Fat Bodies/Thin Critique: Animating and Absorbing Fat Embodiments

Context is Fattening

Fat is coded as having a relationship to both “too little” and “too much,” or, quite simply: too little movement and too much consumption. If torpidity marks a certain suspension of (e)motion, avidity marks another register of animatedness. The fat subject devours, gobbles, gulps, guzzles, gorges, wolfs, shovels. The fat subject craves. Yet, despite the connotation of cravings as emerging from within, the fat subject’s wants are often presented as animated from without. At times, is seems as if food itself does the actual craving, beckoning: “Eat me.” Or, it is as if the fat subject is fixed in a setting, installed in a field that nurtures a response. Either way, we are still firmly in the realm of a ventriloquist act. Perhaps alongside Ngai’s concept of animatedness, we need to put absorption; through absorption we can begin to sift through contemporary deployments of obesogenic environmental accounts, the fat body, and the ever-present racial and class significations of that body.

The notion of absorption intentionally recalls Berlant’s use of counterabsorption, as in “counterabsorption in episodic refreshment … [in] food that is not for thought.”²² While significantly more ambitious, Berlant’s analysis of obesity is in line with obesogenic accounts; she highlights zoning regulations, the availability of fast food, and corporate-sponsored school lunches. “The obesity epidemic,” she argues, “is also a way of talking about the destruction of life, of bodies, imaginaries, and environments by and under contemporary regimes of capital.” Obesity represents “a system and persons gone awry.”²³ She posits a direct relationship between laboring within capitalism and food consumption, suggesting that how we work, and how capitalism works on us, affects how we eat. Berlant is not just concerned with obesogenic environments, however. She wants to think through the how of fat, so to speak. What is the experience of encountering one’s environment in the form of food? Put more simply—what does it feel like to get fat? She argues that eating is a form of “lateral agency” used to combat the temporal speed-up of capitalist labor. Eating is “self-medication through self-interruption” in a present that overwhelms, a present to which one can never quite catch up.²⁴ She argues,:”Eating can be seen as a ballast against wearing out, but also as a counter-dissipation, in that, like other small pleasures, it can produce an experience of self-abeyance, of floating sideways.” Floating, drifting, coasting, these are all words Berlant uses in her work to describe lateral agency, a mode of nonintentionality, “interrupting the liberal and capitalist subject called to consciousness, intentionality, and effective will.”²⁵

Alongside these descriptors of stalled or slowed modes of nonintentionality, she also adds “impassivity and other relations of alienation, coolness, detachment, or distraction,” as well as a repeated emphasis on the presumed physical limitations of fat as an embodiment that makes it “harder to move, period.”²⁵ Drifting and distraction also seem to go hand in hand with receptivity. Just as the fat humans in Wall-E drift through their starliner world, surrounded by aural and visual sensorial distractions, they are also highly amenable to suggestion (“Time for lunch!” and “Try blue—it’s the new red!”). Berlant’s text is an extension of Eve Sedgwick’s argument in “Epidemics of the Will,” which counters the “imperative that the concept of free will be propagated,” or the absolutism of voluntarity versus compulsion, gesturing towards a revitalization of the notion of “habit”.²⁶ Berlant wants to stake out an explanation that swerves from the absolutism of free will, explaining, “I am refuting the kinds of misconstrual that characterize the subject of appetites as always fully present to their motives, desires, feelings, and experiences, or as even desiring to be.” The question that Berlant provokes, however, is not whether such a mode of habitual or drifting being in the world exists, as surely it does, but why this particular mode is so often attached to food, fat, excess, and marginalized communities. Why is habit (and its variations) so often a lens into how marginalized communities are particularly absorbed by their environment? Like other obesogenic accounts, Berlant highlights poor communities and communities of color, arguing, “It is most notably the bodies of U.S. working-class and subproletarian populations that fray slowly from the pressure of obesity on their organs and skeletons.” Berlant’s notion of “slow death’ is defined as the “structurally induced attrition of persons keyed to their membership in certain populations.” Though Berlant notes “a difference between eating and being fat,” her argument rests on the suspension of that difference.²⁷ Fat is conflated with disordered eating, “a scandal of appetite,” being “overfed” or engaging in “appetitive excess.” As fat and consumptive excess remain collapsed throughout the text, the boundaries of membership in populations marked for slow death become strangely slippery. Rather than poverty and marginalization producing fat via excessive appetite, fat becomes a mechanism of race, ethnicity, and class formation in Berlant’s text, and in other obesogenic perspectives. Consumption is a means by which marginalized people are absorbed by their environment, taken in, and consumed.

