Book review: Samantha Murray, The ‘Fat’ Female Body. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008, 196 pp., ISBN 9780230542587 (hbk) £50.00
| Date | 01 September 2010 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0964663910373417 |
| Published date | 01 September 2010 |
| Author | Melanie Latham |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Social & Legal Studies
19(3) 387–399
Book reviews
ª The Author(s) 2010
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DOI: 10.1177/0964663910373417
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Samantha Murray, The ‘Fat’ Female Body. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008, 196 pp.,
ISBN 9780230542587 (hbk) £50.00.
In writing The ‘Fat’ Female Body, Samantha Murray attempts to grapple with the
contemporary social and cultural definitions of obesity and the medical pathologiza-
tion of ‘fatness’. She aims to demonstrate that being ‘fat’ can be many different
things, and that living as a ‘fat’ female – ‘being’ ‘fat’ – has potential in itself far from
being something to criticize, pity, ridicule or celebrate despite itself.
In Part I of the book Murray looks closely at the pathologization of the ‘fat’ body in
medical and public health narratives which form the basis of the current Western moral
panic about obesity. She refers, for example, to medical literature published in 1924
where obese bodies are seen as offensive, contagious, and an aesthetic affront to society.
Obese women are also seen as excessive, subhuman and unfeminine. She find echoes of
these medical opinions in a more recent publication by the World Health Organization in
2000 who also subscribe to a moral anxiety and attempt to speak from an authoritative
medical standpoint which is critical of ‘fatness’ as a growing threat.
Using Foucault (1978, 1992, 2003), she extends the idea of disciplinary medicine
and self-governance to that of the ‘fat’ female who keeps a food and exercise diary, and
attempts to follow medical and media advice to have self-control, lose weight and
‘improve’ herself. Obesity is portrayed by the medical professions and via the popular
media as an illness that the individual can choose to recover from in order to become nor-
mative, rational and ethical (p. 24). The individual is controlled by a system of reward and
punishment by health policy-makers. Furthermore she highlights the particular gendered
nature of this pathologizing and control. In advertisements for food, for example, ‘whilst
(m)en are expected to consume food heartily, women are required at all times to exercise
control and restraint around food and eating’ (p. 57), otherwise Western culture will label
the woman as greedy, excessive, improper, even as addicted to food. This is despite the
fact that most ‘fat’ women are constantly trying to control their eating through dieting.
In Part II, Murray investigates feminist political activist responses to this ‘fat’ phobia
since...
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