Movement of large bodies impaired: the double burden of obesity: somatic and semiotic issues

Abstract

In contemporary obesity discourse, physical activity is routinely portrayed as essential regarding weight regulation. This axiom tends to neglect that health-enhancing exercise may involve categorically different sets of corporeal experiences for obese individuals than for people of other weight categories. Rather, obese people are seen as fundamentally lazy—the moral aspects of this have long been debated. Less attention has been paid to how Western cultural signs and symbols are ‘inadequate’ to distinguish how obese bodies are variously adapted to execute given bodily movement. This article is based on a case study of a Norwegian paediatric obesity patient, and uncovers how she has to accommodate her bodily structure when being exertive. It is argued that embodying a particular ‘configuration’ of an obese body makes movement burdensome, which is a situation made worse by the fact that available ‘symbolic representations’ fail to do this bodily reality justice. The discussion thus focuses on the interplay of somatic and semiotic issues—how phenomenological, corporeal concerns and sociocultural mechanisms combine to make obesity a veritable double burden for some individuals. This has very real implications in terms of participation in physical activity, and the debate might therefore offer useful insights to those who in some capacity encourage large adolescents to exercise.

Keywords:

• Obesity discourse
• Paediatric obesity
• Phenomenology
• Physical activity
• Inadequate signs

Notes

1. Two other participants unequivocally ‘fit the profile’ on par with Berit in terms of mobility. Albeit a young adult—and thus probably physio-anatomically better equipped to handle her body, Parveen's bodily composition is very much at hindrance for movement. Kim experienced society as in all made to accommodate much nimbler bodies than his own.

2. To indicate the effects of variation in patterns of adiposity on the body and like factors vis-à-vis agility and mobility, it may be noted that a more central accumulation of body fat—typically a male pattern—is likely to mount less obstruction to movement as compared to the case discussed here.

3. Had our observer been able to overcome an initial incomprehension at the project of slimming a female body, by closer exegesis she might uncover intercultural parallels as to how bodies are set to ‘cultural work’. Inasmuch as girls of either camp might find their task displeasing and require prodding from well meaning kin, their common ‘task’ is the achievement of a socially sanctioned corporeal fulfilment—or metamorphosis even, since both massive gain and substantial weight loss amount to culturally grounded transformations of one's body.