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 research. Show all posts
Showing posts with label obesity research. Show all posts
Research project: did you go to the Fattylympics?
They are looking for people to give accounts of the event to help document the activism and community organisation that took place so that it can inform future fat activism and can help develop academic work on the creation of size acceptance spaces.
If you would be happy to be involved in this research, please email them on fatgeographymassive@gmail.com and they will send you more information - if you email them you can still decide not to take part after you've got the information, they promise they won't spam you.
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.
Reporting back on the fourth and final ESRC Fat Studies and HAES Seminar
ESRC Seminar Series
Fat Studies and Health At Every Size: Bigness Beyond Obesity
Seminar Four: Researching Fat Studies and HAES: working with/as fat bodies
5-6 May 2011
Bath Royal Literary and Scientific Institution, UK
I spent a couple of days last week at the final ESRC (The Economic and Social Research Council) Fat Studies and Health At Every Size (HAES) gathering, which took place in Bath. There have been four seminars in all, stretching over about 18 months. These meetings have operated like mini conferences, and a warm and supportive community has grown up around them.
As with previous seminars, it's unfeasible to report on everything that happened, there is simply too much, so I'll just pick out a couple of the main themes.
Many of the speakers talked about autoethnography and reflexive research. Such methodologies contrast strongly with dominant research paradigms in 'obesity'. Where the latter draws upon notions of universal scientific truth and objectivity, the former disrupts such ideas by bringing the researchers themselves to the centre, by offering context, emotion, ambiguity and paradox. I particularly enjoyed Karen Throsby's presentation about her experiences researching cross-Channel swimming, which raised questions about researcher roles. Jacqui Gingras, Rachel Colls and Bethan Evans also talked about roles and ethics concerning research with and on fat people.
It is hard to imagine similar conversations happening at, say, amongst stakeholders at an obesity conference where fat people are made absent, abject, and anonymous, and where fat is automatically framed as pathology in need of professional intervention. What is remarkable about these conversations is that they took place at an interdisciplinary level and were points of contact across considerable academic difference, where tensions were able to be contained and addressed to some extent. Even better, these seminars have been open to non-academics, you know, normal people, and although some academic jargon was unavoidable, discussions emerged between people with very different experiences of and approaches to fat. Best of all, people of all sizes instigate the conversations. More mainstream obesity stakeholders would do well to stop what they're doing and listen to this dialogue.
Another seminar strand was devoted to alternative ways of presenting and conceptualising research and fat. Emma Rich, the main organiser of this seminar, invited a number of local artists and performers to showcase their work. Although few were working principally around fat or Health At Every Size, and were concerned more generally with the body, it was clear that there are exciting possibilities for fat and HAES praxis. Perhaps Vikki Chalklin came closest to this with her performance that included material from research interviews.
For me, these seminars have been much more than a series of presentations and discussions. I have experienced them as very freeing, as places of collective intellectual and political engagement, and of a scholarship that feels full of life, community and exciting potential. In 21st century Western academia these are really precious moments! My colleague and friend Bill Savage/Dr R. White has said that the ESRC Fat Studies and Health At Every Size seminars have forever spoiled us, and that other academic gatherings might be good, but they would never be as welcoming and stimulating as the ESRC experience! These seminars have been places where participants can see how things might be if we could talk about fat without having always to start at a 101-level defensive justification to hostile spectators. Having the freedom to think, speak, take risks and be heard in a gentle atmosphere has been wonderful, one of the best experiences of my academic career.
It's sad that this round of seminars has ended, although there will be some post-seminar projects, which are currently being discussed, and there may well be other Fat Studies conferences and seminars in the UK, as well as online activites. Keep your fingers crossed.
Meanwhile, deep thanks to Bethan Evans, the principle investigator, who had the idea of the seminar series and who wrote the successful funding application. Thanks also to my colleagues who organised the seminars, and to everyone who participated and supported them. And thanks to Lucy Aphramor, who closed the final seminar with an impromptu rendition of a beautifully vulnerable, funny and wavery-voiced verse from a HAES song. It really was the perfect ending.
