What's Wrong With Fat? (45 page)

9. Howard Becker,
Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance
(New York: The Free
Press., 1963) ; Erving Goff man,
Stigma: Notes on the Management of a Spoiled
Identity
(New York: Prentice-Hall, 1963).

10. Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson, “Pygmalion in the Classroom “
Th
e Urban
Review
3, no. 1 (1968): 16–20.

11. Becker,
Outsiders
; Goff man,
Stigma
; Peter Conrad and Joseph W. Schneider,
Deviance and Medicalization: From Badness to Sickness
(Philadelphia: Temple
University Press, 1992) ; Bruce G. Link et al., “A Modified Labeling Theory Approach
to Mental Disorders: An Empirical Assessment,”
American Sociological Review
54,
no. 3 (1989): 400–23 ; T. J. Scheff, “The Labelling Theory of Mental Illness,”
American Sociological Review
39, no. 3 (1974): 444–52.

12. Ann Arnett Ferguson,
Bad Boys: Public Schools in the Making of Black Masculinity
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000).

13. Michel Foucault,
History of Sexuality, vol. 1, An Introduction
(New York: Vintage
Books, 1980).

14. Ian Hacking, “Kinds of People: Moving Targets,”
Proceedings of the British Academy
151 (2007): 285–318.

15. Joan W. Scott,
Only Paradoxes to Off er
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1996)
;
Joshua Gamson, “Must Identity Movements Self-Destruct? A Queer
Dilemma,”
Social Problems
42, no. 3 (1995): 390–407.

16. Rachel P. Wildman et al., “The Obese without Cardiometabolic Risk Factor
Clustering and the Normal Weight with Cardiometabolic Risk Factor Clustering,”
Archives of Internal Medicine
168, no. 15 (2008): 1617–24. People with none or one
of the six abnormalities were considered healthy; those with two or more were
considered to have an abnormal cardiometabolic profile.

17. Geraldine M. Budd et al., “Health Care Professionals’ Attitudes about Obesity: An
Integrative Review,”
Applied Nursing Research
24 (2011): 127–37 ; Christina C. Wee et
al., “Screening for Cervical and Breast Cancer: Is Obesity an Unrecognized Barrier to
Preventive Care?”
Annals of Internal Medicine
132, no. 9 (2000): 697–704 ; N. K. Amy
et al., “Barriers to Routine Gynecological Cancer Screening for White and African-
American Obese Women,”
International Journal of Obesity
30 (2006): 147–55.

18. Heena P. Santry, Daniel L. Gillen, and Diane S. Lauderdale, “Trends in Bariatric
Surgical Procedures,”
Journal of the American Medical Association
294, no. 15
(2005): 1909–17 ; R. L. Thompson and D. E. Thomas, “A Cross-sectional Survey of
the Opinions on Weight Loss Treatments of Adult Obese Patients Attending a
Dietetic Clinic,”
International Journal of Obesity
24, no. 2 (2000): 164–70 ; Mary K.
Serdula et al., “Weight Control Practices of U.S. Adolescents and Adults,” pt. 2,
Annals of Internal Medicine
119, no. 7 (1993): 667–71.

19. Alicia Mundy,
Dispensing with the Truth
(New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2001) ; see
also Agnè s Fournier and Mahmoud Zureik, “Estimate of Deaths Due to Valvular
Insufficiency Attributable to the Use of Benfluorex in France,”
Pharmaco-epi
demiology and Drug Safety
21 (2012): 342–51.

20. Jantina de Vries, “The Obesity Epidemic: Medical and Ethical Considerations,”
Science Engineering and Ethics
13, no. 1 (2007): 55–67 ; cited in Tina Moff at, “The
‘Childhood Obesity Epidemic’: Health Crisis or Social Construction,”
Medical
Anthropology Quarterly
24, no. 1 (2010): 1–21.

21. Tara Shuai et al., “A Response to White Fat Activism from People of Color in the
Fat Justice Movement,” NOLOSE, http://www.nolose.org/activism/POC.php.

