- Volume 66 (2021)
- Vol. 66 (2021)
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- Issue 3
- No. 3
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- Pages 511 - 533
- pp. 511 - 533
Bodies In and Out of Shape: Obesity (Discourses) and Agency in Times of Self-Optimization
Pages 511 - 533
DOI https://doi.org/10.33675/AMST/2021/3/7
open-access
This publication is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons License Attribution - NonCommercial - NoDerivatives 4.0.
This essay examines a seeming paradox: on the one hand, current digital technologies and new knowledges in the biosciences and medicine have enabled us to track and optimize our bodies’ physiology and shape, driving many into adopting a rigid regime of “self-perfection.” On the other hand, bodies, all over the world, have become increasingly overweight, if not obese. What once was most evident in the United States has turned into a global “epidemic,” some argue, while others focus on and critique the oversupply of fattening foods and the medicalization of obesity. In its first part, this paper interrogates various accounts of this polarized development and traces the collision of discourses on fatness and fitness. As research illuminatingly highlights how we have come to “embody” neoliberalism, the central concern, in part two, is how discourses on obesity and self-optimization continue to put agency on the line, making it increasingly hard to weigh individual “input” and responsibility. As a consequence, these debates encourage the exploration of alternative models of agency.
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