The predictable new year dose of fat panic kicked off today with widespread reporting of the Royal College of Physicians' (RCP) latest missive, complete with a plethora of headless fatties from the picture archives. The RCP is a charity that represents physicians and, according to its website, "takes a wide role in public health". Action on obesity: Comprehensive care for all, by one of the RCP's working parties, states that the current response to obesity by the NHS is "patchy" and could be resolved by a number of proposed initiatives.
Reading the report is like a journey into Opposite Land. The work is well-meaning, but it exists with a framework that is profoundly problematic. For example, it is hard to disagree that current service delivery for fat people is really poor, particularly for those who undergo weight loss surgery, and that there needs to be proper auditing, quality control and monitoring of all obesity treatments.
But the report, as is typical in a medicalised discourse of fat, is entrenched in a view that regards weight loss as the universal solution to the problem of fat people and health. The authors throw about "severe complex obesity," a term they're obviously pretty proud of, coming soon to a healthcare provider near you, and bound to further medicalise and stigmatise fat people. They make the crucial mistake of failing to question the effectiveness of weight loss at all, so it's not weight loss surgery that ruins fat people's health, it's the fact that the care pathways surrounding the surgery need tweaking. This ties them up in all kinds of knots, looking for answers in the wrong places, for example suggesting that the UK needs a Michelle Obama figure to galvanise the population against obesity, even though her crusade in the US has been disastrous in re-stigmatising fat kids, and even though we've already seen Jamie Oliver screw things up over here.
The report, its press release, and subsequent reporting, reiterates the usual stale fat panic rhetoric about demographics and increasing body weight, and reproduces the inconsistencies of this argument. An estimated cost of £5 billion per year is placed on 'obesity', based on secondary reports, all of which also estimate the cost or propose costs based on irrelevant evidence (I checked their methodology). This figure is therefore a fantasy. More confusingly, Action on obesity: Comprehensive care for all criticises these costs, whilst making a prolonged case for spending more on obesity treatment, presumably because that's what puts the bread and butter in its members' tables. It's nonsense.
This report is an example of obesity research which eschews a research justice framework – more about that in posts to come – but which makes a big honking noise about being for the benefit of humanity. But work like this, cynically capitalising on new years anxiety about fat, is a load of hot air, a waste of space, that serves no one but the members of the RCP, least of all fat people.
If the RCP were really serious about fat people's health, they would be investing in health at every size research, developing fat activist communities, and pioneering projects such as medical self-advocacy, anti-discrimination work, and other low cost, low risk initiatives that have proven track records in increasing fat people's well-being. But that's just crazy talk, isn't it?
Action on obesity: Comprehensive care for all
Showing posts with label obesity epidemicTM. Show all posts
Showing posts with label obesity epidemicTM. Show all posts
Fat, Activism and the London 2012 Olympics
I'm really delighted to have been interviewed by the Games Monitor about fat and the Olympics, including some things about the Fattylympics.
Under the radar: Fat activism and the London 2012 Olympics: An interview with Charlotte Cooper
Under the radar: Fat activism and the London 2012 Olympics: An interview with Charlotte Cooper
Hey activists! Critiques of imperialism plus disability activism can help call out obesity science too!
I'm noticing a wave of TV programmes and articles about the scientific truth of why people are fat, and what should be done about it. I know this is a pretty constant part of the media in the UK, but I'm noticing it more than usual, and it's high profile too. Perhaps its greater visibility is something to do with the forthcoming bikini season, or the devil's Olympics, or the Conservative-Lib Dem destruction of the NHS. Anyway, there it is.
Fat people are not present in this work, unless you count the headless fatties. Even though this is the kind of work that underpins how I am understood by the world, I do my best to take no notice of it because it takes no notice of people like me. There are plenty of articulate fat people who have a good grip on why obesity discourse is corrupt, including very gentle and moderate people who would be polite and constructive with their criticism, but you will never see them in work like this. I have written many times of the ways that obesity discourse makes fat people anonymous, abject and abstract, and this work continues to employ these strategies to reproduce and capitalise on anti-fat stereotypes. If it was truly helpful then it would engage closely with fat people. If fat people who have agency, community and culture to showed up in this work, it would expose the lie that obesity is a medical scourge about which something – surgery, hormones, drugs, genetic engineering, policy, shaming, hand-wringing – must be done.
