Review Essay of “Men and the War on Obesity: A Sociological Study”

A review is presented of the book Men & the War on Obesity: A Sociological Study, by Lee F. Monaghan

University Scholar Series: Natalie Boero

How and Why Obesity Has Emerged as a Public Health Concern On March 20, 2013 Natalie Boero spoke in the University Scholar Series hosted by Provost Ellen Junn at the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Library. Natalie Boero talked about how and why obesity emerged as a public health concern and her book Killer Fat: Media, Medicine, and Morals in the American \u27Obesity Epidemic,\u27 which examines how and why obesity emerged as a public health concern and national obsession in recent years. It enters the world of bariatric surgeries and diet programs to show how common expectations of what bodies should look like help determine what interventions and policies are considered urgent in containing this epidemic. This book offers an alternate framing of obesity based on the insights of the “Health at Every Size” movement. Natalie Boero is an associate professor in the Sociology Department.https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/uss/1017/thumbnail.jp

Practicing food anxiety: Making Australian mothers responsible for their families’ dietary decisions

Concerns about the relationship between diet, weight, and health find widespread expression in the media and are accompanied by significant individual anxiety and responsibilization. However, these pertain especially to mothers, who undertake the bulk of domestic labor involved in managing their families’ health and wellbeing. This article employs the concept of anxiety as social practice to explore the process whereby mothers are made accountable for their families’ dietary decisions. Drawing on data from an Australian study that explored the impact of discourses of childhood obesity prevention on mothers, the article argues that mothers’ engagements with this value-laden discourse are complex and ambiguous, involving varying degrees of self-ascribed responsibility and blame for children's weight and diets. We conclude by drawing attention to the value of viewing food anxiety as social practice, in highlighting issues that are largely invisible in both official discourses and scholarly accounts of childhood obesity prevention

All the News that’s Fat to Print: The American Obesity Epidemic and the Media

Increasingly the term epidemic is being used to describe the current prevalence of fatness in the United States. Skyrocketing rates of obesity among all groups of Americans, particularly children, the poor, and minorities, have become a major public health concern. Indeed, it is difficult to open a newspaper or magazine without encountering a discussion of the expanding American waistline and the health problems associated therewith. In this paper I use 751 New York Times articles on obesity to examine the media construction of the obesity epidemic. I show that there is not one dominant discourse (i.e. medicine) constructing this epidemic, but that a layering of discourses becomes evident through an examination of the construction of the epidemic and the treatments recommended for its containment. Through a periodization and analysis of these articles, I examine the emergent and residual technologies of governance characterizing this epidemic. Through the identification and complication of three discursive pairings arising from these articles, I suggest that undergirding these seemingly contradictory pairings and the technologies to which they give rise is a general location of the problem of obesity within the individual. Obesity then is what I call a post-modern epidemic, an epidemic in which unevenly medicalized phenomena lacking a clear pathological basis get cast in the language and moral panic of traditional epidemics. I conclude with an analysis of how the construction of the obesity epidemic relies on gendered and racialized expectations of women’s embodiment and role as mothers

Anas, Mias and Wannas: Authenticity and Embodiment in Pro-Anorexia Discussion Groups

This paper details the making of community and bodies in online environments, specifically the online pro-anorexia community. Building community among members of these groups is particularly fraught because tensions over claims to authenticity permeate these groups. Because these are embodied practices and online spaces are presumably disembodied, participants constantly grapple with authenticity, largely through the threat of the wannarexic. This paper documents the way in which tensions around authenticity and embodied practices are managed through treatment of the wannarexic, participating in group rituals, and deployment of individual tools. Participants grapple with these tensions through engaging in offline bodily rituals that attempt to make the body evident online