Slow death (sovereignty, obesity, lateral agency)

Critical Inquiry

Volumn 33, Issue 4, 2007, Pages 754-780

  Berlant, Lauren ^a,b  

^a Department of English ^*

^b UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 36749069247     PISSN: 00931896     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/521568     Document Type: Review

References (121)

1. See David Harvey, "The Body as Accumulation Strategy," Spaces of Hope (Berkeley, 2000), pp. 97-116. To call Harvey polemical is not to devalue his profound contributions to understanding the productive destructiveness of capital; in his work, a polemic is a call for precision, not a way of drowning it out
2. Achille Mbembe, "Necropolitics," trans. Libby Meintjes, Public Culture 15, no. 1 (2003): 12
3. See Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, Calif., 1998)
4. Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. Heller-Roazen (New York, 1998)
5. and State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago, 2005)
6. See Austin Sarat and Nasser Hussain, "On Lawful Lawlessness: George Ryan, Executive Clemency, and the Rhetoric of Sparing Life," Stanford Law Review 56 (Apr. 2004): 1307
7. see also Hussain, The Jurisprudence of Emergency: Colonialism and the Rule of Law (Ann Arbor, Mich., 2003)
8. For a related critique of the metaphysicalization of the sovereignty concept, see Friedrich Balke, "Derrida and Foucault on Sovereignty," German Law Journal 6 (Jan. 2005), www.germanlawjournal.com/print.php?id=539
9. Daniel Morris, "The Life and Times of Sovereignty" (unpublished paper) helped me to elaborate and clarify what it might mean to temporalize this concept
10. See Georges Bataille, Literature and Evil, trans. Alastair Hamilton (London, 1973), p. 173
11. and The Unfinished System of Nonknowledge, trans. Michelle Kendall and Stuart Kendall (Minneapolis, 2001)
12. Michel Foucault, "17 March 1976," "Society Must Be Defended": Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975-76, trans. David Macey, ed. Mauro Bertani et al. (New York, 2003), pp. 240-41
13. See, for example, the place of sovereignty in the conceptualization of sociality and publicness throughout Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York, 2005)
14. Balke, "Derrida and Foucault on Sovereignty," argues that the late Derrida also presumes the metaphysical and foundational equivalence of self-mastery, autonomy, and sovereignty in the operation of the Western polis and its individuals
15. See Ernesto Laclau, "Universalism, Particularism, and the Question of Identity," in The Identity in Question, ed. John Rajchman (London, 1995), p. 107
16. and Paul Gilroy, Against Race: Imagining Political Culture beyond the Color Line (Cambridge, Mass., 2000), pp. 220, 230
17. See also Isobel Armstrong, The Radical Aesthetic (Oxford, 2000), p. 236. The antinomian activity of the contemporary U.S. state shows how powerful an as-if or phantasmatic assumption of sovereignty can be in the hands of those otherwise bound by an obligation to legal proceduralism
18. The future anteriority of the subject is central to the problematics of death-in-life in Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York, 1981)
19. and A Lover's Discourse, trans. Howard (New York, 1978)
20. and Drucilla Cornell, The Imaginary Domain: Abortion, Pornography, and Sexual Harassment (New York, 1995)
21. Seen as a problem, this mode of the will-have-been is confronted by Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, N.C., 2005)
22. Available in World Health Organization documents as early as 1998 and registering typical anxiety about the joke-and-threat status of obesity in public-sphere Western rhetoric, globesity is now in wide circulation in medical and commercial venues; see, for example, George Anderson, "Buzzwords du Jour: Prosumers, Metrosexuals, Globesity," Retail Wire, 26 Sept. 2003, retailwire.com/Discussions/Sngl-Discussion.cfm/9272
23. Donna Eberwine, "Globesity: The Crisis of Growing Proportions," Perspectives in Health Magazine 7, no. 3 (2002): 6-11, www.paho.org/English/ DPI/Number15-article2-5.htm
24. Stuart Blackman, "The Enormity of Obesity," The Scientist, 24 May 2004, www.the-scientist.com/article/display/14698; and multiple articles in Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) and other medical journals
25. For a recent academic deployment, see Don Kulick and Anne Meneley, introduction to Fat: The Anthropology of an Obsession (New York, 2005)
26. "Antiwill" is Patricia Williams's brilliant phrase for the mass personality or collective identity deemed so instinctive and appetitive that it is defined by its compulsions (Patricia Williams, The Alchemy of Race and Rights [Cambridge, Mass. ,1991], p. 219)
