In a country known for its
excessive consumption, it’s no surprise that obesity has become one of the
major public health issues of our time. 
A study in the October 9, 2002 issue of JAMA
reported that two thirds of Americans are overweight and one third are
obese. A recent WHO study listed
obesity as one of the top risk factors for premature morbidity and mortality
throughout the world. Obesity has
garnered the attention of physicians, researchers and members of the media
(witness Al Roker’s dramatic weight loss as a result of gastric bypass
surgery). Even academics are getting
into the fray. Yet the contributors to Bodies
Out of Bounds: Fatness and Transgression aren’t really interested in
obesity. Rather, they’re interested in
“fatness” and how fat bodies are represented in the media and arts and how fat
people are marginalized in the general culture. This seems to be a curious proposition—how can fat people who
constitute the majority of this country’s population be rendered “invisible and
absent” as the introduction attests? 
Yet, the contributors to this volume cogently argue that similar to
other disenfranchised and “invisible” groups (women, gays and lesbians, people
of color) fat people have been consistently marginalized in the mainstream
culture. Thus, certain constructions of
fat have become the dominant means to interpret fatness (for instance, the
medicalized discourse of fat, i.e. obesity, that treats it strictly as a
pathology). The editors of this book
ask the question why are we hostile to fat? and instead offer essays that
celebrate expressions of corpulence.

The editors
of Bodies Out of Bounds, Jane Evans Braziel and Kathleen LeBasco, are,
respectively, assistant professor of English at the University of
Wisconsin-LaCrosse and assistant professor in the Communication Arts Department
at Marymount Manhattan College. They divide the book into five parts, with
titles such as “Revaluing Corpulence, Redefining Fat Subjectivities” and
“Deconstructing the Carnivalesque, Grotesque, and Other Configurations of
Corpulence.” The contributors to this
anthology are mostly scholars in university English departments. The early chapters provide readers some
useful historical interpretation of how fat has been conceived in the past (for
instance, the ancient Greeks thought one should not be too fat or too thin; in
Victorian England, fat was a topic of great study but there was no hegemonic
interpretation of fat as there is today). 
Other chapters, such as “Letting Ourselves Go” address the oppression of
fat women: “[f]at women in American society are perpetually victimized by
public ridicule….Fat-phobia is one of the few acceptable forms of prejudice
left in a society that at times goes to extremes to prove itself politically
correct.” Still other chapters examine
the way fat people are depicted in exercise videos and in televisions programs,
from the 1970s detective show Cannon to later sitcoms such as Cheers
and Roseanne.

Perhaps the
book’s greatest shortcoming is its inability to address obesity on the level of
public health. The contributors
earnestly attempt to deconstruct our cultural notions of fat as abject,
carnivalesque, or “as a transgressive and performative hyperbolization of
American ambivalence toward bodies and queerness” (unfortunately, such academic
jargon permeates many of the chapters in this anthology). No contributor attempts to examine obesity
within a cultural milieu where suburbanization, fast food, and sedentary
lifestyles are the norms for many people. 

Nonetheless,
the book is probably of greatest interest to cultural critics who are
interested in representations of corpulence in the culture. Certain chapters of the book would also be
useful to an instructor who is interested in teaching issues regarding the body
and body image. Our culture’s obsession
with appearance (rather than health) drives much of the multi-billion dollar
diet and fitness industry. Bodies
Out of Bounds provides a timely and provocative antidote to our
stereotypical ways of thinking about fat and corpulence.

©
2002 Kayhan Parsi

Kayhan Parsi, JD, PhD is an
assistant professor at the Neiswanger Institute for Bioethics and Health Policy
at the Stritch School of Medicine, Loyola University Chicago. He is the graduate program director for an online
master’s program in bioethics.

Categories: General, Ethics