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6/01 c:/ClRC/Date0ue.p65-p. 15

 

CARRYING THE TORCH: FATNESS AND NATION IN THE AGE OF
WEIGHT LOSS

BY

April Michelle Herndon

A DISSERTATION
Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

American Studies Program

2003

ABSTRACT

CARRYING THE TORCH: FATNESS AND NATION IN THE AGE OF
WEIGHT LOSS

BY

April Michelle Herndon

In twentieth century America, fatness and fear of it
drive discrimination, public health campaigns, eating
disorders, classism, sexism, and racism. This dissertation
articulates an understanding fatness as a complexly
constructed embodiment situated at the center of various
problematic and oppressive American discourses, dislodges
overweight and obesity from biological moorings, and
suggests that America’s problems with fatness inhere not in
the bodies of fat people, but in the way different elements

of American culture construct fatness as pathology.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

In some ways, writing the acknowledgement page is more
difficult than writing the dissertation; it's certainly
more daunting, especially for someone like me who has been
encouraged and supported by so many people during my
graduate career.

First, I have to thank my dissertation director, Dr.
Alice Dreger. Alice supported this project when I’d given
up on it myself, pushing me when necessary and backing off
when I needed space. She's been my friend and mentor
during my time as a doctoral student, and I’m now proud to
call her my colleague. In an academic system where so many
graduate students flounder about and long for a mentor, I
was blessed with a director who has been my North Star. I
also have to thank Dr. Cressida Heyes, who was the first
person to take an interest in my work as a feminist
project. Cressida, like Alice, buoyed my spirits when I
thought I couldn’t possibly finish this project. Both
Cressida and Alice have treated me well—very well. They've
supported me as a large woman writing about obesity, bought
me lots of lunches and coffees, and made me feel like their
colleague. Special thanks also go out to Dr. Howard Brody

for being a doctor who understands this project as

ifi

important and worthwhile, Diane Brunner for offering kind
words when I was in need, and to Dr. Ann Larabee for taking
an interest in this project in its very early stages and
seeing it through to the end. I truly had the proverbial
“dream committee.”

The most amazing thing about this whole process is how
many people have taken an interest in the work. I owe
thanks to all the folks who sent me emails about television
shows, articles from newspapers and magazines, and who were
always outraged at just the right moments. These people
are too numerous to name. I would also like to thank Dr.
Jon Robison for so passionately teaching about obesity and
oppression and Duncan Woodhead for constantly telling me to
just finish this thing. He was right.

Finally, I would like to thank my parents. During my
time here at MSU, they have offered me both emotional and
financial support whenever they could. I know they
sometimes wonder about the life I’ve chosen for myself, but

they’ve supported me nonetheless.

iv

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .1

CHAPTER 1

TAKING THE DEVIL INTO YOUR MOUTH: AMERICAN WEIGHT LOSS

NARRATIVES, MORALITY, AND BETRAYAL. . . . . . . . . . .8
The Politics of Volition. . . . . . . . . . . . .16
The Suffering and the Damned. . . . . . . . . . .36
Finding Your True Self: Disbelief, Denial, and
Betrayal. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .41
How Does the Story End?. . . . . . . . . . . . . 47

CHAPTER 2

MEMORANDUMS OF OPPRESSION: FEMINIST

(MIS)UNDERSTANDINGS OF FATNESS. . . . . . . 58
Construction Sites: Bodies and Pathologies. . . 63
Reading Absence and Presence: Fatness and
Thinness in Feminist Literature. . . . . . . . . 68
The Fat Body Project. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .71
Problems in Utopia. . . . . . . . . . . .75
Fat/Ultra thin and What Remains. . . . . . . . . 80
(Im)possible Selves. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85
Celebrating Fatness. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96
Moving On. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .100

CHAPTER 3

HOMER'S REACHING BROOM: FATNESS, IDENTITY, AND THE

POLLUTION OF DISABILTY. . . . . . . . . . . . .107
The Americans with Disabilities Act. . . . . . .112
Why Disability Studies? . . . . . . . . . 127
Medical Reconstructions of Fatness. . . . . . . 129
Toward Group Identity: The Cases of Fatness and
Deafness. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 134
Questioning the Question. . . . . . . . . . . . 146

CHAPTER 4

COLLATERAL DAMAGE FROM FRIENDLY FIRE?: RACE, NATION,

CLASS, AND THE “WAR AGAINST OBESITY”. . . . . .150
The Fatwa(r ): Rhetoric of War and the Fight
Against Fat People. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 155
The Girth of a Nation: The Politics of Nations
and Bodies. . . . . . . . . . 162
International Politics in the Fat Land. . . . . 168

Dropping the Bunker Buster: Fighting the Good

Fight?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .170
A New Kind of Classism and Racism?. . . . . . . .178
Obesity and Belonging: Race, Nation, and the
American Body. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 182
CZCDNCLUSION. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 199

VVCDRKS CITED. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .205

vi

Introduction

By now nearly everyone in America must be familiar
\quth Jared Fogle, Subway Sandwiches’ resident guru of
‘weeight loss. Jared first appeared in a Subway commercial
reeleased in January, 2000. As the commercial proudly
pxroclaimed, “After sticking to a self-prescribed diet of
SLwaay sandwiches for almost one full year, Fogle lost a
wliopping 245 pounds” (“Subway Diet Guy” par. 1). Jared's
tvezight loss has earned him the national spotlight. To
daat:e, “he has done eight commercials, been featured at
.hLJrldreds of speaking engagements and has participated in
tr1<:>usands of media interviews" (“Subway Diet Guy” par. 2).
t163LE76d'S weight-loss fame has even earned him a role in the
AuT163;rican Heart Association’s Heart Walk events (“Subway
Eli.<3=t: Guy” par. 7). While these accolades are flattering,
‘jEi-IT€3(1'S carrying of the Olympic torch is his shining
n“:>IT1€31Tt. He states, “The highlight of my Subway Career has
t‘:> 1Dave been carrying the Olympic Torch through
III)(:ilianapolis. It gave me a lot of pride to represent not

:JL1“53‘EL myself and Subway, but America, too” (“The Subway Diet

Guy” par. 4). Were it not for the attacks of September 11,
2001, Jared would have also represented America in a new
Subway advertising campaign. According to Rachelle

De shaies and Suzanne Routh, “Subway restaurants pulled a
[one quarter] million dollar ad campaign which featured
company spokesmen Jared Fogle striking a pose like Uncle
Sam and proclaiming, ‘Jared Wants You'”(par. 3).

Equating Jared with Uncle Sam, the quintessential icon
of American patriotism, Subway’s campaign reveals how
closely tied weight loss, national identity, and patriotism
have become. Yet, in spite of concerns over growing
waistlines and public campaigns against overweight and
obesity, the population of the U.S. continues to be one of
the most obese in the world. The disjuncture between
cultural ideas about fatness and the reality of bodies

leads to a torturous existence for many Americans, as

contemporary American narratives of fatness and weight loss

st: ress both the ability and the responsibility of
individuals to modify their bodies. The pressure to lose
We ight continues to strengthen in spite of mounting medical
evidence that meaningful weight loss remains impossible for
many- And so, as Jared Fogle carries the Olympic torch, he
re‘C-T-Ji‘uits each and every American to do his or her patriotic

du t y by losing weight.

This dissertation examines contemporary American
discourses around fat, obesity, and weight loss in order to
better understand fatness’s location within American
culture. Chapter one examines the narratives of weight
loss surgery survivors, such as Al Roker and Carnie Wilson,
alongside narratives of weight loss from the Christian Diet
Movement (CDM) with the aim of exposing the moral and
religious overtones present even in avowedly secular weight
loss narratives. Within the CDM, weight loss gurus such as
Gwen Shamblin tout her program, “The Weigh Down Diet,” as a
way to turn away from the refrigerator and toward God in an
age when spiritual hunger has supposedly been mistaken for
physical hunger (Mead 55) . Within CDM and secular weight
loss narratives, fatness symbolizes spiritual crisis and

struggle and as such is not only understood as volitional,
but even willfully sinful. CDM narratives co-opt fatness
as volitional representation of spiritual woe; coupling
these notions with mainstream weight loss narratives that
suggest fatness can easily be taken care of if one has
Wi l lpower and commitment opens the door for justifying
di Scrimination against fat people. Chapter One maps these
trends within several key CDM and mainstream narratives,
e){ILRQsing the religious and moral overtones of weight loss

Inc3""€ments that set the stage for pathologizing fatness.

In Chapter Two I examine the feminist struggle with
fatness with particular attention to the work of Susie
Orbach. Despite its long-standing commitment to
understanding embodiments as culturally rich constructions,
academic feminism has often depicted fatness as unnatural
and a sign of neurosis. From Orbach’s perspective, fatness
manifests in response to an individual woman’s needs to
respond to and resist an oppressive culture, and when women
are truly liberated, they will all be thin. I argue,
however, that Orbach’s willingness to read fatness as a
temporary and pathological embodiment violates feminist
tenets by reconstructing a natural and ideal embodiment for
women. I maintain that the inability or unwillingness of
many feminists to engage weight as anything other than

pathology is particular disappointing because feminist
studies, much like disability studies, can offer tools for
pos itively reworking the story of fatness.

Chapter Three and Four parse out the specific politics
behind the discrimination against fat people. In Chapter
Th ree, I outline how the Americans with Disabilities Act
and work done by disability scholars can help us think
th rQUgh fatness as a socially disabling condition even in
the absence of physical impairment. As legal scholar

Sondra Solovay's groundbreaking study Tipping the Scales of

Justice: Fighting Weight Based Discrimination suggests,
discrimination against fat people persists because most,
people believe overweight and obesity to be volitional
conditions that impair an individual’s stamina and indicate
sloppiness. The belief that fatness is volitional often
leads to outrage when one suggests that overweight and
obesity be legally considered disabilities. Using
frameworks established by disability scholars to understand
how negative attitudes and unfounded stereotypes about
overweight and obese people bar them from employment even
when they are capable of performing job duties, I argue
that fatness can and should be covered under the Americans
with Disabilities Act. As this chapter shows, the ADA is
one of the only viable options for offering fat people
protection similar to civil rights protection offered to
other marginalized groups.

In Chapter Four, I discuss America’s current “war” on
obesity and how fatness and fat people are thought to
represent the American dream gone awry. Fatness is thought
to Signify both an America that has become lazy and weak-

Wj— 3— led and a tendency to consume to the point of excess.
Adeoates of the war on obesity charge that the excess of

the fat body is bankrupting our national healthcare budget

and responsible for millions in diminished or lost work

productivity. Particularly problematic for working class
people and people of color, fatness has become associated
with them as groups, and as criticisms of overweight and
obese people have intensified via the war on obesity,
criticizing fatness has become a convenient way to
pathologize the working class and people of color. This
chapter considers this trend and situates it historically
among other American public health campaigns.
In Fat History: Bodies and Beauty in the Modern West,
Peter Stearns notes that we have become obsessed about
weight in a time when there are many other modern killers
that fail to arouse the same excitement and moral crusades
(254). Comparing weight to volitional behaviors such as
tanning and speeding as examples of cases where death rates
are increasing, Stearns maintains that weight arouses so
much more concern because it is read as a symptom of
endemic cultural problems (254). This dissertation seeks
to map the ways fatness operates as a linchpin of American
cul ture. As Hillel Schwartz writes in his introduction to
Ne Ver Satisfied, if there is a moral to an account of
O15>esity, it is that fatness so prominently occupies our
imaginations because it is situated at the center of
American culture(8) . In twentieth century America, fatness

and fear of it drive discrimination, public health

(gaumpaigns, eating disorders, classism, sexism, and racism.
[Jriderstanding fatness as a complexly constructed embodiment
sj_tuated.at the center of various problematic and
ogbpmessive American discourses dislodges overweight and
<>t>esity from biological moorings and suggests that
.Amnerica’s problems with fatness inhere not in the bodies of
feat people, but in the way different elements of American

cnalture construct fatness as pathology.

Chapter One

Taking the Devil Into Your Mouth: American weight Loss
Narratives, Morality, and Betrayal

All I could do at this point was pray to a higher
power. “Lord, help me,” I whispered as I looked up at

the sky, but those weren’t regular clouds up there.

It was all marshmallow fluff.
—-Carnie Wilson from her book I’m Still Hungry1

In America, we no longer fear God or the Communists,

but we fear fat [. . .]
—-Gregory Taubes, “The Soft Science of Dietary Fat“T

The Christian diet movement is in full swing. The

1.i.st of publications, many of which are national best
sseallers can’t fail to impress: Charlie Shedd’s The Fat is
1117' Your Head, God’s Answer to Eat by Frances Hunter, C.S

Iscarvett’s Help Lord—The Devil Wants Me Fat!, and Slim for
.EIcilm by Patricia Kreml (Griffith par.'H. In addition to
‘tLIfieese monographs, the Christian diet movement also boasts

with many churches across the nation

we ight loss programs,
church officials as counselors, and

d O l'“iating space, time,

EE‘V’GEIj funds. One particularly successful church-based

‘Ti‘Eilixght loss program is Gwen Shamblin’s “Weigh Down

Workshop.” According to New Yorker columnist Rebecca Mead,
W 110 spent time interviewing Shamblin at her Franklin,
r ennessee base of operations, there are now some “thirty
C— bousand Weigh Down Workshop groups nationwide, most of
C hem offered through churches and held in basements or back
I:— (DORIS on weekday evenings” (48) .
Mead goes on to write that Shamblin’s “core contention
i s that the fatness of America is the symptom of a
S piritual crisis: “overweight people have mistaken a
S piritual emptiness for a hunger for food” (48) . While
m. any people, regardless of how they identify in terms of
f aith, might snicker at titles such as Slim for Him and
w Qnder why churches and religious figures would express

S uch interest in dieting practices, those same people might

h Qt realize how closely mainstream diet movements mimic
religious narratives of morality, trespass, duty, and
r itualism. Contemporary American weight loss narratives,
CIaristianized and secular, emphasize volition and lack of
1ETIQrality as the causes of obesity and willpower and

Inecessary suffering as the cure. In doing so, these
Inarratives help justify the pervasive discrimination
against fat people. The idea of a “spiritual hunger”

QSsentially unrelated to physiology but that suggests

personal pathology and responsibility is central to

filainstream narratives of weight loss, as any perusal
1:; Ihrough the self help/diet section of most bookstores
2:53 ‘ttests. Language about good food and bad food, cheating,
(:3 <3nfession, volition, punishment, (im)morality and
_2:::" esponsibility for the care of one's body as a temple
P ermeate nearly all weight loss narratives and call certain
r .jtuals into existence.
This chapter examines contemporary American weight
:1— <:>ss narratives and rituals as expressed via weight loss
C Cimmercials as well as those of individuals who have gone
p Liblic with their drastic weight loss. From an examination
Q :E these narratives and rituals comes both an understanding
O :f contemporary representations of weight loss heroics and
t be imagined failures of people who remain fat in what can
Qrally be called the Age of Weight Loss. As Roberta Seid so
8 imply but provocatively states in Never Too Thin, “’We
have elevated the pursuit of a lean, fat free body into a
new religion’” (qtd. in Stinson 152). Weight loss in
Arnerica is, indeed, a religion, one complete with its own
i eons. Consider, for example, Subway’s minister of weight
1(353, Jared Fogle. In several ubiquitous television
QQmmercials, Jared’s disciples dutifully follow him into

Sleway shops to learn the secrets of his success. As he

holds the door open for his followers, Jared literally

10

:3 hows them the way to weight loss and salvation from
jf'atness. So a recent press release from Subway proclaimed,
“*'To some, a hero is nothing but a sandwich, but to

t: housands of Subway customers, a hero is a young man who
éfa.‘te a sandwich—Jared Fogle” (“Subway News” par. 1). When
;1_ (osing weight is supposedly as easy as choosing the right
:5; aandwich from the menu, personal responsibility becomes the
<:>‘<Jerriding narrative. Those who follow Jared’s example, or
't:.lne examples of other weight loss heroes, will be given a

IcL<EW'life; those who hear the message but refuse are damned.

The Body As a Temple: Virtue and Restraint in the Age of
Excess
As Hillel Schwartz argues in Never Satisfied: A

«Pifiistory of Diets, Fantasies, and Fat, many historical
GEfjsoochs have been marked by concurrent bounty and
ITeestriction. Speaking specifically of capitalist
ESCDcieties, Schwartz writes, “Dieting strategies have
f<:>llowed the stages of capitalism so closely that one could
kDeethe model for the other” (327). Likewise, cultural
Eit:udies scholar Harvey Levenstein’s Paradox of Plenty: A
53<>cial History of Eating in MOdern America, examines the
tllrend of societies of abundance always torturing themselves

VVi_th dieting. As an example of the concomitant wealth and

l]

-t;orture, Levin offers the 1980’s. In the midst of Robin
_1;.each’s “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous"~a program that
(52 nded with the line “May you have caviar wishes and
<::§hampagne dreams”—“corporeal ideals reached the thinnest

€33.xtremes ever” (238). The same era gave us music videos
:L_ ike Olivia Newton John’s “Let’s Get Physical,” shot
€32.1mjrely in a gym, and legwarmers, traditionally reserved
:iE’<or dancers, as a mainstream fashion trend. Often called
1:;lne “decade of excess” and marked by economic prosperity,
:L_In particular for media moguls and “financial wizards,” the
<e=Lighties also brought public exercise into vogue

( ILevenstein 237) and saw the intense examination in
ea.<:ademia and the media of eating disorders.3 Levenstein
171<3tes that “for the first time in American history, a
JEBIJbstantial number of deaths were directly attributed to
53‘t:arvation [. . .] of the voluntary kind, the result of a
-I?éash of eating disorders, mainly among middle- and upper-
<:=:Lass females” (238). As a case in point, the 1980’s
ES‘LJggest that preoccupation with weight and exercise,

€3.3Lthough frequently explained as concern for health,

i-rdevitably houses other anxieties about “gender, beauty,

(ZZLass, race, and other contentious social concerns" (Sobal

2332). Thus, attitudes about bodies and weight have

12

ifrequently enjoyed synergistic relationships with larger
social concerns and values.
Today, these powerful connections frequently present
i 11 TV weight loss advertisements. A recent advertisement
f or the “Makeover America” weight loss program perfectly
ea zemplifies the careful packaging of numerous social
c: oncerns under the guise of weight loss and health. One of
1:, he advertisements features a large woman standing in front
0 f a background screen where the American flag is lazily
waving. As the flag undulates, the woman explains to the
audience that she realized she had to do something about
her weight when her daughter was almost hit by a passing
ca r and her weight prohibited her moving quickly enough to
reach her child. She continues speaking directly to the
Vi ewer, explaining that even though her daughter wasn’t
j~I'1jured the experience was a “wake-up-call” for her.
Compare a commercial for L.A. Weight Loss Centers that
CDEDens with a fat woman sitting in a lounge chair in her
backyard. Her children come to her asking if they can go
to the park. She imagines herself trying to pick up a
C3<><>ler that she can’t manage and waddling out. To her
Children's dismay, she asks them to play in thebackyard
Sprinkler and tells them that maybe they can go to the park

a“Other day.

l3

In both instances, concern about weight and women’s
1:>odies couples with concerns about one's responsibility as
ea: mother, caregiver, and even a good citizen. The waving
jEflag that serves as the background for the first commercial
(53:5tablishes a sense of national pride, and when juxtaposed

‘nJ'ith a narrative of motherhood and responsibility for our
1—1.ation’s future generations, Americans everywhere are
<::.alled to duty in the battle against the bulge. Both
<::<ommercials rely on certain understandings of what it means
t:.<o be an American, in terms of the activities one should be
earlole to enjoy and the responsibilities one has to family
23.11d therefore implicitly the nation. To be an American is
1:.<D have time and energy for leisure, to become a parent and
I:>:Lay actively with one’s children at public parks, and to
I:>J:otect the children that constitute the future of our
riceation. In short, the narratives presented in these weight
1—<:>ss commercials are about far more than weight, body,
E3;:Lze, and health. In a time when conservatives worry that
fiaandly values are disappearing and Americans no longer take
t:1".1eir responsibility as citizens seriously, these
C3C>mmercials address more than corporeal based concerns
a1:2)outweight and health. As Susan Bordo explains in
CIrlbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and The

I3<>o§y our bodies and discourses and practices aimed at them

14

(often serve as mirrors for our cultural values: “The body~
anhat we eat, how we dress, the daily rituals through which
the attend to the body—is a medium of culture” (165). Thus,
£318 a narrative and practice, contemporary dieting marks us
£53.S concerned citizens who uphold a certain set of values.
Dieting in America, therefore, serves as a marker of

;I:-estraint for not only excesses in food and drink but for
(32.xcess in general, while simultaneously symbolizing that
1t;.he dieter is a good person. The valences of “good person"
.eaflkmmnd within weight loss narratives and discourses of
eeeeating and gluttony, so much so that even those writing
(3.1itically about the weight loss industry are vulnerable.
IE‘cor example, Laura Fraser’s 1997 expose of the diet
.i.11dustry in America, Losing It: America’s Obsession with
FWVeeight and the Industry that Feeds on It, provides a
<:=<Dmpelling and timely look into the growing weight loss
-i—rjdustry and overwhelmingly treats the issue with a
C3.1:‘itical eye, yet at times even Fraser’s critical analysis
C3<:>ntains the rumblings of a moral campaign against
C>‘\7ereating and obesity. While explaining why she thinks
ZXITIericans overeat and therefore become obese, Fraser
wIrites, “Why is it that the French and Italians don’t have
tlfle problem with obesity that Americans have? Some claim

tlhe answer's in the wine or the olive oil. They may also

15

toe less sedentary, and certainly have different genes. But

t:hose cultures also have a tradition of eating food with

:Love, not promiscuity [. . .]” (136). Setting aside for a
;r1noment the obvious connection between eating and sex4 that
1:;he choice of ”promiscuity” suggests, what stands out most
eaire the moral implications involved in Fraser's statement.
:IIn the age of HIV, when promiscuity has been elevated to a
Jrrloral crime of the highest order, suggesting that Americans
eazat with promiscuity proposes that those doing so commit
<::rimes against both themselves and society writ large.
IF’romiscuity, especially when contrasted with love,
j_:ndicates a lack of self-respect as well as a lack of
J:Nespect for others in a time and culture that portrays
raaearly every sexual encounter as a moment of danger for
it><oth the individual participants and the society that will

12><e burdened by them if they fall ill.

The Politics of Volition

Perhaps even more importantly, promiscuity is always
ITeapresented as entirely willful. Thus, to bundle
TF>J:omiscuity, eating, and obesity together in one cultural
rlearrative suggests that fatness and fat people knowingly
Eirdd willingly defile the temple of the personal and social

k3Ody. The result of the narrative of volition is a

16

<:omplexly effective mix of self-blame, self—hatred, and
:supposedly warranted cultural punishment that all resonate
\Nith Christian edicts while naturalizing the thin body. As
EShamblin writes in The Weigh Down Diet, “'If you look at
JZVational Geographic magazine pictures taken in Third World
<::ountries where food is not the addiction—I am not
3::eferring to pictures of starving people—then you will see
1:;hat God made people’s bodies to be lean’”5 (qtd. in Mead
5355). Ignoring the fact that many people in these countries
éaare not Christians, Shamblin makes it clear that “she is
:e;keptical of the suggestion that there is any explanation
jf'or obesity other than downright disobedience to God" (Mead
ES 5). The temple of the body is meant to be thin; making it
ijat is a willful, unnatural act.

Anti—diet activists and scholars confront the issue of
‘V7<olition within their analyses of and responses to weight
J~<oss narratives perhaps more frequently than any other. In
1\7(3 Fat Chicks: How Big Business Profits by.Making Women
-P1Eate Their Bodies—And How to Fight Back Terry Poulton
C2<onsiders the issue of volition to be “the big question.”
ESI‘ie writes:

No discussion of the psychological toll exacted
by the billion dollar brainwash [of the diet

industry] would be complete without addressing

l7

 

the basic question that seems to mystify so many
“normal-weight" people and prompt so much
prejudice: Why do Fat Chicks choose to be
miserable misfits by staying so much bigger than
they “should” be? Answer: They don’t. [. . .]
The Big Lie—that obesity must be voluntary
because anyone who tries hard enough can be
permanently thin—is one of the most cunning ploys
adopted by the anti-fat profiteers. But the
rock-bottom truth is that the media version of
slenderness is simply not a possibility for many
body types. It is a “myth that we can force our
bodies into the shape we think they ought to be,”
says Dr. Jane Bloiun, a psychologist at Ottawa
Civic Hospital’s eating—disorder clinic. “It
doesn’t work that way any more than you can force
your foot into the size of shoe you want" (97).
Indeed, the idea that anyone can be thin as long as they
try hard enough does directly contradict recent information
about the long term effectiveness of diets for weight loss.
As physicians David Kassirer and Marcia Angell note, diets
have a 95% failure rate (52). This daunting and revealing
stnatistic and the refusal to acknowledge what nearly all of

us; know from our personal experiences with dieting belies

 

the stranglehold the discourse of volition has on
narratives about weight.

As Poulton points out, the notion that weight is
alterable for all people—that everyone is capable of being
thin if only they make the choice—both fuels the
discrimination against fat people and assigns the blame for
that discrimination to fat people themselves. Thus, the
punishing of fat people via employment and daily harassment6
is understood by all involved as punishment for volitional
sins. When fat people openly speak about their oppression
as anything other than self-inflicted, their alleged
choices motivate many responses. Writing about her
experience with fat and oppression within the lesbian
community,7 Laurie Ann Lepoff expresses her dismay at the
way her friend responds when she finally opens a dialogue
with her about fat oppression:

[. . .] she responded just so: “But isn’t there
some choice?" she said. “Choice” is not the
issue. The “problem” is not my being fat. The
problem is how I’m treated because of it. You
don’t solve racism by bleaching everyone’s skin
the same color (white, of course). Remove the

offending characteristic and everything will be

19

peachy. Make us all the same and we’ll stop
oppressing each other. I responded to my
friend’s question with considerable antagonism.
“Why don’t you just go straight if you feel so
fucking oppressed as a Lesbian?” I spat into the
phone. “I'm sure you could pass if you really
tried. All it would take is a little will
power.” (206)
Lepoff’s friend’s insensitivity epitomizes the responses
many fat people hear when they discuss their poor
treatment. Thus, Lepoff rightly targets one of the chief
problems with responses like her friend's, which is that
choice is not the issue in oppression of fat people. In a
similar fiery rail against the idea that people choose to
be fat, disability and fat activist Nommy Lamm writes, “I
never chose to be fat (despite what Susan Powter or Jenny
Craig might say), and I never chose to be born with one leg
all fucked up or to get my foot chopped off when I was
three" (“Fishnets” 86). Citing the diet industry as an
instigator of fat oppression, Lamm understands that her
embodiment has been pathologized largely due to the
pervasive nature of fat embodiment as always volitional.

