London Medical Sociology Regional Group
Forthcoming Events
Everyone is welcome to attend LMSG meetings. The group has no formal membership. At each meeting there is a presentation by a speaker, followed by discussion that continues over drinks and supper in the local pub.
Venue
King’s College London,
Room 1.16, Franklin Wilkins Building,
Stamford Street, London SE1 8WA
Nearest tube and rail: Waterloo
Meeting time: 6.00pm - 7.00pm
9 June 2010
Dr Rachel White of University of Westminster will speak on: Worse Than Climate Change? New Constructions of Fatness in the ‘Obesity Epidemic’
The publication of the UK government’s Foresight report ‘Tackling Obesities: Future Choices’ in 2007 was accompanied by Health Secretary Alan Johnson’s claim that obesity is a "potential crisis on the scale of climate change." His widely reported statement is indicative of a turn in the discursive construction of obesity whereby it no longer signifies mere individual failing, but is constituted as a fundamentally anti-social state.
This paper presents an analysis of Foresight and its media coverage in order to show how hegemonic meanings of obesity are constructed not only through scientific and medical discourses, but supplemented by other paradigms such as environmental discourses and heteronormative constructions of gender. Not only this, but within the contemporary media coverage of obesity such meanings are contested only within a narrow spectrum, leaving little space for counter-discourses which, along with the voices of fat people, are significantly absent.
Adopting a discourse analytic approach to this topic opens up the possibility of theorising the ‘obesity epidemic’ in terms of Judith Butler’s notion of the resignification of discourse. The paper argues that the resignification of obesity as analogous to climate change reduces the viability of positive fat subjectivity and contributes to the inequalities and exclusions experienced by fat people. However resignification is never final, therefore this paper will question Butler’s politics of resignification and ask whether or how fat subjectivities which destabilise hegemonic constructions of the fat body can be effectively deployed.
To receive details of all LMSG meetings, please contact Miranda Leontowitsch. Alternatively, please click here for the programme of meetings for 2010.
Annual Report
The London Medical Sociology Study Group Annual Report for 2008 is now available.
Contact the Convenors:
Richard Compton (Convenor)
Send an email.
Miranda Leontowitsch (Treasurer)
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Events Archive
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