwood is perceived as a ‘fat’ woman. And yet, she is not addicted to food. Health professionals might refute this; say she is hiding the truth of her food intake, that she is denying the nature of her ‘disease’. Kerry Greenwood, as a ‘fat’ woman, is prohibited (according to medical discourse) from being a ‘fat’ woman who is not pathological. The ‘experts’ (and most other people) think that as ‘fat’ women, we must be addicted to food. In citing Greenwood, my intention is not to simply to suggest that ‘fat’ women are not addicted to food. Rather, my aim is to make way for a critical interrogation of our contemporary understanding of addiction.

The ‘fat’ woman as ‘addict’ In her article, “Body Modification, Self-Mutilation and Agency in Media Accounts of a Subculture”, Victoria Pitts examines 35 news articles


from the popular media relating to the various practices of body modification (such as tattooing, piercing, and more extreme practices such as branding and scarification). In the positioning of the medical practitioner as an authority figure, the ‘expert’ voice emerges as punitive and disparaging of body modification practices. As Pitts puts it, in almost half of the articles reviewed, a discourse of self-mutilation constitutes these modificatory practices in pathologising terms (Pitts, 1999, p. 291). Pitts discusses the means by which these news articles produce certain normalizing ‘truths’ about difference, often by deploying the authoritative voice of medicine. Given this, the analyses of certain body modification practices by the ‘expert’ has the power to cast them as pathological (Pitts, 1999, p. 292). A large percentage of these medical ‘experts’ framed their responses to individuals who engage in body modificatory practices in terms of a ‘mental health problem’ (Pitts, 1999, p. 292). Pitts notes that: “Although the intensity of the condemnation [of body modification] varied somewhat among mental health professionals, not one of them cited in the accounts I analyzed gave body modifiers a clean bill of health” (1999, p. 294). Given this, Pitts’ concern is with the disciplinary effects of the edicts of medical ‘experts’, and the popular appeal of such narratives: she cites Miller who argues that “these kinds of claims are highly ‘readable’, because they benefit from official or institutional speakers, use authoritative discourses, engage discernible partisan interests and operate in the public sphere” (Miller cited in Pitts, 1999, p. 292). From this Pitts concludes that the positioning of the medical practitioner as the expert whose access to truth is unquestionable is necessarily tied to the construction of the body modifier, the disordered object of selfmutilation discourse, as out of control, driven by pathological impulses, and therefore a threat to both him or herself and to the social body more generally. As Pitts puts it, “the framing of body modification as mutilation makes the prospect of agency dubious or theoretically impossible” (1999, p. 296). This claim is then illustrated by a telling quote from a clinical psychologist who says, of body modifiers and the practices in which they are involved: They may think it’s adornment, and I’m sure they think it’s OK, but I would be really interested to find out about their home lives. It’s my belief they’re running from something (Beaubien cited in Pitts, 1999, p. 299). In light of this claim, while I would argue that the suggestion that a personal responsibility for one’s ‘fatness’ has not totally disappeared


from contemporary medical attitudes towards ‘fatness’, it is important to engage with the problematics of shifting a ‘fat’ individual from ‘social pariah’ to ‘victim’ status. It is ironic that as part of a disciplinary medicine that relies on the fostering of a belief in personal choice and the possibility for agentic practice(s), the mark of ‘pathology’ as bestowed by medical ‘experts’, tacitly denies any such action on the part of the individual. Pitts notes that: …mutilation discourse explicitly and implicitly denies agency to subcultural actors. Even though body modification is undertaken to change appearance, and for self-definition, it turns out that selfdefinition is not a choice, but a desire, addiction, need or urge (1999, p. 396, my emphasis). The phenomenon that Pitts identifies here is of particular interest to me given my earlier discussion of the shift from personal responsibility in medicine to the designation of ‘obesity’ as a disease. I would argue that, given Pitts’ thesis, the same discourse is at work in medical narratives of ‘fatness’, as in narratives of body modification as ‘selfmutilation’. The ‘fat’ person is still positioned as being responsible for their ‘fatness’, even as the label of ‘obesity’ attempts to constitute the ‘disease’ as a clinical pathology – thus ‘fatness’ could be said to likewise be a ‘truth-effect’ of mutilation discourse(s). Since the beginning of the new millennium in Australia, there has been a veritable explosion of media interest in the perceived ‘obesity epidemic’. Countless stories are aired weekly on mainstream current affairs programs, and crowd for space in print media. The power of, and interest generated by, these medical discourses in popular culture, I, like Pitts, contend, is driven by the testimony of the medical ‘expert’ to pathologise certain bodies, practices and pleasures. The notion of addiction and its normalising/pathologising effects is also the focus of Eve Sedgwick’s essay “Epidemics of the Will”. Drawing on Foucault’s critique of the pathologising construction of the homosexual (as a modern invention), Sedgwick interrogates the (trans)formation, in the nineteenth century, of opium eaters, from drug users to ‘addicts’. She writes: From a situation of relative homeostatic stability and control, she is propelled into a narrative of inexorable decline and fatality, from which she cannot disimplicate herself except by leaping into that


other, even more pathos-ridden narrative called kicking the habit. From being the subject of her own perceptual manipulations or indeed experimentations, she is installed as the proper object of compulsory institutional disciplines, legal and medical, that, without actually being able to do anything to ‘help’ her, nonetheless presume to know her better than she can know herself – and indeed, offer everyone in her culture who is not herself the oppor-tunity of enjoying the same flattering presumption (1993, p. 131). What Sedgwick poignantly illustrates here is the ways in which the medico-discursive mechanisms function to constitute the ‘addict’ as what Victoria Pitts calls a ‘discredited person’, whose difference cannot be spoken or perceived beyond the logic of the normal/pathological binary. Sedgwick illustrates the ways in which the figure of the ‘addict’ is constituted, and how she operates within discourses that necessarily impel her into a spiral of disease, death and destruction: the only escape from this inscription of addiction is to ‘kick the habit’, a ‘technology’ which is also always already marked with pathology. What is effected in the logic of addiction and the concurrent imperatives to ‘quit’ one’s engagement with addictive practices, then, is the tacit removal of one’s status as a subject, and the ensuing ‘installation’ of one’s self as an object of disciplinary regimes, power and knowledge about health and pathology, both in a medical and popular cultural setting. Like the ‘addict’ of which Sedgwick speaks, the ‘fat’ woman (in being positioned as the ‘addict’) is silenced and reduced to an object that can be read and understood within a range of disciplinary technologies that insist they know the ‘truth’ of the addict, a truth that is always already located in a logic of pathologisation. ‘Addiction’, then, clearly emerges in and through this critique as a normalising mechanism or technology: as Sedgwick notes, ‘addiction’ is not located either in a substance, or in the body of a user, but rather, “… must be some overarching abstraction that governs the narrative relations between them” (1993, p. 131). She continues: “That abstract space where substances and behaviours become ‘addictive’ or ‘not addictive’: shall we call it the healthy free will? The ability to, let us say, choose (freely) health?” (1993, p. 132). What Sedgwick clearly illustrates here is the way in which liberal humanist dichotomies support and reinforce one another: for example, the ‘non-addict’/‘addict’ binary lines up with the (alleged) polarity between “bodily autonomy; self-control; will power” (1993, p. 132) on the one hand, and the lack of attributes


deemed essential to the good health of the subject on the other. Further, as Sedgwick goes on to note: …So long as ‘free will’ has been hypostatised and charged with ethical value, for just so long has an equally hypostatised ‘compulsion’ had to be available as a counterstructure always internal to it, always requiring to be ejected from it (1993, pp. 133–134). What is compelling about Sedgwick’s insights regarding the ‘drug addict’ is how appropriate and applicable they seem to the figure of the ‘fat’ woman, and in particular, to her constitution as a ‘compulsive overeater’ whose will is necessarily impaired. I would suggest that the ‘overarching abstraction’ to which Sedgwick refers should be thought of as the discourses and discursive practices tied to the tacit knowledges I have discussed throughout this first section, which, as I have demonstrated, permeate every aspect of contemporary Western culture, and in particular, the bodies of which it is composed. What Sedgwick’s analysis reveals is that ‘addiction’, like ‘fatness’, does not and cannot exist as an empirical truth that can be understood and observed universally, despite its position in the humanist logic of medical empiricism. Given this, ‘addiction’ (in terms of its constitution and its ‘treatment’) then, will always be haunted by its own impossibility given the constant flux in its (situated) applications, under-standings and pathologies. Like ‘obesity’, ‘addiction’ functions as a diagnostic and normalising tool that attempts to institute conceptual borders in our tacit, unfixed ‘knowledge’ of deviant bodies, to name ‘pathology’ and thus to arrest its development. Helen Keane shares the position I am taking here, arguing in her book What’s Wrong with Addiction?, that so-called eating disorders such as ‘compulsive eating’, anorexia and bulimia “have been constituted as addictive disorders by both popular and medical discourse” (2002, p. 111) and that the body-subjects associated with these ‘disorders’ have been positioned as pathological objects. This process of categorisation involves the medical sanctioning of a line between the ‘normal eater’ and the ‘compulsive overeater, the normal and the pathological’. And whilst this line is both arbitrary and shifting it is nevertheless constitutive: rather than marking off the aberrant from what is natural and normal, it produces the latter as the centre from which the former has somehow strayed. Keane problematises the logic


of categorising eating practices based on the perceived ‘normality’ of the eating body: Disordered bodies, desires and eating styles for food abusers are constructed against the idea of normal hunger and normal eating. Therefore the notion of healthy, natural eating is as constructed and as culturally encoded as the food rituals of the anorexic and bulimic (2002, p. 112). In other words, historically and culturally specific codings are attached to foods and the rituals that surround them, whereby food has become a material value ‘charged’, as Sedgwick noted, ‘with ethical value’. However, as Keane notes, these codings function in accordance with, and reproduce, hegemonic notions of difference: when the woman positioned as ‘obese’ eats a cake it signifies something very different than the same action would if it were performed by a body positioned as ‘normal’ or ideal. The same could be said, as Keane notes, of health. In public health discourse, we are subjected to constantly changing ‘truth-claims’ about what constitutes a ‘healthy’ diet, and which foods should be avoided at all costs. In light of this, ‘compulsive eaters’ emerge more as recalcitrant, maddening, greedy figures, rather than as those with a genuine disease. Moreover, the ‘compulsive eater’ and the ‘obese’ subject are too often uncritically conflated, in and through the logic of cause and effect: ‘fatness’ is allegedly the effect of disordered (and necessarily compulsive) eating practices. Indeed, much of the medical literature supports this conflation: “Many of the more traditional medical texts slip between compulsive eating and obesity as if they are the same thing, or include a section on obesity rather than compulsive eating” (Keane, 2002, p. 124). While hunger is supposedly a ‘natural’ impulse, it is a highly regulated behaviour structured by moral dictates about moderation and control. One’s (gendered) relationship to food is supposed to reveal much about one as an individual, and given the visibility of substantial flesh as a signifier of ‘fatness’, and the connotations historically associated with it, the ‘fat’ woman is more likely than not to be perceived as an ‘addict’, albeit one lacking the exotic appeal of the figure of the woman addicted, for example, to self-starvation or drug use. More often, she is constructed as lacking a fundamental intelligence needed to exert control over her own (apparently disordered) eating patterns. As Keane points out, “she is represented as the comic figure of the greedy fat woman” (2002, p. 124).


In her analysis of Abraham and Llewellyn-Jones’ medical textbook, Eating Disorders: The Facts, Keane focuses on the diet plan which the authors have developed and which they claim “form[s] the basis of a sensible diet for a sensible person” (Abraham & Llewellyn-Jones cited in Keane, 2002, p. 124, my emphasis). Interestingly, rather than explicitly critiquing the notion of the ‘sensible’ and its association with particular practices and particular body-subjects, Keane brings to the fore the (moral) assumption the text relies on and reproduces but fails to make explicit: that is, the idea that ‘obese’ individuals are not sensible people since they do not eat sensibly, and that this can be clearly observed simply by looking at their bodies. In other words, ‘fat’ people’s bodies are presumed to tell of their failure to understand, take seriously, or commit to ‘common-sense’ principles for health and normalcy. Rather than accepting the authors’ equation of ‘obesity’ with overeating, Keane again notes the kind of circular logic in which those perceived as ‘fat’ find themselves caught. That is, subjects who are not deemed to be ‘obese’, but nevertheless regularly eat what is considered to be large portions are unlikely to think of their eating practices (or to have their eating styles perceived by others) as disordered or compulsive. Similarly, subjects constructed as normatively ‘thin’ might be perceived as simply being fortunate, in that they can satisfy a ‘healthy’ appetite without any attendant weight gain that might position their eating habits as problematic. However, as ‘obesity’ has come to represent the ultimate signifier of a lack of control around food, and is thus easily conflated with overeating, the ‘fat’ body is always already perceived as a site of compulsive behaviours. As Keane concludes: “Put simply, it is only people who are trying to restrain their eating who experience it as compulsive” (2002, p. 125). Keane makes an interesting point here, as the lives of so many ‘fat’ women in the West are irrevocably marked by control, rather than the discursive understanding of their bodies as being out of control. Defining the eating practices of many ‘fat’ Western women is a preoccupation not always with eating food itself, but the belief that their ingestion of any food must somehow be pathological, given the easy and common conflation (both medically and in lay society) of addictive overeating and ‘fatness’. Dieting is, by definition, about restraint and deprivation, and beginning a diet requires an admission that one’s eating, and thus one’s self, is out of control. Moreover, as Keane highlights, it is the very logic of the ‘diet’ that necessarily constitutes one’s pre-diet food consumption as excessive and out of control. In other


words, when a woman, perceived by herself and others as ‘fat’, embarks on a diet, this is never the result of a simple acknowledgement of an objective fact (‘I am an overeater’, ‘I am overweight’): rather the ‘diet’ is the discursive construction of a practice and a self that is pathological. Hence, the logic of the ‘diet’ is also, then, the logic of ‘addiction’. The practice of dieting is yet one of the many vehicles through which addiction is constituted as addiction. This understanding of the diet as a practice informed by and informing the logic of addiction, necessarily foregrounds the mediated nature of all eating practices. Whilst the ‘natural’ experience of hunger implies a lack of intervention, a state of being that is defined by a lack of cultural interference, the (contextually specific) notion of ‘normal’ or healthy eating practices is always tied to particular (idealised) notions of the self and to the investments each of us has in them. More than a simple response to a biological requirement for nutrition, eating situates subjects as responsible or irresponsible: as either working towards a mastery of the self, or as abdicating one’s duty to individual and social ‘health’. In the midst of public health campaigns against ‘obesity’, then, food and eating practices become tools of self-authorship, the means by which one might live an ethical existence; thus food and eating practices are less empirical objects or natural occurrences than highly mediated technologies which are shaped by and reinforce humanist logic. The notion of ingestion as the means by which one can supposedly master oneself, shape oneself as a moral success and a model of health clearly underpins programs such as Overeaters Anonymous.8 The Overeaters Anonymous (OA) program is modelled on the ‘successful’ 12-step program developed by Alcoholics Anonymous. Interestingly, the body and its visibility are not of primary importance in these programs. Certainly, a bodily ‘transformation’ is vital, but more important is an internal, even spiritual cleansing of the self through surrender to a higher power. The cornerstone of the OA program is ‘abstinence’ from overeating and thus the first step must be an admission of ‘fat’ as a disease caused by overeating and compulsion. Strict food plans are generally implemented for members, who are ‘diagnosed’ as having

8 For more information, see the Overeaters Anonymous website (http://www. overeatersanonymous.org), and for an interesting critique of the program, see Katherine Van Wormer (1994) “Hi, I’m Jane; I’m a Compulsive Overeater” in P. Fallon, M. A. Katzman & S. C. Wooley (eds), Feminist Perspectives of Eating Disorders (pp. 287–298). New York; London: The Guildford Press.


addictions to white flour and sugar, which must then be radically eliminated from the diet. Like the problem of alcoholism, ‘fat’ is medicalised, and ‘fat’ bodies are explained as the ‘products’ of the disease of addiction (to food). An enormous struggle with food (as the drug) becomes a constant in OA members’ lives, whereby they must necessarily encounter the object of their addiction daily, yet eat only to live, not to ‘self-medicate’. At the heart of the Overeaters Anonymous program is the privileging of control and the construction of control as that which is innately opposed to ‘addiction’ and the means by which one can overcome it. Thus Overeaters Anonymous draws on and reaffirms the causal relation posited by health professionals between ‘obesity’ and overeating. However, an interesting paradox emerges in the philosophy of Overeaters Anonymous, insofar as members are asked to exert their agency in taking control of their eating and their addictive behaviours, and yet simultaneously, they are asked to surrender themselves to the complete powerlessness they have over their ‘disease’. Indeed, one of the most controversial and problematic aspects of the Overeaters Anonymous program is this insistence on surrender; “the individual must relinquish control overtly, admitting powerlessness” (Spitzack, 1990, p. 31). Paradoxically, this appears to feed back into medical discourses about the lack of control inherent in ‘fat’ women, and reinforces obesity’s status as a ‘disease’ that the individual is responsible for (Spitzack, 1990, p. 26). The environment created by Overeaters Anonymous, is one really founded on shame and pathology, dressed up in the appealing package of a chance at healing and salvation. The ‘fat’ body is the ‘diseased’ body, and it must be overcome through an admission of one’s failure to exert control over oneself. Helen Keane comments on OA: OA admits that for some people the only way to achieve a stable and culturally acceptable weight and a ‘normal’ relationship with food is to give up the possibility of choice and submit to a rigorous disciplinary regime. It unintentionally reveals the violence necessary to maintain concepts of normal weight and natural eating (2002, pp. 129–130). Given the privileging of rationality and acts of choice as part of ‘healthy free will’ in contemporary medical and public health discourse, the removal of the possibility of choice that marks programs like Overeaters Anonymous implicitly positions ‘fat’ women in particular as subjects


incapable of ‘proper’ acts of choice, who need then to be regulated by a ‘rational’ philosophy that operates external to the self, as the ‘fat’ bodies of these women demonstrate their inherent failure of will, failure as Humanist subjects. Finally, the focus on ridding the body of disease and of the misery that caused it to become ‘fat’, is framed in the context of Overeaters Anonymous as a spiritual movement towards purity of self. Thus, somewhat ironically, the transformation of the body from ‘fat’ to ‘thin’ occurs merely as a symptom of the newfound spirituality: not only the flesh, then, but its significance, melts away, once again reasserting the privilege of the rational subject in/of consciousness. The women positioned as ‘fat’ then, find themselves in an impossible position, where one must ‘transcend’ one’s body, but transversely cannot precisely because others will always read the ‘fat’ body as signifying a lack of control, moral weakness and a failure of will. In other words, one’s ‘fat’ flesh always already speaks a confession of pathology. It is this conception of the ‘fat’ body as a ‘virtual confessor’ that I wish to examine in detail in the following chapter.

3 ‘Fat’ Bodies as Virtual Confessors and Medical Morality

Food, dieting, exercise, and movement provide meanings, values, norms, and ideals that the subject actively ingests, incorporating social categories into the physiological interior. Bodies speak, without necessarily talking, because they become coded with and as signs. They speak social codes. They become intextuated, narrativized; simultaneously, social codes, laws, norms, and ideals become incarnated (Grosz, 1995, p. 35). In Space, Time & Perversion, Elizabeth Grosz suggests that as subjects, we come to attach certain social and cultural codings to the aesthetic appearance of all bodies (including the ‘obese’ subject). In other words, it is in and through processes of socialisation that we internalise the expectations of normative bodily aesthetics: that is, the ways in which we maintain our bodies, and co-extensively, the ways in which our bodies (and the bodies of others) appear in-the-world come to discursively ‘mean’ particular things to us. Given this, we acquire the means to ‘read’ and understand certain bodies as ‘confessing’ supposed ‘truths’ about one’s being. Grosz goes on to focus her critical attention on the understanding of all bodies as ‘virtual confessors’, and asserts that “The body becomes a text, a system of signs to be deciphered, read, and read into. While social law is incarnate, ‘corporealized’, correlatively, bodies are textualized, ‘read’ by others as expressive of a subject’s psychic interior” (1995, pp. 34–35). Visible bodily markers (such as fat flesh) are read in ways that position subjects on either the ‘acceptable’ or ‘unacceptable’ side of the normal/ pathological binary equation that signify subjects as either adhering to the requirements of ‘healthy’ ethical living, or as engaging in ‘unhealthy’ behaviours that position one as a moral and aesthetic failure. Following on from this argument, it is my task in this chapter to demonstrate that 69


the fundamental intercorporeality of social space exhibits the visible bodily markers that have been discursively produced as representing/ constructing normativity or pathology. In unpacking this notion, I specifically look at the act of ‘confession’, particularly in the space of the clinic between doctor and ‘fat’ patient. The fat body is always already seen, and the privilege of visibility is its purported correlative to knowledge. Here, I stage a challenge to medical discourses/narratives that constitute ‘obesity’ as a disease, and, particularly, to elucidate the power and authority of the medical voice in making ‘fat’ bodies intelligible as pathological and immoral, not simply to doctors, but to the ‘fat’ individual. Thus, I look specifically at the constructions of individual responsibility that are evident in medical narratives and discourses about ‘obesity’, and the effects of (what I argue) is the forced ‘confession’ of a deficient self residing in a ‘fat’ body. As Grosz demonstrates, bodies are considered, in our culture at least, to confess a ‘truth’, and while there may not be a singular ideal, there are certainly dominant ones. In reading the ways in which bodies “speak” as Grosz posits, we rely on (and are compelled by) a liberal humanist (and necessarily, individualistic) logic that ignores the fundamental intercorporeality of our being-in-the-world, to instead insist that bodies are an external expression of an inner self: hence, visible bodily markers of difference must signal more fundamental aberrations of the ‘self’. Grosz notes that in the individualist assumptions that continue to govern public notions of self-transformation and self-authorship, what is neglected is “the problem of other minds” (1994, p. 12) that always already code bodies and give them meaning. The practice of reading the bodies of other is not something that is deployed only at the level of the individual reading the body of another, but is part of a larger system of exchange whereby the reading of one’s body inscribes that body with particular meanings, and (re)produces the psychic world of the subject being ‘read’. As part of the continuing dominance of humanist logic in medical narratives and public health discourse, the body stands as an exhibition of a subject’s moral investment in ‘health/normality’ – a ‘healthy’ body then is perceived to reveal the ‘healthy’ truth of the interior life-world of the subject. While medicine relies on a separation of mind and body, the two inevitably inform and construct each other as part of the humanist logic it is founded on.

Moral medicine: constituting ethical bodies In the esteemed Medical Journal of Australia, physician John Burry published a paper entitled, “Obesity and Virtue: Is Staying Lean a Matter of

‘Fat’ Bodies as Virtual Confessors and Medical Morality 71

Ethics?”. Burry’s core argument is that in spite of medical evidence to suggest ‘obesity’ is a genetic inheritance, maintaining a ‘healthy’ weight is the responsibility of every individual, and is indeed a matter of ethics. Burry argues: Control of weight, no matter that some have a genetically determined potential to acquire and retain more weight in comparison with others, remains a matter of self-control and personal responibility…This responsibility is related to personal health and the health of offspring, and to the health costs and the healthy functioning of the general community … In a liberal society, fulfilling this responsibility must be a matter of voluntary behaviour, as ‘personal autonomy, the right to choose one’s own way of life for oneself, is the supreme value’….Self-control of one’s weight might be described as a form of bioethics (1999, pp. 2–3). Burry’s thesis exposes not only the humanist/individualist logic of modern medical practice, but demonstrates the inextricability of morality and the ‘proper’ bodily aesthetics of ‘healthy’ bodies. Given the oft-proclaimed ‘objectivity’ of medicine, it is telling that the very ways in which we separate ‘pathological’ bodies from ‘normal’ bodies is just as much about upholding morality as it is about ‘health’. What is also revealed is the tacit assumption that ‘obese’ subjects are ‘immoral’ subjects. For Burry, their ‘fatness’ is evidence of their neglect of a correct ‘ethics of the body’: they are explicit moral and ethical failures that are positioned as unethical and unwilling to assume a ‘proper’ responsibility for their own health and the health of society more generally. Within this, I would argue, is Burry’s contempt for ‘fat’ patients who have neglected a ‘moral’ ethics of bodily maintenance, veiled by a medical concern for the health problem of ‘obesity’. The fat body, for Burry, is a ‘virtual confessor’ that is, fat flesh always already confesses a pathology, by virtue of its very visible difference. However, what appears to be most maddening for Burry is the seeming denial of this virtual confession pathology by a fat subject who will not conform to his ‘virtuous mean’. I will discuss this notion in greater detail shortly. While Burry contends that ‘obesity’ has been shown to occur more often in poorer socio-economic backgrounds, and says that “exercising personal responsibility involves a minimum social, economic, political and educational understanding” (1999, p. 3), he goes on to insist, “I do not wish to deny that there are social elements to the problem, but we need a motivating framework for those who have practical autonomy yet cannot control their weight” (1999, p. 3). Included in his argument


is the following recommendation: “Politicians, clergy, police and moral philosophers must lead the way in physical fitness if we are to expect to reap the benefits of a lean society” (1999, p. 3). Burry’s call to action echoes the recommendations of public health directives about obesity across the Western world,9 in mobilising people ‘of influence’ to endorse the edicts of the medical authorities, and act as moral superiors. What exactly are the benefits of a ‘lean’ society? And more specifically, exactly who is benefited? Is Burry encouraging a kind of ‘moral cleansing’ in asking public figures to preach through their bodies an aesthetic of ‘slenderness’ that is equated to health? In this article Burry is tacitly attaching a moral value to ‘thinness’ as the status quo for a proper sense of nationhood and citizenship. This is evident in the conclusion to the article where Burry states: “Let us propose a BMI of 22 to 25 as a ‘virtuous mean’ to which we should all aspire” (1999, p. 3). Burry suggests that by engaging in processes deemed to be indicative of a moral commitment (that is, weight loss) you may be restored to an ethical citizen. In a secular Western world, bodily maintenance has become the most visible signifier of morality and one’s adherence to the dictates of an ethical lifestyle. This notion is elaborated by Peter Stearns, who writes: …Dieting is fascinating beyond its role as a daily constraint because of what it may say about other moral uncertainties in modern life, because of its redefinition and standardization of physical beauty, and because of its symbolic testimony to good character and personal discipline (1997, p. 247). Taking into account Burry’s argument, what is evident is the degree to which disciplinary medicine relies on the presence of the spectre of morality as a necessary effect of control and regulation to preserve in individuals the autonomous belief in one’s own ability to know oneself, to master one’s body and self-mastery. Burry’s commitment to numerical values as a “virtuous mean” by which to measure oneself demonstrates

9

See, for example, the World Health Organisation’s action plan (2000) that addresses the ‘global obesity epidemic’: Obesity: Preventing and Managing the Global Epidemic. Geneva: World Health Organisation. See also an Australian strategic plan for obesity treatment written by the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC), (1997). Acting on Australia’s Weight: Summary Report. Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Service.


the necessary intermingling of medical science and moral values attached to quantification of certain bodies in marking normativity. Established by medical authority, and traded as a kind of currency between members of lay society are these numbers: kilograms, Body Mass Indexes (BMI), body fat ratios. These numerical values carry moral import as tools to fabricate normative bodies as aspirational ideals that are nonetheless fundamentally immaterial. Annemarie Jutel asserts in “Does Size Really Matter? Weight and Values in Public Health” that there is an “overreliance on weight as an indicator of health” (2001, p. 1), and that these numerical quantifications of bodies have serious implications for medical attitudes towards ‘obese’ subjects. This can be noted in the way in which “doctors are less likely to investigate lifestyle choices or even to provide health advice to slender patients than they are to heavy ones” (Jutel, 2001, p.1), Jutel goes on to claim that: Mirroring early beliefs that physical imperfections reflect inner shortcomings, contemporary physicians unconsciously use visual and perceptual judgements in their evaluation of health, drawing their patients into an aesthetic of normality. As a result, geometrical concepts, numbers, and proportions support definitions of health. ‘Capturing’ normality in a formula, or proportion, such as a heightweight chart, reflects moral and aesthetic judgements about how one ought to look (2001, p. 3). Jutel notes the authority of these quantification formulas in medicine, but also in their ready deployment outside the clinic between lay subjects. The equalising and homogenising function of a number, or a “virtuous mean” as Burry describes it, to which we should all subscribe, is a powerful means of control that taps in to a fundamental desire to achieve normative status, and to understand oneself as occupying the privileged position of ‘health’ in the health/pathology binary equation. Nikolas Rose highlights the powerful effects of mobilising the authority of medicine in weight loss directives about bodily maintenance and self-regulation. He writes: The infusion of medical values into ethical judgements can be located in relation to the successive ways in which humans have been urged to engage in practices of self-formation, to master themselves, improve themselves and regulate themselves in the name of certain problems and through the use of certain techniques (1994, p. 69).


