Beyond psychopathology: Interrogating (dis)orders of body weight and body management

Abstract

As David Smail and Janet Bostock (1999: p. 78) noted a decade ago ‘[c]larifying the role ofideology and culture as ‘‘distal’’ influences on subjective experience is at once one of themost important and one of the most difficult tasks facing community psychology.’ Itremains equally important and, perhaps, just as difficult today. This special issue comprisesa series of critical explorations of the ways in which subjectivities and subjectiveexperiences are discursively constituted, regulated and resisted in relation to normalisedand pathologised body weights and weight management practices.Traditionally, psychological research has focused on the body image of individuals, byfor example, quantitatively measuring body image dissatisfaction in young women (e.g.Grogan, 2006; Tiggemann, 2004). However, the focus on deconstructing hegemonicnotions of body weight and weight management practices is undoubtedly of particularimportance for community psychology today most obviously because, against a backdropin which Westernised cultural ideas constitute the slender body as healthy, attractive,morally virtuous and ‘normal’ (e.g. Bordo, 1993; Malson, 1998, Malson and Burns, 2009),the World Health Organisation has declared that the Western world is in the grip of an‘obesity epidemic’ (e.g. Branca, Nikogosian & Lobstein, 2007).The now highly familiar and culturally entrenched constructions that equate thin/slimbodies with all things good and fatness with all that is aesthetically and morallyreprehensible are now over-written and further consolidated by a neo-liberal discourse ofhealthism.Framed withinneo-liberal ideology, one’shealthbecomesanindividual concernand solutions to health problems are seen to ‘lie in the realm of individual choice’(Crawford, 1980), so that body size is constructed as a personal attribute free of social,cultural, physical and economic constraints (Rich & Evans, 2008). Within this discoursethe thin/slender body is read as a sign of health and ‘excess’ body weight is constructed asunhealthy and a consequence of irresponsible lifestyle choices.Journal of Community & Applied Social PsychologyJ. Community Appl. Soc. Psychol., 19: 331–335 (2009)