ABSTRACT
We began this book with reference to the social-class dimensions of obesity discourse, highlighting the way in which media coverage of obesity implicitly vilifies an overgeneralised, overworked and much maligned social category, ‘the working class’. This ‘category’ purportedly acts irresponsibly towards health, providing ‘bad food’, ‘bad parenting’ and too little opportunity for good, clean, healthy living. Such discourse blames as it individualises, hiding complex structural factors like poor housing and income levels and government inaction on planning and provision that underlie social-class differences in health and longevity. In obesity discourse ‘fat’ or ‘overweight’ is rarely considered proxy for conditions, over which individuals may have little or no control, that blight working-class lives. We cannot in this book deal with the complexities of class/health issues but we do want to touch on some relationships that are either obfuscated or misrecognised in obesity discourse, particularly between popular culture, formal education and ‘the middle class’. The last of these is relatively underexplored in sociological and educational research, often a ‘shadowy and unsatisfactory presence’ in much of the literature on sociology of education and pedagogy: ‘It hovers in the background against which the perspectives and experiences of the working class have been contrasted’ (Power and Whitty, 2002: 596). There are good reasons for this, given the stubborn persistence of social-class inequalities in education, employment, wealth and health, in the UK and elsewhere (see Butler and Savage, 1995; Ball, 2003a).1 However, if nothing else, the voices of the young people reported throughout this book offer a salutary reminder that middle-class children also bleed; they are not always affirmed by pedagogic processes but may fail, feel alienated, neglected, used and damaged.
