University of Amsterdam
The F Word:
From Failed Homo Economicus to Fat Posthumanist
Sofia Apostolidou
RMA Thesis Cultural Analysis
Student Number : 10229450
Supervisor: Jules Sturm
Second Reader: Murat Aydemir
(Never mind that I have been an after
And a before
And another after
And another before
And a during )
1 1 Pattie Thomas, in Thomas’ and Wilkerson’s Taking Up Space (2005).
Table of Contents
1. Introduction………..3
2. Biopolitics andpower……….7
3. Homo Economicus: Rationality, Responsibility,Morality………13
4. Pastoral Power and Homo Economicus………16
5. Health as a Moral Obligation………..23
6. Managing the Body and Manipulating the Body: Bioethics and
Posthumanism………26
7. Prosthesis: Criticisms and Reconceptualisations………32
8. The Fat Suit: A Reconceptualisation of Prosthesis………38
9. Conclusion...42
1. Introduction
Let me begin by saying that I am fat.2 I have been identified as or identified as fat for as long as I can remember. I have, however, only recently been identified as obese, given some weight gain and my subsequently increased body mass index (BMI). Since then, I have been there and back again, 3 numerous times, my weight fluctuating by forty or more kilograms from one year to the next. What is different this time, is that after roughly twentytwo years of dieting, my New Year’s Resolution, or better, my gift to myself for the New Year is to allow myself to eat. No more dieting, no more guilty pleasures or clean meals, none of those right combinations of food groups, no bingeing, no indulging, no succumbing, no resisting, no restraining, no starving, no cheating. None of it. Just eating. Allowing myself to eat while being fat, allowing myself to get even fatter, is not just a change in eating habits. It is a conscious, political decision. In the past, no matter what my actual weight or where it fell in the BMI categories, my eating and exercise habits had served a particular purpose: if I was going to be fat, I had to prove a series of things, first to myself, and then to others. By eating right and exercising, I was absolving myself of my fat sins. Or at least I was trying to. Every correct meal and every hour of exercise served to sustain my claim that I was responsible. Maybe I was fat, but unlike other fat people, I took care of myself. My claim to being rational. Everyone knows that being fat is unhealthy, so it 2 I am paraphrasing Vivian Sobchack and her introduction of her chapter “A Leg to Stand On” in The Prosthetic Impulse (2006). 3 The Body Mass Index is the currently preferred medical tool of determining whether an individual is of normal weight, underweight, overweight, obese or morbidly obese.
would be against common logic to not fight it. My claim to being moral. Fat is bad If I wasn’t trying to get rid of it, I was complicit with it. My decision to stop dieting was a simultaneously a decision to stop subscribing to the negative assumptions that fat is imbued with. In this thesis, I explore these assumptions and the ways in which they are created, sustained and communicated. By doing this, I hope to contribute to the newly emerging field of Fat Studies. As an introduction to the field, I employ what I consider to be two of its most comprehensive works thus far. The first is The Fat Studies Reader (2009), edited by Sondra Solovay and Esther Rothblum, with and featuring a foreword by emblematic activist and fat scholar Marilyn Wann. The second is Charlotte Cooper’s article “Fat Studies: Mapping the Field” (2010). In The Fat Studies Reader,and according to Marilyn Wann, Fat Studies as a field is “defined in part by what it is not” (ix). While I disagree with some of Wann’s exclusions, I employ this definition because it incorporates something I consider important. This is the understanding that fatness itself is defined by what it is not, by what it fails or refuses to be or to do. Within Fat Studies literature, the terms ‘fat’ and ‘fatness’ are being reappropriated from their common uses as insults, into neutral terms, descriptive of a characteristic of the human body, just like ‘tall’, ‘short’ and ‘blond’ are. They are also employed as oppositional to the medical terms obese and obesity. Fat Studies scholars appreciate and welcome the contributions of people such as Jan Wright and Valerie Hardwood (2008), Paul Campos (2005) and J. Eric Oliver(2006), who have taken critical stances to analyse the current epidemiological obesity discourse. These critical approaches are centered on debunking commonly held medical ‘facts’ about ‘obesity’ and analyzing obesity as a social rather than medical issue. However, by insisting that we employ the terms obesity and obese such work errs on two levels. As Charlotte Cooper explains: The academic rigour supporting these studies is a recent development in the field, yet this approach could also be contested. Gard (2008) has criticised Campos for substituting ‘bad science’ with ‘good science’ without critiquing the use of science, and much of the discourse relies on an uncritically positivist stance regarding truth and facts. Moreover, the trend for professional and scholarly remoteness from the subject matter echoes the distance between the WHO report and Foresight, for example, and the fat subjects of their research. Although some of the authors above identify as fat, fat people
themselves are abstracted and largely absent from the discourse which often also fails to engage with the broader historical Fat Studies literature and activism that I will come to later. (1023) Fat Studies as a field recognizes the importance of fat activism, a movement which has its roots in the 1970s but, for Wann, had not found its way into academia until 2004. Wann locates the beginning of Fat Studies at the spring 2004 ‘Fat Attitudes: An Examination of an American Subculture and the Representation of the Female Body’ conference held in conjunction with an art show called ‘Fat Attitudes: A Celebration of Large Women’ at Columbia University Teachers College’ (xi). The importance of activism for Fat Studies ties in with the field’s explicit desire to “keep the actual lives of fat people at the heart of the analysis” (Solovay and Rothblum 2). However, when it comes to defining what fatness is and who exactly is fat, Fat Studies theorists seem slightly at loss. According to Charlotte Cooper, fat is “a fluid subject