What Is Obesity?: Complementary Discourses

Abstract

“What Is Obesity?: Complementary Discourses” seeks to present several perspectives on the entity ‘obesity’ in an effort to establish relationships, differences, and the possibility of critiques between and among the biomedical model, fat studies, media, policy and marketing, and Aboriginality. Using Foucault’s tenets of power, discourse, and governmentality, this thesis will demonstrate the ways in which discourses employ techniques of governance and the responses of self-governing individuals. Each chapter will represent a perspective with its own taxonomy, measures, and constructions of ‘obesity’. To conclude, the thesis will look at the possibility for collaboration in interdisciplinary research on the subject of obesity; in a direct exchange between the perspectives, the thesis will attempt provide a comprehensive account of ‘obesity’ as being comprised of several perspectives simultaneously.