ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts covered in the subsequent chapters of the book. The book provides an overview of various ways of 'thinking about fat', including the anti-obesity perspective, the critical biomedical perspective, the libertarian perspective, ethical approaches, critical weight studies/fat studies and fat activism. The contestants' mortification and humiliation at their fat bodies being displayed was obvious by the expression on their faces and the words they spoke. The 2012 season of the Australian The Biggest Loser focused on the loneliness and despair endured by the contestants, who were particularly selected because they lacked a life partner and allegedly were desperately 'looking for love'. Anthropologists take a cross-cultural perspective, including analyses of the ways in which fatness is represented, understood and treated in non-western societies. Critical scholarship and fat activism have been further influenced by political movements centred on identity politics, embodied difference, and the challenging of medical dominance.