position relative to social norms, it relates to shared experience, is ambiguous, has roots in identity politics and is thus generally selfdefined” (“Fat Studies: Mapping the Field, 1020). Wann refrains from defining who does and who does not count as fat, choosing instead to describe how, “in a fathating society everyone is fat. Fat functions as a floating signifier, attaching to individuals based on a power relationship, not a physical measurement” (xiv). I find these two definitions have their own sets of holes and pitfalls, especially Cooper’s claim that fat is “generally selfdefined” (Cooper 1021). It is my opinion that fatness, as our society perceives it, is actually anything but selfdefined. If we acknowledge the negative connotations fatness has been imbued with, we need to turn to the mechanisms that produce those connotations to find out who is defining it. If we are to remove those from what it means to be fat, we need to nuance our appropriation of the term, and deepen our examination of what it means in its more widespread use. I find that fatness as a concept with all the connotations that accompany, it is more read and imposed on bodies than existing as a self defined state. From this perspective, I find Wann’s approach more useful, in seeing fat as a signifier that attaches itself to individuals, bringing with it a variety of assumptions, confessions and accusations. My aim here is to situate fatness between two fields of critical theory, biopolitics and posthumanism, demonstrating what it means to be fat as a signifier, an experience and everything in
between. I refer to a biopolitical framework in order to identify which social mechanisms enable some things to be perceived as indisputable facts of ‘common knowledge’, for instance, that fatness is inherently wrong and reprehensible. With this biopolitical analysis, I aim to illustrate the inherent assumptions within our society’s treatment of fatness, ultimately mapping how the fat subject is considered reprehensible because it is a failed economic, biopolitical subject. The case studies I have chosen are a fathating webcommunity and a ‘healthy living’ website. These will serve as examples of the kinds of places where this knowledge is produced, exchanged and put to use. I will begin by arguing that fatness has been intrinsically linked with notions such as selfneglect and poor selfmanagement. By extension, celebrated fatness then goes against the core thinking of neoliberal subjectivity, namely the principle of selfmanagement as an absolute imperative. An examination of these points leads to another cluster of notions: responsibility, rationality and morality. Morality will be my bridge into the field of posthumanism, where I will try to demonstrate how the biopolitical imperatives of responsibility, rationality and morality also apply. However, with the field’s fascination with prosthetics and enhancement, these imperatives are also enhanced. Where, by biopolitical standards, fat subjects have failed to responsibly, rationally and morally manage themselves, posthuman subjects find themselves guilty of not responsibly, rationally and morally manipulating themselves to optimal productivity.4 Using criticism that Disability Studies scholars such a Sarah S. Jain and Vivian Sobchack have on posthumanism, I will attempt to demonstrate the ways in which within posthumanism, all subjects can be found as lacking, when compared to their potential, enhanced posthuman version. After addressing and tracing what I consider to be problematic, biopolitical narratives within posthumanism, I attempt to reconceptualise the prosthetic metaphor into one that utilises current definitions while it incorporates the criticism it receives. Echoing Marilyn Wann’s definition of fatness as something that attaches itself to individuals, I attempt to conceptualise fatness as a prosthesis, naming this new concept the fat suit. In analysing those two objects, I will try to uncover the photographic negative of prosthesis, namely the cases in which fatness is read as a prosthesis on an imagined thin body. While prosthesis is usually employed as something that makes a nonfunctional body ‘whole’ and functioning, my analysis will try to demonstrate how a prosthesis can be viewed as something negative, something that makes the body less productive, less functional and thus, in biopolitical terms less moral, rational and responsible. I have chosen one object that depicts the 4 When referring to a neutral subject, I have chosen to use the pronouns theythemthemselves. This style of writing is yet not established within academia, but within activist circles it has been adopted in the attempt to recognise the
protagonist reading fatness as a prosthesis on someone else, and another that depicts a fat subject experiencing fatness as a prosthesis. In both the objects, fatness is seen as inherently wrong, and by extension, fatness as a prosthesis is seen as something entirely undesirable. However, what I will point out is that, if we decide to unsubscribe from the biopolitical imperatives that require subjects to behave rationally, responsibly and morally, fatness as a prosthesis can be seen as negative but not as undesirable. Instead, as the fat suit, prosthetic fatness can be read as a transgressive form embodiment in the Harawayan tradition of the cyborg being “about transgressed boundaries, potent fusions, and dangerous possibilities which progressive people might explore as one part of needed political work” (Simians, Cyborgs and Women 154). The analysis of my last object will thus serve as an example of such a liberating and transgressive function of the fat body. Ally Shyer’s online article “Fat Queer Tells All: On Fatness and Gender Flatness”(2013) will be the object through which I will examine the blurring capabilities of fat embodiment. Ultimately, the fat suit as a form of posthuman embodiment will attempt to combine Haraway’s boundarytransgressing cyborg and its prosthetic tropes into a new, critical tool of analysis that will achieve two things. First, to utilise the critical capabilities of the prosthetic trope without appropriating it or employing it as a mere metaphor. Finally, to point towards a direction where posthuman embodiment analysis can break free from biopolitical narratives of productivity.
