Framing obesity in public discourse: Representation through metaphor across text type

Abstract

Obesity is not only a worldwide public health concern, but it is marked by the extent to which it occupies public discourse space – whether by dissemination of scientific research, arguments for health campaigns, the personal stories of overweight individuals, or blends of all of them. To better understand how these domains intersect and how language about obesity is expressed – is obesity an “epidemic”? A personal failing? A medical problem? – we look at the role of conceptual metaphors (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980) in communications about obesity across text types. Conceptual metaphors act as pragmatic framing devices (Fillmore, 1975; Semino et al., 2016), focusing attention on social meaning and action. We show how meaning-through-metaphor plays out in news stories, government policy texts, and personal accounts by people who self-identify as obese. Our focus is the most active metaphorical framings in the primary semantic domains of war, religion, addiction, and epidemic. Seen together, they capture the complexity of the issue, allow us to better understand public or personal response, and contribute to a larger “pragmatics of metaphor” (Taverniers, 2017). The intersections demonstrate the embedded nature of meaning, language, and agency and the ways in which social attitudes are presented and normalized in discourse.