Butchering the fat body: Enacting and engaging fatness in an American “anti-obesity” campaign
Bibliographic record
Abstract
While public concern with body weight is not simply a recent phenomenon, the past several decades have witnessed the intensification of a set of discourses that frame the fat/ness of bodies as a public health crisis, particularly in the United States. In 2004, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the US-American Advertising Council (Ad Council) co-produced a series of print, radio, and television "public service announcements" as part of a self-described "obesity prevention" campaign, which deploys a cultural framework of healthism to present fat as a pathological entity in need of elimination through the efforts of the responsibilized citizen. In this paper, I bring methodological guidance from Sara Ahmed's Queer Phenomenology together with the work of other critical theorists to consider how fat/ness is represented by this campaign as an index of the undisciplined body-self, as a space of abjection, and as a basis for the exclusion of fat bodies as both desired objects and desiring subjects. However, scope may also exist for disruption of the "prescribed" enactments and for new, "queer" orientations toward fat/ness and fat bodies to emerge.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".