2. Biopolitics and power
First things first. In order for me to even begin, I have to lay my groundwork, which is situated in a Foucauldian analysis of biopower. Later I will engage theorists such as Joanna Zylinska and Nikolas Rose, who have dealt with and expanded Foucault’s theory, but for the moment, I delineate the parts of Foucauldian theory that I use. In Society Must Be Defended, Foucault offers a comprehensive overview of the historical shift from sovereignty to liberal politics. In classical theories of sovereignty, part of the sovereign’s responsibility is to manage life and death. A citizen can obey the sovereign’s rules and live, or disobey them and die (240). This means that, “life and death are not natural or immediate phenomena which . . . fall outside the field of power” (240). This field of power, as it had been established, began to showsignificant signs of transformation during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The ways in which power had been executed multiplied and began to be directed toward the body. This began with disciplinary techniques directed toward individual bodies, later being directed toward manasspecies (243). Foucault calls these seventeenth and early eighteenth century politics “anatomopolitics” of the human body (243). By the end of the eighteenth century, when power was being directed toward manasspecies, these anatomopolitics of the human body had been reformulated into a biopolitics of the human race (243). 5 These shifts in practices of power occurred as the European system of political governance shifted from sovereignty to liberalism. In his later lectures at the College de France, Foucault published a book under the title The Birth of Biopolitics, which discusses the turn from classical liberalism to neoliberalism as the final step in this series of governmental shifts. Neoliberalism and its ideology will thus be the central framework of my analysis, particularly for examining how the application of economic models has been used in order to decipher social phenomena (The Birth of Biopolitics 240). With this framework, any kind of social interaction as well as any act of personal management can be explained by and reduced to economic mechanisms. The central socioeconomic mechanism that Foucault explores is the theory of human capital. He sketches human capital as the outcome of relations between capital, wage and income. Explaining Irving Fisher’s analysis of the relationship between capital and income, Foucault says that “capital is everything that in one way or another can be a source of future income”. On this basis, if we accept that wage is an income, then capital arises as “all those physical and physiological factors which make someone able to earn that wage” (The Birth of Biopolitics, 224). In this definition, the entirety of a subject’s existence becomes their capital: their physical and mental health, their social relations, their education, their entertainment. Every aspect of their life is reflected in their bodymachine and, thus, their capital. As Foucault further explains, ability is a central term: Ability to work, skill, the ability to do something cannot be separated from the person who is skilled and who can do this particular thing. In other words, the worker’s skill really is a machine, but a machine which cannot be separated from the worker himself, which does not exactly mean, as economic, sociological, or psychological criticism said
traditionally, that capitalism transforms the worker into a machine and alienates him as a result (The Birth of Biopolitics 224). What this means for the neoliberal subject is that they now must arise as a homo economicus. While in its classical form the term meant “the man of exchange, the partner, one of the two partners in the process of exchange” (225), in neoliberal ideology, the homo economicus becomes an “entrepreneur of himself, being for himself his own capital, being for himself his own producer, being for himself the source of [his] earnings” (226). This homo economicus must then manage their only source of income, the machine that is their working body, which cannot, as we saw, be separated from the subject themselves. Your ability is your machine is your management is yourself is your ability. I examine this set of abilities and the ways in which the fat subject is seen as failing with my first case study, an image taken from a website called HFR : The HealthFitness Revolution. I have 6 7
chosen this website as a representative for the many dedicated to the ongoing ‘War Against Obesity’ initiative in the United States. These websites vary in tone but agree in message: fat is extremely bad for you, your children, the people around you, the society of which you are a part. The tone itself may be ominous, such as in the grim webpage called The Weight of the Nation: Confronting America’s
Obesity Epidemic, a series of documentaries dedicated to raising awareness on the issue. The 8
homepage features the name of the documentary in bold, red letters. The tone may be cheerful, such as the WOOT: War On Obesity Today website, where the user is greeted by images of people happily working out and mottos encouraging fitness, all surrounded by colourful drawings of fruits and vegetables. 9 The tone of the HFR website is a combination of both, which is why I have chosen it as an the one representing the general middleoftheroad discourse packaged as common knowledge about fatness. While The Weight of the Nation can be described as polemic and needs to be analysed specifically as such, and the WOOT is – at least to me – paralyzing in its frantic cheerfulness, the HFR has the calm, measured tone of an authority with its facts straight, not needing to resort to hysterics or war language. The HFR does not have any fights to fight, it does not need to be intense in its 10 argument. The HFR simply offers facts accessible to any rational being. I will be using my analysis of the website as a case study in order to discuss the places where dominant discourses around fatness are 6 http://healthfitnessrevolution.com/ 7 In my opinion, just the phrasing of the initiative as a ‘revolution’ screams for attention, but, alas, this is another aspect of the topic with which this thesis will not deal.
established and made easily accessible to the public. The way the website addresses its visitors, the nature and the presentation of information are all important ingredients in the stew of assumptions surrounding fatness. By breaking down these assumptions and tracing them back to their ideological nutrients , I hope to shed some light on the whys and hows of fatness and the creation of it as 11 something inherently undesirable. Later, I turn to the forum of an online community and discuss its members’ submissions regarding fat people in order to show the ways in which this information is received, incorporated and exercised as critique in public opinion. What is first presented to you on the homepage of the HFR is a series of rotating images that function as links to articles promoting fitness, physical activity and healthy nutrition habits. Articles with titles like, “You Are What Your Father Eats”, “Healthy VS Unhealthy Diet”, “How to Live to 100”, “Best Foods to Fight Fatigue”, “Best Foods for Alzheimer’s Disease”, “The Benefits of Biking” follow each other in a succession which, for all stated purposes, is not explicitly about or against fatness. These articles are focused on passing down the wisdom of wellbeing, the recipes for longevity, strength, fitness and even mental health. If anything, dieting and nutrition are apropos to the sacred mission of healthy living. This leads to another point I feel the need to address. As I analyse later, a large part of the typical, kneejerk resistance that happens when someone is accused of using fatphobic narratives is the guise that their critique is not directly about the actual fatness of a person, but is about health and general wellbeing. In what the internetbased fat activist community calls ‘concern trolling’, people use the old ‘I am not xphobic, BUT‘ structure to then explain a million ways in which fat is bad for you. Utilizing this stance, the HFR offers a variety of articles on what is actually good for you before subtly shifting the focus once a visitor moves a bit further into the site. I cannot help but notice the intrinsic irreducibility of an imperative such as what is ‘good for you’. None of the websites seem to be aware of any possibilities that can be ‘good for you’ other than not being fat. Foucault discusses irreducible choices as intrinsic parts of the homo economicus ideology by referencing David Hume’s famous aphorism, “If I am given the choice between cutting my little finger and the death of someone else, even if I am forced to cut my little finger, nothing can force me to think that cutting my little finger is preferable to the death of someone else.” (Hume, qtd in The Birth of Biopolitics 272).Foucault goes on to explain that “these are irreducible choices which are nontransferable in relation to the subject. This principle of an irreducible, nontransferable, atomistic 10 This is a humorous usage of the term hysterics. Please don’t eat me, fellow feminists. 