Further information about the seminars
Government Support for Fat Studies and HAES in the UK
Reporting back on the first ESRC Fat Studies and HAES Seminar
Reporting back on the second ESRC Fat Studies and HAES Seminar
Reporting back on the third ESRC Fat Studies and HAES Seminar
ESRC Fat Studies and Health At Every Size
Fat Studies and Health At Every Size: Bigness Beyond Obesity
Seminar Four: Researching Fat Studies and HAES: working with/as fat bodies
5-6 May 2011
Bath Royal Literary and Scientific Institution, UK
I spent a couple of days last week at the final ESRC (The Economic and Social Research Council) Fat Studies and Health At Every Size (HAES) gathering, which took place in Bath. There have been four seminars in all, stretching over about 18 months. These meetings have operated like mini conferences, and a warm and supportive community has grown up around them.
As with previous seminars, it's unfeasible to report on everything that happened, there is simply too much, so I'll just pick out a couple of the main themes.
Many of the speakers talked about autoethnography and reflexive research. Such methodologies contrast strongly with dominant research paradigms in 'obesity'. Where the latter draws upon notions of universal scientific truth and objectivity, the former disrupts such ideas by bringing the researchers themselves to the centre, by offering context, emotion, ambiguity and paradox. I particularly enjoyed Karen Throsby's presentation about her experiences researching cross-Channel swimming, which raised questions about researcher roles. Jacqui Gingras, Rachel Colls and Bethan Evans also talked about roles and ethics concerning research with and on fat people.
It is hard to imagine similar conversations happening at, say, amongst stakeholders at an obesity conference where fat people are made absent, abject, and anonymous, and where fat is automatically framed as pathology in need of professional intervention. What is remarkable about these conversations is that they took place at an interdisciplinary level and were points of contact across considerable academic difference, where tensions were able to be contained and addressed to some extent. Even better, these seminars have been open to non-academics, you know, normal people, and although some academic jargon was unavoidable, discussions emerged between people with very different experiences of and approaches to fat. Best of all, people of all sizes instigate the conversations. More mainstream obesity stakeholders would do well to stop what they're doing and listen to this dialogue.
Another seminar strand was devoted to alternative ways of presenting and conceptualising research and fat. Emma Rich, the main organiser of this seminar, invited a number of local artists and performers to showcase their work. Although few were working principally around fat or Health At Every Size, and were concerned more generally with the body, it was clear that there are exciting possibilities for fat and HAES praxis. Perhaps Vikki Chalklin came closest to this with her performance that included material from research interviews.
For me, these seminars have been much more than a series of presentations and discussions. I have experienced them as very freeing, as places of collective intellectual and political engagement, and of a scholarship that feels full of life, community and exciting potential. In 21st century Western academia these are really precious moments! My colleague and friend Bill Savage/Dr R. White has said that the ESRC Fat Studies and Health At Every Size seminars have forever spoiled us, and that other academic gatherings might be good, but they would never be as welcoming and stimulating as the ESRC experience! These seminars have been places where participants can see how things might be if we could talk about fat without having always to start at a 101-level defensive justification to hostile spectators. Having the freedom to think, speak, take risks and be heard in a gentle atmosphere has been wonderful, one of the best experiences of my academic career.
It's sad that this round of seminars has ended, although there will be some post-seminar projects, which are currently being discussed, and there may well be other Fat Studies conferences and seminars in the UK, as well as online activites. Keep your fingers crossed.
Meanwhile, deep thanks to Bethan Evans, the principle investigator, who had the idea of the seminar series and who wrote the successful funding application. Thanks also to my colleagues who organised the seminars, and to everyone who participated and supported them. And thanks to Lucy Aphramor, who closed the final seminar with an impromptu rendition of a beautifully vulnerable, funny and wavery-voiced verse from a HAES song. It really was the perfect ending.
Further information about the seminars
Government Support for Fat Studies and HAES in the UK
Reporting back on the first ESRC Fat Studies and HAES Seminar
Reporting back on the second ESRC Fat Studies and HAES Seminar
Reporting back on the third ESRC Fat Studies and HAES Seminar
ESRC Fat Studies and Health At Every Size
Fat, Sex Work, Rescue Industries
I'm very interested when other areas of critical engagement and struggle have crossovers with fat activism. I know this is controversial in terms of fat, which is seen by many as a choice and a triviality, but it fits with the earliest fat activist analyses of oppression (not that I think challenging oppression is all there is to fat activism). For example, Judith Stein's pithy two-page mimeographed introduction to fat activism places fat within a matrix of oppression and calls on fat activists to challenge other forms of oppression too. Sometimes this is lost, fat activism has been criticised for its racism, for example, but I think the idea that no one is free until everyone is free is good to bear in mind.