Obesogenic accounts open the door for interventionist, paternalistic policies targeted at curbing consumption, always with an eye toward poor communities and communities of color, and often yoked to nationalist discourses of security and progress. No doubt Berlant is aware of this, as she gestures and makes asides to a dismal history of racially and ethnically marginalized bodies marked for containment, management, and discipline. She pauses to note sedimented racist and classist formulations of nonnormative bodies and the behaviors presumed to go with them, not to raise alarm so much as to announce her own arrival. Berlant’s argument toggles between fat as permanent and fat as changeable, fat as defining for some populations and not others. She states, “As for the overfed, owing the means of production might well produce more overfeeding, more exercise of agency towards death and not health, and certainly not against power.”²⁸ Yet, in a slightly modified version of her “Slow Death” essay published later, Berlant suggests, “The privileged have slightly more resources for resisting these modes of exhaustion, using their stretched time to eat well, exercise, vacation, and sleep.”²⁹ It is not altogether clear why the underprivileged would respond to increased resources by “more overfeeding” whereas the already privileged use this good fortune to “eat well”. Obesogenic arguments, as Anna Kirkland explains, often imply that “some people are impervious to bad environments (the elites, who still manage their bodies properly) while others are more fully constructed by their environments (poor fat people).”³⁰ We find ourselves on the well-worn terrain of the poor and marginalized as over-determined by their environment, whereas the economically and racially privileged shape and resist it.

One of the more stunning manifestations of contemporary obesogenic perspectives is a Los Angeles ordinance enabling the use of zoning parameters to restrict building permits for fast food restaurants in a predominantly African American and Latino area of South Los Angeles. Passed in 2008, the ordinance is the first of its kind to use zoning ordinances to restrict fast food restaurants with the intent to improve community health.³¹ While obesity itself is not mentioned, concern for “serious public health problems through poor nutrition for children” does appear in the text of the ordinance, and many of the council members who voted on the bill used obesity as a key narrative to generate support.³² Statistics regarding the number of fast food restaurants in South Los Angeles versus West Los Angeles, a predominantly white, and more affluent area of Los Angeles, accompanied by comparative BMI statistics broken down by race and ethnicity, were often included in these conversations. Thus, the implicit argument is that African American and Latino residents of South Los Angeles are overweight and obese, in part, due to fast food consumption. Interestingly, Roland Sturm and Deborah A. Cohen found significant disparities between media reports of fast food availability in South L.A. and reality, finding that South L.A. actually had a lower density of fast-food restaurants than West L.A.³³ The fast food ban in South L.A. is indicative of the way in which populations get defined by obesity and sets of behaviors presumed to go hand-in-hand with obesity—yet another example of Puar’s notion of identity as risk coding. Subjects are fixed in a setting, installed in a field that nurtures a particular appetitive response, a response that produces not just fat, but also a particular racialized and classed embodiment of fat. In this sense, Berlant’s notion of an “environment” needs to be pushed beyond her articulation, as not just a way of “describ[ing] space temporally, as a back-formation from practices,” but also as a way of producing racialized and classed identities as a back-formation from practices, a way of producing the very subjects “marked out for wearing out” that Berlant seems to just stumble upon.

In a 2000 Harper’s magazine story on obesity, identity as risk coding is made spectacularly clear as the author, Greg Critser, sets a scene of family bonding through consumption:

Places like McDonald’s and Winchell’s Donut stores […] are the San Francisco bathhouses of the [obesity] epidemic, the places where the high-risk population engages in high-risk behavior. Although open around the clock, the Winchell’s near my house [in Pasadena, California] doesn’t get rolling until seven in the morning, the Spanish-language talk shows frothing in the background while an ambulance light whirls atop the Coke dispenser. Inside, Mami placates Miguelito with a giant apple fritter. Papi tells a joke and pours ounce upon ounce of sugar and cream into his 20-ounce coffee. Viewed through the lens of obesity, as I am inclined to do, the scene is not so feliz.³⁴