27. For the actuarially based establishing arguments, see National Center for Health Statistics (a subdivision of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention), "Prevalence of Overweight and Obesity among Adults: United States, 1999-2002," www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/pubs/pubd/hestats/obese/ obse99.htm; the CDC general obesity homepage, www.cdc.gov/nccdphp/dnpa/obesity/ index.htm; International Obesity Task Force, www.ioff.org; the several World Health Organization obesity reports at www.who.int/nutrition/publications/ obesity/en/index.html
28. and Ali H. Mokdad et al., "The Spread of the Obesity Epidemic in the United States, 1991-1998," JAMA, 27 Oct. 1999, pp. 1519-22
29. For debunking arguments, see J. Eric Oliver, Fat Politics: The Real Story Behind America's Obesity Epidemic (New York, 2006)
30. Paul Campos, The Obesity Myth: Why America's Obsession with Weight Is Hazardous to Your Health (New York, 2004)
31. and the prescient Richard Klein, Eat Fat (New York, 1996)
32. For geopolitically relativizing arguments, see Helen Gremillion, "The Cultural Politics of Body Size," Annual Review of Anthropology 34 (2005): 13-32
33. This is part of a longer project on negative affects and the agency of self-interruption. A related essay is Lauren Berlant, "Two Girls, Fat and Thin," in Regarding Sedgwick, ed. Stephen M. Barber and David L. Clark (New York, 2002), pp. 71-108
34. See Thomas L. Dumm, A Politics of the Ordinary (New York, 1999), pp. 10-49
35. For a great habitation of the Lyotardian "temporalization of space and spatialization of time," see Andrew Quick, "Time and the Event," Cultural Values 2 (Apr. 1998): 223-42
36. The event has been accumulating much critical attention via Lyotard, Deleuze, Nancy, and the post-Freudians, all of whom focus on the event as an experience that manifests radical contingency. I concur with this sense to the extent that the event always points to an impactive experience. But, with the exception of Freud's après coup and Deleuze's perturbation, event theorizers use extreme and melodramatic antifoundational languages of nothingness, shattering, cleavage, and so on to describe impact, disregarding what about the event is at the same time ordinary, forgettable, charming, boring, inconsequential, or subtle. I am thinking with Jameson's work on genre here to initiate a way of describing events that allows calibrations of their resonance to articulate different registers of impact (including the vagaries of the vague, the null, and the whatever) and the conventionality of even memorable affective experiences. See Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: The Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, N.Y., 1981)
37. For kindred views, see Douglas Collins, "The Great Effects of Small Things: Insignificance with Immanence in Critical Theory," Anthropoetics 8 (Fall 2002-Winter 2003), www.anthropetics.ucla.edu/ap0802/collins.htm
38. and Kathleen Stewart, Ordinary Affects (Durham, N.C., forthcoming)
39. See also the ruminations on the ongoingness of the historical event in William H. Sewell, Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation (Chicago, 2005)
40. A related view on how to think about the temporality of environments in late capitalism, focused on the environment in its natural sense along with its epistemological one, can be found in Barbara Adam's wonderful Timescapes of Modernity: The Environment and Invisible Hazards (New York, 1998)
41. See Teresa Brennan, The Transmission of Affect (Ithaca, N.Y., 2004)
42. For more on the anti-intellectual utility of an actuarial imaginary in the orchestration of public politically related emotion, see Berlant, "The Epistemology of State Emotion," in Dissent in Dangerous Times, ed. Austin Sarat (Ann Arbor, Mich., 2005), pp. 46-78
43. Such a description as this, pointing to disavowed ways of living that thrive within the "same" temporal regime or horizon of history, resonates with Agamben's use of "zone of indifference" or undifferentiation [zone di indifferenza] to describe the thriving antinomianism within political life under contemporary regimes of national/global law (Agamben, State of Exception, p. 23)
