Obesity Epidemic’
Art & Activism in the Age of the ‘Obesity Epidemic’ by Pamela Grombacher A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in HISTORY OF ART, DESIGN AND VISUAL CULTURE Department of Art and Design University of Alberta © Pamela Grombacher, 2014 Abstract This thesis considers three contemporary artworks that open up new possibilities for size acceptance activism, a political movement that arose in the late 1960s to combat fat stigma and weight-based discrimination. Fatness is vilified in many parts of the world as an unhealthy, unattractive, and, most significantly, immoral embodiment. This is due, in part, to “healthism,” or the moralization of health, and to the perceived controllability of body size. In cultures where health is viewed as a moral obligation and size is viewed as a personal choice, fat people are discriminated against for supposedly choosing to be unhealthy. Fat stigma has worsened in the wake of the “obesity epidemic,” the alarmist rhetoric of which frames fatness as a lurking and deadly contagion that threatens to destroy public health. There are those within the size acceptance movement, however, who question the legitimacy of this “epidemic” as a true health crisis and suggest that it is instead a moral panic that reflects cultural anxieties about personal accountability. As politicians, medical practitioners and diet industrialists wage a “War on Obesity” to eradicate fatness and thus rid society of this alleged scourge, size acceptance activists resist weight-based discrimination by arguing that stigma, rather than fat, is the true enemy to be conquered. I suggest new possibilities for resistance by analyzing artworks that subvert hegemonic notions of fat in novel and nuanced ways.
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