CFP: Special Issue of SSJ: The Social Construction of Fat

The Social Construction of Fat

Call for papers for a Special Issue of SSJ.

Guest Editor: Margaret Carlisle Duncan, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

The Social Construction of Fat:

This special issue calls for manuscripts that focus on a sociological treatment of fat and the fat body, including its biomedical construction as obese or overweight—and hence, fundamentally unhealthy—; its social construction as morally suspect, self-indulgent, undisciplined, out of control, lazy, greedy, and repellent; and the social meanings that people attribute to the “obesity epidemic.”

Obesity is a salient theme in both popular writing and in scientific research these days. One can hardly pick up a newspaper or journal without seeing some reference to this fearsome “epidemic that’s sweeping the country” which, we are told, affects fully two-thirds of the adult population and increasing numbers of children. Experts
offer dire warnings, predicting that in 2050, 100 percent of the American population will be overweight or obese. The grave pronouncements by a string of Surgeons General beginning with C. Everett Koop continuing up to the present, and by the CDC lend official credibility to such warnings. Novels such as Wally Lamb’s, She’s Come Undone, Margaret Atwood’s Lady Oracle, Jennifer Weiner’s Good in Bed and, more humorously, Bridget Jones’s Diary and The End of Reason suggest Western culture’s obsession with body ideals and reveal the difficulty of being fat in a society that reveres thin, hard physiques. With the exception of Gard and Wright’s The Obesity Epidemic: Science, Morality and Ideology, few full-dress treatments of fat as a sociological phenomenon and its relationship to physical activity and/or body culture have occurred.

Possible Topics:

All submissions must be scholarly analyses grounded in sociological theory and be connected in some way to sport , exercise, physical activity, leisure and/or body culture. This issue will consider empirical (data-based) papers and new theoretical approaches relating to overweight, obesity, and fat. Possible topics for scholarly sociological analysis include (but are not limited to) the intersection of fat with sexuality, disability, race, ethnicity, class, and age; the globalization of fat; fat as cultural habitus; the fat body as transgressive spectacle; fat and the panoptic gaze, the medicalization of fat; social movements such as “fat but fit,” the obesity epidemic as a moral panic; fat activism and sport; fat practices and representations, and, other subjects that explicitly address fat as a sociological construction and articulate its relationship to physical activity.

Submissions

Manuscripts must be submitted to http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/hk_ssj
All manuscripts must follow the editorial guidelines identified in the Sociology of Sport Journal's Instructions for Contributors and will be subject to the usual blinded review process. Authors must indicate in their cover letter that this manuscript is being submitted for the special issue.

Deadline for submission: March 1, 2007.

For more information contact: Margaret Carlisle Duncan at
mduncan@uwm.edu.