‘Fat’ bodies as virtual confessors Without our volition or control, then, the body always already confesses. In The History of Sexuality: Volume 1, Michel Foucault asserts that since the Middle Ages, the West has made increasing use of the rite of confession in the production of truth (1978, p. 58). Whether in church, the clinic, or on the street, the act of ‘confession’ has become key to the operation of knowledge/power, and demonstrates the ways in which we embody tacit knowledges about ‘proper’ bodies. Foucault asserts the dispersed nature of the disciplinary power associated with the confessional, stating “[The confession] gradually lost its ritualistic and exclusive localization; it spread; it has been employed in a whole series of relationships: children and parents, students and educators, patients and psychiatrists, delinquents and experts” (1978, p. 63). Foucault notes that where we originally relied on the testimonies of others to illustrate one’s character, we now mobilise confession in pronouncing the truth of ourselves (1978, p. 58). Such is the power of the confession in the West as a tool in the production of ‘truth’ that it has pervaded every aspect of our contemporary lives: in personal relationships, juridical matters, and medical consultation. What most interests Foucault about confession is that it plays a central role in individualisation, in the systems of identity and difference, systems of categorisation, and the systems of reward and punishment that are attached to these categories that pivot around the binary of normalcy/deviance. He claims: One confesses – or is forced to confess. When it is not spontaneous or dictated by some internal imperative, the confession is wrung from a person by violence or threat, it is driven from its hiding place in the soul or extracted from the body… (1978, p. 59). Foucault’s theory of confession has interesting implications for the ‘obese’ body of medical discourse. All bodies are always already visible: with regard to the ‘obese’ body, its pathology is inscribed onto its ‘fat’ flesh through the ‘expert’ medical interpretation of its simultaneous characterisation as ‘diseased’, and as a body unwilling to recognise its disease. The incitement to confess (that takes place not only in the clinic, but in a myriad of social spaces) is based in a demand for the ‘obese’ subject’s own recognition of pathology, of an ownership of a body of transgressions. The confessee has read and ‘knows’ the body of the


‘obese’ confessor as a body of disease and excess, in and through historically and culturally specific discourses that have become sedimented in our very being at an almost pre-conscious level, and are mobilised in the practice of reading bodies without conscious or deliberate effort. In this way, it would seem the confession of the ‘fat’ body is already foretold. Let me elucidate this. There seems to be an implicit silencing in the extraction of a confession from the ‘fat’ body. The irony is that as the bodily markers of the ‘fat’ body are read, they provide “access to a subjectivity” (Alcoff, 2001, p. 268). In this way, the ‘obese’ subject is immediately ‘known’: the ‘fat’ flesh of one’s body has already silently performed a confession. This confession is one of necessary pathology, indulgence and excess, and before the ‘fat’ subject even speaks, this confession is produced as a truth. The fat body always already virtually confesses, and thus an interior ‘truth’ is supposedly assigned to the fat subject, for them to then admit and confirm. Foucault asserts: The obligation to confess…is so deeply ingrained in us, that we no longer perceive it as the effect of a power that constrains us; on the contrary, it seems to us that truth, lodged in our most secret nature ‘demands’ only to surface…Confession frees – but power reduces one to silence….production [of truth] is thoroughly imbued with relations of power…(1978, p. 60). Foucault points out that a confession always requires a subject to have someone to confess to – and to thus exercise on the confessing subject the power of exoneration, redemption, judgement, or punishment (1978, pp. 61–62). The ritual of the confession involves power relations that act upon the body of the confessing subject, whereby an essential ‘truth’ has been revealed and the body-subject must be policed, and (self) regulated. In Foucault’s portrait of confession, the function of power specific to the ‘obese’ woman is the confirmation of the knowledges that govern the relationship between the confessor and the confessee. Foucault says: “…in between the words, a truth which the very form of the confession holds out like a shimmering mirage” (1978, p. 59). A confession is not a self-realisation or a revelation to the one who hears the confession, rather it is structured as a moment of confirmation of the tacit knowledges that form the perceptual background to the power relations operating between the confessor and the confessee. The confessee is positioned as already knowing the ‘truth’, but wants to confirm the confessor is also aware of the truth of their own


body. Such is the function of the disciplinary power of norms and pathologies, well beyond the walls of the clinic. As Foucault suggests: The confession is a ritual of discourse in which the speaking subject is also the subject of the statement; it is also a ritual that unfolds within a power relationship, for one does not confess without the presence (or virtual presence) of a partner who is not simply the interlocutor but the authority who requires the confession, prescribes it and appreciates it, and intervenes in order to judge, punish, forgive, console, and reconcile; a ritual in which the truth is corroborated by the obstacles and resistances it has had to surmount in order to be formulated… (1978, pp. 61–62). Having lived as a fat woman, on several occasions I have consulted with doctors about various maladies I was suffering from, which invariably I was told were a direct result of what they perceived as my ‘fatness’. Via the ‘clinical gaze’ of the doctor, my fat body was always already pathological by virtue of its hypervisibility. Of course, the clinical examination of my body would also involve the doctor deploying various technological apparatuses aimed at enhancing their perception (blood pressure monitors, stethoscopes, x-rays, ultrasounds and so on) in order to confirm the doctor’s diagnosis of my fat body as pathological, with the usual range of co-morbidities such as diabetes, heart disease, hypertension and joint problems. Maddeningly, in the wake of these investigations, my doctors were forced to conclude (albeit somewhat disappointedly) that my blood pressure was in fact ‘normal’, my lung capacity was ‘good’, and my internal organs were in working order. Nevertheless, under the medical gaze, the eminent visibility of my ‘diseased’, ‘obese’ body functioned as a signifier of pathology, my ‘bodily being’ was perceived by those concerned, as a negative, ‘problematic’ mode of embodiment. I was repeatedly advised to lose weight as a matter of urgency, despite my otherwise apparently good ‘health’. While the doctors I consulted with immediately perceived me as ‘fat’, but in order for me to accept (even in part) the pathological label of ‘obesity’, what was required was a confession of my own pathology. As Foucault claims, this exchange is far from neutral, but is only legitimised and validated if the confessee is positioned as a subject of authority who holds the power to forgive, correct, alter or transform the newly purged confessor. The diagnostic procedure, then, can be said to be marked by the confessional. However, the confession of the patient is not offered as an unadulterated ‘truth’. The confession


must be filtered, and interpreted by the authority embodied by the one confessed to. Foucault demonstrates this here: If one had to confess, this was not merely because the person to whom one confessed had the power to forgive, console, and direct, but because the work of producing the truth was obliged to pass through this relationship if it was to be scientifically validated. The truth did not reside solely in the subject who, by confessing would reveal it wholly formed. It was constituted in two stages: present but incomplete, blind to itself, in the one who spoke, it could only reach completion in the one who assimilated and recorded it (1978, p. 66). The diagnosis handed from the doctor to the patient undergoes a tacit negotiation before this is accepted. What is most interesting here is the marking of the confessional again by a humanist logic. The patient/ child/prisoner is invited into a space that is simultaneously marked by apparent autonomy, where the confessor is given the ‘opportunity’ to reveal a truth of themselves, while at the same time, a disciplinary power functions to hear this confession, interpret it, and to produce a ‘truth’ for the confessor. This negotiation is effected through the power relations present in the hearing of a confession of pathology from the patient. This moment of confession verifies the patient’s pathology, and inscribes the pathology onto the patient as a ‘truth.’ For example, in Corporeal Generosity (2002), Rosalyn Diprose locates the doctor’s consulting rooms and the clinical encounter that takes place within these walls as a site of confession. Diprose speaks of sexuality in her discussion, but I would suggest that a similar confessional trajectory occurs in the clinical encounter with a ‘fat’ patient. Diprose suggests: In this medical examination we are not simply confessing to an already constituted sexuality and unburdening ourselves of a truth that seems to infect us. Rather…we are constituting ourselves as subjects of sexuality in the presence of someone with the authority to make of us what she will (2002, pp. 109–110). By this, Diprose means that in the moment of confessing one’s supposed ‘pathology’ one (re)makes oneself, (re)producing oneself as a subject of this pathology and what this pathology means culturally, in a (clinical) space where one is most vulnerable, where one is seeking help and


reassurance. Diprose says that “[t]he clinic, like the confessional in general, incites not just the desire to speak but desire itself. It is a place where pleasures and pains are articulated, formed, and transformed; where a self is dissolved, dissembled, and assembled” (2002, p. 110). Diprose uses a story in her discussion that I would like to recount in part here: …Claudia enters a clinic seeking a prescription for her asthma medication. She knows what she needs, and this is all she wants. The doctor, a woman around Claudia’s age and unfamiliar with her case, asks the usual two or three questions about Claudia’s medical history before happily meeting her request. But as she is writing the prescription, the doctor asks if there is anything else that Claudia would like. Even though Claudia replies ‘no’ several times, the doctor persists: did Claudia realise, for instance, that a simple course of hormone therapy could eliminate her problem of facial hair. Claudia is…mortified by this question… (2002, pp. 111–112). Diprose comments that in light of stories like Claudia’s “[i]t is clear… that…the clinician is an agency of domination, a deputy of medical discourse and the conventions it may harbour” (2002, p. 114). Claudia’s body is offered up in the clinical space, and as it is read within the rubrics of dominant discourses about feminine beauty (to which the clinician cannot be immune), Claudia’s body confesses without her uttering a word, just as the ‘fat’ body appears as pathological before the patient has even spoken to complain about a possible unrelated malaise. Similarly, in Marcia Millman’s landmark book Such a Pretty Face: Being Fat in America, (1980), the author talks about the indignities of the ‘fat’ woman’s experience of going to the doctor. It has been thought that the percentage of obese women with life-threatening diseases is often higher than women of a normal weight, because they are unwilling to seek medical help for fear of derision and humiliation. This is poignantly evident in the following story recounted to Millman: I’ve had a lot of bad experiences with…doctors in general. A fat person hates to go to the doctor. Even if you go to the doctor because of a cold, the doctor will say ‘lose fifty pounds’ as if that will take care of the cold….I had a cold, walked into [the doctor’s] office and he looked at me and said, ‘I’m not going to treat you unless you lose some weight.’ I said, ‘I just want some cough medicine so I won’t cough myself to death.’ He said, ‘Okay. I’ll give you


some cough medicine, but if you don’t lose twenty pounds in two weeks, don’t come back’ (1980, p. 18). In both of the examples offered above, the clinician appears to attempt to wrest a confession of pathology from the patient, as though the primary complaint of a cold that had brought the patient to the doctor’s office in the first place was some sort of elaborate ruse to enter the space of confession, to unburden oneself of one’s pathology. Whether the confessional operates within or outside of the church, the effect is the same. Attached to the ‘truth’ produced for the confessor is a moral value that is marked by the presence of pathology. The ‘normative’, ‘healthy’ body (which is most often represented in public health discourse as a ‘thin’ body) speaks to its society of an adherence to tenets of purity and maintenance of the body through self-control and managed desires. However, this venerated body is a fundamentally immaterial one. By this, I mean to suggest that this ‘normative’ body is nowhere to be found as a reality. Despite its ideal status, and its function as a ‘phantasy’, its aspirational power lies in the privilege it affords. Given this ‘normative slender’ body’s immateriality, all bodies fail as projects, albeit to varying degrees and with different cultural values attached to their respective failings. In discussing the particularity of the cultural values attached to the perceived ‘failing’ of the ‘fat’ woman’s body, Spitzack suggests “[a]s one who is diseased physically and morally, the obese woman is obliged culturally to ‘admit’ to her sins and abnormalities” (Spitzack, 1990, p. 31). This obligation to confess is thrown into higher relief given the permeation of medical attitudes about ‘obesity’ beyond the walls of the clinic and into a popular consciousness. Thomas Osborne discusses the function and implications of naturalising norms beyond the clinic: For, when the principle is taken up within other disciplines, it supports the positivist contention that the normal can be known and laid down as law, prior to the pathological. In short, we get a general obsession not with a given human nature but with normality as such. Such is another consequence of a medical ideology: something which may be unremarkable in narrowly medical terms, but which has powers, so to speak, beyond itself, as a principle of transferability (1998, p. 270, my emphasis). By transferability, Osborne asserts that medicine has extended beyond itself, and that ‘normalisation’ and ‘pathologisation’ have become social phenomena. “In short, the very ‘power’ of medicine is dependent upon


its status as ideology in this particular sense; where norms stray beyond themselves” (1998, p. 271). Indeed, the norm/pathology binary has constructed us as subjects, has enabled our readings of our own bodies and the bodies of others, and requires ‘othered’ fat bodies to confess their difference: to confess their pathology, their moral failure, and their aesthetic affront. What I have attempted to demonstrate here is the complex and fraught interrelationships between medical and popular discourse, normative bodily aesthetics, and morality. Moreover, what I have shown is the ways is which these interrelationships inform and support each other, and the implications they have for the lived embodiment of those marked and positioned as unethical, immoral and pathological. By drawing on my previous discussion about the permeation of medical discourses in popular culture and everyday intersubjective encounters, I would like to mention briefly an Australian public health campaign against ‘obesity’. This initiative, titled “I Decide”, was launched by Abbott Australasia, the pharmaceutical company responsible for one of the more recent weight loss drugs, Xenical (orlistat). The campaign features an extensive television commercial series, which consists of a number of both male and female ‘clinically obese’ participants, promising the camera such things as “I will not eat that slice of cake”, “I will exercise more”, “I will listen to my doctor”, which is followed up with the tagline of the campaign “I Decide”. Campaign posters are visible in many pharmacies and doctor’s offices, with images of the smiling actors from the television commercials, with the words “I Decide” running under their faces. What is not immediately evident to the general public about this campaign is that it is in fact a marketing campaign for a weight loss drug that has recently has its status changed by national medical authorities so that it can now be purchased over-the-counter without a doctor’s prescription. The “I Decide” campaign launched a website (http://www.idecide.com.au) that provides readers with a number of different ‘tools’ and resources for their weight loss, such as BMI calculators, tips for finding a doctor to assist you, exercise and eating plans and suggestions such as keeping a ‘food diary’ in order to track daily exactly what foods you consume. The website homepage features a real-time clock ticking down the seconds, with the question in bold lettering underneath: “Is this the moment you decide to talk to your doctor about your weight?”. Below this is the caption: “Weight loss begins from within.” (http://www.idecide.com.au). In the section entitled “Talking With Your Doctor”, the following advice is given: Losing weight needs a commitment from you. Explain you have taken a real decision to lose weight and that you are conscious about


sensible eating and the importance of exercise – but you would also like to know more about treatments your doctor can offer and what other assistance they can give (http://www.idecide.com.au/index.php?id=10). The “I Decide” campaign is reliant upon the admission and acknowledgement of the ‘obese’ subject of one’s pathology and deficiency, a gesture that is, in itself, constitutive: in short, “I Decide” could be rebranded to read “I Confess”. The campaign operates under the disguise of permitting subjects to choose: ‘I decide’, it is up to me, I make the choice about my health and my body. What the “I Decide” program requires from its participants is a confession, where the images of the actors used in the promotional posters and banners, despite hesitant and/or satisfied smiles, appear as a kind of mugshot, zeroing in on the ‘obese’ subject’s face, waiting for a confession. The ‘decision’ to lose weight is an expected correlative to the ‘confession’ of one’s ‘fat’ pathology. Moreover, the campaign is reliant on the visibility of fat flesh, of the way we code fatness as aberrant, both aesthetically and clinically. It demands that the fat faces of the subjects featured in the campaign posters be read by us, to be positioned by us as pathological, and as confessing to their bodily neglect. While operating under the rubric of a medically necessary lifestyle change, the obese subjects in the “I Decide” campaign command us to read their bodily difference, and to approve their decision/confession not simply because of a health danger, but in light of the aesthetic affront their fatness poses. This public health campaign is disciplinary/surveillance medicine in action: ‘obese’ Australians are asked to recognise themselves in the faces of the ‘fat’ actors featured in the posters, and to bear witness to their own pathology. One’s ‘decision’, one’s imputed autonomy belies a more fundamental mobilisation of the health/pathology binary, whereby health is presented in a clearly understood model/bodily aesthetic, where ‘obese’ subjects are expected (ironically) to confess their bodily transgression, and must then ‘decide’, choose to normalise themselves. Juxtaposed with the conviction of a personal autonomy and choice in one’s relation to one’s body, the act of ‘confession’ requires the other to normalise oneself, and to be ‘healthy’.

Conclusion The empiricist logic of humanism insists that we can know the essence of something through observation. However, as I have shown, contrary to humanist thought, empirical observation is never neutral, but always


laden with cultural meanings, specificities and prejudices. In establishing and deploying a universal ‘standard’ to measure all bodies against, humanist medicine produces an insistence on ‘sameness’ that fundamentally belies a deeper concern for normalisation. Margrit Shildrick notes: …the point emerging from Foucauldian analytics is that in the production of truths there is no distinction to be made between empirical and normative disciplines. Rather, the so-called hard sciences are intermeshed with disciplinary practices (1997, p. 45). Shildrick alludes to the tacit positioning of certain discourses as dominant is what makes them so irrefutable. The dominant position of medicine and science has become a ‘naturalised’ ideal, whose authority may not be questioned. The seeming ‘transparency’ of empiricism deployed in medicine is fundamental here: what the eye sees, what the doctor observes, cannot be challenged. He is simply ‘seeing’ pathology, but the questions remains: in his clinical gaze, can he divorce himself from the ‘perceptual backdrop’ of hegemonic knowledges that structure the very way in which he sees? As argued throughout Part I, in upholding the norm/pathology binary in medical discourse, what is effected is a neglect of a recognition of the socio-cultural function of the categories of ‘normal’ and ‘pathological’, and medical participation in the way these terms come to ‘mean’ in lay society, and their sedimentation in pre-conscious practices of perception. The central task of this first section has been to demonstrate this complicity. To position the human subject centrally as the possessor of reason, and capable of all things, an assumed commonality obscures the lived realities of people’s lives that are necessarily complicated and structured in and through discourses of gender, race, class, sexuality, health and pathology. In the argument I have mounted in the chapters of Part I, I have problematised the seeming “one-way relationship” (Grosz, 1995, p. 105) between the paternalistic and rational figure of the doctor presiding over the patient/subject, who is relegated to a malfunctioning machine in need of restoration to normality. Underpinning this relationship is the problematic neglect of the lived embodiment of the ‘patient’, and the dichotomous positioning of bodies along a ‘healthy/aberrant’ binary in order to maintain the humanist power of medical discourse. What is ignored in medical discourse, as I have shown, is the persistence of tacit bodily knowledges that construct us within every context, not least the privileged ‘objective’ space of medical consultation and diagnostics.


What has been demonstrated is the co-extensive nature of medical concerns about ‘obesity’, and public anxieties about ‘fatness’ more generally, via the provision of a close analysis of public health campaigns and strategies to combat ‘obesity’ in the Western world, and indeed globally. Additionally, the tacit belief in ‘obesity’ as being caused by individual weakness, and being the result of unmanaged desires and addiction to overindulgence has been interrogated. The persistence of these ideas is fascinating, given the fact that at times we view the punitive medical approach as a fragment of history that is long past, to be replaced by a more caring dedication to healing and restoration to health. Framed by Foucault’s thesis of ‘disciplinary medicine’, the institutional shifts in the practice of medicine that continue to perpetuate both clinical and lay readings of bodily difference and pathology as representative of deeper character flaws and moral deficiencies have been mapped and critiqued. What has emerged from this analysis is that the disciplinary role medical discourse plays in an active construction of a model of ‘health’ that is dependent upon very stringent understandings of morality and virtue, and with fundamental assumptions made about the relative social values of health as opposed to pathology. In Part II, I wish to take up the sedimented knowledges that I have discussed here as informing and being informed by medical discourse that produce the bodies of ‘fat’ women in particular as defective, repulsive, and as moral and aesthetic failures. In the light of this, I wish to examine the responses of ‘fat’ women to these negative readings of their bodies, and the rise of the Size Acceptance movement.


Part II ‘Fat’ Backlash: Activism and Identity Politics

I am well aware that I am fat. I am reminded when I go into a restaurant, and ask for the dessert menu at the end of the meal. A look passes over the waiter’s face that says, “If I were your size lady, I wouldn’t be topping off dinner with a slice of lemon meringue pie!” I am reminded when I go to a gynaecologist and watch him write down OBESE in capital letters on my file, and underline it angrily three times with his gold fountain pen. I am reminded when I go swimming at the beach, and I overhear a mother telling her slightly chubby pre-teen daughter “You don’t want to end up looking like that do you?” Defeated, I venture into the fat people’s section of the lingerie department in Kmart and look until I find the largest, cruellest pair of underpants imaginable. At least three times as big as your standard pair of Cottontails, and made of frighteningly strong elastane. The waistband, about a centimetre and a half wide, is made of reinforced elastic, which gives way to zig-zagged panels of double-elastane. Another panel runs down the back of the pair of underpants to transform fat buttocks into a generous, but smooth contour. In the fitting room, I unhook the pants from their hanger. I take my clothes off, and begin to ease the stubborn fabrics up over my thighs, inch by inch, wincing in pain as I jam my hips into the elastic, and gasping as I feel the front double-elastane panel force my belly back towards my spine. I feel cut in half, trussed, the low-cut pant legs cutting into the tops of my thighs painfully. But I could almost believe I was thin. The tops of my arms strain against the sleeves that encase them, a double chin is evident, my thighs rub together uncomfortably in the heat of the small cubicle, but my excess – my folds and bulges so derided and despised – are contained.


4 Fed Up with Fat-Phobia: Coming Out as ‘Fat’

This is how we see: thin, vertical lines are good; horizontal fat rolls are bad. A hierarchy of Y-axis of X. Marx says: Reverse the terms, put fat on top. I say: Dichotomies are dumb. Love it all! (Wann, 1998, p. 30, my emphasis). If the medical and popular accounts of ‘fatness’ are problematic for the reasons elaborated in Part I, how else might we (re)think size variation(s), and in particular, ‘fatness’? One response might be the claim made above by Marilyn Wann, one of the key fat activists in the Size Acceptance movement in the United States. Here, she insists that she wants to discard the notion of dichotomies and a consequent overreliance on identity categories in overturning anti-’fat’ attitudes present in Western society. In short, Wann wants us to ‘see differently’, to ‘see’ outside of the structural dichotomies she mentions. However, what Wann fails to realise is that ‘seeing’ differently can never simply be a case of changing one’s mind, since perception is never simply a cognitive function that we as individuals have rational control over. As I argued in the preceding section, perception is a (inter)corporeal process of knowing and ordering the meanings of our various ways of being and our interactions: they are constitutive of our bodily being-in-the-world. Perception, then, constitutes subjects, and their relations with others, rather than being the mechanism by which an already constituted subject gathers information about others and the world. Whilst as a fat woman myself, I empathise with the sentiments that inform Wann’s thesis, it nevertheless seems to me that Wann’s politics, like that of the majority of fat activists, falls back on liberal humanist logic: mobilising uncritical ‘feel-good’ discourses in their various interventions into social and political constructions of the ‘fat’ female body. What I wish 87


to discuss in the following chapters in this section is that in mobilising these particular discourses, much fat activism reaffirms – albeit inadvertently – the very systems of power/knowledge it sets out to challenge. My task in this chapter, then, is to interrogate whether, and to what extent, the proposed fat politics of liberation emerges as a politics of constraint insofar as it insists on a problematic (albeit politically strategic) singular, unambiguous ‘fat’ political identity. I do want to qualify my critical position at this point. My intention here is not to universalise the various approaches of fat activist groups, nor to suggest that they are uncritical of the drawbacks presented by adopting a singular political identity for strategic purposes. However, I do think it is fair to suggest that political change via a resignification of ‘fat’ bodies and an end to fatphobia is a shared concern of all size activists. Given this common motivation, the strategic adoption of a clear and unambiguous fat political identity is necessary. Many fat activists, and indeed those engaged in other forms of identity politics are aware of the advantages and disadvantages of assuming an ‘essential’ identity for political change and activism, and are cognisant of the fact that singular identities are problematic: that is, such identities are not an accurate reflection of our subjectivities which are always already contingent and multiple, but are mobilised and maintained for political purposes. However, I am interested in expanding critical inquiries into the complexities of adopting a strategic and singular political identity, given the intercorporeality of our lived experience, and to suggest that despite the multiplicity and contingency of subjectivity, a conscious compartmentalisation of politically strategic and lived identities is ultimately untenable. I want to explore the problems that arise in and through the processes of political activism where the drive to intervene in and change public responses to certain bodies first requires changing one’s own mind about one’s own body. To do this, it would seem that what is required is a conscious eschewal of the discourses that not only inform dominant responses to marginalised modes of embodiment, but that also irrevocably construct all bodies and the ways in which they are lived, experienced and imagined. Moreover, these discourses operate on a tacit bodily level, and given this, throwing off these embodied knowledges (at an apparently conscious level) seems an impossible exercise. In mounting this critique, I do not want to devalue fat activism or suggest that this kind of movement for political change should be abandoned: rather, I want to complicate this process by acknowledging and engaging with the idea that bodies are not simply selfauthoring, but are always already in a system of exchange, they are

Fed Up with Fat-Phobia: Coming Out as ‘Fat’ 89

always already with-others and are thus always constructed, effected/ affected and understood in and through this system. This lived reality, then, cannot help but complicate politically strategic ‘fat’ identities, seeking to rewrite not only their own life script, but also a wider social script about ‘fat’ bodies. As I have noted previously, a humanist logic of self-authorship and bodily autonomy underpins Western public health directives on ‘obesity’, and maintains an insidious, yet powerful disciplinary effect in convincing subjects of their own centrality in self-definition and determination of their health and their bodies. I want to suggest here that despite powerful political interventions into negative public and institutional attitudes towards ‘fatness’ in the West, many size activists mobilise an individualistic humanist logic of self-mastery and assumptions of bodily autonomy, analogous in many ways to narratives espoused by disciplinary medicine. Thus, I contend that uncritically eschewing the formation of self through intersubjective relations, and relying on a problematic commitment to a cultivation of the self negates the space allowed for bodily ambiguity and ambivalence in pride politics. In the previous section, I explored the discursive construction of the ‘fat’ subject in and through anti-’fat’ narratives circulating in Western societies, most often framed as medical warnings about public health and a moral panic about a perceived ‘obesity epidemic’. These narratives encompass medico-scientific pathology, morality (both religious and secular) and, as I will go on to discuss in more detail, normative gender aesthetics. These discourses construct identity and difference in historically and culturally specific ways, positioning those perceived as ‘fat’ as failed subjects. Rather than simply labelling bodies that are already abject, these discourses actually abject bodies. Thus such bodies become: “the constitutive outside of the domain of the subject” (Butler, 1993, p. 3). What this process occludes is the fundamental intercorporeality of identity and difference, and thus the tenuous hold the subject has on one’s own identity, and the constant threat the other poses to that haunted identity. In response to the pathologisation of ‘fat’ bodies that I have detailed previously, the Size Acceptance movement has emerged. In this chapter, I wish to interrogate this movement, with particular emphasis on activism in the United States of America, and the model of subjectivity it presupposes in its agenda for celebrating ‘fatness’ in all its permutations. I am interested in mounting a critique of the humanist principles on which this model of subjectivity is founded, and, moreover, the difficulties with liberationist politics. I will question the problematic act of ‘coming


out’ which, as many queer theorists have suggested, assumes an unambiguous identity, and articulate the problematics attendant on this act of ‘outing’ for the ‘fat’ woman, given the ways in which ‘fat’ women live their embodiment are always multiple, contradictory and eminently ambiguous. There are three key problems I have identified with regard to at least some quarters of Fat Pride movement, and wish to explore in detail in the discussion that follows: firstly, a strategic insistence on the autonomous, self-authoring subject, and consequently, on identity as unified, knowable and unambiguous; second, a reliance on, and reproduction of, the problematic mind/body split; and third, an uncritical re-hierarchising of a ‘fat’ aesthetic over a normative ‘thin’ one. These problems are apparent, as I will show, in the performative politics of some radical fat activist organisations, and I interrogate, with the help of Moya Lloyd, the problematic appropriation and misreading of Judith Butler’s thesis of performativity in the name of identity politics. As part of this analysis, I will question the ontological status of choice, and the ways in which ‘fat’ women are encouraged, in a fat pride context, to make rational choices in order to change their investment in dominant ideals of feminine bodily aesthetics. Later in this second section, I look at Foucault’s later work on an ‘aesthetics of existence’, to illuminate and examine the obstacles to self-authorship and bodily resignification. My goal in this section is not to discard the empowering political possibilities of resignifying ‘fatness’ in the cultural imagination. Rather, what I aim to achieve is to highlight the complicated and tacit investments we have in dominant discursive structures that construct us as ‘fat’ subjects, even as we resist them, and how these narratives and aesthetics problematise and inform our political activities, even as we attempt to act against them.

Losing it: what are ‘fat’ women thinking? Firstly, it is interesting to note that Size Acceptance is primarily a movement engendered by women for women, and is informed by a particular understanding of feminism. Given this, it would seem to recognise that bodies are always already gendered, and that ‘fatness’ means different things depending on the gendered attributes of the body perceived as ‘fat’. In light of this, prior to my discussion of particular Size Acceptance organisations and their political agendas, it is important to discuss more generally the gendering of ‘fatness’. Let me do this by turning to a particularly poignant example of the ways in which the popular imagination conceives of the ‘fat’ woman.


In early 2006 in Australia, promotional commercials were screened for the impending Australian series of The Biggest Loser,10 a reality television program conceived in the United States that chronicles the weight-loss efforts of a group of ‘clinically obese’ men and women. The program is set up as an odd kind of game show with the winner garnering a sizeable cash prize, where success is strangely measured by loss. The ‘contestants’ are pitted against one another in a boot-camp style environment in which every meal is monitored and rigorous daily exercise routines are mandatory. At the close of each week, during the twelve-week program, the contestants attend a public weigh-in, and if they do not lose the requisite amount of weight, they face being eliminated from the contest by the fellow team members. What was most fascinating about the promotional commercials for the forth-coming show was the confessional admissions of the female contestants who expressed (often emotionally) their reasons for wanting to lose weight in the following ways: “I realised I’m 22 years old and I’ve never had a boyfriend.” “My resolution for this year is to fit into my wedding dress and to be a beautiful bride.” “I want to feel beautiful again.” These responses emerged in sharp contrast to the men’s motivations for participating in the radical weight loss experiment. The male contestants said things like: “I want my kids to be proud of their dad”, “I don’t want Mum to bury me”, and one contestant who works as a firefighter claimed, “I want to save more lives.” There is, then, an undeniable gender discourse operative in the contestants’ motivation to lose weight. For the women, they feel their bodies always already position them as either worthy or unworthy of a heterosexual male gaze, which in turn bestows on them a relative value within a framework of ideal feminine bodily aesthetics. The women are simultaneously reliant on their bodies for their being-in-the-world, and wish to disavow their ‘fat’ bodies as obstacles to their ‘true’ selves. In contrast, the men’s responses in the commercials reveal a relationship to their bodies that is premised on the privileging of masculine bodily strength, power and the ability to protect. Interestingly, the men’s motivations are all about action (about what they will be able, or unable, to do), whereas the women’s motivations are

10

The Australian series of The Biggest Loser is now into its third season (2008).


centred on their appearance. This reproduces (gendered) ideas about activity/passivity, and subject/object. For men, ‘fatness’ is a feminising characteristic that has significant implications for their gender identity. What is evident in the men’s responses is that they believe their ‘fatness’ weakens them, and this belief is situated in a heterosexual logic, that (re)produces gender norms. Similarly, the women’s responses are part of this same logic, whereby their commitment to their weight loss is about a process of (un)becoming, of becoming normative, ‘healthy’, and aesthetically beautiful, and therefore desirable to men. A more fundamental logic however unites the women’s and the men’s responses here: that of a liberal humanist emphasis on ‘choice’ and the individual responsibility. The rhetoric of The Biggest Loser is such that the program claims to present the contestants with the opportunity to take control of their lives, to choose to remake themselves as normative, ethical and responsible citizens. In and through the commitment the contestants make to master their bodies, we witness again the kind of disciplinary function of medical narratives, and the reproduction of ‘choice’ within a rigid dichotomy of ‘health’ and ‘pathology’. The irony here, as with the “I Decide” campaign, is that whilst the contestants have elected to be part of this weight loss challenge, supposedly through an act of free-will and of personal choice, what emerges from their confessions is a desire to embody normative gendered bodily aesthetics. Therefore, their ‘choice’ to lose weight is never simply theirs alone, nor is it simply the product of rational intent. Rather, their desire to lose weight, and the imperatives that inform this desire, are necessarily underpinned by an involuntary, or tacit investment in dominant aesthetics. Another interesting aspect of the lived embodiment of gender identity that emerges from the responses of the female contestants on The Biggest Loser is the implicit sense of distance that is instituted between their selves and their bodies.11 It is as though these women understand their selves as completely separate entities from their bodies. These women appear to interpret their ‘fatness’ as so offensive both to their selves and to others, that they disavow their bodies (and their co-extensive negative bodily representations), and deny their ‘fat’ flesh as having anything to do with their sense of self. It is suggested, in their responses, that in transforming their bodies to a more ‘normative’ standard, they may then be able to 11

This is not to suggest that men do not experience their selves as split from their bodies. However, I would argue that this split in men’s gendered identity operates under different discursive imperatives.


effect a closer relationship with their ‘flesh’, that they might be able to ‘feel beautiful’, and thus regard their bodies as more connected to their selves. One of the more common understandings of the body in women’s narratives of their experiences (regardless of whether they identify or are positioned as ‘fat’ or not) is the conceptualisation of the body as a ‘container’, an outer shell that houses the self, and acts often as a barrier or obstacle to the presentation of an authentic inner self to the world. Given this, in the example that follows, I wish to address the way feminist self-help literature has approached the ‘fat’ female body. In 1978, Susie Orbach published her landmark text, Fat is a Feminist Issue, which was hailed by hordes of Western women as the most important self-help text written for them to date, enabling an understanding of their bodies and women’s problematic relationship to food. Orbach’s central theory in this text is that ‘fat’ women (in particular) eat compulsively to stay ‘fat’, in order to create a sexual buffer between themselves and a repressive patriarchal society. The conception that ‘fat’ surrounds a female body as a kind of armor to protect against sexual objectification is central here, as is the conception of the body as an object one owns and may exert control over. Orbach posits that we are taught from a very young age that our female bodies are coveted as (hetero)sexual commodities and that we must be aesthetically pleasing in order to fulfill our roles as women. The female body is, she asserts, constituted as the property of male sexual desire, and later of the family, as carer: She is brought up to marry by ‘catching’ a man with her good looks and pleasing manner. To do this she must look appealing, earthy, sensual, sexual, virginal, innocent, reliable, daring, mysterious, coquettish and thin. In other words, she offers her self-image on the marriage marketplace (1978, p. 20). What is of interest to me about Orbach’s thesis, is the connection she establishes between the practice of overeating (which she uncritically assumes all ‘fat’ women engage in), and the eschewal of traditional passive female sexuality. In other words, Orbach foregrounds a form of resistance (albeit an ambiguous one) which, whilst it may in most cases operate unconsciously, nevertheless could be regarded as a form of feminist political practice. Indeed, this association could be said to lay the groundwork for later attempts by fat activists to celebrate ‘fatness’ as a political intervention/identity.