11 I promise to try and limit my food and weight related puns to a minimum, but I cannot promise that I will be very
individual choice which is unconditionally referred to the subject himself is what is called interest” (272). Ultimately, all neoliberal claims to the homo economicus as a rational subject are intrinsically linked with the notion of interest. Within neoliberal ideology, economic models are applied to social ones, but in order for this application to function, the homo economicus must Accept reality. Rational conduct is any conduct which is sensitive to modifications in the variables of the environment and which responds to this in a nonrandom way, in a systematic way, and economics can therefore be defined as the science of the systematic nature of responses to environmental variables (269). The subject that the website addresses, the rational subject that is aware of their own interests and the means to secure them, is one that accepts the irreducible reality that longevity is better than death and a fully functioning memory is better than one afflicted by Alzheimer’s disease. Respectively, someone who is reproducing fathating narratives does not feel the need to address any fault on their side simply because the strength of their argument seems irreducible in its reality. If fatness is bad for your best interests as a person, it is intrinsically, irreducibly bad. Τhis irreducibility needs to be justified. Accepting it as a fact without demanding proof would be irrational and thus unacceptable. The truth of this badness is strengthened in various parts of the website. For instance, in statistics offering insight into the various health costs of fatness both for the individual bearing it – in terms of ill health – and for the work force and the state itself – claiming, in terms of economic and insurance related burdens. In those statistics, various problems connected with fatness are brought to the reader, bringing them to the seemingly irrevocable conclusion that fat people die early. Fat people have a high risk of developing heart disease. Fat people are not capable of enjoying life to its full extent. Fat people are jeopardizing the future of the country by putting youth at risk. The obese workforce costs American businesses several billions dollars each year. In a nutshell, fat people are counterproductive, for themselves and for society. In Foucauldian terms, a fat person has failed at their core obligation as a neoliberal citizen as they have not successfully regulated themselves. We are thus carried to the next tension point between the rational subject of society and the fat individual. Examining Jean Condorcet’s text Esquisse d’un tableau historique des progrès de l’espirit humain (1793), Foucault explains that, between economical subjects, the interest of the
individual is intrinsically linked to that of others (The Birth of Biopolitics 277). Again, the hierarchical prioritization of information on the website is significant. The ‘hard facts’ are not the first things that the visitor encounters. These are facts that are presented as nothing more than a reminder to the already informed visitor. The website is thus treating its visitor not as a patient or student, but as an equal in conversation. The same pattern applies to the article that I have chosen to focus on titled “Tips for Overcoming Weight Loss Plateau”. The article delivers advice on how to successfully continue one’s diet, the key word here being continue. This article targets people who are already dieting. Sound, rational homines economici. If the application of economic to social models is to work, its subject must be a rational homo economicus. The visitor of this article is thus not addressed with even the potential of being a fat subject, but instead as an already properly functioning individual, dedicated to maintaining their good health, and by extension, their capital. I would like to dig a bit further into what this assumption, that the visitor is an already wellfunctioning homo economicus, reveals about the mechanisms that produce the knowledge (and thus rationality) allotted to this subject as their primary mode of operation.
3. Homo Economicus: Rationality, Responsibility, Morality
The image accompanying the article (Figure 1) depicts two men standing next to each other, one of them muscular, holding gym weights and an apple, and the other overweight, holding a hamburger and a package of fries. Now comes the interesting part. Both of the men’s abdomens are hollow, and inside their bellies you can see a machine and a construction crew. The muscular man’s machine is madeof shiny silver. His construction crew is comprised of two welldressed men consulting a diagram and a worker, clad in a white uniform, propped upon a stair, tinkering with some cogs in the center. The machine in the fat man’s abdomen, on the other hand, is rusty and appears dirty and neglected. The working crew is comprised of four men not in uniform, their attire dirty and worn. 12
Figure 1 The metaphors in this image are saying that if you eat well and exercise, your body will function like a welloiled machine. By making the ‘right’ choices, you supply your body with the ‘right’ crew that will make effective, well thoughtout, rational decisions in the maintenance of your bodymachine, keeping it in the best possible condition. The key word is maintain. As depicted in the image, the machine already appears to perfectly function, needing only minimal tinkering from the worker. If, by juxtaposition, you make the wrong choices, your bodymachine will be neglected, rusty and lowfunctioning. The workers in your body will operate under no instructions from a knowledgeable, rational authority. Instead of maintaining an already functioning machine, these workers scatter over its length, appearing more like they are trying to salvage it from total destruction. In what seems an almost too literal a representation of the Foucauldian subjectmachine, the successful homo economicus, represented by the thin man, demonstrates the correct management of his capital. His machine, his ability to work, which “cannot be separated from the worker himself” (The Birth of Biopolitics 224), is given proper care in order to ensure that the human capital in question will be at a maximum. The fit man of the image also serves to represent their imagined visitor and target audience, the economic subject who has taken this valuable knowledge and has accordingly responded “in a nonrandom way, in a systematic way” (Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics 269). 12 While I promised to treat fatness as a genderneutral issue for the purposes of this paper, I cannot resist simply pointing out that the image is gendered in an almost suspiciously intentional way: not only are the central figures of the image male, but so are their machines’ working crews!
