Butchering the fat body: Enacting and engaging fatness in an American “anti-obesity” campaign

ABSTRACT While public concern with body weight is not simply a recent phenomenon, the past several decades have witnessed the intensification of a set of discourses that frame the fat/ness of bodies as a public health crisis, particularly in the United States. In 2004, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the US-American Advertising Council (Ad Council) co-produced a series of print, radio, and television “public service announcements” as part of a self-described “obesity prevention” campaign, which deploys a cultural framework of healthism to present fat as a pathological entity in need of elimination through the efforts of the responsibilized citizen. In this paper, I bring methodological guidance from Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology together with the work of other critical theorists to consider how fat/ness is represented by this campaign as an index of the undisciplined body-self, as a space of abjection, and as a basis for the exclusion of fat bodies as both desired objects and desiring subjects. However, scope may also exist for disruption of the “prescribed” enactments and for new, “queer” orientations toward fat/ness and fat bodies to emerge.