44. At the same time as a discourse and practice of obligation to the law endure to resanctify the sacred rights of human subjects, a variety of zones in which the law is suspended also emerges, negating conventions of rights protection in order to protect the idea of protection. This is not just a phenomenon of state practices but also of popular support for the suspension of legal protections on behalf of legal freedom. The problem in Agamben's important description of this multiplication of distinctions into a zone of incoherence is that a structuralism perdures in the idea of bare life as that which is included as the excluded. Agamben overterritorializes what is fundamentally a temporal, symbolizing, and expanding penumbra suffusing and confusing the law. The concept of indistinction should be much stronger, enabling discussion of the foundational disavowals within democratic practice of parceling out freedom and unfreedom, legitimacy and all its formal and informal others. This argument about the activity of displacement is akin to Talal Asad's argument about the institutions of hypocrisy that protect cruel and unusual punishment within liberal legal regimes. Asad shows powerfully how out of sight is not out of mind. See Talal Asad, "On Torture, or Cruel, Inhuman, and Degrading Treatment," in Social Suffering, ed. Arthur Kleinman, Veena Das, and Margaret M. Lock (Berkeley, 1997), pp. 285-308
45. See U.S. Congress, "Personal Responsibility in Food Consumption Act of 2005," HR554, 109th Cong., 1st. sess., Congressional Record (19 Oct. 2005)
46. See also "Personal Responsibility in Food Consumption Act of 2005,"http://www.foodconsumer.org/777/8/printer-Personal-Responsibility-in- Food-Consumption-Act-of-2005.shtml
47. For a legal/cultural reading of this event, see Dahlia Lithwick, "My Big Fattening Greek Salad: Are French Fries the New Marlboros?" Slate, 14 Aug. 2003, www.slate.com/id/2086970/
48. See Laurie Tarkan, "Bananas? Maybe. Peas and Kale? Dream On," New York Times, 21 June 2005, www.nytimes.com/2005/06/21/health/nutrition/ 21pick.html?ex=1130126400&en= e8330837b26798fi&ei=5070
49. Melanie Warner, "California Wants to Serve a Health Warning with That Order," New York Times, 21 Sept. 2005, p. C1
50. and Roni Rabin, "Study or No, Fries Are Still Bad News," 20 Sept. 2005, p. B13
51. See also the response from business, "California's Low-Fact Diet," Investors Business Daily, www.ncpa.org/sub/dpd/index.php?page= article&Article-ID=2397
52. See World Health Organization, "Controlling the Global Obesity Epidemic," www.who.int/nut/obs.htm
53. "'Globesity' Gains Ground as Leading Killer: Weight Problems Spreading to Even Poorest Countries," 10 May 2005, msnbc.msn.com/id/ 4900095/
54. Geoff Dickson and Grant Schofield, "Globalisation and Globesity: The Impact of the 2008 Beijing Olympics on China," International Journal of Sport Management and Marketing 1, nos. 1-2 (2005): 169-79
55. and Eberwine, "Globesity."
56. Patricia Davidson, "Unequal Burden," www.kaisernetwork.org/ health-cast/uploaded-files/041103-nbwhp-morning.pdf
57. For wonderful analyses of addiction's disruption of the agency/intentionality phantasm, see High Anxieties: Cultural Studies in Addiction, ed. Janet Farrell Brodie and Mark Redfield (Berkeley, 2002)
58. "Fat Americans Getting Even Fatter: Extreme Obesity Is Ballooning in U.S. Adults," 14 Oct. 2003, www.cnn.com/2003/HEALTH/diet.fitness/10/13/ extreme.obesity.ap/index.html
59. See Roland Sturm, "Increases in Clinically Severe Obesity in the United States, 1986-2000," Archives of Internal Medicine, 13 Oct. 2003, pp. 2146-48
60. The UK is comparably described; see "Diet and Obesity in the UK," www.esrcsocietytoday.ac.uk/ESRCInfoCentre/facts/index55.aspx? ComponentId=12741&SourcePageId=6970
61. This increase is also being tracked among adolescents; see Richard A. Miech et al., "Trends in the Association of Poverty with Overweight among U.S. Adolescents, 1971-2004," JAMA, 24-31 May 2006, pp. 2385-93
62. See Gary Gardner and Brian Halweil, "Underfed and Overfed: The Global Epidemic of Malnutrition," Worldwatch (Mar. 2000), www.worldwatch.org/note/840
63. The pandemic nature of unhealthy overweight is registered in countless places. See research summaries in Sue Y. S. Kimm and Eva Obarzanek, "Childhood Obesity: A New Pandemic of the New Millennium," Pediatrics 110 (Nov. 2002): 1003-7
64. Barry M. Popkin, "Using Research on the Obesity Pandemic as a Guide to a Unified Vision of Nutrition," Public Health Nutrition 8 (Sept. 2005): 724-29
65. and Alexander R. P. Walker, "The Obesity Pandemic: Is It beyond Control?" Journal of the Royal Society for the Promotion of Health 123 (Sept. 2003): 150-51
66. While increasing homogeneity of food distribution in global urban and suburban contexts has made unhealthy weights a global medical concern, at the same time the norms of what constitutes evidence of bodily thriving remain resolutely local. See Natalie Angier, "Who Is Fat? It Depends on Culture," New York Times, 7 Nov. 2000, p. F1
