ABSTRACT
In the UK and elsewhere our personal and public lives are increasingly framed and regulated by an incessant outpouring of health messages relating to obesity and measures to be taken to avoid it reflecting what some theorists have described as the medicalisation of our daily lives. The ‘normal anxieties’ we encounter in relation to food, relationships, exercise and work, among others, are reinterpreted as medical ones and ‘problems that might previously have been thought of as existential – that is the problems of existence – now have a medical label attached’ (Furedi, 2007: 1). Indeed, like Furedi, we would suggest that it is now very difficult to think of any kind of human experience that does not come with a health warning or some kind of medical explanation, creating a culture in which we are all seen as ‘being potentially unwell’ as ‘the default state we live in today’ (ibid.: 2). Arguably, being ‘potentially ill is now so prevalent that we have reached a situation where illness has become a part of our identity, part of the human condition’, so that ‘illness is now as normal as health (and wellness), something we all have to work on as something to aspire to and achieve as if we don’t buy into this discourse then we revert to “being ill”’ (ibid.). Even worse, in our view, we risk being labelled aberrant, deviant or subversive for not wanting to achieve or engage with these inherently ‘good things’. Echoes of an earlier age when juvenile courts reached into the private lives of youth and disguised basically punitive policies in a rhetoric of ‘rehabilitation’ (Platt, 1971) reverberate in today’s obesity discourse, whose proponents, believing that ‘youth’ and their parents and carers need protection and correction from their inclinations to eat badly and exercise too little, endeavour to reach into every site of human activity. Their views draw upon theories offered by genetics, biology and epidemiology, much taken up by politicians (see Chapters 3 and 6) and like-minded educationalists, and have increasingly dominated political thinking since the mid-1970s and the way people think about themselves as embodied human beings. This has helped lay down the
seeds of more pervasive and penetrating forms of control involving systems of social management and self-regulation driven by targets and numbers, the commodification of everything, including medical care, parenting and learning in and outside school. In this ‘politicisation of health’ (Furedi, 2007: 4) one focus of political activity, engendering policy after policy, has sought to deal with the impending obesity epidemic, requiring regulation of populations by informing them how they are to monitor both their own and others’ ‘bodies’ through constant introspection and surveillance. As Furedi points out, in this culture and political climate, unless we are seen to be vigilant in keeping ‘our body’ (and those of others) in constant check, we are likely to be considered irresponsible citizens, letting us all down, at great cost to personal and public health.