In this formulation, people of color are, by definition, high-risk. What makes Mami and Papi and little Miguelito helpless to resist, but not the journalist who lives near the donut shop? Compare this account to Berlant’s scene of working-class filiation:

Although one might imagine that the knowledge of unhealthiness would make parents force themselves and their children into a different food regime, ethnographies of working-class families argue that economic threats to the family’s continuity and the parents’ sense of well being tend to produce insular households in which food is one of the few stress relievers and one of the few sites of clear continuity between children and parents […] filial relations of eating become scenes for the production of happiness in terms of repeatable pleasure, if not health.³⁵

The zoning of fast food in South Los Angeles, along with Critser’s and Berlant’s versions of racialized and working-class familial bonding, raise the question of whether obesogenic accounts are less about the constituting factors that are rendering marginalized communities fat, and more about fat helping to define and prop up the very boundaries of those communities themselves. Identity as risk coding also emerges in debates over the BMI scale. In 2000, the International Obesity Taskforce (IOTF) recommended a different BMI scale for “Asian populations” than the standard scale, specifically advocating lowering the “overweight” cutoff from a BMI of 25 to 23, and the “obese” cutoff from 30 to 25, arguing that “the medical impact of even modest weight gain was greater among these populations than in others.” The use of colonialist imaginaries in the report is striking, “Early European explorers of the Pacific Ocean were impressed by the large and muscular physiques of the island inhabitants, particularly in Polynesia and Micronesia. In more recent times, attention has turned to the heightened susceptibility of these populations to obesity associated with modernisation of lifestyle.”³⁶ In this case, fat becomes yet another way to stabilize the boundaries of racial and ethnic groupings, while simultaneously implying that modernization is ill-fitting, so to speak, with certain bodies.

The focus on childhood obesity may be another mechanism by which race and ethnicity become solidified through fat. Concerns over childhood obesity ensure that women become targets for intervention, not just for their own excessive bodies, but for the excessive bodies they reproduce in their children.³⁷ In the 1980s, the fear was that women of color were having babies at alarming rates; the fear today is that women of color are having fat babies at alarming rates. The field of epigenetics has increased interest in the impact of fetal environment on health outcomes later in life, obesity included. Epigenetics points to the potential for a physiological mechanism by which oppression is embodied and passed on to future generations, such that “stressors experienced by one generation, such as imbalanced nutrition or psychosocial stress, can perpetuate changed biological settings to offspring, with effects on such functions as glucose metabolism, blood pressure regulation, fat deposition, and the physiologic response to stress.”³⁸ Epigenetics, as Hannah Landecker explains, has a “boundary-dissolving effect: one’s corporeality is much more vividly rendered as continuous with the landscape and the social nature of agriculture through the necessary act of eating.”³⁹ Epigenetics is a means by which the environment is quite literally absorbed, embodied, and passed on. Yet, as Becky Mansfield argues, the deployment of epigenetics can operate as an installment of “race [as] the outcome that proves itself” by determining behaviors already associated with whiteness as normative, and behaviors already associated with communities of color as deviant and dangerous.⁴⁰

Conclusion

Obesogenic accounts, including Berlant’s, are seductive, as they seems to remove blame from individuals, and they rehearse a well-worn, comfortable argument for many progressive scholars and activists that capitalism run amok is bad for us. The problem is that they tend to rest on a shared foundational presumption that consumption drives obesity, that excessive bodies are, in part, produced by excessive consumption, and that fat people consume food differently than folks that are not fat. Let me suggest that there remains an empirical question around these baseline claims, particularly as they get applied to low-income communities and communities of color. The two overriding assumptions driving these accounts, that poor folks and fat folks are gorging on Big Macs and middle-class and upper-class folks and thin folks are picking away at alfalfa sprouts, is not borne out by the data we have. Caloric intake, fat gram intake, fast food intake, soda consumption, all the usual suspects that get trotted out in both scholarly and media accounts, can be remarkably similar across seemingly divergent populations. More importantly, there is just too much we do not know about why some folks are fat and some folks are not, particularly when we sometimes find identical patterns of behavior across these two groups.

