Conference Programme, Abstracts & Papers

Session 9B - Social Perspectives on Different Bodies
Chair: Elizabeth Toon

The Obesity Debate: A Story of Sloth and Gluttony with a Moral Ending…
Sofie Vandamme
Eu-project 'Eurobese','Ethics and Obesity and Overweight Epidemic: Image, Culture, Technologies and Interventions', ErasmusMC and Faculty of Medicine and Health Care, Department of Medical Ethics and Philosophy, Rotterdam, The Netherlands

Overweight and obesity are according to the WHO a major threat for health in our century. Worldwide. Therefore many EU and non-EU countries have implemented or are considering interventions aimed at preventing overweight and obesity by influencing the lifestyle of citizens. Such interventions are not morally neutral. They may cut deep in the individual persons life because they involve essential cultural views and values regarding food and eating, appearance and image, the impact of biological or socio-cultural technologies and freedom.
Therefore, the problem of obesity has to be analysed in the light of cultural norms and values regarding the image of obesity and overweight, food and eating, physical exercise, and individual lifestyle. What does it mean for a person in a certain society to be overweight? What is the image of obesity and overweight? What are the similarities and differences between the image of women and men? What does it mean to fundamentally change one's lifestyle? Without deeper understanding of those notions, interventions cannot be ethically evaluated.
In this presentation, I will focus on the cultural values, norms and traditions regarding the image on obesity.
I will explore the obesity debate from two opposite points of view.
On the one hand, there is the anti-obesity camp, proclaiming obesity is a danger for public health. Relying on medical argumentations, obesity is depicted as an epidemic. 
On the other hand, there are the so-called 'fat-activists', a movement of  'fat' people seeking recognition for being fat. They see fatness as an expression of bodily diversity. 
Through an analysis of the discourses of both perspectives on obesity, I will explain how notions as 'disease', 'individual freedom and identity', 'beauty' and 'responsibility' are functioning in the construction of some major claims and moral presuppositions in the contemporary obesity debate.

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'Under the Microscope': Transgressing the Boundaries of 'Correct' Infant Feeding
Fiona Dykes
Reader in Maternal & Infant Health, Maternal & Infant Nutrition & Nurture Unit (MAINN), Faculty of Health, University of Central Lancashire, Preston, Lancashire, United Kingdom

This paper draws upon a recent critical ethnographic study conducted within postnatal wards in two maternity units in the North of England, UK (Dykes 2004).  Two areas of dissonance, highlighted by women, with regard to breastfeeding are discussed.  The first centred upon the requirement for women to juxtapose competing notions of breastfeeding.  Breastfeeding was seen as a sign of natural motherhood, with breast milk being pure and untainted.  It was also viewed and experienced as a subversive manifestation of corporeal unboundedness.  The dissonance experienced by women was potentiated by them occupying a space, centre stage, within a highly public place, the hospital. 
The second point of dissonance stemmed from ideologically pervasive notions of correct breastfeeding and associated institutional normalisation, labelling, regulation and surveillance.  The powerful ‘exclusive breastfeeding is best’ discourse resulted in the labelling, normalisation and pathologising of women.  With exclusive breastfeeding as the gold standard giving formula milk was seen as contaminating and deviant.  Foucault’s (1976, 1977, 1981) theory centring upon hierarchical surveillance and the normalising gaze is utilised as a conceptual lens through which to view the dilemmas for women within institutionally regulated settings such as the hospital.  However, despite the inscribing power of the ‘gaze’, women resisted surveillance and subverted the ‘rules’. 
A case is made for the disruption of normalising discourses and acceptance of ‘leaky’ distinctions.  Haraway’s (1991) cyborg imagery enables the development of a unitary paradigm that recognises transgressed boundaries, potent fusions, dangerous possibilities and partiality.  It is argued that seeing breastfeeding in relational terms, not scientific, moralistic or essentialist ways, captures the complexity of breastfeeding, allows us to transgress boundaries and celebrate diversity without disembodiment.

The Monster Without: Red Dragon, the Cleft-Lip, and the Politics of Recognition
Timothy Harfield
Department of Sociology, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada

Among the most common facial birth-defects, it is in a way surprising that the cleft-lip and/or palate has not been featured more prominently in Hollywood feature films.  With other, less common, birth defects like down syndrome and skeletal dysplasia being featured recently in very positive lights, in The Ringer (2005) and Tip Toes (2003) respectively, and especially given its prominence among celebrities including Tom Brokaw, Stacy Keach, Cheech Marin and, most recently, Joaquin Phoenix, Hollywood representations of the cleft-lip are strikingly absent.
There is one recent and salient exception to this silence.  Directed by Brett Ratner, the film Red Dragon (2002) features Ralph Fiennes as Francis Dolarhyde, a serial killer motivated by a psychosis induced as a result of a poorly repaired cleft-lip, and certain monstrous childhood mis-recognitions by his mother.  On the one hand, then, Red Dragon would seem to break with recent trends in film to challenge negative attitudes toward persons with genetic defects through education and by representing them with dignity.  Rather than ‘humanizing’ the cleft-lip, the film serves to play on existing perceptions of the defect as ‘monstrous.’ On the other hand, however, the film also problematizes Dolarhyde by identifying his monstrosity, not with his cleft-lip, but rather by locating him within a system of (mis)recognition.  In several poignant moments, for example, we see Dolarhyde softening and turning away from his monstrosity--away from the recognition of his mother--as a result of his intimate relationship with a blind technician named Molly Graham who recognizes him as other than he has recognized himself, as other than monster, as one with dignity and worthy of love.  The film, then, problematizes Dolarhyde’s cleft-lip, suggesting that it is not the cleft-lip that is monstrous, but rather those systems of recognition that would constitute it as such.
This paper will analyze the film Red Dragon in light of recent psychoanalytic and critical theory on the politics of recognition, using it as a starting point for discussing the subject-positions of persons with cleft-lips, an issue which has, to this point, been under-theorized.

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