Despite what looks to be promising in Orbach’s thesis, that is, the connection between ‘fatness’ and resistance, she then undermines the political potential of ‘fatness’ in and through her foundational insistence on ‘fatness’ as always being a ‘problem’. She cannot relinquish this notion precisely because this would mean she would have to relinquish her understanding of, and investment in, heterosexuality. Let me explain. Orbach presents the role of woman as a necessarily (hetero)sexual one, and women’s participation in society, she argues, is regulated by the attractiveness of their bodies and what they can offer in a heterosexual economy. Thus, Orbach’s model of (hetero)sexuality insists that ‘fat’ must always equate to sexual rejection, and (hetero)sex is a realm only inhabited by the normative ‘thin’ female body. Moreover, she argues, since ‘fatness’ is an inherent barrier to (hetero)sexual activity, the ‘fat’ woman becomes, by definition, the passive object whose only option is to wait for a someone who is prepared to find the person underneath the layers of ‘fat’. However, Orbach asserts that while many ‘fat’ women desire to be thin in order to enjoy the supposed ‘privileges’ of a normative female (hetero)sexuality, becoming a sexual being also holds much fear. Orbach suggests that “[m]any [fat] women felt a relief at not having to conceive of themselves as sexual. Fatness took them out of the category of woman and put them in the androgynous state of ‘big girl’” (1978, p. 43). As a ‘new’ thin woman, the ‘fat’ that once surrounded her body and protected it from (hetero)sex can no longer say ‘no’ to sex for her; she must speak her own needs and take control of her own sexuality. Staying ‘fat’ means avoiding the issue of one’s (hetero)sexuality altogether. So in Orbach’s summation, the ‘fat’ woman compulsively eats to stay ‘fat’. A series of complicated contradictions are apparent in Orbach’s project. Firstly, in insisting her readers must actively rid themselves of the ‘armour’ of their ‘fat’, Orbach is encouraging women to re-insert themselves into a heterosexual framework in which women are necessarily the passive objects of desire. Secondly, and somewhat ironically, the course of action Orbach suggests her readers should follow involves relinquishing resistance, since as she has noted, ‘fat flesh’ is the ultimate symbol of resistance, at least in her way of thinking. Consequently, one could argue that Orbach’s work is, in fact, counter-feminist, despite her claim to be a feminist therapist. For Orbach, one of the motivations for weight loss is the removal of this ‘fat’ barrier between self and world, a barrier, which she claims, inhibits women’s (hetero)sexual pleasures. She writes: “We are aiming


for a situation where the sequence, me: fat: world, is replaced by me: world” (1978, p. 93). The most obvious problem with this is that Orbach presupposes that female pleasure can only ever be experienced in and through heterosexual relations. More interesting to me, however, is the particular model of the body, the self and one’s relations with others, which Orbach’s work relies on. This model is one of disconnectedness between the self, the body, and the world. It is one in which consciousness (which is conflated with the self) is privileged over the ‘flesh’. However, as I have argued throughout, subjectivity is always already bodily, and can only ever exist in and through relations with others and a world. Feminists have tried to advocate different modes of bodily being for years as an empowering practice that necessarily challenges patriarchal ideals of feminine beauty. Ironically, while Orbach rails against patriarchy and details its destructive effects on the female psyche, she relies on a liberal humanist and heteronormative ontology that necessarily and inevitably reproduces the kinds of inequalities that she tries (albeit unsuccessfully) to counter. Moreover, as well as reproducing the logic of what Adrienne Rich has called “compulsory heterosexuality”, Orbach’s thesis reinforces the notion of ‘compulsory overeating’, and its innate association with ‘fatness’ and femininity. Despite the problems noted above, Orbach’s text has undeniably played a foundational role in the emergence of fat politics, and it is for this reason that I have engaged with it here. However, Orbach’s thesis has not simply instituted a trouble-free course of action for fat politics, but, as I will go on to show, it has also, more significantly, established an ontological legacy that continues to haunt attempts to reinscribe the ‘fat’ female body.

‘Divine’ interventions: ‘coming out’ as ‘fat’ Unrepentant fat girls are the real bad girls. Sexual lawlessness is so mainstream that we are selling it to teenyboppers. Think of how radical Girl Power would have been if the Spice Girls had all been fifty pounds heavier, ate grilled cheese sandwiches and French fries and still wore skimpy outfits – stomachs and cottage cheese thighs akimbo. Maybe that is what we need to break down the isolation of fat women. It’s time to take fat out of the closet (Walton as cited in LeBesco, 2004, p. 94). What we see here is what would seem to be the logical step from the association of ‘fatness’ with resistance, to the celebration of ‘unrepentant


lawlessness’, a step that Orbach interestingly was unable to make. The picture that Walton presents us with is a graphic depiction of living large in all its glory and power. This depiction is necessarily supported by the haunting account of the isolated ‘other’ woman: the woman who has yet to embrace her ‘fatness’ and exert her lawless resistance to dominant modes of bodily being, the ‘fat’ woman who remains in the ‘closet’. In rejecting repentance, and shame with which it is associated, Walton’s call to ‘come out’ of the ‘closet’ is a call “to imagine a world in which fat bodies are recognizable to one another without the patina of shame” (LeBesco, 2004, p. 94). So what exactly is the ‘closet’, and how does it function? Are their different kinds of ‘closets’ in which different ‘types’ of bodies are hidden? What is the ‘epistemology’ of the ‘closet’? In a deconstructive response to these kinds of questions, Eve Sedgwick has attempted to ‘denaturalise’ binary understandings of heterosexuality and homosexuality, and the marginalising effects that this normative model of identity and difference (re)produces. In other words, Sedgwick’s work critically undermines the epistemology of the ‘closet’, not by asking ‘homosexuals’ to declare their homosexuality, but rather by problematising the systems of power/ knowledge that constitute these subjects as homosexual. Interestingly, in “Divinity: A Dossier, A Performance Piece, A Little Understood Emotion”, Eve Sedgwick and Michael Moon further elaborate the notion of the ‘closet’ as a nexus between body-subjects, historically constituted as homosexual, and those positioned as ‘fat’. The dialogue between the authors begins with Sedgwick’s account of a dream she had a couple of years ago. She says: I was shopping for clothes for myself at a store that was nominally Bloomingdale’s. I was dubious about whether they would have any clothes that would be big enough for me, but a saleswoman said they did, adding that rather than being marked by size numbers, each size-group of clothes was gathered under a graphic symbol: over here, she said, were the clothes that would fit me. ‘Over here’ referred to a cluster of luscious-looking clothes, hung on a rack between two curtained dressing rooms. The graphic symbol that surmounted them was a pink triangle. I woke up feeling extremely cheerful (1993, p. 215). What is interesting in Sedgwick’s account is primarily the tacit reference to reclamation of a historically stigmatised term/motif. The ‘pink triangle’, like the black triangle, was the symbol used in Nazi concen-


tration camps to mark homosexual prisoners during the Second World War. However, in later years this symbol was reclaimed by gay activists, and became a symbol of pride, and a sign of refusal, defiance and resistance. In the context, then, of Sedgwick’s dream, one might argue that the ‘pink triangle’ that replaces a size number that is necessarily stigmatised is significant, in that it enables Sedgwick to reposition herself positively in relation to pathologising discourses and their histories, to assert some agency in her own becoming, to be ‘extremely cheerful’, to become divine. Indeed, the figure of ‘the divine’ (also the figure of Divine, the notorious drag performer) could be said, as Michael Moon claims, “to offer a powerful condensation of some emotional and identity linkages – historically dense ones – between fat women and gay men” (1993, p. 218), to foreground, “interlocking histories of stigma, selfconstitution, and epistemological complication proper to ‘fat’ women and gay men in this century” (1993, p. 218). Moon goes on to suggest that the “combination of abjection and defiance” particular to the histories of ‘fat’ women and gay men, “often produces a divinity effect in the subject, a compelling belief that one is a god or a vehicle of divinity” (1993, p. 218). This is perhaps what we see in Walton’s garish, bold and defiant depiction of a ‘fat’ ‘goddess’ in a secular society: we have a picture of a ‘fat’ woman who is her own creation. The ‘fat goddess’, standing firm against the world with her cottage-cheese thighs akimbo refuses normative ways of knowing: the knowledge others believe they have of her. Without taking this stance, what happens instead is that those kinds of normative knowledges take precedence over any notion of self one might have. So, for example, as Michael Moon says: …incredibly, in this society, everyone who sees a fat woman feels that they know something about her…If what they think they know is something as simple as that she eats a lot, it is medicine that lends this notionally self-evident (though, as recent research demonstrates, usually erroneous) reflection the excitement of inside information; it is medicine that, as with homosexuality, transforming difference into aetiology, confers on this rudimentary behavioural hypothesis the prestige of a privileged narrative understanding of her will (she’s addicted), her history (she’s frustrated), her perception (she can’t see herself as she really looks), her prognosis (she’s killing herself) (1993, pp. 229–230). In direct response to this statement, Sedgwick claims that despite the fact that ‘fat’ flesh is always already read as a virtual confession, it is


nevertheless possible and, in fact, politically desirable, to “[come] out as a fat woman” (Sedgwick, 1993, p. 230). So, what does Sedgwick’s brand of ‘coming out as fat’ look like? How is that process enacted by the ‘fat’ woman? Should I say: “Hi, my name is Sam – I’m FAT, and that’s FABULOUS, don’t you reckon?” Following Sedgwick’s advice, then, would require nominating myself as ‘fat’ voluntarily at the start of every interaction. Sedgwick says that ‘coming out’ as ‘fat’ “…is a way of staking one’s claim to insist on, and participate actively in, a renegotiation of the representational contract between one’s body and one’s world” (1993, p. 230). If, as Sedgwick suggests, there is indeed something like a ‘representational contract’ written for the ‘fat’ woman, then the potential of renegotiating (or even voiding) this contract is significant. The logic of representation is that one simply names what already exists. So, renegotiating this contract by renaming/reinscribing what is already in existence may indeed have far-reaching political effects, but the assumptions on which such a process is founded are problematic. Sedgwick rejects the idea that ‘fatness’ is a sign of pathological subjectivity, for example, but embraces other tacit knowledges about the body as an empirical object. Sedgwick also takes up the notion that rationality can be a tool of body politics, which then tacitly reproduces a privileging of mind over the body. However, what is taken for granted in Sedgwick’s call to ‘come out as fat’ by ‘speaking’ one’s ‘fatness’, is that ‘fatness’ somehow can constitute a ‘truth’, an empirical fact that can be known, understood, and simply rehierarchised through modes of political reinscription. What is also assumed by Sedgwick is that there is a ‘core’ self that can intentionally reject the discourses that ironically constitute its very being. This individualistic notion is problematic, given the reliance on a ‘decision’ to de-invest one-self from the very knowledges that are constitutive of the self. Alcoff argues that these knowledges are ‘carried’ in the body (2001, p. 272), and precisely because of their tacit nature, they are dismissed as invisible, ‘natural’ responses to embodiment and bodily interactions with one’s world. As I have previously explained, it is these knowledges that provide us with a ‘perceptual backdrop’ that makes our bodies and other bodies intelligible to us, and in this very constructed and embodied perception, a critical distance and engagement is particularly difficult, but nevertheless essential to make visible the kinds of ways in which we ‘know’ our bodies and the bodies of others. In her book, A Critical Introduction to Queer Theory, Nikki Sullivan discusses the hallmarks of liberationist politics, and the kind of


political subject it assumes. Like Sedgwick, Sullivan claims that it is possible to compare the political motivations of the Gay Pride movement to Size Acceptance, whereby the key goal of the enterprise is overturning negative public attitudes towards particular bodies and identities. She writes: Associated with ‘pride’…was the belief in the transformative power of ‘coming out’, of publicly declaring one’s personal and political identity… ‘Coming out’ has its benefits and its disadvantages, but either way, the call to come out presupposes that such an action is in itself transformative and that the identity that one publicly declares is unambiguous (2003, p. 31). In declaring oneself to be ‘fat’, to ‘out’ oneself as a ‘fat’ girl, one assumes (as Sullivan points out) an unambiguous identity. What emerges here tacitly is the complete impossibility of an unambiguous identity. This in turn calls into question the process of ‘coming out’, via its insistence on a core self that is the sum of the individual. One must be ‘fat and proud’, with no grey areas, no contradictions, no questions, no ambivalence. Of course, life is rarely this simple, as Kathleen LeBesco notes: Echoing the mantra of ACT-Up and Queer Nation, coming out as a fat person means announcing, “We’re here, we’re spheres! Get used to it!” While the command for others to get used to fatness rings loud and clear, fat people often manifest a sense of ambivalence about their bodies (2004, p. 95). Of this process of ‘coming out as fat’ that Sedgwick insists on, Moon claims that this should be thought of as a response to a particular history of abjection and defiance, but more interestingly, to a particular history of being abjected, that is, of being positioned as the constitutive outside of the subject. Given this, it seems that the so-called ‘fat’ person has only two choices: firstly, they must remain abjected, as nothing more than the receptacle for all that must be excluded from the self, or secondly, to ‘recreate’ themselves, which is then, by definition, a god-like gesture, towards the project of becoming divine. What Moon says is happening in fat liberation, which also happened in gay liberation, is a dislinking of cause and effect, a dislinking of the


normative association of ‘fatness’ with ‘overeating’. What happens instead is: the politicised insistence on a willed agnosticism about individual causes, the anti-ontogenic crux moment in fat liberation, rhymes so closely with the analogous moment in gay liberation, records a profound and unacknowledged historical debt. It might point as well to the political need for a historicising, philogenic, antiessentialist construction of size (Moon & Sedgwick in Sedgwick, 1993, pp. 234–235). What Moon means, then, is that there needs to be a recognition of the fact that ‘size’ will always be imbued with meaning, however, the project of fat liberation requires a critique of the systems that produce size in certain ways. Moon is interested in an anti-essentialist philogenics of size, that is, in the way that community identities are formed in ways that are not biologically determined, but discursively produced in historically specific ways. Moon seeks to counter the essentialising, normalising accounts of size by elaborating anti-essentialist ones that can articulate, in theoretically nuanced ways, the construction of ‘fat’ individuals, and of ‘fat’ community identity. This, in fact, is what my own project here aims to achieve.

No more shame: the Size Acceptance movement Given the negative discourses that delimit and construct ‘fat’ women and their experiences of their bodies, the idea of intervening in the ‘contract’ one’s ‘fatness’ has with the world is a compelling and empowering one, that we might be able to insist on being seen in new ways. It is precisely this aim that has been taken up by the Size Acceptance movement, which ‘fat’ women have embraced, particularly across the United States and the United Kingdom. However, before I interrogate the kinds of politics Size Acceptance espouses and the assumptions it is founded on, let me first briefly discuss the genesis of the movement. In America in 1969, William Fabrey, a husband tired of seeing the distress caused to his wife by a society who reviled her ‘fat’ body, founded the National Association to Aid Fat Americans or NAAFA (Cooper, 1998, p.130). Particularly influential in Fabrey’s commitment to establishing NAAFA was Llewellyn Louderback’s groundbreaking book, Fat Power (1970). In his foundational text, Fat Power, Louderback


set the agenda for the future of fat pride in the kinds of problematic ways outlined above. He writes: The fat are, by nature, an eminently peaceful, unorganized lot. That’s one of their chief virtues….Fat Power, then, would be peaceful. Its stance, though militant, would be one of appeal. While recognizing that anti-fat prejudice – like racial, sexual, and religious bias – will never be wiped out entirely, the fat would nevertheless cry out against the more obvious injustices that have been visited upon them (1970, p. viii). Louderback’s statement relates back to the earlier observation LeBesco makes about the problematic desire to speak for all members of the ‘fat’ community, and his understanding is explicit of the tendency of fat politics to universalise and overlook difference. Louderback seems to draw on stereotypical ideas about ‘fatness’, associating it with characteristics such as laziness, and benign resignation. However, Louderback’s primary concern was to assert the novel notion that “…the fat person’s major problem is not his obesity but the view that society takes of it” (1970, p. vii). This way of thinking is reflected in the decision to later rename Fabrey’s organisation the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance, which signalled an important political shift and an interest in moving beyond the building of supportive ‘fat’ communities to a new commitment to social activism. NAAFA is the largest Size Acceptance organisation in the world, and it works to stop the daily discrimination against ‘fat’ people through political action such as lobbying airlines who insist on charging two airfares for a ‘fat’ passenger to travel, movie theatres who do not accommodate the expansive hips of ‘fat’ patrons, employer prejudice against ‘fat’ interviewees, and so on. NAAFA is interested in instituting anti-discrimination legislation that applies to ‘fat’ citizens in the same way it is used to supposedly protect people from harassment or discrimination on the basis of race and/or sexuality.12 Thus, NAAFA maintains a three-pronged approach in their activism: Advocacy, Education and Support. NAAFA has local chapters across the United States, and 12

For an excellent critique of the problematic mobilisation of law in the Fat Acceptance movement, see Anna Kirkland (2003) ‘Representations of Fatness and Personhood: Pro-Fat Advocacy and the Limits and Uses of Law’ in Representations 82, Spring 2003, pp 25–51.


has spawned similar organisations in Canada, the United Kingdom, New Zealand and Australia, though mostly on a smaller scale. As well as lobbying US congress on matters relating the size discrimination, NAAFA offers support groups, publishes a regular newsletter, holds an annual conference, organises a number of social events, and facilitates a dating culture in ‘fat’ communities.13 Whilst NAAFA does important work in helping to provide marginalised ‘fat’ subjects with a supportive community, a number of criticisms have been levelled against the organisation. It has been argued, for example, that NAAFA is too conservative an organisation to adequately represent a political movement that, some have argued, must necessarily be radical. Consequently, since 1969, a number of factions and splinter groups have emerged, one of these being a radical collective called the Fat Underground. The founding members of the Fat Underground asserted that the initials of their new organisation (‘F. U.’) were a reflection of their sentiments with regard to their clash with the NAAFA board of management, and their resultant departure (Fishman, n.d., p. 5). They were angry, and felt social prejudice against ‘fatness’ was only increasing rather than abating due to what they perceived was a somewhat soft approach by NAAFA. It was the media coverage of Mama Cass’ death that piqued their rage and sparked their increasingly radical politics. As Hernandez explains: ….following the sensationalized media reports of [Mama Cass Elliot’s] death [where she was reported to have choked to death on a ham sandwich], the Fat Underground appeared at a women’s equality day parade, sporting black armbands and candles for Elliot. In an unprecedented speech about institutional fat oppression, one of the members took to the main stage and publicly denounced the medical system for murdering the singer, who had been on a severe diet and had just lost 80 pounds at the time of her death (n.d., pp. 1–2). It was at this event that members of F.U. for the first time vehemently and publicly critiqued the medical establishment and its role in (re)producing institutional and social pathologising attitudes. Thus, two of the members of the Fat Underground (Judy Freespirit and Aldebaran) wrote the first ‘Fat Liberation Manifesto’, a seven-point polemic detailing the anger of the Fat Underground with regard to institutionally sanctioned

13

For more information, please see the NAAFA website (http://www.naafa.org)


‘fat oppression’.14 The F.U. Fat Liberation Manifesto signalled an alliance with radical leftist politics (Fishman, n.d., p. 5), and diversified the Size Acceptance movement. Rather than benign petition campaigns, or setting up a few local chapters, the Fat Underground shifted the focus away from an assimilationist emphasis on ‘acceptance’ and firmly onto a separatist agenda of ‘pride’. The Fat Liberation Manifesto marked a shift, then, to a new radical militancy in the fight against fat prejudice. However, I would argue that the manifesto problematically effaces difference in the lived experiences of women perceived as ‘fat’, and effects a universalising of ‘fat’ experience from an Anglo-centric speaking position.15 The problems that emerged from F.U.’s Manifesto can be found in contemporary fat pride more generally. As Charlotte Cooper points out in Fat and Proud: The Politics of Size (1998), the fat liberation movement is largely a white, middle-class political project, which does not actively consider ethnicity and racial issues. In Revolting Bodies: The Struggle to Redefine Fat Identity, Kathleen LeBesco also notes the problematics of a diverse range of ‘fat’ experiences being accommodated under one political movement, and the implications of a single speaking position in representing all fat women.16 She writes: … the strategies for talking one’s way into a subject position are a point of contention among fat activists today. They provide various rationales for pre-empting the position of the speaking subject: some want to be able to make claims on behalf of all fat people, to posit one specific notion of ‘the’ fat experience; others want only to be able to speak for themselves, and frequently articulate concerns about the oppressive nature of fat community demands (2004, p. 77). Since the establishment of these various foundational radical organisations, many different and diverse groups have joined the movement.

14 The Fat Manifesto by Freespirit and Aldebaran can be found in its entirety in Schoenfielder and Wieser (eds) (1983) Shadow on a Tightrope: Writing by Women on Fat Oppression, (Aunt Lute Books: San Francisco). 15 For a further fascinating interrogation of these issues, see Andrea Shaw’s article entitled ‘The Other Side of the Looking Glass: The Marginalization of Fatness and Blackness in the Construction of Gender Identity’ in the ‘Thinking Fat’ special issue of Social Semiotics 15:2, pp. 143–152. 16 While the fat pride movement includes significant support and activism for, and representation of ‘fat’ men, I would suggest that at least in the West, understandings of ‘fatness’ as a sign of weakness, moral decay and aesthetic transgression operate most pressingly on women.


There is now an International Size Acceptance Association (http://www. size-acceptance.org), with chapters across the Western world, however NAAFA remains the core organisational body for the movement.17 What is important to note here is that the Size Acceptance movement is not a unified entity. The conflict that precipitated the breakaway of the group that came to be known as the Fat Underground from NAAFA has continued to the present day. Charlotte Cooper notes that “the mythology of a cohesive fat rights movement, and the fear of differences within it has led to the promotion of some beliefs which threaten to undermine its integrity” (1998, p. 174). Cooper suggests this homogeneity and, coextensively, the underlying assumption that the experience of all ‘fat’ women is the same is problematic, and requires critical attention. Contemporary fat pride, and radical fat activist movements have attempted to redress this imbalance, through a greater emphasis on queer identities and political activism, and yet the problem of speaking position and a ‘common goal’ persists. In concluding this chapter, I want to return for a moment to the Fat Underground’s ‘Fat Liberation Manifesto’, and to reflect on three key points, which are as follows: 2) We are angry at mistreatment by commercial and sexist interests. They have exploited our bodies as objects of ridicule, thereby creating an immensely profitable market selling the false promise of avoidance of, or relief from, that ridicule. 3) We see our struggles as allied with the struggles of other oppressed groups against classism, racism, sexism, ageism, capitalism, imperialism and the like…. 7) We refuse to be subjugated to the interests of our enemies. We fully intend to reclaim power over our bodies and our lives… FAT PEOPLE OF THE WORLD, UNITE! YOU HAVE NOTHING TO LOSE…November 1973 (Freespirit & Aldebaran cited in Schoenfielder & Wieser, 1983, p. 53). I have included these three particular points from the Fat Liberation Manifesto because they encapsulate the kind of politics that the fat 17

For a comprehensive explanation of the history of the Size Acceptance movement, and a list of past and current fat activist organisations throughout the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom, see Charlotte Cooper (1998) Fat and Proud: The Politics of Size (The Women’s Press: London).


pride movement promulgates. Firstly, much is made in fat politics of the multi-billion dollar industry of weight loss and its gendered focus, its tapping into and reproduction of the shame experienced by those whose bodies are pathologised in a society that privileges a particular feminine ‘slender’ bodily aesthetic. Freespirit and Aldebaran assess the positioning of ‘fat’ women within the weight-loss industry as a reductive mode of objectification, whereby ‘fat’ bodies are dehumanised through a dual process of pathologisation and a vile commodification of ‘fatness’ as representative of an aberrant body in need of ‘salvation’. Secondly, the Manifesto reveals a commitment to radical politics, and equates ‘fat’ oppression in Western society with the struggles of other oppressed groups such as the working class and non-white subjects. This homogenising move by the Fat Underground is motivated by the desire to assert an affirmative representation of ‘fat’ women, and yet effectively universalises the experience of ‘oppression’ for all marginalised groups, thus ignoring the specific lived conditions across race, class and gender divides. Finally, and of greatest interest to me, the Manifesto expresses a model of politics which presupposes a voluntarist subject. Here, the ‘fat’ woman is envisaged as the humanist subject who can simply ‘choose’ to discard negative understandings of her ‘fat’ body, and reclaim a power that somehow operates outside of existing systems of power/knowledge. The strategic, but problematic emergence of the centrality of the voluntarist subject in identity politics here in the fat pride movement will be the focus of my discussion in the following chapter.

5 Fat Pride and the Insistence on the Voluntarist Subject

Just say the magic words: “Yes, I am a fatso!”…With these words, you create revolution. You turn fat hatred back on itself. As a fatso, you possess the ultimate weapon against weight worries, body prejudice, and size-related discrimination: fat pride (Wann, 1998, p. 28). In 1998, Marilyn Wann published a book called Fat!So?: Because You Don’t Have to Apologise for your Size. Using the rhetoric of pride movements of the past, Wann makes demands on society in the same way as the Civil Rights Movement and Gay Pride. However, at the heart of her politics, are changes we can make as individuals. According to Wann, it is up to ‘fat’ women to decide for ourselves that negative readings of ‘fatness’ can be discarded in our project of self-empowerment. As I have noted, Size Acceptance is not a unified or singular political movement, and this itself suggests the resistance, difficulties and ambiguities present in identifying simply as ‘FAT’. For the purposes of my argument, I am focusing on what appears to be a central tenet of the philosophy of most size acceptance organisations: that is that we should learn to love our ‘fat’ bodies, and make them visible in new, enabling, and politically empowering ways. Wann launched the FAT!SO? zine after coming to a turning point in 1993: not only was she refused health insurance because of her weight, but her then-boyfriend explained that he was too embarrassed to introduce her to his friends because she was ‘fat’ (Wann, 1998, p. 9). In the wake of these humiliations, Wann discovered the Size Acceptance movement in the United States, and has gone on to successfully lobby for legislation against size-related discrimination in her home city of San Francisco. The FAT!SO? motto is, “Don’t apologize for your size!”, 106

Fat Pride and the Insistence on the Voluntarist Subject 107

and Wann sets out her new world order in her own ‘Fat Manifesto’. This consists of 12 steps, perhaps writing back to 12 step programs such as those that govern ‘addicts’ in support groups such as Alcoholics Anonymous, and more portentously, Overeaters Anonymous, which I examined in Part I. However, rather than seriously reproducing the ‘12 step’ model, Wann parodies it in an attempt to subvert our systems of ‘knowing’ about this process in relation to addiction and rehabilitation. In other words, Wann ‘queers’ the 12 steps of recovery from addiction: instead of using the program as a tool for overcoming a dangerous ‘habit’, she makes it a vehicle of self-assertion and pride. At the centre of her Manifesto is the exhortation with which this section opened. Here, Wann simplifies Sedgwick’s attempt to, at once, acknowledge her own ‘fatness’, and persuade others to recognise the damage their negative interpretations of her body have on her lived experience. Wann’s approach sets itself up as revolutionary, while Sedgwick’s does not. However, Wann’s project of liberation is ultimately less tenable than Sedgwick’s assimilationist agenda, her call for a greater ‘tolerance’ of difference. What both Wann and Sedgwick’s projects reproduce, however, is the logic of confession, which, as Foucault points out, produces individuals (as aberrant for the most part) rather than liberating them. Despite these criticisms, Wann’s rhetoric is both persuasive and seductive, precisely because she taps into the fears and shame experienced by those deemed ‘fat’, and offers instead an open celebration of one’s body, rather than a life of humiliation and concealment. Fat pride as it is envisaged here offers an attractive ‘exit’ to ‘fat’ girls who have been that told certain interactions, performances and practices are off-limits: for example, fat pride organisations hold events such as Fat Lingerie Parties, Fat Pool Parties, Fat Fashion Parades. Here, boxes of size 26 g-strings are ripped open with glee; lacy negligees guaranteed to slide effortlessly over ample hips are offered up, bellies hang over new bikini bottoms with impunity. In short, ‘fat’ girls are offered the chance to take up the position of privilege denied to them as a result of the pathologising, hegemonic constructions of identity and difference, which cast them into the domain of abjection. The offer of taking up a privileged position appears to be a cornerstone of the ‘playful’ activism that Marilyn Wann advocates. For example, what greets you on Wann’s website homepage (http://www.fatso.com) is an image of her bare bum with ‘FAT!SO?’ emblazoned across one dimpled cheek. Similarly, her FAT!SO? book has a bright blue and hot pink cover with a sexy cartoon representation of a ‘fat’ girl, suggestive of an animated, fleshly naughtiness. Despite this, Wann’s serious agenda is to


situate herself as a necessary voice against ‘fat-phobia’ and ‘fat’ selfhatred. Her solution to the impasse between the ‘fat’ woman and normative body image is a simple one: just change your mind about your body. She insists: You can face your fears. You can dispel that cloud. And you don’t have to change the world to do it. You don’t even have to change your weight. You just have to change your attitude. It’d be my honor to act as your friendly tour guide on the trip from the old attitude (fear of fat) to the new attitude: flabulousness! (Wann, 1998, p. 130). The strategic power of imagining one’s ‘fat’ body in an entirely different, positive and enabling way cannot be underestimated here. Wann speaks in a new, counter-intuitive language to the entrenched cultural prejudice against ‘fatness’. She resignifies ‘fat’ as a positive political identity, instead of a pejorative descriptor. However, this strategic resignification, while having positive effects for activism, also has complex lived effects: and of course, political and lived experience cannot be separated. Playfulness aside, if jettisoning fat shame were as simple as Wann seems to suggest, none of us would feel bad about ourselves: pathologisation would be totally ineffective, and practices of normalisation would not exist, nor could they. If Wann’s project were, in fact, possible, there would be no such thing as identity: we would simply be free-floating potentialities, with no relations to others or to a world. In short, the model of subjectivity that Wann’s politics (and, I would argue, fat politics in general) presupposes is both humanist, and as I will go on to elaborate, untenable. Let me elaborate. In simply ‘choosing’ a new and affirmative way of being-’fat’-in-the-world, the fat activist is mobilising a humanist logic of the primacy of the individual, and the power of rationality in overcoming one’s lived reality. In this way, Wann privileges the mind over the body, and in a sense what the process of ‘outing’ insists on is that there is a gap between the mind and the body, whereby the ‘fat’ subject may alter their lived experience simply through changing their mind. She insists: Reclaiming the word fat is the miracle cure you’ve been looking for, the magic trick that makes all your worries about your weight disappear. Do you want to feel good about yourself? Silence your tormentors? Look better in miniskirts? Use the F-word. Dorothy made her wish come true by saying, “There’s no place like home.” Well, I’m not Glenda the Good Witch, but I’m here to tell you that all you have to do is say the magic word, fat. Say it loud, say it proud: Fat! Fat! Shake


your belly three times and there you are, at home in your body, free from the guilt and the shame, the stress and starvation, and the selfhatred (1998, pp. 18–19). The interesting point Wann makes here is that through declaring you are a ‘fatso’, you can be ‘at home in your body’. This seems somewhat oversimplified given the experience many ‘fat’ women have of detaching themselves from their bodies because of the shame their ‘fat flesh’ subjects them to. What I mean by this, is that the notion of ‘being at home in your body’ is situated in a fundamental liberal humanist logic, which relies on a necessary separation of body from self. In thinking of one’s self as being a separate entity that can be comfortably housed in a body, while attempting to erase shame, nevertheless reinforces a logic of disconnectedness between the self and the body, despite the inevitable corporeality of our subjectivity. Returning to my earlier point about the logic of confession that underpins Step One of Wann’s Fat Manifesto, what she proposes here is an admission of the truth of one’s ‘fat’, rather than a denial of its existence (in favour of ‘living from the neck up’). This is certainly a powerful political act, but the question of changing one’s mind without ambivalence through a positive proclamation of one’s ‘fatness’ is a problematic one. Again, Wann simply accepts ‘fatness’ as an empirical ‘fact’, rather than as a discursive construct. She seems to be attempting to resolve the mind/ body split through this acknowledgement of one’s body, and indeed celebration of it, and yet the space for bodily ambiguity that is by and large elided, reproduces this problematic split. Undoubtedly, activists like Marilyn Wann promulgate a powerful and important message: the social hatred of ‘fat’ is really baseless and unfounded, but our culture constructs ‘fat’ as always already abject(ed), so therefore there can, in fact, never be a neutral way to think ‘fat’. However, the rhetoric of fat pride is persuasive and seductive because it taps into the ‘fat’ woman’s fears and shames about herself and her body, and encourages celebration instead of apologising for the perceived shortcomings of her body. Reading Wann’s Manifesto was an interesting experience for me, because, unsurprisingly, I was attracted to changing my lived experience as a woman positioned as ‘fat’, and thus as a marginalised and shamed subject. However, on the other hand, I was faced with the impossibility of the task of simply changing my mind about my body. While Wann speaks of ‘feeling at home in your body’ through the process of ‘coming out’, this does not fit with my experience. As a woman deemed ‘fat’ and thus ‘abject’ in our culture, I feel completely (and, in