67. A huge literature exists on the translocal impact of U.S. food policy and neoliberal market practices (often called reforms) on global food production. A good general introduction to the field is Tim Lang and Michael Heasman, Food Wars: The Global Battle for Mouths, Minds, and Markets (London, 2004). But for a sense of the texture of the debates, it is most instructive to track the series of reports on food production politics, policies, and consequences at the World Trade Organization and World Social Forum Meetings at alternet.org and opendemocracy.org
68. For a valuable European history of state and medical moralization around bodies as manifest in food, see Bryan S. Turner, "The Government of the Body: Medical Regimens and the Rationalization of Diet," British Journal of Sociology 33 (June 1982): 254-69
69. See Bernard Hicks, "America on the Move: The National Health Campaign for 2003," American Fitness (Jan.-Feb. 2003), www.findarticles. eom/p/articles/mi-m0675/is-1-21/ai-97115843
70. See Surgeon General, "The Surgeon General's Call to Action to Prevent and Decrease Overweight and Obesity," www.surgeongeneral.gov/ topics/obesity/
71. for the current emendations of Satcher's plan, see "Surgeon General: Obesity Rivals Tobacco as Health Ill," USA Today, 13 Dec. 2001, www.usatoday.com/news/health/diet/2001-12-12-obesity.htm
72. There is a vast clinical literature responding to this cluster of empirical claims; see, for example, JoAnn E. Manson et al., "The Escalating Pandemics of Obesity and Sedentary Lifestyle: A Call to Action for Clinicians," Archives of Internal Medicine, 9 Feb. 2004, pp. 249-58
73. Eric Schlosser, Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal (Boston, 2001), pp. 242-43
74. The literature on pangenerational disability from obesity and obesity-related illnesses is often focused on diabetes and hypertension. See for example the front-page New York Times series on diabetes: Ian Urbina, N. R. Kleinfield, and Marc Santora, "Bad Blood," New York Times, 9-12 Jan. 2006
75. and Melissa Scollan-Koliopoulos, "Consideration for Legacies about Diabetes and Self-Care for the Family with a Multigenerational Occurrence of Type 2 Diabetes," Nursing and Health Sciences 6 (Sept. 2004): 223-27
76. Harvey, "The Body as Accumulation Strategy," pp. 103, 104
77. The National Depression Screening Day website is www. mentalhealthscreening.org/events/ndsd/index.aspx. See also Miriam Jacobson, "The Epidemic of Obesity: The Costs to Employers and Practical Solutions," www.wbgh.com/pdf/costs.pdf
78. Mary Shomon, "National Depression Screening Day Offers Public an Open Invitation to Learn about Treatment Options, Expectations," thyroid.about.com/library/news/bldepressionscreen.htm
79. and Gregory E. Simon et al., "Depression and Work Productivity: The Comparative Costs of Treatment Versus Nontreatment," Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine 43 (Jan. 2001): 2-9
80. See, for example, the argument against setting "moral panic" versus the obesity epidemic in the blog Inquisition Twenty-First Century, www.inquisition21.com/article103.html?&MMN-position=78:78, and the hundred-plus articles on the libertarian Cato Institute website at www.catoinstitute.org, with titles such as "Obesity and 'Public Health'?" "Fat Scare Leads to Government Girth," "What You Eat is Your Business," and "Big Reasons for Fat Skepticism." Rush Limbaugh even blamed the obesity epidemic on the Left, the welfare state, and the United Nations; see "Limbaugh Blamed the Left for Obesity Crisis," 29 Aug. 2006, mediamatters.org/items/200608290013
81. There have been two "Declaration of the World Food Summit" instantiations, in 1996 and 2002. The archive of the transnational collaboration mostly among financially stressed nations, but including the United States, is located on the United Nations website at www.un.org/esa/devagenda/food.html. The U.S. government's speeches focus on bank financing of entrepreneurial initiatives. The 2002 declaration explicitly acknowledges that no progress is being made in the eradication of world poverty despite all of the money, planning, and good intentions directed toward that end at these meetings
82. All statistics on obesity are debated, especially those about children. See, for example, the special issue on the obesity epidemic of Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism 89 (June 2004),
83. featuring many articles focusing on the debate about how to diagnose and treat children. See especially Arnold H. Slyper, "The Pediatric Obesity Epidemic: Causes and Controversies," pp. 2540-47
84. These debates in the medical literature produce popular literature, such as Grant Pick, "Slim Chance," Chicago Tribune Magazine, 25 Apr. 2004, pp. 12-17, 26
