New Zealand's concern over an 'obesity epidemic' has resulted in overweight bodies being linked to a biomedical model of disease. This post discusses some of the issues from Tayla's Honours thesis in which she argued that cultural and social forces of morality and medical discourses shape how New Zealand society perceive overweight individuals.
Not long ago, I overheard a five year old call a woman fat. She didn't mean it as an insult; it was simply her way of
describing the appearance of someone. “No, not that lady, the fat one” she
said. And that isn't her fault - no five year old is aware of the consequences
of calling someone fat, nowadays it’s just so perfectly normal to
categorize people based on their weight, and because it’s so normal to categorize
people based on size, it has also become so perfectly acceptable to discriminate against overweight people. There are a number of reasons why this is the
case, in fact it took me a whole year of research and a 10,000 word dissertation to discuss only a
mere few reasons why discrimination against fat people is so common in Western
society. What I have come to realise, however, is that discrimination against overweight people is so normalised
because it’s so embedded in public health promotion. And one of the ways in
which this public health promotion reaches the general public, and what this post discusses, is through the
use of the media.
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American Evolutionary Psychologist Geoffery Miller's scandalous tweet exemplifies how individuals think it is acceptable to discriminate against size. |
Statistics in New Zealand News Media
News media, and
mass-produced popular media such as television, advertising and visual imagery
act as one medium in which we view overweight individuals.