fact, necessarily) disconnected from my body. It seems to me, that while the ‘fat’ body is afforded visibility via the fat pride movement, the centrality of the body to identity, and the inevitability of embodied subjectivity, is ignored. It is as if to accept my own body and identify as ‘fat’ along the fat activist ‘party line’, I must simultaneously forget the dominant discourses that shape my understanding of my body, that I live out corporeally in every interaction, every gesture, and somehow ‘rise above’ my ‘fat flesh’, in order to embrace it. Again, the logic of liberal humanism is mobilised here, neglecting the irrevocable corporeality of subjectivity. If identity is always already bodily, then how is it that we can rise above the ‘fat’ body that is positioned as the source of all our humiliation, shame and anger? What is it, in fact, that would do the ‘rising’? Moreover, if Wann’s politics does not achieve the empowerment it promises me, this is my failure. I am supposedly in charge of changing my mind about my fatness, and if I do not feel better about my body, I must be doing something wrong. To me, Wann is demanding I locate my ‘fat identity ‘ in my consciousness: consequently, I don’t feel I am actually embodying my ‘fatness’. More than ever, I seem to be doing the time-honoured ‘fat’ girl defense mechanism, which is ‘living from the neck up’. Wann’s call to arms privileges the mind, reason and the public sphere over the body, emotions and one’s private experience. A chasm opens for me between the body as it is lived and the body as it is imagined or ‘known’. As discussed in Part I, Alcoff’s conception of the ‘perceptual backdrop’ that is always already corporeal is not simply a mode of seeing the world, but perceiving it through the lens of the dominant discourses that construct us as subjects. The difficulty with the liberatory and celebratory project of the fat pride movement is that an impossibility emerges in attempting to change these knowledges – which are, as Alcoff insists, fundamentally tacit – through a simple practice of ‘renaming’ one’s body as ‘beautiful.’ These tacit knowledges, as Alcoff claims, are not simply invisible to us, but are, indeed, constitutive of the self, and one is thus unable to simply discard them in order to live as one’s ‘true’ self. If, as Wann implies, identity is located in consciousness, is there not just a simple rehierarchisation at work in her politics? Not only is the ‘fat’ body being (re)valued over the normatively ‘thin’ body, but the mind is being privileged over the body. The assumption that informs Wann’s thesis is that in naming oneself as ‘fat’, it is possible to liberate oneself from the public culture of ‘knowingness’ about the ‘fat’ body, beyond, and unfettered by, dominant discourses and existing systems of power/knowledge. In


emphasising this, what emerges is Wann’s reliance on an outmoded notion of ideology and the model of subjectivity of which theorists such as Judith Butler are critical. In her landmark text, Gender Trouble, Judith Butler argues that, contrary to essentialist models of identity, subjectivity is (en)gendered in and through a series of learned, discursively informed reiterative ‘acts’, behaviours, and gestures. Butler insists on the performative nature of gender, then, and suggests that there is no pre-discursive, autonomous ‘I’ that exists prior to gender, but that the very nature of a gendered identity is performative and is bounded by discourse and systems of power/knowledge that the gendered subject cannot stand outside of (and does not exist prior to). As Butler writes: The abiding gendered self [is] shown to be structured by repeated acts that seek to approximate the ideal of a substantial ground of identity, but which, in their occasional discontinuity, reveal the temporal and contingent groundlessness of this ‘ground’ (1990, p. 141). What Butler’s model of gendered subjectivity allegedly effects is a political space for change and resignification. If gender is a series of learned behaviours, which, repeated over time, construct a (hetero)normative gender identity, then surely intervention into these performances is possible, and dominant understanding of gender may thereby be reinscribed. Through parody, Butler argues, gender can be performed hyperbolically, and thus, is (or at least can be) revealed as, a cultural fiction which we (re)produce in and through the embodiment and bodying forth of tacit body knowledges. Gender and its various accoutrements are then not essential or pre-discursive, but instead are acquired, and therefore, one would imagine can, at least in theory, be opened to change and resignification. This possibility Butler offers in her theory of performativity has been mobilised as a powerful and enabling tool for activists committed to identity politics. However, Moya Lloyd suggests in her article “Performativity, Parody, Politics” (1999) that what is most interesting is the misreading and misappropriation of Butler’s thesis, and the way her theory of performativity has been taken up by identity politics. Lloyd argues that proponents of identity politics have asserted for themselves a voluntarist position in taking up Butler’s concept of performativity and its enabling possibilities. Despite the fact that this voluntarism is contra Butler’s conviction that there is no self-authoring ‘I’, much activism


makes use of a self-determinist framework in refiguring identity at both an individual and social level. The attraction, then, of Butler’s thesis for the voluntarist subject in/of identity politics is the possibility of acting at will, despite the fact that there is a fundamental misreading of Butler’s position on the politics of self-definition that marks gender (and fat) activism. However, Butler herself questions the power of parody for political change and intervention, because of the dominant understanding of parody presumes a subject who consciously, and intentionally parodies/ performs gender norms. She asserts: Parody by itself is not subversive, and there must be a way to understand what makes certain kinds of parodic repetitions effectively disruptive, truly troubling, and which repetitions become domesticated and recirculated as instruments of cultural hegemony (1990, p. 139). Hence, rather than asserting a voluntarist notion of parodic performativity, Butler is concerned to interrogate how, why, and under what conditions the reiteration of gender norms is necessarily complex, unpredictable and open to change. Despite Butler’s insistence on the non-existence of an autonomous, self-authoring being, it is interesting to explore the fundamental misreading and insistence on a self-defining subject that undergirds the activism I am analysing here, and the model of voluntarism that lies at the core of fat identity politics. Butler critiques this conceptualisation of political agency in identity politics: The foundationalist reasoning of identity politics tends to assume that an identity must first be in place in order for political interests to be elaborated and, subsequently, political action to be taken. My argument is that there not be a ‘doer behind the deed’, but that the ‘doer’ is variably constructed in and through the deed (1990, p. 142). Butler goes on to argue that agency is not something that suggests selfauthorship or a pre-discursive ‘I’, but that “the culturally enmired subject negotiates its constructions, even when those constructions are the very predicates of its own identity” (1990, p. 143). Here, she contests the centrality of a fixed identity in identity politics, and identifies a subject who rather than being self-governing, has choices that he or she can make within a matrix of culturally specific discourses. What Butler offers, then, is a reconceptualisation of our dominant understanding of agency, one that does not rely on and (re)produce the conflation of


‘agency’ with self-definition, and thus, does not presuppose a voluntarist, self-defining subject. However, Butler demonstrates that rejecting the liberal humanist notion of the subject does not require the rejection of political intervention. In this way, Butler moves beyond the dichotomous humanist logic of absolute choice versus no choice.

(Mis)reading Butler and (re)making ‘fat’: pride and performance Pretty Porky and Pissed Off is a force of large and in charge women dedicated to expanding public awareness and acceptance about fat issues….To be clear, we are pigs on our own terms, not out of hate but out of love…In our performances, PPPO’d uses a lot of images and metaphors about “fat” such as references to eating, food, pigs and desserts. We are attempting to do “fat” drag. That is our style of performance and politics – to parody stereotypes about fat people – unveiling them as the lies that they are (http://www.stumptuous.com/ppp). Pretty Porky and Pissed Off are a Canada-based fat performance troupe (now disbanded) whose performances have involved radical and playful interventions into the negative meanings that ‘fat’ female bodies garner in Western societies. Through their performances of what they call ‘fat drag’, parodying hyperbolically the kinds of behaviours that mainstream society believe define the ‘fat’ woman, they draw on Butler’s work on performativity, and the enabling political possibilities this may afford the fat pride movement. They argue that in ‘performing’ ‘fat’ stereotypes that focus on compulsive overeating and excessive indulgence, they ‘playfully’ reveal the very ‘act’ that constitutes understandings of normative feminine bodily aesthetics, and thereby expose these understandings as fictions. Similarly, in Revolting Bodies: The Struggle to Redefine Fat Identity, Kathleen LeBesco talks about the importance of a “playful subjectivity” (2004, p. 81), and the use of parody in fat activism, and cites the political actions of the queer activist group, the Lesbian Avengers. Of the group’s activities, LeBesco notes that “a joyful sense of the creatively outrageous is ever present in the Lesbian Avengers’ fire-eating, baton-twirling direct action political organizing” (2004, p. 81). The Lesbian Avengers have an inclusive approach to their queer activism, and are most interested in overcoming dated feminist strategies of exclusive identity categories, arguing instead for diversity and celebration of difference.


The Lesbian Avengers appear to have a vested interest in not only asserting their own queer identities, but into making clear and powerful political interventions into dominant binaries governing sexuality and gender, in order to dismantle and destabilise mainstream understandings of sexual identity. However, despite this inclusive and politically enabling approach, LeBesco calls attention to a tacit reliance on identity categories, as evidenced in the very name of the activist group itself. She asks: But why would a political group that seeks to dismantle false polarities willingly select a name that lends itself so easily to a lesbian/ nonlesbian dichotomy? Are the Lesbian Avengers actually caught up in the same political arena as dangerously essentializing liberal and nationalist political projects? (2004, p. 82). In the same way as the Lesbian Avengers tacitly mobilise the political identity of ‘lesbian’, so too does fat pride movement rely on the identity of ‘fat’ as central to its overarching project of body love and celebration. In doing this, what is tacitly reaffirmed and strengthened are the lines between identity categories that activists often set out to dismantle. I would argue that ‘celebration’ requires a tacit ownership of, and commitment to an identity that is unambiguous. However, Kathleen LeBesco endorses the political interest in playfulness and celebration as being key to resignifying the ‘fat’ body in mainstream consciousness. She says: …fat activists plan events that focus less on official policy and more on repositioning fat in the cultural imaginary. They borrow tactics from the Lesbian Avengers: we see scale smashings, ice-cream eat-ins, and fat bikini swim meets, which aim to publicly present a fatness that is not the victim of bad genes or its own lack of will. Through this rubric, we can begin to envision fat play, rather than fat pathology (2004, pp. 82–83). LeBesco follows Butler’s demand for resignification of bodies, and argues for “new strategies of playing games of identity” (2004, p. 79). However, one could argue that while this strategy of ‘playfulness’ in fat activism is indeed empowering and enabling, at the heart of the claim of ‘playful’ activism is a suggestion of an unproblematic removal of oneself from dominant discourses about ‘fatness’, where the subjects of fat activism can ‘throw off’ the constituting elements of discourse, and stand outside of these narratives in order to redefine ‘fat’ identity.


Despite the (however politically strategic) rhetoric, then, changing oneself and one’s place in the world is not simply a case of changing one’s mind. This is precisely because (tacit body) knowledges and identity exist beyond pure cognitive function, and are never experienced as rational and disembodied. Pretty Porky and Pissed Off insist that political action and change is to be located then, in varying the repetition of acts. The appeal of remaking oneself (in and through parodic repetition) beyond the constraints of negative discourse and cultural expectation is great, and emerges as an individualistic ‘do what you want and feel great about it’ rhetoric that allegedly answers the anger and frustration simmering inside ‘fat’ women who feel marginalised and oppressed by Western idea(l)s. It is this notion of self-authorship that has been fervently embraced by fat activists, and indeed by many branches of identity politics more generally. Let me explore this by turning to Bell’s article “All Hyped Up and No Place to Go”, in which the author simultaneously draws on Butler’s thesis, and insists on a voluntarist model of subjectivity (rejected by Butler). In her article, Bell argues that the figure of the gay skinhead parodies straight masculinity, and thus draws attention to the fundamental fiction that all ‘masculine’ men must be straight. Moreover, Bell suggests that through this parody, gay skinheads “create a queer space in a heterosexual world, which is in itself empowering” (Bell cited in Lloyd, 1999, p. 199). However, what Bell problematically ignores is the discursive history of the figure of the skinhead. Historically, as Moya Lloyd notes, the ‘skinhead’ has been associated with the “[occlusion of] black people in general, but gay black men in particular” (Lloyd, 1999, p. 200). Bell neglects the fact that identity is always already situated in a history, and is relative to others. In making an argument for parodic self-reinscription, Bell ignores historicity and fails to recognise identity and/or its parodic performance cannot simply be (re)inscribed independent of this history, and of the context in which the performance occurs. Consequently, the voluntarist position asserted by Bell, and also the idea that parody is, in itself, subversive, raises the question of the basis on which other queer community members might understand this parodic performance as parodic. In response to this question, what is evident is the fact that the voluntarist subject of identity politics is governed by an individualist logic in their project of political intervention, and yet in this process, what is ignored is the necessary (and always already operative) condition of intersubjectivity. In other words, insofar as meaning and identity are fundamentally intercorporeal, then self-transformation can never be


effected simply at the level of the ‘individual’ in liberal terms. Bell’s account resonates with the construction of the voluntarist subject mobilised by fat activism. In attempting to resignify ‘fat’ bodies, and to cultivate newly positive ‘fat’ identity, fat activists (like their queer counterparts) often overlook the deeper discursive structures that bound meaning and identity. As the criticism of the ‘gay skinhead’ indicates, the issue of context is fundamental to political action, and its (in)efficacy. The parodic performances of fat activists do indeed signify anger and political commitment to change, but what about the effects of these performances on a mainstream audience? Most of the empowering and apparently parodic performances instituted by current fat activist groups are contained within ‘fat-only’ events and festivals, and while they may provide members with a sense of liberation and resignification of their own ‘fat’ flesh, they are unlikely to effectively intervene in dominant mainstream understandings of ‘fatness’. While some public fat activist events like scale-smashings and International No-Diet Day attempt to raise awareness in mainstream society of the ongoing oppression of ‘fat’ women, and the kinds of discipline and regulation ‘fat’ bodies must submit to, most fat political activities occur within fat-positive communities who are invested in changing their own attitudes towards their bodies, and have, as Lloyd suggests, the least to lose from a radical subversion of the dominant superstructure of anti-fat attitudes in mainstream Western societies. Kathleen LeBesco supports this point: Fat identity (like queer identity), however performative, will possibly and indeed probably be read as admitting to what current Western mainstream standards imagine as grotesque perversion. A consideration of the ways in which fat identities alter how politics is staged (rather than merely representing yet another aesthetic choice) highlights the importance of communication as a political practice (2004, p. 83). This is not to say, however, that these performances are not important, or that they are futile. Lloyd suggests that while activist performances may have the most potent effect in supportive communities, one cannot foreclose the possibilities these performances can have in a ‘wider context’, when “they are reiterated in the dominant culture” (1999, p. 208). What this suggests is that whilst we may, to some extent, be able to predict the end result of political activities within an activist community with which we are familiar, the effects of any action will always be con-


textually specific, complex and ongoing. In other words, whilst we cannot control the outcomes of these political activities, this does not mean that we should abandon the project altogether.

‘Fat’ is beautiful: can we have a counter-aesthetic? I have discussed previously the inherent problems with self-authorship and self-transformation, and it is at this point that I wish to turn to an examination of normative bodily aesthetics, and to interrogate the possibility of designating a counter-aesthetic as a tool in the project of selftransformation. To me, the ‘fat’ female body of fat politics is asking to be seen within frameworks of beauty and desirability that appear to be non-normative and subversive, but are in fact reaffirmations of normative frameworks. In this way, fat politics still privileges the characteristics associated with the ‘normative’ body and attempts to make them its own. As ‘fat’ girls, we still want to know what it is to take up the privileged position inhabited by those deemed ‘thin’, even if we don’t want to alter our ‘fat’. Michelle Meagher makes this point in her discussion of the cover of Camryn Manheim’s autobiography Wake Up, I’m Fat (1999) which features an image of Manheim herself dressed up as a beauty pageant winner – complete with leotard, tiara, armful of roses and a sash emblazoned with ‘Miss Understood’. Meagher argues, that whilst this parody of discourses of beauty “…is surely an empowering and positive image” (2003, p. 28), “Manheim [nevertheless] embodies a hegemonic version of femininity…” (Meagher, 2003, p. 28). Similarly, the fat pool parties or fashion parades organised by size acceptance groups cannot function unequivocally as a parody or an ironic comment on heteronormativity. It seems to me that this is an attempt to access/experience normative female bodily experience and sexuality through the deployment of the g-string, the bikini – in short by permitting a visibility of the ‘fat’ body that has been shamed and hidden. And why wouldn’t one want to access the kinds of privileges and practices that have been denied the ‘fat’ female lived experience for so long? I am not suggesting that these events where the ‘fat’ body is made visible in ways that traditionally have been the domain of thin women should be shut down, but it is worth recognising that this ‘liberatory’ practice still upholds a visual regime that asserts ‘thinness’ as the preferable modality of female bodily being. Fat politics does not see itself as implicated in heteronormative aesthetic ideals, and that it is merely reproducing them by simply reversing the ideal, not dismantling


it. The question is: how effective is the simple reversal from a negative body to a celebrated one? It would seem to me that the system of judgement that positions the ‘fat’ body as a negative body remains intact. Further to this discussion, in her article, “Performing Identity: Dawn French and the Funny Fat female Body”, Anna Hole cites Barbara Brook (2003, p. 85), who claims that “women’s bodies are organised by a heterosexual economy in which ‘beauty’ is defined as heterosexual attractiveness and women ‘interiorise’ the surveillance of an imagined male observer” (Brook as cited in Hole, 2003, p. 316). This claim demonstrates the precise function of disciplinary medicine that I explored in the previous section. Whilst women labour under the ‘illusion’ of choice in following of the directives of public health discourse, the question that I have raised throughout my discussion here is: what can ‘choice’ actually mean for women in a context in which subjectivity is always already an effect of, and mired in, the world in which it is produced? Specifically, choice becomes illusory given the fact subjectivity, particularly for women, is always already haunted by gender imperatives of self-surveillance, by the world. John Berger affirms that “[a] woman’s self [is] split into two. A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself” (cited in Hole, 2003, p. 316). These claims by Berger relate to Foucault’s account of (self) surveillance as operating in gendered ways. In light of these assertions, and dominant feminine bodily aesthetics in the West, Anna Hole asks how the ‘fat’ woman can fit into this “economy of viewing” (2003, p. 316). She says “…she may resist objectification, stepping outside the notions of female identity expressed here” (2003, p. 316). To illustrate this claim, Hole uses the example of acclaimed British comedienne, Dawn French, who is known for her performances in The French and Saunders Show and The Vicar of Dibley, and who has become one of the most successful female British comediennes to date. She is also a ‘fat’ woman. Dawn French has been particularly outspoken on the topic of her ‘fatness’, and has devoted herself to celebrating her size loudly and joyfully, thus positioning herself as a role model for many ‘fat’ women in Britain and other Western countries. She is committed to communicating the beauty of ‘fat’ women’s bodies in the face of a tyranny of normative feminine slenderness. French says: “If I was alive [in Rubens’ time] I wouldn’t have to be a comedian to earn a living, I’d be celebrated as a fabulous model” (cited in Hole, 2003, pp. 319–320). Hole suggests that French’s assertion that her body would be coveted as normatively beautiful in the days of Rubens is underpinned by the notion that the role of a model is superior to that of her current career as a comedian,


“an understanding that reinforces the contemporary notion of female success as dependant on physical/sexual desirability” (2003, p. 320). Hole infers that this is a retrograde step for feminist thinking about women’s bodies, as it still relies on an objectification of women as beautiful bodies. French’s constant assertions about the superiority of her particular form of corporeality demonstrate a fundamental reliance on a visual regime in dictating a woman’s desirability and beauty. This relates to the ‘re-valuing’ of the abject(ed) ‘fat’ female body by the Size Acceptance movement. Whilst French claims to celebrate her ‘fatness’, her biographer Alison Bowyer, suggests that French’s brand of fat pride is less a project purely of celebration and self-acceptance, than a vehement campaign against thinner women. In supporting this claim, Bowyer cites French’s Esquire magazine interview (2000), in which French insists that ‘fat’ women are better lovers than thin women, and that “most men secretly fanc[y] large women”, and contemptuously refers to non-fatties as ‘coat-hangers’ (Bowyer, 2000, p. 153). Men, says French: …love to sink themselves into softness, to sleep wrapped around curvy hips and swollen bellies, to rest their heads against delicious, ample bosoms…In fact, I haven’t shagged one yet who didn’t like it. Big women do sex fantastically well. We know how to use our mighty weight; we know the considerable power of a full and voluptuous body. Our ample embraces are mere tastes of the pleasures men are on this earth to enjoy. There is a whole feast we can provide (French as cited in Bowyer, 2000, p. 153). The only subversion, if it can be thought of in this way, is French’s (uncritical) reversal of the ‘thin’/‘fat’ binary. This is telling, in that tacit in French’s reversal is the notion that the abject(ed) other can only take up the place of the privileged subject by supplanting her. French simply (re)values ‘fat’ over thin, and names it as the new ‘ideal’ female body. Hence, the reversal ultimately does nothing to challenge the logic that constitutes the ‘fat woman’ as abject(ed) in the first place. Hole insists that French argues for “the aesthetic and sexual superiority of the fat female body over the thin as ‘replacing one stereotype with another’” (2003, p. 320), and that her reversal of the ‘thin’/‘fat’ terms and their attendant meanings is accompanied by an uncritical assumption that this simple exchange furthers the liberatory project of ‘fat’ women, when in fact, it leaves the system of judgement that operates within a visual regime unaltered and untroubled. Hole argues that French appears to


ignore the implications (and limitations) of a simple re-hierarchisation of ‘fat’ over ‘thin’: Whilst merely replacing the skinny blond as stereotype of ‘sexy woman’ does a great disservice to thin women, it disempowers the fat female body too. By re-locating it at the centre of male desire and inscribing it with the cultural meanings of the female as sex object, she is renouncing the wealth of meanings attaching to the fat female body as site of comedy, as comic subjects rather than sex objects (2003, p. 320). Here, Hole suggests that the political potential French could mobilise to positively reclaim the comic stereotypes about the ‘greedy fat woman’ are neglected in favour of a recuperation of normative ideals about feminine beauty and sexual desirability. As such, in denigrating ‘thin’ women, French rejects the feminist history that has worked to enable women to find a way out of the patriarchal and heterosexist positioning of women merely as desirable objects. Moreover, French’s universalising comments about ‘fatness’ elide the experience of women from backgrounds other then her own. Ultimately, then, French’s celebration of ‘fatness’ remains firmly entrenched within a staunchly (hetero)normative framework. Further to this, French’s relentless focus on the great sexual skill of ‘fat’ women always situates them in relation to men, and thus reasserts a compulsory heterosexuality. I would suggest that this kind of body celebration achieves very little other than uncritically reversing the ‘thin’/‘fat’ binary, and therefore does not challenge the logic that constructs the normative framework or hierarchy of Western female bodily aesthetics. There is seemingly no interest for French in dismantling this binary, or indeed, in moving away from a reliance on the traditional patriarchal understanding of women as objects to, as Berger suggests, be ‘looked at’. Consequently, the question emerges: what is it, in fact, that French is celebrating? By reducing the fat female body to pure spectacle, to a silent image and a site of admiration and male desire, instead of a platform for dangerous speech and embodied female desire, appetite, and unruliness, the fat woman’s political potential to disrupt conventional feminine stereotypes is undermined (2003, p. 320). While as a self-identified ‘fat’ woman, French’s body confidence is certainly refreshing and empowering, there are deeper concerns that emerge


from her assertions about her own ‘fatness’, and the assumptions she tacitly makes about the experience of other ‘fat’ women. It would seem to me that French’s primary project however, is a resituation of the ‘fat’ body as the dominant female aesthetic in a heterosexual ‘economy of viewing’. French, as well as many other fat activists, attempt to cultivate themselves as ‘beautiful objects’ as testament to their commitment to a counter-aesthetic to dominantly normative slender female bodies. Drawing on the work of Michel Foucault, and his theory of an ‘aesthetics of existence’, I would like to further examine the question of the possibility of a counter-aesthetic in the following chapter.

6 Fattening Up Foucault: A ‘Fat’ Counter-Aesthetic?

I would like to begin my discussion here with an account of a personal humiliation: an intense experience of my own ‘fat’ body’s ‘look-atedness’. Just over a year ago, I attended a seminar in a series of papers on sexuality. In this particular session, the paper delivered explored issues relating to masculinity. A colleague had conducted interviews with young male cadets training at the Australian Defence Force Academy, where a number of young men talked openly about their sexual experiences and practices. One of the young cadets relayed the story of an apparently common sexual activity known as the ‘Rodeo’. This practice involved a group of about ten cadets, who would gather in a hotel room. The boys would make an agreement that one of them would go out to a local pub or club, and find the most obese woman he could, pretend he was sexually interested in her, make her feel desired, and then lure her back to the hotel room. The other nine boys would wait in the hotel room for the couple, hiding behind couches, in the bathroom, in wardrobes. Once the young male cadet and the ‘fat’ girl arrived, the boy would seduce the girl, and begin to undress her, encouraging her to believe that he was about to have sex with her. He would then ask her to kneel on the bed on all fours, and he would produce a scarf to blindfold her. The ‘fat’ girl would be lulled into thinking this was just a kinky start to sex with the young cadet. Instead, the young boy would call out a signal to the other boys and they would run out from their hiding places. One by one, they would jump on the ‘fat’ girl’s back, kicking at the soft flesh of her hips and belly, riding her like she was some sort of animal. They would ignore her tears and her screams, and once they had all had their turn, and the ‘fat’ girl was completely humiliated, they would kick her out of the room. 122


I sat in the audience, listening to this story in horror. I suddenly became acutely aware of my own ‘fat’ bulges and folds. I imagined every eye in the room on me, shaking their heads in pity, revulsion and even morbid curiosity. I pulled my shirt surreptitiously away from the bulges of my belly and my hips, trying to separate the appearance from the reality. I shifted in my chair, and felt my cheeks burn hot and my stomach churn. I was angry, so angry, so humiliated for the ‘fat’ girl who had suffered at the hands of these young boys: she was just a girl, a girl like I was and had been, and she had been made into a ravenous, libidinous, ridiculous creature. And yet I was ashamed. I was aware of the disgust my body inspired, its complete unacceptability and invisibility in the sexual domain, apart from being a figure of ridicule. I felt hot tears sting my eyes, and I knew I had to get out. I squeezed my wide hips between the rows of chairs, and fled the room. It was not that I did not realise that society does not think ‘fatness’ is sexy. It was not that I had never had the experience of being relegated to the category of the asexual ‘big girl’ or been laughed at, or positioned as sexually undesirable. It was that this story was so illustrative of these attitudes and so callous and violent in the way they were played out. I could reason things out along lines that ‘fatness’ was not abhorrent to everyone, that this kind of cruelty was the exception rather than the rule. I tried to critically reflect on the way in which this story highlighted the privileged position of heteronormative understandings of sexual desirability, where the woman is expected to conform to certain notions of feminine beauty in order to be desired by a man. But in the midst of this reason, I experienced myself as split. I saw myself as the ‘fat’ girl at the centre of the ‘Rodeo’, and realised that as a ‘fat’ woman I am expected to deny my own sexual desires and identity because my body stands as an “embolism”, to use Sedgwick’s term, between my sexuality and my society (Sedgwick, 1993, p. 217). In fact, the ‘fat’ woman is supposed to be asexual: often, she is not permitted to experience sexual desire at all, let alone sexual pleasure. In the one moment that ‘fat’ girl imagined herself as a sexual being, allowed herself to believe she was desirable, she was made an object of ridicule, had all her sexual anxieties thrown back in her face. I felt carved up, split in two: I felt that any conception of myself as a sexual being was ridiculous, and could only be imagined in my mind, never acted out by my body. I felt radically disconnected from my own flesh, my own sexuality. One only has to reflect on the ways in which we speak about ‘fatness’ in this historical moment in Western societies to understand the way in which this mind/body split is generated/enforced. We talk


about ‘fatness’ as a major health crisis, an epidemic, a drain on resources, a symbol of the failed body, and as an aesthetic affront. We do not talk about ‘fat’ and sex. The two appear as mutually exclusive. We do not almost plough into the car in front of us as we ogle a billboard displaying a ‘fat’ woman in lacy lingerie. We do not gaze lasciviously at a bulbous bottom in tight jeans. We do not fantasise about the fleshy jiggles and wobbles of a ‘fat’ body in the throes of sexual passion. Some of us might. But most of us do not. Or at least we know we are not supposed to. In Hanne Blank’s Big Big Love: A Sourcebook on Sex For People of Size and Those Who Love Them, she discussed the ways in which we are conditioned to think about the linear progression of sex and desire: Culturally, we’re taught to believe that sexual activity happens as a result of sexual desire. Sexual desire, in turn, happens as a result of beauty, sexiness, sex appeal, love (2000, p. 2). So let us think about ‘fat’ bodies having sex, ‘fat’ bodies engaging in uncontained pleasures of excessive flesh. Our culture codes these imaginings as disgusting, perverse, perhaps an underground sexual fetish for kinks wanting to be dominated and smothered. But in the mainstream sexual marketplace, ‘fat’ bodies are not marketable commodities. The ‘fat’ body stands as a symbol of gluttonous obsessions, unmanaged desires and the failed self. In the midst of an historical epoch marked by a preoccupation with idealised body forms, and an eroticisation of a slender bodily aesthetic, the ‘fat’ body appears as a defiant blockage in a culture seduced by particularised notions of beauty and attractiveness. The body has come to be our visible representation to the world of our adherence to puritanistic lifestyle crusades, ‘correct’ and ‘healthy’ diets, exercise regimes and, most importantly, a reflection of the inner self. The body has come to be a representation of the ‘realised self’. As I demonstrated in my earlier discussion of Susie Orbach’s work, ‘fat’ emerges as a barrier to a fulfilment of traditional female sexual roles (Orbach, 1978, p. 43). According to Orbach, staying ‘fat’ means avoiding the issue of one’s sexuality all together, as the ‘fat’ female body can allegedly never be conceptualised as a sexually desirable one. Orbach’s understanding of the ‘fat’ female body relies on an understanding that the ‘fat’ body houses an ‘uncultivated self’. In cultivating this self, the body that reflects this completed process is a necessarily normatively ‘thin’ one.