Etir Lepoff and Lamm, the idea that people always choose

20

 

their bodies is at best tangled and at worst unrealistic
and a means of justifying fatphobia.

Carnie Wilson, whose two monographs on her weight loss
surgery are bestsellers, provides further evidence that fat
is considered a choice even by fat people themselves.
Wilson writes a typically American narrative about why she
thinks many people choose to remain heavy:

For many people, weight is a way or an excuse to
explain why certain things have not worked out
well. “It’s because of my weight” or “It's

because I wasn’t attractive enough."8

If you take
the weight away, you can't use it anymore as a
reason for your failures. It’s like starting
your life over without any kind of defenses,
without the tools that you’ve become dependent on
using to protect yourself.9 (Gut Feelings
210)

As Wilson understands it, being fat is not only a choice,

but a choice made out of a need to disguise a person's true

shortcomings. Here, the rhetoric of “choice" functions as

a no—win situation: if a person chooses to be fat, then he

or she does so because it’s a way to hide individual

skuortcomings, and if a person chooses to diet and fails,

tileen that failure is also signifies a personal inadequacy.

21

For those who are thin, permanently or even for a
brief period in their lives, as well as for folks who are
fat, the allure of the rhetoric of choice rests in the
illusion that they are in control. From the perspective of
Vivian Mayer, this control fantasy is at the heart of
weight discrimination, self— hatred and blame. She writes,
“The problem is the belief that drinking a low—calorie soft
drink enables them to choose their figures, the illusion
that fat or thin is a matter subject to personal choice and
control” (3). Because obesity is conventionally considered
a choice and choice displaces responsibility onto an
individual, what many fat people describe as discrimination
might be described by others as a result of a “victim’s”
shortcomings.

Even those who see fatness as a problem with cultural
roots frequently understand the solution to require
individual action and choice. Shamblin’s belief that “the
fatness of America is the symptom of a spiritual crisis”
leads her to conclude that the solution, rather than
necessarily changing American culture (much less standards
of Western beauty), is to choose to turn to God instead of
the refrigerator (Mead 49). Here again, the Christian Diet

Avaement and secular narratives of weight loss share

téBITritory. In Fat is a Feminist Issue: A Self—Help Guide

22

 

for Compulsive Eaters (which I analyze in more detail in
Chapter Two), a feminist analysis of weight in women's
lives, Susie Orbach argues that women use overweight or
obesity to protect themselves from sexual harassment or
being seen as thin and sexy and therefore incompetent. As
large women, they are supposedly taken seriously and able
to avoid being over-sexualized. Claiming that women use
these weight gaining “strategies” to thwart unwanted
advances and unwarranted assumptions, Orbach suggests that
cultural changes will alleviate the need for obesity.
Still, she suggests that individual women should, at least
in the meantime, understand the meaning and uses of their
excess weight and work to be thin.

Criticizing this type of move, fat activist Joan
Dickenson writes, “I agree that fat is a problem—but whose
problem? By stating that each woman can solve it for
herself, Orbach implies—even as she lists the cultural
roots of fat—that the problem is ours. Thinness is best,
it is a woman’s duty to try for it, and therefore her fault
if she fails. Blame the victim” (41-2). W. Charisse
Goodman notes that many texts face similar pitfalls:

Indeed, most books on this subject [women,
weight, and discrimination] begin by condemning

the pressures placed upon women to be slender but

23

end by reinforcing those pressures when the
discussion turns to the plight of the fat woman
and what can be done to help her lose weight.
(50)
In light of recent work on fatness and discrimination,”’the
tendency to blame fat people for bigotry and intolerance
directed against them is even more depressing: “Overall [.
.] work increasingly suggests that weight may draw more
open and widespread discrimination than race or gender or
age, and that the prejudice turns up in almost all spheres
of life, from the classroom to the office to the streets”
(Goldberg 1). The issue of choice and the belief that
people are responsible for their own misery—even when
derived from the poor treatment they receive from others—
detracts from a recognition of socially responsible
attitudes toward fat people. Goodman provides a compelling
contemporary example when she reviews personal ads and
finds an ad posted by a “socially conscious" man who seeks
a woman but “no fatties” (62). To be socially conscious
excludes being concerned about fatphobia because again
discrimination against fat people is only a response to fat
people’s poor choices. As Cecilia Hartley states,

“Ekatphobia is one of the few acceptable forms of prejudice

24

left in a society that at times goes to extremes to prove
itself politically correct" (65).

The incessant discrimination and abuse fat people face
is undoubtedly fueled by the assumption that fat people
literally get what they deserve. Time and time again, fat
people are told to change themselves to suit standards of
body size, beauty, and health. The omnipresence of these
demands prompts harsh criticism from many anti—diet
activists and writers. According to Poulton, “Certainly,
other minorities face deplorable prejudice. But when
you’re overweight, the hostility feels more personally
directed. [. . .] the overweight are still regarded as
deserving of abuse and exclusion” (90). The claim that
fatness is always voluntary has been particularly powerful
in justifying fat discrimination.

Also central to assigning blame to fat people is the
belief that fatness is sinful and wrong. Shamblin has no
qualms about listing weight gain among a long list of sins
she feels her methods can productively address: “She
argues that her method of renunciation can be applied to
all manner of other sins, such as alcohol abuse or
dependence on prescription drugs or homosexuality [. . .]”
(Ahead 48). Given that gluttony counts as one of the seven

Cheeadly sins, it should come as no surprise that the

25

Christian diet movement so sharply targets obesity. As
minister Charlie Shedd declared in his 1957 Pray Your
Weight Away, “’We fatties are the only people on earth who
can weigh our sin'” (qtd. in Griffith par. 25). Gluttony
is not, of course, a direct correlate to obesity,11 but like
most narratives about body size and eating, within Shedd's
work excess weight and poor diet are always partnered. The
fat body becomes the physical evidence that the sin of
gluttony has been committed, in the same way that STD's
serve as proof of the sin of promiscuity.

Goodman notes that the American association between
gluttony and fatness is imagined to be so strong that if a
fat woman isn't a glutton in public by overeating or dares
to deny that she's a glutton people treat her like a lying
child (11). On television talk shows featuring large
guests, large people who deny overeating are usually
directly confronted and charged with lying or dismissed as
being in denial. Similarly, in his inspirational guide for
dieters, Devotions for Dieters: A 180 Day Guide to a
Lighter You, Christian diet guru Dan R. Dick tells the
story of Helen, a woman who thinks she’s fooling God and
her friends when she says she’s really trying to lose

weight:

26

Helen lamented that she couldn’t lose weight, but
she hardly tried. Oh, she would spend time with
her friends talking about diets, and she would go
to exercise class and sit on the side of the gym
while her friends exercised, and she would buy
diet sodas and TV dinners, but she would also buy
coffee cakes and ice cream. The saddest thing
about Helen was that she couldn’t understand why
her friends weren’t sympathetic to her.
Everyone, including God, will sympathize with us
when we are giving our best efforts. However, if
we deal with losing weight like Helen, even God
will have little patience with us. Only fools
think they fool God! (77)
For Helen, as Schwartz might say, “[. . .] the crime became
proof of the disease” (“The Three Body” 413). Since the
body is so visible and assumed to be the corporeal result
of the crime of overeating, all those who gaze on the body
take on the role of God in the sense that they can't be
fooled. The fat body is proof that the soul is that of a
sinner.
While fatness and gluttony are conflated into a neatly
packaged sin, fasting and the thin body remain associated

with purity and vision. As Schwartz points out in his

27

essay “The Three Body Problem,” “fasting has been bound up
with the spiritual and the visionary from time immemorial.
It may serve as the shaman’s avenue to trance or the
ascetic’s path to clear—mindedness” (425). He goes on to
write that “[. . .] fasting gave access to an interior self
and another world in which contacts with the spiritual, the
ethereal, the transcendental were so much easier” (“The
Three Body” 426). In other words, the ability and will to
deny the body intensifies the spiritual possibilities,
echoing the classic split so central to Western concepts of
mind/body and soul/body. While only a few diet programs
recommend fasting, the notion that mental (and perhaps
spiritual) clarity comes from denying the body certain
foods is prevalent in commercial weight loss narratives.”
The language of “cleansing” is strewn throughout narratives
of fasting and dieting, casting fat as a pollutant to both
the spirit and the body, and this discourse is only
amplified when it meets Christianity. As Dick writes in
Devotions for Dieters:
In many respects, dieting is like a washing away
of fat. What greater joy is there than to step
up on the scales and see the pointer a few marks
to the left of where it was a couple of days ago.

When we lose, we feel cleansed, and the cleansing

28

is not just physical. Emotionally we begin to
feel better about ourselves. Our guilt, our poor
self image, our pain all begin to wash away, too.
This is the best washing of all. We are renewed
both inside and out, and we become fitting and
holy temples; righteous dwelling places for the
Lord! (15)

Outside the Christian diet movement, discourses of
cleansing and purity attach to the very minutiae of dieting
and weight loss. In both her initial publication about her
bariatric surgery and her follow-up bestseller about life
after weight loss surgery, Wilson frequently describes her
food choices in terms of “good” and “bad." This is
language most of us are used to hearing, but Wilson takes
the moral highroad by claiming that she eats “clean” foods
(I’m Still Hungry l6, Gut Feelings 205). The investment in
classifying the health and moral hygiene of certain foods
is well-documented by those who study diet culture in the
United States. In her book Women and Dieting Culture:
Inside a Commercial Weight Loss Group, Kandi Stinson notes
that within the weight loss group she infiltrated group
members referred to certain items as “‘red light foods'”
that “signal temptation, danger, sinfulness” (154). One

cannot help but be reminded of red light districts and

29

again note the mingling of food, sex, and taboo within such
phrases. In order to overcome the desire for these “red
light foods” and remain “clean” Wilson's advice to dieters
(or more specifically to those who choose weight loss
surgery, because she believes it’s the only viable option

)13 is to avoid certain foods

for permanently losing weight

whenever possible but to taste them without eating them

when temptation becomes too strong. She writes:
The easiest and most exciting weight-loss method
I've tried is chewing food and then spitting it
out. This way, you get the taste and experience
of chewing the food, without all of the fat and
calories (although you still get some). Now,
this is really not attractive on dates—when you
run to the bathroom, he might think you’re
bulimic.14 Worst of all, your own mother might
slap you on the hand even if you're 35 years old,
because those aren’t exactly the table
manners she taught you. But once in a while,
when you just need to taste that piece of
chocolate, it’s better than eating it. (I’m Still
Hungry xxxii)

Although Wilson often nods to moderation in both her

texts,15pointing out that she still eats cookies and

30

tiramisu—only now she eats a few bites rather than an
entire dessert—the characterization of certain foods as
good, bad, and clean presents problems her concessions
can't solve. As Stinson is quick to point out in her work,
the dualism of good foods/bad foods means that in spite of
moderation “sin is inevitable” (154). As Wilson writes,
“Carbs are the devil” (I’m Still Hungry 170). A little
chocolate or a lot of chocolate? Either way, one has taken
the devil into her mouth.

With sin comes punishment, and once again the concept
of punishment and sin feature as prominently in secular
weight loss narratives as those with an avowedly religious
base. WLS establishes a punishment for eating forbidden
foods that can be physically painful and embarrassing. In
March 2002, Today weatherman Al Roker underwent gastric
bypass surgery knowing that the surgery “carries a sobering
l-in-200 fatality rate” (Tauber and Dagostino 108). Now
over one hundred pounds lighter, Roker speaks openly about
the surgery he initially hid from the public and his Today

6 In addition to singing the praises of WLS and

colleagues.1
his new found health, Roker also speaks about one of the
downsides of the surgery: dumping syndrome. Dumping

syndrome often results from “eating too much, especially

high—fat, high-sugar foods" and causes survivors of gastric

31

bypass procedures to “experience dizziness, nausea,
vomiting or diarrhea” (Tauber and Dagostino 110). In his
November 2002 cover story for People, Roker recounted his
first experience with dumping: “I took a couple of bites
of these ribs, and while it was going down, I thought,
‘That was a bad move,’ he says. “We got off the air, and I
just kind of sidled off to the bathroom” (Tauber and
Dagostino 110). Roker doesn’t follow up this comment with
any sort of analysis or commentary. For him, sidling off
to the bathroom seems to be just something that's now part
of his life.

Roker’s experience and his blasé attitude about it
mirrors Wilson’s description. In fact, it's difficult to
get through a chapter of Wilson's I’m Still Hungry without
reading a description of dumping. Wilson’s first
experience is described in vivid detail. After serving her
dinner guests Jell-O and Cool Whip, Wilson was forced to
apologize to her friends then go upstairs until her dumping
passed. She writes:

[. . .] let me just tell you that dumping is the
most horrible feeling in the world. Your heart
beats really fast, you’re sweating, your nose
gets totally stuffy, and you feel really dizzy.

It’s like a panic attack combined with a terrible

32

stomachache and a horrible cold. Basically there
isn't a part of your body that doesn’t feel like
total shit. Hitting your bed is about the only
option you have (short of calling your doctor) so
that’s what I did. (25)
She goes on to write that she had other “world class
dumping experiences” where eating yogurt and carob chips
made her deathly ill and one of her friends had to care for
her until it passed (I’m Still Hungry 25-6). Yet what is
most disturbing about Wilson's treatment of dumping is the
joy she expresses when she writes about what is, according
to her own representation, a very punishing physical and
mental process. In a section at the end of I’m Still
Hungry called “How To Be a Good Weight Loss Surgery (WLS)
Patient (If You Care)” Wilson writes:
Dumping isn't fun—however, it's my lifesaver now
because I feel a certain reaction after I eat
specific foods. If those foods are high in sugar
or fat and I eat too much of them (which might
only be two or three bites), I'll have a nasty
reaction. The food will “dump” directly into my
intestine, and my pancreas will be fooled and
will produce a lot of insulin—it's like being a

diabetic. [. . ] I also feel extremely tired and

33

have to lie down, no matter where I am. (Some
people experience severe cramping and get the
runs, too.) But the worst part is this feeling
of impending doom that comes along with
everything else. This could go on from 15-45
minutes, as the degree of dumping varies.
Sometimes I don’t even know what caused it.
You've got to be ready for the possibility
of this happening. [. . .] That's why I’m happy
that I dump. Why would I want to be able to eat
a lot of the foods that made me fat in the first
place? I love being able to write that! (150)
Confessing another one of her “sins” (not drinking enough
water) and the resulting punishment, Wilson says that she
became so constipated “(something common for WLS patients
who don't drink all their water) that [. . .] there was a
brick at the bottom of [her] ass” (I’m Still Hungry 38).
Throughout this discourse, Wilson believes dumping syndrome
and the pain and panic that accompany her “failures” are
apt punishment for eating forbidden foods. In fact, Wilson
never says anything critical about the surgery and its
horrendous side-effects, further emphasizing that she
thinks any problems encountered are because she alone has

misbehaved.

34

It seems especially appropriate that the punishment
for eating foods with high fat or high sugar contents
manifests in such a shame-inducing and public way. As
Michel Foucault writes in “Technologies of the Self,” “To
prove suffering, to show shame, to make visible humility
and exhibit modesty—these are the main features of
punishment” (245). Thus, dumping serves several purposes
within mainstream narratives of weight loss. Even though
she might not always know what food causes the dumping,
Wilson sees dumping as a necessary punishment for food
trespasses. Dumping also serves as a sort of public
confession of sin. With dumping, those who have undergone
WLS signify both that they are being punished for their
trespass and that they are “at least trying” to do
something about their weight. In other words, an
individual’s dumping says, “Even though I was bad at this
moment, I’m being punished so that my larger goals can be
reached.” It's interesting to note that the diet drug
Xenical elicits a similar response, causing anal leakage
and/or diarrhea when patients eat too much fat. There is
definite trend toward products and procedures that elicit
loss of control in obese patients. Given that obesity is
already emblematic of a loss of control, such physical

reactions can only heighten these notions. The specific

35

manifestation of anal leakage and/or diarrhea might even be
said to infantilize obese people, again playing on the idea
that obese people can't control their bodies. Lest we
think that such side effects are always accidental, R.J.
Albrecht and W.J. Poires suggest that people who are sweet
eaters be specifically targeted for the Roux en Y WLS
procedure that encourages dumping so that these folks won’t
ingest too many sweet drinks (155). In at least this

instance, the punishment is in no way coincidental.

The Suffering end the Damned

Demands that people “at least try” to do something
about their weight often exact public confessions and
sacrifices as proof of effort. In his novel Killer Diller
Clyde Edgerton tells the story of Phoebe, a large woman
staying at the Nutrition House, which is a residential
Christian weight loss program. When Phoebe meets a man
named Wesley, who falls for her rather quickly, she feels
compelled to tell him that she’s trying to lose weight.
After Wesley says he likes her the way she is, Phoebe says,
“'Well, thanks, I guess. But at least I am doing something
about the, you know, extra weight’” (Edgerton 109). Phoebe
exhibits the self-policing and confessions that result from

pressures to always emphasize that one has not chosen to be

36

fat and is “at least trying.” Similarly, on eDiets.com, a
commercially based website that offers diet advice as well
as product endorsements, members’ narratives provide ample
evidence that fat people's awareness that others expect
they always be “doing something” about their weight is not
just fiction. Yvonne M., who is described as a woman who
once liked “casseroles with cream of mushroom soup bread
with butter and jelly chips and salsa m icecream mcheese m
mmmmmmmas in murder on a diet!” now weighs in fifty pounds
lighter, talks about how she used to buy groceries: “’I

would look at my cart in the checkout line and think ‘look

at all the junk I'm buying,’[. . .] ‘There were no fruits
and vegetables. The checkout girl must have thought I was
terrible. I was terrible!’” (eDiets.com). Like Edgerton's

Phoebe, Yvonne M. polices herself and even names her crime
as “murder.” The punishment for being a terrible person
who murders a diet is to live under constant scrutiny and
expectation.

Those who are fat and resist the expectation to always
be on a diet face different but no less problematic scorn.
According to Susan Bordo, fat people whose experiences and
stories fall outside the standard narrative of shame and

torturous efforts to lose weight do not escape punishment

37

because they are seen as violating norms of embodiment and
behavior. She writes:
[. . .] the obese—particularly those who claim to
be happy although overweight-are perceived as not
playing by the rules at all. If the rest of us
are struggling to be acceptable and “normal,” we
cannot allow them to get away with it; they must
be put in their place, be humiliated and
defeated. (203)
Thus, one either submits to the pressure and constantly
polices his or her behavior—down to what goes into a
grocery cart on a Friday afternoon—or faces contempt for
resisting. The trend of castigating those who resist
disciplinary practices such as dieting has been well noted
by cultural studies scholars. Discussing cosmetic surgery
for women, Anne Balsamo argues that:
One of the consequences of the [. . .]
normalization of cosmetic surgery is that
electing not to have cosmetic surgery is
sometimes interpreted as a failure to deploy all
available resources to maintain a youthful, and
therefore socially acceptable and attractive,

body appearance. (66)

38

Dieting has become so normalized that many people who drink
Diet Cokes don’t see themselves as special or even being on
a diet. As the Weight Watcher’s slogan proclaims, “This is
not dieting. It is living” (Schwartz Never Satisfied 255).
Like Balsamo, David Morris worries that the normalization
of the drive toward the perfect body and the increasing
availability of means to pursue Western ideals of beauty
will exact heavy tolls for those who can’t or refuse to
meet ideals: “It certainly increases the prejudice and
difficulties facing people who cannot possibly measure up”
(256). In short, fat people might well be able to choose
whether or not to diet, but they cannot choose whether or
not to be rebuked for their appearances.

Even though dieting has in some sense been normalized,
we still tend to place those who have lost weight on
pedestals and admire their efforts. In fact, the trope of
justified sacrifice is perhaps one of the strongest and
most troubling features of weight loss narratives. Noble
suffering furnishes both a means to elevate those who
perform their duty to attempt weight loss and a vehicle for
chastising everyone else. In Devotions for Dieters Dick
writes:

If the example of Jesus teaches us anything, it

should be that suffering is a noble and good

39

thing when it leads to a better way. Our diets
are definitely the source of suffering, but there
is great blessing awaiting all who stick with
them. God promised special blessings to those
who keep courage in the face of suffering and
don't give in. Losing weight not only makes us
look and feel better, but it draws us closer to
God and His divine plan for us. Our suffering is
not in vain. (39)
Meaningful suffering through weight loss is not, however,
reserved only for Christians. When the narratively—secular
Carnie Wilson thinks about the suffering she's endured at
the hands of WLS, she comforts herself with the belief that
going public with her own struggle—with the surgery,
dumping, constipation, and having several reconstructive
surgeries to remove excess skinN—has helped to convert
others to WLS. Prior to her surgery, Wilson spent several
months researching WLS on the internet, which Wilson
endorses as one of the best sources of information about

the procedure.18

It was during her interactions with other
folks who had been through or were considering WLS that

Wilson decided to have the surgery and go public with her

decision. She writes:

40

And they [people in the chat rooms] convinced me
more than ever that by doing this, I would be
helping others, too. I wouldn't just be helping
myself, but all those in private pain who needed
to know that there was hope, all those who were
struggling with this relentless burden I knew
inside and out, all the women and men who were
staring at an unbearably bleak future when they
looked in the mirror every day. (Gut Feelings
135)
Seldom does a better example of sacrifice (an almost Christ
like sacrifice) present itself within mainstream dieting
narratives. By sacrificing a large portion of her stomach
and intestines as well as most of her privacy, Wilson is
providing others a means to see the light, to see a
different future for themselves. She is offering them the
chance of an afterlife (life after fat) while establishing

hers as a life to be emulated.

Finding Your True Self: Disbelief, Denial, and Betrayal
Central to the issue of choice and pressure to do
something about one’s weight are the beliefs that no one is

really meant to be fat and that anyone who is fat can’t

possibly be happy. In Unbearable Weight Bordo writes about

41

a talk show audience’s reaction when a fat woman declared
that she was happy:
[. . .] much of the audience reaction was given
over to disbelief and to the attempt to prove to
one obese woman that she was not happy: “I can’t
believe you don't want to be slim and beautiful,
I just can’t believe it.” “I heard you talk
about how you feel good about yourself and you
like yourself, but I really think you're kidding
yourself.” (203)
What is it about the fat body in particular that, within
the contemporary imagination, eclipses all possibility of
happiness? Without doubt, our culture's designation of
fatness as a disease, moral failure, and disgusting
embodiment factor into the near-universal assertion that
fat people cannot be happy as fat people. Even beyond
these discourses lies one of the most important means of
dismissing fat embodiment. As we watch thin women step out
of the shadows once cast by their fat bodies, a favorite
ploy of the weight loss industry, we witness a visual
display of what is perhaps the most powerful rhetoric of
weight loss narratives: being true to one's self by

finding one’s true (thin) self amidst a prison of fatness.

42

In Better Than Well: American Medicine Meets the
American Dream,19 Carl Elliott maintains that the idea of
being true to one’s self demands a certain moral
responsibility:

“To thine own self be true” articulates perfectly
the notion of authenticity as a moral ideal: the
idea that we each have a way of living that is
uniquely our own, and that we are each called to
live in our own way rather than that of someone
else. (29)
Being true to one’s own self, where fatness is concerned,
introduces compelling challenges. The belief that people
are not meant to be fat is so strong that to “live in our
own way” really means to choose how to lose weight in our
own way rather than to choose how to “live in our own way”
as fat people. In I’m Still Hungry Wilson writes: “I used
to say things like, ‘I'm meant to be heavy’[. . .]” (64).
She goes on to say, “I got my wake-up call and thought,
What is this bullshit? No one and nothing is meant to be
heavy, except for whales and really good crystal" (64).
Like her other statements about fatness hiding personal
shortcomings, Wilson indicates that she was fooling herself
by justifying her choice to be fat because “no one is meant

to be heavy.” Fatness is seen as somehow unnatural and

43

apart from the true self, and at the worst moments, as a
contagion that fools one into keeping the true self from
emerging.

Obesity’s status as a medicalized illness only adds to
the idea of fatness as a contagion that interferes with the
true self. In Stories of Sickness, Howard Brody writes
about the ways sickness sometimes causes a disjuncture
between one's self and one’s body. In terms of our
experience, Brody maintains that we imagine ourselves as a
“single entity, not an admixture of mind-me and body-me [.

.] My body moving through the world and bumping into
things is simply me moving and bumping” (47-8). Brody goes
on to say that sickness turns our bodies into our enemies
and “[introduces] a sense of split and disruption where
unity formerly reigned” (48). Because medicine and culture
understand obesity as an illness, many people—fat and
otherwise—experience obesity as foreign to their bodies.
And, because fatness is a heavily moralized illness (and
presumably a volitional and “curable one”), remaining fat
is tantamount to being unfaithful to one’s true self.

Thus, fat people are frequently charged with the crime of
betraying themselves. In I’m Still Hungry, Wilson writes
about one night when she decides to look at pre-surgery

photos because she was feeling bad about herself. She

44

hoped she’d find photos that chronicled her progress
uplifting. Although her husband, Rob, met Carnie before
her surgery, she decides to show him the pictures, hoping
he would affirm her progress and help pull her out of her
slump. When he sees the photos, however, he exclaims,
“’Jesus Christ! How could you do that to yourself? How
did you let yourself get that big?!’” (68). Although she's
initially crushed by her husband's reaction Wilson later
berates herself, asking, “How did I let myself get that
big?” (68). The rhetoric of letting one’s self get “that
big” once again situates fatness as unnatural, an anathema
to one’s true self and suggests that fat people have
participated in chosen self-betrayal. As Elliott explains
it: “The feeling is that you ought to be true to who you
really are, that there would be something wrong, something
vaguely dishonest or unsavory, about running away from your
true self; that this would be a kind of betrayal or fakery”
(38). Further, “[. . .] if you are not living a life (as
yourself) you have missed out on what life has to offer”
(39).

