The Fat Female Body

Exploring the rapidly increasing interest in obesity and fatness, this book engages with dominant ideas about 'fatness' and analyses the assumptions that inform anti-fat attitudes in the West, looking at the intersection of medicine and morality in pathologising 'fat' bodies.

Investigating the current interest in obesity and fatness, this book explores theproblems and ambiguities that form the lived experience of 'fat' women in contemporary Western society.Engaging with dominant ideas about 'fatness', and analysing the assumptions that inform anti-fat attitudes in the West, The 'Fat' Female Body explores the moral panic over the 'obesity epidemic', and the intersection of medicine and morality in pathologising 'fat' bodies. It contributes to the emerging field of fat studies by offering not only alternative understandings of subjectivity, the (re)production of public knowledge(s) of 'fatness', and politics of embodiment, but also the possiblility of (re)reading 'fat' bodies to foster more productive social relations.

Introduction: The 'Fat' Female Body: Pathological, Political and Phenomenological Imaginings
PART 1 Positioning 'Fatness' in Our Cultural Imaginary The 'Normal' and the 'Pathological': 'Obesity' and the Dis-eased 'Fat' Body 'Fat' Bodies as Virtual Confessors and Medical Morality
PART 2 Fed up with Fat-Phobia: Coming Out as 'Fat' Fat Pride and the Insistence on the Voluntarist Subject Fattening Up Foucault: A 'Fat' Counter-Aesthetic?
PART 3 Throwing Off Discourse? Questions of Ambivalence and the Mind/Body Split ('Fat') 'Being-In-The-World': Merleau-Ponty's account of the 'body-subject' Embodiment as Ambiguity: 'Fatness' as it is Lived
Afterword: 'Fat' Bodily Being