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Book part
Publication date: 17 March 2010

Michaela DeSoucey and David Schleifer

This chapter addresses how small businesses resist city regulations by using material things, by making craft knowledge claims about material things, and by letting material…

Abstract

This chapter addresses how small businesses resist city regulations by using material things, by making craft knowledge claims about material things, and by letting material things organize their political activity. Chefs successfully resisted a foie gras ban in Chicago, where political resistance shaped the production and use of material things. Bakers successfully resisted a trans fat ban in Philadelphia, where material properties of things structured political resistance. We bring together analytic tools from the sociology of culture and science and technology studies to demonstrate how materiality can be both an instigator and an instrument of legal and political resistance.

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Special Issue Interdisciplinary Legal Studies: The Next Generation
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-84950-751-6

Book part
Publication date: 2 September 2009

Anna Kirkland

Doctors need to consider all kinds of traits and risk factors about a person in a treatment situation, while antidiscrimination law puts significant restrictions on what an…

Abstract

Doctors need to consider all kinds of traits and risk factors about a person in a treatment situation, while antidiscrimination law puts significant restrictions on what an employer can consider about a person in hiring. These two contexts – health care and the antidiscrimination-governed workplace – seem to adopt entirely incompatible conceptions of how to regard the person, and hence, what rights she is considered to deserve. Therefore, how can we make sense of the claim by fat acceptance advocates that doctors discriminate against them based on their weight? Even when little or no formal rights exist for fat citizens in either sphere, there are nonetheless transformative discourses available that cross-pollinate each context. Revisiting rights by bringing these two discordant contexts together helps illuminate problems of injustice that must be confronted in the future as we move toward a more universal and equitable health care system in which conceptions of rights must have some place.

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Special Issue Revisiting Rights
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-84855-930-1

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Appearance as Capital
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-80043-711-1

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Progress in Psychobiology and Physiological Psychology
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-0-12-542118-8

Book part
Publication date: 21 April 2010

Alana J. Hermiston

Purpose – In North America today, we are witnessing an unprecedented preoccupation with “excess” weight, with millions of people perceived to be part of the epidemic of obesity…

Abstract

Purpose – In North America today, we are witnessing an unprecedented preoccupation with “excess” weight, with millions of people perceived to be part of the epidemic of obesity. While this chapter does not seek to contest medical evidence that average weights of North Americans have risen in recent years, nor deny the potential development of associated health problems, it offers a critique of the terminology invoked in these discussions and especially challenges the characterization of increased weight among the population as an “epidemic.” This chapter suggests that what we are witnessing is more appropriately understood as a moral regulation project premised on ideas of risk, contagion, and neoliberal discourses of health.

Methodology/approach – In arguing that the concern about obesity may be understood as an example of moral regulation, this chapter employs the work of Alan Hunt, as well as Deborah Lupton's insights on governmentality and health.

Findings – In reviewing the scholarly literature on obesity as well as Canadian public health initiatives, a discourse of risk and contagion is evident. The overweight and obese (and these are commonly conflated) are presented as dangerous to themselves and others.

Contribution to the field – In suggesting an alternative understanding of the obesity “epidemic” as a socially constructed and morally regulated phenomenon, this chapter aims to further discuss and reassess how those who are considered fat are understood and treated in North America.

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Understanding Emerging Epidemics: Social and Political Approaches
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-84855-080-3

Book part
Publication date: 19 November 2021

Han Koehle

Though ciscentric discourses often claim that genitals alone define gender, public disciplining of gender deviance suggests a move toward a broader and less genital-focused…

Abstract

Though ciscentric discourses often claim that genitals alone define gender, public disciplining of gender deviance suggests a move toward a broader and less genital-focused concept of gender, even among people who explicitly object to the normalization of trans people in society. In this chapter, I explore genital focused and holistic concepts of embodied gender in public discourses about cisgender celebrities and then in trans writings about gender and fatness emerging around the time of the transgender tipping point of 2014. I argue that hyperfocus on genitals in ciscentric discourses about trans bodies not only misunderstands trans experiences of gender but also misrepresents the role of genitals in post-millennium discourses about cisgender bodies.