Seldom do we encounter people who say they were born
to be fat or that they feel they were meant to be fat or
that it's even okay that they’re fat. So powerful is the

idea that fat is unnatural and a betrayal of the self that

45

even people who have been fat their whole lives, such as
Wilson, believe they were not meant to be fat. Elliott
notes that the belief that one is meant to be someone else,
behave a different way, feel a different way than one has
for his or her entire life is common among many groups of
people. In one particular case he discusses how certain
patients taking Prozac describe the drug as self-affirming
and self—revealing rather than transformative: “These
patients would report not that Prozac made them feel like
new people, but that it made them feel like themselves”
(Elliott 51). One patient, Tess, stopped taking Prozac and
according to Elliott “[she] had returned to the very state
in which she had been for the most past forty years, her
entire life apart from the brief period she was on Prozac,
and yet she said she did not feel like herself. She felt
like herself when she was on Prozac” (51).

We cannot, of course, ignore the social edicts that
undoubtedly color Tess’s and Wilson’s narratives of their
true selves. My aim here is not to suggest that Wilson is
meant to be fat or that Tess was meant to be depressed or
that their narratives can necessarily be discounted.

Rather I want to suggest that the social stigma of fatness,
much like depression, often precludes the possibility of

fat or depressed people themselves—much less others—seeing

46

them as doing anything but betraying who they should really
be, or who they can be with the help of weight loss,
medication, or sheer willpower. In the case of fatness, to
say that I was really always thin—no matter how fat I
became—is to salvage a socially viable self, a self that is

not stigmatized and hated by wider society.

How Does the Story End?

In The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics
Arthur Frank argues that within our culture, narratives of
illness and suffering often communicate broader messages
about morality and responsibility. He writes that
“displaying one’s past to others requires taking
responsibility for what was done” and that “the story is a
moral opportunity to set right what was done wrong or
incompletely” (132). Thus, stories of suffering and
sacrifice, such as those told by Roker and Wilson, signify
their willingness to take responsibility for their own
condition. We can hear this acceptance echoed in Wilson’s
belief that bariatric surgery is a form of social action
and when Yvonne from eDiets.com compares herself to a
murderer. These narratives, and the rhetoric of “personal

responsibility" in particular, often sidestep (as Wilson

47

does in her narrative) the genuine oppression fat people
face and the need for social resistance.

Unfortunately, as bariatric surgeries become
popularized and are touted as the only true hope of
permanent weight loss, more fat people will be sacrificed.
They will endure excruciating pain, multiple surgeries, and
a lifetime of dizziness, vomiting and dumping for eating
the “wrong” foods. Their existences become living (if one
can call it that) monuments to their acknowledged sin and
responsibility. Poulton refers to this as the secret war
behind the battle of the bulge:

When you add in those who die from weight loss
surgery, plus those whose lives are sacrificed to
anorexia and bulimia, plus the many who perish
because they try to control their weight by
smoking, we may be talking about tens of
thousands. But guess what? Nobody’s keeping
score. We never hear the names of the casualties
in what amounts to a secret war. We aren't even
told that they die, let alone why. And if we do
happen to find out, blame is never assigned to
anything but, at most, foolish, inexplicable

vanity. Why in the world do [people] do these

48

things to themselves? Tsk, tsk. What a shame.
(213)
Poulton directs our attention to the damaging context of
contemporary weight loss narratives and the way people
assign blame for the sin of gluttony that supposedly began

the cycle of weight gain and the sin of vanity that ends

it. Those who take the devil into their mouths must be the
ones to spit him out. Lord deliver us from Little Debbie
Cakes.20

49

NOTES
1. See page x.
2. See page 104.
3. Examples include Susie Orbach’s Hunger Strike and Kim
Chernin's The Obsession. In chapter two I discuss the
trend of studying anorexia and specifically address parts
of these two texts.
4. In Unbearable Weight, Susan Bordo maintains a
compelling and detailed argument regarding the
relationship between food and sex. In particular, she
argues that advertisements for food (especially forbidden
foods such as ice cream) often use sexual language,
suggesting that the desire to eat food and the resulting
pleasure has become so taboo in our culture that it is
sexualized. For a complete discussion of this trend, see
Bordo’s chapter entitled, “Hunger As Ideology.” I also
provide a more detailed analysis of connections between
food and sex, using some of Bordo’s work, in Chapter Two.

\\

This theme emerges again in the discourse of the war
against obesity,” which I analyze in Chapter Four.

5. Many people engaging in secular debates about obesity
suggest that obesity is a result of our corrupt society,

which seems to be part of what Shamblin is implying here.

Many people imagine Third World countries as more

50

primitive and somehow uncorrupted by the pursuit of the
pleasures consumption offers to First World countries,
and Shamblin’s argument here seems to reflect these
beliefs. For a discussion of how such arguments play out
in secular debates about obesity in the United States,
see chapter four.

6. In addition to simply asking most fat people about
their own experiences with fat discrimination, which will
surely be enlightening, those interested in learning more
about contemporary fat discrimination should read Sondra
Solovay’s Tipping the Scales of JUstice: Fighting Weight
Based Discrimination. As a lawyer, Solovay reviews
several recent legal suits filed as a result of fat
discrimination and their implications. She also provides
thorough analyses of multiple means of weight
discrimination Via verbal abuse (see her chapter called
“Verbal Abuse and Beyond”) and workplace discrimination
(see the chapter called “Professional Appearance
Required: Weight Based Employment Discrimination”). In
sum, Solovay argues that fat people are discriminated
against purely because there bodies are believed to
signify many of the traits contemporary American society

professes to hate (such as laziness and incompetence) and

51

that this treatment is often not seen as discrimination
but rather just desserts.

7. It is important to note here that within her essay
Lepoff is concerned that her work, because of the
examples she includes, will be seen as anti—lesbian. Her
work, however, even though this particular example might
seem harshly worded, is neither anti—lesbian nor
homophobic in general. Using her personal experiences as
evidence, she aims to highlight a persistent problem,
namely that even those within other oppressed groups see
fatness and fat oppression as an issue of individual
responsibility rather than a cause for social action.

8. Although Wilson discredits the notion that
discrimination could actually be based on appearance,
studies suggest otherwise. Solovay cites a study done by
Rothblum, Brand, Miller and Oetjen that “used studies
about appearance to predict discrimination against fat
people. They cite a model of hiring decisions which
posits that physical attractiveness elicits positive
expectations. This in turn leads employers to perceive
attractive applicants to be, among other things, more
skillful and intelligent than unattractive applicants [.

.]" (101). Given that our culture defines fatness as

52

inherently unattractive, there can be no doubt that
fatphobia exists.

9. Here, Wilson claims that fatness is used as a means
of protecting one’s self from the harsh realities of
one's personal shortcomings. This claim is also made by
Susie Orbach in Pat is a Feminist Issue. For a full
discussion of Orbach’s argument and my analysis of it,
please see chapter two.

10. Here I would again recommend Solovay’s work as the
most comprehensive study yet produced.

11. The bone of contention is not that these folks do not
exist but rather that the constant conflation of
overeating with obesity is misguided. In his book Big
Fat Lies: The Truth About Your Weight and Your Health,
Glen Gaessar provides ample studies to prove that a
simple connection between eating and body size cannot be
proven. Other good sources include W. Charisse Goodman's
The Invisible Woman (referred to in this chapter), Cheri
Erdman's Nothing to Lose, and Healthy Weight Journal.
12. For some people—especially those with food
allergies, ulcers, or other folks who just have foods
that disagree with them—avoiding those foods probably
does make them feel better. My point here is that

contemporary narratives suggest that we will always feel

53

better if we avoid “bad” foods. Further, we cannot
eliminate the social factors involved in how people
eating “good” foods feel. In other words, these might
not be wholly physiological reactions. People experience
their bodies through social screens and given the
accolades heaped on those who eat “right,” it seems
unrealistic to think that feeling physically well is in
no way related to social rewards.

13. In I’m Still Hungry, Wilson devotes an appendix to
discussing why WLS is the only viable option for losing
weight if one is morbidly obese. She claims that “diets
don’t work for morbidly obese people” (176).

14. I have to admit that I laugh each time I read this
portion of Wilson’s explanation of why it's okay to chew
food and spit it out. Although with her tone and
rhetoric she suggests that anyone thinking of this
behavior as bulimic is humorous—perhaps even bordering on
the ridiculous—I can’t think of a better definition of
bulimia than the practice of chewing but not digesting
food.

15. Although I worry about Wilson's texts and their
bestseller status, I must give her a nod for not making
herself about to be a complete convert to “good eating.”

She does, at least, take the time to tell readers that

54

she still eats (rather than always spitting out)
desserts, chips, and salsa. Perhaps more interestingly,
she openly discusses her struggle to identify with a thin
body that she sometimes doesn’t recognize as her own when
she passes a mirror. When she refers to herself as
“still hungry,” Wilson means both that WLS has not solved
all her issues with food and that she’s still working on
many of the problems in her life. In other words, I
think she at least partially avoids what one of the risks
Arthur Frank identifies as often inherent in narratives
such as hers. He believes that one of the dangers of
stories that present complete and total change “is like
the risk of the Phoenix metaphor: they can present the
burning process as too clean and the transformation as
too complete, and they can implicitly deprecate those who
fail to rise out of their own ashes” (135). Let there be
no doubt. Wilson aims to convince people that she has
made change and they can, too, but I think she deserves
some credit for speaking so honestly about the fact that
WLS did not solve all her problems and that those who
come out on other side of losing weight should be
problem-free.

l6. Roker's surgery was eventually presented on an

episode of NBC’s news magazine Dateline. Carnie Wilson's

55

surgery was also broadcast via the internet on
SpotlightHealth.com.

17. Wilson is at pains to point out that she had never
had any other kind of reconstructive surgery. I find it
interesting that she doesn’t consider her bariatric
surgery a reconstructive surgery. Wilson, like most
people, sees the reconstruction of her stomach and her
digestive tract as far more than a cosmetic surgery.
Although many people experience drastic problems after
weight loss surgeries and have hosts of health problems
they might not have had while they were heavy, Wilson’s
proclamation that she'd never had any other kind of
reconstructive surgery is an assertion that her weight
loss was for health rather than cosmetic.

18. One of the reasons the web is considered such a good
source of information about weight loss surgeries is that
many of the sites with chat rooms are sponsored by
companies such as Bariatric Treatment Centers of America.
There are, of course, alternate sites such as the
National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance

(www.naafa.org), but these are vastly outnumbered by the

 

commercial sites. In the only published monograph about
reversing WLS, Dani Hart provides insight into why it's

so difficult to find dissenting voices on the internet

56

sites available. When she entered chat rooms to talk
about the problems that lead up to her choice to have her
WLS reversed, she was called “crazy, weak willed,
neurotic, a failure” and virtually run out of the chat
room (67). In other words, anyone who dares to visit a
chat room to discuss problems is told that the problem
lies not with the surgery but with that individual. With
this kind of policing, it’s no wonder that so many of the
websites and chat rooms boast rave reviews of WLS.

19. I must point out that the majority of the Elliott's
chapter on this issue, “The True Self,” focuses on

narratives presented by transgender and transsexual

folks.
20. This last line is a version of what one of the
members of Shamblin’s Weigh Down Diet program says. The

actual quote is “The Lord has delivered me from Little

Debbie Cakes” (qtd. in Mead 51).

57

Chapter Two:
JMemorandnma of Oppression: Feminist
(Mia)underatandings of Fatness
As Audre Lorde walks into her doctor’s office, a nurse
pulls her aside:

“You’re not wearing a prosthesis,” [the nurse]
said, a little anxiously, and not at all like a
question. “No,” I said, thrown off my guard for
a minute. “It really doesn’t feel right,”
referring to the lambswool puff given to me by
the Reach for Recovery volunteer in the hospital.
Usually supportive and understanding, the nurse
now looked at me urgently and disapprovingly as
she told me that even if it didn't look exactly
right, it was “better than nothing,” and that as
soon as my stitches were out I could be fitted
for a “real form.” “You will feel so much better

I

with it on,’ she said. “And besides, we really
like you to wear something, at least when you

come in. Otherwise, it’s bad for the morale of

the office.” (427)

58

The nurse's desire to normalize Lorde’s body by
substituting a “puff of lamb’s wool” for her breast found
its basis in her concern that Lorde was making other
patients nervous. Lorde's body served as a reminder that
any woman in that room might herself lose a breast to
cancer. Thus, though Lorde felt comfortable with what she
calls her asymmetrical body, the nurse did not see Lorde’s
comfort as the issue. It was the comfort of other people
at stake in Lorde’s refusal to don an artificial breast and
the nurse’s insistence that she comply.

Though we live in a world where many women develop
breast cancer and undergo mastectomies, the altered bodies
of women who have survived cancerous growths are seldom
seen. They are, instead, normalized via prosthetic
breasts, leading to a level of invisibility for those
particular women, a concomitant lack of public concern for
women’s health, and the continued belief that a “proper”
female body sports two breasts rather than one. Part of
this erasure stems from our cultural preoccupation with
bodies that consistently endorse the same ideals—in
particular, the ideals that we not visibly age, suffer or
decline. While fatness and breast cancer might seem fields
apart, they have a similar stigmatizing impact on bodies.

Paradoxically, even while loathed for being larger and more

59

visible, the oppression of fat people-especially fat women—
results in fat women being closeted and silenced. To make
visible the fat body, like uncovering the body affected by
cancer and surgery, demands recognition and respect despite
the discomfort generated by non-normative embodiments.

For Lorde and other women who have experienced
mastectomies, “puffs of lambswool” and the like are meant
to camouflage the absence of a breast. For fat women,
fashion functions as the arena of camouflage, the
opportunity for fat women to make their bodies’ contours as

1 Oprah, now famous for her anti—fat

invisible as possible.
rhetoric as well as her very public use of a personal
trainer and private chef, frequently comments on larger
women’s dress sense and what she considers the faux pas of
bodily exposure. While giving her audience tastes of
spring and summer fashions, Oprah has often said (referring
to her own arms as well) that women whose lower biceps
jiggle when they wave should cover their arms at all costs

I

because people “just don't want to see that.’ In essence,
Oprah and her clapping audience demand that large women, or
even thin women with flabby arms, suffer through hot

summers with arms sweltering and hidden under heavy cloth,

proving a vested interest in the comfort of onlookers

60

rather than the comfort of individual women with flabby
arms.

Taking issue with the demand to cover, disability
scholar and activist Simi Linton discusses what it means to
live with a non—normative body and dress “appropriately”—
that is, to assure the comfort of others. Referring to
disabled people as the “lumpy and bumpy,” Linton
enthusiastically tells readers that the days of blankets on
laps—hiding white and withered legs for the comfort of
others—are gone. Disabled people are, as she puts it,

I

letting “their freak flags fly,’ exposing what are
understood as socially unacceptable bodies and forcing the
public to deal with discomfort rather than disabled
individuals dealing with shaming cover-ups (23). In short,
Linton understands that revealing (and perhaps reveling in)
pathologized embodiments can force the issue of socially
constructed rules and regulations regarding bodies,
politicizing choice of dress and social expectations.

Fat bodies, especially fat female bodies, are
undoubtedly pathologized via aesthetic standards and
represented by television personalities like Oprah Winfrey,
Sally Jessee Raphael, and Maury Povich as traumatic, ugly,

pitiful, scary, shameful, and hated. The only time the

“lumpy and the bumpy” (to borrow Linton’s term for a

61

discussion of fatness) are trotted out is when they are
made spectacles. As Sharon Mazer explains in her essay
“‘She’s So Fat’: Facing the Fat Lady,” Fat ladies are
still the most eroticized and popular “freaks” at carnivals
(259). At these moments, their bodies serve as commodities
of fear that help draw viewers into the shows. Yet, even
as academic scholarship frequently gazes down on popular
culture from the ivory tower of raised consciousness,
scholars often overtly echo similarly negative sentiments
about fatness and fat women. Although many scholars
committed to social justice have struggled to come to terms
with myriad ways race, gender, class, sexuality, and
disability are structured and enforced, and have done so in
ways that vehemently resist pathologizing these identities,
fatness remains a largely pathologized embodiment as well
as a frequently unconsidered category of identity.

Of particular interest to me in this chapter is
feminist scholarship's treatment of fat women and how
certain feminist scholarship has, perhaps unwittingly,
“covered” fat female bodies with negativity and pathology.
Examining a range of texts, including those that deal with
fatness directly and the plethora of literature focusing on
ultra—thin bodies (specifically those of women with

anorexia), my purpose is to expose how feminist scholarship

62

has both represented (and sometimes simultaneously) denied
fat bodies theoretical attention and nuanced analyses. By
reading feminist scholarship on anorexia alongside key
pieces of feminist scholarship on fatness, I move to expose
an unspoken commitment to the concept of a “natural” body
to which women can supposedly retreat once social pressures
are changed or blocked. I argue that if one of the chief
tenets of feminism is to speak to the social realities of
women, then scholarship must speak to the needs of women
living with fat bodies. To do so demystifies fatness,
simultaneously serving the needs of many different women by
alleviating at least some of the negative discomfort,
stigma, and fear nearly all women associate with fatness.
Thus, I argue that feminist tendencies to portray fat and
ultra-thin bodies as self-destructive reactions to social
forces help to further construct the idea of the “natural”
body feminist scholars and activists have long sought to

dislodge.

Construction Sites: Bodies and Pathologies

In the contemporary United States, bodies are often
read as sign posts sending signals about health, moral
status, sexuality, and class. This is a trend many

scholars have noted and an insight essential for

63

understanding how fatness functions in both wider society
and within individual bodies/selves. In her study of
American girls and their relationships with their bodies,
Joan Jacobs Brumberg maintains that historical and
contemporary trends set the scene for “some young women
today” to “regard the entire body[. . .]as a message board”
(137). Brumberg argues that contemporary interest in the
body, and particularly in sculpting, piercing, and
disciplining the body, exists “because [young girls]
believe that the body is the ultimate expression of the
self” (97). Similarly, David Morris in his book Illness
and Culture in the Postmodern Age highlights the ways
contemporary bodies have become the sites of imaginary
utopias. Where people of earlier time periods understood
utopia as a social state, Morris argues that bodies now
serve as the site of possible nirvana: “[. . .] the
insistently private and secular postmodern utopias reflect
a belief that the only valid remaining space of perfection
lies, ready at hand, in our own individual flesh" (137).
Further, all will be right in our lives once we achieve the
utopian body, a body which is “healthy,” thin, white, “a
paradise of curves and muscle” (Morris 137). The irony of
the body project is that utopia is never completed and the

inner self supposedly (re)presented via the outer body

64

(even when embodying cultural standards of perfection) is
often in conflict with how people feel about themselves.
The constant pressure and drive for corporeal self-
improvement necessitates incorporating the messages
inscribed on and read from our bodies, at least partially
and superficially, into our ideas of our selves, which
makes the body simultaneously a personal and inexorably
cultural text. Elizabeth Grosz explains how bodies serve
as signs and signifiers in the era of the utopian body:
[. . .]there is an ever more insistent
inscription by physio-cultural object-signs on
the surface of the body[. . .]binding individuals
to systems of significance in which they become
signs to be read (by others and themselves).
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. (“Bodies and

Knowledges” 199)

65

Thus, bodies become texts to be read by others as well as
writing projects for embodied subjects. In turn, by
consuming the cultural values associated with bodies,
subjects fashion themselves into objects to be read and
consumed by a wider audience. As such, bodies continue to
signify well beyond the original sign and intent of the
subject, always exceeding the body project undertaken.
Regardless of the specific means of producing a particular
body—be it via cosmetic surgery, makeup or tattooing—any
body is culturally situated. Explaining this phenomenon,
Moira Gatens states that there are “ready made images
through which we make sense of our bodies” (viii). Even
bodies that seem “outside” mainstream culture in fact
constitute reactions to and embodiments of our cultural
norms and expectations.

Within recent feminist scholarship “bodies[. . .]are
never mere biological entities” but instead are “culturally
constructed and hotly contested social spaces where we can
observe the complex signs of human fantasy and or human
trespass” (Morris 146). The image of the fantasy female
body is one we know all too well: white skin, western
features, blond hair, blue eyes, smooth and shapely legs,
body hair removed, silky skin, thin body, flat stomach and

large breasts. As within most binary systems, the

66

trespassing body has opposing traits, and I will return to
this concept later in the chapter. For now, it is
important to note that cultural values and technological
developments work synergistically to fine tune the fantasy
image even further: “Techno-bodies are healthy, enhanced,
and fully functional—more real than real” (Balsamo 5).

The contemporary Vision of the human body attaches to
discourses of medical interventions and fantasies of
perfection. There are very real consequences for those who
do not naturally meet these expectations as well as those
who choose not to use technological developments in pursuit
of fantasy bodies. As Balsamo explains, many women who opt
out of cosmetic procedures become pathologized both due to
physiological features such as wrinkles and sagging breasts
as well as the very refusal or inability to obtain cosmetic
aids (10). The cost for those resisting (for whatever
reasons) the compelling pressures and promises of cosmetic
procedures can often lead to stigma and isolation. With
the ground of the body already so culturally fraught,
fatness pathologized via multiple socio-medical discourses
and representations, and women in particular being held to
unrealistic standards of perfection, it is no wonder that
those living with female fat bodies find themselves under

immense scrutiny and pressure to be thin.

67

Reading Absence and Presence: Fatness and Thinness in
Feminist Literature

Female embodiment remains a consistent area of
interest in feminist scholarship, but the last twenty years
demanded an even sharper focus. As scholars have struggled
to understand how identity markers such race and sexuality
function as embodied traits affecting epistemologies, value
systems, and material conditions, feminists have also found
themselves confronted with a growing number of young women
with eating disorders. Why, feminists have asked, are
eating disorders on the rise at this moment in history?
What cultural values might be aggravating if not causing
what many referred to as an epidemic? How could we best
understand eating disorders such as anorexia and bulimia?
What respective roles did and do the individual and culture
play in these conditions? A large body of corporeal
feminist scholarship, both academic and popular in tone,
that takes the anorectic body as its subject has resulted.
Although fears of fatness and what fatness represents have
been regular players in analyses of anorexic women, fat
bodies and fat women have shared little, if any, of the

text.

68

A notable exception, feminist scholar and therapist
Susie Orbach has taken up the fat body as an object of
analysis. Orbach proclaimed fat a feminist concern with
the publication of her germinal work, Fat is a Feminist
Issue: A Self—Help Guide for Compulsive Eaters. Calling
upon a plethora of psychological and medical literatures
and cultural narratives that supposedly prove fatness is a
disease, Orbach’s work established her as one of the first
feminist scholars to bring fatness in the lives of women to
public attention.

Yet, in many ways, Orbach’s central premise echoes the
classic tropes of the $30-50 billion per year diet
industry:2 inside every fat woman is a thin woman waiting
to emerge. For Orbach, the problem of excess weight
persists in women’s lives because they are constantly
subjected to social forces that lead to insecurity and
emotional imbalance, both of which lead to the compulsive
eating Orbach conflates with fat embodiment. Thus,
Orbach's account of fatness relies on an understanding of
fat bodies as somatic reactions to social dictates. For
the most part, Orbach positions fatness as “unnatural” and
“abnormal,” resulting from emotional imbalances and/or

disordered eating.

69

In 1986 Orbach followed her study of fatness with
Hunger Strike: The Anorectic’s Struggle as a Metaphor for
our Age. Although Hunger Strike addressed the ultra-thin
body, the parallels with Orbach’s work on fatness are both
striking and theoretically significant. In Hunger Strike
Orbach depicts the ultra—thin body as another corporeal
retort to the cultural expectations under which women
labor. This once again situates embodiment within a vortex
of power struggles. Most feminists would surely agree that
bodies (and in particular women's bodies) exist within
complex power relations; Orbach’s work, however, suggests
that between fat and ultra-thin bodies lurks a thin—but-
not—too-thin body that will appear when women are no longer
oppressed or at least learn to negotiate oppression in ways
that are not self-destructive. Again, I will return to
this point later in the analysis and suggest how we might
think of these parallels between fat and ultra-thin bodies.
For now, however, it is most important to note that for
Orbach, and scholars of similar ilk, fat bodies and ultra-
thin bodies cannot constitute meaningful aspects of one’s
political identity.

Susan Bordo and other feminist scholars have rightly
noted that Orbach’s analysis steps beyond pathologizing

individual women and instead looks to understand women’s

70

lives and corporeal states as intertwined in complex
cultural matrices, and indeed such analyses have proved
invaluable in the feminist struggle to counter narratives
of women as always already emotionally flawed and unstable.
As Bordo states about anorexia, bulimia, and disordered
eating, “[. . .] these disorders [. . .] reflect and call
our attention to some of the central ills of our culture [.
.]” (139). Bordo goes on to say that “anorexia appears
less as the extreme expression of a character structure
than as a remarkably overdetermined symptom of some of the
multifaceted and heterogeneous distresses of our age”
(141). While the trend Bordo both notes and approves of
has been and continues to be important for feminist goals,
Orbach’s use of these embodiments as symptoms is
problematic in both her accounts of fatness and ultra—
thinness because she reads these bodies only as memorandums

of oppression.

The Fat Body Project

At the heart of Orbach’s analysis of fatness in the
lives of women and the political project of her work lies
the belief that fatness serves a real purpose in the lives
of many American women—even if that purpose is not always

openly articulated. In classic mainstream psychoanalytic

71

style, Orbach suggests that once women recognize the
purpose fatness has served, they can begin to move beyond
it. She writes, “Bear in mind that you first have to own
something before you can lose it” (87). Further, “if [a
woman] can understand how her fat has served her she can
begin to give it up” (31). The goal of losing the fat body
is what motivates Orbach’s analysis and final argument
about women's bodies, cultural pressure, and fatness. In
other words, according to Orbach fat is only a feminist
issue in the sense that it is a self-destructive coping
strategy from which women should be freed.

