Obesity, Health Advocacy and the Imaginary Geographies of Illness

Abstract

The most common way to begin a commentary on the obesity epidemic is to rehearse a series of statistics that are meant to support the idea that obesity rates have become a “crisis by any standard” (Pomeranz 186). Then, typically, experts will list the chronic health problems associated with obesity as a means of reinforcing the semiotic applicability of the word “epidemic” to the ostensibly normative issue of there being too much weight on people’s bones. Rather than performing these by now familiar rhetorical moves, my point of departure will be to recognize that although the material basis of obesity panic is the social reality represented by the gradual bloating of these numbers, the obesity epidemic is more aptly to be understood as a particularly speculative and instrumentalist “epidemic of signification,” to use a term from Paula Treichler’s study of AIDS and the intersection of science and morality (1). Indeed, at no point in human history has the collective weight of a population possessed the gravity or borne the intensity of political consideration that it does in our time. At a time in which the global flow of populations and the accelerated global movement of capital destabilizes appeals to the familiar paternalism of the nation-state, fatness and the symbolic weight of an increasingly fat body politic feeds a renewed state concern with social reproduction and public concern over the unsustainability of contemporary life under our increasingly banal conditions of crisis.