Year

2024

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Department

School of Humanities and Social Inquiry

Abstract

Fatness is both culturally stigmatised and commonly framed as one of the critical public health and economic challenges facing contemporary society. Governments and other social institutions dedicate significant effort and resources to attempting to curb rates of obesity in their populations. Alongside this, a generalised cultural aversion to fatness animates a huge amount of economic activity by structuring consumer behaviour. As such, a wide array of institutional, commercial and personal surveillance practices have been deployed to in some sense manage or address obesity.

This thesis explores the way that surveillance technologies and practices have contributed to the production of obesity as a problematic concept and abject social category. I examine both historical and contemporary forms of bodyweight and health surveillance in order to demonstrate how these systems of measurement and representation have been pivotal in actively producing obesity as a useful and economically productive concept. Intertwined with this argument is an exploration of how the deployment of weight and health surveillance frequently subjects fat people to unnecessary stigma, and discrimination.

A particular focus is a critique of the way obesity is technologically produced and integrated into the practices of contemporary surveillance capitalism, which can be separated into two broad trends. Firstly, relative body weight and related markers are perceived as a pivotal measure of health risk and become critical ingredients in many contemporary forms of surveillance facilitated risk assessment. Such risk assessments modulate people’s access to insurance, credit, employment, and housing and other essential services and opportunities. The consistent deployment of bodyweight as a risk indicator thus generates a form of structural disadvantage for fat individuals. Secondly, surveillance capitalist activities, specifically social media platforms and associated targeted marketing, are key sites for the production of cultural aversion to fatness. The mass production of anti-fat subjectivities is enormously lucrative, but also leads to a variety of poor social and psychological outcomes for fat individuals.

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Unless otherwise indicated, the views expressed in this thesis are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of the University of Wollongong.