For Orbach, the fat body provides an escape route for
the pressures women in classically thin bodies face daily.
Orbach states that she “[is] not suggesting that the desire
to be fat is a conscious one” (33). Instead she argues
that attaining a fat body is a reaction, a largely if not
exclusively unconscious yet purposeful reaction, to an
unkind social world where fatness can provide a much needed
shield from immediate sexualization and concomitant sexual
harassment. For Orbach, the fat body represents a way of
achieving a utopia where women are not harassed. When
commenting on the women she interviewed during the course
of writing Fat, Orbach reports that after becoming fat

“many women felt a relief at not having to conceive of

72

themselves as sexual. Fatness took them out of the
category of woman and put them into the androgynous state
of ‘big girl'” (35). One recurring example of a daily
struggle that being a “big girl” supposedly aids is the
quest to be taken seriously at work, evidently a struggle
that is intensified when one is thin and sexy. One means
of negotiating this problem is acquiring the fat body that
removes one from the category of woman:
In this way, [fat women] can hope to be taken
seriously in their working lives outside the
home. It is unusual for women to be accepted for
their competence in this sphere. When they lose
weight, that is, begin to look like a perfect
female, they find themselves being treated
frivolously by their male colleagues. When women
are thin, they are treated frivolously: thin-
sexy-incompetent worker. “When I’m fat, I feel I
can hold my own. Whenever I get thin I feel like
I’m being treated like a little doll who doesn’t
know which end is up.” (13)
Hence, Orbach understands fatness as a means of
renegotiating traditional gender roles within the workplace
but fails to understand the negative associations fatness

also carries, namely laziness and slovenly behavior.

73

In a succinct statement of her goals and her
characterization of fatness as a direct result of
overeating, Orbach writes:

It is the thesis of this book that compulsive
eating in women is a response to their social
position. As such, it will continue to be an
issue in women’s lives as long as social
conditions exist which create and encourage
inequality of the sexes. Any treatment for
overweight women must address this fact. (183)
Orbach’s thesis and the goals of her work reveal several
necessary assumptions that fuel her project. First, and
perhaps most obviously, she conflates overweight with
overeating.4 In doing so Orbach characterizes fatness as a
mere symptom. Now, surely it can be effectively argued
that within contemporary U.S. culture fat bodies are read
(in the same sense Brumberg, Grosz and Morris assert) as
symptoms of both individual and cultural pathology;
however, Orbach bucks the postmodernist and feminist trend
of acknowledging bodies as message boards. She suggests
that instead fat women’s bodies are not only read as
symptoms but are indeed symptoms. The political import of
this move is two—fold. First, Orbach deftly constructs the

fat body as unnatural and distinguishes fatness as a kind

74

of “diseased” state that plagues modern women and indicates
treatment. Second, she implies that as a symptom of a
diseased culture, fatness can, will, and should disappear
once feminist scholarship and consciousness raising enact
social change. With these simple but effective moves,
Orbach structures her work around the premise that fat
bodies will not exist in the social utopia feminists work
toward. Instead, women’s bodies will migrate towards their

“natural” state.

Problems in Utopia

Orbach’s naturalizing of the thin body leads her to
neglect the many forms of oppression to which fat women are
unjustly subject. For example, she fails to theorize the
negative associations fatness also carries for working
women—namely laziness and slovenly behavior. While Orbach
repeatedly suggests that fat bodies eradicate unwanted
sexual attention, fat women’s experiences suggest
otherwise: first hand accounts evoke being desexualized
(as Orbach suggests) but also being hypersexualized. As
Cecilia Hartley states in her essay “Letting Ourselves Go.”
“the states of anorexia and obesity [. . .] situate women
as simultaneously asexual and hypersexual” (68). Along

this line, sociologist Marcia Millman argues that the fat

75

body is in many cases sexualized to the point of
fetishization.5 During her investigation into fatness in
America, Millman discovered that many men who attend dances
hosted by the National Association for the Advancement of
Fat Americans (NAAFA) do so in order to meet fat women they
assume to be both “easy” and orally fixated (20).
Apparently, the logic is that if one is fat one must be
obsessed with food; if one is orally fixated on food, one
must be orally fixated in other ways as well—and also more
willing to engage in fellatio. Doreen Katz, herself a fat
woman and one of Millman's subjects, states that “a lot of
the men go out with fat women because they’re easy, they’re
grateful for the attention” (20). In addition to the
belief that fat women are orally fixated, many men who call

themselves “fat admirers”6

also see fat sexuality as taboo
and thus appealing. In Millman’s account, one “fat
admirer” says that since he's already slept with a cripple
and a circus freak he would now like to sleep with a fat
woman (169). It appears that fat sexuality carries an aura
of the forbidden which in and of itself seems to cause
sexual arousal in many of the men in Millman’s account.

\\

As Bordo makes clear, “obesity is” understood as an
extreme capacity to capitulate to desire” (Unbearable 201).

The inclination to equate unrestrained eating with

76

unrestrained sexuality is well documented by Bordo. She
analyzes numerous commercials for high fat, taboo food
items such as ice cream and cake and how these
advertisements play upon the idea of unrestrained female
delight, submitting to what we know is naughty but what we
like so much. Bordo’s analysis of Flashdance stands as
perhaps her best example of representational conflations of
eating with sexual desire.7 The movie, featuring the thin
and athletic Jennifer Beals, is a 1980’s cult classic about
Alex, an aspiring dancer working as a welder to make ends
meet, hustling her way to the top by pushing her body to
literally dance until it drops. Her fiery desire for a
dance career is matched only by her desire for her male
lover, who also happens to be her boss. In one of the more
risqué scenes in the movie, Alex and her boss are at dinner
when Alex removes her tuxedo jacket to reveal that she is
wearing only a vest and cuffs underneath. Her back is
completely exposed and the curves of her breasts peek
seductively from the sides of the vest. At that moment,
she picks up a piece of lobster, dips it in butter, and
precedes to suck the butter off the meat, repeatedly
sliding the piece of lobster across her lips while staring
at her boss and lover. With a face filled with

anticipation and a raspy voice, he asks, “Is that lobster

77

good? I guess you’re really hungry, huh?” (Flashdance).
The message is clear. As Bordo states, “unrestrained
delight in eating operates as sexual foreplay, a way of
prefiguring the abandon that will shortly be expressed in
bed” (Unbearable 110). Thus, fatness does not and cannot—
in spite of Orbach’s claims to the contrary—always remove
one from the reaches of sexualization.

Where the anorectic body, according to most
contemporary scholarship, is able to escape being
sexualized, the fat body seems to be the subject of intense
sexualization. In The Beauty.Myth: How Images of Beauty
are Used Against Women, Naomi Wolf argues that the
obsession with thinness and the way we have come to think
about the thin and fat body have as much to do with issues
of obedience as attraction: “A cultural fixation on
thinness is not an obsession about female beauty but an
obsession about female obedience” (187). If Wolf is
correct, then fat women are guilty of being very, very
naughty, a perception which perhaps contributes to their
sexualization.

Although Orbach notes that at least one of her
interviewees believes that by taking up the same amount of
space as a man will make her more powerful at work, most

women’s experiences with fatness suggest otherwise. In a

78

world in which the female body is supposed to occupy
minimal space, the fat female body is an anomaly. As Young
explains, women are conditioned to keep their bodies tight
and compact; therefore, even in daily activities such as
walking women tend to make their bodies as small as
possible. Young writes, “Women generally are not as open
with their bodies as are men in their gait and stride.
Typically, the masculine stride is longer proportional to a
man’s body than is the feminine stride to a woman’s” (145).
Socially and physically, women are expected to occupy an
absolute minimum of space.

Even when not in motion, fat bodies occupy more space,
and this fact may lead to anger expressed against those of
us who live our lives with fat bodies. Millman argues that
what often begins as pity for fatness turns into anger as
people come to think of fat people—especially fat women—
taking up far too much room in the world (70). To make her
point, Millman tells the story of a woman who is forced to
sit in the handicap section of the bus in order to have
enough room and the anger that results (70-1). Rather than
considering what it means that bus seats are only available
for those of smaller size and what it must be like to
struggle through a world which disavows your existence at

every turn, the passengers Millman observes are angered

79

that the woman is taking up that space. Fat women whose
bodies do not “fit” where they should are reminded daily
that there are limits to the space the female body can
fill. Every day we are told by the stares we receive, the
too—small bus seats, and airline regulations,8 that we
occupy too much space. Again, this seems to be an aspect

of living as a fat female body that Orbach has ignored.

Fat/Ultra-Thin and‘What Remains
Reading Orbach’s work on anorexic behavior (Hunger

Strike) as both a text about anorexia and a silent text
about fatness once again reveals the inclination to portray
all but naturally and thinly sexual bodies as signs of
disease. Strikingly like the way she describes the
desexualization of fat women and their concomitant removal
from the category of woman, Orbach writes of ultra-thin
women:

As the anorectic becomes thinner and thinner so

she loses the definition that fleshy hips and

breasts give. From afar she might not even be

taken for a woman. Up close, she is a subject of

scrutiny, for her shapelessness removes her from

the immediate categorization of conventional

femininity. (Hunger 87)

8O

Thus, in the same way she argues that fat women use their
bodies as a safeguard from heteropatriarchal forces, Orbach
here argues that the extreme thinness of the anorectic’s
body serves women similarly.

If both fat bodies and extremely thin bodies indicate
cultural ills and will become obsolete once feminist goals
are achieved, then what will remain? What corporeal
futures lie ahead for women? In Orbach’s utopia the only
logical embodiment that follows is a thin-but-not-too-thin
body, a supposedly asymptomatic body to which women will
paradoxically both revert and advance. In spite of such a
fantasy, Margaret Shildrick succinctly argues in Leaky
Bodies and Boundaries there is no access to a “pure”
corporeal state (14). Women’s bodies, regardless of
feminism’s strides, cannot exist outside of culture. As
Judith Butler has argued, there is no outside to
subjectivity. Taking Shildrick’s claim seriously “requires
finding a way of representing the self that is not body-
neutral or disembodied (and therefore presumptively thin),
but intimately connected with the body in a new vision of
embodiment that no longer disdains the flesh” (Kent 131).
Yet, Orbach repeatedly suggests that a pure embodiment, and

I

in turn it would seem a “pure identity,’ will emerge post

feminist revolution.

81

Interestingly enough, Orbach’s scholarship tacitly
suggests that women’s bodies, especially when not in their
pure and natural state, hinder women, which is a claim many
feminists vehemently refute because such claims have been
used to justify the oppression of women. Arguments that
women’s bodies are the source of their inferiority and
oppression have been lodged in efforts to quash the very
social responsibility feminists demand. One might go
further and note that Orbach’s reliance upon liberal
humanist logic is also problematic. As Shildrick explains,
one of the key assumptions of liberal humanism is that once
the body is transcended, a universal human nature will be
revealed (108). In Orbach’s case, rather than human nature
per se being revealed, a natural body that requires no
political critique will be revealed once fatness has been
transcended. In her essay “Fighting Abjection" Le’a Kent
criticizes this approach to understanding fatness as

\\I

employing the dangerous logic of we’re all the same
underneath’” (140). This rhetoric, she suggests, seeks a
point of origin as a site of return and fails to understand
the ways bodies and selves interact.

Although within Orbach’s analysis we all have the same

bodies underneath—at least once our social albatross is

cast off-in Fat Is a Feminist Issue, Orbach represents

82

fatness and ultra—thinness/thinness as diametrically
opposed embodiments. Reading Orbach’s Hunger Strike
closely alongside other key feminist texts on anorexia
nervosa and the women living with both fat and ultra—thin
bodies can help scholars understand that although these
embodiments are often portrayed as diametrically opposed
they do, in fact, take part in the same system.

Orbach's utopia of the thin-but-not—too-thin body, if
it exists at all, exists as an ephemeral constructed dream
rather than a reality of how women tend to experience their
bodies. In surveying feminist literature on anorexia,
several themes emerge as constant threads throughout
women’s personal stories: the need for control and the
fear of fatness and what fat bodies represent. In The
Obsession: Reflections on the Tyranny of Slenderness Kim
Chernin reports that many of the women she interviewed were
willing to die in order to be thin. One woman interviewed
by Chernin says, “I don’t care how long it takes. One day
I’m going to get my body to obey me. I’m going to make it
lean and tight and hard. I’ll succeed in this, even if it
kills me” (24). Chernin’s participant, like many women,
sees her body as a separate entity, a foe to be
manipulated, controlled, and even destroyed if need be.

Such accounts give testimony to how far women are willing

83

to go in order to meet the “norms” established by the
culture of the body. The drive to conquer the body is only
spurned forward by the multi-billion diet industry in the
United States that, as Balsamo indicates, helps to fuel the
fantasy that the body can and should be “perfected." The
pressure of these technologies of perfection grasps nearly
all women, regardless of body size.

The result of such pressures can be attempts to deny
the very existence of the body, another tactic both fat and
ultra-thin women are purported to share despite their
seemingly disparate embodiments. According to Chernin,
many anorexic women’s greatest desire is to renounce the
materiality of the body and its needs in spite of constant
hunger (Chernin 52). A similar phenomenon occurs in the
lives of fat women. Millman’s interviewees frequently
discuss living their bodies from the neck up and pretending
that only their faces are important and visible (65). The
similar strategy of avoiding and denying the body suggests
that although these two types of bodies are often
understood as theoretically opposed (and although in many
cases each deserves its own separate analysis) the ways
women live as these two kinds of bodies are indeed quite

similar.

84

(Im)possib1e Selves:

One of the most frustratingly important features of
Orbach’s depiction of fatness lies in its inability to
account for the incorporation of fat into the concept of
the self. Her account, like many popular representations,
does not allow for a “self” that might be fat. Here, I do
not mean to suggest that there is an “authentic” fat self;
to do so would be to fall into the same pattern as the
representations of thin=natural that I argue against. What
I am suggesting is that, again, we must find means of
representing and living as large female bodies that
encourage fat women to “stop living their bodies as the
‘before’ picture and begin to have a body thought valuable
in the present” (Kent 131). In Fat is a Feminist Issue
Orbach illustrates what a fat woman’s body looks like in
terms of her/self and her embodiment. She does so by
drawing a thin woman’s body that is then padded with
concentric rings that make it larger and larger. Although
not writing about Orbach’s work in particular, Kent spots a
similar narrative strategy as a trend in mainstream
cultural representations of fatness, saying that “the fat
body rings the margins of the good self [. . .]" (136).
According to Kent, what we most need is some means of

articulating a self that holds the possibility of fatness,

85

a mflf'Umt might hold fatness as at least part of its
(shiftnm) identity rather than an inconsequential
indivflhml characteristic or a cage holding us back from
our:fifll.potential.
hfierestingly, Lorde’s discussion of her post-surgery
bodyefllows for a dynamically shifting embodied identity.
Againvnfiting about the nurse’s desire to normalize her
body via a prosthetic breast, Lorde maintains that
regardless of the puff of lambswool, she—as an embodied
self—will not be the same:
To imply to a woman that yes, she can be the
“same” as before surgery, with the skillful
application of a little puff of lambswool, and/or
silicone gel, is to place an emphasis upon
prosthesis which encourages her not to deal with
herself as physically and emotionally real, even
though altered and traumatized. (427)
rxk3.resists a necessary and unquestioned retreat to the
y—surtnery body because the retreat to this body
evitefloly neans a retreat to a pre-surgery self.
genstirug that a pre-surgery self is there waiting for
niJnatjxon disregards the powerful ways changes in our
ies; dix:tate and manifest changes in ourselves. Instead,

ie [sleu3es emphasis on animating the new self, the self

86

 

 

As Nancy Mairs might say, Lorde

thatis‘Um changed body.

unwnstmkb that she is a body rather than that she has a

body (53).

Mans’ work on her status as an academic woman

disabhxiby multiple sclerosis examines the trend of

undershmmfing the body as that which is owned and occupied

by Unaself rather than constitutive of the self. Mairs

you are likely to say if you talk

writes, “I have a body,

about embodiment at all; you don’t say, I am a body. A
body is a separate entity possessable by the ‘I’; the ‘I’

and the body aren’t, as the copula would make them,
grammatically indistinguishable” (53). Relying on the work
of French feminist Helene Cixous, Mairs goes on to explain
that within Western culture the “I” is most often

understood in terms of the “not I,” a process many cultural

snnnjies scholars believe drives the need to establish “the

<3ther”’ (54). Mairs deftly explains how this process of

otluerirm; affects epistemes of the body:
We tend to ascribe to the other those qualities
we prefer not to associate with our selves: it

is the hidden, the dark, the secret, the
Thus when the “I” takes possession of

shameful.
‘the body, it makes the body into an other, direct
(object of a transitive verb, with all the other’s

87

 

repudiated and potentially dangerous qualities.
(54)
Tth weimagine the body not as one’s self but rather that
whhflistmkb in opposition to us. The body is, as Bordo
exphnhs “L . .] experienced as confinement and
limitatuxn a ‘prison,’ a ‘swamp,’ a ‘cage,’ a ‘fog' [.
.]” kaearable 144). The propensity to view the body as a
ffindramxais heightened when the stigma of fatness is
added. Fatness is, as Kent notes, the epitome of abject
lorror and otherness: “Within mainstream representations
f the body, the fat body functions as the abject: it takes
p the burden of representing the horror of the body itself
Jr the culture at large [italics in original]” (135).

Our ability, both as a culture and as individuals, to
cept and incorporate other physical objects as parts of
r kxxiies and necessarily parts of ourselves while
nairdJug unable to imagine fatness in the same way
>turtn3 how alien we imagine fatness to be. When writing
ut Inez? transition from unaided walking to requiring a
as armi'then a brace, which she found particularly
ensxiven, Mairs tells readers that she eventually came to

tfuesea physical objects as part of her bodyself: “[.
<dcni’t; think about my brace any more than I think about

arue. II’ve incorporated them, I suppose; made them, in

88

 

 

their necessity, insensate but fundamental parts of my
body” (56). These fundamental parts of her body, including
her M.S., lead Mairs to carefully consider a question one
of her writing students poses: how did you find your voice?
As Mairs ponders this question, she realizes that she had
“always had a voice, but it wasn’t this voice” (58). Thus,
from Mairs' perspective, her voice is her body at a given
moment rather than being stable, rigidly defined, and
partitioned from the influences of her body. Self, body,
and voice are one and the same. Mairs folds together M.S.,
womanhood, writing, and her canes and braces into her
bodyself. Both Mairs and Lorde display an ability to
understand and accept the bodyself as altered, making it
all the more puzzling that fat, an organic and necessary
component of the human body, remains alienated and othered
in most women’s lives and many feminist accounts. In their
personal experiences as bodies/selves, both Mairs and Lorde
capture the political and personal importance of actively
and purposefully incorporating corporeality—all of one’s
corporeality—into identity.

Following Kent's lead and envisioning the fat body as
more than a bad body encasing the “good self”—viewing it
instead as theoretically, politically, and personally

valuable—requires mapping the possibilities of fat

89

 

 

idaujty. Claiming an identity based on what most people
consnkn to be a mutable and transitory embodiment
inevififlfly raises problems of essentialism. Specifically,
thecnmmtion I’ve faced at conferences concerns itself with
how we<xn1talk about fatness and fat identity in a
meaningful and broad way without losing the specificity
required to situate both as dynamically influenced by
myriad facets of individual and group identities. In her
essay “Queering Fat Bodies/Politics” Kathleen LeBesco
explains what an essentialist fat identity might look like:
An essentialist position on fat identity can take
a biological or sociocultural perspective; common
to both is the theme that the condition of
fatness is necessary, could not be otherwise, or
has some essential (usually failure-related)
cause. Whether they trace a biological path to
bad genes or horrible hormones or a social path
to traumatic childhood experience, those arguing
for essentialist positions view fat identity as
the unfortunately avoidable outcome resulting
from some original variable gone awry. Of
course, not all essentialist positions are anti—
fat; some prefer to focus on the present fact of

fatness and the impossibility of changing it,

90

 

 

using this resignation as a platform for civil

rights size-acceptance movements. (84)

Rejamjhg both of these approaches, LeBesco writes that her

work‘us intended to initiate a different theorization of

fatness and fat politics” (84). She states that “an anti—

essentialist position on fat identity does not seek causal

factors but focuses instead on the ability of human actors

to participate in the creation of meaning [. . .]” (84).

Following LeBesco's lead, I seek to theorize fatness in

ways that suggest the possibility of a non-essentialized

fat self by examining the unstable and dynamic nature of

fat as a category.

The popular narrative of the thin body trapped inside
the fat body works not only to suggest that thin bodies are

“natural” embodiments but also that there is slippage

between these two corporeal forms. Acknowledging fatness

as a trait that can be acquired, a trait that even

‘Vuiturallyfl thin people can acquire over time (and often

premnnmably'not because they are lazy or immoral even though
we (xvi all become so), unites fat and thin embodiments as
intenxflmangeable at certain moments. Perfect examples of

the ifnuerchangeable nature of fatness and thinness occupy

ciaytinue television screens constantly: The thin woman

stepping out of the shadow of a fat woman, the infamous

91

 

‘txaforey’ picture, and the victory dance of a woman who,

aften: stmadding layers of fat, can finally play with her

ycnnug Cfiiild. At these key moments, viewers know that the

fat kxxdy and the thin body inhabit the same territory.
\Nhetluar or not this is intended by the diet industry as yet

anotluar clever means of keeping us all concerned about our

weitfln: (what if that happens to me?)

is a moot point. The

‘narrative of thinness ensconced in fatness reveals the

slippery nature of situating embodiments as diametrically

opposed.

Because fat bodies often speak of an (un)acknowledged

understanding of possible corporeal futures and/or pasts,

as Lorde’s body does, fat embodiments elicit fear and

concomitant hatred. In both cases, the fear and hatred

take on a particular patina where women are concerned,

serving to remind us of our own vulnerability, current

social status, and both overt and latent desires for

certain bodies. To see a body fatter than one’s own,

regardless of one's current size, is to breathe a sigh of

relieftjmt one is not yet “that big.” In her examination

of(kxmy Island’s Fat Lady, Helen Melon, Mazer explains

thattflmse performances are as much about the audience

nemben3(and especially the thin audience members) as they

anaabmn:the Fat woman herself. As Mazer admits, she

92

 

 

fOundlmnself wondering how her size compares to Helen

Mehxfls muiwhether it’s possible she could eventually be

as lanfiaas Melon (271). Thus, fat bodies serve a dual and

oflxfllseemingly contradictory purpose. On one hand, they

On the other hand, fat bodies extend

make people nervous.
As Vivian Mayer explains in her essay

\\[.

possible comfort.

“The Fat Illusion” people gazing upon fat bodies
.]get to feel superior to some mythical person who is

fatter than they and who goes on eating without shame”

(12).
The discomfort caused by non—normative embodiments

that hold the possibility of being acquired has already

been well-noted by disability scholars. Many disability

theorists openly confront similar fears by calling able—

bodied folks Temporarily Able Bodied (TABS) (Shildrick 60).

Such a tactic forcibly unites rather than differentiates
those who are able bodied and those who are disabled,

collapsing the falsely constructed binary of

ablexbfliisabled. The refusal to firmly differentiate

betumxni these bodies directly confronts the unspoken fear

that <3fteni leads to stigmatization and hatred of people who

are; fat anuj/or disabled. Such a strategy takes note of the

facfi: them: “Although not all of us weight 500 plus pounds,
We will leave the

1e ck) evenitually occupy the same turf.

93

 

sideman as [Helen Melon] will leave. And we will turn to

fmximudias she does: for the satiation of hunger and
satisfimfijon of a particular desire for pleasure” (Mazer

270-71). Perhaps Terry Poulton says it best in her book No

the essential point is that no one is

Fat Chicks: “[. . .]

propamnmb proof, whatever she weighs” (84). Most of us

live with at least the potential to become fatter than we

are at any given moment and the propaganda about what it

means to be fat is very powerful.

Again, this common turf holds the possibility of being
simultaneously unifying and divisive. As a result of the

intense focus on embodiment and the social benefits and

punishments associated with particular bodies, women often

challenge and criticize each other not on merit but at the

level of the corporeal. If the thin body is the non-body

euui represents the denial of the body’s hungers and needs,

tiny) the fat body is, as Bordo says, about being all body,

the gflmysical manifestation of what is perhaps many women's

<greatemfi: fear (148). Further, Bordo pursues an argument
and in

atxmit time hostility directed towards fat bodies,
martixmilarraagainst fat women. She writes that, “in the
euse <>f time obese [. .] what is perceived as their
eifliarn: rtfloellion against normalization appears to be a

ourxze (3f tflie hostility they inspire” (203). Bordo goes on

94

 

to saytflmt those who resist normalization and appear happy

whileckflng so inspire even more animosity: “[. . .] the

obesewmmrticularly those who claim to be happy although

overwehyurare perceived as not playing by the rules at

all. If'the rest of us are struggling to be acceptable and

‘normal,’ we cannot allow them to get away with it; they

must be put in their place, be humiliated and defeated”

(203). Thus, those who are struggling to meet the norms

themselves become the enforcers of the same normative

framework. Scholarship that continues to over-emphasize

the differences in fat and thin bodies instead of the

shared experiences among differently embodied women misses

opportunities for potentially transgressive alliances.

Perhaps one of the most remarkable reasons fear of

fatness persists in the lives of American women is because

fat women are, for the most part, paradoxically made

invisible. While fat bodies are themselves extremely

visitflxexvithin our culture—both because the population of

peopflxecof size is growing rapidly in the U.S. and because

largeekxxdies violate so many norms—they are simultaneously

{made lJNfllSible because they are seldom constructed as

When large women are represented, these

successful agmfis.

representations are often medicalized accounts of fat

vonmni’s lgtves that are based almost solely on pain and

95

 

1“

sufferhuh leaving the public with distorted and often
false accounts of what it is like to live with a fat body.
Accmnfixsthat depict alternative experiences of fatness and

most especially those that deal with fatness on a

sociopolitical rather than medical model, are greatly

underrepresented: “In contemporary culture, the fat body

generally becomes visible only at the margins, if at all,
and only when written into a pathologizing narrative in

which fat is a cause of ill health and a system of poor

behavior” (Kent 132). Further, the popular belief that fat

bodies are only thin bodies in waiting causes fat bodies

frequently to be read as absence rather than presence,

 

while thin bodies are assumed to be natural forms.

Corporeal epistemological frameworks that have difficulty

theorizing and representing fatness as a legitimate

embodiment result. As Kent succinctly states, “fat is

incessantly referred to, and just as incessantly erased”

(133).

Celebrating Fatness?

