Debating, theorising and researching obesity in challenging times

The past decade has witnessed a cacophony of calls to combat ‘the obesity epidemic’ and the ‘impudent lifestyles’ claimed to cause it. Reportedly affecting most adults and a growing number of children (but considered especially problematic among the poor, notably working-class mothers), overweight/ obesity/fatness is presented by various ‘entrepreneurs’ (Monaghan et al, 2010) as a massive public health crisis that not only threatens individual health but also national wealth. This concern is evidenced across a range of national contexts, though ‘the obesity epidemic’ is largely deemed ‘modernity’s scourge’ (Gard and Wright, 2005, p. 68) and thus the blight of nations such as the United States, or Britain that is typified by the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges (AMRC, 2013, p. 3) as ‘the “fat man” of Europe’. The degradation of fatness is not new, but the sheer scale of this seems to be quite fitting under current social, political and economic conditions. Indeed, concerns about economic fitness and fatness have considerable resonance following the near collapse of capitalism in 2008 and conditions of (unresolved) global crisis (Wallerstein, 2011). Amidst austerity, comprising cuts to publicly funded health services and social welfare, the ‘larger public’ are routinely extolled to literally exercise greater self-discipline and ‘tighten their belts’. Lean times, we are told, necessitate lean, efficient, healthy bodies and the cutting of unwanted, aberrant flesh that is weighing us all down. Social Theory & Health (STH) has served as an important forum for debating, theorising and presenting challenging research on medicalised fatness/weight. Ruth Graham’s (2013, p. 286) endorsement of this journal as a ‘slightly edgy discursive space’ wherein everyday health matters are integrated with more formal, abstract theory is a fitting sentiment that goes beyond her substantive interests in anorexia and death. Indeed, STH offers ‘plenty of food for thought’, so to speak, on related issues of fatness that implicate social and not just fleshy bodies. Hence, it was with considerable interest and pleasure to have been invited to compile this special issue. My instructions were to select eight previously published papers from STH on obesity and write an editorial. There are enough papers on this topic in STH to fill two special issues. My exclusion of certain contributions is largely a pragmatic decision and is not meant to imply that such papers are irrelevant to the broader debate. Any omission should not be interpreted to mean that I am unsympathetic towards other authors’ disciplinary and philosophical commitments. For example, to note two