Instead, this rash of TV programmes and articles about the scientific truth of obesity, and its inevitable solutions, present a world of experts who have no connection to the people about whom they are expert. What kind of expertise is that? This is why I think of this stuff as being more about the people who produce it than the people they think they're helping. Once again I thank the gods for disability activists who, over past decades, produced similar critiques of charity and medicalisation, showing how these concepts are generally less than helpful to disabled people themselves; these debates are directly applicable to fat people and obesity interventions, as I have discussed in my book Fat & Proud, and my ancient article for Disability & Society.
More recently, excellent critiques of problematic imperialist activist interventions are hot off the press, a response to white fat activism from People of Colour in the fat justice movement springs to mind, as does Teju Cole's The White Saviour Industrial Complex, I think these critiques, as well as anti-imperialism work more generally, can also help people call out obesity science and create space where more diverse voices can be heard within and beyond the dominant discourse. As disability activists say: nothing about us without us.
Meanwhile, obesity scientists keep gaining column inches for their neutral, helpful work. They clearly see themselves as the good guys, no-one could conceive that their work was problematic in any way. They're just helping to rid the world of people like me and you, you know, the useless ones, the social burdens. They're doing it for our own good.
Fat people are not present in this work, unless you count the headless fatties. Even though this is the kind of work that underpins how I am understood by the world, I do my best to take no notice of it because it takes no notice of people like me. There are plenty of articulate fat people who have a good grip on why obesity discourse is corrupt, including very gentle and moderate people who would be polite and constructive with their criticism, but you will never see them in work like this. I have written many times of the ways that obesity discourse makes fat people anonymous, abject and abstract, and this work continues to employ these strategies to reproduce and capitalise on anti-fat stereotypes. If it was truly helpful then it would engage closely with fat people. If fat people who have agency, community and culture to showed up in this work, it would expose the lie that obesity is a medical scourge about which something – surgery, hormones, drugs, genetic engineering, policy, shaming, hand-wringing – must be done.
Instead, this rash of TV programmes and articles about the scientific truth of obesity, and its inevitable solutions, present a world of experts who have no connection to the people about whom they are expert. What kind of expertise is that? This is why I think of this stuff as being more about the people who produce it than the people they think they're helping. Once again I thank the gods for disability activists who, over past decades, produced similar critiques of charity and medicalisation, showing how these concepts are generally less than helpful to disabled people themselves; these debates are directly applicable to fat people and obesity interventions, as I have discussed in my book Fat & Proud, and my ancient article for Disability & Society.
More recently, excellent critiques of problematic imperialist activist interventions are hot off the press, a response to white fat activism from People of Colour in the fat justice movement springs to mind, as does Teju Cole's The White Saviour Industrial Complex, I think these critiques, as well as anti-imperialism work more generally, can also help people call out obesity science and create space where more diverse voices can be heard within and beyond the dominant discourse. As disability activists say: nothing about us without us.
Meanwhile, obesity scientists keep gaining column inches for their neutral, helpful work. They clearly see themselves as the good guys, no-one could conceive that their work was problematic in any way. They're just helping to rid the world of people like me and you, you know, the useless ones, the social burdens. They're doing it for our own good.
Diet Songs: Ayds
I'm stuck on the name, I can't get past the name. A weight loss product called Ayds which, when you say it aloud, sounds like AIDS. I associate dieting so strongly with drawn-looking emptied out bodies that when I hear Ayds I think of the wasting suffered by people with AIDS, and that famous photograph of David Kirby dying amidst his devastated folks. This is probably not the association that the makers of Ayds wanted to promote in the product's heyday, but it's certainly the association that led to Ayds' demise.
Just saying the name invokes a handful of feelings: schadenfreude, a longing for other similar diet crap to bite the dust, sadness and rage about HIV/AIDS, bemusement. Ayds is so exposed by its name and obvious quackery, if it can happen to that product, why not Slim Fast, LighterLife and the rest of them? Why must it fall to an unfortunate coincidence?