Stigmatizing fatness via narrow and often medicalized
accxnnits is problematic; but so are texts that celebrate

fatruess i1} that they tend to disassociate from stigma

For example, adopting a strategy

ratluar than resisting it.

96

akhito Hume who feel that past celebrations of fatness

shouhicfifer comfort, Richard Klein provides a lengthy

1Ustorhxfl.account of fatness’s many incarnations

througmmHLhistory and across cultural divides. Klein’s

chief claim is that fatness is currently constructed as

undesirable and indicative of laziness but this has not

always been the case; social standards are dynamic and

fickle. He works through his argument by referencing

examples of fat worship from the Venus of Willendorf to

renaissance painters. Klein suggests that evoking other

time periods and cultures serves both as proof that fatness

is socially constructed and that it must come into vogue

again at some point because “fashion is cyclical" (55). In

what is perhaps the most shocking and revealing moment in

his article, Klein makes reference to a particular tribe in

Africa that houses soon—to-be—married women in huts where

they are basically force-fed because they value fatness so

highly (59).

In a related move that also romanticizes the cultural

(Other; Piarilyn Wann in her book Fat?So! writes about her

lcnuging tx) be Samoan, asserting that living within Samoan

culinire MKNJld mean being celebrated for her size. Ignoring

theegdrobflxmns of racism, Wann romanticizes Samoans and their

allxmged.afloility to live without concern for weight. Her

97

 

desimaat once reveals her exoticizing of Samoan culture, a

faihnxato understand Western corporeal standards as

globaLu/influential, and the refusal to see other cultures

ascxnmextually dynamic. Continuing along similar lines

Wann writes, “When I was in the Middle East a woman asked

me how I got so fat” (24). She includes this comment as

proof that her fatness meets only with harmless curiosity

outside the United States. Wann’s fantasy suggests that

white self are limited. Rather

the possibilities of a fat,

than retreating to the naturally thin body as constructed
by Orbach, Wann hopes to retreat to a Samoan body and

culture or Middle Eastern country she thinks remain

unpolluted by Western influence. In these supposedly

pristine environments, her fat body would be accepted.

Wann and Klein’s choices of non-white and marginalized

peoples, as well as other historical epochs as examples of

fat acceptance, create analytical frameworks that detract

attenthNi from women living in societies where they are

Against this rhetoric, Sally

pathologized fim:fatness.

Tfijxfiale writes that regardless of how many times she has
.beeni tolciloy others that it is okay to be fat because there
were; tiHEHS in history fatness when was revered she is still

facmxj witli the reality of living in a time when fatness is

hattxj arui feared: “It doesn’t matter that whole human

98

 

epochslmwe celebrated big men and women, because the brief

perhxiin which I live does not; since I was born, even the

volupmxum calendar girl is gone” (16). Echoing similar

sentiments, Nomy Lamm writes, “The positive images of big

women Unfi:feminism offers have failed to make me feel any

more at home. I’m certainly not some earthy goddess

figure, ample-bosomed giver of life, mother and caretaker"

(82). The tendency Tisdale and Lamm describe, which most

often offers as models previous time periods when fat women

were appreciated as comfort and support, fails to deal with

contemporary issues of size and makes such supposed

appreciation of large women seem apolitical and

ahistorical.

Finally, celebratory accounts fail to recognize that

oressures toward fatness exert different, but theoretically

pressures on women. As Nomy Lamm

and materially similar,

states, “[. .] of course I don’t want to be expected to

ive Lua'to some unattainable ideal established by the media

ruicdiet industry, but I don’t want to be pressured from

he cflfluer direction either” (“Fishnets” 83). Be it the

ressruxa for thinness or fatness, both instances seek

Dntrtfl.<3f women’s bodies for particular political and

flmnercjxil purposes. Rather than situating fatness

_sevfluere (It in the past and asking women to find strength

99

 

 

h\\

in the knowledge that at some place or point in history
they could live without being ashamed of their size, we
need a history of the present that enables political

resistance against oppression.

Mbving On

In Unbearable Weight Bordo asserts that “these
[eating] disorders [. . .] reflect and call attention to
some of the central ills of our culture” (139). I have
shown here that a central ill of mainstream feminist
culture is its inability to cope with fatness in the lives
of women. It is an ill well-noted by feminist scholars who
identify as fat and find themselves struggling toward an
understanding of fatness that moves beyond pathology. For
example, in “The Fat Illusion” Vivian Mayer writes that
“fear of fat is so entrenched in the American mind that
even the most radical women, who have spent years exploring
and rebuilding women’s consciousness through the Women’s
Liberation Movement, have failed to spot the fraud [of
weight’s stigma]” (3). She goes on to write that “aside
from a superficial awareness that fat women are oppressed
by lookism, radical women still see fat as a personal
sickness: abnormal, lamentable, and curable” (4). Also

noting the seeming failure of the Women’s Liberation

100

Movement to make much headway in the battle to conquer the

fear of fatness, Poulton writes:
Fully twenty-five years after the Women’s
Liberation Movement galvanized us into achieving
our potential in so many other ways, the most
treasured goal of women—according to numerous
surveys-is not personal fulfillment, family, love
professional success, or wealth, but simply
becoming as tiny as the bogus beauty icons
paraded past us every waking moment. (85)

Finally, Pat Lyons clearly states where all this has lead

feminists and what must be done:
Whatever has kept so many feminists on the
sidelines of the great weight debate—whether it
is ignorance about the severity of the problem,
shame, or ambivalence about one’s own weight,
believing that weight is a trivial matter of
appearance, or for whatever reason—it is time to
come off the sidelines and get into the game.
(par. 16)

Mayer, Poulton, and Lyons, all of whom self-identify
as fat women, see feminist scholarship as a potentially
strong means to change. They continue to believe that,

even though much feminist scholarship unnecessarily

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ostracizes fat bodies, positive alliances remain possible.
Concerned about women's health and how the mainstream
medical establishment treats fat women, Lyons writes,
“Women of all sizes, but especially large women delay or
avoid medical care because of shame about their weight or
to avoid a weight loss lecture. And yet the women's health
community has been quite silent on the issue of weight
prejudice” (2). The delay of medical care and the possible
negative consequences for both fat women assumed to be ill
due to larger body sizes and thin women assumed to be well
due to “normal” body sizes can often lead to poor
healthcare and poor health for all women. We are all, in
some sense of another, swept up in the “great weight
debate,” all subjected to the established norms-most often
to our eventual detriment.

More and more women are coming out as fat. In a short
piece in Shadow on a Tightrope, a fat activist known only
as Thunder writes about her own experience of coming out as
a fat woman as a complicated and complicating choice:
“coming out as a fat woman—acknowledging my size, accepting
it [. . .] has been a longer journey, and in many ways a
lonelier one [than coming out as a lesbian” (210). In
Thunder’s experience, her family and friends found her

lesbianism easier to accept than her fatness because they

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saw her fatness as mutable and unnecessary. Accepting
one’s size and giving up the dreams of thinness can be a
difficult process for women. Many women describe the first
few months as incredibly difficult, a horribly depressing
time when they actually grieve for the lost fantasy and are
uncertain of how to proceed with their lives. For many
women, these feelings of loss and ambiguity never entirely
fade. Nomy Lamm comments on her ambivalent feelings about
her fatness: “For most of my life, I’ve been told that fat
people are gross and ugly and could never be desirable.
And, of course, there are times when that demon still lives
in me, but there are plenty of times when I am out in the
world feeling irresistible” (“Fishnets” 80).
Disproportionate attention in feminist scholarship to
thin bodies, and many feminists’ construction of fat bodies
as transitory and mutable has left many fat women wondering
if, how, and where they are represented within feminist
scholarship as anything other than markers of neurosis and
cultural ills. Within feminist scholarship lie the tools
to advance a progressive politics of fatness. Feminists
have usefully theorized how corporeality and identity
attach to one another, and much feminist scholarship
analyzes the processes by which certain bodies have become

naturalized, fetishized, and stigmatized. These tools must

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now be employed to development of a progressive politics of

fatness.

104

NOTES
1. Many people might argue that fashion has become more
size friendly as more designers introduce plus—size lines.
My contention, however, is that the availability of clothes
doesn’t seem to have much significant impact on how people
react to seeing fat women’s bodies in “revealing” clothes.
As audience members on Jenny Jones like to say, “just
because it’s in your size doesn’t mean you should wear it.”
2. See Kassirer and Angell, page 52.
3. See page 54 in Bordo’s Unbearable Weight.
4. When Pat is a Feminist Issue was published in 1978,
many scholars were already questioning the simple equation
that overeating equaled overweight. For example, in 1957
Hilde Bruch wrote in The Importance of Overweight that
overweight and obesity could not always be assumed to be
the result of overeating (86-87).
5. The fetishization of fatness is evidenced by a
substantial pornography genre dedicated to fat women. Some
titles include Life in the Fat Lane and 2,000 Pounds of
Love.
6. NAAFA’s website has a section dedicated to “fat
admirers” who are interested in chatting with and possibly
meeting potential mates. They consider the forum one of

the services they offer to the fat community.

105

7. The example of Flashdance is taken from Bordo (see page
110), but the summary of the movie that follows is my own.
8. Southwest Airlines recently re—instituted a policy that
allows them (at their discretion) to charge larger
passengers for an extra seat. I discuss this policy in

Chapter Four.

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Chapter Three
Hamer’s Reaching Broom: Fatness, Identity, and the

Pollution of Disability

In an episode of the animated television sitcom The
Simpson’s entitled “King Size Homer,” Homer, forever on the
lookout for how to do as little as possible, gets another
one of his wacky ideas to escape work: he decides to
purposefully gain enough weight to be accommodated under
disability legislation. The idea is that this will allow
Homer to work from home. Homer first sets his goal weight
at 300 pounds, and visits Springfield's resident quack, Dr.
Nick, for advice about how to quickly gain weight. Dr.
Nick suggests that Homer take advantage of the “neglected
food groups” such as “the congealed” group. Dr. Nick tells
Homer he is guaranteed to gain weight with one simple
premise: if it’s greasy, eat it. To determine whether or
not a particular food item is suitable for Homer's purpose,
he’s told to rub the food in a circular motion against a
piece of paper. If there’s enough grease on the food to

turn the paper translucent, then it's “his window to weight

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gain” (“King Size Homer”). By following the diet, and by
stuffing his face with hamburgers, ice creameand eventually
even Play-Doh as he’s reaching for those last few pounds—
Homer finally exceeds his goal weight and tops out at 315
pounds.

Now at his desired weight, Homer wears only pink
floral muumuus because he’s too fat to fit into anything
else. He loafs all day, watches soap operas and changes
television channels with a broomstick while children from
the neighborhood lurk outside the windows and taunt him.

At 315 pounds, Homer becomes too lazy to even hit a
computer key that signals the nuclear plant to discharge
gasses that, when they build up, can cause a reactor
meltdown. When the gasses build to a critical level and
Homer realizes that a nuclear disaster is imminent, he
tries to phone the plant to warn them about the impending
disaster but discovers that his fingers are too fat to dial
the phone. He also realizes how many mobility problems he
has. Reaching the reactor is a struggle, to say the least.
His weight bursts the tires on his own car and he is forced
to steal an ice cream truck for transportation.

At the same time Homer is racing down the freeway to
the nuclear plant, Lisa is riding the bus to school.

Martin tells Lisa he heard that her dad went into

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restaurant and ate all the food and then the restaurant had
to close. Defending her father, Lisa tells Martin that
just because Homer is overweight he shouldn’t assume that
he’s a “food crazed maniac.” At that very moment, Homer
races beside the school bus, eating an ice cream cone while
he’s mumbling to himself about saving Springfield from
nuclear disaster.

When he finally reaches the plant, Homer struggles up
a ladder to the top of the reactor and tries to pull the
manual release lever that will release the toxic gasses and
cool the reactor core. As he’s unable to reach it, he
wishes he had his “reaching broom.” At the very moment of
the explosion, Homer falls into the top of the reactor core
and stops the disaster by plugging the release valve with
his fat body. When asked what kind of a reward he’d like
for his bravery, Homer says he’d like to be thin again.
Mr. Burns (the owner of the plant) tries to implement an
exercise program for Homer, but when Homer can’t even
manage a single sit up, Mr. Burns says he’ll just pay for
the liposuction. This act ends Homer’s ability to claim
disability and work at home.

Is fatness a disability? Do fat people deserve
protective legislation? These seem to be the questions

“King Size Homer” raises with its portrayal of fatness and

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the possibilities of disability. Playing on familiar
narratives of fatness as a voluntary condition (and in
Homer’s case, purposefully assembled from poor eating
habits and sedentary lifestyle) the episode strikes a chord
with contemporary concerns about disability in general and
obesity specifically. On the federal government’s ADA
website, a section entitled “Myths and Facts about the

I

Americans with Disabilities Act,’ concerned citizens can
find answers to their questions. Notably, the page
specifically addresses the issue of weight alongside
concerns about the abuses of the ADA by people with
“emotional problems” (www.usdoj.gov). So, the Simpson’s
episode resonates with real-life fears about frivolous and
expensive disability claims, fears heightened by the
constant circulation in the America media of the supposed
costs of healthcare for obese people. “King Size Homer"
also underscores the rhetoric of volition in dominant
understandings of fatness and disability, shadowing recent
court rulings about “correctable” disabilities. As I will
discuss in this chapter, recent rulings about disability
and The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and about

obesity specifically emphasize volition and individual

responsibility to self-correct rather than focusing on the

110

ADA’s purpose of providing civil rights protection for
members of socially oppressed groups.

Homer’s “reaching broom” tests the limits of
disability precisely because obesity is so freighted with
notions of volition and even downright willfulness, as
evidenced by Homer’s purposeful action. Looking
specifically at obesity, this chapter maps the regulatory
functions of liberal systems of justice and medical
paradigms used to certify disability and aims to illustrate
why these rubrics cannot usefully account for stigma in
spite of the fact that one of the goals of the ADA is to
protect against harmful stereotypes. Thoughtful
examination of fat embodiments tenders new insights into
discussions of disability as socially constructed. An
examination of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990
and the ways courts have interpreted both the ADA and
fatness helps us understand what is at stake in
conversations about restricting disability and why obesity
might seem like such a reach in terms of disability
legislation. In answering the question of whether or not
fat is a disability, we must turn toward a framework
established by disability scholars that understands
disability as a politicized identity and not merely a

physical condition. The question of whether fat is a

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disability encompasses legal issues about what is and is
not covered under the Americans with Disabilities Act as
well as contemporary ideas about obese people, disability
as a physical condition and social identity, just and

unjust compensation, and the tangled issue of volition.

The Americans with Disabilities Act
In 1973 the United States’ Congress passed The

Rehabilitation Act. While this legislation made it illegal
to discriminate against disabled individuals applying for
government positions, it did not affect the private sector.
Responding to this significant oversight, Congress passed
the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990, making such
discrimination illegal in both the public and private
sectors. The purpose of the ADA was to remove barriers to
employment that had previously kept disabled individuals
from obtaining gainful employment:

The Americans with Disabilities Act gives civil

rights protection to individuals with

disabilities similar to those provided to

individuals on the basis of race, color, sex,

national origin, age, and religion. It

guarantees equal opportunity for individuals with

disabilities in public accommodations,

112

employment, transportation, State and local

government services and telecommunications.

(“Americans with Disabilities Act" 1990)
The ADA’s definition of disability is notably broad and
therefore open to much interpretation. Rather than setting
aside certain conditions as disabling, the ADA instead sets
certain standards to be met: “An individual is considered
to have a ‘disability’ if s/he has a physical or mental
impairment that substantially limits one or more major life
activities, has a record of such impairment, or is regarded
as having such an impairment” (“Americans with Disabilities
Act”). While the ADA does not clearly define what

I

constitutes “major life activities,’ the phrase has usually
been interpreted as meaning physically based tasks. For
example, walking is frequently considered a “major life
activity” under the ADA.

Although obesity is commonly understood to cause
problems with activities such as walking, many courts have
ruled that because weight is not specifically mentioned in
the ADA employers can discriminate amongst job candidates
so long as such discrimination is not unlawful. The
question of unlawful discrimination is, however, especially

tangled as the cases of Krein v. Marian Manor Nursing Home

and Philadelphia Electric Co. v. Commonwealth show. In

113

1987 the case of Krein v. Marian Manor Nursing Home tested
the waters of obesity and what it means to be perceived as
disabled. Krein, a nurse’s aid, maintained she was denied
employment because she was perceived as disabled. Krein
never claimed she was impaired by any physical condition
but rather claimed that her prospective employer
discriminated against her because he believed she would be
rendered by her obesity physically incapable of performing
the job requirements. Krein’s claim was that she was made
disabled by stereotypes about obese people. Krein, in
fact, insisted that she was not suffering from a medical
condition related to her obesity (Garcia 216).

The federal court hearing Krein’s case refused to
acknowledge that Krein may very well have been and probably
was perceived as handicapped by her potential employer,
and, in doing so, ruled against her. Because Krein
insisted she was able to fulfill the requirements of the
position—she espoused a narrative and experience of fat
embodiment that explicitly opposed mainstream medicine’s
contention that fatness is a physically disabling
condition—Krein was effectively shut out of seeking legal
recourse. The ruling made it clear that if Krein had been
willing to testify that she was disabled and could find a

physician who would argue that her fatness constituted a

114

physical disability, her claim might have stood a better
chance.

The 1982 case of Philadelphia Electric Co. v.
Commonwealth exemplifies another problem with what can
legally constitute discrimination where obesity is
concerned. Weighing 341 pounds and standing five feet
eight, the female plaintiff was subjected to standard pre-
employment examinations and was then asked to endure a
physical examination. The doctor performing the exam, who
was under the employ of the company, did not recommend her
for employment because the company had previously
established weight guidelines for customer service
representatives. The company decided the appropriate
weight for those working in customer service should
coincide with a standardized height and weight chart. In
this case, the company believed the applicant should weigh
around 140 pounds (Garcia 219).

Early in the legal process of this case, the
Philadelphia Electric Company was considered at fault. The
initial ruling operated under the premise that “her morbid
obesity was a handicap within the meaning of the state act”
and that the condition did not interfere with the
plaintiff’s ability to perform the job she sought (Garcia

219-220). In other words, the original ruling presented an

115

understanding of weight as a state of the body that is not
necessarily always physically disabling but was, in this
particular case, perceived as a disability; therefore, the
plaintiff was a victim of stigma and was socially disabled.
The ruling, however, did not stand; it was later reversed
by an appellate court. The appellate court maintained that
“since the doctor had found nothing wrong with the
plaintiff, there was nothing to prevent her from performing
her duties” (Garcia 219). Continuing on, the court also
argued that because the plaintiff’s obesity didn’t
interfere with her ability to perform the tasks required by
the job that “it was not a job related handicap” (Garcia
219). Ironically, the court also maintained that under
Pennsylvania statutes obesity did not in and of itself
present as a handicap, adding that there was no proof that
the plaintiff was in any way handicapped. Finally, the
court added that “‘an employer may be selective about the
persons he [sic] employs as long as he [sic] does not
unlawfully discriminate against the applicants’”(Garcia
219).

The original ruling that the plaintiff's weight was
not a disability, but that she’d been perceived as disabled
and should therefore be protected, was certainly on the

track of recognizing the social construction of disability

116

and the debilitating stigma associated with fatness. The
subsequent rulings, however, are wrongheaded. Take, for
example, the appellate courts' insistence that the
plaintiff was not disabled because the doctor performing
the medical exam found her to be healthy. The court stated
that, because the plaintiff could perform her job duties,
she was not disabled and therefore had no job—related
handicap. Yet, the plaintiff had never asked that she be
considered physically disabled or incapable of performing
the necessary tasks entailed by the position; in other
words, she was never seeking reasonable accommodation,
which might have entailed something like being able to sit
down while performing certain tasks. She was instead
seeking protection from the discrimination that treated her
as physically unworthy of work.

As shown by the handling of Philadelphia Electric Co.
v. Commonwealth and Krein v. Marian Manor Nursing Home as
well as other miserly interpretations of ADA standards, the
seeming (im)possibilities of such legislation dealing with
the stigma surrounding fatness shepherd people of size into
a sticky wicket. They can either self-identify as
physically disabled and hire any one of millions of doctors
who understand weight only as pathology to certify that

being morbidly obese is indeed disabling (if not

117

immediately then in the near future), or they can argue
they have been perceived as having a disability and
therefore socially disabled and almost certainly be ruled
against. In other words, the non-specific language of the
ADA and bountiful refusals, from both federal and state
courts, to acknowledge or work against the stigma
associated with obesity force plaintiffs to adopt
regulatory and hence detrimental constructions of both
disability and fat embodiment, constructions that often
reiterate the negative discourses already associated with
both identities. In the current legal climate, those
offering alternate accounts of disability and/or fatness
risk being unrecognized.

In “The ‘Miserly’ Approach to Disability Rights,”
legal scholar and disability activist Andrew Imparato notes
that since the passage of the ADA the U.S. Supreme Court
has consistently moved toward interpretations of disability
that restrict the possibility of civil rights protection
under the ADA. Discussing the court’s recent opinions on
correctable conditions, Imparato writes:

Does the ADA let people with correctable
conditions “in the door” of civil rights
protection? Why not? As Justice Stevens notes,

“Inside that door is nothing more than basic

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protection from irrational and unjustified

discrimination because of a characteristic that

is beyond a person’s control.” (205)
In other words, the court’s practice of narrowly defining
disability out of fears about who it lets in the door fails
to provide the civil rights protection the ADA should
offer. As Justice Stevens understands, the ADA exists to
“dismantle employment barriers based on society’s
accumulated myths and fears” (qtd. in Imparato 205). These
accumulated “myths and fears” inevitably involve people who
are physically impaired and those who are perceived as
physically disabled. In the same way that civil rights
protection ensures that individual African Americans, for
example, are not discriminated against because they are
thought to embody the stereotypes associated with African
Americans as a group, the spirit of the ADA aims to do the
same for people labeled or treated as disabled.

According to Imparato, the failure to acknowledge the
role of irrational myths and fears is the most significant
flaw in recent Supreme Court decisions regarding
disability. The court’s definition of disability tends
toward a discrete physical state rather than a social
experience and fails to seriously entertain discussions of

disability as a source of stigma and stereotype. This in

119

spite of the fact that the ADA specifically set out to
protect those “regarded as having [. . .] an impairment [my
emphasis” (Americans with Disabilities Act). Discussing
cases involving individuals who can “correct their
impairments through mitigating measures such as medications

I

and assistive devices,’ Imparato points out that such
people no longer “meet the statutory definition of
‘individual with a disability’ under the ADA. In other
words, the ADA no longer protects disabled people who [.

.] are able to function well but nonetheless experience
discrimination because of irrational employer behavior”
(204). Yet, it seems unlikely that a strong distinction
between a potential employee who is disabled and a
potential employee who is perceived as disabled exists in
the mind of employers who discriminate. Under the spirit
of the ADA and civil rights legislation, to be perceived as
disabled is to be disabled. Interpretations of the ADA

\\

that deny this harsh reality [leave] millions of disabled
Americans without an effective remedy for discrimination”
(Imparato 207).

For many people, the word disability calls to mind a
person in a wheelchair, and it's no wonder this is the

image disability conjures. The person in a wheel chair is,

after all, our cultural symbol of disability. In addition

120

to emphasizing physical impairments, and in particular
mobility related impairments, the symbol of the person in
the wheelchair also suggests that disability lies within
that person.1 We don’t, after all, have signs that
represent disability as a social problem. We don’t pull
into parking lots and see signs representing misguided
individuals who disable others by their actions or
inaction, and we don’t have signs that represent the ways
physical and institutional structures inhibit movement.
People who are differently disabled are not set against
backgrounds that emphasize their struggles with particular
environments or situations. Instead, the way we culturally
symbolize disability focuses our intention on an impaired
individual who is free floating (although chair—bound) and
without cultural background. Presented against such a
stark background, the problem can only lie within a
particular individual.

The narrative of disability presented by handicap
signs and court rulings that emphasize “correction” in
order to limit the category of “disabled” further
complicate efforts to house obesity under the ADA because
each represents an attempt to sort out physical disability
from social disability. Because those making and upholding

ADA policies and other similar policies rely so heavily on

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medical definitions and popular myths, other narratives of
fat embodiments are not recognized within juridical
frameworks. The result of these processes is that
different experiences with fat embodiments are not
intelligible under the required terms. When courts
interpreting the ADA only consider medical definitions of
obesity and disability they ignore the tremendously
disabling stigma surrounding what are considered to be
“less than normal” embodiments. As disability studies
scholar Susan Wendell explains in The Rejected Body:
Feminist Philosophical Reflections on Disability, the
stigma associated with certain bodies and abilities can
sometimes be as disabling as physical impairments
themselves might be:
[. . .]being identified as disabled also carries
a significant stigma in most societies and
usually forces the person so identified to deal
with stereotypes and unrealistic attitudes and
expectations that are projected on to her/him as
a member of a stigmatized group. (12)
Thus, the attempt to separate those who are “really”
disabled (such as those who are physically impaired) from
those who are socially disabled (those who are

discriminated against due to fear or hatred, such as some

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HIV positive individuals) is wrong-headed. As Wendell
points out, there is no clear line between the biological
and the social: “[. . .] the biological and the social are
interactive in creating disability” (35).

In the case of obesity, sorting out the biological
from the social is especially complicated. As the cases of
Krein and Philadelphia Electric Co. suggest, obesity is
expected to be a disability in the sense that our cultural
narratives about fat people hinge on inactivity and the
downright inability to perform certain physical tasks. The
belief that fat embodiment is disabling is represented in
Homer’s reaching broom as well as the weight loss
narratives discussed in Chapter One. The idea that obesity
is disabling is not, then, something new or radical. The
idea that obesity isn’t always a physical impairment but
can be a social disability presents, however, a different
twist. Because obesity might manifest as a physical
impairment for some, other obese people—like the plaintiffs
in the two sample cases—might not experience problems with
major life activities but instead with people’s responses
to their bodies.