Michel Foucault’s later work, which is marked by a particular articulation of ethics, is also concerned with practices that allow for a ‘cultivation of the self’. In The History of Sexuality Volume II: The Use of Pleasure, Foucault suggests that one might be able to create oneself as a ‘work of art’, through sets of ethical practices that are less concerned with the dictates of a universalising moral code, and more to do with ‘techniques of the self’. Foucault stresses the importance of the aesthetic ideal in cultivating oneself: What strikes me is the fact that in our society, art has become something which is related only to objects and not to individuals, or to life….But couldn’t everyone’s life become a work of art? …From the idea that the self is not given to us, I think that there is only one practical consequence: we have to create ourselves as a work of art (in Rabinow, 1984, p. 350). The way in which we conduct ourselves and maintenance our lives and bodies, then, produces the lens through which we understand ourselves, and our world. Foucault references the Greco-Roman world when he explains that to live a ‘beautiful life’, one must avoid regimes of excess, and practice control in all aspects of one’s existence. It is important to point out that despite his close examination of these classical societies, Foucault does not suggest that the practices of the Greco-Roman world can be grafted unproblematically onto our contemporary society, and in his discussion of an ‘aesthetic of existence’, he is not, he claims, looking for a solution for the modern subject in the practices of the Classical world. He speaks instead of his attempt to construct a genealogy of ‘problems’, and to explore the ‘dangers’ inherent in all modes of thinking and being. If all ways of being-in-the-world are dangerous, it is our task, he writes, to decide whether the dangers of some modes of being outweigh others (Rabinow, 1984, p. 343). Despite this, Foucault nevertheless suggests that “an aesthetics of existence” may have enabling possibilities for us, insofar as we could make of ourselves ‘works of art’ by observing the fine balances these ancient people kept between the overarching binaries of activity and passivity, excess and restraint. Interestingly, this notion has difficult implications for the ‘fat’ female body, which has come to stand as the ultimate symbol of excess, and a body out of any balance. However, as I have shown, cultivating oneself as a ‘fat’ work of art in relation to an aesthetic via a series of bodily practices, seems to hold a particular


appeal for an activist establishment of a ‘fat’ counter-aesthetic. What interests Foucault is: Those intentional and voluntary actions by which men not only set themselves rules of conduct, but also seek to transform themselves, to change themselves in their singular being, and to make their life into an oeuvre that carries certain aesthetic values and meets certain stylistic criteria (1992, pp. 10–11). Herein a problem emerges, and a marked shift is evident from Foucault’s earlier conception of a subject as a product of systems of power/ knowledge. In this text, Foucault, I contend, presents us with a voluntarist subject: a subject who can act to transform himself, to govern himself, and to re-make himself.18 However, my question is this: from whence do the ‘stylistic criteria’ Foucault speaks of, come? And once one positions oneself in relation to these criteria, can one’s selftransformation be regarded simply as a process of self-authoring? What these questions point to is the fact that the subject of aesthetics is not simply self-restraining, but is in fact – and Foucault seems oblivious to this – constrained by contextually specific ‘stylistic criteria’. In The Use of Pleasure, Foucault asserts that all systems of social morality imply self-discipline and control, including the expected maintenance of the body. One of the four areas of daily life that Foucault examines is that of dietetics and care of the body, where he analyses the ‘regimen’ of the Classical Greeks as a set of practices that enabled a system of bodily ethics. The Classical regimen favoured restraint, and avoided excess. Here, Foucault implicitly intimates that ethics is directly related to aesthetics, and his understanding of being ethical relies on a concept of a ‘beautiful life’. But who prescribes and judges this aesthetic? I would argue that this ‘aesthetic’ is not something spontaneously produced in a vacuum by the individual, but is a learned discursive, culturally shared production that allows us to understand, embody and (re)produce the dictates of beauty. As Foucault tells it, an arts of exist-

18

Foucault uses the pronoun ‘he’ as a generic term to describe the subject, but I would argue that rather, it is a universalising term that fails to articulate the ways in which subjects are always already marked by gender and other imperatives.


ence is all about a reigning in, a giving of shape and form to one’s life, one’s desires, one’s body. He writes: The individual fulfilled himself as an ethical subject by shaping a precisely measured conduct that was plainly visible to all and deserving to be long remembered (1992, p. 91). As I have argued throughout this book, bodies deemed ‘fat’ are read in our culture as symptomatic of greed, mismanagement, excessiveness, lack of control, and so on: as such, they are constituted as pathological. Given this, in order for the ‘fat’ woman to conform to the aesthetic ideals that lie at the core of an ‘arts of existence’, she needs to transform her body, and her flesh, to be perceived as living a ‘beautiful life’, to become normatively beautiful. Hence, she must restrain her supposedly excessive desires, she must learn to exercise control in all aspects of her daily life, she must set about employing Foucault’s ‘techniques of the self’. But if the body-subject of Foucault’s aesthetics is such that she is unable to be perceived as a self-defining subject, then what does this suggest about the viability of a counter-aesthetic? Interestingly, rather than focusing on the normalising discourses associated with aesthetics – discourses which I am suggesting are both inescapable and intimately tied to the notion of the aesthetic – Foucault seems more interested in the choice we have in allegedly constructing ourselves in accordance with ‘ethical practices’. Discussing ethics in Classical Greek society, he says: It is that we have to build our existence as a beautiful existence; it is an aesthetic mode….nobody is obliged in classical ethics to behave in such a way as to be truthful to their wives, to not touch boys, and so on. But if they want to have a beautiful existence, if they want to have a good reputation….they have to do that. So they accept those obligations in a conscious way for the beauty or the glory of existence. The choice, the aesthetic choice…for which they decide to accept this kind of existence…[is] a choice, it’s a personal choice (Foucault in Rabinow, 1984, p. 356). Foucault’s assertion here encapsulates my concern with the question of the degree to which we are free to choose our investment in aesthetic ideals. What the quote clearly demonstrates is that in order to be seen to be living a ‘beautiful life’ – and thus to be positioned as and to take up the position of the subject of aesthetics – one must necessarily


conform to the aesthetic expectations of others. If we look at the way in which fat pride insists on a self-definition of the ‘fat’ subject as a beautiful body that can stand outside of visual regimes of power and dominant aesthetics, then how does the intersubjective nature of an aesthetic come to be realised as a means of overturning dominant slender feminine bodily codes? After reading Foucault, I thought back to the way I experienced my ‘self’ in response to the story about the ‘fat’ girl at the centre of the ‘Rodeo’. I felt myself split, I removed my self from my flesh, trying to keep my self and my offensive body separate. Foucault at first seemed to offer me a means of reconnecting my ‘self’ to my body, of living a ‘beautiful life’, free of the humiliation and shame of dominant understandings of the ‘fat’ female body. However, in thinking through these practices of the self, new questions emerged. Can we choose the level of investment we have in historically and culturally specific aesthetic ideals necessary for living this ‘beautiful existence’? If an aesthetic is indeed, as Foucault might insist, a discursive production, if we cultivate ourselves in relation to that ideal, to what extent can the self be created as a free and autonomous being? Further, what about the role of the other in this notion of living a ‘beautiful life’? It would seem that an ‘aesthetic of existence’ is never just a relation of self to self, but is necessarily a relation to others and the world, and we are irrevocably constructed by the aesthetic ideals of others and the world. It is this point that Foucault seems to ignore. If we think back to the sexual practice of the ‘Rodeo’, we see that the ridicule of the ‘fat’ woman comes from society’s own implicit understanding of aesthetic values, and the ways in which her body contravenes them. She is situated as a ridiculous sexual creature, ravenously and libidinally out of control. She is made ridiculous by her seeming refusal to bear witness to the offensiveness of her own body. To actively become sexual, she must act on her body to transform it or, as Foucault suggests, to master it, to resolve the affront it presents to dominant aesthetic values. We measure beauty through aesthetics, which is a learned understanding of what is attractive and sublime, and what is ugly and ridiculous. It would seem to me, given that Foucault does not clearly explain the way in which he understands the concept of aesthetics, that the ‘fat’ woman must cultivate herself by transforming her ugly and ridiculous body to a ‘thinner’, more ‘aesthetically pleasing’, attractive and sublime form. In cultivating herself, she must overcome her ‘fat’ body. The ‘fat’ body can never be seen to be living a ‘beautiful life’ in the way


Foucault suggests, as it is always already read in terms of its associations with gluttony, lack of self-control and excess. While in dominant discourses, woman is always already associated with characteristics such as excess and immoderation, the ‘fat’ woman allegedly embodies the worst of them. In the popular imagination, her desires have run wild, and she stands as a symbol of moral and ethical decay. She does not fulfill feminine expectations of beauty and submission: she takes up too much space, she is uncontained and excessive. In short, she does not, and cannot (be seen to be) live(ing) a ‘beautiful life’. So, is it possible to elaborate an aesthetics that doesn’t structurally exclude the ‘fat’ woman? An aesthetic that could operate independently of dominant historically and culturally specific ways of coding feminine beauty? It is my argument that while forming a counteraesthetic is possible (such as through some of the fat-affirmative representations in the Size Acceptance movement), there is an inherent impossibility in the ways in which it can be taken up and seen as “beautiful” by mainstream society. In deriving this ‘beauty and glory of life’ that Foucault suggests an arts of existence affords, don’t we have to conform in some way to the expectations of what we should be, in order to be aesthetic subjects, don’t we have to rely on the desires and pleasures of others to bring us into being? In so far as one is able to take up the position of the subject of aesthetics – that is, to see oneself, and be seen by others, as living a ‘beautiful life’, then one is also able to experience pleasure in one’s self, one’s actions, and one’s life. But what happens if one – for example, the ‘fat’ woman – is structurally excluded from this position? How does the person who is excluded from the dominant aesthetic ideal experience pleasure in his/her self and his/her actions? As I have mentioned earlier, organisations such as NAAFA attempt to celebrate ‘fatness’ through events such as pool parties, lingerie shows and fashion parades for their ‘fat’ members. However, this is problematic in that they are simply reversing the dominant aesthetic ideal, rather than dismantling and subverting it. What is neglected in fat pride narratives, and in Foucault’s account of an aesthetics of existence, is the role of the other, and the intersubjective experience/reality of our being-in-the-world. Ironically, despite Foucault’s and fat pride’s emphasis on the individual, it would seem that an ‘aesthetic of existence’ is never just a relation of self to self, but is necessarily a relation to others and the world, and we are irrevocably constructed by the aesthetic ideals of others and the world. It is this point that Foucault, and more interestingly, fat activists, seem to ignore.


While positioning the ‘fat’ body as part of a counter-aesthetic where ‘fatness’ is re-hierarchised over thinness as the superior feminine bodily form may seem empowering to ‘fat’ women who have uniformly been denigrated, devalued, and regarded as grotesque in the context of dominant aesthetics, whether it operates effectively or not given its insistence on an autonomous subject is a matter of debate. What is more interesting to me is that in instituting any kind of aesthetic as a set of ‘stylistic criteria’ according to which a ‘fat’ woman must model herself, does little more than replicate the oppressive visual standards upheld by dominant aesthetics in prescribing ways of appearing in the world to be considered a beautiful and ethical subject. The project of fat pride should surely be about questioning and dismantling this visual regime rather than attempting to appropriate it, thus replicating its prescriptive and oppressive imperatives. Perhaps the ‘fat’ woman could find a space for her body by drawing on marginalised counter-discourses, but this is not likely to be very successful precisely because her being as a subject of a counter-aesthetics is not recognised or validated by the dominant social powers. So the question, then, is how could we recognise the pleasure of the other and/or his/her aesthetic practices as examples of an alternative ‘beautiful life’? Foucault asks: Are we able to have an ethics of acts and their pleasures which would be able to take into account the pleasure of the other? Is the pleasure of the other something which can be integrated in our pleasure? (in Rabinow, 1984, p. 346). Here, Foucault poses a problematic question of whether, in fact, the pleasure of the other can be incorporated into our own pleasure. However, this seems to erase difference and attempts to normalise the experience of pleasure, even as it appears to be other-oriented.19 To further illustrate these claims, I want to examine them using the example of Feederism. Feederism is an underground ‘fat’ sexual practice that involves women who allow themselves to be submissively force-fed though a funnel by a dominant male master, who derives sexual excitement 19

For a more detailed analysis of Foucault’s economy of pleasure, see Nikki Sullivan’s (2001) “(Re)Writing subjectivity: a different economy of bodies and pleasures?” in her Tattooed Bodies: Subjectivity Textuality Ethics and Pleasure. Connecticut: Praeger.


from watching his submissive servant grow ‘fatter’ and ‘fatter’ as he forces her to eat more and more. There is a “goal weight” for the women who allow themselves to be force-fed, which is over 500 lbs, at which time they are said to have joined the “500-club” (Blank, 2000, p. 240). Disturbingly, men who engage in this sexual fetish (known as “feeders”) often force-feed the feedee to the point where she is completely immobilised, so ‘fat’ she can no longer move, clean herself or leave the house. Once the dominant male feeder has achieved the goal of incapacitating his feedee, he will leave the woman and go and find another who is interested in what is termed “erotic weight gain” (Manheim, 1999, p. 131). Camryn Manheim in her book Wake Up, I’m Fat! discovers this sexual fetish in her exploration of the fat underground, and comes across the following personal advert in Dimensions magazine: Hi, My name is Cathy. I’m a 681-lb submissive eating machine that is addicted to eating and being so stuffed I can’t move! Would like to talk to anyone who is supportive of my lifestyle. I am actively being force-fed and funnel-fed, and the fatter I get, the fatter I WANT TO BE. Would like to talk to women and men who share my relentless need to be stuffed and packed with fattening foods till I can’t move (as cited in Manheim, 1999, p. 131). The woman who describes herself in this personal advert positions herself as an active participant in ‘erotic weight gain’. I would suggest that this further problematises the concept of choice that Foucault posits, where he assumes an autonomous and free subject who can choose the modes of being to embody and live out, independent of dominant ideals. It is hard for most of us to imagine that a woman would want to put herself in a position of mortal danger in order to be desired and to be allowed to imagine herself as a sexual being. However, as Hanne Blank explains: A fat person who has been taught all his or her life that he or she was disgusting and physically undesirable might even find a feeder’s erotic interest so gratifying that he or she becomes a willing feedee simply in order to find him or her overtly sexy (2000, p. 243). One of the most troubling aspects of the relationship between the dominant male feeder and the submissive female feedee is that it suggests a kind of creationist fantasy for the male, in which he derives


sexual pleasure from bringing a monstrous creature into being.20 What this fantasy disavows is the debt to the other that is incurred in the construction of that self as god-like. In this way, the pleasures of the other exist only in so far as they serve the purposes of the project – which remains tacit rather than explicit – of the cultivation of the self. Similarly, what emerges from Foucault’s account of erotic relations in the Classical world is that the subject of aesthetics creates himself21 through a relation to the other that is disavowed. Let me elucidate this. Unlike the feeder, whose primary focus is on the other, the subject of aesthetics in the Foucauldian schema is concerned primarily with the self, the relation to itself, and practices of self-transformation that allegedly contribute to a ‘beautiful life’. However, the subject of aesthetics can only (re)create himself as such by structurally denying the other any such possibility. In short, through this process of selfcultivation, the subject of aesthetics, like the male feeder, comes into being through the simultaneous production of the other as an object. What this demonstrates is that self and other are inextricably bound and it is impossible to construct the self without reference to others and the intersubjective world, despite Foucault’s insistence that the ‘aesthetic of existence’ is fundamentally a relation of the self to itself. At the same time, the female feedee, like the spectre of the other in Foucault’s beautiful lie, experiences her pleasure almost by proxy. What I mean by this is that her pleasure (if it exists at all) is always already an effect of the aesthetic practices and ideals of the male subject. The ‘fat’ feedee, like the other, can never actively participate in her own self-cultivation. Foucault seems to discount the power of the intersubjective experience in his formulation of an aesthetics of existence, which focuses so strongly on the self’s relation to itself as part of the practice of selftransformation. This focus not only ignores the role of the other in the

20

This is not a universalisable theory, but is a response to dominant fetishistic heterosexual discourses. ‘Fatness’ can play significantly different roles in other sexual subcultures. See, for example, the online group and journal Fat and Queer (http://community.livejournal.com/f_and_q/, last accessed 12 March 2008). 21 As I alluded to earlier, Foucault makes no apologies for situating his explication of the ethical subject as an implicitly male subject. However, in imagining the possibilities of an arts of existence for the ‘fat’ women, as Lois McNay points out, “Foucault fails to consider the dissonance that arises from a contemporary morality that addresses itself to women as ethical subjects, but draws, nevertheless, on a tradition in which woman has historically been positioned as the ‘beautiful object’” (McNay, 1994, p. 151).


constitution of the self, but at the same time prioritises the self over the other, and a form of individualism over a theory of intersubjective becoming. Foucault never really explains his understanding of aesthetics and the ramifications it has for the subject who cannot help but be constituted by the power relations operating in his/her cultural context (McNay, 1994, p. 155). In fact, intersubjectivity produces an aesthetic, through the ways we talk to each other, what we desire, what it is okay to desire, and what is kinky or strange. It is produced in the ways we interact with each other sexually and intellectually, and the emotional responses we have to certain people or objects on an aesthetic level come to us through learned ways of seeing and interpreting attractiveness. Despite Foucault’s claim that it is not valid to transplant, in any complete manner, the aesthetics of an ancient civilisation into contemporary society, the adoption of the notion of an aesthetics of existence in the present day, and in relation to the ‘fat’ woman, illustrates the impossibility of overcoming the dangers, that I would argue, are inherent in Graeco-Roman society. That is, in cultivating oneself in relation to an aesthetic ideal, one is always already reproducing the dominant ways of knowing and of bodily being that construct subjectivity at the expense of others. In so far as an aesthetics of existence appears to be normalising, its effects are most dangerous for those situated as “other”, and my example of ‘feederism’ is illustrative of one particular example of this.

Conclusion In this section, I have attempted to give critical attention to the way discursive regimes not only operate despite celebratory politics, but also indeed are tacitly reproduced and affirmed by it. Size Acceptance does not attempt to alter, nor can it attempt to alter dominant aesthetic ideals simply by changing one’s mind about one’s ‘fat’ body. Fat politics and Size Acceptance are crucial in establishing communities and support to ‘fat’ people who have suffered cruelty, shame and humiliation because of their size. However, in creating communities and offering support, one does dismantle dominant cultural ideals about the body and ideal bodily aesthetics. In moving outside these fat-friendly communities, the politics of ‘coming out’ as ‘fat’ does not formulate new modes of embodiment or being-in-the-world. If ‘coming out’ as ‘fat’ refuses an ambiguous identity, then it refuses the possibilities ambiguity presents. I am simply suggesting that if we can open a space for the ambiguity


and contradictions of bodily experience, if we can accept the impossibility of a unitary self in fat politics, we can accomplish more than simply attempting to ‘re-hierarchise’ ‘fat’ over ‘thin’. In this section, I have outlined the key problems in some quarters of the current fat pride movement and fat activist events: namely, the distance effected between selves and bodies, the neglect of ambivalence in ‘fat’ lived experience, and the persistence of dominant aesthetics in activities that claim to be committed to resignifying negative meanings inscribed on ‘fat’ female flesh in the West. In Part Three that follows, I draw on the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty in considering more closely the questions I have raised here with relation to the ambivalence and ambiguity in ‘fat’ lived experience and to address the neglect by the fat acceptance movement of the importance and centrality of intersubjective relations to the construction of the self, and indeed, of an embodied subjectivity.

Part III ‘Fat’ ‘Being’: Rethinking the ‘Body-Subject’ with Merleau-Ponty

I had been searching the Internet for hours, looking at endless fat pride sites, and reading through numerous manifestos for my own fat liberation and bodily celebration. However, I was becoming increasingly confused and uncertain. I glanced away from the computer screen, and noticed the mirror on the adjacent wall. I was wearing a sleeveless top, my dimpled arms on display. I set my jaw, and convinced myself I was strong, powerful, swollen with my fat identity. But I kept looking at my reflection. I felt guilty, but pleased. Here I was, searching fat politics websites, but only a few hours ago I had crept back into the fitting room in K-Mart. Back in the cubicle, I looked down at the cruel underpants crumpled on the floor where I had kicked them away from me. I was angry, and appalled by my willingness to submit to expected aesthetic bodily ideals. I had wanted out: to get off the merry-go-round of humiliation, to ‘come out’ as fat. But, I bent down to retrieve the underpants, and slowly started to pull them up my legs, up over my hips, around my waist. They were just as tight the second time, just as painful, just as constricting. But standing before my reflection, I ran a hand over the soft flesh of my belly. I turned side-on, and looked at my reduced girth, the swell of my buttocks, and I closed my eyes against my reflection. Sitting in front of my computer, surrounded by scrawled notes on size acceptance, and with the screen flashing reams of search results at me, I straightened up in my chair and looked into the mirror again, this time, at my waist. My bulges were all but gone, and even through my anger and my pain, I could not help but smile.


7 Throwing Off Discourse? Questions of Ambivalence and the Mind/Body Split

No matter how good we feel about our bodies, we still live in environments where there is pressure to lose weight…As fat activists we try and redirect our anger and dismay towards fathating cultural attitudes, but sometimes we still end up back at square one, blaming our bodies for our oppression and feeling overwhelmed by our fatness (Cooper, 1998, pp. 57–58). Given the individualist politics that appears to underpin an aesthetics of existence, or a cultivation of the self, what is interesting is the cracks that appear in this project in accounts of lived experience by fat activists. For example, tucked away in fat activist Regina Williams’ essay filled with the rhetoric of self-love and acceptance is the following admission: “I still have those moments of insecurity, the feelings of inadequacy, the loneliness” (Williams in Edut, 1998, p. 185). Surely this is a very understandable reaction, given the fact that ‘fat’ women in the West must exist in a society underpinned by stringent rules governing normative slender feminine bodies, and yet this ambivalence poses a problem for fat activism. Fat pride wants you out – out and proud – with no grey areas. It is this question of ambivalence in identity politics that I wish to explore in this chapter. In the previous section, I examined the key assumptions that the many proponents of the Size Acceptance movement is founded upon – assumptions that ironically also inform medical and popular accounts of ‘fatness’ as a pathology – and critiqued the problematic split that these assumptions effect between the ‘mind’ and ‘body’ of women generally (not only ‘fat’ women). As I have shown, this mind/body split is an effect of liberal humanist ontologies.


In this chapter, I aim to examine body knowledges that women positioned as ‘fat’ (and indeed, women more generally) internalise and embody, and the disconnection this effects between the lived body and the perceived body. In the later chapters in this section, by drawing on the work of Merleau-Ponty, I attempt to reconceptualise the problematic liberal humanist conception of the self, and investigate the possibilities of a (personal) political project that reconfigures an understanding of a ‘body-subject’, and does not insist upon the eschewal of dominant discourses that have shaped women’s relationships with their bodies, their embodied being. By exploring MerleauPonty’s phenomenological account of embodiment in which he insists upon a world that is fundamentally intersubjective, and ambiguous, I argue that a more productive form of political action is possible. Whilst my aim here in Part III is not to unveil a miraculous new formula for ‘fat’ body politics, with the help of Merleau-Ponty, I offer an alternative way of conceiving of the politics of bodily being, contra an insistence on an autonomous, self-governing subject. In and through my demonstration of lived existence as always already fundamentally embodied, and intersubjective, I argue that reconceptualising subjects as ‘being-in-the-world’ has significant political implications for the way in which we ‘live’ our (inter)corporeality. As discussed in Part I, the problematic act of ‘coming out’ as ‘fat’ relies on the strategic declaration of an unambiguous identity, for material and political ends, and yet, the ways in which I live my ‘fat’ body are multiple, contradictory and eminently ambiguous. As a fat woman, I could go out feeling armed with Wann’s political arsenal, wearing a sleeveless top, my dimpled arms on display. I may feel strong, powerful, swollen with my ‘fat’ identity, snarling at others who cast withering glances at my bulky frame. But then, I might pass a shop window, and shudder as I catch a reflection of myself, my body appearing to me as grotesque and foreign, a bulging, jiggling vehicle of disgust and shame I want nothing to do with. I experience myself/my body in ways that shift and vary and contradict each other. As I outlined in the previous section, apart from an annual conference, NAAFA schedule regular events for its members that include pool parties, lingerie parades and social dances. As a ‘fat’ woman, the idea of attending such an event is at once terrifying and exciting. The idea of entering a space full of other ‘fat’ women is initially terrifying: all these ‘fat’ girls displaying their flesh shamelessly, women 200 kilograms and larger frolicking in cool water, oblivious to the jiggles of their excess flesh, the dimpling of their thighs, the folds of sagging flesh hanging over bikini

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bottoms. I try to imagine myself striding around a pool deck, martini in one hand, Wann’s ‘Fat Manifesto’ in the other, with my body exposed for all to see. I try to imagine the sense of freedom I would feel. I try to imagine what it would feel like not to be afraid of my flesh, not to be afraid of the response it might elicit, not to feel I had to cover myself up to prevent others’ disgust. I imagine myself at these pool parties, pressed amongst a sea of heaving wet breasts bursting from their scant moorings, dripping wet bellies and bottoms and hips shaking unashamedly. All around me would be ‘FAT’, ‘fat’ flesh ‘coming out’ as it were, out of its control top underwear, its girdles, its dark ‘slimming’ colours. And then I realise that when I do imagine my body in this setting, I cannot think of it as being ‘fat’ – that whilst the women around me are ‘fat’, I cannot bring myself to envisage the reality of my own ‘fat’ body, even in my own private daydream. Why can’t I? I would argue that inevitably one imagines a hierarchy of ‘fatness’ in which one is well placed. I might accept that I am ‘fat’, but my sense of self is maintained in some way by knowing that I can measure myself favourably against other ‘fat’(ter) girls. What I am saying here is that I was reading the bodies of the other ‘fat’ women who populated my daydream of liberation against the irrevocable ‘perceptual backdrop’ Alcoff offers in her discussion of tacit body knowledges. I am not simply a ‘fat’ subject on my own, a ‘fat’ individual, but I am always already part of a network of relations with others. Just as the discourses that inform the ‘perception’ of other people judging ‘fat’ bodies, I have internalised these negative knowledges, and do not only read my own ‘fat’ body this way, the ‘fat’ bodies of my alleged ‘fat’ ‘sisters’.

Fat activist confessions and ambivalence as a condition of ‘being’ My inability to immerse myself completely in my fat-affirmative ‘daydream’ furthers my claim that selfhood is always experienced in multiple, complex and contradictory ways. Moreover, my selfhood is always already situated in an intersubjective world, and is constituted in and through my relations with others. My subjectivity is never fixed, stable and knowable in an unambiguous and singular way. In Such a Pretty Face: Being Fat In America, Marcia Millman notes the fragility and impossibility of maintaining an unambiguous identity in an intersubjective world. She writes: …it would be misleading to say that the women in NAAFA are glad to be overweight. Most have come to NAAFA because they are at the


end of the conventional line – having repeatedly failed to become and stay thin, they’ve decided to learn to live with what they are. Being unable to pass for normal in the outside world, they have found a comfortable home among their own (1980, p. 8). Herein lies an articulation of the appeal of ‘fat’ community building, which offers a safe, protected and supportive space for ‘fat’ women who seek refuge, rather than coming to NAAFA with the explicit agenda of participating in radical body politics. Interested in exploring the dynamics of NAAFA communities more closely, Debra Gimlin requested access to a local chapter of the organisation, and recounts her experience of a local chapter of NAAFA, and the relationships members have with their bodies, despite their activism. Gimlin observes that “the political segments of [NAAFA] see the self and body as separate entities” (2002, p. 124). She writes: The political strand of the group argues that fat women are no different from ‘normals’, while the local chapter links fatness to a specific conceptualization of the self – the sexualized, feminized self. NAAFA thus conceptualizes the body-self relationship in two distinct – and somewhat contradictory – ways. This ‘self-contradiction’…means that for NAAFA members, the fat body is simultaneously the self and not the self (2002, p. 123). These competing ideologies within NAAFA are interesting: on the one hand, ‘fatness’ and its associations with hyperfemininity and sensuality are taken to express an ‘inner’ self, and on the other hand, the Fat Feminist Caucus (FFC) promote the idea that ‘fatness’ is something that is ‘not your fault’, just a simple genetic disposition. The FFC insists that because of hereditary factors, and cultural factors such as yo-yo dieting (which most often has the effect of seeing women regaining weight quickly once they stop dieting, often gaining even more weight than they lost), ‘fatness’ is something that is out of one’s control. The approach to ‘fatness’ by the FFC is very determinist, and again posits ‘fatness’ as a biological fact, rather than as a discursive phenomenon. Where I have previously outlined problems in some forms of fat activism, and the distance effected between bodies and selves, in this chapter I want to concentrate more closely on the reopening of a mind-body split in the lived experience of many fat activists before I go on the discuss the ‘body-subject’ as imagined by Merleau-Ponty later in this section. Debra Gimlin writes that “although the outside world may


ascribe specific identities to ‘fat’ persons, NAAFA members themselves contend that the self is independent from the body” (2002, p. 125). NAAFA offers a safe environment, support, resources (clothing, etc), social events and access to sexuality. She also notes that there are two distinct sections to the local chapter of NAAFA: one focused on support and community building, and one more interested in political action. The political arm is called the Fat Feminist Caucus (FFC), and in observing this collective, Gimlin notes that FFC members “rely on notions of the disembodied self as they negotiate their political activities and their individual attempts to come to terms with being fat” (2002, p. 125). It is clear that the mythic ‘liberatory moment’ promised by the Fat Pride movement is inherently problematic, as it fails to address the intersection of mind and body. Gimlin particularly concentrates on the story of Moira, a member who, …dissociates self and body because she needs ‘be be detached from the object of all that hatred.’. Moira has learned to survive in a hostile social environment by coming to see her body as essentially not who she is. However, denying the physical part of her entity is unsatisfying to Moira because it feels inauthentic (2002, p. 131). Moira tells Gimlin that she feels caught in a tension between not wanting to refuse her body, as it is part of who she is. However, she has come to terms with being ‘fat’ by ultimately regarding her ‘fat’ body as not who she essentially is (Gimlin, 2002, p. 131). This raises a number of concerns, particularly calling into question just how Size Acceptance has succeeded in encouraging ‘fat’ women to ‘love’ and ‘celebrate’ their bodies. This in fact seems to be the exact opposite of the way in which ‘fat’ women come to terms with being ‘fat’. Instead, one’s participation in ‘fat’ communities requires a commitment to the ideal that the ‘fat’ body has no bearing on one’s identity. Moira says that she tries to be “in my mind, someone else so fascinating that I wouldn’t even need to have a body, so my body wouldn’t matter” (Gimlin, 2002, p. 131). Coextensive with this attempt to become a disembodied self, to become “someone else”, Moira nevertheless admits the damaging effects of this split lived experience. She says that disavowing her ‘fatness’ “is a rejection of a part of me….I am a fat woman. I would rather not have to live in a sort of fantasy world where I am only part of who I am” (Gimlin, 2002, p. 131). This question of the tacit refusal of the body is also raised in Laurie Toby Edison and Debbie Notkin’s 1994 collection of fat-affirmative


photographs of ‘fat’ women called Women En Large: Images of Fat Nudes. The aim of the book was to encourage not only ‘fat’ women, but Western society at large, to consider ‘fat’ women’s bodies in new ways, to invite them to bear witness to real ‘fat’ bodies, and to acknowledge the beauty of these ‘fat’ bodies. As part of the book, women who posed for the photographs commented on their participation in the production of the collection, and more specifically, of their daily lived experience as a ‘fat’ woman. One such participant was Kate Schaefer, who describes her own complex and ambivalent relationship with her ‘fatness’: Ambivalent about being fat? Who isn’t? (That is, who isn’t ambivalent if their feelings aren’t unmitigated despair, shame and anger?) What positive feelings I have about my own fat are fairly few and far between. This is a book of pictures of women who are more than an armful, and who are beautiful, yes, in these pictures and on other places, but take that knowledge and turn it around for myself? Not in this lifetime. Immediately, I have to qualify that: sometimes I can see myself beautiful in spite of the fat. Beautiful in the fat? No (1994, p. 92). What is most interesting about Schaefer’s confession is that while she supports the project of many activists in the fat pride movement, and accepts that Notkin and Edison’s photographs of ‘fat’ nudes reveal a beauty that is not often represented, she cannot experience herself in this notion of a counter-aesthetic, nor can she recognise her own ‘fat’ body as a beautiful body. She is trapped by her political commitment to fat acceptance that is driven by her own anger and enforced shame over her ‘fatness’, and yet ‘throwing off’ these discourses unproblematically is an untenable task for Schaefer in her daily lived experience. Clearly she wants social attitudes towards ‘fatness’ to change, and agreed to participate in Notkin and Edison’s project by bravely disrobing to pose nude for the images in a book dedicated to a celebration of ‘fat’ women and the affirmation of a counter-aesthetic of feminine beauty. And yet, despite her political affiliations and beliefs, her own experience of her ‘fat’ body cannot simply be unmediated by dominant aesthetics and anti-fat attitudes. Changing her mind about her body is not as simple as Marilyn Wann would have us believe. Schaefer is still irrevocably constructed by negative discourses about her ‘fat’ body, and these narratives always already mediate her bodily experience, even as she performs her pride. Similarly, a figure who has become synonymous with the performance of fat pride is 25-year-old Beth Ditto, lead singer with the punk


indie band, The Gossip. Ditto has reached a queer young audience of new riot girls angry about fatphobia with her powerful and uncompromising criticism of Western body fascism, particularly as it affects women. Identifying as a feminist queer fat activist, Ditto regularly speaks out about queer fat issues, stripping during her concerts and wearing form-fitting, revealing outfits to show off her five foot, 95 kilogram frame. In 2007, Ditto posed nude for the cover of leading music magazine NME, which was hailed as a radical intervention into representations of ‘fat’ women. Ditto favours a reclamation of the term ‘fat’ over descriptors like ‘overweight’ which suggest a normative standard for bodies, but argues against a simple re-hierarchisation of fat over thin, saying “I hope that bodies can just be bodies and there’s not any kind of fascism involved” (Hattenstone, 2006, p. 4). Despite Ditto’s radical stage presence and political commitment to ‘big fat girls’, she also notes the complexities of the lived space between a strategic political identity and the persistence of cultural ideals about women’s bodies: I mean, God it’s a daily struggle for self-esteem. Isn’t it for everybody? But if you have a lot of odds against you…I really believe that if you don’t tell yourself, no one is going to tell you, so you might as well start telling yourself that you are amazing (Hattenstone, 2006, p. 4). Fat politics talks about the ‘fat’ body in terms of its possibility for resistance and the political implications of changing one’s attitude. But even for activists, as is evidenced by Ditto’s admission, this moment of resistance is an ongoing internal conflict rather than a moment of discursive rupture. As Lisa Ayuso explains: Even the most confident of FAT girls have to struggle to keep every ounce of fat intact. The truth of the matter is that many FAT activists hold a small and guilty desire to be skinny (Ayuso in Mitchell, Rundle & Karaian, 2001, p. 157). In other words, even the subject of fat politics experiences a disconnection from her body, a need to be apart from the source of her angst: her ‘fat’ flesh. What emerges from these small snippets, these quiet admissions, is that the unified self that fat politics seems to expect, and draws its strength from, is inevitably always already an ambiguous subject. The fat activist does not want to appear to be a ‘traitor to the


cause’, or a ‘sell-out’, and yet, these admissions reveal the irrevocable ambivalence a ‘fat’ girl experiences. It’s clear that we all feel ambivalent about our bodies, particularly when we live an embodiment that has traditionally been marginalised. Identity politics, such as fat activism, also clearly represents an enabling and powerful intervention into dominant responses to marginalised bodies, and has significant and positive effects. However, the need to make a space for a political identity that does not require singularity for strategic reasons does emerge from the very fact that we cannot experience our bodies in singular, unambiguous ways. This reality, then, needs to be accommodated in ways where ambivalence does not have to be a kind of guilty secret, but is productive in terms of opening out multiple ways of being, without the imputed threat of a weakening of one’s political commitment and position. Given this, Ayuso advocates making a space in fat activism for bodily ambiguity: As a FAT activist, and I am one, I feel the way to survive is to acknowledge I am sizist, that I want to be thinner, maybe not thin but thinner, and why…Activism that legitimises both the not-so-good days of being FAT as well as the days where surrounding myself in a FAT world is sometimes the best medicine for a broken heart (2001, p. 160). It is here that I discovered one of the first admissions of the neglect of much of the current fat activism to accommodate the ambivalence we feel about our bodies: even as many ‘fat’ women are simultaneously committed to the overarching project of fat activism to claim a space in Western society for ‘fat’ women that is not bounded on all sides by pathology and hatred, we still embody, and are informed by, the inherent shame that dominant understandings of ‘fatness’ construct in us. This shame is an effect of the same humanist logic this fat politics is ironically based on, and reproduces. Humanism is inseparable from the notion of the individual and individual responsibility as I have argued in the previous chapters, and it is this kind of individualist approach that is required by some activists within the fat pride movement. In this way, fat pride can ironically contribute to the implicit reproduction of shame: the ‘out and proud fat girl’ straddles the tension of the absolute inability to conform to an ideal body that is fundamentally immaterial, and the responsibility to think differently about oneself, in the hope that in time it might persuade others to think differently about ‘fatness’ too. We are simultaneously in the world as subjects, and in the world with others, and it is this fact that is ignored by fat politics, and thus the fundamental ambiguity of our existence is neglected.


