Fat and Identity Politics, UCLA

UCLA Center for the Study of Women presents Paul Campos, author of "The Obesity Myth: Why America's Obsession with Weight is Hazardous to Your Health." In this talk, he discusses efforts to make fat people thin, through weight-loss diets, drugs, and surgery. Campos sees weight as a political and social issue and notes that body size is often used as a tool of discrimination, especially against women. Organized by Prof Abigail Saguy, Department of Sociology at UCLA, this talk is part of the Gender and Body Size lecture series, which addresses the new interdisciplinary field of "fat studies." Recent discussions of body weight have been dominated by health policy concerns over the so-called obesity epidemic. Despite a long tradition of feminist critique of fat hatred as a problem of patriarchy, there has been very little critique of the growing emphasis on the importance of slenderness for health reasons.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• gender
• weight
• obesity
• fat
• studies
• sociology
• body
• size
• discrimination
• health
• thin
• weigh

[ForwardN2Unknown]

Most of what he says is spot on, but one thing which is not quite correct is that we "do not know" how to cause weight loss. Whether it has any health benefits is another matter, but we do know how the body physiologically stores and burns fat.

[wade2bosh]

actually lowest mortality is in the normal weight category (bmi). 23ish.

[DovSherman]

I had been thinking about the similarities between conversion therapy and the diet industry recently so it was intriguing to see this comparison drawn by Campos.

[malica77]

Thanks for posting and making this available! Fascinating talk, even though I disagree with so much as a formally obese person.

[singmespanishtango]

Preach brother! A very interesting lecture.

Thank you to UCLA for sponsoring the talk and putting it online.