Thus, we are confronted with the knowledge that
reliance on physical tests of dis/ability only reinforces

the pathologizing and medicalizing of disability, and fails

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to understand all disability as at least somewhat socially
constructed. Such tactics also place the onus, at least in
the case of fatness, squarely on the individual. In other
words, these literal strategies for determining who is
“truly” disabled deny the sorts of group politics involved
with many stigmatized identities because they only concede
to physical traits. Medical professionals, lawmakers, and
judges often resist believing they are influenced by
cultural norms and group stereotypes; however, fatness
features as an interesting test case for these claims
within both medicine and disability law. While attempting
to judge each case on an individual basis, many courts do
not consider that people of size are often not treated as
individuals in the first place, and although mainstream
American medicine’s analysis of weight works under the
assumption that it is the individual’s responsibility to
control her body, it is also clear that medicine finds
little room for individual analyses of weight. Instead,
almost anyone considered obese by medical standards will be

given the same diagnosis and recommendations.

Why Disability Studies?
In the same vein as disability scholars such as Simi

Linton and Susan Wendell, I aim here to dislodge disability

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from its origins in impairments and medicalized physical
conditions. This is not to suggest that physical
impairments are unimportant; certainly there is physical
suffering and frustration endured by many. Rather it is to
say that the way such impairments feature in people’s lives
divulge cultural values about bodies, normativity, and
social responsibility. Wendell encourages readers to
defamiliarize the most common notions about disability by
looking for social and environmental factors. She writes:
One of the most crucial factors in the
deconstruction of disability is the change of
perspective that causes us to look in the
environment for the source of the problem and the
solutions. It is perhaps easiest to change
perspective by thinking about how people who have
some bodily difference that does not impair any
of their physical functions, such as being
unusually large, are disabled by the built
environment—by seats that are too small [. . .]
doors and aisles that are too narrow [. . .]the
unavailability or expense of clothing that fits.
(46)
Examining the terrain of disability from the perspective

that problems inhere not within particular individuals but

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rather within social contexts, social expectations, and
built environments allows us to map disability as a
socially constructed phenomenon rather than an inherent
physical trait.

For both Wendell and Linton, disability studies must
move beyond the study of physical impairments and toward a
study of group politics and social contexts. In Linton’s
Claiming Disability: Knowledge and Identity, she maintains
the distinction between impairment and disability in order
to articulate and theorize differentiations between medical
and cultural, individual and group. Thus, she
characterizes impairments as related more closely to
medicalized individuals while disability refers to disabled
people as a culturally recognized and defined group.
Linton argues that “[. . .] we should [. . .] utilize the
term disability studies solely for investigations of
disability as a social, cultural, and political phenomenon”
(149). Thus, while understanding that there are fat people
who suffer impairments due to size, I choose to focus on
disability studies in terms of Linton’s use of the concept.
While physical impairments surely cause personal struggles,
the treatment of fat/disabled people as social pariahs must

be addressed first and foremost.

126

Resistance to seeing fatness as a disability and fat
people as a politicized group situates itself squarely
within medical epistemological frameworks that focus almost
exclusively on the isolated biology of individuals. In a
striking comparison between the politics of the supposedly
biological categories of race and disability, Wendell
states that “[. . .] the belief that ‘the disabled' is a
biological category is like the belief that ‘Black’ is a
biological category in that it masks the social functions
and injustices that underlie the assignment of people to
these groups” (24). Echoing the problems with
individualization and medicalization, Sondra Solovay writes
that the battle between those who choose to see weight as a
disability and those who discredit any attempt to do so
stems from the belief that weight constitutes a problem
with an impaired individual (135). For weight in
particular, the definitions of impairment and disability
entangle themselves in cultural debates about
medicalization, group and individual autonomy, cultural
decisions and consequences of pathologizing certain bodies,
ultimately demanding corrective action on the part of
individual people rather than collective social action. If
we think of obesity only as an individual impairment, then

the true context of the situation is lost.

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Although obesity is not specifically named within the
Americans with Disabilities Act, there is hope.
Considering the numerous policies written to protect one
group then later extended to others offers a progressive
vision of how fatness might come to be productively housed
under ADA legislation. Sexual harassment policies, for
example, were originally aimed at protecting women from
unwanted sexual attention and harassment proffered by men.
However, recent cases have, rightfully, moved beyond the
original purpose and dated language of such policies to
also protect men who are sexually harassed by same sex
colleagues. Thus, interpretations of these policies
acknowledge dynamic cultural shifts. Those interpreting the
Americans with Disabilities Act and state legislations
passed for similar purposes have also remained open to
considering newly proposed forms of disability. For
example, when members of the medical community began to
cite scientific studies suggesting that alcoholism was a
disease—in the sense that those suffering from it shared
similar physical traits and characteristics—courts adopted
similar views. As a result, alcoholism, although not
explicitly named under the Americans with Disabilities Act
as a disabling condition, is often a legally recognized

disability. Thus, courts clearly do engage in considering

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shifting paradigms of disability. There are also several
cities, including San Francisco and Santa Cruz,2 that have
successfully passed legislation against weight
discrimination, and Michigan3 has a state law barring weight
based discrimination. These steps must, however, be read
cautiously as small steps in the right direction. There is
far more at stake in locking out obese individuals than
merely being true to the original nomenclature or intention
of anti-discrimination legislation; closing the door on
disability claims is far more about the pervasive and

perverse fatphobia of our culture.

Medical (Re)Constructions of Fatness

Many people fear that accepting fatness as a
disability and the concomitant possibilities of it becoming
a protected category condones fatness. This seems
intolerable in a time when obesity is referred to as a
public health crisis of epidemic proportions and raises the
same sort of concerns Today Show anchor Matt Lauer
expressed about products for the larger people: won’t all
this accommodation just encourage people to be fatter?
(“New Products”). While the majority of American culture
indicates to us that fat is unhealthy, immoral, and often

downright disgusting, the medical opinions on weight are

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actually quite mixed. Even well respected members of the
medical community are beginning to understand that such
assertions display a woefully fatphobic and misguided
understanding of obesity, one that damages fat people as
well as public health campaign goals in very tangible ways.
One of the most notable statements of professional
dissent came on January 1 of 1998 when Dr. Jerome Kassirer
and Dr. Marcia Angell published an editorial in The New
England Journal of Medicine that succinctly stated the
reasons any New Year’s resolution to lose weight was
doomed. Citing the well-known fact that 95% of diets fail,
Kassirer and Angell asked that the medical community stop
pushing for weight loss. In addressing the issue of
“health” so often used to justify fatphobia, they wrote:
Given the enormous social pressure to lose
weight, one might suppose there is clear and
overwhelming evidence of the risks of obesity and
the benefits of weight loss. Unfortunately, the
data linking overweight and death, as well as the
data showing the beneficial effects of weight
loss, are limited, fragmentary, and often
ambiguous. (52)
Given their substantial review of medical literature and

their inability to find the unquestioned cause and effect

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of obesity and heart disease, for example, Kassirer and
Angell concluded that because the data present medical
professionals with more questions than answers healthcare
providers should not uncritically recommend weight loss to
their patients as if it were a simple and accessible
“treatment” option.

Despite the efforts of doctors such as Kassirer and
Angell, misinformation continues to circulate, further
confusing the American public about fatness. In 1993 the
Journal of the American Medical Association published a
brief statement entitled “Actual Causes of Death in the
United States.” Contained within this short piece was the
statement that 300,000 people had died in the previous year
due to “diet and activity patterns” (2208). Weight was
never specifically mentioned; the study focused on poor
nutritional habits and lack of exercise, regardless of
weight.4 In the following months, however, weight was all
that was mentioned when this statistic came up. The
300,000 figure was even included in the Surgeon General’s
“Overweight and Obesity at a Glance.” The report states
simply, “300,000 deaths each year in the United States are

associated with obesity” (www.surgeongeneral.goy).3 Yet

 

that isn’t what the original statement said; it clearly

I

referred to “diet and activity patterns,’ not weight.

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Nevertheless, in addition to the statistic being batted
around repeatedly on television newscasts, it was liberally
sprinkled throughout newspaper and magazine articles.6 A
voice in the wilderness in Sizewise: “Your World, Your
Size” finally admonished:
The legs this “300,000” figure has serves
as an example of how literally anyone can
come up with a “fact” ignore other,
disputing evidence, and watch their “fact”
take on a life of its own. In this case,
the “fact” is helped along by an aggressive
diet industry, looking for any angle or
scare tactic to get you to buy their
product-one more time. (“That ‘300,000
Deaths a Year’ Figure” par. 3)
The figure has, indeed, been used by the diet industry.
For example, in Joel Fuhrman’s Eat To Live: The
Revolutionary Formula for Fast and Sustained Weight Loss,
the 300,000 figure appears in the foreword, which is
written by the director of the Cardiovascular Institute of
the Columbia—Presbyterian Medical Center (Oz).
Interestingly enough, the director takes his 300,000 figure
from the Surgeon General, showing how the problem became

compounded once the nation’s doctor misrepresented the

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statistics. In Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical
Disability in American Culture and Literature, Rosemarie
Garland Thomson argues that representation, especially when
speaking about representations of disability or other
misunderstood embodiments, often tells us more about what
people take to be reality than reality itself (11).

Reading the 300,000 figure in light of Thomson’s argument,
it would seem that the liberal misrepresentation of the
figure has served to verify people’s desires about obesity
and danger and has helped fuel fatphobia.

My own experience with doctors resonates with these
examples of near hysterical fatphobia and the overwhelming
cultural narratives of fatness, constructions fueled far
more by the drive toward normative bodies than solid
medical evidence. I have many times been reminded by
medical care providers that-despite the fact that my blood
pressure, cholesterol, and pulse are within acceptable

I

ranges—I am “unhealthy,’ for no other reason than my
weight. Although it is difficult to find scientific
studies that suggest fatness is in and of itself the
catalyst behind diseases such as arteriosclerosis or high
blood pressure, it seems that many medical practitioners

feel quite comfortable telling overweight and obese

patients that regardless of any other aspect of their

133

lifestyle or health, they are ill. The doctors who have
confronted me have offered a litany of possible impairments
they see in my future, ranging from heart disease to
arthritis in my knees. The problem here is that,
regardless of a patient’s weight, health care providers
should be talking to all patients about food and exercise
habits because those matter to all of us, rather than
chastising those of us believed to have conspicuous
embodiments. Yet, mainstream medical accounts of obesity
and disability often focus on physiology and impairments
alone, failing to address the stigma the misquoted 300,000

figure showcases.

Toward Group Identity?: The Cases of Deaf Culture and
Fatness

The lack of social room for self definition of ability
also elides alternative accounts of disability. Because
weight is almost always medicalized and concomitantly
pathologized, alternative narratives of fat embodiments
often remain unrecognizable or, at the very least,
shocking. Speaking of disability broadly, Linton writes,
“We [disabled people] further confound expectations when we
have the temerity to emerge as forthright and resourceful

people, nothing like the self-loathing, docile, bitter, or

134

insentient fictional versions of ourselves the public is
more used to” (3). When medical narratives of disability
maintain such firm footing within cultural imaginations,
little room is left for political self—definition.

In posing the question of whether or not fatness is a
disability—and in particular whether or not fat people as a
group should be protected as a group in the same way as
other recognized minorities—we are faced with the question
of identity. Yet, as discussed in the Chapter Two, even
scholars committed to understanding the most subtle nuances
of identity have difficulty approaching fatness as a
possible site of identity formation. Although analyses of
weight work under the assumption that it is the
individual’s responsibility to control her body, it is also
clear that medicine treats fat people as a group; almost
anyone considered obese by medical standards will be given
the same list of possible causes, conditions, and
complications. Thus, ironically, one place where fat peOple
have already been accorded group status is medicine.

Though American medicine does offer a ready-made group
identity to fat people, it is not a progressive one. In
medicalized narratives “the obese” are frequently accused
of emptying our national health care budget and driving up

insurance rates for “healthy” Americans (Gaesser 60,

135

Albrecht et al 149). Even psychoanalysis partakes in
negative constructions of “the obese”; one particularly
interesting study, supposedly conducted to better
understand “the morbidly obese patient,” states that
“depression is the hallmark of the obese” and declares that
many of us are very “angry people” (Fox et al 479).
Familiar with such strategies, Linton notes a trend in
psychological and psychoanalytical studies of casting
personality traits as pathologies related to disabled
embodiments (99). In doing so, such studies imply that any
problems disabled people encounter—whether it be
depression, social anxiety, or general dissatisfaction with
life—result from their embodiment rather than social
structures. As Adrienne Asch explains, there is a long
history of attributing “the negative aspects of a disabled
person’s life solely to the biological characteristics of
the condition” (78). Asch also notes that blaming “
physiology for any problems acted to alleviate social
responsibility:
Inability to read print, and not the lack of
Braille or recorded material, explained why blind
people were [. . .] poorly educated and
unemployed. People with impaired mobility were

perceived as in their homes and not out shopping

136

because they couldn’t walk, not because stores
and restaurants had narrow aisles and flights of
steps that barred access for people in
wheelchairs. (78)
Thus, ironically the stigmatizing and pathologizing of fat
and disabled people is conceived around the medicalized
notion that we are, indeed, a cohesive group,
unfortunately, a group of “patients” often evoked for the
purposes of pathology only, not for empowering political
action.

So what would the contours of a progressive Fat group
status entail? Historically, activism and legislation aimed
at social justice centers around the belief that certain
groups have been oppressed via social structures such as
racism, sexism, and nationalism. However, as already
stated, fat individuals remain largely ignored by such
activism or legislation. In addition to fears about
frivolous claims, the belief that fat people do not
constitute a cohesive social (as opposed to medical) group
hinders progress toward advocacy and protection. Yet, many
of the litmus tests for politicized group identities are
met by fat folks by virtue of sharing similar social
locations resulting from stigma. As a group, fat people

share many common experiences, and fat people also share

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many common experiences with those conventionally
considered disabled.

To be certain, fat people constitute a diverse
population, but there are important shared experiences. We
are constantly told we have a social responsibility to
change our bodies, regardless of how we might feel about
such proposals. Second, we are repeatedly told to lose
weight even though mounting evidence exposes weight loss as
a false panacea. Third, our bodies are held up as public
spectacles on a daily basis. Pitted against one another,
particularly in the case of women, we are often represented
as warning signs for those who are currently thin as well
as those who are already heavy. Watching The Jerry
Springer Show on any given day provides ample evidence of
many women’s ability to chastise other women about weight.
Thin women castigate fat women, and women who are
themselves large play the game of “at least I’m not that
fat.” In spite of being pitted against one another and
differentiation within the group, these experiences remain
similar across such lines, suggesting Fat is a shared
political identity.

Indeed, these shared experiences are already uniting a
growing Fat community. In addition to The National

Association to Advance Fat Acceptance (NAAFA),

138

organizations such as SeaFattle—whose tag line is “raising
consciousness or raising hell”—are “dedicated to both
activism and support around issues of size and self
acceptance, women’s (and human) empowerment, and fat
liberation” (Seafattle). These and other organizations
offer forums for sharing experiences, support, strategies
for action, as well as engagement in self-definition around
social issues. They reject oversimplified, misleading, and
demeaning medicalized narratives. So in growing numbers,
fat people understand themselves as a cohesive group.

Paying attention to the way fat people understand
themselves and regarding Fat as a viable political identity
might encourage protection for fat people as a class.
However, resistance to such proposals is quite strong.
Why? What specifically makes the proposition of
acknowledging fat persons as a group so threatening? How
are notions of individual responsibility and “choosing" to
be obese implicated here? As disparate as the identities
“Fat” and “Deaf” might seem, critically reading recent
debates about deafness and what is now being referred to as
“elective disability” can help activists and scholars think
through these questions.

Consider, for example, a comparison between weight

loss “medicine” and cochlear implants. A careful analysis

139

of fatness and deafness reveals similar strategies aimed at
eliminating both physiological traits, despite the fact
that medical interventions produce neither conventionally
hearing nor conventionally thin people. While cochlear
implants have been touted as “cures” for deafness, members
of Deaf culture have fought to be recognized as a protected
social group, a group that should not be forced to
assimilate into mainstream hearing culture. As Bonnie
Poitras Tucker explains in her article, “Deaf Culture,

I

Cochlear Implants, and Elective Disability,’ Deaf culture

is based on several practices believed to create cultural

autonomy:
The theory of Deaf culture is primarily premised
on a shared language—American Sign Language
(ASL). Individuals who communicate via ASL
clearly do speak a different language [. . .] in
addition, some members of the Deaf cultural
community claim to be part of a separate culture
as a result of attending segregated . . .schools
for Deaf children, or as a result of their
participation in Deaf clubs or wholly Deaf

environments in which they socialize or work. (6—

7)

140

Additionally, most individuals who identify as members
of Deaf Culture take great pride in their deafness (Tucker
7). Those inside and outside Deaf culture, who both
acknowledge and wish to support this separate culture and
pride, refuse to view Deafness as a disability that should
be “cured.” Opponents of cochlear implants believe both
that the political genocide of Deaf Culture and the
implantation of cochlear devices is wrong. At the basic
level of physical outcomes, opponents of cochlear implants
question the success rates of this new miracle technology.
Members of Deaf culture might persuasively argue that there
is no “choice” of disability because cochlear implants
simply do not create hearing people. For example,
bioethicist Robert A. Crouch, who is a staunch opponent of
cochlear implants, believes that there are serious
limitations to cochlear technology. Indeed the author of
the section on cochlear implants included on
Healthlibrary.com writes that as a result of Crouch’s work
we must reconsider the “miracle” of technology. S/he
writes: “We need to recognize the limitations of cochlear
implant. A recent study found that after five years of
hard work, patients with such implants were able to correct
[sic] pronounce just 70% of vowel sounds. Lest this sound

satisfactory, the preceding sentence has just one word

141

without a vowel” (“Cochlear Implants”). There is no doubt
that these implants do not successfully alleviate deafness
as it is understood medically.

Nevertheless, efforts to culturally establish support
for mandatory cochlear implants has grown as the demand for
responsible self—correction has mounted. But is it the
responsibility of the Deaf to assimilate? Proponents of
cochlear implants, including Tucker, describe the
technology as “a surgically implanted device that is
capable of restoring hearing and speech understanding to
many individuals who are severely or profoundly deaf” (6).
Supporters of cochlear implants often view the surgical
insertions of the devices as Deaf culture’s responsibility
to larger society, especially when deafness is discovered
in children. From this perspective, the presence of a
“cure,” and deaf people’s refusal of it, amounts to
choosing disability, which of course angers advocates of
cochlear technology and the same people worried about
“frivolous” accommodation/demands for supposedly volitional
conditions. Likewise, bariatric surgeries, which often
reduce stomach capacity to around two tablespoons and
bypass sections of bowel, are socially encouraged (even
pushed) despite questionable outcomes. NAAFA maintains a

staunch position against such surgeries: “the National

142

Association to Advance Fat Acceptance condemns
gastrointestinal surgeries for weight loss under any
circumstances”(“NAAFA Policy: Weight Loss Surgery”). The
rationale behind NAAFA’s policy is based on a lack of
organized longitudinal follow—up studies, new surgeries
being performed without adequate testing, and a host of
complications, including dumping, life threatening and
debilitating post-surgery complications, and death (“NAAFA
Policy: Weight Loss Surgery”). Moreover, like cochlear
implants, weight loss surgeries (in particular the most
popular procedure at the moment) simply do not produce
“normal,” i.e. thin people.7 NAAFA states, “Currently, the
most frequently performed procedure, vertical banded
gastroplasty, results in weight loss of about 20% within
18—24 months. Because weight regain is common within two
to five years after operation, doctors plan “staged
surgery” (“NAAFA Policy: Weight Loss Surgery”).

In sum, both fatness and deafness continue to be
represented as ideally curable and mutable traits despite
the mixed outcomes of medical technologies designed to
“fix” them. Fat and Deaf people’s identities are
depoliticized because they are not recognized as members of
individual groups and diverse populations sharing the

identification of disabled people. Often already isolated

143

from mainstream culture and often from other disabled
people, non—recognition further breaks down group bonds,
isolates us into discrete individuals, and severely hinders
the forming of politically conscious group politics. As
Linton states, “the material that binds us [disabled
people] is the art of finding one another, of identifying
and naming disability in a world reluctant to discuss it”
(5). This “art" can be severely hindered by the isolation
of disabled people into discrete individuals who are
thought to share no common experiences due to the diverse
nature of impairments. The experiences of Fat and Deaf
people exemplify the commonalities between what might seem
to be disparate groups of people and can form the basis for
new political alliances perhaps previously untapped.

While I’m not making an argument for anything like a
Fat culture, I will again suggest, as Rosemarie Garland
Thomson has suggested, that “the shared experience of
stigmatization creates commonality” (l5). Notably, Harlan
Lane, Robert Hoffmeister and Ben Bahan maintain, “the DEAF—
WORLD is not to be found in any single locale” (124) nor is
a FAT-WORLD. What is important about the comparison of
Deaf culture and the Fat experience is that, while they
might not necessarily share a particular physical location

(either within each separate community or with one

144

another), members of both groups are bound together by
mainstream culture’s erasure of people thought to have
abnormal (and now volitional because “correctable”)
embodiments.

For fat people achieving a politically progressive Fat
identity necessitates getting over the sense that they are
“polluted” by the label of disability. The Fat community
is decidedly divided on the issue of whether or not fatness
should be considered a disability. One time NAAFA
executive director Sally Smith believes that the
controversy over disability and fatness is responsible for
a “split in the [. . .] weight movement” (Vogel). When
asked to elaborate on the “split,” Smith did so and offered
her own opinion on the issue: “There are people who think
that we should take what we can get [. . .]. There are
others of us—and I’m among them—[who say] that claiming
fatness as a disability is a way of splintering us”
(Vogel). Smith’s statement about people “taking what they
can get” suggests that disability should be the last
possible option in fighting for civil rights protection.
Fat people worry that claiming disability further
stigmatizes them as individuals and as a group while
proving fat people unable and unworthy of work. These

worries manifest because of the mistaken belief that

145

disability inheres within an individual’s body. In order
to move beyond the notion that Fat identity is polluted by
claims to disability, members of the Fat community must
come to accept disability as socially constructed.
Likewise, others need to divest themselves of the idea that
fat people making claims to disability are “polluting” the
charitable image of the “worthy cripple.” The notion that
the label of “disabled” is reserved for those unfortunate
folks who have been the victims of “accidents" (genetic or
otherwise) undercuts the potential for both fat and/or

disabled people to participate in progressive politics.

Questioning the Question

So, is fatness a disability or can it be? As I have
shown, overweight or obesity is physically disabling for
some, but prevailing attitudes about overweight and obesity
are, or at least hold the potential to be, socially
disabling for all overweight and obese people. As the
increasing number of legal cases filed about weight
discrimination suggest, and the innumerable narratives of
discrimination available on websites sponsored by fat
advocacy groups attest, weight discrimination is not only
alive and well but on the upswing. From a legal

standpoint, however, overweight and obesity are

146

increasingly defined as a personal problem rather than a
social liability. As Imparato’s study discussion of recent
rulings makes clear, fat people, like other potentially
disabled people who have any avenue of self-correction
available, find themselves largely without legal
protection. For overweight and obese people living in the
age of weight loss—when it is expected that everyone “be
doing something" about his or her weight—courts ruling on
fatness and disability tend to circle the wagons around
volition and individual responsibility rather than provide
civil liberties protection. Recent rulings thereby have
been stripping the Americans with Disabilities Act of its
spirit, choosing to cite it as a document that concerns
itself with physical impairments rather than social stigma

and ostracization.

147

NOTES
1. The problems with the handicap symbol are being
addressed by MUDS, the Modernization of the Universal
Disability Symbol Task force. On their website

(www.mudstaskforce.com), the taskforce explains that one of

 

the reasons they are suggesting the symbol be modified is
because people who might not have readily apparent
disabilities are frequently harassed when they park in
reserved spaces.

2. The Santa Cruz, CA law was passed in July of 1992 and
the San Francisco, CA law was passed in June 2000. For a
citation of the Santa Cruz law see the Works Cited entry
for the Santa Cruz City Equal Employment and Opportunity
Commission. A citation for the San Francisco law is also
in the works cited section; see San Francisco Human Rights
Commission.

3. See Elliot Larsen Civil Rights Act listed in Works
Cited.

4. Here I am greatly indebted to Dr. Jon Robison. During
the summer of 1998 I took a summer class with Jon, which
turned out to be germinal to my work. Jon’s refusal to
settle for the easy explanations of obesity and his desire
to offer socially just accounts of fatness that took into

account both medical and cultural narratives were both

148

inspiring and informational. It was during Jon’s class
that I first heard about the misquotation of this
particular statistic.

5. The print version of Satcher’s report presents several
versions of the “300,000 deaths” statistic. For example,
the Foreword states, “Approximately 300,000 deaths a year
in this country are currently associated with overweight
and obesity” (xiii). “Section I: Overweight and Obesity
as Public Health Problems in America,” however, uses the
same statistic differently: “Unhealthy dietary habits and
sedentary behavior together account for approximately
300,000 deaths every year” (1). The second citation more
accurately reflects the original statistic.

6. For examples, see Janda’s “The War on Obesity,”

I

Shelley's “Surgeon General Warns of Obesity Epidemic,’ and
FDA Consumers’ “Overweight, Obesity Threaten U.S. Health
Gains." Citations for these articles can be found in the
Works Cited section.

7. Roseanne recently appeared on The View and discussed
the fact that although she underwent WLS several years ago

she has still been able to keep her weight up. See Works

Cited.

149

Chapter Four
Collateral Damage from Friendly Fire?: Race, Nation, Class

and the “war Against Obesity"

Last July 4”‘when I drove past the Veterans of Foreign
Wars Post in my neighborhood, I was struck by the sign out
front:
Happy July 4th

Hotdog and Hamburger Supper
God Bless America1

\\ II

For someone who studies the war against obesity in the
United States, it captured some of the central issues
surrounding America’s obsession with fatness and in
particular the institutionalized oppression of fat people.
All across the land Americans find themselves in a nation
that celebrates its birthday with what are probably its
quintessential foods-hotdogs and hamburgers—yet rails
against those same foods in its government sanctioned
dietary advice. As the public health campaign against
obesity intensifies, being slim and “healthy” are treated

as matters of patriotic duty (perhaps the way to help

“bless America”) of each inhabitant. With three plastic

150

lines of letters, the VFW sign captured the central
tensions and contradictions of our nation’s moralized war
against obesity.