85. and Harriet Brown, "Well-intentioned Food Police May Create Havoc with Children's Diets," New York Times, 30 May 2006, www.nytimes.com/2006/ 05/30/health/nutrition/30essa.html?ex=1306641600&en= 6af8d736ac0673bd& ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss
86. Kelly Brownell and Katherine Battle Horgen, Food Fight: The Inside Story of the Food Industry, America's Obesity Crisis, and What We Can Do about It (Chicago, 2004), p. 15; see pp. 23-24
87. There is a vast literature on constrained physical environments and the obesity increase; a good place to begin is the Obesity and the Built Environment website of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, www.niehs.nih.gov/drcpt/beoconf/home.htm
88. Marion Nestle and Michael F. Jacobson, "Halting the Obesity Epidemic: A Public Health Policy Approach," Public Health Reports 115 (Jan.-Feb. 2000), cspinet.org/reports/obesity.pdf
89. See U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, "Overweight and Obesity: What Can You Do," www.surgeongeneral.gov/topics/obesity/ calltoaction/fact-whatcanyoudo.htm
90. Greg Critser, Fat Land: How Americans Became the Fattest People in the World (Boston, 2003), p. 7
91. See Tim Wise, "Collateral Damage: Poor Whites and the Unintended Consequences of Racial Privilege," Z Magazine, 5 Oct. 2003, www.zmag.org/Sustainers/Content/2003-10/05wise.cfm
92. See Critser, Fat Land
93. Nestle, "Hunger in the United States: Policy Implications," in Food: A Reader, ed. Carole M. Counihan (New York, 2002), pp. 385-99
94. and United States Conference of Mayors, "A Status Report on Hunger and Homelessness in America's Cities 2001: A 27-City Survey," Dec. 2001, www.usmayors.org/uscm/hungersurvey/2001/hungersurvey2001.pdf
95. For counterarguments as to whether food insecurity is increasing - a debate about methods of measurement - see Mark Nord et al., "Household Food Security in the United States, 2000," www.ers.usda.gov/publications/ fanrr21. The important thing here is just to note that, in the contemporary United States, mass unhealth due to significant excess weight and mass hunger are not antithetical states or historical contradictions but propped strangely and perversely onto each other
96. See Joan Tilghman, "Obesity and Diabetes in African American Women," Journal of the Association of Black Nursing Faculty 14 (May-June 2003), www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi-moMJT/is-3-14/ai-103380683
97. See also David S. Freedman et al., "Racial and Ethnic Differences in Secular Trends for Childhood BMI, Weight, and Height," Obesity 14 (Feb. 2006): 301-8
98. See Virginia Wei-Win Chang, "The Social Stratification of Obesity: Bodily Assets and the Stylization of Health" (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 2003)
99. See Kenneth Adams et al., "Overweight, Obesity, and Mortality in a Large Prospective Cohort of Persons Fifty to Seventy-One Years Old," New England Journal of Medicine 355 (2006), content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/355/8/ 763
100. For a variety of comparisons among women's eating and mobility patterns, see Jeffrey Sobal and Albert J. Stunkard, "Socioeconomic Status and Obesity: A Review of the Literature," Psychological Bulletin 105 (Mar. 1989): 260-75
101. and Meg Lovejoy, "Disturbances in the Social Body: Differences in Body Image and Eating Problems among African American and White Women," Gender and Society 15 (Apr. 2001): 239-61
102. See also Chang, "U.S. Obesity, Weight Gain, and Socioeconomic Status," CHERP Policy Brief) (Fall 2005)
103. Chang and Diane S. Lauderdale, "Income Disparities in Body Mass Index and Obesity in the United States, 1971-2002," Archives of Internal Medicine, 10 Oct. 2005, pp. 2122-28
104. and Chang and Nicholas A. Christakis, "Income Inequality and Weight Status in U.S. Metropolitan Areas," Social Science and Medicine 61 (July 2005): 83-96. Chang's work alone demonstrates the lability of contemporary accounts of the class and racial indicators of overweight and obesity. In "U.S. Obesity, Weight Gain, and Socioeconomic Status," she argues that poverty-related obesity presents a variety of significant health-care challenges in the U.S. while at the same time she claims that the rate of increase in obesity currently varies significantly across class lines and locale and that middle-class nonwhites are increasing their degree of overweight faster than are the poor. In "Income Inequality and Weight Status in U.S. Metropolitan Areas," though, she and her coauthor note that varying degrees of economic inequality in different metropolitan areas