Body Sovereignty and Body Liability in the Wake of an “Obesity Epidemic”: A Poststructural Analysis of the Soda Ban

ABSTRACT

Public discourse about the 2012 soda ban proposal and its eventual dissolution offers a useful context for interrogating how discursive processes constitute and regulate normality, risk, and obesity. Using poststructural sensibilities, I critique the soda ban and public discourse about it. Although architects of the soda ban and its proponents challenged the neoliberal narrative of free choice by self-governing citizens, their efforts were stymied by (1) arguments that offered a minimalist role for the state in regulating health, and (2) contemporary anxieties about losing the ability to self-determine what to let into the body. This analysis renders visible power struggles that inform cultural understandings of what produces good health and who is responsible for its maintenance. Ultimately, I argue that soda ban discourse constructs the body as a liability and is situated in a current cultural fixation on body sovereignty. My analysis of these two axes has implications regarding the limits of biopower and the ways the body is configured in the current political economy and the conventional neoliberal imaginary.