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Advances in Trans Studies: Moving Toward Gender Expansion and Trans Hope
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-80262-030-6

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Book part
Publication date: 29 April 2013

Julian Wells

Popular understandings of the financial crisis tend to focus on the rents extracted by elite personnel in the financial sector. Professional discussions, however, have addressed…

Abstract

Popular understandings of the financial crisis tend to focus on the rents extracted by elite personnel in the financial sector. Professional discussions, however, have addressed the faulty assumptions underlying theory and practice – in particular, the assumption that returns to financial assets follow the Gaussian distribution, in the face of much empirical evidence that these have power law distributions with far higher kurtosis. It turns out that the power law tails of returns to financial assets are also a feature of the distribution of company rates of profit, a discovery that stems from proposals to ‘dissolve’ the traditional transformation problem by abandoning the condition of a uniform rate of profit and instead considering its distribution.Marx himself was aware of the importance of considering the distributional properties of economic variables, based on his reading of Quetelet. In fact, heavy-tailed distributions characterise a wide range of variables in capitalist economies, the best-known probably being the Paretian tail component in distributions of income and wealth. Nor is this simply an empirical fact – such distributions emerge readily from a range of agent-based simulations.Capitalist economies are, in a particular technical sense, complex self-organising systems perpetually on the brink of crisis. This modern understanding is prefigured in Marx’s discussion of how the compulsive character of social relations emerges from the atomistic exercise of human free will in commercial society. The developing literature of probabilistic Marxism successfully applies these insights to the wider fields of econophysics and complexity, demonstrating the continuing relevance of Marx’s thought.

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Contradictions: Finance, Greed, and Labor Unequally Paid
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-78190-671-2

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Book part
Publication date: 13 October 2008

Heather Schofield and Sendhil Mullainathan

The purpose of this paper is to explore consumer thinking about nutrition decisions and how firms can use consumers’ awareness of the links between nutrients and health generated…

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to explore consumer thinking about nutrition decisions and how firms can use consumers’ awareness of the links between nutrients and health generated by public health messages to market products, including ones, which have little nutritional value. We approach this issue by tracking the development of public health messages based on scientific research, dissemination of those messages in the popular press, and use of nutrition claims in food advertisements to assess whether firms are timing the use of nutrition claims to take advantage of heuristic-based decision-making. Our findings suggest that the timing of the development of nutrition information, its dissemination in the press, and use in advertising accords well with a heuristic processing model in which firms take advantage of associations between nutrient information and health in their advertisements. However, the demonstrated relationships may not be causal. Further research will be needed to provide stronger and more comprehensive evidence regarding the proposed message hijacking process. If the message hijacking framework is borne out: (1) simple overall health rating scales could significantly improve consumer decision-making, (2) the impact of misleading advertisements could be mitigated by encouraging a multidimensional view of nutrition, and (3) more intensive regulation of product labeling could limit the impact of hijacked messages.

Overall, this paper considers a novel hypothesis about the impact of public health messages on nutrition and health.

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Beyond Health Insurance: Public Policy to Improve Health
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-84855-181-7

Book part
Publication date: 9 October 2012

Jessica Parr and Nicolas Rasmussen

Purpose – To reconsider the historical relationship between addiction and obesity, which current literature tends to treat as unrelated until the late twentieth century.Approach …

Abstract

Purpose – To reconsider the historical relationship between addiction and obesity, which current literature tends to treat as unrelated until the late twentieth century.

Approach – We describe the forms of sociality and therapeutic discourses manifested in the emerging weight loss group movement from the 1940s until 1970 in cultural and intellectual context, drawing mainly on popular media and medical literature. The histories of these ‘Fatties Anonymous’ groups serve as valuable lens for studying the mutable cultural linkage between drug addiction and obesity that was first forged in the golden age of psychoanalysis.

Findings – We show that medicine began interpreting obesity as addiction around 1940 and that this view achieved dominance in both medical and popular discourse by 1950. The theoretical framing of a psychoanalytical interpretation of obesity in the 1940s, combined with the simultaneous rise to prominence of obesity-related problems in public health and popular stigma around fatness, was translated in the Cold War United States into a popular mutual-aid weight loss movement modelled on Alcoholics Anonymous.

Originality value – Our account challenges the present received view that the stigmatised health conditions of obesity and addiction only came to be related in the late twentieth century. There is notable similarity between the 1950s ‘Fatties Anonymous’ type group and present public health campaigns in fostering the individual's sense of self-control and encouraging self-enterprising improvement. Neither historical and contemporary similarities nor differences should be elided. Further research in this area would be of value to current and future developments in public health.

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Critical Perspectives on Addiction
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-78052-930-1

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Book part
Publication date: 4 December 2020

Heike Bartel

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Men Writing Eating Disorders: Autobiographical Writing and Illness Experience in English and German Narratives
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-83909-920-5

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