do not much affect individuals' risk of obesity, except for white women, who continue to use weight status as a means of class mobility. The implication of the latter article is that income inequality in the U.S. does not create weight-related ill-health; but the implication of "Income Disparities in Body Mass Index and Obesity in the United States, 1971-2002" is that there is, nonetheless, a high correlation between individual income and unhealthy weight because the poor are indeed more likely to be significantly overweight than everyone else. This tension between causality and correlation is what creates much of the polemical and methodological debate over whether weight-related unhealthiness in the U.S. presents an epidemic, a problem, or even an interesting phenomenon
105. For a useful summary of the current literature, see Debra J. Brown, "Everyday Life for Black American Adults: Stress, Emotions, and Blood Pressure," Western Journal of Nursing Research 26, no. 5 (2004): 499-514
106. While the specter of shorter life has been tracked in the medical and popular press for awhile, the clearest current epidemiological representation of this phenomenon is S. Jay Olshansky et al., "A Potential Decline in Life Expectancy in the United States in the Twenty-First Century," New England Journal of Medicine, 17 Mar. 2005, pp. 1138-45
107. The popular debate continues. Just after the publication of Rob Stein, "Obesity May Stall Trend of Increasing Longevity," Washington Post, 17 Mar. 2005, p. A2
108. a counterargument was staged in W. Wayt Gibbs, "Obesity, an Overblown Epidemic?" Scientific American, 23 May 2005, www.sciam.com/print- version.cfm?articleID=000E5065-2345-128A-9E1583414B7F0000
109. See Dyann Logwood, "Food for Our Souls," in Body Outlaws: Young Women Write about Body Image and Identity, ed. Ophira Edut (Seattle, 1998), p. 98
110. For the general problem of disciplinary moralizing at vulnerable populations, see John Gilliom, Overseers of the Poor: Surveillance, Resistance, and the Limits of Privacy (Chicago, 2001)
111. on the specifically medical side, see Michael Fitzpatrick, The Tyranny of Health: Doctors and the Regulation of Lifestyle (London, 2001)
112. See Gremillion, "The Cultural Politics of Body Size"
113. and Sidney W. Mintz and Christine M. DuBois, "The Anthropology of Food and Eating," Annual Review of Anthropology 31 (Oct. 2002): 99-119 for surveys of size and eating motivation in the historical and anthropological disciplines
114. The seeming impossibility of not seeing behaviors as symptoms, as condensations and displacement, of "larger" social forces is striking. The symptom as case becomes a map of an historical field. It is always an expression of a social relation. For ethnographic or observational material that suggests otherwise, showing ingestion as an activity of self-abeyance, see David K. Shipler, The Working Poor: Invisible in America (New York, 2004)
115. and Jason DeParle, American Dream: Three Women, Ten Kids, and a Nation's Drive to End Welfare (New York, 2004). See also note 38
116. See Mariana Valverde, Diseases of the Will: Alcohol and the Dilemmas of Freedom (Cambridge, 1998)
117. For a beautifully written but even more self-contradictory performance of this perspective, see especially Elspeth Probyn, "Eating Sex," Carnal Appetites: FoodSexIdentities (London, 2000), pp. 59-77. Adapting Deleuze and Guattari's articulation of the sexual and the alimentary, Probyn argues paradoxically that eating is at once a performative part of the becoming X central to the ongoing undoing of the subject in assemblages of processual sensual activity and that the appetitive is nonetheless exemplary as a grounding site of self-discovery, self-confirmation, identity, and ethics
118. The "slow food" movement emerging in Europe in the 1990s responds to many of the environmental factors this essay details; along with its critique of neoliberal agricultural policies, it translates the impulsive improvisation around recalibrating the pacing of the day into a collective program for deliberative being in the world in a way opposed to the immediatist productive one of anxious capital. For a terrific analysis of the phenomenon, see Alison Leitch, "Slow Food and the Politics of Pork Fat: Italian Food and European Identity," Ethnos 68 (Dec. 2003): 437-62
119. See Lillian B. Rubin, Worlds of Pain: Life in the Working Class Family (New York, 1976)
120. and Jody Heymann, Forgotten Families: Ending the Growing Crisis Confronting Children and Working Parents in the Global Economy (Oxford, 2006)
121. See, for example, Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World (New York, 2001)