I remember when I was a lot younger and my grandmother was still alive, her flat became increasingly filled with small pieces of paper attached by tape to an apparently random collection of things. On each paper was written the name of the object it was stuck to; ‘toaster’, ‘cooker’, ‘sink’, ‘chair’ and so on. Over time, as she forgot …
So much of current obesity discourse relies on conceiving the body as fixed and bounded, to be represented numerically, and compared to the average. Increasingly made known through measurement and calculation, this particular conception of the body produces an entity that can be owned, sold, worked on, or worked against. Crucially, this way of thinking about the ‘problem’ of obesity …
Science, Medicine, and Anthropology