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Visual Rhetoric - Visual Culture - Pedagogy
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The BMI Project
Submitted by mkhaupt on Mon, 2007-10-22 00:02
Fat-acceptance activist/blogger Kate Harding has assembled a collection of photographs to illustrate "how ridiculous the BMI really is." Each photo title states the person's BMI status (underweight, normal, obese, and morbidly obese), and the range of representations is both shocking and breathtaking. My favorite is Moxie, the morbidly obese cat with a BMI of 58.6.
What I really love about this collection is that not only does it challenge the arbitrary categorizations of what it means to be "normal" or "morbidly obese" (one woman in that painful category is pictured at a Tai Chi tournament in Japan), but it also challenges the individual's conceptions of what those categories represent. For example, a "normal" individual may actually look "underweight," while many of the "obese" (such a loaded term) women are, to put it bluntly, smokin' hot. And then there is Shauna Marsh Reid, who has lost fully half of her body weight, going from 352 pounds to 176, extensively documented here, yet still falls under the BMI category of "overweight." Despite the fact that she is healthier than she has ever been in her life, the lack of context inherent to the BMI works to condemn her as still somehow unacceptable. Tags:
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:D
Really nice article...don't forget to feed em! :D
Great blog; I stumbled on
Great blog; I stumbled on this. Thanks for this entry.
I read something recently in the geography literature that compared the new "medicalization" of obesity (i.e., that fatness is a disease) to earlier social movements of temperance. In times when temperance was promoted as a big health issue, it was partly because doctors were indeed worried about the health effects of alcohol, but in large part due to their own feelings about _morality_.
So, focusing on fat bodies as if they are deviant, sinful, lazy, gluttonous could arguably come as much from the perceptions of morality than any real proven health concerns (the jury is still out, for example, whether obesity CAUSES diabetes, heart disease, etc., OR the other way around....).
Everyone's Obese
I just think "obese" is the most ridiculous term. According to these classifications, I know a lot of people who are obese, and I would never associate their lifestyles with the horribly unhealthy ones conjured by that term. This collection of photos makes that argument very clearly. When I think of someone that's obese, I do not picture the women who were labeled that way in this collection.