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Accepted Paper:
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the liminal space overweight individuals occupy when making decisions about, and acting upon, their bodies. It discusses the connection between ‘obesity’ and morality and examines the diverse experiences that exist within the overweight body.
Paper long abstract:
The framing of excessive body weight as problematic is one of the most dominant health discourses of the 21st century. In the midst of an 'obesity epidemic', biomedical narratives dominate public understandings of obesity and present fat individuals as a picture of poor-health, as lazy and morally irresponsible. This discourse dominates current discussions of obesity to the extent that narratives engaging with lived experiences of the fat body are frequently excluded from public discussion and popular thought. Anti-obesity researchers often present fatness as deviant behaviour, implying that people have a moral and medical obligation to manage their weight. In contrast to this, members of fat acceptance groups are beginning to embrace a body diversity frame and present fatness as a natural and largely inevitable form of diversity. Such views of the overweight body have the potential to alter fat individuals' understandings of their own bodies and their position in society as they work towards forming positive narratives of their own bodies - either in accepting their weight, or undertaking practices of weight loss. This paper explores the ethnographic connection between these perspectives of the overweight body by examining the liminal state between 'badness' and 'goodness' that many overweight individuals occupy when making decisions about, and upon, their bodies. This analysis connects obesity and morality by observing how fat individuals navigate the terrain of responsibility and morality, illustrating the diverse perspectives and experiences that exist within the overweight body and asks the question - at what point does 'fatness' become 'badness' and how do we define these moral states?
Moral dimensions of health, illness, and healing in a globalised modernity
Session 1