Are you really fat?

"Good Old Days" by Irenco Robert Bier. Reprinted from the cover of J.E. Braziel & K. LeBesco (eds) Bodies out of Bounds, University of California Press, 2001

Both women and men spend hours obsessing about their weight, says Dr Kirsten Bell. But we need to question assumptions linking weight and health problems – as well as other taken-for-granted views.

Bell, a Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at Macquarie University, has a broad research interest in the way biomedicine helps perpetuate assumptions about women’s and men’s bodies.

“Biomedicine is presented as neutral, objective science,” she says. “But there are many people who are moderately overweight who are not going to be dead soon from heart disease or Type 2 diabetes.”

Feminist scholarship is now challenging the ways obesity is defined, and also the link between it and negative health outcomes.

Challenging assumptions

The World Health Organization says that there are more than a billion overweight adults worldwide, an epidemic of “globesity”. According to the latest Australian figures, 48 per cent of men and 38 per cent of women are overweight, and a further 19 per cent of men and 22 per cent of women are obese.

Health authorities use a proliferation of medical studies to provide evidence for warnings about the costs and risks. But ‘what is obese?’ ask Bell and other scholars.

“There is widespread variation across time and space on when the ‘normal’ body becomes the ‘fat’ body,” she says. “There are also controversies about the ways public health discourse gives scientific credibility to cultural loathing of fat.”

In some cultures, bodies considered fat in the developed West are prized. Another assumption, that it is only women who are concerned about weight, also needs challenging, she says. Increasingly, men are also concerned about their bodies. They want to be thin, and muscular too. Women talk about becoming “thinner” while men want to be “fitter”.

Public responses to obesity

The expanding weight loss industry and constant public discussion of obesity are of interest to researchers such as Bell.

“The widespread public censure judge Ian ‘Dicko’ Dickson received following his comments on contestant Paulini’s size during the 2003 series of Australian Idol shows the extent to which feminist interpretations of body weight have been taken up,” she says.

However, it is interesting that the same judge’s comments on the size of a male contestant in the 2004 series aroused little public response.

Bell is now negotiating with a weight loss organisation to speak to some of those who have used its services, to incorporate their experiences into her work.

For further information, contact Dr Kirsten Bell at kbell@scmp.mq.edu.au

The Department of Anthropology website is at www.anth.mq.edu.au

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