The obese body as interface: fat studies, medical data, and infographics

Abstract

In a recent issue of CDQ, Aparicio and Costa (2014) present a discussion of the long history of data visualization, articulating that data visualization is, again, gaining in popularity and attention. Included in this discussion of data visualization is a subset of data visualization--infographics. Such inclusion is apt, considering that Blythe, Lauer, and Curran (2014) found that infographics are one of the top 10 genres in which alumni of technical communication programs reported that they generate on the job site and within their own lives. With regard to the importance of and renewed interest in data visualization (and by extension infographics), in this article I call attention to a specific use of the infographic---as a form of data visualization from health-related organizations of medical and statistical data regarding obesity. Through analysis of obesity infographics, I argue that infographics about medical data can (and do) feminize the "obese" body and claims the female body as an efficient instrument of normalization and cultural management. To do so, I rhetorically analyze obesity infographics to illustrate that the infographic genre's goals---to simplify, clarify, and deliver complex information in a visually compelling manner---can exercise problematic commitments to expediency and illustrate problematic notions of exigence [Katz, 1992; Ward, 2010; Dragga & Voss 2001]. Such commitments, encourage misreadings of medical data and, by extension, the infographics that convey data regarding body categorizations and notions of health. By obfuscating how infographics potentially drive simplification of terms that reify the narrow frames with which we understand "obesity" and "obese" bodies, I argue that such visual representations of data can also serve a metonymic function for ever-narrowing cultural conceptualizations of obesity-as-detriment and obesity-as-bodily-fault. Further, I argue that such problematic use infographics can reduce the complexities of the body and definitions of the body, especially of the "obese" body and definitions of "obesity," with the effect of potentially pathologizing, managing and normalizing information and bodies under the guise of promoting "health" and "healthy living." Interfacing with medical data in this way, in other words, can be both understandable and yet highly problematic; this article illustrates how and why.