ABSTRACT
Big Joe presented himself as physically and emotionally strong. However, he almost felt under siege when discussing a TV programme where members of the public telephoned in and berated those whom medicine might label overweight, obese or even morbidly obese. As a counterpoise to ‘being pushed into this section of people’ who were deemed undeserving of healthcare, Big Joe talked about being happy with his size, his relatively good health and his masculine credentials or social fitness. In short, this hardworking family man resisted the imposition of what Goffman (1968) calls a ‘spoiled identity’, though such resistance would appear fraught and contested. This is because medical authorities and proponents of public health are drawing from and amplifying the Western cultural fear and loathing of fatness, or fatphobia, with claims about a global ‘obesity epidemic’ (WHO 1998). This is defined as a ‘disease’ – attributable to ‘sedentary lifestyles and high-fat, energy-dense diets’ (WHO 1998: xv, xvi) – that should be tackled, or aggressively fought, by militarized medicine.
