Thinking about food and embodiment

Deborah Lupton, Department of Sociology and Social Policy, University

of Sydney

Bodies as social constructions

• The lived experience of the body in everyday life

• How bodies are governed, regulated and controlled

• How bodies are culturally portrayed

• How other people’s bodies interact with our bodies: interembodiment/intercorporeality

• Bodies as conceptually fluid and permeable: how body boundaries (literal and symbolic) are regulated

• Bodies as assemblages

• Theorising fatness• Fatness and morality• The grotesque body• The abject body• The fluid, permeable body• Food/health/beauty triplex• HAES

Theorising fatness

Foucault:

• the body• the medical gaze• the care of the self• governmentality• biopower and biopolitics

Feminist philosophers: fluidities, leaky bodies

• Elizabeth Grosz• Julia Kristeva• Margit Shildrick

Queer theory

• The cultural construction of embodiment/identity

• Embodiment and identity as unstable• Gender and sexual identity as performed

(Judith Butler)• The challenging of normativity

Health, diet and morality

• Religious and spiritual beliefs• Health as an indicator of goodness• Body size as an indicator of self-control and

self-discipline• Ill-health and fat embodiment as indicators of

excessive consumption, lack of self-discipline

The grotesque body

• Transgression• Excess• Lack of self-discipline and self-control• Ugliness

The abject body

• Fluid, permeable• Not tightly contained or controlled• Monstrous• Object of loathing and disgust

The food/health/beauty triplex

• Health, diet and attractiveness all linked to body size

• Healthy = thin = beautiful

‘Queering’ Health at Every Size

• HAES positions concepts of the body as natural and instinctive

• By changing our view of our selves, we change others’ views

• But can ‘nature’ and the ‘instinctive’ be separated from society and culture?