Lisa Ayuso articulates the need for activism that permits space for bodily ambivalence, and tacitly calls for a resituation of the fat pride project. What she envisages is a move away from a concentration on unambiguous bodily celebration towards an acknowledgement and exploration of the very embodied sizeism of the daily lived experience of the ‘fat’ woman. Similarly, this is demonstrated in the editorial comments from the groups of women who put together the special ‘Fat’ edition of Fireweed. They write: We live a life of spreading the word on the beautiful world of big. We have a bevy of fat girl fans that follow our wide loads, and so we assumed that everyone’s experience was relatively similar. What we forgot about in the sugar-hazed frenzy that brought us together was the bad days. When nothing fits, including the chairs and the most comfortable place to be is in bed (cited in LeBesco, 2004, p. 96). Fat identity politics does not always make a space for bodily ambiguity, regarding those who experience their ‘fat’ bodies with ambivalence as possible ‘traitors to the cause’, despite the movement’s own inherent contradictions. While Size Acceptance notes that the ‘fat’ body is simultaneously hypervisible (due to its size and the negative knowledges that are inscribed on one’s flesh) and invisible (inasmuch as the ‘fat’ body is positioned outside of dominant aesthetic ideals and refused access to sexual life) in Western society, I would argue that the apparently ‘new ways’ in which fat politics makes the ‘fat’ body visible are problematic. The ‘fat’ body of fat politics still exists in a (negative) visual regime, whereby one simply reverses the kind of response the ‘fat’ body elicits within a dominant heteronormative framework, rather than critically engaging with this regime to dismantle it. While fat politics seems to assume that the very existence of the ‘fat’ body is subversive, events such as fat pool parties and fat lingerie parties only reproduce the obsession with the visible and the power of aesthetic ideals. Certainly, wearing a size 26 g-string as a ‘fat’ girl and strutting down a catwalk can be read as a powerful political act. In doing so, it would appear one is parodying heteronormative visual aesthetics. But isn’t there something that underlies that act? If you have been denied the opportunity to experience oneself as a ‘normative’ woman, being given that chance is seductive, exciting. Even in my anger at these heteronormative presentations of feminine sexuality, as a ‘fat’ girl, I would argue that I nevertheless have to desire to experience them. The emphasis in Size Acceptance is still irrevocably on the visible, and I


question whether the ‘new ways’ it is attempting to make the ‘fat’ body visible have far-reaching political implications. In ‘outing’ the ‘fat’ body, apparently we are asking others to make us visible in new, more positive ways. This in itself is an enabling political act. However, who is looking? How do we see our own ‘fat’ bodies in this ‘liberatory’ moment? Can we remove ourselves from the knowledges that have become so embedded in our sense of self, simply by changing our mind about our ‘fat’ bodies? In fact, fat politics undermines its celebration of the ‘fat’ body by seeming to encourage a split self in its rhetoric – a disconnection is effected in ‘fat’ bodily experience in that fat pride insists that we see ourselves from exterior subject positions, and asks ‘fat’ women to occupy positions outside our bodies: to look at our bodies in new ways, but what about embodying ‘fatness’? In response to this question, and before moving on to an analysis of Merleau-Ponty’s account of the ‘body-subject’ in the following chapters, I wish to conclude by asking you to consider the following quotation by Susan Stinson: I take my belly in my hands. It’s warm. My fingers feel cool, but quickly warm, too. It has a good weight, is soft. I sit very still, and feel the pulse in my thumbs, then find the pulse in the place of my thickest fat. It’s delicate and regular, there, yes, there, yes, there. It comes from the underside where my palms are resting, from the left half and the right half, from veins that curve out with the rest of me. This is not dead lard. It’s my body. It’s my living fat (Stinson quoted in LeBesco, 2004, pp. 47–48). Susan Stinson’s description of her own ‘fat’ bodily experience is a rare one. She touches herself with tenderness; she is connected to her flesh. Her fleshy rolls do not repulse her; she does not apologise for them, or attempt to disavow her body as somehow separate from her self. This piece does not seek to celebrate ‘fatness’ by reversing dominant hierarchies pertaining to normative feminine bodily appearance. Similarly, Stinson’s account does not speak of a shame of ‘fat’ flesh and an insistence on disconnecting self from body. Rather, Stinson shares with us her lived bodily experience: in this moment she notes the fundamental interrelatedness of her ‘body’ and her ‘self’. As she insists: her flesh is ‘not dead lard’. Stinson is her body – and as Maurice Merleau-Ponty stresses, our bodies give us a world, make meaning possible and are always already ambiguous.

8 (‘Fat’) ‘Being-In-The-World’: Merleau-Ponty’s Account of the ‘Body-Subject’

Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy offers a radical rethinking of traditional understandings of the body that have informed western philosophy. His work is premised upon an understanding of our being-in-the-world as constituting us as more than objects, and less than subjects (Crossley, 2001, p. 89). Merleau-Ponty understands us as being-in-theworld as ‘body-subjects’: in and through this reconceptualisation of embodied subjectivity, he challenges the notion that the body is separate from the mind, and that our bodies exist only as objects amongst other objects. Rather, it is in and through our bodies that we rise towards a world, and that we have a world. The body-subject for Merleau-Ponty is purposeful and makes meaning in-the-world. Merleau-Ponty, however, escapes the problematic understandings of the subject as an individualist, autonomous being. Rather, Merleau-Ponty, through his exegesis of perception, our acquisition of a corporeal schema, habit formation, and the fundamental intersubjectivity of our lived existence, stages a powerful and productive reformulation of embodied being, beyond intellectualist accounts of consciousness and Cartesian logic. Let me now explain Merleau-Ponty’s ‘body-subject’. As I have discussed in previous chapters, perception cannot be regarded as a purely cognitive function. Rather, it is embodied and constitutive of our being-in-the-world. Similarly, Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological account of embodiment pivots around the ‘perceiving subject’, and he begins his thesis with criticisms of the empiricist and intellectualist understandings of the body as distinct from the mind. Firstly, Merleau-Ponty critiques the empiricist thesis that posits the body simply as an object amongst other physical objects. He argues that the empiricist approach understands perception as a simple physiological stimulation in response to external stimuli/objects, which is then processed in and 147


through the individual’s capacity to reason; a capacity that is central to his/her being. Merleau-Ponty suggests that the empiricist model of perception ignores the life-giving effects of perception, in making meaning and bringing subjects, and a world, into being. This cannot be reconciled through an understanding of perception as functioning on a merely cognitive and sensory level. Merleau-Ponty asserts that in and through perception, ‘the world’ is made to mean, and comes to be.

Perception In a similar account to that of Alcoff, Merleau-Ponty notes that all visual ‘objects’ are always already part of a “structured visual field” (Crossley, 1994, p. 9). As parts of this visual field, ‘objects’ are only significant insofar as they are related to the entire visual field. And, as Nick Crossley explains, these objects “always stand out against a background which functions as both their relief and as the necessary contextual precondition of their meaning” (1994, p. 9). In other words, objects never function independently of one another, and only mean, only come into being, in relation to the visual field of which they are a part. This, of course, relates to my discussion in Part I of Alcoff’s conception of ‘tacit body knowledges’ that are sedimented in our being so as to provide a ‘perceptual backdrop’ for all our (inter)actions, habits and understandings of the world, and of others. These tacit knowledges, then, could be said to be central in the construction of what Merleau-Ponty terms the visual field. Merleau-Ponty’s account of the visual field is significant because it directly answers the problems associated with empiricism and intellectualism. Merleau-Ponty identifies two separate (and opposite) problems with these approaches. He argues that empiricism insists on a determinate object, whereas intellectualism asserts a determinist subject (Crossley, 1994, p. 10). However, what both these approaches share is a fundamental reliance on a distinction between subject/object, self/other and mind/ body. In empiricist and intellectualist accounts of perception, the mutually constitutive effect of the perceiving subject and the perceived object is ignored. However, if we accept Merleau-Ponty’s conception of ‘objects’ as always part of a background, and as always already constituted in relation to this background, then, contra to the empiricist understanding of perception, the ‘object’ is in fact the product of perception, rather than its raw material, or to put it otherwise, as the object of perception in an empirical sense. In other words, the perceiving subject is only such because she perceives, and the perceived object is only such because it is

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perceived as such. Neither the perceiving subject or the perceived object could be brought into being or made to mean without the presence of the other. Subject/object are thus not separate, but are always already constitutive of each other. It is important to note here that perception is not just about ‘seeing’, but rather, according to Merleau-Ponty, perception is a mode of bodily being-in-the-world that is constitutive of this being, and is not (and can never be) confined to the ‘visual’. Co-extensively, the visual cannot be separate from other forms of sensory perception. Whilst one might perceive the world in terms of empirical objects, this is only possible insofar as these ‘objects’ are always already situated: this context is what constitutes the ‘object’ as an ‘object’. For example, as I have shown throughout my discussion, the ‘fat’ body is constituted as an empirical object in and through a specific mode of perception that is always already contextually specific, always already related to a world. By association, Merleau-Ponty is also critical of the fact that empiricist and intellectualist (or Cartesian) approaches to perception regard the body as an object amongst others, and hence, privilege the mind over the body and posit the former as the centre of reason and of knowledge. Our mind is allegedly the centre of our being, has the capacity to know itself completely. The body is thus denied any ‘real’ role in human action and meaning-making. In his critique of Cartesian logic, Merleau-Ponty insists that we must turn our attention to perceptual behaviour, to the fact that all behaviour is borne of an inseparability of action and meaning. Meaning is created in and through action: it is not simply an effect of action, but is inseparable from action itself. Meaning is lived, through the act, not simply created at its conclusion. What is also important is the fact that action is not an effect of consciousness. The behaving subject, at least as Merleau-Ponty understands it, is not fully formed in the way Descartes posits, that is, that the subject is the origin of action, exists prior to that action, and is not fundamentally changed by it. Rather, for Merleau-Ponty, bodily being-in-the-world is constituted in and through action. As Merleau-Ponty insists: The union of soul and body is not an amalgamation between two mutually external terms, subject and object, brought about arbitrary decree. It is enacted at every instant in the movement of existence (2002, p. 102). According to Merleau-Ponty, then, we do not move our bodies in the world as a result of conscious reflection, but we always already rise


towards a world as embodied beings. And just as our bodies are not separate from our selves, nor can our bodily being-in-the-world ever be separate from others, and the world.

The ‘mirror stage’ In “The Child’s Relation to Others” Merleau-Ponty critiques the classical psychology approach to the formation of an individualistic self and the understanding of one’s irrevocable separateness from others (Low, 1992, p. 49). Classical psychology insists on a psyche that is necessarily a ‘private awareness’, that is inaccessible to others, except indirectly, as each individual is aware of the existence of a private access to their own experiences, feelings and ideas (Low, 1992, p. 49). Merleau-Ponty argues that classical psychology regards bodily experience in terms of a range of sensations that are experienced by the individual that variously indicate one’s wellbeing or illness, and the ‘properness’ and/or ‘improperness’ of one’s internal function. The effect of this, then, is to insist on the separateness of the individual, which then ‘shuts off’ one’s body from the bodily experience of another. Douglas Low goes on to explain that: Given these presuppositions the only way that I can recognize the other person as a person, as a conscious subject, is to project my own internally experienced psyche into a body that I recognize, from a point of view outside of it, as similar to my own (1992, p. 49). Merleau-Ponty contests this view promulgated by classical psychology, which is centred on a fundamental assertion of the individual psyche that is off limits to others, and also insists on an inarguable delineation between the self and the other. All this relies on conscious reflection in the effort of imposing my psyche into a body that appears similar to my own. Merleau-Ponty is most interested in demonstrating the fact that we are not born into the world as isolated beings possessed of a private consciousness that cannot be shared with others (Low, 1992, p. 51), but rather that we are always fundamentally social beings. Drawing on the example of a child, Merleau-Ponty claims that while children do recognise the presence of an other, they do not have the mature faculties to engage in this process of intellectualising the figure/psyche of the other (1992, p. 49). Merleau-Ponty demonstrates the inability of infants to make conscious distinctions between their interiority and their exteriority, as well as between their selves and others. It is only through a gradual


process of consciousness that presents to the child the differentiation between the experience of the self and the experience of the other (Diprose, 1994, p. 120). A child forms an understanding of their own corporeal schema through a series of learned behaviours it acquires through mimesis of the actions of others. This then always already situates us as social beings, whereby we are constructed as fundamentally intersubjective through the incorporation of the movements, gestures and actions of others into the child’s own corporeal schema (Diprose, 1994, p.120). As Rosalyn Diprose explains: That a child’s corporeal schema, which is itself [sic], is organised through mimesis and transitivism is why it can be said that one’s lived body is socially constituted: it is built on the invasion of the self by the gestures of others who, by referring to other others, are already social beings (1994, p. 120). The child comes to be in relation to others, and her corporeal schema, which is herself, is formed in and through mimesis and transitivism. Thus, ‘herself’ is never autonomous, but rather, is an effect (always in process) of intersubjective relations that occur between body-subjects at a pre-conscious level. In other words, the child Merleau-Ponty presents to us is not an already constituted subject who deploys modes of conscious reflection in the formation of habits that are an effect of rational intent. Rather, in the interplay of gestures, actions and modes of being that ‘play across’ the child, and are incorporated into, and constitutive of her corporeal schema – in turn, the gestures and movements she passes on to others – the child becomes a subject. What becomes clear from this is that one’s being-in-the-world is an effect of a specific socio-cultural context, and is irrevocably connected to this context. Given the situatedness of the ‘body-subject’, then, this process of becoming is not only enabling and constitutive, but it also bounds the potentialities of our bodily being-in-the-world. In other words, our corporeal histories always already situate us in-the-world, and we are always circumscribed by the world and by others. In this way, Merleau-Ponty highlights the (im)possibility of subjects becoming radically ‘other’. This tension was one I engaged with in the previous chapter with respect to the liberatory project of fat pride as an individualist politics of self-transformation. We do not exist in a vacuum, but always in an interworld of meaning and lived experience, which necessarily bounds the kinds of reinvention we may aspire to institute. As I argued in the last chapter, simply ‘reinventing’ a notion of beauty and/or feminine bodily


aesthetics independently of the ‘other’ becomes an impossible task, given that the context where these notions of beauty or aesthetics reside is always already intersubjective. Thus, within an intersubjective context, these ‘reinvented’ notions are unrecognisable to others. Merleau-Ponty illustrates the kinds of claims that I have made above by re-working Jacques Lacan’s (1977) theory of the ‘mirror-stage’ (le stade du miroir). What this story shows is the fundamental inseparability of self, other and world. What is also demonstrated is that the ‘birth’ of the subject is ironically the ‘birth’ of the subject that is always already split: as Lacan notes, the recognition of the self as a unified, coherent and autonomous being is simultaneously a (mis)recognition. Merleau-Ponty writes: At the same time that the image of oneself makes possible the knowledge of oneself, it makes possible a sort of alienation. I am no longer what I felt myself, immediately to be; I am that image of myself that is offered by the mirror. In this sense, I am torn from myself, and the image in the mirror prepares me for another still more serious alienation which will be the alienation by others…For inevitably there is conflict between the me as I feel myself and the me as I see myself or as others see me. The specular image will be, among other things, the first occasion for aggressiveness towards other to manifest itself. That is why it will be assumed by the child both in jubilation and in suffering. The acquisition of a specular image, therefore, bears not only on our relations of understanding but also our relations of being, with the world and with others (1964, pp. 136–137). What I want to suggest here is that the story of the ‘mirror-stage’ should not be read in terms of a linear temporality. In other words, there is no self in existence prior to the very moment of this (mis)recognition of the self, and the self as already split. The child does not live prior to this moment in a state of idyllic connectedness to the universe. There is not a discrete moment where this split is effected. Rather, this ‘event’ is one that has always already passed, or in Levinasian terms, is “an-archic” (Levinas, 1978, p. 117). It is also an event that is so fundamental to the self that it is continually recurring through the self’s constant negotiation with the world that ‘invades it’. What happens, then, is the unity of self is fundamentally informed by this split. Thus selfhood is manifestly ambiguous: it is enacted as a continuous vacillation and (re)negotiation. The ‘event’ of the child seeing one’s specular image as split from one’s self, as I have described it above, inaugurates a parallel lived experience between self as unified, and self as split. There is, in our lived experience


(particularly as women), a constant vacillation between self as always bound up with others and the self as separate from others, and indeed, from our bodies. The presentation to the child of her specular image forces a formulation of a body image that then operates as apart from the bodysubject, where the child is split and asked to take up an exterior subject position in regarding her body, and its perception as a specular object: that is, an object for others. As Nick Crossley explains, the child “now exists for herself as a specular image and her being is referred to this specularity” (Crossley, 1994, p. 30). In Judith Moore’s autobiography Fat Girl: A True Story, she describes her own shock and misrecognition of her own body as it appears to her in photographs: It may come as a surprise to you – or maybe it won’t – but I often do not realise that I am fat, or how fat I am. When I am by myself I don’t tend to think about how I appear. I think about what I am doing. So when I see photographs…I am shocked by the difference between how I believed I looked and how I did look (Moore, 2005, pp. 42–43). When Moore is not faced with her specular image, she mentions that she lives her body in her actions, and does not think about the way her body appears in the world, or for others. It is only when she is asked to survey her body from the outside that she experiences shame and shock, and has split forced between who she feels herself to be, and the way she appears. However, in terms of women’s gendered embodied being, often one’s lived experience manifests in a disappearance of this vacillation, given the fundamental sedimentation of the split in one’s subjectivity. This ‘lived split’ is a process that is effected through particular gendered histories and contexts, and results in our embodiment being lived and experienced in gender specific ways: indeed, the split, and its attempted overcoming are embodied and bodied forth in and through historically and culturally specific gender discourse(s). A dominant narrative in women’s accounts of embodied being (regardless of whether they identify as ‘fat’ or not) is the experience of the body as a kind of ‘container’, an outer ‘shell’ that house the self, and acts often as a barrier or an obstacle to a presentation of an alleged ‘inner’ self to the world. This is generally symptomatic of humanist ontologies, so the question emerges as to why in fact this is particularly problematic for women? As I discussed earlier, I would argue that this emerges most starkly for women in the lived experience of their embodiment because of the historico-discursive


construction of femininity and its association with the body, with fleshliness, and with immanence. Women are constituted as the ‘body-vessel’ for reproduction, a ‘container’ to nurture life (Potts, 2002, p. 36). It is this sedimented tension in women’s constitution as women that is perpetuated in and through gender discourses and discursive practices. Annie Potts investigates the sedimented nature of these gender discourses in her article “Homebodies: Images of ‘Inner Space’ and Domesticity in Women’s Talk on Sex”. Here, she examines the personal narratives of women and their relationship to their bodies, and notes that “female bodies and female sexuality are most frequently depicted in western culture through images of interiority, containment and domesticity” (Potts, 2002, p. 35). Potts presents the responses of women as part of her study into heterosexual behaviours in New Zealand. One of Potts’ respondents describes her understanding of the difference between men and women’s sexualities: Agnes: Well, I think that it’s that external/internal thing, you know. The sort of anatomy of it. I don’t know. Men are much more…out there. Perhaps clearer in what they – what they’re – I know myself, I’m more hidden and more layered (2002, p. 39). What is evident is Agnes’ response is her understanding of her self as being somehow apart from her gendered body, and she relies on a biological understanding of difference between male and female bodies as somehow explaining this split she experiences. She tacitly insists on an ‘inner’ self that is ‘housed’ within her body, and that must somehow remain protected from the world, whilst for Agnes, men do not have to live their bodies as buffers against the world. Agnes goes on to claim that “…boys are sort of out there (gesturing outwards), like sort of they’re all out there, and I’m all in here (pointing inwards)…” (Potts, 2002, p. 40). Potts introduces us to the notion of women’s bodies as ‘houses’, and she mobilises the term “chora”, drawn from ancient western philosophy, in order to elucidate this idea (Potts, 2002, p. 40). She notes that, given historical constitutions of men and women, “if woman is imagined as space, then man is the conqueror, the actor, or the adventurer in that space” (2002, p. 43). Jean Grimshaw looks at the idea of “somatophobia” to describe the embodied experience of women. She argues that we internalise an intense hatred for our bodies that effects the disconnection from one’s own flesh: It destroys the ‘unity’ of the body. The body is broken into ‘parts’ which have to be worked on. Underlying the apparent ideology of


‘loving’ your body or caring for it is a profound somatophobia which focuses, often with a language of quite virulent hatred, on the inadequacy of body parts (Grimshaw, 1999, p. 96). However, what Grimshaw presumes is an original unity of the body that is then broken into parts. Grimshaw’s tacit assumption of an original unity that is manifestly a mode of ‘healthy’ being that is somehow devastated in and through a process of enculturation is, in fact, an example of a repressive hypothesis. This is not what Merleau-Ponty argues, as he rejects the notion of any original being, but insists that we come into being in and through our relations with others and a world. In challenging this lived split, Merleau-Ponty argues: The outline of my body is a frontier which ordinary spatial relations do not cross. This is because its parts are inter-related in a particular way: they are not spread out side by side, but enveloped in each other (1962, p. 112). Rather than conceiving of the body as an entity that exists separate from the self, Merleau-Ponty posits embodiment as an envelopment, a unity in which all aspects of our bodies – our limbs, eyes, hands, head, consciousness – operate together to situate us in a world. To regard the limits of the body as fundamentally delineated from the world via a clear, indisputable bodily boundary, is a notion Merleau-Ponty rejects, as we always rise towards a world, and in turn, the world is always enveloped in us. Merleau-Ponty claims: …our body is not merely one expressive space among the rest, for that is simply the constituted body. It is the origin of the rest, expressive movement itself, that which causes them to begin to exist as things, under our hands and eyes (1962, p. 146). Depending on our situation and specific corporeal histories, our embodiment will manifest in a range of differing modes of bodily being. Aspects such as sexuality, race, class, and of course gender will shape the way we move in the world, and the way we gather our corporeal schemas together to move towards tasks. Merleau-Ponty has often been criticised for presenting a body-subject that is genderless, and thus as many feminist theorists have argued, by default, male. Feminist theorists have often criticised Merleau-Ponty’s assumption of a genderless (and thus normatively male) body-subject in his philosophical reflections on embodiment, and have accused him of ignoring the specificities of women’s lived


experience and embodiment. My concern is not with pursuing this line of critique here, as I regard the enabling possibilities of Merleau-Ponty’s conception of the body-subject salient and eminently useful for female body politics, as well as male embodiment.22 However, I would argue that Merleau-Ponty’s model of embodiment does not necessarily occlude women, or attempt to universalise the experience of all human embodiment, but rather reconfigures the Western tradition of thinking about the cogito as a reserve of meaning, reason, and an understanding of the world, and the subsequent devaluing of corporeality and intercorporeal relations. In this way, the possibilities that Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy opens for women’s embodiment that has long been experienced as split, are significant. In Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of the specular image, he is not suggesting that we are simply objects for each other, but that a fundamental aspect of the body-subject is the fact that it always already is structured by a relationship to the other. Merleau-Ponty’s work is marked by a dialectic, whereby he insists on the indivisibility of the self from the other, just as he insists on the inability of the self to be separated from the body. The body-subject and the bodies of others rely on each other to bring each other into being, and make meaning of the world. As Douglas Low asserts of Merleau-Ponty’s project, “…the explicit sense of individuality is formed in a relationship with the other, that the explicit sense of individuality requires the presence of the other” (Low, 1992, p. 55). The specular image of oneself that the mirror’s reflection presents the child with an ‘outside’ view of the self, so that the child must then realise that her body does not simply exist for her, but exists for others. Moreover, any knowledge she may have of herself is always already mediated by the interworld of human experience, and through the intersubjective encounters with others. The awareness for the child of her specular image, then, simultaneously positions her as a subject for-others, that can be seen and known from the outside. What emerges then, is a moment of awareness of the fundamental ambiguity of lived existence for the child. What I mean by this is that the specular image is both not the self, and the self. It is separate from itself, and simultaneously

22

For a discussion of this critique of Merleau-Ponty by feminist theorists, see Shannon Sullivan (1997) “Domination and Dialogue in Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception” in Hypatia 12:1, pp. 1–19, and the response to her critique by Silvia Stoller (2000) “Reflections on Feminist Merleau-Ponty Skepticism”, in Hypatia 15:1, pp. 175–182.


itself. In this way, despite the fact that the child realises in its specular image that it can be regarded as an ‘object’ for others, the distinction between self and other cannot ever be absolute (Diprose, 1994, p. 120). What I have shown here is that whilst a self emerges, it emerges in and through its relations with others, and is thus always haunted by the ‘other’. What the ‘mirror-stage’ story conveys is the way in which the corporeal schema (which is the self) is fundamentally intercorporeal but always already ambiguous.

Habit and the corporeal schema Given the latter discussion, let me turn now to Merleau-Ponty’s account of habit formation and the constitution of the corporeal schema. Behaviour as a mode of active being is, on Merleau-Ponty’s account, habitual, rather than intentional and driven by consciousness. This is not to suggest a behaviouralist understanding of ‘habit’ that also relies on dualist logic, and is therefore as problematic as empirical and intellectualist accounts. Rather, Merleau-Ponty understands ‘habit’ as a competence, a skill that is always already meaningful, and is embodied in our corporeal schema. Merleau-Ponty regards habit as a key aspect of our bodily being-in-theworld, which is of course constantly in process. Habit, in and through our corporeal schema, is always situated in-the-world, and transversely, it always situates us in-the-world as body-subjects. Further to this, MerleauPonty’s interest in explaining the bodily phenomenon of habit is to demonstrate the impossibility of conceptualising the body as a mere object amongst other objects. His evidence for this is the inarguable ‘withness’ of the body.23 We do not, he argues, engage in conscious effort and reflection every time we move an arm, or stretch a leg, shake

23

In the introduction to Susan Bordo’s (1993) Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture and the Body, she discusses the poem “The Heavy Bear” by Delmore Schwartz, which includes the epigraph by Whitehead “The withness of the body” (1993, p. 1). Bordo notes that Schwartz’s poem, in which the protagonist imagines himself as a bear, with his body acting as “a stupid clown of the spirit’s motive,” (1993, p. 1) demonstrates the notion that “the body and its passions are obstacles to expression of the ‘inner life’; [demonstrating a] characteristically modern frustration over the isolation of the self and the longing for authenticity…” (1993, p. 3). Bordo claims that Whitehead’s epigraph to the poem (that I quoted above) “sets out the dominating, double-edged construction, the one that contains and regulates all the others – that of disjunction and connection, separateness and intimacy” (1993, p. 2).


another’s hand or get to our feet after being seated. For Merleau-Ponty, habituality dissolves the objectivity of the body: To understand is to experience the harmony between what we aim at and what is given, between the intention and the performance – and the body is our anchorage in the world. When I put my hand to my knee, I experience at every stage of the movement the fulfilment of an intention which was not directed at my knee as an idea or even as an object, but as a present and real part of my living body, that is, finally, as a stage in my perpetual movement towards a world (1962, pp. 144–145). What Merleau-Ponty is making clear here, as body-subjects, we are essentially motile, and our everyday behaviours are formed by, and form part of, what he calls the ‘body-schema’. He asserts: …the life of consciousness – cognitive life, the life of desire or perceptual life – is subtended by an ‘intentional arc’ [or corporealschema] which projects round about us our past, our future, our human setting, our physical, ideological and moral situation, or rather which results in our being situated in all these respects. It is this … which brings about unity of the senses, of intelligence, of sensibility and motility (1962, p. 136). The ‘corporeal schema’ Merleau-Ponty offers positions the body as the agent and effect of all meaning, it is what permits a gathering together of the infinite numbers of experiences that make the world intelligible to us, and situate us in it. Indeed, rather than conceiving of an objective body that houses a rational, conscious self, Merleau-Ponty argues we are our bodies, and it is in and through bodily being that the world, and our relations to it (and within it) become meaningful. As Merleau-Ponty stresses, “the body is our general medium for having a world” (1962, p. 169, my emphasis). This notion is what Merleau-Ponty refers to as a “corporeal schema”. He argues: It is never our objective body that we move, but our phenomenal body, and there is no mystery in that, since our body, as the potentiality of this or that part of the world, surges towards objects to be grasped and perceives them (1962, p. 121). By this, Merleau-Ponty argues that we do not experience our body as an object that we carry with us, and that we must animate via con-


scious deliberation. Rather, our bodies are the potentialities of a world, whereby meaning is made in and through our bodily space and the way we take it up in the world, and our perception of this world is always already bodily. Merleau-Ponty uses the apt example of driving a car in order to explain that motility is not consciously driven, but rather is an effect of tacit body knowledges. That is, knowledges that function, that are produced and (re)produced in and through habit, at the level of the body. Merleau-Ponty writes: If I am in the habit of driving a car, I enter a narrow opening and see that I can ‘get through’ without comparing the width of the opening with that of the wings, just as I go through a doorway without checking the width of the doorway against that of my body (1962, p. 143). What Merleau-Ponty demonstrates here is the way in which our corporeal schema is formed and (re)formed through the project currently being carried out, where in a sense, the motor vehicle is absorbed into our corporeal schema, and our bodily being is reconfigured such that the car does not exist as an object separate from it. What this shows is that just as the world is brought into being under our hands, our eyes and our actions in-the-world, the projects our bodies are directed towards always modify our own corporeal schema(s). In other words, there is a constant system of exchange between the body-subject and the world which rise towards each other, but the system of exchange is not a conscious, voluntary undertaking, but rather is a set of primordial behaviours, movements and responses. As Rosalyn Diprose explains: Not only is the world incorporated into one’s lived body-space through the projection of a corporeal schema, but the corporeal schema is modified in the process. That is, the project polarises and gathers together the body: the body, its senses and extremities are unified and certain aspects privileged, depending on the task being carried out (Diprose, 1994, p. 105). What is important to note here is that one does not simply experience one’s body as though it were a lens separate from the self that one regards the world through. Rather, one’s lived experiences are always already corporeal, and we do not simply experience our bodies, but our bodies are our experience, our experience in-the-world. In a Merleau-Pontyian sense, I perceive every interaction, every space, through my body. For


Merleau-Ponty, one’s subjectivity is irrevocably corporeal, and it is through our bodies that we come to be-in-the-world.

The body-subject and women’s bodily experience In her seminal essay “Throwing Like A Girl”, Iris Marion Young cites a study by Erwin Straus that notes the difference between the bodily comportment of men and women when throwing a ball (1998, p. 259). Young argues that because of the effects of internalising historically and culturally specific understandings of their own ‘female’ bodies, women’s bodily comportment is ‘inhibited’, and the tacit knowledge of this process of (en)gendering is quite literally, ‘carried’ by women in their corporeality. Given these tacit knowledges, women (re)produce ‘feminine’ modes of bodily comportment, not because they consciously and/or intentionally choose to do so, but rather because the performance of gender is a mode of habituation, formed in and through mimesis and introjection. Young talks about the marked difference in expansive movements between men and women. Where men might walk with their arms swinging, and a long legged gait, women are more likely to take smaller steps, and keep their arms close to their bodies. When sitting, men may spread their legs and recline in a seat, where women are taught to sit up straight with their legs together, or their ankles neatly crossed. Men are permitted to take up more space, where Young argues that women fail to “make use of the spatial and lateral potentialities” of their bodies (1998, p. 262). The difference between the gendered comportment of men and women, I would suggest, is informed in and through sedimented discourses and discursive practices of gendered performance that operate at the level of the body. In one particular photograph featured in Women En Large, Cynthia McQuillin poses in her study at home, seated in her swivel office chair, clutching her acoustic guitar, hugging it over her pendulous breasts and belly. She leans her chin into the contour in the body of the guitar, and looks up to us, only revealing the faint glimpse of a small smile. Her hair falls in tendrils and hides half of her face. In light of Young’s thesis, this image is particularly interesting. Despite the size of McQuillin’s body, and its constitution as non-normatively feminine, McQuillin’s pose, and the comportment she demonstrates, is so illustrative of the desire to take up less space in-the-world. She hides her flesh behind her guitar, shields her face from the camera with her hair, and tries to appear as diminutive and normatively ‘feminine’ as possible.


