ABSTRACT
In this chapter, relying on multiple theoretical frameworks—Fat Studies, Mad Studies, and feminist bioethics—I critique the DSM-V biomedical narrative of “obesity” as “mental illness” to argue that the complexity or thickness of fat Mad subjectivity is obfuscated by reductionist and risk management biomedical models. I problematize the recent inclusion of obesity in the American Psychiatric Association’s (APA) fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-V) as a sufficient and sole reason to be recommended to a psychiatrist, which suggests that the fat body is necessarily a product of, or kind of, a mental disorder (APA, 2013, p. 22). This inclusion of obesity in the DSM-V marks an attempt to solidify a biomedical relationship between obesity and mental illness, such that fat embodiment is surveilled and punished as both physical and mental deviance. I argue that there are similarities between hysteria and obesity as discriminatory diagnostic labels that function to pathologize some bodies and/or minds as out of control and dangerous in order to justify violent “treatment” plans rooted in a desire to discipline non-normative gender performance and/or embodiments. The recommendation of the chapter is that the seemingly “objective” DSM-V is engaged in evidence-free discrimination to justify and allow for epistemic, psychiatric, and/or medical violence against marginalized and/or subversive identities and, as a result, the DSM-V should be eliminated from mental health services.
