Susan Greenhalgh

In recent decades, America has been waging a veritable war on fat in which not just public health authorities, but every sector of society is engaged in constant "fat talk" aimed at educating, badgering, and ridiculing heavy people into shedding pounds. We hear a great deal about the dangers of fatness to the nation, but little about the dangers of today's epidemic of fat talk to individuals and society at large. The human trauma caused by the war on fat is disturbing--and it is virtually unknown. How do those who do not fit the "ideal" body type feel being the object of abuse, discrimination, and even revulsion? How do people feel being told they are a burden on the healthcare system for having a BMI outside what is deemed--with little solid scientific evidence--"healthy"? How do young people, already prone to self-doubt about their bodies, withstand the daily assault on their body type and sense of self-worth? In Fat-Talk Nation, Susan Greenhalgh tells the story of today's fight against excess pounds by giving young people, the campaign's main target, an opportunity to speak about experiences that have long lain hidden in silence and shame. Featuring forty-five autobiographical narratives of personal struggles with diet, weight, "bad BMIs," and eating disorders, Fat-Talk Nation shows how the war on fat has produced a generation of young people who are obsessed with their bodies and whose most fundamental sense of self comes from their size. It reveals that regardless of their weight, many people feel miserable about their bodies, and almost no one is able to lose weight and keep it off. Greenhalgh argues that attempts to rescue America from obesity-induced national decline are damaging the bodily and emotional health of young people and disrupting families and intimate relationships. Fatness today is not primarily about health, Greenhalgh asserts; more fundamentally, it is about morality and political inclusion/exclusion or citizenship. To unpack the complexity of fat politics today, Greenhalgh introduces a cluster of terms--biocitizen, biomyth, biopedagogy, bioabuse, biocop, and fat personhood--and shows how they work together to produce such deep investments in the attainment of the thin, fit body. These concepts, which constitute a theory of the workings of our biocitizenship culture, offer powerful tools for understanding how obesity has come to remake who we are as a nation, and how we might work to reverse course for the next generation. -- Publisher description.

the human costs of America's war on fat

Fat-talk nation

Greenhalgh Susan

A collection of essays outlining new anthropological approaches to the issue of fertility.

Anthropology and Demographic Inquiry

Situating Fertility

"This is an extraordinary book—riveting story, concise scholarship, experimental ethnography—and it is beautifully told. Greenhalgh makes a cogent and powerful analysis of the sociopolitical sources of pain through feminist, cultural, and political understandings of the nature of medical science and medical practice in the United States."—Sharon Kaufman, author of The Healer's Tale "Far above a simple telling of an illness, Greenhalgh takes the experience as a way to view gendered relations in medical care, the seduction of science for the physician and the patient, and the creation of facts and selves in the treatment of pain. She sets a new standard for the practice of autoethnography."—Virginia Olesen, Professor Emerita of Sociology, Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences, School of Nursing, University of California, San Francisco "A compellingly told story that advances our understanding of the meaning of chronic illness, particularly for women. This work adds a new dimension to the genre of illness narratives."—Susan DiGiacomo, Series Editor, Theory and Practice in Medical Anthropology and International Health "A very useful and very well written book. . . . It states the issues in the culture of biomedicine field effectively and makes them relevant."—Arthur Kleinman, author of Writing at the Margin: Discourse between Anthropology and Medicine "A deeply troubling, meticulous account about the chasm between medical orthodoxy and the subjective experience of chronic illness. This courageous book is essential reading for physicians and the public at large."—Margaret Lock, author of Encounters with Aging: Mythologies of Menopause in Japan and North America

Facts and Fictions of Chronic Pain

Under the Medical Gaze

Edwin A. Winckler

This work compares IT parks in China, India, Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan, and Hawaii, in search of strategies that policy makers can employ to reduce the Global Digital Divide, advance distributional equity, and soften some of the negative effects of economic globalization.

Contending Approaches to the Political Economy of Taiwan

Li Zhang

"This study of the intimate connections between science and society in China shows that science and technology, far from saving China, as the country's leaders promise, are producing unanticipated, often deeply disturbing effects"--

Can Science and Technology Save China?

This compelling account of the author's experience with a chronic pain disorder and subsequent interaction with the American health care system goes to the heart of the workings of power and culture in the biomedical domain. It is a medical whodunit full of mysterious misdiagnosis, subtle power plays, and shrewd detective work. Setting a new standard for the practice of autoethnography, Susan Greenhalgh presents a case study of her intense encounter with an enthusiastic young specialist who, through creative interpretation of the diagnostic criteria for a newly emerging chronic disease, became convinced she had a painful, essentially untreatable, lifelong muscle condition called fibromyalgia. Greenhalgh traces the ruinous effects of this diagnosis on her inner world, bodily health, and overall well-being. Under the Medical Gaze serves as a powerful illustration of medicine's power to create and inflict suffering, to define disease and the self, and to manage relationships and lives. Greenhalgh ultimately learns that she had been misdiagnosed and begins the long process of undoing the physical and emotional damage brought about by her nearly catastrophic treatment. In considering how things could go so awry, she embarks on a cogent and powerful analysis of the sociopolitical sources of pain through feminist, cultural, and political understandings of the nature of medical discourse and practice in the United States. She develops fresh arguments about the power of medicine to medicalize our selves and lives, the seductions of medical science, and the deep, psychologically rooted difficulties women patients face in interactions with male physicians. In the end, Under the Medical Gaze goes beyond the critique of biomedicine to probe the social roots of chronic pain and therapeutic alternatives that rely on neither the body-cure of conventional medicine nor the mind-cure of some alternative medicines, but rather a broader set of strategies that address the sociopolitical sources of pain.

Population politics are a major issue in China. Susan Greenhaigh explores the origins and development of the one-child policy from the late 1970s to the present day, showing how sociopolitical life in China has been subject to scientization and statisticalization.

Susan Greenhalgh

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