This is particularly problematic for the ‘fat’ female body: its wide, soft hips, rounded buttocks, and ponderous breasts suggest a kind of parody of femininity, where all the feminine bodily characteristics are emphasised and exaggerated. And yet ‘fat’ female bodies do not conform to aesthetic ideals relating to female sexuality. Without even moving, without making even one expansive movement, a ‘fat’ woman always already takes up too much space in the world. Young goes on to argue that, “[w]omen often approach a physical engagement with things with timidity, uncertainty and hesitancy” (1998, p. 263). This refers again to the ‘tacit body knowledges’ I have discussed throughout: the issue here is not that women consciously think they are incapable of lifting heavy objects. Rather, the issue is the embodying, and bodying forth, of gendered modes of bodily comportment, of historically and culturally specific ‘knowledges’ about femininity: the perception of the world against the ‘backdrop’ of these knowledges about gender haunt the comportment of women. Young goes on to assert that for many women as they move while playing sport, “a space surrounds us in imagination that we are not free to move beyond; the space available to our movement is a constricted space” (1998, p. 263). Young describes ‘inhibited intentionality’ as one of the modalities of feminine bodily existence. She notes that Merleau-Ponty locates intentionality in motility, and says that “the possibilities that are opened up in the world depend on the modes and the limits of the bodily ‘I’ can” (1998, p. 265). This is fundamentally important to the ‘fat’ body and the physical, psychical and cultural space afforded it. Feminine bodily existence is an inhibited intentionality, which simultaneously reaches toward a projected end with an ‘I can’ and withholds its full bodily commitment to that end in a self-imposed ‘I cannot’….Their bodies project an aim to be enacted but at the same time stiffen against the performance of the task (Young, 1998, p. 265). Regarding the ‘fat’ woman, an interesting question emerges from Young’s analysis. What is it exactly that the person positioned as ‘fat’, and therefore experiencing herself as ‘fat’, cannot do? I would argue that whatever task the ‘fat’ woman ‘stiffens’ in the face of is not related to her incapability of carrying it out. Rather, the ‘fat’ woman is constituted in her embodied being in and through the ‘tacit body knowledges’ that are encrusted in the very joints of her being: that is, she has embodied certain prohibitions against certain tasks because of historically and culturally specific discourses about gender and ‘fatness’.


As I discussed in the previous chapter, the ‘fat’ woman will often not, for example, eat in public. This refusal, then, is a specific manifestation of a particular mode of ‘I cannot’. Sitting in a café, a public space, I would argue that it is not simply that the ‘fat’ woman chooses not to eat: her bodily response to the tacit knowledges that constitute her is never a result of conscious reflection. Rather, she literally cannot swallow any food: she has embodied the culturally discursive prohibitions against a ‘feeding performance’ for a woman positioned as ‘fat’, and thus she literally ‘stiffens against the task’. The ‘fat’ woman ‘cannot’, in this moment, ingest any food, given that (as I have previously explained) what she is, in fact, ingesting is not simply a slice of cake or a piece of quiche. Rather, she is ingesting the opinions of others, and the shame associated with them. In other words, the act of eating in public for the ‘fat’ woman is so corporeally traumatic as to elicit the response of ‘I cannot’.

The ‘unity of the body’ Given Young’s articulation of women’s embodied experience and Merleau-Ponty’s demonstration of the unity of the body, we come to see that it is our bodies that give us a world, and that we are always already our bodies. What Merleau-Ponty’s conception of habit also demonstrates is that lived experience does not reside in the interior world of the humanistic portrait of the individual as a self-governing, free entity whose body is a mere object. Rather, the situatedness of the body-subject in-the-world highlights the inevitable intersubjectivity that always forms and reforms us as beings. The body, then, for Merleau-Ponty, is always an active mode of engagement in-the-world. Its bodily actions fold over on themselves, and never emerge as discrete. Insofar as we perceive, we are perceived. Insofar as we touch, we are touched. Given this, it is impossible to maintain a mind/body dualism, in that we are always embodied, our action is embodied, and we are always in-the-world. Further to this, we come to the world through our bodies, and we do not exist prior to our bodies. In explaining this, Merleau-Ponty uses the term ‘body-subject’: we act inthe-world of which we are always part. We do not exist prior to the world, we are always already in-the-world, and it is motility, rather than conscious intent, that gives us a world. Merleau-Ponty writes: Consciousness is being-towards-the-thing through the intermediary of the body. A movement is learned when the body has understood it, that is, when it is incorporated into its ‘world’, and to move one’s


body is to aim at things through it; it is to allow oneself to respond to their call which is made upon it independently of any representation (2002, pp. 159–161). Merleau-Ponty stresses that the co-ordination of all our bodily parts, and their gathering together as a body ‘schema’ is not an internal operation happening only within us towards a world. Rather, our action and our co-ordination is always already in-the-world, a synthesis with the world. The ‘knowledge’ that we deploy in order to be in the world is not a reflective intellectualisation of our acts, movements and gestures, but is rather mediated through an irrevocable relation with the world. Why is Merleau-Ponty so interested in highlighting our beingin-the-world? The answer to this is precisely because it directly answers the problems he identifies in empiricist and intellectualist understandings of perception, which position the mind as the source of all meaning, and deny the body any role in meaning making. As Merleau-Ponty demonstrates, we understand the world through our bodies, we know with our bodies, and as ‘body-subjects’, our understanding and knowledge of the world is embodied. He writes: We have relearned to feel our body; we have found underneath the objective and detached knowledge of the body that other knowledge which we have of it in virtue of it always being with us and of the fact that we are our body. In the same way we shall need to reawaken our experience of the world as it appears to us in so far as we are in the world through our body, and in so far as we perceive the world with our body (1962, p. 206). Merleau-Ponty’s account of habit and the body-subject does not position us simply as unthinking parrots of sets of culturally and historically specific learned behaviours, gestures and occupation of space, but rather insists that in the possibility of our bodies moving towards tasks that may be non-habitual, and the modification of our corporeal schema in this process, a range of possibilities and bodily potentialities is opened for us, and reaffirms his rejection of a static, fixed identity, in favour of a selfhood that is necessarily always in process. Habit, as a mode of being-in-the-world, I would argue, is a form of bodily knowledge. As Merleau-Ponty insists that habit “is knowledge in the hands, which is forthcoming only when bodily effort is made, and cannot be formulated in detachment from that effort” (1962, p. 144). What we have, then, is a concept of a knowledge that moves beyond


the limitations of the liberal humanist framework that I have critiqued throughout this book. Habit, for Merleau-Ponty, then, is a “knowledge in the hands”. In other words, we do not simply makes things mean as a result of conscious reflection detached from our bodies. Rather, we make meaning in and through our bodies, in every action, effort and habitual behaviour. As Merleau-Ponty notes, bodies are “sensing-sensibles”: this (tacit) perceptual knowledge is not a reflective, conscious knowledge, but is always already corporeal. As Nick Crossley explains: This embodied form of ‘knowing without knowing’ challenges the Cartesian worldview…and not only because it reveals our relationship to our bodies to be other than that of a subject to an object. It is a form of knowing which transcends the subject/object duality; a form of unformulated and perhaps unformulable knowledge which exists only in the capacity to do and which, for that reason, is indissociably ‘tangled’ with that which it knows (2001, p. 122). We do not ‘know’ prior to our bodies, or as a result of consciousness, but rather we know in and through our bodies. This conception of embodied being, and bodily knowing that Merleau-Ponty posits, is thus radically different to that of the empirical knowledge that I critiqued in the previous chapters. What Merleau-Ponty’s reconceptualisation of bodily being and embodied knowledge highlights is the very (im)possibility of empirical knowledge. As I discussed in the previous chapters, medical discourse ignores the tacit body knowledges that make meaning at the level of the body. In this way, the health/pathology binary is upheld precisely because of a narrative of empiricism, rather than an acknowledgement of one’s own embodied and tacit investment in moral and aesthetic discourses.

The ‘body-subject’ and medicine As I have previously discussed, medicine reads bodies and constitutes pathology through an insistence on rationality and scientific objectivity. Medical science insists on not only an objective body, but also on the centrality of consciousness for knowing the world, and making the world intelligible to us. What is disavowed by medical discourse is this very inseparability of our bodily being-in-the-world from the world (and the discourses) in which we are always already situated. In the case of illness (or pathology), the clinician is assumed to ‘know’ the body presented to him for healing as diseased: a knowledge


that is constructed as operating independently of his irrevocable rootedness in the world, and his tacit body knowledges. These corporeal knowledges cannot ever be consciously overcome in favour of objective enquiry, precisely because, as I have shown with the help of Merleau-Ponty, we can only ever know at the level of the body. What then happens in the space of the clinic is a clash between the lived and experiencing ‘body-subject’ and the empiricist ‘objective’ body. As Drew Leder claims, “it could be said that the patient presents the lived-body for treatment while the doctor treats the Cartesian or object body” (Leder, 1984, p. 32). This resonates with Emily Martin’s groundbreaking study in her book, The Woman in the Body: A Cultural Analysis of Reproduction (1987). Martin interviews a large number of women in the United States across different socio-economic backgrounds and racial groups to look at the language they employ to refer to their bodies during menstruation, childbirth and menopause. She looks at the way women perceive themselves as fractured beings, and how their identities are fundamentally fragmented. Interestingly, Martin talks about modern medical science as contributing to the fragmentation of the woman by understanding the body simply as a machine, thereby “[ignoring] other aspects of our selves, such as our emotions or our relations with other people” (1987, pp. 19–20). Here, Martin suggests the disembodied, disconnected nature of modern medicine, and the ways in which these modes of thinking have permeated our popular consciousness in thinking about our bodies. As women, our bodies have been made strange to us: projects we are set apart from, and even the language we employ to talk about our bodies constantly removes our flesh from our selves. What is ignored though, in the positioning of the body of the patient as an ‘object’, is that the doctor himself is a body. The reality of the clinical encounter is that the doctor cannot be other than a ‘bodysubject’, and his bodily being is not defined by a consciousness operating independently of his body. As Diprose insists, “the clinician is a body given to a world of the other and immersed within it” (Diprose, 2002, p. 118). In this way, the doctor is always already an embodied subject who relates to the body-subject of the patient intercorporeally, and ‘perceives’ the patient at the level of the body: moreover, “if the clinician is not a god, then [his] ability to know the other’s body is limited insofar as [his] social history” (2002, p. 119). And yet, as I have previously demonstrated, the body of the doctor is never figured in the clinical encounter, as the space of the clinic operates as a space


characterised by scientific rationality and objectivity. The gaze of the doctor is diagnostic: it regards the objective body in terms of either health or pathology, as either ‘functional’ or ‘broken’. In understanding the body as an object that is either in working order, or damaged, a reduction of the body to a ‘thing’ is effected. For if, as Diprose suggests, “medicine assumes that the body is merely a thing which requires fixing, then it is likely to perpetuate the alienation inherent in the collapse of the lived body” (Diprose, 1994, p. 110). The ‘broken’ or pathological body is thus objectified by medicine, constructing it simply as a ‘malfunctioning’ appendage to a core ‘essence’. At this point, I would like to offer the story of Betty Shermer, a woman ‘diagnosed’ as ‘obese’ by her doctor, and thus as ‘in possession’ of a ‘malfunctioning’ body. Shermer was thus instructed to undergo a risky surgical procedure known as an intestinal bypass. This procedure involves bypassing a large section of the intestine in order to restrict the amount of food that can be ingested, and to limit the amount of caloric energy and fat that can be absorbed by the body, as food passes more quickly through a much shorter length of intestine. In this way, rapid weight loss is effected. Shermer did in fact lose much of her weight, but her bypass was not a simple procedure. As a result of the surgery, which has a number of known risks, Shermer suffered the following catastrophic health problems: After the surgery…I started having a higher fever [caused by an infection]….I got yellow jaundice and a collapsed lung. I lost half of my hair. I lost the skin on my hands, feet, and legs. I think that was from the fever. The doctor told me that the lining of my stomach had rotted; this was also from the fever. I was nauseous, throwing up constantly…I could not brush my teeth because it would make me throw up. My mouth was always dirty. I couldn’t get anything clean. I’d wake up with my side draining over everything. I didn’t want to go near anyone because I knew I must have a terrible odour….I was so deathly ill I didn’t care if I lived or died (1983, pp. 158–159). In undergoing the procedure to ‘fix’ her ‘pathological’ body, Shermer was abject(ed) even further. As a woman positioned as ‘fat’ by society, and as ‘pathological’ by medicine, her objective body was ‘treated’ by medicine, and reduced to a ‘thing’. And yet the account of the trauma of her lived experience post-operatively may prompt many to ask, what indeed was ‘fixed’ by medicine? Shermer says: “I was in perfect health before, now I’m not. But I feel 100% better being 100 pounds thinner


in this society” (Shermer in Schoenfielder & Wieser, 1983, p. 159). Given this, medical discourse might say that in spite of this, Shermer’s body is now ‘fixed’. But the ‘objective’ body of Shermer that medicine claims to have ‘fixed’ has, in fact, been further ‘broken’ by medical intervention. Shermer concludes: …my liver is damaged as a result [of the bypass]. I have to have blood tests every three months for the rest of my life. If I should have trouble with my liver now, the best thing would be for me to have the intestine reconnected. I’d never do that unless it was a matter of life and death, and even then I don’t know if I’d do it (1983, p. 157). Medical discourse cannot separate itself from the world in which it is constituted, nor can clinicians ‘know’ at an objective level, as they too, are embodied beings who perceive at the level of their corporeality and in the context of their own corporeal histories. Ironically, Shermer’s intestinal bypass reduced her biologically ‘functioning’ (albeit ‘fat’) body to a ‘broken’ body (despite its re-situation on the ‘acceptable’ side of the health/pathological binary). However, more significantly, Shermer’s lived body was reduced to a ‘thing’ by medicine, and co-extensively, has instituted in her a bodily alienation. Diprose writes that “[a]lienation is not about losing ownership of one’s body. Rather, it is about the reduction of the lived body to a thing” (1994, p. 110, my emphasis). This alienation, I would argue, is also particularly salient in women’s lived (gendered) embodiment. Despite Shermer’s post-operative illness, and the pain she suffered, she suggests that even in the face of further suffering, she would not want to reverse the procedure if it meant that her body would again be positioned in-the-world as ‘fat’. For her, the trauma of being deemed ‘fat’ surpasses the physical pain she suffered after the procedure to rid her self of her ‘fat’ flesh. Biomedical approaches to the body necessitate its reduction of a body to a ‘thing’, thus co-extensively universalising the experience of all bodies through the assumption of its project towards a ‘common good’. In and through this universalising response, medicine effectively erases difference, as part of an agenda for ‘health’, and more significantly, ‘normalisation.’ Thus, Merleau-Ponty’s insistence on a body-subject, instead of the reduction of a body to a ‘thing’, “not only reinstates the dignity of the patient by stressing that the fabric upon which biomedicine works is the self, but it also highlights the specificity of that person’s condition, however common that condition may appear to be (Diprose, 1994, p. 110).


Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological body-subject, then, in its lived being-in-the-world, challenges the universalising of experience, and calls into question the problematic diagnostic medical gaze as generalising the understanding of a patient’s suffering, based simply on a pathology assigned via empirical observation. The lived reality of the patient is ignored in the context of the curative imperative, where the patient’s embodied being is disavowed in favour of the ‘healing’ of illness, and eradication of pathogens. What is ironic is that this universalising move towards a ‘common good’ also undergirds the political project of fat activism. As I discussed in the previous chapter, in its celebratory imperatives, fat pride tacitly succeeds in universalising the lived experience of ‘fatness’ for all women, and therefore, even within its foundation in liberation, is fundamentally premised upon (like medicine) an economy of the same. What is also ironic, in the founding of medical discourse and fat politics on an economy of the same, and is that simultaneously central to both of these universalising approaches is a commitment to individualism. It is the concept of the ‘individual’ Merleau-Ponty dissolves in his exegesis of the ‘flesh-of-the-world’, and it is this ‘flesh-of-theworld’ (that describes the necessary and irrevocable ambiguity of our lived existence) that I will discuss in the final chapter that follows.

9 Embodiment as Ambiguity: ‘Fatness’ as it is Lived

I know myself only in so far as I am inherent in time and in the world, that is, I know myself only in my ambiguity (Merleau-Ponty, 1962, p. 345). For Merleau-Ponty, your corporeal schema is never individual: it is fundamentally intersubjective and specific to your social and familial situation. Further, as a corporeal schema is constituted in relation to others, it is ambiguous. Insofar as any body claims absolute self-identity and difference from the other through building a partition between their body and the body of the other, this ambiguity is suppressed (Diprose, 1994, p. 119). Merleau-Ponty’s last work, published after his death, including many of his working notes for concepts he intended to develop further, was entitled The Visible and the Invisible. In this work, he presents a closer investigation of intersubjectivity as he outlined in The Phenomenology of Perception, making use of a biological term – ‘chiasm’ – to explain the inextricable connection of the self to the other in intercorporeal relations. In other words, his project of dismantling binary structures that have governed Western thought, such as mind/body and self/other, continues in The Visible and The Invisible in a more profound and considered manner than his previous assertions. Whilst, as the story of the ‘mirror-stage’ shows, Merleau-Ponty does not dismiss the boundaries of the subject that make possible such relations as being looked at, and looking, and touching and being touched, he does however stress that the relationship between self and other is essential to the construction of individual identities. As discussed previously in relation to fat politics, in ‘changing one’s mind’ about one’s body, we insist that the centre of all meaning and 169


power resides in the individual, and attribute nothing to the world, others and intersubjective relations. The individualistic premise of fat activism that offers agency and emancipation through a privileging of the mind over the body is then mythic, as it discounts the culturally and historically specific discourses that as Alcoff claims, structure for us ‘a perceptual backdrop’ that mobilises particular ways of seeing. Alcoff argues, as Merleau-Ponty does, that meaning is always bodily, and that dominant discourses and aesthetics that structure our perception always make different bodies mean particular things to us, albeit tacitly. What the liberal humanist logic that fat pride expounds inevitably occludes is the fact that subjectivity is always already an intersubjectivity. The experiencing body is a fundamentally intersubjective body. One experiences through one’s body and the bodies of others. By negating the experiences and bodily responses of others, as fat politics so often urges its members to do, one cannot experience the potentialities and possibilities of one’s own ‘fat’ body. Returning to Regina Williams’ essay “Conquering the Fear of a Fat Body: The Journey towards Myself”, which I discussed in the previous chapter, the title of Williams’ article here is in itself telling with respect to the split she is attempting to live under the mantle of an unambiguous ‘fat’ political identity. The title speaks to us of a fundamental Cartesian-ness. Williams appears to be advocating an overcoming of the ‘fat’ body in order to know her self.

Flesh: the chiasmatic reversibility While Merleau-Ponty acknowledges a fundamental ‘dehiscence’, or split, that demarcates one body from the next, he argues for a reconceptualisation of intercorporeal relations that are dependent on us understanding ourselves, others and the world as all part of the same ‘Flesh’ – “the flesh of the world” (Merleau-Ponty, 1968, p. 248). He says: When I find again the actual world such as it is, under my hands, under my eyes, up against my body, I find much more than an object: a Being of which my vision is a part, a visibility older than my operations or my acts. But this does not mean that there was a fusion or coinciding of me with it: on the contrary, this occurs because a sort of dehiscence opens my body in two, and because between my body looked at and my body looking, my body touched and my body touching, there is overlapping or encroach-

Embodiment as Ambiguity: ‘Fatness’ as it is Lived 171

ment, so that we must say that the things pass into us as well as we into things (1968, p. 123). For Merleau-Ponty, there is a “non-dualistic divergence” (Reynolds, 2005) between the bodily experience of touching and being touched, and in turn, this forces a dissolution of a clear binary structure, whereby the possibility of touching and being touched encroach upon each other and give rise to the possibility of us being altered, and in turn, altering others and the world. Merleau-Ponty’s formulation of this divergence that does not rely on the self/other dichotomy, disposes with the understanding of absolute individuality that privileges the rational, thinking being. Merleau-Ponty’s best-known example offered in explanation of this idea is his account of one’s own hand grasping one’s other hand. He says: It is time to emphasize that it is a reversibility always imminent and never realized in fact. My left hand is always on the verge of touching my right hand touching the things, but I never reach coincidence: the coincidence eclipses at the moment of realization, and one of two things always occurs: either my right hand really passes over to the rank of touched, but then its hold on the world is interrupted; or it retains its hold on the world, but then I do not really touch it – my right hand touching, I palpate with my left hand only its outer covering (1968, pp. 147–148). The example Merleau-Ponty offers here demonstrates his crucial claim of a quasi-separation between the body-subject and the world, that is nevertheless subtended by a fundamental interconnection, folding over into each other, dissolving binary structures and dualistic imaginings of the body as opposed to the world. If the world is brought into being and made to mean under our hands and eyes (that is, in and through perception) as Merleau-Ponty argues, so too are we constantly modified and structured by the world. This concept is what MerleauPonty refers to as the “flesh of the world” (1968, p. 248). …My body is made of the same flesh as the world…, and moreover …this flesh of my body is shared by the world, and the world reflects it, encroaches upon it and it encroaches upon the world (1968, p. 248). ‘Flesh’, then, for Merleau-Ponty operates as an apt corporeal metaphor for intersubjectivity and indeed for the essential ambiguity that he


argues marks our lived experience. Stemming from this ambiguity, of the constant and ongoing encroachment of the world on us and vice versa, the attempt to define the world and/or the body in terms of binary oppositions is weakened and made untenable. The body is not, then, simply a subject, or an object, not simply a tabula rasa, or a disembodied consciousness. Rather, the body-subject emerges as a mediator between the sensing self and the world, and as the fleshly site of meaning-bearing intersections between inside and outside, self and other, subjects and objects (Taylor, 1987, p. 69). Merleau-Ponty’s notion of ‘flesh’, then, effectively extinguishes the presence of absolutes in terms of isolated individualism which makes projects of ‘coming out’ and fat liberation eminently problematic given their bases in the self/other dichotomy. As Taylor articulates, “never reducible to the differences it simultaneously joins and separates, the body is forever entre-deux” (Taylor, 1987, p. 69). In this way, the reversibility of ‘flesh’ cuts across any distinctions we try to make between self and other, and between our bodies and the bodies of others, as it insists on fundamentally chiasmatic relations. The concept of an ‘outside’ is dissolved: “the perceiver or commentator belongs to what they see or comment upon as flesh of its flesh, and furthermore, it exists as something seen or commented upon only because they exist to see it” (Crossley, 1994, p. 14). Given this encroachment, and dissolution of boundaries, binaries and oppositions (at least in the clear-cut manner we have conceptualised them in the history of Western thought), our lived existence is always haunted, and defined by a fundamental ambiguity: we do not exist in-the-world as discrete objects, but as part of a ‘flesh’. MerleauPonty does not deny that it is possible to make use of distinctions between one subject and another, one subject as seen and one as the seer, however he is at pains to point out that all of these binary structures are always constituted in relation to one another, not independently of its counterpart. In other words, despite the distinctions that can be made between subjects, between objects, Merleau-Ponty insists that a pre-cultural overarching unity reaches across these points of difference. This unity is what Merleau-Ponty refers to as ‘flesh’. For Merleau-Ponty, ‘flesh’ does not simply refer to the skin that encases our bones, and flesh does not terminate at the tips of our fingers, or at soles of our feet. Flesh does not refer to the outside only, does not refer to a body as distinct from a consciousness, but encompasses inside and outside, and in doing so, collapses the binary structure of inside/outside. Flesh is idea, habit, action, matter and meaning.


Flesh extends beyond the body, to encompass the world, all matter and all meaning. In other words, as body-subjects, we are always already part of the ‘flesh-of-the-world.’ In thinking this through one might consider that while we think of there being such a thing as empty space between people and objects, “the universe is really full with no empty space at all” (2001, pp. 63–64). That is, whilst there are ‘body-subjects’, we are all implicated in a pre-conscious, primordial ‘being-with’ that dissolves any conception of Cartesian logic. As Merleau-Ponty explains: There is not the For Itself and the For the Other. They are each the other side of the other. This is why they incorporate one another: projection-introjection – There is that line, that frontier surface at some distance before me, where occurs the veering I-Other Other-I – (1968, p. 263). This quotation, taken from the ‘working notes’ in Merleau-Ponty’s final work, asserts that we cannot think of our embodied being as two separate entities: a being for one’s self, and a being for others. Rather, Merleau-Ponty argues, they are always already connected, and are indissociable, as we are always already situated in an interworld defined by our relations with others. The line between self and other, Merleau-Ponty insists, is unable to be maintained as we necessarily play across each other, make each other mean, and bring each other into being.

‘Fat’ ambiguous lived experience Central to the concerns of the liberal humanist project, particularly its model of individuality (which I have argued is deployed by fat activists), is the existence of a ‘knowable’ and stable core self, where our true ‘essence’ is contained. Meaning arises from the necessary intersubjective relations, rather than meaning being something that originates in us through conscious rational reflection. The overarching project espoused by fat liberation refers back to what Foucault suggests as a cultivation of the self. The fat activist project by and large is concerned with celebrating the body via changing one’s mind about the conditions we allegedly have the choice to permit or forbid in shaping our daily lived experience as ‘fat’ women. In celebrating the body through changing one’s mind about dominant discourses that circulate in our intersubjective world, the dualistic conception of mind/body is reaffirmed, and the power of the rational mind to overcome the body and intersubjective responses to it privileges the conscious self over the body, and establishes a reliance on


liberal individualism in the cultivation of a self that is interested in rejecting dominant discourses. As I mentioned in the previous chapter, Cynthia McQuillin did in fact pose nude for the book, and notes “how hard it is to come out in this book and say ‘Hey! Look at me,’ in a way where no one can fail to really see me” (1994, p. 98). Context here is central, as the project of the book, such as that of Women En Large, is a celebratory one, in order to represent ‘fat’ women outside of dominant frameworks of abjection, and reconfigure ‘fatness’ as a counteraesthetic, as beautiful. In this way, the ‘fat’ model would experience liberation and empowerment which are directly related to the context of the situation she finds herself in, where she is (re)presenting her ‘fatness’ not as something to be hidden, but as something to be embraced, visibilised and read in the context of a counter-aesthetic political impetus to celebrate ‘fatness’ as beautiful, strong and desirable. Now, at this point, it is crucial to note that the model is participating in an important political moment of (re)inscription of ‘fatness’, but to assume that a sense of empowerment and celebration is the only emotion she experiences is, as Merleau-Ponty would suggest, disingenuous. McQuillin may feel discomfort, self-consciousness and difficulty in experiencing her body in the way her political context requires her to. The possibility of ‘throwing off’ the dominant discourses that have marked and inscribed her ‘fatness’ over the course of her life, and that have indeed formed her own corporeal schema and mode of being-inthe-world are revealed as an untenable task given the very encrustment of these notions in the joints of McQuillin’s being. Again, Merleau-Ponty’s fundamental insistence on the ever-present condition of ambiguity emerges. The reversibility of inside and outside, of centre and periphery, of true and false, are always already formulated in a Merleau-Pontyian sense as two sides of a coin that are always part of one another, always infect one another, and indeed bring each other into being, not as separate entities, but as ‘non-dualistic divergences’ that always co-implicate each other in their operation and are lived out inseparably from each other in our embodied encounters with the world. Ambiguity, then, comes from an irrevocable set of intersubjective relations in and through which we are formed and (re)formed. In fat politics, it is ambivalence towards one’s own body as that which effects a split because of the perceived ‘deviation’ from a committed political identity. However, I would argue that it is the denial, disavowal and rejection of ambivalence, and the irrevocable presence of this ambiguity in our embodied being-in-the-world that effects the mind-body split.


The mind-body split emerges as a useful tool in ‘overcoming’ the ‘fat body’ in fat politics, as it becomes possible to celebrate a ‘fat’ identity, albeit a fundamentally disembodied identity. Given this, a Cartesian logic is mobilised that privileges consciousness and cogito over an embodied subjectivity, and tacitly positions the ‘fat’ body as a “drag on consciousness” (Bordo, 1993, pp. 1–3), and makes the ‘fat’ body an obstacle to the self that can only be resolved through its tacit disavowal. What then can be said about the experiencing body and bodily experience? I would argue that the way we attempt to live an incarnation of a real ‘inner self’ is always inflected with ambiguity, and this in turn calls into question the possibility of a certain self-knowledge. This recalls Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s claim that it is possible to ‘come out’ as a ‘fat’ woman (which of course requires the belief and conviction in an essential self), where she says the key is “uttering bathetically as a brave declaration [the] truth that can scarcely in this instance ever have been less than self-evident” (1993, p. 230). Is the ‘core’ self of the ‘fat’ women then to be found in her ‘fat’ flesh, through an acknowledgement of it as proclamation of one’s ‘fatness’ as the sum truth of oneself? Given this, is a declaration of one’s ‘fatness’ about recognising a body in order to set it aside as an obstacle to the realisation of an ‘essential’ self that dwells within the body, and exists separate from it, thus privileging the mind over the body? This then, as Bordo has noted, sees the body emerge “as animal, as appetite, as deceiver, as prison of the soul and confounder of its projects” (1993, p. 3). However, in taking into account Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of ambiguity, we can conceive of ambiguity as something other than disempowering, limiting and situating us as hopeless subjects incapable of agency or agentic practice(s). Merleau-Ponty’s insistence on the necessary ambiguity of lived experience asks us to acknowledge the fundamental ‘uncertainty’ of our understanding of the world and ourselves, and the centrality of intersubjective relations to our embodiment. This concept of ambiguity, then, calls into question the value, potential and possibility of the liberal individual and the essential self, critiquing the limitation of the humanist understanding of the subject by demonstrating the impossibility of ‘absolute’ truth, and ‘absolute’ individualism. At best, it would appear that political mobilisation of an ‘essential’ self becomes a kind of mask one wears, and attitude one adopts, rather than a real and meaningful engagement with the world and with others. For Merleau-Ponty, there is an ambiguity that cannot be overcome (between the self and the


other), and for fat politics there is an ambiguity that cannot be tolerated. Let me explore this tension. As Merleau-Ponty’s account of the ‘mirror-stage’ clearly illustrates, ambiguity arises from a fundamental ‘confusion’ (Diprose, 1994, p. 121) between self and other. Nevertheless, in hegemonic culture, this ambiguity is disavowed. As Merleau-Ponty notes, there are two ways in which we can most commonly overcome ambiguity. The first way involves making the assumption that the other is identical to us, and the second way is through positioning the difference of the other as an ‘absolute difference’, whereby the other represents all that the self does not want (Diprose, 1994, p. 122). What both of these approaches insist upon is a firm binary structure between the self and the other, as well as the conviction that identity (both of the self and the other) is fixed and static, able to be known and understood, and untroubled by intersubjective relations. In effacing any difference in the other, Merleau-Ponty says that we reproduce a problematic liberal humanism that insists on the sameness of all people, and an ignorance of the particularities of our respective experiences and situations. For as Merleau-Ponty has stressed that “[there are] striking differences of situation – differences which pertain to the collectivity in which [we] have lived and received [our] initial training” (1964, p. 106). In the Primacy of Perception, Merleau-Ponty makes a crucial insight into the function of the terms “ambivalence” and “ambiguity”: Ambivalence consists in having two alternative images of the same object, the same person, without any effort to connect them or to notice that in reality they relate to the same object and the same person…[Ambiguity] consists in admitting that the same being who is good and generous can also be annoying and imperfect. Ambiguity is ambivalence that one dares to look at face to face (1964, pp. 102–103, my emphasis). What Merleau-Ponty alludes to here is the fundamental impossibility of one’s subjectivity as being fixed and/or stable. Rather, he demonstrates that subjectivity is always already unfixed, unstable, multiple and contradictory. In this way, ambiguity is the very state of our lived existence. Ambivalence is a response that attempts to overcome this state, whereas ambiguity is the state of our existence in itself. In that sense, this quotation from Merleau-Ponty is not to be read as a call to arms: it is not a call to see oneself and others in a more neo-liberal broadminded, tolerant way, but functions as a mode of bearing witness


to the fundamental complexities and heterogeneity of our being-inthe-world. The term ambivalence I would suggest is related to a conception of a body image, which does in fact intimate an understanding of the body as something you see as separate from your self, and as something that is always already superimposed on, and measured against, popular representations of normative (female) bodies, which then always offers up ambivalence based on competing images of the same body (one’s own body). Ambivalence, then, as it functions in the experiences of many ‘fat’ women involved with the fat pride movement, suggests a tacit division between the body (and the images one holds of it) and the self as an autonomous being that allegedly decides and chooses its investment in the world and can throw off constitutive discourses. In contrast to this, I would then offer that ambiguity is related to one’s body schema, whereby there is a recognition of the multiple aspects that construct us as subjects, and that dispenses with a conception of identity as being singular, stable and eminently knowable (to us, and to others). Ambiguity then, is a means of living the various incorporations into our body schemas, which, rather than being images of bodies, are our bodies that move towards a world, and give us a world. We are always already embodied, and embodiment is necessarily accompanied by ambiguity. To shun ambiguity is to deny its very constitutive nature in us as subjects and effects a split subjectivity that can-not ‘be-in-the-world’ as a wholly celebratory political ‘fat’ identity. In embodying an ambiguity, a powerful political act is effected. In being a body-in-the-world who experiences through one’s body rather than attempting a conscious overturning of this project by removing oneself from one’s body has powerful – and painful – political implications. To experience ambiguity as a progression from ambivalence is not in fact a retrograde step. Rather, it asks for us to reconceptualise our understanding of ourselves as body-subjects that are multiple, unfixed and always in process. Ambiguity is not an obstacle for political action, as it merely describes a fundamental and irrevocable condition of our lived embodiment. In acknowledging that we cannot, and indeed never are, shut off from the world and from others as isolated individuals, it is in the spaces and fissures that ambiguity opens for us as body-subjects, and an awareness of the tacit impossibility of an individualist project of the self to overcome the body, and the incompleteness of us as body-subjects. In this awareness, in this lived ambiguity, a political act unfolds in-theworld, and this political act, as Merleau-Ponty has elsewhere insisted, will


always play across the body of another and modify it, just as it plays across and modifies me as a ‘fat’ woman.

