Christopher E. Forth - Fat: Culture and Materiality

FAT

FAT

Culture and Materiality

Edited by
Christopher E. Forth
and Alison Leitch

FAT

Country towns are full of it.

The suburbs are awash with it.

Acidic molecules consort with glycerol,

Adopt another name, move into cells and hang out there.

It cushions heels, grows big around the waist and other parts

When glands play sport, unlike their hosts.

It sashays through arcades where it leans heavily

On trolleys stacked with meat. It makes its pilgrim way

To packaged sacraments on supermarket shelves.

Around the globe, a billion factories work around the clock to keep it sleek.

Motel chains and airlines do not make life easy for it

And its feedlot children bobbing in its wake.

It cannot bear to see so much it yearns for going spare:

It plugs a void. It loves a pick-me-up, a snack:

It keeps its strength up in lacunae between meals.

It lards the littoral, is unflagging in its interest,

Offers shares to politicians, corporations, come who may.

It flattens springs of king and queen-sized mattresses,

Beats single beds to pulp. It tries to fit itself in dinky chairs

In theatres, restaurants and cars; twin-sized men and women

Manifest it on the margins of school playgrounds,

Cheering jumbo-sized descendants oscillating round a ball.

Some of its exemplars are renowned for stepping light,

And pirouette like graceful zeppelins at play.

It is the cynosure of classrooms, office towers, is imposing

On a stage. It pauses to consider stairs and hills;

It keeps strange pets who share its appetites and shape.

It goes on convoy in vast vehicles that sigh as it steps in.

No end of artists celebrate it. Rubens loved it;

Joseph Beuys wrapped it tenderly in felt.

It wages war with buttons, belts. It builds a verandah on the toyshop,

And amuses tiny friends to whom the wonder is it replicates itself.

From Michael Sharkey, The Sweeping Plain (2007).

Bloomsbury Academic

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First published 2014

Christopher E. Forth and Alison Leitch, 2014

Christopher E. Forth and Alison Leitch have asserted their rights under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editors of this work.

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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 978-1-47252-018-0

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Christopher E. Forth

Anne Meneley

Brad Weiss

Christopher E. Forth

Alison Leitch

Anna Lavis

Nadine Ehlers

Trudie Cain, Kerry Chamberlain, and Ann Dupuis

Jennifer-Scott Mobley

Trudie Cain is a research manager in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at Massey University, New Zealand. She received her PhD in sociology from Massey University and contributes to papers on research methods, globalization, and New Zealand culture and identity. She has published in the areas of migration, particularly on issues of social cohesion and labor market outcomes, and embodied reflexivity. Her research interests include gendered, sized, and migrant identities; qualitative research methodologies and ethics; and the materiality of everyday lives. She is particularly interested in the negotiated spaces of the clothed body.

Kerry Chamberlain is professor of social and health psychology at Massey University in Auckland, New Zealand. He is a critical health psychologist whose research focuses on health and the everyday, with specific interests in medications, media, materiality, mundane ailments, food, disadvantage, social and cultural process, and innovative qualitative research methodology. He has published widely on health issues and qualitative research and methodologies.

Ann Dupuis is associate professor of sociology and regional director of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at Massey Universitys Albany Campus in Auckland, New Zealand. She has a long-standing interest in inheritance and the meanings associated with inherited possessions, whether in the form of money from housing, wealth inheritance, or special gifts. She has published extensively in the area of the meanings of home and the connection between home, home ownership, and ontological security; urban intensification; and private urban governance.

Nadine Ehlers teaches in cultural studies at the University of Wollongong, Australia. She is the author of Racial Imperatives: Discipline, Performativity, and Struggles against Subjection (2012) and has published in journals such as Social Semiotics, Patterns of Prejudice, and Culture, Theory, and Critique.

Christopher E. Forth is the Howard Professor of Humanities and Western Civilization and professor of history at the University of Kansas, United States. A specialist in the cultural history of gender, sexuality, and the body, his books include The Dreyfus Affair and the Crisis of French Manhood (2004) and Masculinity in the Modern West: Gender, Civilization and the Body (2008), as well as several edited collections, including Cultures of the Abdomen: Diet, Digestion and Fat in the Modern World (2005). He is currently completing a cultural history of fat in the West.

Anna Lavis is a medical anthropologist and research fellow at the University of Birmingham. Within the multidisciplinary context of the Department of Primary Care, she conducts research into psychosis. Also focused on individuals lived experiences of mental illness, Annas doctoral thesis explored pro-anorexia, and she continues to work on eating disorders, food, and eating. With Emma-Jayne Abbots, Anna has recently edited Why We Eat, How We Eat: Contemporary Encounters between Foods and Bodies (2013) and founded a research network entitled Consuming Materialities: Bodies, Boundaries and Encounters. As a research associate in the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Oxford, Anna is currently collaborating on projects investigating media representations of obesity.

Alison Leitch teaches in sociology at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, and has a PhD in social anthropology from the University of Sydney. She has conducted long-term ethnographic fieldwork in the Italian marble-quarrying community of Carrara. Among her publications are the journal articles Slow Food and the Politics of Pork Fat (Ethnos), The Life of Marble (Australian Journal of Anthropology), The Materiality of Marble (Thesis Eleven), and Visualizing the Mountain (Journal of Modern Italian Cultural Studies