Again, rationality is a central notion in the selfmanagement of the homo economicus. The ability to adjust and respond to the information provided ensures that the homo economicus’ enterprise is under the best possible regulation. As Thomas Lemke explains in "The Birth of Biopolitics: Michel Foucault's Lecture at the Collège De France on Neoliberal Governmentality”, Neoliberal subjects subsequently arise as utterly culpable for their own governance, in their responsibility towards optimally manipulating, restraining, educating, and entertaining themselves. Awarded with ‘absolute’ liberty regarding the maintenance of themselves, neoliberal subjects must now prove worthy of this gift, by demonstrating their best possible behaviour in their management of their lives. According to Foucault, this neoliberal homo economicus ‘becomes a behavioristically manipulable being and the correlative of a governmentality which systematically changes the variables of the ‘environment’ and can count on the ‘rational choice’ of the individuals (13) Governmentality, then, according to Foucault, is the conduct of conducts, a definition that can extend to governing both others as well as ones’self. Furthermore, as Călin Cotoi points out in "Neoliberalism: A Foucauldian Perspective", this definition is “about the emergence of specific ‘regimes of truth’, exploring the ways in which various modalities of speaking the truth are formed, authorised truth speaking persons designated, and areas in which, about whom and from where, statements, discourses and practices rooted in truth are generated” (3). Thus, the neoliberal homo economicus is left to operate in a field of seemingly endless freedom, unaware of the fact that all of their supposedly informed and rational manoeuvres are the direct results of a specifically framed ‘regime of truth’ where ‘truth’ is formed and authorized in particular manners. The websites I analyse are examples of the kinds of places where that ‘truth’ is generated and distributed. The websites themselves base their arguments on specific biomedical narratives about fatness. They also function as a bridge between scientific discourse and the public under the promotion of the state. However, it is not the responsibility of any state to enforce rational conduct on its citizens, it is only there to provide them with the knowledge needed for them to conduct themselves in the rational way they are supposed to. This ‘rational conduct’ expected of neoliberal citizens is, according to
Foucault, “any conduct which is sensitive to modifications in variables of the environment and which responds to this in a nonrandom way, in a systematic way, and economics can there be defined as the science of the systematic nature of responses to environmental variables” (The Birth of Biopolitics 269). Paired with the statistics offered on the HFR, the image of the fat man in the picture delivers a powerful message: the body is a machine for which the subject is responsible. Faced with the freedom of choosing between apples and fries, working out and burgers, the subject finds two separate roads stretching ahead. The first is a road of rationality and responsibility, the one that will guarantee optimal results for the bodymachine, results which will be reflected both on the inside (the shiny machine itself) and on the outside (the muscular body which is directly proportionate to the condition of the machine). By choosing the second road, the antithesis of the first, subjects fail in a number of ways. They fail to be rational, the workers in the fat body working without a plan, uninformed by scientific methods. They fail to be productive, the machine appearing to barely function, rusty and old. And they fail in public space, the state of the machine and the counterproductivity of the workers reflected in the fatness of the body surrounding the machine. The image of the fat man functions as a cautionary tale for the website’s visitor: This is what will happen to your machine, your capital, if you neglect your economic responsibilities as a neoliberal subject. Nevertheless, it would be incomplete to identify the website’s visitors entirely with the image of the fit man and to position the fat man as only a cautionary figure. If that were the case, the website itself would be redundant. In a more nuanced metaphor, I think it would be possible to claim that there are three planes of existence within which the visitor, the fit man and the fat man reside. Drawing from religious imagery, I would say that on the left side of the image lies Heaven, productive, welladjusted, rational, wellfunctioning neoliberal Heaven. Even the colours of the left side of the image, the cloudy whiteness, the shiny machinery seem to suggest so. On the right side lies Hell. Dumpy, grey, rusty, malfunctioning Hell. And right in the middle, right where the visitor is unconsciously positioned, lies Purgatory. The visitor is most likely not as shiny, muscular or fit as the man on the left. However, based on the tone and the content of the article, the visitor is also not assumed to be the lost cause that is the man on the right. Instead, the visitor is trapped in Purgatory, standing in the middle of the road, repenting for old sins, and thus their inability to enter Heaven. But not having yet committed the
penultimate crime of forbearing selfmanagement, and so safely not quite in Hell. What will the visitor choose? Two paths stretch out before them, each signaled by an outstretched hand. On the left, a shiny, nutritious apple. On the right, a gritty, unhealthy hamburger. The religious undertones of this message inevitably bring us to the question of who might be the ‘priest’ of this ‘religion’ as well as what this ‘religion’ actually entails. In the following parts I will utilise Nikolas Rose’s theory on pastoral power in order to explore the first part of the question, and Jan Domaradzki’s approach to medicine as a secular religion in order to explore the second.
4. Pastoral Power and Homo Economicus
In The Politics of Life Itself (2007), Nicholas Rose speaks of a new kind of emergent power which he calls pastoral. Pastoral power is not organized or administered by ‘the state, . . . It takes place in a plural and contested field traversed by the codes pronounced by ethics committees and professional associations, by the empirical findings generated by researchers, the attitudes and criteria used by employers and insurers, the tests developed and promoted by psychologists and biotech companies, the advice offered by selfhelp organizations, and even, one might add, the critical perspectives contributed by religious organizations and sociological critics. (The Politics of Life Itself 73) When trying to identify which organising field of pastoral power the website uses, my first reaction was to identify it as a ‘selfhelp’ organization. The website does not posit itself explicitly as such. It is not a help manual, it is a ‘revolution’. I believe that my perception has to do with the tone of the website, a subtext which posits the website as there to help you help yourself. What is, however important about pastoral power and its practice is that it is not unidirectional, it is relational. Using reproduction as an example Rose describes how