The problem with Berlant’s account, and other variants of the obesogenic account, is that, as much as it claims to avoid pathologizing individuals and the choices individuals make, the reliance on the fat-equals-excessive-consumption framework necessarily ends up doing just that. It might avoid a certain kind of blaming—the “you should know better” kind of blame—but the obesogenic account risks replacing this with the arguably more troubling “you shouldn’t know better” claims. Berlant’s use of the term “overfed” raises the question, in particular—what would qualify as just fed, according to her? What, according to Probyn’s formulation, would constitute “restraint” or “just the right measure”?⁴¹ When do racially and economically marginalized peoples, fat or otherwise, get to just eat without that act being swept up into an “epidemic of signification”?⁴² Particularly given the deep association between marginalized communities and excessive appetite (of all sorts), as well as the oft-performed reduction of racialized and classed others to their surroundings, whether nature or culture, or both, it behooves us to proceed with caution before we use the so-called obesity epidemic as a thought experiment. We should be concerned, not with food that is not for thought, as Berlant suggests, but with thought that provides little sustenance to those already weary from the burden of oversignification.

22. Berlant 2007: 780. [↩]
23. Berlant 2007: 763. [↩]
24. Berlant 2007: 777. [↩]
25. Berlant 2007: 779. [↩] [↩]
26. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Epidemics of the Will,” Tendencies (Durham: Duke UP, 1993): 133. [↩]
27. Berlant 2007: 767 f. 32. [↩]
28. Berlant 2007: 767. [↩]
29. Lauren Berlant, “Risky Bigness: On Obesity, Eating, and the Ambiguity of ‘Health,'” Against Health: How Health Became the New Morality (New York: NYU Press, 2010): 36. [↩]
30. Anna Kirkland, “The Environmental Account of Obesity: A Case for Feminist Skepticism,” Signs 36 (2011): 476. [↩]
31. Other cities, including several in California, have restricted fast food restaurants, but they have done so with the expressed intent to protect small businesses, to preserve the historic character of an area, or to reduce nuisances like traffic and litter. [↩]
32. See http://cityclerk.lacity.org/lacityclerkconnect/index.cfm?fa=ccfi.viewrecord&cfnumber=07-1658. [↩]
33. Roland Sturm and Deborah A. Cohen, “Zoning For Health? The Year-Old Ban On New Fast-Food Restaurants in South LA,” Health Affairs 28 (2009): 1090. In addition, Sturm and Cohen note that a widely circulated Los Angeles Times‘ statistic claiming that fast food restaurants make up 44 percent of all available food retailers in South L.A. included “restaurants with seating for ten or fewer […] regardless of what type of food they produced.” South L.A. has a large number of small, family-owned restaurants that fit this description and are included in this percentage. [↩]
34. Critser, “Let Them Eat Fat: The Heavy Truths about American Obesity,” Harper’s (March 2000). For an excellent analysis of this piece, see Paul Campos, The Obesity Myth (New York: Penguin, 2004). [↩]
35. Berlant 2007: 778. [↩]
36. http://www.wpro.who.int/nutrition/documents/docs/Redefiningobesity.pdf [↩]
37. Recent surveys show primary health care trusts in England are increasingly instituting policies denying obese patients coverage for IVF, and the British Fertility Society recommends a ban on IVF treatment for obese patients. Similar policies have been recommended and implemented in various ways in Canada, Scotland, and New Zealand. China regulates foreign adoption according to BMI, requiring potential adopters have a BMI less than 40. See http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9400efdc1031f933a15751c1a9609c8b63. [↩]
38. C.W. Kuzawa and E. Sweet, “Epigenetics and the embodiment of race: Developmental origins of US racial disparities in cardiovascular health,” American Journal of Human Biology 21 (2009): 6. [↩]
39. Hannah Landecker, “Food as Exposure: Nutritional Epigenetics and the New Metabolism,” BioSocieties 6 (2011): 19. [↩]
40. Becky Mansfield, “Race and the New Epigenetic Biopolitics of Environmental Health,” BioSocieties 7.4 (2012): 369. [↩]
41. Elspeth Probyn, “An Ethos with a Bite: Queer Appetites from Sex to Food,” Sexualities 2.4 (1999): 427. [↩]
42. Paula A. Treichler, “AIDS, Homophobia, and Biomedical Discourse: An Epidemic of Signification,” October 43 (1987): 31-70. [↩]