This week I had the pleasure of spending some time with Laura Agustìn. If you have never read Laura's book Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry, which she authored in 2007, you must hurry and get a copy now; likewise read her blog, The Naked Anthropologist.
Although Laura is part of a wider movement, for me her book was a paradigm-changer which enabled me to recognise more deeply the agency of people who migrate and sell sex, what selling sex looks like, and how this is thwarted by the rescue industry. Laura's work has helped me unpick hyperbolic rhetoric concerning trafficking discourse, and I am grateful for her rational approach to sex work, particularly in her methodology of sex work research. It also enabled me to reconsider my own personal relationship to sex work and to connect with fat sex workers.
I live in Stratford, close to where the 2012 Olympics will be held. There are discredited reports that major sporting events result in an increase in trafficking and that evening Laura had been invited to be an expert presenter at a meeting at Waltham Forest council which was concerned with this possibility. Waltham Forest is one of the five London boroughs that is connected to the Olympics, though I live in Newham. So on Wednesday I took her to have a look at the Olympic site, and also on a mini-tour of Stratford's more obvious brothels, its sex shop and red light area, active and present long before the Olympics were announced in 2005, and just another part of the area. Fun!
I won't go on too much about the council meeting, which took place in the very formal Chamber. I'm sure minutes will be available in due course if you want to find out more about what was said in detail. Briefly, two police officers working for the Met's anti-trafficking department stated their case, as did four people who work with sex workers and migrant people, including a nun, and two medics. Varying ideological positions on sex work were represented though all could be described as 'rescue industry'. Laura spoke, and people from the council recorded and questioned the speakers. The idea that the Olympics will result in an increase in trafficking was immediately dismissed as soon as evidence to the contrary was produced. So the meeting ended up being an arena for people to state their positions and argue for their own legitimacy. No conclusion was reached, the Chair resolved to have more meetings, though this may be in question because there are local government elections looming. As an observer, I think councillors were expecting one thing but ended up having their minds blown by having to consider alternative paradigms.
As an observer, I found the meeting really interesting in a dull, committee type way. What intrigued me were the crossovers in the way that fat is presented in policymaking. Obviously there were no out sex workers present to offer their expert testimony, just as there are never autonomous fat people present during similar meetings of obesity stakeholders, it's as though the concept Nothing about us without us never existed. These gatherings are about professional management of perceived problematic populations, where there is a moral and medicalised discourse concerning embodiment, and where 'helping' is a euphemism for 'control', and where people routinely rely on duff 'evidence.' In these contexts, sex workers/fat people are talked about, made pitiful, framed as service users, are absent and Othered. Even the language has parallels: 'prostitution' sounds a lot like 'obesity' to me, 'trafficking' is as much a neologism as 'bariatric,' and 'sex work' could be seen as analogous to 'fat'. Professionals pump themselves up as essential to the discourse, medics especially so, yet it's clear that the rescuers need their fodder more than sex workers or fat people need them, for example, what do you do with massively resourced anti-trafficking units when there are no trafficked people?
Of course there are differences between the way that fat and sex work is framed in contexts such as this meeting I went to with Laura. I think fat people are far less organised than sex workers – not that fat people and sex workers are necessarily mutually exclusive groups – partly because shame is much more present. Issues concerning criminalisation and migration are also different.
Despite these differences, acknowledging common ground can be very illuminating. I would love to see broader analyses of how helping industries further marginalise their apparent constituents, for example.
What was exciting about the meeting in Waltham Forest was the way that Laura's testimony was paradigm-shifting for many people in the room. I have experienced this when I start talking about fat with people, or at least in those situations where people are more able to move beyond clichés. It's clear that many people are hungry for more complex and human ways of thinking about things that have been overstated through moral panics, and that trite accounts of trafficked women or obesity epidemics are not enough, and that ethical, grassroots ways of understanding may be possible.
