Conceptions of the body in obesity epidemic discourses

"Competing explanations of the obesity epidemic identify either individual or systemic causes, blaming the failure of fat people themselves or larger societal problems as the cause of increasing rates of obesity. Yet, despite important political differences between these frames, both characterize the fat body similarly and use the fat body to symbolize the same things: loss of control, lack of moral fortitude, and irrationality. This thesis traces the cultural roots of the denigration of the fat body, and analyses the meaning of the fat body in contemporary critiques of industrialized food production, finding that food activist literature, a variant of the systemic frame, is as reliant on the stigmatization of fat and the fundamental distrust and rejection of the body in general as is the individualizing frame. Both these frames, and the very concept of an ""obesity epidemic"", emerge from and continue the long tradition of somatophobia in Western culture.