Most Americans don’t bat an eye at nationally launched
<3ampaigns for fitness and health because our history
presents a wealth of examples of similar crusades. For
(example, the President’s Council on Physical Fitness and
Sports, developed by Dwight D. Eisenhower and continued by
(John F. Kennedy, gained popularity when it was discovered
'that American boys were becoming less fit. During
Kennedy’s era, the campaign aimed to fortify a population
of young American boys who had fallen behind Soviet boys in
fitness tests (Critser Fet Land 76)f3The President’s
Council established a set of tasks that school children
would perform and these tasks, such as pull ups and fifty
yard dashes, were intended to measure students’ fitness.
Eventually, the tasks fell under criticism because many
people failed to see these exercises as necessarily
indicative of or promoting fitness. While defending the
program.and the chosen evaluative tasks, program director
Ash Hayes said, “Why was a pull-up so important? Ask any
soldier who had to pull himself out of a foxhole, or any
fireman who had to hang from the window of a burning

building” (Critser Fet Land 82). Hayes’ comment expressed

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concerns not only about the fitness of individuals but
about our national ability to fight wars or perform civil
service. Such programs therefore addressed concerns about
individual health in tandem with apprehensions about our
nation’s position in global politics and power.
Contemporary health campaigns—equally allied with

nationalistic concerns—have turned their attention to
obesity rather than physical fitness per se. Surgeon
Generals C. Everett Koop and David Satcher, as the nation’s
physicians, respectively launched Shape Up America! in 1994
and the “war against obesity” in 2001. These are arguably
two of the most significant contemporary public health
campaigns. According to Shape Up America! (SUA), “as the
nation looks toward controlling healthcare costs, no
workable agenda can ignore the pressing issue of combating
obesity in America” (“About SUA" par. 1). Koop and his
cohorts further claimed that obesity—related illnesses
“cost employers [. . .] $4.06 billion annually” (“About
SUA” par. 5). In addition to the economic burden of
obesity, SUA’s organizers provided a long list of health
problems they believed to be obesity related:

Medical researchers calculate that 88 to 97

percent of all cases of Type II diabetes, 57 to

70 percent of coronary heart disease cases, 11

152

percent of breast cancers, and 10 percent of
colon cancers that are diagnosed in overweight
Americans are attributable to obesity. (“About
SUA" par. 4)
When Satcher announced America’s “war on obesity” on
December 13, 2001, he provided nearly identical statistics
to justify his concern for American health. To launch the
“war,” Satcher and Health and Human Services Secretary
Tommy G. Thompson held a press conference and to motivate
those watching Thompson stated that “all Americans—as their
patriotic duty—[should] lose 10 pounds” (Doherty 1).

Both SUA and Satcher’s campaign concerned themselves
with the physical and fiscal fitness of the United States
and its citizens, but as Thompson’s call to action
suggested, “fitness” could also be about who is a worthy
American and who isn’t. In the same ways people might
speak about whether or not a person is “fit” for marriage
or a “fit” mother, the state sanctioned mandate to be
patriotic by losing weight suggests that being “fit” to be
an American means watching one’s weight. In order to be a
proper American one must meet a certain corporeal standard
and take seriously the moral responsibility to be a

patriotic citizen.

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While many scholars have critically studied how
various social categories and specifically stigmatized
identities influence everything from popular narratives to
government policies about citizenship, fatness remains
outside the purview of most of these scholarly analyses.
This marginalization is particularly troubling because
fatness politics, when combined with the politics of race,
gender, and class, can produce a volatile mix. For those
already marginalized within U.S. culture—including women,
peOple of color, immigrants, working class and poor people—
being fat can be yet one more badge of stigma. If, as many
scholars have argued, the idealized citizen is white, male,
and middle class3 and the idea of the ideal citizen is
further complicated by Thompson’s suggestion that
responsible Americans are those who diet and are thin, then
the United States is faced with a growing population of
people who fall far outside the confines of ideal citizens.
As empirical studies suggest that the fattest people in the
United States are people of color, immigrants, and members
of the lower class, the war against obesity targets a
specific group of people who are already, in some sense,
second class citizens.

This chapter examines the current movement to classify

obesity as a problem of class, race, and nationality that

154

has economic repercussions for the United States and
represents a serious threat to the health of our nation.

By examining the rhetoric of the war against obesity and
our history with other “health” wars as well as the moral
imperatives involved in narratives about race, food,
bodies, belonging and assimilation, this chapter seeks to
parse out how our nation’s current war on obesity
negatively affects a growing number of people. By
critically reading “health” as a culturally rich concept
rather than a value-free and unquestioned state of the
body, I explain how circulating discourses about obesity,
nationality, class, and race signify far more than a
concern for the physical well-being of any individual’s
body. I contend that the politics of fatness and fat
bodies operate as a nexus of power where we can observe
national angst and submerged racism and sexism being played
out within individual lives. This chapter reads the
rhetoric of the war against obesity as a value-laden
discourse with perhaps unintended but very serious negative
consequences for overweight and obese people and suggests

that the benefits of the war may not offset the costs.

The Fatwa(r): Rhetoric of‘War and the Fight Against Fat

People

155

Shortly after September 11, 2001 the United States
began a war against terrorism meant to track down those
responsible for the numerous attacks that took place and
the thousands that died that day. In the wake of the
falling towers, many Americans were angry and self-
righteous, believing that a war against terrorism was more
than justified. A war against terrorism, however, is a war
against an abstract and ephemeral ideology with unknown
protagonists, and thus doesn’t serve well as a target for
the emotions that war arouses. People look to social
actors involved in political ideologies when they wish to
assess blame or vent anger. For example, many people might
vow that they hate racism or sexism, but aim their
righteous anger at people who are racist or sexist. Even
though many people recognize the institutionalization of
social problems such as racism and sexism, the human actors
within such systems are still blamed for racist and sexist
actions. Thus, when the Bush administration declared a

II

“war against terrorism, it declared the nation’s anger
about terrorism but made clear it aimed to punish people
believed to be terrorists. As media coverage soared,
racialized images of Afghanis, Iraqis, and anyone else with

certain cultural presentations and ethnic phenotypes came

to serve as the face of the enemy in the war against

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terrorism. Thus the nation finds itself fighting a war not
against terrorism, but rather against specific groups of
people.

These same problems, emotions, and the search for
human causation can be observed within recent public health
campaigns, often referred to as “wars” against offending
agents. Writing about the government’s war on AIDS,
Michael Sherry points out that wars require a recognizable
enemy: “Since the most obvious enemy—the viral agent—was
faceless and invisible, [HIV] served poorly as the object
of those intense emotions that war [. . .] arouses;
instead, it located the disease within and on the bodies of
the disease’s victims” (41). Advocates of the war against
obesity imagine themselves to be engaged in a battle for
our nation’s health because they believe obesity to be the
most significant public health threat to the United States.4
What many doctors, public health officials and concerned
journalists writing in support of the war against obesity
fail to recognize, however, is that a war against obesity
also means a war against fat people. To have a war against
AIDS, to have a war against poverty, to have a war against
welfare, or to have a war against obesity without involving
the people at the intersections of these identities and

social locations seems impossible. Recent U.S. history

157

indicates that our nationally sanctioned battles against
diseases—whether people believe they are caused by poor
eating habits or pathogens—become associated with a certain
group of people given enough time and media coverage. So,
for example, as the media frenzy around SARS broadcast
images of Asians wearing masks and gloves, many people
inevitably came to associate the disease with any and all
Asians.

The situation is further complicated and the
associations even more problematic, however, when the
disease in question is tacitly understood as volitional
and/or the result of immoral behavior. Even though people
might imagine pathogens existing on their own, perhaps free
floating in the air waiting for a hapless victim, those
attacked by the pathogens still tend to be pathologized on
the basis of culture and/or behavior. The images of SARS
and AIDS call to mind dirty Asians and infectious gays who
voluntarily act irresponsibly. Obesity is not a pathogen,
not free floating, and never a virus that attacks a
helpless and innocent victim. Instead, obesity is
virtually always typecast as a condition brought on
oneself. A war against obesity, then, cannot be a war
against a faceless pathogen. Obesity is a condition of

human causation and therefore necessitates a war against

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the group of people participating in the volitional
behaviors that cause it.

The war on obesity was officially declared by David
Satcher in December of 2001 in his publication “The Surgeon
General’s Call to Action to Prevent and Decrease Overweight
and Obesity.” Notably, this was the moment when the United
States was still reeling from the infamous 9/11 attacks and
President Bush was daily vowing to track down those
responsible. In the midst of this turmoil, the valences of
Satcher’s war on obesity became clear as journalists began
to refer to the war as a fatwa, obviously playing on the
pronunciation of the Arabic word as well as the perhaps
less obvious religious implications. The fatwa, a legal
decree issued by an Islamic authority that is commonly
associated in the western media with death sentences
delivered by fundamentalists, provided a new means of
discussing the fight against obesity.

Todd Seavey, writing in an online forum for the
American Council on Science and Health, feels that the war
against obesity is a “subtler manifestation” of the fatwa
(par. 2). From Seavey’s perspective, the government’s
fight against fat is, or at least has the potential to be,
a legal decree against fat as health advocates such as

Kelly Brownell suggest taxes on junk food. In addition to

159

Seavey’s article, others adopted “fatwa” as a way to
discuss the war against obesity. Titles such as “The Fat
Fatwa Won’t Work” and “Fatwa on Obesity Carries No Weight”
became commonplace in popular media accounts.S
Where do the religious and moral implications of the
fatwa lie and why do so many journalists choose this
particular expression to describe Satcher’s campaign? As
explained in Chapter One, contemporary American
associations with fatness—even when avowedly secular—
involve concepts of (im)morality. In spite of his
hesitancy to declare a war against fatness and his concern
that individual rights will be violated by excessive
government intervention, Seavey states in his article
“Issuing a Fatwar:”
At the same time, don’t be afraid to moralize a
bit. Fat is no doubt a side effect, in part, of
booming American wealth, and as such emblematic
of the triumph of the free market. At the same
time, it may be indicative of our slovenly lack
of self-discipline in an era of loose morals.
Fat is often the indicator of lack of self—
control and it may be productive to label it so.

If the fat acceptance movement insists that “fat

160

is beautiful,” those concerned for public health
are within their rights to respond with the
more-justifiable slogan “fat is deadly” and even
with the judgment “fat is evil.” Still, we must
remember that fat people are not evil, merely
engaged in self-destructive patterns (that also
set a bad example for others). We must remember
to hate the fat and not the fattie, as it were.
(par. 12)
Seavey’s beliefs about fatness and, by association fat
people, follow the contemporary American penchant for
considering the fight against fat as a morally righteous
battle. Within Seavey’s framework, fatness indicates a
physical and fiscal economy of excess, an excess that, in
spite of any cultural influences, should be managed by the
individual. His proclamation that members of the public
health movement are “within their rights” to judge fat as
evil boldly situates fatness as a sinful vice. One does
have to wonder for whom labeling fat as such will be
“productive.” When Seavey states that we must remember to
“hate the fat and not the fattie” we are reminded of the
Christian edict to hate the sin and not the sinner.
Cleaving the sin and the sinner are not, however, as easy

as Seavey assumes.

161

The Girth of a Nation: The Politics of Nation and Bodies
The government has been battling fat for much longer
than the two years since Satcher’s declaration. According
to social historian Harvey Levenstein, the 1977's Nutrition
Committee’s “dietary goals” called fat “a national evil to
be extirpated” (241). In this case, the Nutrition
Committee was speaking directly about fat in foods, but as
history shows, associations with fat people are often not
far behind. In Never Satisfied, Hillel Schwartz provides
ample history to support his claim that fat frequently
occupies our national imagination, and this preoccupation
seems especially poignant in times of war. Schwartz
maintains that World War I “was not about fatness, but from
the start it was about food and soon enough about fats”
(140). As it became considered criminal to waste rationed
foods such as fats, meat, and sugar, fat people were
targeted because it was assumed that they were excessively
consuming rationed goods: “A woman overweight by 40 lbs
was to be accounted as hoarding 60 lbs of sugar in her
excess flesh” (Schwartz Never Satisfied 141). From there,
the jump to thinness equaling patriotism was short but
devastating: “In such an atmosphere, reducing weight

became civil defense" and in 1918 a member of “the

162

Interallied Scientific Food Commission announced, ‘There
are probably a good many million people in the United
States whose most patriotic act would be to get thin [.

.] and then to stay thin’” (Never 140—41). In short, “[the
war] transformed gluttony into treason [. . .]" (Schwartz
Never Satisfied 143).

As Schwartz’s study suggests, and Thompson's request
that all good Americans lose ten pounds cements, government
sanctioned concern about America’s weight follows
historical trends of national trepidations about excess and
the assumption that those who are overweight are most
wasteful. Against this historical backdrop Satcher’s new
war against obesity—the fatwa—again takes on international
and nationalist meanings that exceed those associated with
a simple campaign for better national health.

For advocates of the war against obesity, one of the
strongest reasons for the campaign is the staggering cost
of obesity. P. Hauri, FF Horber, and P. Sendi conclude
from their 1999 cost-benefit assessment of bariatric
surgery that “the economic burden of obesity is
considerable [. . .]” with the “direct costs of obesity-
associated diseases in the U.S. to be at least $45.8
billion in 1990, and the indirect costs [. . .] estimated

to be $23 million” (480). Similarly, an article in the

163

July/August issue of World Watch states that one Harvard
obesity expert “estimates the direct costs (hospital stays,
medicine, and visits to the doctor) and indirect costs
(reduced productivity, missed workdays, disability
pensions) of obesity in the United States to be $118
billion annually” (Gardner and Halweil 32-3).6 These
figures shock most Americans, especially when they’re told
that the costs of obesity now exceed the costs of tobacco-
related expenses. In his article “Fat Nation” Andy Steiner
sums up the situation when he writes, “Fat is now being
labeled a serious—and costly—public health crisis linked to
heart disease, diabetes, and other serious illnesses. The
discussion has taken on the language of crisis” (72).
Without a doubt the U.S., as well as many other countries,
faces a shortage of healthcare resources, but the language
of a fat-based crisis and the emphasis on figures that seem
outrageous to average Americans, particularly when they’re
not compared to other health care costs, amplifies calls
for action and the targeting of fat people as the
responsible group.

According to James O. Hill, an obesity studies scholar
from the University of Colorado, we should expect healthy
(read thin) people to express anger about the rising

healthcare costs of obesity that will be passed on to

164

everyone. Speaking about people’s reactions to current
cost estimates, Hill says “‘the main thing we see is real
shock when people digest [the costs of obesity]. They get
very worked up—and why not? They are taking care of
themselves’” (qtd. in Critser Fet Land 148). In spite of
the justification of outrage, the social costs to fat
people (such as being disabled from working due to fears of
low productivity and rising health insurance costs) go
largely unexamined because, as explained in my analysis of
disability, certain members of the U.S. population are seen
as beneficiaries of public and government charity rather
than productive citizens. The notion that fat Americans
simply eat too much food, the figures suggesting they are
also unproductive at work (presumably creating more work
for others), and the supposed health care costs that are
passed onto people that “take care of themselves” cast a
tightly woven blanket of condemnation over fat oppression.
If, after all, we have hard empirical proof that fat people
are costing our nation money—endangering our national
health care budget and the health of worthy citizens who
aren’t bringing health problems on themselves-then isn’t
outrage and even perhaps fat hatred justified and

reasonable? Shouldn’t action be taken?

165

Many cultural critics and public policy officials have
already suggested bold actions for curbing the costs of
obesity related expenses. For instance, Kelly Brownell is
credited with being the first person to propose a tax on
“junk food" in hopes that such a tax—similar to the
increased taxes on cigarettes—would generate extra
government revenue for the healthcare of people who are
currently overweight or obese while simultaneously
encouraging some currently overweight and obese people to
diet and thin people to remain so (Fortino). Brownell has
been associated with the Center for Science in the Public
Interest, is a psychology professor by trade, and also
directs the Yale University Center for Eating and Weight
Disorders. In 2000 Brownell testified at the National
Nutrition Summit in Washington D.C., a government
conference to bring together the “collective expertise of
the country’s leading nutritionists” (“Fat Tax Attack!”
par. 1). Speaking about what some have dubbed his “twinkie
tax," Brownell has stated, “’Hit junk—food junkies where it
hurts: in their wallets” by “slapping high-fat, low—
nutrition food with a substantial government ‘sin’ tax”7
(“Fat Tax Attack!” par. 3). Since Brownell’s campaign for
a “fat tax," the Internal Revenue Service passed

regulations in 2000 that allowed folks willing to pay for

166

their own bariatric surgeries to take a significant
reduction in taxes (“A Taxpayers Guide”). Continuing such
measures, last year the IRS allowed deductions for
physician—recommended weight loss programs (Internal
Revenue Service).

Initially, many people might agree that these courses
of action are reasonable, perhaps even kind. After all,
it's not often the IRS gives anyone a break, and the
majority of people might see the opportunity to lose weight
as a chance to invest in their health while receiving tax
deductions. The United States is woefully behind many
other nations in terms of preventative health care and
measures taken to ensure that people can be proactive about
their health would be welcomed. The thorny part of such
policies and the part most often overlooked is the
assumption behind what it means to lose weight. The IRS
policy that allows deductions when a physician has
recommended a particular program for weight loss makes it
clear that the ideas girding this government policy are
that weight loss necessarily promotes health. A true
health campaign might supplement gym memberships for
everyone rather than weight loss for a few. Thus, it looks

very much like this supposed “public health campaign” is

167

really a battle against obesity (and, as I argue, obese

people) rather than a battle for health.

International Politics in the Fat Land

As Susan Sontag explains, “illnesses have always been
used as metaphors to enliven charges that a society was
corrupt or unjust” (72). In past and present rhetoric,
“disease imagery is used to express concern for social
order” (72). Seavey’s justifications of the “fatwa”
against fat, especially his claim that fatness is
indicative of American culture’s excesses, illustrate the
ways the war against obesity has become a medium for
addressing the excesses of American culture in general.
Following Sontag’s logic, obesity—as an illness—functions
as a metaphor for American society gone awry; obese people
operate as the lynchpin in circulating concerns about
American society and its possible downfall. Although most
Americans consider the capitalist system and their ability
to consume key to fulfilling the American dream, what is
imagined to be the excessively conspicuous consumption of
American resources by obese people is made to stand in
contradiction to the American dream. Instead, obesity

represents the downfall of American culture.

168

Within the international arena, the United States
literally represents fatness. During a time of war—the war
against obesity and the war against terrorism—concerns
about our national image become heightened. At these
moments, the image of the fit, rugged American seems
especially vital. Americans don’t, after all, want the
world to look at our nation as a country going “soft."
Americans want their bodies, their currency, their economy,
and their image thought of as hard and strong, and
America’s ideas about obesity and fat people simply do not
compliment those images. Americans are well aware that the
world is watching our population’s weight grow and reading
the country’s self—proclaimed obesity epidemic as a
consequence of national excess. In Beppe Severgnini’s
Ciao! America: An Italian Discovers the U.S., he gives
ample text to evaluating American bodies and what they
symbolize about American culture. Writing about American’s
large backsides, Severgnini declares, “If that’s the price
tag for being the world’s number one nation, then no
thanks” (138). It appears that our neighbors to the North
also enjoy engaging in such schadenfreude. Indeed, the
United States has become a litmus test of sorts for
Canadian obesity. Writing about Canada’s obesity

“epidemic” Mark Kennedy states:

169

Canadians may be tempted to smugly shrug off the
problem [of the obesity epidemic] by noting that—
as anyone who’s ever eaten in a U.S. restaurant
surely knows—we’re nowhere near as fat as our
neighbors South of the border. Indeed, 55% of
Americans are overweight, and a stunning 23% are
actually obese. (E4)
Kennedy goes on to caution Canadians that they are facing
their own problems, as Canada now has more obese children
than the United States, “the country that gave the world
Big Macs and Twinkies [. . .]” (E4). The question of “Are
we as fat as Americans?” seems to be the way other nations
gauge what many consider a world-wide obesity epidemic.
Although Americans are often obsessed with being “number
one,” being the front runner in the obesity epidemic

\\

tarnishes the image of the U.S., as Severgnini’s no
thanks” shows. The international attention heaped on

American obesity is matched by our government’s zeal for

the campaign against it.

Dropping the Bunker Buster: Fighting the Good Fight?
For some time, feminist scholars, cultural critics,
and journalists have reported that people of color (and

most often women of color) are somehow immune to fatphobia.

170

In other words, these scholars assert that within
communities of color, weight is simply not an issue or even
that it is prized in some circumstances.8 There are those
who have argued against these assertions, instead claiming
that women of color (especially young women) find
themselves just as concerned with the cult of thinness.
Most notable of these scholars is Becky Waansguard
Thompson, whose publication of A Hunger So Wide and So Deep
marked the opening of a national discussion about young
black women and their concerns about fatness. Citing
numerous conversations with young black women who obviously
worried about their weight, Thompson muddied the water that
once seemed clear. In fact, A Hunger So Wide and So Deep
argues that young black women have even more at stake in
the achievement of the ideal body image. According to
Thompson, with the ideal Western representation of
womanhood and beauty consisting of white skin, long blond
hair, and blue eyes, most black women—whether they be thin
or heavy—fall well outside traditional notions of beauty.
With this in mind, Thompson stakes a counterargument to the
stereotype and insists that black women are concerned about
weight precisely because they understand that being heavy

removes them even further from the ideal of Western beauty.9

171

If there ever was any truth to the generalization that
black women remain unconcerned about their weight and are
not discriminated against because of it, the war against
obesity has certainly changed the situation. The main
actors in the war against obesity make a point of stressing
that people of color and the working class are most at risk
for obesity, adding that “modern obesity, like cholera in
nineteenth century New York and London, is more common
among the poor and disenfranchised” (Steiner 74).
Statistics do, in fact, support these assertions. Greg
Crister writes:

While new studies, particularly those from the
CDC, showed that the fat epidemic was slowly but
surely crossing over into the upper and middle
classes, particularly among men, the most
consistent numbers concerned the poor and the
working poor. Among these classes, obesity was
rampant. At the very bottom end were households
with less that $10,000 annual income; among them,

33 percent of blacks were obese, 26 percent of

Hispanics, and 19 percent of whites. (Fat Land
110)
Critser goes on to write, “Poverty. Class. Income. Over

and over these emerged as they key determinants of obesity

172

and weight related disease” (Fat Land 116). Critser is not
alone in pressing these statistics. New York Times science
writer Natalie Angier states that “One in ten middle—aged
black women is morbidly obese, more than 100 pounds
overweight, explaining at least in part why black women are
four times more likely as white women to die young of heart
disease” (1).

A recent spate of articles utilize these and similar
statistics to justify the war on obesity and classify
overweight as a healthcare problem of people of color
and/or poor people, i.e., a problem that should rally
liberals as much as conservatives. Summing up the
situation, Kennedy writes, “[. . .] statistics clearly bear
out the politically incorrect stereotype: while we’re all
at risk of getting fat, it’s the poor and uneducated who
are most likely to be obese” (E4). Such empirical data
leads avowedly liberal authors such as Critser to argue
that the war against obesity is more about class (and
concomitantly race) than anything else. Writing about his
own weight loss, Critser states, “The more I contemplated
my success, the more I came to see it not as a triumph of
will, but as a triumph of my economic and social class”

(Fet Land 2).

173

Critser’s comments acknowledge economic disparities in
the U.S. while still suggesting that by working hard
enough, one can be both rich and thin, which is the new
American Dream. For Critser, far too many people have been
locked out of the American Dream of thinness. I cannot
argue with the accuracy of these statistics, nor would I
suggest we turn a blind eye to inequities that near
guarantee some wealthier people access to a wider variety
of healthful foods, opportunities and time to exercise, and
better health care. But the faulty assumption here is that
a wider variety of foods, exercise, and better healthcare
cause thinness, which is what Critser and other proponents
of the war against obesity seem to be after. Critser’s
argument rests on the belief that thinness, like obesity,
is always volitional and controllable. Critser and his
cohorts rightly point out the disparity of resources, but
the ramifications of these arguments, Critser's in
particular, are potentially more detrimental than helpful.

Take, for example, how Critser follows from
inequalities through to the issue of young black women,
their rising obesity rates, and body image. Although
Critser argues that many poor blacks are almost forced to
eat at McDonald’sm—and therefore become obese—he still

finds the notion that anyone be exempt from weight based

174

discrimination quite troubling. Critser maintains that the
obesity epidemic is driven by a fast food industry that
traded in its desire to be associated with a white, family
atmosphere for a growing inner city, poverty stricken, and
captive market. He maintains that the fast food industry
now serves supersize portions to supersize folks for
supersize profits. This, coupled with urban environments
that aren’t activity friendly due to poorly maintained
sidewalks, absence of public parks, and street violence,
are the key factors in Critser’s understanding of the
obesity epidemic. In short, he argues that fast food
industries exploit populations who are hungry, need food,
are short on cash and time, and often lack transportation.
To stop the obesity epidemic, we must stop this
exploitation.

Yet, Critser doesn’t entirely focus on capitalistic
exploitation as the suggested target of public wrath; he
goes on to argue that targeted weight based discrimination
can also help stem the tide of obesity. Contrasting
statistics about black and white women’s average weights,
Critser believes that “social stigma may serve to control
obesity among white women” (Fat Land 121). Citing rising
numbers of overweight children and adolescents, Critser

finds the prospect of young black women not being teased

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about their weight problematic.ll Critser seems to think
that the African American community is behind the times
when it comes to enforcing ideal body weight and suggests
that “a few more Black Kate Mosses wouldn’t be a bad thing”
(“Let Them Eat Fat" 4). Thus, Critser believes concerns
about young women and anorexia and bulimia are misguided in
the era of obesity. What is far more important, he
insists, is that we provide motivation for losing weight.
When considering arguments about community autonomy and
African American’s rights and needs to hold alternate
standards of beauty and body size, Critser dismissively
states that such thinking “denies minority girls a
principal—if sometimes unpleasant—psychological incentive
to lose weight: that of social stigma” (Fat Land 121). In
essence, Critser suggests opening up yet another avenue of
discrimination.

