Obesity discourse and fat politics: research, critique and interventions

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Notes

1. There are important differences in terminology that warrant note here. Medicalised accounts tend to use the terms ‘obesity’ and ‘overweight’, since these terms refer not only to the size of a body, but also that it is diseased or at increased risk of disease. Critical work, such as that within this special edition, problematises the use of these terms, and where we use them here, we do so with caution – using them when we are referring to academic or policy work which labels bodies as such, or branches of social science that challenge obesity science on its own terms. We are critical of these biomedical terms and the pathologisation of bodies on the basis of size. More often within the social sciences the term ‘fat’ is used by writers in order to distance themselves from biomedical categories and for fat activists, it is used as part of a political strategy to reclaim the word, transforming it into a marker of pride thereby countering its use to stigmatise particular bodies (Cooper 2010).

2. Not all of the papers in this special issue were presented as part of this seminar series, and there are some presented that are not included here. Most presentations from the seminar series are available as audio/video files for download from the website: http://www.dur.ac.uk/geography/research/researchprojects/fat_studies_and_health_at_every_size/ [Grant No. RES-451-26-0768]