Would Ayds be a viable brand nowadays? I'm inclined to think that it would. I think the obesity epidemicTM has made many people more desperate than ever to try and lose weight. Associations with illness don't seem to matter, I know someone who was congratulated on her weight loss after a couple of months suffering amoebic dysentery. How does the stigma of AIDS or terminal illness compare to fat stigma? Would people be willing to be associated with one in place of the other? I really don't know.
We recorded this pretty straight because, really, what else are you going to do with gold like this? Simon's spidery track sounds like a virus in your blood.
Diet Songs: Ayds by Charlotte Cooper + Simon Murphy (.mp3, 840kb)
Diet Songs
New Project: Diet Songs
Nimble
Slim-Fast
Tab
Diet Pepsi
Nutrasweet
Diet Coke
Ryvita
Ayds
Special K
How the Left failed fat
About a week ago my friend sent me a link to an article by Jennie Bristow that was published in Living Marxism when my book came out in 1998, you can read it below. My publisher at the time sent me a press packet of all the coverage my book generated, but this article wasn't in it so I never saw it. I'm glad that I didn't read it back then, the work had been a monumental struggle for me at a time when I was living a somewhat marginal life, and I would have been devastated.
I'm in a better position to talk about this stuff 13 years on. Bristow's vicious piece is callous in its response to Christina Corrigan's death, and disablist and racist to boot. Without ever having met me, she paints me as a miserable, whining wannabe victim intent on playing oppression olympics, when actually my book sets out the many ways in which fat activists resist and transform hatred, and why we do it. Bristow presents fat activism as dogmatic and American, which it certainly can be, but there's more to the picture than that. She posits the classic argument that fat is trivial compared to 'real' oppression, not least because fat is a choice. Weirdly, she demolishes me but agrees that fat hatred is real and has negative effects on people's lives – er, isn't that what I was saying? She also sets up a creepy and false bad fatty/good fatty division between me and the lovely Janice Bhend, who published my work in her magazine in the 90s. What would Bristow have made of the passages that my publisher refused to publish? The sections about fat and trans people, sex-positive feminism, SM? I imagine she would have blown a gasket. And what about my publisher's feminist censorship of those ideas? We'll never know what she would have made of that, if only she'd done her journalistic homework and spoken to me first. The best bit is where Bristow refers to "The Charlotte Coopers of this world," heheheh, yes, there are legions of us! All like me!
Bristow's article was not the first time that Living Marxism dismissed fat activism, in 1994 Ann Bradley went to town on Mary Evans Young's project of getting an anti-diet Early Day Motion read and supported in Parliament. I won't dwell on those pieces, or my book, both came out years ago and are done and done. Contexts have changed and I feel confident that Fat & Proud was a good piece of work because of the positive response I've had to it over the years.
What I do want to say is that both Bradley and Bristow's articles capture the British Left's failure to get on board with embodied liberation, including fat. This is also mirrored in some kinds of feminism (and it hasn't escaped me that both of these Living Marxism articles were authored by women). The legacy of the belittling of fat activism, and the feminist pathologising of fat within eating disorder paradigms is that the Left has a particularly muddled and weak relationship to this kind of political activity today. I see this as a wasted opportunity, a terrible shame. If the unions had supported Jane Meacham when she was sacked for being too fat in the late 1980s, we might very well have employment protection today. And how come it's left to the bloody Daily Mail to highlight dodgy goings on in the weight industry – notably a number of deaths of women who happened to be on the Lighterlife diet – whilst The Guardian continues to bleat on about the obesity epidemic long after anyone is interested?
Maybe Bristow has the answers. I wrote to her last week to see if she would like to re-engage with some of the things she said about my work in the light of how the world has since changed. As yet she hasn't responded.
Bradley, A. (1994). Fat's not a feminist issue. Living Marxism, 68, p.11
Bristow, J. (1998). The 'fat rights' lobby is out to lunch. Living Marxism, 109, p.30
PS. And I'm still pissed off that when Michael Moore solicited his TV audience for ideas, he never took up my suggestion that diet industries would be a good target for Crackers the Corporate Crime Fighting Chicken! What, hold a grudge? Me?