It works through the relation between the affects and ethics of the guider—the genetic counsellors and allied experts of reproduction who operate as gatekeepers to tests and medical procedures—and the affects and ethics of the guided—the actual or potential parents who are making their reproductive decisions, and their networks of responsibility and obligation (74). Thus, the decision in the website’s part to position its visitor as an already properly functioning, rational individual, can be interpreted as a strategic move in the practice of pastoral power. The website is not there to lecture, it is there to have a friendly conversation between equals. Pastoral power enables the creation of a series of microtechnologies which, unlike the traditional pastoral model, do not require a knowledgeable lecturer and a submissive receiver, but instead place the participants in an equal level, thus blurring “ . . . the boundaries of coercion and consent. They transform the subjectivities of those who are to give consent or refuse it” (74) and teach “new ways of rendering aspects of oneself into thought and language, new ways of making oneself and one’s actions amenable to judgment” (74). As pastoral power is bidirectional we cannot speak of one of its ends without taking into account the other. However, I would argue that in the example of the HFR website, the perceived ‘pastor’ of the interaction is more in focus. While,in the way the website is designed, I could extract a number of observations about the visitor, the visitor did not have a direct voice in the discussion. For that reason, I decided to bring in my second object, an online community called Reddit. Using this community I will explore what happens when the authority on the matter shifts from a perceived ‘expert’ to the ‘general public’ and explore the different kind of divisions that this shift creates. Reddit is an online forum platform comprised of hundreds of forums, called ‘subreddits’, all of which have been created and are moderated by users. The material in the subreddits is also usergenerated and users can post links to articles, images and videos, or submit an original text of their own writing. Every subreddit has its own theme, its own rules, its own etiquette, and often its own Wiki page. It is usually in the sidebar of the page where one can find the rules and the Wiki page, as well as links to previous, archived posts that could prove to be useful for a new user. The subreddits that I will use form a constellation, all of which are explicitly dedicated to fat hatred, from slightly different angles. Users can choose to share stories of how ridiculous fat people are
in fatpeoplestories, they can share examples of fat people’s lack of rationality in fatlogic, or, if they just want to let it all out, head for fatpeoplehate. Some would argue that Reddit is a particularly harsh place, and that the explicit hatred expressed in those subreddits is not indicative of the rest of society. I would instead argue that Reddit is nowhere near the harshest place of the internet. Places such as
4chan and Stormfront take the proverbial cake and eat it before Reddit has even had time to lift its 13 14
fork. I would instead argue that Reddit, as a democratically functioning platform where anyone can express anything, simply allows its users to be more explicit about the assumptions under which they operate in everyday life. As a fat person, the only difference that I have seen in the attitude of Reddit users from the ones in my everyday life, is the opacity with which the assumptions are put to use. Where in everyday life, they function in a polite subtext, in the anonymity of Reddit they are brought to the surface in all their explicitness. On the sidebar of fatpeoplestories one can find the rules of what constitutes a good ‘fat people story’. This is the first place where I detected an interesting dichotomy, ‘hamplanets VS fat people’. According to the sidebar: “This sub is a place for you to tell us about hamplanets in your life and your relationships/encounters with them. Remember that hamplanet is not just about the weight, but also the hamentality rudeness, entitlement, fatlogic, etc. Not all fat people are hambeasts but all hambeasts are fat people”. The issue is further explored by the users of the subreddit. In a submission appropriately titled “Hamplanets VS Fat People” (2013), user KangK brings up a quote by Roald Dahl, one that you would not normally expect to come by in a place dedicated to fat hatred. The user’s submission reads: ‘If a person has ugly thoughts, it begins to show on their face. And when that person has ugly thoughts every day, every week, every year, the face gets uglier and uglier until you can hardly bear to look at it. A person who has good thoughts can never be ugly. You can have a wonky nose and a crooked mouth and a double chin and stick out teeth, but if you have good thoughts it will shine out of your face like sunbeams and you will always look lovely’. Roald Dahl, The Twits, 1979. I feel like this quote is relevant when we distinguish between fat people and hamplanets. After all, so long as the fat person doesn’t have absurd logic or a ridiculous sense of entitlement, we don’t consider than [sic] hamplanets, do we? They are not the people that we are criticising.
(KangK, “Hamplanets VS Fat People”) User MCprofK replies: “I love this subreddit, but I must be honest that some things that it stands for aren’t entirely clear from the start. Now, I won’t try to speak for the entire sub, but this is my opinion. Fat people are disgusting. But this is the thing... To me, to be truly a ‘fat person’ you have to have the fat mentality, or simply not realize it at all, and accept none of the guilt”. Let me make the distinction between ‘hamplanets’ and fat people more clear, in case some of my readers are fat and thus suffering from subpar reasoning capabilities.15 According to this approach, on the one hand, we have fat people and fat people are deemed disgusting. However, there exists a 16 hierarchy in their horridity: to be a true embodiment of disgust, a ‘hamplanet’, one needs to also be selfentitled, rude, and afflicted by fatlogic. Fatlogic’s standing definition in the UrbanDictionary is The astounding mental gyrations obese people use to justify their size. Fatlogic never, ever includes eating too much and exercising too little. Fatlogic insists that five triple cheeseburgers doused with mayonnaise are balanced by a diet soft drink. “I’m not fat, I’m just largeboned.” “I have a condition, I gain weight for no reason at all.” said when finishing the fourth bag of cookies before noon. 17 Where in everyday life, fat people are concernedly reprimanded for their choices regarding their health and the management of themselves, here, in the warm safety of the internet, the advisory tone is crystallised in an underlying question: Where is your logic? Where the pastoral power exercised by the websites, the specialists, the dieticians, the doctors, the diet bloggers has made the dangers of fatness entirely clear, ‘hamplanets’ must be operating under a completely different set of rules, a warped and greasy logic that prevents them from seeing things clearly. From utilizing the information supplied in order to rationally manage themselves, in order to adjust, adapt and manipulate themselves, ensuring the worth of their capital, enjoying the benefits of selfregulation, and by extension offer those benefits to the 15 I am allowed to make this kind of jokes because I am myself fat. 16 I am reluctantly using the word disgust here, as this is the one employed by the user in the original submission. I of course understand that such a term opens up a whole new layer of analysis regarding fatness and the way it is treated, a layer which, like many others I will have to put aside for the time being.