22. Andrew Pollack, “Advisory Panel Favors Approval for Weight-Loss Drug,”
New
York Times
, February 22, 2012.

23. The actual data points to an
association
, not causation, between elevated BMI and
certain illnesses. That the medication increases risk of heart disease—the biggest
killer associated with elevated BMI—is particularly troubling. According to a
member of the Qnexa panel who voted in favor of approval:
One of the big reasons though, for many panel members, was not the health risks
of obesity, but rather the fact that Qnexa is a combination of two existing approved
drugs, topiramate and phentermine, and doctors are already able to prescribe the
two drugs to people who want to lose weight. I think collectively we felt that since
the train has already left the station, it would be better to have a little more con
trol over the situation and that if we didn’t recommend Qnexa, there would be a
lot of weird off label prescribing of various doses of the two other drugs. (e-mail
correspondence, April 19, 2012).

24. Lauren Cox, “Scottish Courts Briefly Take Obese Mother’s Newborn Child,”
ABCNews.com
, October 27 2009 ; Jill Sherman, “Fat Children ‘Should Be Taken
from Parents’ to Curb Obesity Epidemic: Council Warning to Parents Guilty of
Neglect,”
Sunday Times
, August 16, 2008 ; Lauren Cox, “Courts Charge Mother of
555-Pound Boy: A Mother Facing Felony Charges for Her Son’s Obesity,”
ABCNews.
com
, June 29, 2009. Lisa Belkin, “Watching Her Weight,”
New York Times
, July 8,
2001 ; Joe Eaton, “The Battle over Heavy T.,”
Washington City Paper
, September 26,
2007.

25. Jeanette DePatie, “The HAES Files: A Tale of Two Billboards,” Association for
Size Diversity and Health, February 2, 2012,
http://healthateverysizeblog
.org/2012/02/07/the-haes-files-a-tale-of-two-billboards/.

26. Ibid.

27. Ibid.

28. As discussed in chapter 2, economically powerful groups have sporadically
challenged the public health crisis frame, most notably the restaurant and
food industry lobbying group the Center for Consumer Freedom, or promoted
the idea that one can be beautiful at a range of body sizes, in the case of the
skin-care product company Dove. However, these organizations have operated
independently from fat rights organizations. This is in stark contrast to obe
sity organizations such as the International Obesity Task Force (IOTF), which
have been bankrolled by pharmaceutical companies that produce weight-loss
drugs.

29. Malcolm Spector and John I. Kitsuse,
Constructing Social Problems
(Menlo Park,
CA: Cummings Publishing Company, Inc., 1977), 75. See also Joseph R. Gusfield,
Th
e Culture of Public Problems: Drinking-Driving and the Symbolic Order
(Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1981) ; Joel Best,
Social Problems
(New York: Norton,
2008) ; Stephen Hilgarten and Charles L. Bosk, “The Rise and Fall of Social
Problems: A Public Arenas Model,”
American Journal of Sociology
94, no. 1 (1988):
53–78.

30. I have, from time to time, ceded to these pressures. Most notably, I was the second
author on an article published in 2006 in the
International Journal of Epidemiology,
entitled “The Epidemiology of Overweight and Obesity: Public Health Crisis or
Moral Panic?” In this article, my coauthors and I argued that the risks associated
with increased population weight had been overblown and identified political,
economic, and social reasons for this distortion of reality. Paul Campos et al., “The
Epidemiology of Overweight and Obesity: Public Health Crisis or Moral Panic?,”
International Journal of Epidemiology
35, no. 1 (2006): 55–60.

31. For example, Emile Durkheim,
Th
e Elementary Forms of Religious Life
(New York:
Free Press, 1995 [1912])
;
Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckman,
Th
e Social
Construction of Reality
(Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor, 1967) ; Abigail C.
Saguy,
What Is Sexual Harassment? From Capitol Hill to the Sorbonne
(Berkeley:
University of California Press., 2003)
;
Michele Lamont,
Money, Morals and
Manners: Th
e Culture of the French and American Upper-Middle Class
(Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1992) ; Ann Swidler, “Culture in Action: Symbols and
Strategies,”
American Sociological Review
51, no. 2 (1986): 273–86.

