This document discusses various perspectives on embodiment and food from sociological and philosophical viewpoints. It covers topics like how bodies are socially constructed and regulated; feminist views of fluid, permeable bodies; queer theory perspectives on unstable embodiment and identity; and concepts of morality, health, and attractiveness as linked to body size. Theories discussed include those of Foucault, Grosz, Kristeva, and Butler. The document also examines ideas of the grotesque, abject, and fluid body as well as the Health at Every Size movement.

1. Thinking about food and
embodiment
Deborah Lupton, Department of
Sociology and Social Policy, University
of Sydney

4. Bodies as social constructions
• The lived experience of the body in everyday
life
• How bodies are governed, regulated and
controlled
• How bodies are culturally portrayed

5. • How other people’s bodies interact with our
bodies: interembodiment/intercorporeality
• Bodies as conceptually fluid and permeable:
how body boundaries (literal and symbolic)
are regulated
• Bodies as assemblages

20. • Theorising fatness
• Fatness and morality
• The grotesque body
• The abject body
• The fluid, permeable body
• Food/health/beauty triplex
• HAES

21. Theorising fatness
Foucault:
• the body
• the medical gaze
• the care of the self
• governmentality
• biopower and biopolitics

22. Feminist philosophers: fluidities, leaky bodies
• Elizabeth Grosz
• Julia Kristeva
• Margit Shildrick

23. Queer theory
• The cultural construction of
embodiment/identity
• Embodiment and identity as unstable
• Gender and sexual identity as performed
(Judith Butler)
• The challenging of normativity

24. Health, diet and morality
• Religious and spiritual beliefs
• Health as an indicator of goodness
• Body size as an indicator of self-control and
self-discipline
• Ill-health and fat embodiment as indicators of
excessive consumption, lack of self-discipline

25. The grotesque body
• Transgression
• Excess
• Lack of self-discipline and self-control
• Ugliness

26. The abject body
• Fluid, permeable
• Not tightly contained or controlled
• Monstrous
• Object of loathing and disgust

27. The food/health/beauty triplex
• Health, diet and attractiveness all linked to
body size
• Healthy = thin = beautiful

28. ‘Queering’ Health at Every Size
• HAES positions concepts of the body as
natural and instinctive
• By changing our view of our selves, we change
others’ views
• But can ‘nature’ and the ‘instinctive’ be
separated from society and culture?