Harjunen - Neoliberal Bodies and the Gendered Fat Body

Neoliberal Bodies and the Gendered Fat Body

In recent decades the rise of the so-called global obesity epidemic has led to fatness and fat bodies being debated incessantly in popular, professional, and academic arenas. Fatness and fat bodies are shamed and demonised, and the public monitoring, surveillance and outright policing by the media, health professionals, and the general public are pervasive and socially accepted.

In Neoliberal Bodies and the Gendered Fat Body, Hannele Harjunen claims that neoliberal economic policy and rationale are enmeshed with conceptions of body, gender, and health in a profound way in contemporary Western culture. She explores the relationships between fatness, health, and neoliberal discourse and the role of economic policy in the construction of the (gendered) fat body, and examines how neoliberal discourses join patriarchal and biomedical constructions of the fat female body. In neoliberal culture the fat body is not just the unhealthy body one finds in medical discourse, but also the body that is costly, unproductive and inefficient, failing in the crucial task of self-management.

With an emphasis on how neoliberal governmentality, in its many forms, affects the fat body and contributes to its vilification, this book is essential reading for scholars of feminist thought, sociology, cultural studies and social theory with interests in the body, gender and the effects of neoliberal discourse on social attitudes.

Hannele Harjunen is Senior Lecturer in Gender Studies in the Department of Social Sciences and Philosophy at the University of Jyvskyl, Finland.

Routledge Research in Gender and Society

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2 Womens Work and Wages
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3 Rethinking Households
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4 Gender, Welfare State and the Market
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5 Gender, Economy and Culture in the European Union
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6 Body, Femininity and Nationalism
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7 Women and the Labour Market
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8 Victorias Daughters
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9 Homosexuality, Law and Resistance
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10 Sex Differences in Labor Markets
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11 Women, Activism and Social Change
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12 The Gender of Democracy
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13 Female Homosexuality in the Middle East
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14 Global Empowerment of Women
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15 Child Abuse, Gender and Society
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16 Gendering Global Transformations
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17 Gender, Race and National Identity
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18 Intimate Citizenships
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19 A Philosophical Investigation of Rape
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20 Migrant Men
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21 Theorizing Sexual Violence
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22 Inclusive Masculinity
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23 Understanding Non-Monogamies
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24 Transgender Identities
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27 Overcoming Objectification
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28 Intimate Partner Violence in LGBTQ Lives
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29 Contesting the Politics of Genocidal Rape
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30 Transnational Migration, Media and Identity of Asian Women
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31 Feminist Solidarity at the Crossroads
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33 Gender, Development and Environmental Governance
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45 New Dynamics in Female Migration and Integration
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47 Gender, Nutrition, and the Human Right to Adequate Food
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48 Teaching Womens Studies in Conservative Contexts
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50 Gendering the Memory of Work
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51 Mens Intrusion, Womens Embodiment
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52 Neoliberal Bodies and the Gendered Fat Body
Hannele Harjunen