Critser is not the sole author of such claims; many
people feel that a certain amount of discrimination can
prove helpful. When Southwest Airlines announced it would
begin enforcing a 22 year old policy of charging larger
customers for extra seats, many people believed this would
serve as incentive for people to lose weight (DeLollis l).
The idea behind what I call “helpful discrimination" seems

to be a fear that accommodating fat people will only

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encourage more obesity among the population. Thus, in the
same way people fear that accommodating a wider range of
what constitutes disability will lead to more and more
people claiming to be disabled, Americans fear that
accommodating larger bodies will lead to more people
becoming fat. In a recent Today Show segment about
products manufactured specifically for larger people—aids
for putting on socks with ease, a steering wheel with a
smaller turning radius, and seat belt extenders for cars
and airlines—Matt Lauer asked very bluntly, “These are all
great products, but won’t the presence of such products
just encourage people to gain weight?” (“New Products for
Larger People”). Critser poses similar questions in his
book and answers them by writing:
[. . .] we would be fooling ourselves if, as a
culture, we came to believe that such
accommodations come without a price, and perhaps
a sizable one. Science, history, and common
sense all hold that physical reminders of one’s
excess girth are critical when it comes to
controlling further weight gain. (Fat Land 60)
Obesity’s price—in this case any sort of accommodation—is

too great. Fat people must be physically reminded of their

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place on the social ladder, a place given them because of

the abnormality of their bodies.

A New Kind of Classism.and Racism?
In their brief but germinal editorial in the New
England Journal of Medicine, “Losing Weight: An Ill—Fated

II

New Year’s Resolution, physicians David Kassirer and
Marcia Angell explain that a “reason for the medical
campaign against obesity may have to do with a tendency to
medicalize behavior we do not approve of. In this age of
political correctness, it seems that obese people can be
criticized with impunity because the critics are trying to
help them” (53). I would argue that in addition to a
tendency to medicalize unpopular behavior, one might also
consider the ways portraying obesity as a problem of class
and race potentially provides new avenues for racism and
classism, especially in light of arguments about obesity
and the rising costs of healthcare. Writing about the
changing face of America and its growing immigrant
population, American Studies scholar George Lipsitz
maintains that new avenues of racism often appear in
response to changing conditions. He writes, “[. . .]

competition for scarce resources in the North American

context generates new racial enmities and antagonisms,

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which in turn promotes new variants of racism” (12). It
hardly seems a coincidence that at a time when medicalized
or biologically based accounts of race and/or poverty have
fallen out of vogue, arguments about the classed and raced
nature of those hardest struck by the obesity epidemic have
gained popularity. Everything thought about the working
class, the poor, women, and people of color, the
stereotypes of volition-laziness, lack of moral
responsibility, costly to Americans who pull their fair
share—all of these notions seem reiterated via obesity’s
status as pathology. Fatness has become a vehicle for once
again making these stereotypes and fantasies “real” to
people.

For example, even though Critser staunchly argues that
we must recognize the social and economic causes of obesity
and why it affects poor people of color more than others,
he also clearly retains rights to criticize obese people in
(de)moralizing ways. Perhaps not so coincidentally, in
horror show restaurant scenes he often describes people of
color:

Although open around the clock, the Winchell’s
near my house doesn’t get rolling until around
seven in the morning, the Spanish language talk

shows frothing in the background while an

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ambulance light whirls atop the Coke dispenser.
Inside, Mami placates Miguello with a giant apple
fritter. Papi tells a joke and pours ounce after
ounce of sugar and cream into his 20 ounce
coffee. Viewed through the lens of obesity [.
.] the scene is not so feliz. (“Let Them Eat Fat”
3)
Regardless of his intentions, Critser’s description reads
much more like an anthropological description of obesity as
a result of poor parenting skills and misguided familial
and cultural examples than an argument about class
injustices. Although Critser might argue that if the
Winchell's wasn’t there the people he describes might not
have such easy access to fritters, coffee, and sugar, his
descriptions suggest that obesity remains largely
volitional and particularly a problem for weak people of
color who placate their children with fattening foods.

The richest example Critser provides of his investment
in criticizing obese people of color tightly ties together
the key cultural narratives about obesity and submerged
racism and Classism. Again writing about the poor and/or
people of color he states, “Places like McDonald’s and
Winchell’s Donut stores, with their endless racks of glazed

and creamy goodies, are the San Francisco bathhouses of

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said [obesity] epidemic, the places where the high-risk
population gathers to engage in high risk behavior (“Let
Them Eat Fat” 3). The tie between McDonald’s and
Winchell’s and San Francisco bathhouses, and obesity and
HIV, establishes obesity as a correlate to a disease many
Americans consider to be the punishment for engaging in
“high risk" (read: sexually sinful) behavior. When the
immoral break certain social codes, penalties result. The
tie to bathhouses further suggests that these “behaviors”
are entirely volitional. No one, after all, is really
forced to go to a bathhouse. It’s a place one chooses to
go, and the rhetorical strategy of aligning bathhouses and
fast food joints places volition at the forefront. After
all, shouldn’t peOple be able to resist the “endless racks
of glazed and creamy goods” and the bodies of attractive
men? Yet if poor people of color are trapped by their
economic situations and this is the root of the obesity
epidemic, then why compare them and their behavior to gay
men, a group that is not associated with economic strife
and lack of choice? Given the rampant homophobia in
American culture (as well as Critser’s argument here”),
lashing obesity to homosexuality inevitably also casts
obesity as a crime against nature and morality. Michael

Sherry's argument about HIV and its poor service as an

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identifiable target in the war against AIDS, as well as
Sherry’s claim that the war was waged against those bodies
and identities most easily identified with the disease,
offers an apt historical example of the possible effects
Critser’s moralizing discourse will have in the lives of

obese people.

Obesity and Belonging: Race, Nation, and the American Body
In September of 2000 Anamarie Regino, a four year old
Mexican American girl, was taken away from her parents
because she was obese. Without doubt, Anamarie was a big
child: “At four years old, standing four and a half feet
tall, she [weighed] just over 110 pounds—meaning she [was]
three times heavier and 50 percent taller than an average
child her age” (Belkin par. 1). During the early coverage
of the case, the media images of Anamarie presented her as
a spectacle, an obese child whose life was in danger.
Initially, the case might have seemed to be only about the
health of a child; however, months later when Anamarie’s
parents were interviewed, especially her mother Adela, it
became clear that the handling of the case was about far
more than an overweight child. Adela Regino’s account of
how she and her family were treated, particularly by the

social workers involved in the case, suggests that concern

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about Anamarie’s weight couched a struggle involving
citizenship and race. Although Adela’s native language is
English, she claims that the social worker consistently
asked her to speak Spanish, which Adela speaks but not
fluently. Born in the United States, Adela was also
irritated by the social worker’s blatant assumption that
she must have been born in Mexico: “She kept asking me for
phone numbers of my family in Mexico. I kept telling her I
was born and raised here. My mother was born here. She
wanted us to be ignorant foreigners so she could write that
on her report” (qtd. in Belkin). What the social worker
reported was eerily close to what Adela feared. According
to Lisa Belkin, a writer for The New York Times who
investigated the story and was given access to the legal
documents involved in the case, the social worker “hinted
that the family does not fully understand the threat to
their daughter’s safety and welfare due to language and
cultural barriers” (par. 22). The social worker in charge
of the case assumed that the Regino’s, because of their
race and culture, didn’t know and couldn’t understand how
to properly care for their child and this resulted in her
obesity.

The subtexts of the Regino case speak to struggles,

misunderstandings, assumptions, and demands of citizenship,

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particularly for people of color, and the state
intervention in this case (re)presents patterns of
government investment in understanding and changing
consumption patterns. In Paradox of Plenty Harvey
Levenstein maintains that the U.S. government has a long
history of involvement with food programs, including
programs aimed at assessing and changing food choices of
those seen as culturally different. In particular, the
United States government has taken an interest in the food
choices of immigrant populations and the working class, and
although the war on obesity might be relatively new,
government concern about obesity and immigrants is long
standing.

In 1941, anthropologist Margaret Mead was commissioned
by the government to study and explain interrelationships
between food habits and culture in hopes that she could
find ways to change diet “in ways that didn’t threaten
culture” (Levenstein 71). Mead’s study, however, was
considered unsatisfactory because she concluded that
patterns of consumption were far too complex and sometimes
bound to people’s identities for the government to make any
sweeping recommendations regarding nutrition and food
(Levenstein 71). Perhaps the best known work on immigrant

children, eating, overweight and obesity, is Hilde Bruch’s

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1957 The Importance of Overweight. Bruch, who is best
known for The Golden Cage, one of the first texts on
anorexia nervosa that looked at the role of family dynamics
in eating disorders, launched her study because as a
European arriving in America she was fascinated by the
number of overweight and obese children. Unlike Mead,
Bruch was not commissioned by the U.S. government to
conduct her study, but many of her conclusions certainly
echoed national concerns. Bruch was constantly frustrated
and bewildered by immigrant parents’ refusal to adopt the
nutrition plans she suggested for their children. In
response to this strong resistance, Bruch began to
understand overweight and obesity in children of immigrant
parents as a result of poor family dynamics and
psychological problems. She writes, “it was poor
cooperation on the part of fat children and their parents
that aroused my interest in possible psychological aspects
of obesity" (8). Family dynamics, however, included parent
and child interactions as well as how well she felt
families were assimilating. By studying obesity in
children and possible psychological factors, Bruch
catalogued and measured how well immigrants were fitting

into American society.

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Writing about Bruch’s study, historian Paula Saukko
maintains that Bruch’s analysis of childhood obesity was
ultimately about whether or not immigrant families were
living up the American ideal:
For Bruch, the norm was not merely a certain
weight: her comments on the immigrant families’
home and family size, their consumption patterns,
their manners, and their ways of raising children
entangled body weight in a broad normative agenda
for everyday life. The white middle-class
family ideal, which demanded a ‘carefree, child-
centered outlook-with relaxed methods of child
discipline, separate rooms for each child, and
educational toys and music lessons’ [. . .]
reached its apex in the fifties. In short,
Bruch’s agenda interpreted the immigrant
families’ problems as resulting from their
inability to live up to that ideal. (37)

Living up to that ideal involved, as Saukko suggests,

complete Americanization. Weight became a stand in for

assimilation and belonging.

From Bruch’s perspective, the most stubborn immigrant

trait to change was food choice. Bruch writes:

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Children of [immigrant] background are inclined,
as they grow older, to reject the social customs
and traditions of their parents; but an
appreciation of mother’s cooking and her
lavishness in offering food lingers on after
other values have been abandoned. Acquisition of
new food habits is a late step in the
emancipation from home and in the process of
Americanization. (40-1)
By referring to “the emancipation from home” Bruch
established a framework for understanding the social
customs and beliefs of immigrant parents—and by default
other countries and cultures—as oppressive.
Americanization offered freedom. It’s also apparent that
Bruch fully understood the ways food binds families and
communities together and that food choice can be tied to
identity—in this case a familial and national identity. In
order to truly become American old food habits were to be
discarded and the children of immigrants were urged to
adopt an American diet. According to Schwartz,
“Americanization began to imply an actual physical change”
and “100 percent Americanism meant a change in food habits
from the ethnic to the homogenized” (Never Satisfied 143).

Thus, the idea of a unified America and the desire to be

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American was mapped onto food choices and diets. Those who
wanted to be American were expected to eat American, and
ethnic foods had no place in this plan.

Eating the American way has become even more complex
since Bruch’s era, especially as America’s population has
become more diverse. As Lipsitz points out:

U.S. citizens invested in the notion of their
nation as essentially white and European confront
a daunting demographic challenge. The population
of the United States now includes thirty million
Latinos and ten million Asian Americans. African
Americans, Native Americans, Asian Americans, and
Latinos account for more than half of the
population of Los Angeles, Miami, San Antonio,
Honolulu, and several other major
cities. (10)
While one might assume that the changing demographic of the
United States and the presence of ethnic restaurants on
nearly every block would drastically change narratives of
food and nation, this doesn't seem to be the case. Whites
cruising ethnic neighborhoods for a Friday night dinner and
being a person of color who primarily eats ethnic food draw
very different reactions. In part because of the growing

popularity of ethnic cuisines, food is even more closely

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tied to nation; often cuisine is the only thing Americans
know about other nations. Further, the changing
demographic of the United States appears helpless in
changing ideas about what constitutes American food. As
Levenstein astutely notes, fast food is seen as the
American food (227).

For contemporary Americans who retain an ethnic
identity, the choice of foods for celebrating America’s
birthday reveals a persistent national investment in white
identity. By contrast, Chicano activist Oscar Zeta Acosta
engages in a denial of American identity as white by
passing up hamburgers and hotdogs on the fourth of July,
and instead choosing instead to eat guacamole and “[watch]
someone irreverently sew corn chips to the American flag"
(Chamberlain 102). Acosta insists on re-making the fourth
of July into a holiday that accounts for at least part of
his American identity, a Mexican American identity.

Acosta’s autobiography presents readers with instance
after instance of his struggle with a fat brown body and

his love of ethnic food. He consistently resists doctors

advice for how to heal his ulcers. He writes, “What value
is a life without booze and Mexican food?” (12). He goes
on to write, “[The doctors] said, ‘Nothing too hot or cold,

nothing spicy and absolutely nothing alcoholic.’ Shit, I

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couldn’t be bland if my life depended on it” (12). Reading
“bland” as white—which seems fair given the associations
between spicy food and Chicano identity that abound within
Acosta’s text as well as Bruch’s insistence that immigrants
eat white foods—Acosta’s resistance to changing his diet
represents his refusal to compromise his life as a Chicano.
As Marcia Chamberlain points out, Acosta’s “doctors read
his choice of foods pathologically but he reads them
culturally. Enchiladas, hot sauce, and cheap beer are part
of his heritage; they give him strength and vitality, and
they connect him to the larger Mexican American community”
(101). Yet even Chamberlain misses the mark a bit with her
analysis; Acosta’s doctors most likely read his food
choice, culture, and race as routes to pathology.

Acosta’s Mexican American identity and diet are
problematic within contemporary discourses of nationalism
and responsible citizenship because to eat differently is,
as W. Charisse Goodman notes, “to be set apart from others”
(112). The assertion of a Mexican American identity
challenges not only ideas about American food but about
American citizenship. As Craig Calhoun argues, in the
discourse of nationalism, one is only French or Chinese and
the primary nationality takes precedence over any other

aspect of one’s identity: “This way of thinking reinforces

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the idea of nationality as a sort of trump card in the game
of identity” (256). Thus, being an American citizen
entails being committed to the American identity first and
foremost. Being set apart from others is poorly suited to
a nation seeking to present a unified identity and from
Acosta’s autobiography, it appears that eating differently
can also act as protest. In fact, Chamberlain says that
during many Americanization programs immigrants were told
to “choose ‘white’ foods because [. . .] ‘eating un—
American foods [i.e. spicy, exotic foods] could be
interpreted as a protest’” (101). While Acosta certainly
means for his food choices to serve as protest, those whose
food choices are interpreted as protest even if not
intended as such face being considered un-American.

When obesity is also at issue, the situation is even
further complicated. Writing about Acosta’s fat brown
body, Chamberlain notes that “his fat body is
simultaneously the ultimate dream come-true and the
ultimate American nightmare, ‘a gross physical salute to
the fantastic possibilities of life in this country’" (92).
Acosta’s body, as well as those described by Critser, are
both the embodiment and the antithesis of American ideals.
On the one hand, Acosta’s brownness and his ability to

conspicuously consume serve the American dream

191

mythopoetically. He symbolizes the weak, poor and hungry
the U.S. promises to protect, and fulfills the fantasy that
anyone can make it in the United States regardless of race,
class, gender, ad infinitum. On the other hand, his size,
seen as emblematic of his overconsumption, is the American
dream gone awry. For people of color, particularly those
still strongly identified with immigrant groups, fatness
indicates excessive consumption of food as well as the
excessive consumption of American resources.

When the war on obesity, the war on poverty, and the
war against immigration all converge on one body, the
discrimination Critser believes helpful abounds. Openly
criticizing certain groups can draw negative responses, but
obesity provides a useful vehicle for criticizing groups of
people already marginalized in the United States.

According to Mark Roehling, an industrial relations scholar
who studies weight based discrimination, “Being fat seems
to have a consistent strong effect, more consistent than
any other form of discrimination I’ve seen, though part of
that may be because people feel freer to talk about it"
(qtd. in Goldberg 1). Roehling states that in his review
of existing research about weight based discrimination he
was surprised that “in those studies where researchers

asked participants about weight discrimination” people were

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quite “forward [. . .] in admitting that they were making
decisions based upon weight. In a way, it appears to be
the acceptable bias” (“WMU News” par. 15).

In Fet History: Bodies and Beauty in the Modern West,
Peter Stearns writes that “the social, class, and race
implications of American dieting merit attention as well [.

.]. In a society that likes to discuss equal opportunity
and resists class labels, the United States has used
dieting as a marker among groups [. . .]” (259). The
division among groups becomes stronger as the battle
against obesity gains strength from the backlash against
recent lawsuits against fast food companies. One posting
on a Yahoo message board read, “I say we all get together
and sue fat people for being fat and raising our insurance
costs” (PFunk Bootsy). Regardless of whether or not one
believes fast food companies should be held accountable,
it’s still apparent that holding companies accountable will
not alleviate weight based discrimination. It might, in
fact, increase fatphobia as fat people are yet again
charged with receiving resources they don’t deserve. Why
should companies pay because fat people have no control and
are looking for a free ride? Considering the implications
of a war against obesity and its tangled ties to discourses

of nationalism and citizenship, we must re-evaluate the

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goals of this war. As Diane Carol Bast, editor of Health

Care News states:
A government-sponsored “war on fat" will resemble
the war on drugs, alcohol, tobacco, firearms, and
other products disliked by the elite but valued
by the majority. All these campaigns are sources
of human suffering, public costs, and violations
of individual rights that must be weighed against
the slight benefits to public health they may
engender. (Meier and Bast par. 26)

In order to understand the complexities of the “war against

obesity,” healthcare professionals, scholars, and any

concerned citizens must take into account the full range of

human costs. Otherwise, many Americans might become the

victims of friendly fire during the “war on obesity.”

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NOTES
1. This message was in front of VFW Post 701 in Lansing,
MI during the summer of 2002.
2. During the course of my argument, I use two pieces by
Critser. The first is “Let Them Eat Fat," an article that
appeared in Harper’s. The piece was popular enough that
Critser spun it into his book Fat Land. When I use “Let
Them Eat Fat” instead of Fat Land it’s usually because some
of the language in the article was changed for the
monograph.
3. For a feminist account of liberal society and the ways
it is structured around an ideal male, white citizen, I
recommend Wendy Brown’s States of Injury: Power and
Freedom in Late MOdernity. In her chapter “Finding the Man
in the State,” Brown argues that within liberal societies
subjects are often believed to be without gender but the
ideal liberal subject is a male who is able to move freely
throughout society (182).
4. Although I criticize Critser later in the chapter, I do
think he genuinely believes that class is at the root of
the obesity epidemic, and his argument is not without its
merits. Much like Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation,
Critser’s Fet Land investigates the hidden politics behind

food in the United States and offers important insights

195

into how certain people are encouraged (be it by marketing
or location) to consume in certain patterns. There is no
doubt that class can play a substantial role in food
politics, and I think Critser rightly points this out. I
believe his intentions are good but his rhetoric is
seriously flawed.

5. See Works Cited for complete information.

6. Cost related statistics for obesity often vary wildly.
Even when I’ve attempted to compare data from similar
years, the figures frequently don’t match. Further,
figures associated with the costs of obesity frequently
appear in newspaper and popular press articles without
reference to sources. According to Meier and Bast one
reason the dollar costs of obesity are difficult to pin
down are the methods used to collect such data, which
constitute “an amalgamation of incomparable numbers,
including health care costs handled by a variety of private
insurance policies or by individuals paying their own out-
of-pocket costs” not to mention the difficulties in
accounting for exactly how obesity causes reduced
productivity (par. 17).

7. Brownell’s rhetoric, as the article cited here

explains, has softened a bit since his initial proposal.

196

8. Refer back to the discussion of Klein and Wann in

Chapter Two.

9. Here I summarize Thompson’s chapter, “Making ‘a Way
outa No Way,” pages 1-26.
10. In line with current narratives about obesity, Critser

assumes that eating at McDonald’s necessarily makes people
obese. While I would certainly not argue that McDonald's
provides the best quality food, I would argue that there
are many people who regularly eat at McDonald’s and remain
thin. McDonald’s doesn’t cause obesity. I think this is
yet one more example of Critser sidestepping more nuanced
discussions of obesity.

11. In a chapter entitled “Who Let the Calories In,”
Critser bemoans the fact that Americans now consider
children’s feelings and emotions more important than what

he considers to be the more serious problem of obesity (Fat

Land 36—37). In fact, Critser suggests harassment as a
means of controlling children’s weight. He Claims that
children who were “lovingly ‘hassled’ [. . .] were

substantially less overweight ten years later” (Fat Land
38).

12. The homophobia expressed in Critser’s statements is
just as deplorable as the fatphobia. He obviously

characterizes AIDS as a disease only associated with gay

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men, and in doing so suggests that AIDS, like obesity, is
restricted to a certain population. My objections to the
comparisons between obesity and HIV are not meant to
reiterate Critser’s homophobia. In other words, I don’t
object to fat people and gay men being associated but
rather to how Critser goes about it. Within his rhetoric,

both are derided.

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Conclusion

In Never Satisfied: A Cultural History of Diets,
Fantasies, and Fat, Hillel Schwartz recounts the history of
the first mass manufactured bathroom scale. Known as “The
Detecto,” the scale was introduced by the Jacobs Brothers
of Brooklyn in 1921 (169). At the same time the Jacobs
Brothers were marketing their private scale, street corners
across America were graced with penny scales, and by the
late 1920’s penny scales had begun to provide both a
person’s weight and his or her fortune on a convenient card
that could be carried in a wallet or purse. According to
Schwartz, “people saved their weight cards, which were at
once a personal medical record and a set of promises about
what lay ahead—marriage, fame, money, children, good
health, the end of troubles” (Never Satisfied 167).

Penny scales and fortune tellers on street corners
have faded, but the cultural value of weight as a predictor
of health and happiness remains. For most Americans weight
is still their primary means of measuring health and the

potential for happiness. Nearly every bathroom in the

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nation houses a bathroom scale. Yet, the American
obsession with weight has paradoxically made bodies
simultaneously private and public issues. At the same time
Americans are able to weigh themselves in their bathrooms,
arguably the most private room of a house, their bodies are
judged at every moment as a public spectacle that signifies
one’s wellness, economic and social class, morality, and
citizenship.

As a public health campaign, “the war against obesity”
continues to gain steam. The values bolstering the
campaign and the possible consequences seem to go
unexamined and Americans continue to dream of thinness,
with many of them pursuing “health” via thinness at any
cost. Cancer survivor Christine Arthurs offers a unique
perspective on this latter day American obsession with what
she calls “perfect health” (A16). Reflecting on Susan
Sontag’s work in Illness as a Metaphor, Arthurs suggests
that wellness as a metaphor can be just as loaded. She
writes, “Like illness, wellness is charged with meaning,
especially in today’s health conscious society. We don’t
just want good health but perfect health” and “we have
forgotten that the human organism doesn’t have to be
perfect to be deemed healthy” (A16). Exercise physiologist

and fat activist Jon Robison echoes Arthur’s sentiments in

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his article “Do We Really Need to Exercise and Eat Low Fat
to Get Into Heaven?”. Questioning America’s obsession with
thinness and the belief that thinness is a stand in for
health, Robison writes:
Health is much more than the absence of disease
or behavioral risk factors for disease. We need
to shift towards a more holistic conception of
what it means to be healthy, taking into
consideration the social, emotional and spiritual
as well as the physical aspects of the human
existence. Our culture’s at times almost
religious fervor regarding the importance of
weight and exercise to health is making this
difficult. Can we truly say that someone is not
“healthy” because they choose not to exercise and
eat less than 30 percent of their calories from
fat? Is a person with anorexia nervosa who eats
virtually no fat and exercises constantly
healthy? How about someone who hates their job,
is in a failing relationship and abuses their
children? Is he healthy if he works out at the
gym 5 days a week and has a body mass index of

less than 25? (par. 1-2)

201

After clouding the waters of “health,” Robison clearly
states the consequences of America’s obsession: “[. . .]
this incessant focus on diet and physical fitness as the
principle determinants of health is misleading and keeps
people from addressing other areas of their lives that may
have more impact on their overall well being” (par. 8).

As both Arthurs and Robison argue, the American
preoccupation with a concept of “health” narrowly defined
by height and weight charts and health qua thinness is as
likely to lead us away from health as toward it. Examined
critically, the rhetoric of the U.S. government’s “war on
obesity” appears to be less about a public health campaign
and more about the linguistic pathologizing and
scapegoating of already marginalized groups. In parsing
out the causes for the hatred of and discrimination against
fat people, America’s national_policy against fatness
cannot be excused. As Annemarie Jutel explains, “national
policies contribute to crystallizing social beliefs about
body fat and its nefarious qualities” (par. 4).

Certainly a positive and comprehensive public health
campaign would encompass many of the measures Greg Critser
and his cohorts suggest. Critser, for example, argues that
if urban neighborhoods were safer people would be more

likely to walk as exercise. According to his research,

202

many inner city dwellers report that fear of crime keeps
them from walking in their own neighborhoods (Fat Land 73).
Of course everyone deserves to be safe, but why must a
campaign against obesity be the vehicle for making
neighborhoods safe? Don’t people deserve to be safe
regardless of whether or not they take evening walks?
Whether or not they are thin or fit? Critser’s argument
serves as apt example of the how more important factors can
be overlooked when the rhetorical target of public health
campaigns becomes particular embodiments. Following
Robison’s argument, personal safety and freedom from fear
might be issues that have a greater impact on a person’s
overall well being.

A legitimate public health campaign must address more
than obesity and strive for more than fitness as a narrowly
and problematically defined state of “health” or
perfection. Instead, a true public health campaign must
adopt a more holistic approach to American health, which
means addressing both the physical and psychological well

being of all citizens. The argument behind a successful

\\ II

and progressive public health campaign must be an us
argument rather than a “them” argument. Like the “Detecto”

scale, casting overweight and obese people as the cause of

America’s physical, fiscal, and moral problems and failures

203

portends a future that further stigmatizes and disables a
growing group of Americans who find themselves fat in the

age of weight loss.

204

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