Agustìn, L.M. (2007) Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry. London: Zed Books.
This week I had the pleasure of spending some time with Laura Agustìn. If you have never read Laura's book Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry, which she authored in 2007, you must hurry and get a copy now; likewise read her blog, The Naked Anthropologist.
Although Laura is part of a wider movement, for me her book was a paradigm-changer which enabled me to recognise more deeply the agency of people who migrate and sell sex, what selling sex looks like, and how this is thwarted by the rescue industry. Laura's work has helped me unpick hyperbolic rhetoric concerning trafficking discourse, and I am grateful for her rational approach to sex work, particularly in her methodology of sex work research. It also enabled me to reconsider my own personal relationship to sex work and to connect with fat sex workers.
I live in Stratford, close to where the 2012 Olympics will be held. There are discredited reports that major sporting events result in an increase in trafficking and that evening Laura had been invited to be an expert presenter at a meeting at Waltham Forest council which was concerned with this possibility. Waltham Forest is one of the five London boroughs that is connected to the Olympics, though I live in Newham. So on Wednesday I took her to have a look at the Olympic site, and also on a mini-tour of Stratford's more obvious brothels, its sex shop and red light area, active and present long before the Olympics were announced in 2005, and just another part of the area. Fun!
I won't go on too much about the council meeting, which took place in the very formal Chamber. I'm sure minutes will be available in due course if you want to find out more about what was said in detail. Briefly, two police officers working for the Met's anti-trafficking department stated their case, as did four people who work with sex workers and migrant people, including a nun, and two medics. Varying ideological positions on sex work were represented though all could be described as 'rescue industry'. Laura spoke, and people from the council recorded and questioned the speakers. The idea that the Olympics will result in an increase in trafficking was immediately dismissed as soon as evidence to the contrary was produced. So the meeting ended up being an arena for people to state their positions and argue for their own legitimacy. No conclusion was reached, the Chair resolved to have more meetings, though this may be in question because there are local government elections looming. As an observer, I think councillors were expecting one thing but ended up having their minds blown by having to consider alternative paradigms.
As an observer, I found the meeting really interesting in a dull, committee type way. What intrigued me were the crossovers in the way that fat is presented in policymaking. Obviously there were no out sex workers present to offer their expert testimony, just as there are never autonomous fat people present during similar meetings of obesity stakeholders, it's as though the concept Nothing about us without us never existed. These gatherings are about professional management of perceived problematic populations, where there is a moral and medicalised discourse concerning embodiment, and where 'helping' is a euphemism for 'control', and where people routinely rely on duff 'evidence.' In these contexts, sex workers/fat people are talked about, made pitiful, framed as service users, are absent and Othered. Even the language has parallels: 'prostitution' sounds a lot like 'obesity' to me, 'trafficking' is as much a neologism as 'bariatric,' and 'sex work' could be seen as analogous to 'fat'. Professionals pump themselves up as essential to the discourse, medics especially so, yet it's clear that the rescuers need their fodder more than sex workers or fat people need them, for example, what do you do with massively resourced anti-trafficking units when there are no trafficked people?
Of course there are differences between the way that fat and sex work is framed in contexts such as this meeting I went to with Laura. I think fat people are far less organised than sex workers – not that fat people and sex workers are necessarily mutually exclusive groups – partly because shame is much more present. Issues concerning criminalisation and migration are also different.
Despite these differences, acknowledging common ground can be very illuminating. I would love to see broader analyses of how helping industries further marginalise their apparent constituents, for example.
What was exciting about the meeting in Waltham Forest was the way that Laura's testimony was paradigm-shifting for many people in the room. I have experienced this when I start talking about fat with people, or at least in those situations where people are more able to move beyond clichés. It's clear that many people are hungry for more complex and human ways of thinking about things that have been overstated through moral panics, and that trite accounts of trafficked women or obesity epidemics are not enough, and that ethical, grassroots ways of understanding may be possible.
Agustìn, L.M. (2007) Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry. London: Zed Books.
I've been interviewed for a Finnish mag with Beth Ditto on the cover
Wanna read the unedited and raw English version? Here you go... (.pdf 88kb)
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