rest of the society. Here, I would like to point out how claiming that there exist some kind of inherent, horrible qualities that fat people share, qualities that function as the reasons for any hatred expressed towards fatness, again echoes the fat person’s failure at properly regulating themselves, this time as a social being, while allowing the hater18 to relinquish all responsibility for their attitude: if only fat people could have been polite, timid, quiet, and most of all aware of the sadness of their situation, people would like them. Like the website of my first analysis, the users of the site would have us believe that the focus is not even fatness itself. It is on all the repercussions that come with being fat. On the websites, the repercussions were framed in terms of health. Here, they are framed in terms of just being plain horrible. Interestingly though, the distinction between ‘hamplanets’ and fat people does not enjoy a unanimous support. The highest upvoted comment in the submission reads: 19 To me anyone who lets go of themselves to become obese has a problem, regardless of how pleasant they are. I can’t hold them to equal esteem as I would other people, the same way I wouldn’t hold someone who doesn’t bathe and shave very highly. Taking care of yourself is a good indicator of how you deal with other situations, people who don’t care about themselves are less likely to care about other standards. Following this logic, by allowing themselves to get fat, a person demonstrates how little they value the gift of freedom and selfregulation that neoliberalism has given us. By allowing their body to get fat, fat people have demonstrated their failure at rationally governing themselves and should subsequently be ready to relinquish any claims to being respected, as they have already committed the ultimate act of disrespect towards themselves. It may prove useful to point out the parallels between the websites and the subreddits. The tone is fundamentally different; where HFR aims to educate and thus encourage and stimulate, the subforums ridicule and condemn. Where the websites offer statistics and advice, the subforums offer anecdotes and a space for collective expression of hatred. However, no matter how different these two examples appear at first sight, they only function as direct mirror images of each other. If it weren’t for the disapproval imbued in the public opinion, the websites would not be able to afford their benevolently 17 Galanity. “Fatlogic”. Urban Dictionary. July 21st 2013. Web. May 24th 2014. 18 I could not resist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ialFmVoKtX8. 19 Depending on whether a user agrees or disagrees with a comment they can either upvote or downvote it by
patronizing tone. On the other hand, if it weren’t for the websites, the Reddit community would be deprived of two important elements of their argument: first, the basic assumption itself that fatness is indeed something that should be fought, regulated and frowned upon. Secondly, and most importantly, the assurance that this knowledge is publicly available to fat people themselves. Again, anyone who, faced with that amount of ‘scientific’ evidence, continues to be fat, can only fall within the two categories available for fat people. There is the category of the careless, lacking in selfrespect ‘fatties’ who, despite their better knowledge, continue to criminally abuse their ‘freedom’ to optimally manage their bodies, resulting in their complete entrepreneurial failure. The ‘fatties’ belonging in this category form the pinnacle of the failed entrepreneur, as they fail to responsibly respond to the key element of governmentality, the ability to adjust and conform to circumstances and data. Then there exists another category, that of the irrational ‘fatties’: if, as they should, they have become educated on the perils and burdens of their situation, instead of conforming, they choose to dispute it, then they are obviously guilty of fatlogic. In the prism of the successful entrepreneur, these ‘fatties’ represent an even more basic level of failure: the failure to utilize their rationality, in their mission to successfully manage themselves. This is another area where pastoral power comes into play. In its relationality pastoral power is exercised not just by the knowledgeproducing institutions, but from the ‘followers’ themselves. The ethical failures of fatness are only implied on the website. In the subreddit, however, they are violently brought into play. That is because pastoral power “. . . mobilizes affects of shame and guilt, and of the respective claims, scope, and limits of freedoms for the self and obligations to others” (Rose 74). The perceived visitor of the HFR has now moved into a completely different level of hierarchies. In the HFR and within pastoral power, the visitor is equal to the anonymous institution of knowledge production that the HFR represents. However, again within pastoral power, the HFR is slightly more equal than the visitor. The visitor is not directly guilty of something, but is potentially guilty enough to be placed in Purgatory. In fatpeoplehate, the subscribers are given a direct voice in their equal interaction with the knowledge institution. This time, however, they are not the ones being addressed, and thus being put in direct comparison with the Heavenly neoliberal ideal. They have taken it upon themselves to exercise their end of pastoral power onto the inhabitants of Hell. The characteristics of these inhabitants, as sketched by the users of the subreddit, are centered around the notion of guilt. They are guilty of abusing their neoliberal right to choose. They are guilty of neglecting to exercise their neoliberal
obligation towards reason. And, finally, they are guilty of not being aware of their crimes, of not feeling guilty enough. I believe this last type of guilt binds the other two together. The examples of fatlogic on the UrbanDictionary, where fat people describe a condition or being bigboned as the reason for them being fat signal the disapproval directed towards those who don’t properly put their logic into use in order to properly utilise their right to choose. This combination is additionally imbued with moral meaning: if the fat subjects were logical enough, and responsibly reacted to the information provided, they would have no other choice but to feel guilty about their thus far failure to successfully adapt to it. By supplying themselves with excuses instead of admitting to the rational, condemning justifications of their fatness, they are circumventing their moral obligation towards maintaining good health. This particular association between guilt imbued with a religious type morality and the aspiration of good health is another area where I would like to go into, again with fat subjects as my main focus. For this reason, I will go into Jan Domaradzki’s analysis of medicine as a secular religion, and the moral implications that accompany such a shift.
