Articulating Fatness: Obesity and the Scientific Tautologies of Bodily Accumulation in Neoliberal Times

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Notes

In a landmark article, Howard Becker (1967) proposed that all sociologists (and, we would add, all critical theorists) are invariably partisan, that there can never be such a thing as objectivity, and that they should explicitly proclaim “whose side we are on.” This politics of “taking sides” is explicitly embedded in the act of announcing ones politics.

The progress in scientifically naming and measuring obesity was so palpable that by 1998, Bray, James, and Bouchard (1998b) were able to outline 16 different methods for measuring body fat, and the attendant physical/social/scientific costs and benefits for each which will supposedly help combat the overwhelming onset of the “disease” in the world's population. More recent research has even suggested that a computerized model demonstrates that bariatric surgery, once a dangerous life-threatening fat-reducing operation, “significantly prolongs life by an average of three years.”

Richard Atkinson and Judith Stern (1998) seemingly paradoxically argue against weight loss but toward an understanding of obesity as an epidemic medical problem in “Weight Cycling: Definitions, Mechanisms, and Problems with Interpretation.” Also see Bray et al. 1998. They and others who have performed similar research/public intellectual acts are taken to task by Michael Gard (2010a, 2010b), Julie Guthman and Melanie DuPuis (2006), Lee Monaghan, Robert Hollands, and Gary Pritchard (2010), and Jan Wright (2009).

Indeed, during the Third University of Maryland Physical Cultural Studies Graduate Student Conference, David Andrews, Psyche Williams-Forson, Stephen Roth, Jaime Schultz, and Debbie Young's panel response to Ryan King-White's keynote presentation revealed some of the frustrations Roth and Young (self-identified obesity scholars) have over the ways the (American) media characterize and oversimplify their work.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (2009), the percentage of American high school graduates attending college has risen from 42% in 1970 to 70% in 2009. However, critics such as Henry Giroux and Michael Apple have convincingly argued that although access to the university system has increased, the money politics of the university have created newfound burdens on both students and academic staff members alike. Del Gandio (2010) made this point explicitly clear: Rather than providing space for intellectual thought and worldly experience, the academy has become an adjunct to corporate profit. The average college campus is ground zero for licensing agreements; construction contracts; outsourcing of bookstores, venders, concessions and food, laundry, traveling and printing services; corporate sponsoring of buildings, events, speakers and campus programs; patenting of intellectual property rights; and corporate funding, ownership and direct influencing of research. Such corporatization transforms students into customers, teachers into workers, administrators into CEOs and campuses into market populations. It's no wonder, then, that university presidents are serving on corporate boards—it's now common practice within academic-corporate culture (Del Gandio 2010, paras. 2–3).

George Ritzer's The McDonaldization of Society (1993), and The McDonalization Thesis (1998), has drawn considerable criticism for what many regard as a hasty generalization of the current ‘dehumanizing’ climate of higher education. Although it should suffice to say that Ritzer might have offered an overstated brushstroke of the current university environ, it must also be noted that his argument was based on his own empirical observations formulated while working at the University of Maryland, College Park. Although we agree that Ritzer might overzealously vilify life at the generic McUniversity, two of the authors of this article (King-White and Newman) were doctoral students at the University of Maryland and would not disagree with Ritzer's assessment of the dehumanizing forces active within their alma mater. Nor would the other author of this article (Giardina) with respect to his doctoral alma mater, the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

Moreover, in most “research-intensive” and “research-extensive” institutions, it is not a matter of if one produces research “outputs,” but what type of research. Institutions now often reserve “seed grants,” teaching and research assistantships, or reduction in teaching loads for those teacher-researchers who can promise long-term “return on investment” in the form of externally lucrative research projects.

Of course, just as there has been a significant increase in these lines of fundable inquiry, it should also be noted that a more critical, and socially beneficial body of inquiry (set against the moors of “corporate America”) now holds increasingly important sway over the discipline. See Henry Giroux (2007).

Compounding the more managerial, revenue-oriented focus of university administrators is the fact that the aforementioned rush of new attendees into the university system has not been met with a similar rise of tenured and tenure-track professors. As a result, essentially the same number of professors are asked to teach more or larger classes, serve on more committees, and, of course, publish at the same rate as before so that universities can garner distinction as top research institutes. See Davies and Bansel (2005).

As if to foreshadow this point, in 2004, then-Georgia Senator Zell Miller stated in response to Senate colleague Dick Durbin's speech on junk food in schools that, “our kids are not obese because of what they are eating in our lunchrooms at school. They are obese, frankly, because they sit around watching MTV and playing video games, and to do something about that requires the role of parents, not the role of the federal government” (quoted in Tumulty 2006, 3).

Gard (2010a) and Guthman and DuPuis (2006) spend a considerable amount of time adding some much needed complexity to the ideas others have suggested would help “cure” obesity.