And while I'm at it, have a look at Depicting fat and class too.
I'm in a better position to talk about this stuff 13 years on. Bristow's vicious piece is callous in its response to Christina Corrigan's death, and disablist and racist to boot. Without ever having met me, she paints me as a miserable, whining wannabe victim intent on playing oppression olympics, when actually my book sets out the many ways in which fat activists resist and transform hatred, and why we do it. Bristow presents fat activism as dogmatic and American, which it certainly can be, but there's more to the picture than that. She posits the classic argument that fat is trivial compared to 'real' oppression, not least because fat is a choice. Weirdly, she demolishes me but agrees that fat hatred is real and has negative effects on people's lives – er, isn't that what I was saying? She also sets up a creepy and false bad fatty/good fatty division between me and the lovely Janice Bhend, who published my work in her magazine in the 90s. What would Bristow have made of the passages that my publisher refused to publish? The sections about fat and trans people, sex-positive feminism, SM? I imagine she would have blown a gasket. And what about my publisher's feminist censorship of those ideas? We'll never know what she would have made of that, if only she'd done her journalistic homework and spoken to me first. The best bit is where Bristow refers to "The Charlotte Coopers of this world," heheheh, yes, there are legions of us! All like me!
Bristow's article was not the first time that Living Marxism dismissed fat activism, in 1994 Ann Bradley went to town on Mary Evans Young's project of getting an anti-diet Early Day Motion read and supported in Parliament. I won't dwell on those pieces, or my book, both came out years ago and are done and done. Contexts have changed and I feel confident that Fat & Proud was a good piece of work because of the positive response I've had to it over the years.
What I do want to say is that both Bradley and Bristow's articles capture the British Left's failure to get on board with embodied liberation, including fat. This is also mirrored in some kinds of feminism (and it hasn't escaped me that both of these Living Marxism articles were authored by women). The legacy of the belittling of fat activism, and the feminist pathologising of fat within eating disorder paradigms is that the Left has a particularly muddled and weak relationship to this kind of political activity today. I see this as a wasted opportunity, a terrible shame. If the unions had supported Jane Meacham when she was sacked for being too fat in the late 1980s, we might very well have employment protection today. And how come it's left to the bloody Daily Mail to highlight dodgy goings on in the weight industry – notably a number of deaths of women who happened to be on the Lighterlife diet – whilst The Guardian continues to bleat on about the obesity epidemic long after anyone is interested?
Maybe Bristow has the answers. I wrote to her last week to see if she would like to re-engage with some of the things she said about my work in the light of how the world has since changed. As yet she hasn't responded.
Bradley, A. (1994). Fat's not a feminist issue. Living Marxism, 68, p.11
Bristow, J. (1998). The 'fat rights' lobby is out to lunch. Living Marxism, 109, p.30
PS. And I'm still pissed off that when Michael Moore solicited his TV audience for ideas, he never took up my suggestion that diet industries would be a good target for Crackers the Corporate Crime Fighting Chicken! What, hold a grudge? Me?
And while I'm at it, have a look at Depicting fat and class too.
The Dodo Is My New Favourite Fat/Not Fat Animal
The other week I had to drive from Hartford, Connecticut, to Kennedy Airport in New York. As is my way I set off too early and ended up with some time to kill. I stopped off in New Haven to have a look at Yale (sites of preposterous privilege and power are so interesting, don't you think?), and I went to the university-affiliated Peabody Museum. I wasn't expecting much, I just wanted to stop driving for a bit and have a pee.
Museums of natural history don't tend to float my boat. You've seen one dusty taxidermied baboon, you've seen 'em all. I prefer nature to be explained to me in person, from behind a car's windshield, or on TV. No one could accuse The Peabody of being a cutting edge museum of 21st century best practise. Its centrepiece Black Holes exhibition looks like it was designed in 1987, and much of the collection has the reek of old skool natural science and colonial anthropology about it, the seamless segue between rocks, insects and animals, then mummies and 'primitive peoples' is especially problematic, for example.