5. Health as a Moral Obligation
So far, in my attempt to break down the elements that comprise the fat hating discourse, I have focused more on the arguments around the lack of rationality and the lack of responsibility of which fat subjects are accused. However, as I believe has become evident, there is another inherent characteristic with which fat subjects are imbued, one which appears to be equally strong in the criticism it evokes. This element is a certain lack of moral values of which fat subjects are often accused. So far, I have used the word “guilty” numerous times. When user MCprofK says “To me anyone who lets go of themselves to become obese has a problem, regardless of how pleasant they are. I can’t hold them to equal esteem as I would other people . . . ”, he signals that this “letting go” is heavily imbued with moral meaning. I have already touched upon the relationship between the position of pastoral power that the HFR represents and its perceived viewer on one hand, and the way that this relationship is internalized and transferred into the relationship between the fatpeoplehate subscribers and the fat subjects of their stories. My approach thus far has focused on the way that someone internalizes the medical,
healthrelated information from the website and comes to criticize the fat subject in their failure to rationally and responsibly respond to it. Now, I want to focus on the kind of criticism that stems from the fact that the fat subject demonstrates a failure to morally correspond to that information. Following my biblical reading of the HeavenPurgatoryHell positioning of the viewer within the HFR article’s image, I would like to claim that accusations of lacking in morality directed towards fat subjects are echoing religious anathemas in their subtext. The religiosity of it all, however, no longer comes from a churchoriented mentality but from a health/medicine one. In his article “Extra Medicinam Nulla Salus. Medicine as a Secular Religion”,20 Jan Domaradzki explains how, in the modern world, religion does not disappear, but instead transforms itself. These transformations not linea or definitive: “In the modern world, churchoriented religiosity becomes only one of the options. Hence, when modernisation weakens religion, it also enables new forms of its manifestation” (Domaradzki 22). Sports events, secular ideologies and rock concerts among others seem to function as means for the subject of the modern world to express their desires and faiths. However, as Domaradzki explains, medicine seems to be the main reformulation of the modern subject’s religious needs. Although medicine presents itself as “rational, ie scientific, objective and neutral, its organisation and functioning are typical of religion . . . It is present in people’s life from the womb to the tomb, provides a response to the same fears and angsts of humanity as the Church, and the pursuit of ‘eternal’ health, youth and beauty has substituted the religious zeal for salvation” (23). In addition to that, the rising popularity of trends such as ‘healthism’ exemplify the fact that “an increasing number of individuals tend to justify their behaviours not so much by reference to traditional morality based on the notions of ‘faith’, ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ but (good) ‘health’. In consequence, [there appears a] constant proliferation of ideology of healthism” (24). I find 21 that is this sentiment that is echoed in user MCprofK’s declaration that anyone who has let themselves become obese has a problem. Thus, homo religiosus is transformed into homo medicus (Means, qtd in Domaradzki 25). Domaradzki further expands on the way “health has become a basis of individual and social identity (‘we’—the Healthy) and distinction (‘they’—the Ill). It helps to manifest a shared system of values and lifestyle and thus strengthen collective group identity, integrity and sense of worth” (Domaradzki 26). I believe this transformation sheds further light on the way pastoral power is exercised from the HFR website I am using as an example, to its perceived viewer and then to the frequenters of the 20 In a footnote, Domaradzki explains: “Although the original Latin phrase used in the title: Extra ecclesiam nulla salus, which means outside the church there is no salvation refers to Christian teaching on soteriology and eschatology, the word ‘salus’ itself also means ‘health’ ” (21).
fatpeoplehate community. United under their moral superiority, the members of the fatpeoplehate community feel the need to stigmatize those excluded from it. Following Susan Sontag’s line of thought, Domaradzki underlines that even though “the stigma attached to many diseases has been secularised, disease’s moral metaphor of evil exists. Still, it is associated with a moral weakness of character and becomes a source of blame and stigma” (29). What is even more interesting and possibly singular in the case of fatness, is that fatness is perceived as a conscious decision of the subject to be unhealthy. Or, if not so much a decision, a reprehensible lack of decision – the decision to be healthy. The ‘letting go’ of user MCprofK reflects back to this sentiment. While I attempted to form a distinction between the failures of which a fat subject is guilty, at this point I can only acknowledge their intimate interconnectedness. In the cases of failure towards rationality and failure towards morality and when health is adopted as a religious initiative, the connection becomes clearer: science, and by extension the medical institutions, have laid out the dogma, the word of the Lord. The only rational and moral reaction for a subject would be to at least try and comply with it. Partial failure is, I believe, excused: as Petr Skrabanek explains, in modern medicine, health “is rather an unrealistic ideal, a superhealth ” (Death of Humane Medicine and the Rise of Coercive Healthism 42), something which is also illustrated by the way the HFR’s perceived viewer is safe from the Hell of IllHealth, but not granted access into the Heaven of Fitness. What is nevertheless inexcusable, even more than the failure to be healthy, is the absence of guilt over said failure. Returning to what user KangK has to say, “To me, to be truly a ‘fat person’ you have to have the fat mentality, or simply not realize it at all, and accept none of the guilt”. In addition to that, any attempt to question the dogma of medical, healthrelated discourse “meets with an anathema and excommunication” (Domaradzki 28). A large part of the fatpeoplehate community is dedicated to ridiculing fat activists. In another interesting intersection of the homo economicus with the homo medicus, fat activists are ridiculed both on a level of morality but also on the level of their rationality: most of the posts targeting fat activists are framed as rageinducing examples of fatlogic. So far, I have discussed the failures of the fat subject in the realm of the present, and the real. My biopolitical analysis has hopefully demonstrated how fat subjects fail in managing their body when compare to the way they should be. The moral failure of fat subjects lies in the refusal to rationally manage the information provided to them, and responsibly respond. Where Domaradzki positions the 21Domaradzki explains: “Not surprisingly, the new moral code appeals to the same virtues Catholicism does and both are theological: there is faith in the healing force of medicine, hope for a cure and love toward medical nel; and there is human prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance which are the basis for the imperative of control. Together they form the ethos of healthism (Borowiec and Lignowska 2012; Crawford 1980;
moral connotations of neglecting one’s health in a postchurch, religious level, I would like to venture into examining an even further layer of moral judgement, that not only judges who participates in a communion, and who is excluded from it, but who even counts as a person, and is worthy of the ethical privileges that come with this identity. For this reason, I will go into the field of bioethics, and examine what how the moral failure of one’s health connects not only to the core of being a homo economicus, but to the core of being human. Departing from that, I will take my analysis into posthumanism, a field that has taken up the task to completely transgress the boundaries between human/non human categories, along with their hierarchical characteristics. However, as I will try to demonstrate, even if, within posthumanism subjects need to be a human in order to be worthy of ethical respects, it appears that they still have to be homines economici.
