This presentation focuses on the rhetorical use of medical in(ter)ventions, specifically looking at how medical discourse labels healthy bodies in terms of size. For example, in 1998 the Body Mass Index (BMI) cutoff for being “obese” was moved from 27 to 25; as Tina Ranieri explains, “more than 30 million people became obese overnight without gaining one single pound. And it happened while they were sleeping.” In 2013 the American Medical Association voted to classify obesity as a disease. In both of these instances, a part of people’s identity changed literally overnight-- In a society that often shames people for their body size, suddenly “becoming” part of that category can be an unsettling experience. This presentation will discuss on how people become bodies through medical discourse, and how current health communication pushes these bodies into categories that are laden with negative cultural meaning by looking at social media responses to mainstream health communication, such as the #IAmNotADisease hashtag on twitter. This presentation further argues that the technologies that dictate health (scales, units of measurement, the BMI) need to address the larger systemic issues around concepts of “health” such as socioeconomic status and access instead of promoting shame as a tactic.
| manthey_fat_vs_obese_cw15.pdf |