Freedom, autonomy and the body-subject Merleau-Ponty, as I have shown, rejects determinism precisely because it requires subjects to exist simply as ‘things’, rather than, as MerleauPonty insists, ‘body-subjects’. For subjects to be determined, they would also have to exist as autonomous beings separate from their context, situation, environment, and world (Crossley, 1994, p. 32). Rosalyn Diprose identifies some key problematic assumptions we make about a traditional conception of freedom. Firstly, she argues that freedom presupposes a fully-formed liberal self, and is therefore equivalent to autonomy. Secondly, she claims that freedom relies on a liberal humanist notion of rationality, which necessarily separates the self from the body. Finally, Diprose argues that our commonly understood notion of ‘freedom’ assumes that there is a ‘common good’ to which we should all aspire, and more significantly, that consists of values that are universal, and that are in the interests of every body (1994, pp. 102–103). However, for Merleau-Ponty, the possibility for freedom lies in his understanding of ‘habit’. Precisely because of our ‘situatedness’ in-theworld, we must respond to situations we find ourselves in and ultimately, some of these responses may become habitual. The ‘response’ Merleau-Ponty speaks of, however, is not one borne of free-will or selfgovernance. Freedom, for Merleau-Ponty, is always inextricably linked to ‘choice’. However, Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of choice is not a liberal humanist insistence on autonomy and self-authorship. Rather, Merleau-Ponty insists: …choice presupposes a prior engagement with and belongingness to the world which cannot, if infinite regression is to be avoided, be chosen itself: it presupposes a meaningful view of and grasp upon the world, a set of preferences and a means of deliberation (Crossley, 2001, p. 134). In other words, any choice that can be made by us is always already rooted in a situatedness in-the-world that is inescapable (and thus, cannot be chosen), but that any choice that is meaningful can only ever be towards-a-world. To assume that choice is dependent upon transcending this rootedness in the world is to assume a pre-cultural,


pre-discursive self that operates outside of, what Merleau-Ponty terms, the ‘flesh-of-the-world’, in which we are all irrevocably implicated. Choice, then, is a negotiation of our position within this ‘flesh’, and consequently, choice, like freedom, cannot be absolute. In every choice, we are transformed, according to Merleau-Ponty, however this transformation is always already situated in a history, and in a world. We cannot disimplicate our subjectivity from its connectedness, nor can we expect to (re)make ourselves anew with each choice we make. Of course, as Merleau-Ponty insists, we act in the world in and through habit. Our habitual behaviour can be creative, can be open to choice, even as we are situated subjects. For Merleau-Ponty, freedom is not absolute – it is always already a situated freedom. Merleau-Ponty insists that freedom is predicated on the irreducibility of the body-subject to a ‘thing’ through a process of self-objectification or via another’s interpretation. Freedom, then, is always bounded by the ambiguity that haunts Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy, and indeed our lived existence. Diprose writes: Freedom is the condition of being-in-the-world in the mode of a pre self-conscious, pre-individual engagement with an open, ambiguous situation which we structure and resolve according to a corporeal style or schema built from our particular social history…yet freedom is not absolute (1994, p. 107). In other words, freedom, and the choices we make, are always delimited by one’s corporeal schema, one’s situation, corporeal history, and by others. In the same way we can be objectified in a doctor’s gaze, or in the eyes of passer-by in the street, our embodied freedom is bounded by the discursive structures that constitute not only the body-subject, but also the bodies of others, and the relations between them. Diprose claims: Others restrict our freedom, not because they interfere with an original autonomy…but by an intolerance to our bodily comportment towards the world, an intolerance which may reduce us from an open-ended mode of belonging to a world to ‘being-in-the-world in the way of a thing’ (1994, p. 107). In other words, contra the repressive hypothesis of which Foucault is critical, it is not that we are firstly ‘subjects’ who are reduced to ‘things’ in the restriction of our original freedom and autonomy. Rather, the


status of ‘object’ is (re)produced in and through culturally and historically specific discourses that attempt to produce ‘truths’, seek to overcome ambivalence and disavow ambiguity. What ambivalence does, then, is to disavow the ambiguity of our rootedness in-the-world, and in doing so, attempts to concretise one side of the dichotomy of self/ other. In tacitly seeking singularity through the disavowal of ambiguity, ambivalence closes down our openness to others and to a world. Moreover, it closes down our openness to change. In concretising being, it constitutes being as an ‘object’, rather than a mode of existence. In other words, being becomes an ‘object’ of knowledge, rather than an intersubjective mode of becoming and unbecoming. Nowhere is this clearer than in the medical and liberationist accounts of ‘fatness’. In these accounts, there emerges an intolerance towards ‘fat’ bodily comportment: in medicine, this bodily comportment is read as ‘pathological’ and abject(ed), and therefore cannot belong. Fat politics fails to realise that others do indeed restrict our freedom, in their assumption that medicine (and its popular cultural permutations) interferes with an original autonomy. This model of self-governance is, in fact, a fiction. Fat politics does not adequately address the fundamental intersubjective nature of our being-in-the-world.

Conclusion The aim of my discussion in this final section has not been to offer a new model for ‘fat’ embodiment, or to call for the eschewal of a universal fat political activism that insists on an unworkable liberal politics of the individual. Rather, with the help of Foucault, Merleau-Ponty, and others, what I have attempted is to construct a clearer picture of the realities of ‘fat’ women’s lived experience in a fundamentally intersubjective world. I have demonstrated the way in which we are always already intersubjective beings that are formed and (re)formed through our encounters with others. I have posited that it is in the understanding of the centrality of intersubjectivity to our lived experience in-the-world, that the real possibilities for political action present themselves, beyond the sphere of a purely individualist politics. In conceiving of bodily being that exists beyond limiting binarisms, or a fundamental commitment to a prediscursive ‘self’, I have attempted to think through new possibilities for living the flesh and all its ambiguities and particularities.

An Afterword: ‘Fat’ Bodily Being?

In light of my critique of medicine, and fat politics, and my close engagement with Merleau-Ponty here, the question remains: what now? If fat politics is guilty of reproducing the very ‘intellectualist’ approaches of medicine that it wants to reject, then what kind of ‘fat’ body politics may in fact offer women positioned as ‘fat’ a more productive and enabling means of being-in-the-world? The problems I have identified with the individualist politics of fat pride have drawn me to Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of being-with, of intersubjective relations. Similarly, my dissatisfaction with the (tacit) reaffirmation of the mind/body split in fat liberatory narratives drew me to Merleau-Ponty’s insistence on bodily-being, and situatedness in an interworld. I would suggest that Merleau-Ponty’s work offers a more productive, enabling and embodied politics of lived experience. In defining a mode of bodily being-in-the-world which does not rely on binary oppositions or the insistence of a certain and fixed identity that is constituted only by the consciousness of the individual, MerleauPonty offers new possibilities for embodied being, and moving in the world as an embodied subject, rather than as a body that houses a self; a self that is motivated by a political project of overcoming the ‘fat’ body, and the responses it elicits. I have been most concerned here with problematising existing dominant discourses on the ‘fat’ body, and with opening up new debates about ‘fat’ women, with the aim of shifting the burgeoning field of fat theory beyond the socio-political into a philosophical analysis of where/when/how is our ‘bodily-being-in-the-world’ made ‘flesh’? I have sought to consider new ways of conceiving embodiment, and our bodily being-in-the-world, and to insist that these new conceptualisations of embodied being have powerful political implications and applications. 181

182 An Afterword

Again, I wish to stress that it is not my intention to institute a new prescriptive mode for fat politics that promises to achieve a radical resignification of ‘fat’ (female) bodies. Rather, I have demonstrated with Merleau-Ponty’s help, the irrevocable centrality of the body to our lived experience, and the fact of fundamental ambiguity in this lived embodiment, that far from being disabling and disempowering, actually serves to (re)connect the body to the self and enable a means to live the ‘fat’ body in ways that explore more fully its political potentialities in an intersubjective world. In and through Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of the ‘body-subject’, I have presented a critique, that is, in itself, a creative undertaking, and a political act.

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Index A Critical Introduction to Queer Theory 33, 98–100 Abbott Australasia 80–81 abjection 4, 5, 41, 42, 89, 97, 99, 107, 109, 119, 166, 174, 180 abstinence 66 addiction 14, 15, 40, 57, 59–67, 83, 97, 107, 131 aesthetics 2, 7, 9, 14, 16, 38–41, 69, 71–73, 80, 81, 89, 90–93, 103, 113, 116–121, 123–124, 125–130, 132–133, 135, 137, 142, 152, 170, 174 see also ‘fat’ counter-aesthetic; normative bodily being; aesthetics of existence aesthetics of existence 90, 125–129, 132–133, 137 see also ‘fat’ counter-aesthetic Alcoff, Linda Martin 31–36, 56, 75, 98, 110, 139, 148, 170 alcoholism 49, 66–67, 107 see also addiction alienation 152, 166–167, 179 see also objectification “All hyped up and no place to go” 115–116 ambiguity 6, 8, 89, 99, 109, 133–134, 137–138, 142–145, 152, 156, 169, 170–172, 173–178, 180, 182 cf ambivalence ambivalence (cf ambiguity) 89, 99, 109, 134, 137, 144, 174–177, 180 American Obesity Association 30 asexual ‘big girl’ 94, 123 Ayuso, Lisa 143, 144, 145

being-in-the-world 5, 6, 32, 70, 87, 91, 125, 129, 133, 138, 147–168, 174, 177 see also ‘fat’ being-in-the-world; corporeal schema Bell 115–116 Berger, John 118, 120 Big Big Love: A Sourcebook on Sex for People of Size and Those Who Love Them 124, 131 biology 28, 31, 44, 52, 66, 100, 140, 169 Blank, Hanne 124, 131 BMI (Body Mass Index) 17, 19–20, 72, 73, 80 bodily literacies 13–14, 34 see also lipoliteracy; body as confession bodily styles see comportment; being-in-the-world; women; men body 70–71, 88 as confession 70–71, 74–81, 97 distance from 92, 109, 123–124, 128, 134, 137, 140, 143, 153–154 see also Cartesian dualism as house/container 154 see also being-in-the-world, somataphoboia body modification 59–61, 163 body-subject 26, 46, 75, 96, 127, 138, 140, 146, 147, 151, 157–160, 162, 167–168, 171–173, 177–179 Bordo, Susan 175 Burry, John 70–73 Butler, Judith 89, 90, 111–115

Barnett, Richard 18, 19 beauty 1, 2, 34, 91, 93–95, 123–124, 127–129 see also aesthetics; normative bodily being; women, normative feminine bodily styles

Canguilhem, Georges 45, 47 Carnal Appetites: FoodSexIdentities 58 Cartesian (mind/body) Dualism 5–6, 90, 92–93, 98, 108–110, 123–124, 134, 137, 140, 147, 149, 153, 162–165, 169, 170, 173, 175, 177, 181–182

189

190 Index Cecil Textbook of Medicine 47–51 Chang and Christakis 47–51, 55 chiasm 169–172 child development (Merleau-Ponty) 150–157 choice 4, 22–26, 27, 29, 30, 46, 49, 61, 67, 81, 90, 92, 99, 112–113, 118, 127, 131, 173, 178–179 see also voluntarism; disciplinary medicine; coming out (fat) clinical gaze 11, 21, 34–43, 76, 82, 164–165, 167, 180 coming out (fat) 90, 95–100, 109, 133, 137, 138, 139, 146, 172, 175 comportment 160–161, 179, 180 see also being-in-the-world; corporeal schema confession 3, 14, 21, 68, 70, 71, 74–81, 91–92, 97, 107, 139–142 see also body, as confession; ‘fat’ as confession of pathology; diagnosis “Conquering the fear of a fat body: The journey towards myself” 170 Cooper, Charlotte 103–104, 137 Corporeal Generosity 37, 77–78, 165 corporeal schema 147, 151, 155, 157–160, 163, 169, 174, 177, 179 corpulence 18 Costain, Lyndel and Croker, Helen 23–24 counter-aesthetic see ‘fat’ counteraesthetic Crossley, Nick 147, 148, 153, 164, 172, 178 cultural imaginary 13–43, 114 cure 2, 16–18, 28, 53, 57, 108, 165–168 deviance 3, 13–14, 16, 31–36, 40, 48, 55, 63, 74 diagnosis 37, 39–40, 45, 46, 63, 66, 76–77, 82, 97, 166, 168 see also confession diet 4, 19–20, 24, 27, 28, 29, 64–67, 69, 72, 102, 124, 140 difference 175–177

Diprose, Rosalyn 37, 77–78, 151, 159, 165–166, 167, 169, 178 disciplinary medicine 4, 7, 9, 15–16, 20, 21–31, 37, 49–51, 72, 81, 83, 89, 188 discipline 4–5, 14, 17, 21, 24, 26, 45, 49, 62, 67, 72, 74, 83, 89, 126 discrimination 39, 101–102, 106, 145 disgust 5, 11, 40–42, 46–47, 58, 123, 124, 131, 138–139 Ditto, Beth (The Gossip) 142–143 divinity 95–100 “Divinity: A dossier, a performance piece, a little understood emotion” 96–100 “Does size really matter? Weights and values in public health” 73 dualism 148–149, 169, 171 eating 4, 18, 24, 29, 48, 52–59, 63, 64–67, 80–81, 131, 162 see also diet, overeating “Eating out: The experience eof eating in public for the overweight woman” 57 Edison, Laurie Toby and Notkin, Debbie 141, 142 embodied subjectivity 6, 8, 31–33, 82, 110, 134, 138, 146, 147–150, 162, 168–173, 175 epidemic 15–16 see also obesity as epidemic “Epidemics of the will” 61–63 erotic weight gain see feederism essentialism 35, 55, 75, 88, 100, 111, 114, 141, 175 ethics 7, 70–73, 125–127, 130 see also aesthetics of existence; individual responsibility eurocentrism 55–56 see also race; whiteness excess 5, 8, 14–15, 18, 59, 113, 124–129, 138 of desire 1, 15, 57, 124, 127 see also addiction of flesh 3, 14, 49, 75, 85, 124, 125, 128–129, 138

Index 191 of food consumption 65, 75, 113, 124 see also eating; overeating Fabrey, William 100–101 ‘fat’ as abject 4, 5, 11, 41, 89 as barrier 94–95, 124 see also body, distance from; ‘fat’ as resistance; Cartesian (mind/body) dualism as biological fact 140 as classed 18–19, 54 as confession of pathology 47–51, 65–68, 71, 73, 74–81, 97 see also patholgisation; pathology; confession; body, as confession as diseased 27, 20, 74 as disease of civilisation 49 as excessive 3, 11, 75, 125, 129, 138 as feminising 92 as failure of will/moral weakness 3, 7, 5–52, 62, 67–68, 83, 124, 129 as gendered 2–3, 4, 39–41, 54–55, 90–95, 105 as indicator of hypersensitivity 52 as indicator of mental health problems 38–41, 83 as indicative of wealth 18–19 as immoral 24, 26, 30, 47 as other 7 as perverse 53 as resistance 93–96, 118 as source of anxiety 3, 7, 21, 47 celebration of 107, 114, 117–121 133, 138–139, 142, 145, 173, 174 embodying 146 see also ‘fat’ being-in-the-world; ‘fat’ people; ‘fat’ women fat acceptance movement see Size Acceptance Movement Fat and Proud: The Politics of Size 103–104 ‘fat’ being-in-the-world 11, 85, 108, 135, 138–139, 142, 146, 160–162

‘fat’ counter-aesthetic 117, 121, 126–130, 142, 174 Fat Feminist Caucus (FFC) 140–141 Fat: Fighting the Obesity Epidemic 52 Fat Girl: A True Story 153 Fat is a Feminist Issue 93–95 “Fat liberation manifesto” 102–103, 104 ‘fat’ people 9, 16, 103–104, 113 as weak 52–55, 83 as gluttonous 55, 57, 129 as hysterical 55 as social pariah 61 as victim 61 as proud 99 ‘fat’-phobia 5, 8, 87, 108–109, 143 see also discrimination ‘fat’ political identity see identity politics fat politics/activism 6, 8, 87–105, 108, 133, 137, 143, 144, 170, 173, 177, 180, 181–182 see also fat pride; size acceptance movement Fat Power 100–101 fat pride 5–8, 89–90, 101, 103–105, 111, 106–121, 128, 129–130, 134, 135, 137, 142, 144–145, 146, 151, 168 170, 177 Fat!So? Zine 105 Fat!So?: Because You Don’t Have to Apologise for your Size 105 Fat Underground (FU) 102–103, 105 ‘fat’ women 54–58, 113, 118–121, 122–123, 125 as aesthetic ideal 117–121 as emotional 54–58 as not overeaters 59 as passive object 94 as repellent see also disgust 41 as resisting objectification 93–95 see also ‘fat’ being-in-the-world; ‘fat’ people; ‘fat’ Food and Drug Administration (FDA) 17 feederism 130–132 femininity see women feminism 7, 8, 58, 90, 93–95, 113, 119, 120, 143, 155

192 Index flesh of the world 14, 170–173, 179 food 17–24, 28–29, 53–67, 69, 80, 93, 113, 131, 162 see also eating; overeating Foucault, Michel 31, 179, 180 aesthetics of existence 90, 121, 125–133, 173, 179 confession 74–78, 107 discipline 7, 21, 24, 28, 31, 83, 118 medicine 15–16, 21, 24, 28 36–37, 42, 44, 61, 83 freedom 26, 139, 178–180 French, Dawn 57, 118–121

heterosexual male gaze 91, 93–95, 122–124 heterosexuality 35, 91–96, 115, 118, 120–121, 154 see also sexuality Hole, Anna 118–120 “Homebodies: Images of ‘inner space’ and domesticity in women’s talk on sex” 154 humanism see liberal humanism; individualism humiliation 5, 6, 11,78, 106–107, 110, 122–123, 128, 133, 135 hunger 64, 66 hypothalamus lesions 51–53

Gard, Michael and Wright, Jan 20, 22, 23, 26 gender 111–118, 153–155, 160–161, 167 Gender Trouble 111–112 Gimlin, Debra 140–141 Global Strategy on Diet, Physical Activity and Health 20, 56 n.7 Graham 13, 34 Greenwood, Kerry 59 Grimshaw, Jean 154–155 Grosz, Elizabeth 13, 69–70, 82

“I Decide” campaign 80–81 identity 6, 25, 58, 87–90, 97, 99–100, 108, 110, 111–117, 118, 123, 135, 138–141, 175–176, 181 gender identity 3, 92, 103 n. 15, 111 identity and difference 30–31, 42, 58, 74, 89, 96, 107, 169 identity politics 9, 87–89, 99–100, 103–105, 108, 111–117, 137, 138, 141–144, 170, 174–177 individual responsibility 4, 14, 17, 20, 21–25, 29, 46–48, 71, 72, 92, 144 see also disciplinary medicine individualism 5, 31, 74, 89, 98, 106, 108, 115–116, 129, 133, 137, 144, 147, 162, 168, 169–170, 172, 173–175, 177, 180, 181–182 see also liberal humanism individuality 156, 169 in-itself and for-others 6, 156, 173 see also intersubjectivity; specularity intercorporeality 32, 42, 69–70, 88–89, 115–116, 138, 150–153, 156–157, 165, 169, 170 International Size Acceptance Association 104 intersubjectivity 6, 36, 42–43, 80, 87, 89, 115, 128, 129, 132–133, 138–139, 147, 151–152, 156, 162, 168, 169–172, 173–176, 180–182

habit 147, 151, 157–159, 160–161, 162, 163–164, 178–179 as addiction 62, 107 see also addiction eating habits 54, 65 see also food; eating; overeating perceptions 32, 148 health 1–7, 11–15, 17–31, 69–70, 79, 35–36, 39, 42–45, 49, 50, 53, 62–73, 79–83, 89, 92, 124, 155, 164, 166–167 as moral 50–51 mental health 38–41, 60 healthy lifestyles 4, 22, 30, 51 see also pathology; normalcy height/weight tables 19, 26, 73 “Helping Individuals to Help Themselves” 23 heredity 47–49, 140 Herndon, April 16

Index 193 Jenny Craig (Weight Loss Company) 19–20 Jutel, Annemarie 27, 73 Keane, Helen

63–67

Lacan, Jacques 152 LeBesco, Kathleen 95–96, 99, 101, 103, 113–114, 116, 145, 146 Leder, Drew 165 Lesbian Avengers 113–115 Levinas, Emmanuel 152 liberal humanism 3, 5, 7–9, 24–26, 37, 46, 50, 53–54, 62–63, 66, 68, 70–71, 77, 81–82, 87–90, 92, 95, 105, 108–110, 113, 114, 116, 137–138, 144, 153, 162, 164, 170, 173–176, 178, 180 see also individualism liberation 8–9, 58, 88–89, 98–100, 102–107, 110, 113–116, 119, 135, 138–141, 146, 151, 168, 172, 173, 174, 180–181 lifestyle 4, 17, 22–30, 48–51, 72–73, 81, 124 lifestyle models 49–50, 124 lipoliteracy 13–14, 34 see also bodily literacies lived body 137, 142, 146, 151, 159, 166–167 Lloyd, Moya 90, 111, 115–116 Louderback, Llewellyn 100–101 Low, Douglas 150, 156 Mama Cass Elliot 102 Manheim, Camryn 117, 131 “Mapping Embodied Deviance” 34 Martin, Emily 165 masculinity see men McLester, Dr. James S. 1–3 McNay, Lois 132, 133 McQuillin, Cynthia 160–162, 174 Meagher, Michelle 117 meaning cultural meanings 13, 26, 46, 82, 120 production of 4, 13, 32–33, 36, 69–70, 87, 100, 115–116, 146,

147–149, 151, 156–159, 163–164, 169–173, 178 medical administration 15, 20, 23, 25–26, 29, 46 see also disciplinary medicine medical authority 3, 5, 7, 11, 22, 34, 38, 50, 60, 70, 73, 76 medical gaze see clinical gaze “Medical Modelling of Obesity: A Transition from Action to Experiencee in a 20th Century American Textbook” 47–51 medicalisation 7, 14, 48–52, 164–165 see also pathologisation men 40, 115, 118, 119, 120, 122, 126, 131–132, 154, 160 ‘fat’ men 2, 91–92, 103 gay men 115 masculine bodily styles 160 see also heterosexual male gaze mental health 38–43, 59–68 see also addiction mental health practitioners 38–40, 60 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 1, 6, 8, 134, 138, 146, 147–153, 155, 169–174, 181–182 Millman, Marcia 78–79, 139–140 mirror stage 150–152, 156–157, 169, 176 see also specularity Mitchell, Allyson 1, 5 Moon, Michael 96–100 Moore, Judith 153 moral panic 57 over obesity 3–5, 7, 14–16 19–20, 22, 27, 35, 89 moral responsibility 21, 25, 48–50 see also individual responsibility motility 158–159, 161, 162 mutilation 59–61 National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance (NAAFA) 101–104, 129, 138–141 National Association to Aid Fat Americans (NAAFA) 100

194 Index National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) 27–31, 72 n.9 No-Diet Day 116 norm 18, 44–47 normalcy 15, 18, 27, 31, 34, 39, 42, 44–45, 56, 58, 61–65, 69, 73, 80, 82 see also pathology normalisation 4, 5, 7, 16, 25, 27, 30, 46, 47, 61–63, 79, 81–82, 100, 108, 127, 130, 133, 167 normative bodily being 3–4, 34, 69, 70–73, 79, 80, 93–95, 117, 123, 126–127, 137, 160–161, 177 see also women, normative feminine bodily styles; beauty; aesthetics Normativity 3, 24, 35, 42, 45, 46, 70, 73, 127–128 Obese Humans and Rats 51–57 “Obesity and Virtue: Is Staying Lean a Matter of Ethics?” 70–73 ‘Obesity’ 18 as disease 4, 14–16, 20, 24, 26, 47–51 as epidemic 4, 20, 22, 89 as contagion 4 ‘fighting’ of 30–31 medical constructions of 47–56, 70 see also ‘fat’ objectification 93, 105, 118–119, 116, 179 see also alienation On the Normal and the Pathological 45 Orbach, Susie 93–96, 124 Osborne, Thomas 25, 44, 79 other (the) 32, 42, 81, 89, 128–130, 132–133, 150, 151, 152, 156, 165, 169, 173, 176 Overeaters Anonymous (OA) 66–68, 107 overeating 17, 48, 54–59, 62–68, 93, 95, 100, 113

parody 111–112, 113–116, 117, 145, 161 passing (as thin) 4, 85, 140 pathologisation 13–21 38–39, 47–51, 62 pathology 3, 14, 37–39, 76, 77, 80, 82, 164 see also health, normalcy perception 14, 31–38, 56, 57, 74–75, 81–82, 87, 97, 98, 110, 139, 147–150, 164, 167 empiricist model of 148–149, 164 see also clinical gaze performance 57–59, 113–117, 142, 160 “Performance, Parody, Politics” 111 performativity 90, 107, 111–113, 116 “Performing Identity: Dawn French and the Funny Fat Female Body” 118 personal responsibility see individual responsibility Pitts, Victoria 59–62 politics of ambiguity 177–180, 181–182 Pool, Robert 51, 52 Potts, Annie 154 Pretty Porky and Pissed Off 5, 113, 115 prevention 28 Primacy of Perception 152, 176 Probyn, Elspeth 58–59 ‘proper’ and ‘improper’ bodies 35, 42, 56, 71, 74, 150 psychology, classical 150–151 public health discourse 1, 5, 7, 14, 19–30, 49, 50, 64–67, 70, 72, 79–83, 89, 118 public/private distinction 31, 59, 110, 139, 150 queer politics 99, 104, 107, 113–116, 132, 143 queer theory 33, 90, 98, 99 race

3, 26, 33, 44, 55–56, 82, 101, 103, 105, 155 see also whiteness, eurocentrism

Index 195 rationality 24, 25, 37, 42, 45, 54, 67–68, 82, 87, 90, 92, 98, 108–110, 123, 151, 158, 164, 171, 173, 178 see also liberal humanism, individualism representation (logic of) 98 resistance 76, 93–95, 106, 143 reversibility 171–172 Revolting Bodies: The Struggle to Redefine Fat Identity 103, 113–114 Rose, Nikolas 25, 73 Schachter, Stanley and Rodin, Judith 51–57 Schaefer, Kate 142 Sedgwick, Eve 58, 61–64, 96–100, 107, 123, 175 sediment 7, 31, 34, 57, 82, 83, 148, 153–154, 160 selfhood 6, 139, 141, 150, 152, 163 self-authorship 15, 23–25, 49, 66, 69, 70, 88–89, 90, 111–117, 126, 178 self-control 42, 56–57, 62, 71, 79, 126–128 self-help 21–23, 93 self-mastery 72–73, 89, 126–128 sexuality 3, 7, 16, 40, 77, 82, 93–97, 101, 114, 117–121, 122–124, 141, 145, 154, 155, 161 ‘fat’ and sex 117–121, 123–124, 128 heteronormativity 95, 117, 123, 145 see also feederism shame 56–58, 67, 96, 100, 105, 107–110, 117, 123, 128, 133, 138, 139, 142, 144, 146, 153, 162 Shermer, Betty 166–167 Shilrick, Margrit 82 Size Acceptance movement 5, 6, 8, 9, 83, 87, 89, 99, 100–105, 106, 119, 129, 133–134, 137, 141, 145, 146 see also fat pride; fat politics/activism

sizeism see discrimination slenderness 19, 30, 34, 72, 79, 94, 105, 117–121, 124, 128, 130, 137 as indicator of moral goodness 70–73 as indicator of health 72 as aesthetic 126–128 as indicator of investment in contemporary social values 71 see also women, normative feminine bodily styles somataphobia 154–155 Space, Time and Perversion 69–70 specularity 152–153, 156–157 Spitzack, Carole 67, 79 Stearns, Peter 72 stigma 26, 45, 49, 96–97 Stinson, Susan 146 subjectivity (surface/depth model) 26–27, 70–71, 74, 124 see also Cartesian dualism; body, distance from; cf body-subject Such a Pretty Face: Being Fat in America 78–79, 139 suffering 2, 37, 76, 167, 168 Sullivan, Nikki 33, 98–100, 130 surveillance (including selfsurveillance) 21–24, 34, 35, 45, 81, 118 surveillance medicine see surveillance; disciplinary medicine; individual responsibility tacit body knowledges 27, 32–36, 41, 58, 74, 75, 88, 98, 110–111, 115, 138, 139, 148, 159–162, 164–165 Tattooed Bodies: Subjectivity Textuality Ethics and Pleasure 130 Terry, Jennifer and Urla, Jacqueline 23, 34 The Biggest Loser 91–93 The Birth of the Clinic 15, 44 The Bodies of Women: Ethics, Embodiment and Sexual Difference 151, 157, 159, 166, 167, 169, 176, 178, 179

196 Index “The Child’s Relation to Others” 150–151 “The Effects of Obesity on the Clinical Judgements of Mental Health Professionals” 38 The History of Sexuality: Volume 1: The Will to Knowledge 74–77 The History of Sexuality: Volume II: The Use of Pleasure 125–127 The Obesity Epidemic: Science, Morality and Ideology 22, 26 The Visible and the Invisible 169 The Woman in the Body: A Cultural Analysis of Reproduction 165 “Throwing Like a Girl” 160–162 touch 36, 146, 162, 169–171 “Toward a Phenomenology of Racial Embodiment” 31 see also Alcoff, Linda Martin visibility 4, 11, 16, 26–27, 31–34, 36–38, 64, 66, 69–72, 74, 76, 81, 98, 106, 110, 117, 123, 124, 127, 128, 130, 145–146, 170, 174 voluntarism 105, 111–121, 126 Wake Up, I’m Fat 117 Wann, Marilyn 19, 87, 106–111, 138, 139, 142 weight (measurement of) 18, 19, 26, 72–73 see also height/weight tables, BMI

weight loss 18–19, 22, 70–72, 80–81, 91, 92, 94, 105, 166 weight loss drugs 17, 80–81 gastric bypass surgery 17 intestinal bypass surgery 166 whiteness 31, 34, 35, 39, 56, 103, 105 World Health Organisation (WHO) 1, 3–4, 20, 26, 27, 56 n.7, 72 Williams, Regina 137, 170 women feminine bodily styles 153–155, 160–162 normative feminine bodily aesthetics 4, 9, 14, 40, 78, 90–91, 95, 105, 113, 118, 120, 123, 136, 129–130, 137, 146, 151, 161 normative femininity 59, 145–146 see also slenderness; cf ‘fat’ counter-aesthetic Women En Large: Images of Fat Nudes 142, 160–161, 174 Women of Substance 59 Yalom, Irvin 41–43, 58–59 Young, Laura M. and Powell, Brian 38–41 Young, Iris Marion 160–162 Zdrodowski, Dawn

57

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