However, in some areas of the museum, brave curators have drawn attention to these shortcomings. A notice points out that a giant model of a dinosaur, one of the museum's treasures, was put together wrongly by the 19th century scholar who supervised its assembly. He didn’t know any better and it was only when evidence surfaced years later that anybody realised the skull was a bit off, that there weren't enough vertebrae, and that the tail should have been in the air, not on the ground. I really enjoyed this admission because it exposed the myth that representations of natural science are pure and objective truths, it shows that they are as much a product of contemporary ideology as anything.
I don't know about you but I'm fascinated by Dodos and The Peabody has a little display devoted to these sweet and extinct creatures, featuring a skeleton and a model made of chicken and ostrich feathers. Again there is a note saying that more recent evidence suggests that the model is not an accurate representation of how a Dodo really looked.
This is where it gets interesting in terms of fat. The model Dodo is almost completely round, whereas the text display says that in real life they were probably leaner and "more athletic". The panel suggests that the Dodo was probably represented as being fat like this to emphasise the belief that it was stupid, helpless, basically a sitting target for hunters. This assertion is likely to represent present-day thinking on what fatness represents, rather than an objective truth.
I don't know when the model was built, or if this interpretation is what the model-makers intended but I'm really fascinated that the association between fat and abjection could be played out in the model of a Dodo. I think debates about the meaning of fat being transmitted by media, epidemics, fashion, or whatever, are commonplace, but using a Dodo to get the message across is jaw-dropping. The way fat people are typically represented within Obesity EpidemicTM rhetoric is also very Dodo-like; we herald extinction, we are useless beings, we are laughable, pointless and stupid. It's funny how the leaner interpretation of a Dodo is associated with more modern and enlightened thinking, the future is thin!
I don't have much with which to conclude other than that the reproduction of fat abjection moves in mysterious ways, and my interest in Dodos just got a lot geekier.
PS. I went to Bristol Museum and Art Gallery (in the UK) about a month after I wrote this post and I was excited to see they have a fat Dodo model there too, though with no explanatory text. Any more sightings?
Museums of natural history don't tend to float my boat. You've seen one dusty taxidermied baboon, you've seen 'em all. I prefer nature to be explained to me in person, from behind a car's windshield, or on TV. No one could accuse The Peabody of being a cutting edge museum of 21st century best practise. Its centrepiece Black Holes exhibition looks like it was designed in 1987, and much of the collection has the reek of old skool natural science and colonial anthropology about it, the seamless segue between rocks, insects and animals, then mummies and 'primitive peoples' is especially problematic, for example.
However, in some areas of the museum, brave curators have drawn attention to these shortcomings. A notice points out that a giant model of a dinosaur, one of the museum's treasures, was put together wrongly by the 19th century scholar who supervised its assembly. He didn’t know any better and it was only when evidence surfaced years later that anybody realised the skull was a bit off, that there weren't enough vertebrae, and that the tail should have been in the air, not on the ground. I really enjoyed this admission because it exposed the myth that representations of natural science are pure and objective truths, it shows that they are as much a product of contemporary ideology as anything.
 |
| The exceptionally round Peabody Dodo |
This is where it gets interesting in terms of fat. The model Dodo is almost completely round, whereas the text display says that in real life they were probably leaner and "more athletic". The panel suggests that the Dodo was probably represented as being fat like this to emphasise the belief that it was stupid, helpless, basically a sitting target for hunters. This assertion is likely to represent present-day thinking on what fatness represents, rather than an objective truth.
I don't know when the model was built, or if this interpretation is what the model-makers intended but I'm really fascinated that the association between fat and abjection could be played out in the model of a Dodo. I think debates about the meaning of fat being transmitted by media, epidemics, fashion, or whatever, are commonplace, but using a Dodo to get the message across is jaw-dropping. The way fat people are typically represented within Obesity EpidemicTM rhetoric is also very Dodo-like; we herald extinction, we are useless beings, we are laughable, pointless and stupid. It's funny how the leaner interpretation of a Dodo is associated with more modern and enlightened thinking, the future is thin!
I don't have much with which to conclude other than that the reproduction of fat abjection moves in mysterious ways, and my interest in Dodos just got a lot geekier.
 |
| Bristol's very own fat Dodo |
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