32. For a lucid discussion of how material and symbolic resources are mutually consti
tutive and the ways they can be exploited to exert social change, see William H.
Sewell, Jr., “A Theory of Structure: Duality, Agency, and Transformation,”
American
Journal of Sociology
98, no. 1 (1992): 1–29.

33. Deb Burgard, “Keynote” (presented at a joint meeting of NAAFA and ASDAH
annual convention, Chicago, IL, July 15, 2007) (emphasis in the original).

34. Ibid. (emphasis in the original).

35. Sandro Galea et al., “Estimated Deaths Attributable to Social Factors in the United
States,”
Minority Health & Health Equity Archive
101, no. 8 (2011): 1456–65.

36. Kelly Brownell and Katherine Battle Horgen,
Food Fight: Th
e Inside Story of the
Food Industry, America’s Obesity Crisis, and What We Can Do about It
(New York:
McGraw-Hill, 2003) ; Kelly D. Brownell and David S. Ludwig, “Fighting Obesity
and the Food Lobby,”
Th
e Washington Post,
June 9, 2002 ; Kelly D. Brownell et al.,
eds.,
Weight Bias: Nature, Consequences, and Remedies
(New York: Guilford Press,
2005) ; Rebecca Puhl and Kelly D. Brownell, “Bias, Discrimination, and Obesity,”
Obesity Research
9 (2001): 788–805 ; R. M. Puhl, T. Andreyeva, and K. D. Brownell,
“Perceptions of Weight Discrimination: Prevalence and Comparison to Race and
Gender Discrimination in America,”
International Journal of Obesity
32 (2008):
992–1000.

37. James Morone,
Hellfire Nation: Th
e Politics of Sin in American History
(New Haven:
Yale University Press, 2003) ; Rogan Kersh and James Morone, “How the Personal
Becomes political: Prohibitions, Public Health, and Obesity,”
Studies in American
Political Development
16 (Fall 2002): 162–75.

38. Morone,
Hellfire Nation
;
Kersh and Morone, “How the Personal Becomes
Political.”

39. Mark Nord, Margaret Andrews, and Steven Carlson, “Household Food Security
in the United States, 2003” (Washington, DC: Economic Research Service and
U.S. Department of Agriculture, 2004),
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers
.cfm?abstract_id=631912 ; Sam Dolnick, “The Obesity-Hunger Paradox,”
New York
Times
, March 12, 2010 ; Alexander B. Adams, “John James Audubon: A Biography”
(New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1966) ; Marilyn S. Townsend et al., “Food Insecurity
Is Positively Related to Overweight in Women,”
Journal of Nutrition
131 (2001):
1738–45.

40. Julie Guthman,
Weighing In: Obesity, Food Justice, and the Limits of Capitalism
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011).

41. Marion Nestle,
Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002) ; Eric Schlosser,
Fast Food Nation:
Th
e Dark Side of the All-American Meal
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company,
2001).

42. Guthman,
Weighing In
; Linda Bacon,
Health at Every Size: The Surprising Truth
about Your Weight
(Dallas: BenBella Books, 2010).

APPENDIX

1. Wendy Griswold, “A Methodological Framework for the Sociology of Culture,”
Sociological Methodology
17 (1987): 1–35
;
Joshua Gamson,
Freaks Talk Back:
Tabloid talk Shows and Sexual Nonconformity
(Chicago: Chicago University Press,
1998).

2. Darnell Hunt,
O. J. Simpson Facts and Fictions: News Rituals in the Construction of
Reality
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999) ; Wendy Griswold, “The
Fabrication of Meaning: Literary Interpretation in the United States, Great
Britain, and the West Indies,”
American Journal of Sociology
92, no. 5 (1987):
1077–117.