My weekend readings, they relate to current events. 10 November 2009 11:09 am
Posted by Tracy in : culture,geekery,health,health at every size,history,monkeys,news,politics,random,reading,school,society , trackbackSo like I mentioned yesterday, I read a lot this weekend (more so than usual even), because I had a new deadline on top of the stuff assigned for class: two of my NYU library books were recalled. (A third book is also now due the 20th, so I’ve got just a little time to keep that one on the back burner for a bit. Anyway.) Book #1 was Weighty Issues: Fatness and Thinness as Social Problems, edited by Jeffery Sobal and Donna Maurer (1999). We read the introduction to an earlier Maurer and Sobal book, Eating Agendas: Food and Nutrition as Social Problems (1995) earlier this term at the start of Marion Nestle’s food sociology class, and it was so interesting I got the whole book out of the library, which in turn led me to some of Sobal and Maurer’s other books, namely Weighty Issues and Book #2: Interpreting Weight: The Social Management of Fatness and Thinness (also 1999). Anyway.
The centerpiece for today’s post is from Chapter 3 of Weighty Issues, “Fat Boys and Goody Girls: Hilde Bruch’s Work on Eating Disorders and the American Anxiety about Democracy, 1930-1960″ by Paula Saukko. I promise you, it’s awesome. Saukko takes a historical case study about some early research into eating disorders, and uses it to demonstrate how health theory and practice is a reflection of its social, cultural, political, and historical context. I was so not expecting this piece to be great, and then I came to the conclusion (emphasis mine):
Reading Bruch’s descriptions of fat immigrant children’s lives and the lives of her starving anorexic clients alongside the subsequent interpretations of the medical profession, allows one to see that changing the ways we experience ourselves and our bodies may require transformations in housing policy, treatment of ethnic minorities, health care, medical science and practice, wages, gendered labor practices, child-care, production, selling and consumption of goods, and immigration and foreign policy. In short, to effect changes in the imagery, techniques, institutions, and politics in which our bodies and our selves are enmeshed, it is not sufficient merely to reimagine or to learn to accept our individual minds and bodies; rather, it requires that we look outside ourselves and change the world. (45)
Oh hell yes, readers, she went there. And I applauded. Then I spent some time thinking about how the obesity crisis is in many ways a panic of privilege: rich, healthy people fussing about poorer, less healthy people, but defining health in such a way that the “other” can almost never achieve it. I wondered in my paper journal if it had anything to do with white people freaking out about their vanishing numerical majority on top of their cultural hegemony having basically been eroding since the mid-1960s (by which I mean the end of what we think of as the 1950s — suburbia, post-WWII prosperity, pre-civil rights and second wave feminist rabblerousing). And of course now the precariousness of privilege is especially fragile, what with the imploding economy and collapse of lives built on debt, and on top of that there’s a non-white guy in the White House, OMG OMG OMG time to tea party it up, booga booga socialism! This is no time to reconsider the last century or so of freaking out about fat (or the shock of less omnipresent starvation, whatever); just fit it right in. And that’s before I even get into impending environmental doom. Whee!
Anyway, while I’m on the topic of fat and U.S. healthcare reform (the House passage of which one clever Tweeter quipped was “like a kidney stone”), here’s the New York Times on resistance to “fatties drive up costs” scapegoating. Given how many Representatives wouldn’t pass the proverbial kidney stone without sacrificing coverage of one of the most common elective surgeries, I wonder if the Senate will up the “marginalizing lots of citizens” ante by picking on the overweight or obese 2/3 of the U.S. population? Only time will tell. Sigh…
This calls for a unicorn chaser: here’s Bellen! on fat stereotypes. I think the ending is like an ironic little gracenote of poetic justice.
