viz. - obesity

Beyonce: Let's Move Campaign and Inter-cultural Rhetorics

noelradley — Sat, 30 Apr 2011 21:24:24 +0000

H/T Beverly Mireles

The Beyonce video above was launched this month as a part of Michelle Obama's "Let's Move Campaign" on behalf of the National Association of Broadcasters. The video mobilizes inter-cultural rhetorics in support of public health, most obviously with the shift mid-video from hip hop to Latino-inflected dance moves and music. The 'flash workout' indicates the need for solidarity among minority populations most affected by the state of food and exercise culture in America. Healthy bodies and race relations, the video communicates, are the same cause. The flag waving at the end of the video underlines a populist appeal.

Of course, it's not so simple as Michelle Obama , Beyonce, or the NAB would have it. The class signals in the main video, such as the cafeteria workers joining the flash dance, seem wishful thinking. The young women in the "Behind the Scenes" video talk about their unhealthy diets with self-reflection, but it doesn't seem the problem gets solved with Beyonce flippantly (petulantly?) taking a bite from an apple in the main vid.

For the most part Beyonce's fully energized and empowered movement authenticates what would otherwise a paradoxical performance as school girl. The school girl costuming becomes a way for Beyonce to occupy and enable--rather than exploit--the nubile teen sexuality of the young people participating. And although for a lot of the video it's hard to see past Beyonce to the young bodies moving behind and beside her, there are some grainy shots of the young subjects taking their own videos with flip cameras. These few shots keep the flash mob from merely becoming Beyonce's glorified back up dancers. All in all, it's not perfect, but I think it's definitely salvageable and interesting cultural work.

Fast Food Morality

Michael Widner — Tue, 26 Apr 2011 12:30:00 +0000

Image via Fast Food FAILS Ads vs Reality

Appetizing, right? This image comes from one of several websites devoted to examining the differences between fast food as-advertised and as-is. These sites make the same argument: the ads promise fresh, attractive food, but what you get when you buy it fulfills the worst fears of the fast-food consumer. These photographs are the equivalent of showing how images of cover models are photoshopped for magazines. They imply that the companies who push such disappointing food are dishonest cheats.

The distortions of ads ties into a larger complex of concerns surrounding the marketing and consumption of fast food. San Fransisco, for instance, recently banned McDonald's from selling its Happy Meals to protect children ("Won't somebody think of the children?") from the pernicious effects of the toy-waving, high calorie junk food. The toy always rides on other heavily-marketed children's fare, mostly movies. The accumulated force is, many argue, too much for kids or parents to withstand. The child-consumer, like the adult duped by unrealistic ads, is a mindless, uncritical consumer of media and food, drawn in by doodads, bright colors, and that clown. Our mission, then, should be to teach the young how to parse marketing.

Picture of a McDonald's Happy Meal via "The War on Happiness: Leave Happy Meals Alone", The Atlantic

Screenshot of happymeal.com

Instead, we shame them. As other viz bloggers have noted (see Bodies of Evidence, Bodies vs Behavior: The Problems with Childhood Obesity Campaigns, and Lee Price and Exposed Eating), conversations about eating and ways to combat obesity often impute some moral defect to the subjects because of their bodies. The obese, such arguments go, blindly follow the dictates of ads and yet also rational agents whom we should blame for their unhealthy bodies. Even if PSAs don't verbally blame and shame the child, images of fat kids are held up for warning and mockery. Commentary often vocally does blame the parents for their moral failings and poor parenting.

Image via McDonalds Sued Over Happy Meals

The sarcasm from the Mitchieville blog encapsulates this judgement:

McDonald’s really does make it hard to say no to my legitimate children. I’ve tried feeding them food straight from the fridge, but apparently kids’ don’t like ice cubes and mustard for dinner. So then my kids’ catch a McDonald’s commercial on the tube – the same tube they had been watching for 10 straight hours – and they start up with their blathering nonsense about how they would love a hamburger and fries.

Parents who give in to their childrens' demands for Happy Meals are the same neglectful parents who plop their tots in front of the tv 10 hours a day, yet another moral failure.

The link between body and morality is not limited to children and fast food, however, as the Christian Diet movement shows:

Globe cover via Miss Plump Universenet

Several recent books imply that obesity is not only unhealthy, but a sin (e.g., Dieting for God and I Prayed Myself Slim). The correspondence between body and soul is easy and clear. If you do good works (i.e., eat healthy and exercise), your body will reflect it. If you sin by giving in to the deceiver and overeat, your "crime" will out as fat.

But like the habits these ideologies attack, the equivalence of body with soul is temporarily satisfying, ultimately unhealthy, and too convenient.

Reboot: Bodies of Evidence by Emily Bloom

noelradley — Tue, 19 Apr 2011 13:22:34 +0000

Image Credit: The Museum of Fat Love

H/T: Layne Craig

Amidst massive media coverage of the “obesity epidemic,” visual arguments have emerged online that challenge the terms of the current debate. One example is the website, The Museum of Fat Love, which presents a collection of photographs of smiling couples. Similarly, Newsweek ran a series of photographs on their website titled“Happy, Heavy and Healthy” in which readers submitted pictures of themselves performing athletic feats. Both websites called for volunteers to submit evidence that individuals classified as overweight or obese can live healthy, happy lives. The use of visuals in both instances is striking—both websites are predicated on the understanding that overweight individuals have been misunderstood (perhaps even vilified) in the course of public debates on obesity and public health.

These photo collections led me to consider representations of obesity in other media and, particularly, the cropped photographs that feature so regularly on local nightly new programs. Why is it that obesity is so often represented by a headless body? Although the obvious answer is to protect the identity of these individuals, such images paint an eerily dehumanized portrait of obesity. The obesity debate has created a strange visual rhetoric that photographic montages such as The Museum of Fat and “Happy, Heavy and Healthy” may be attempting to reorient.

Image Credit: MSNBC

In a recent article in Slate Magazine, "Glutton Intolerance," Daniel Engber argues that social stigmas against overweight individuals are not only deplorable but may actually cause the health problems associated with obesity. Citing a study by epidemiologist Peter Muennig, Engber writes that weight discrimination contributes to the stress-related illnesses that are generally attributed to obesity. If weight-stigma is itself a public health “epidemic” then perhaps visual evidence for active, well-loved plus-size people may perform an important function in undermining stigmas and, thereby, relieving dangerous stress.

Bloom's Original Post from October 6, 2009.

Bodies of Evidence

EmilyBloom — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 20:16:14 +0000

Image Credit: The Museum of Fat Love

H/T: Layne Craig

Amidst massive media coverage of the “obesity epidemic,” visual arguments have emerged online that challenge the terms of the current debate. One example is the website, The Museum of Fat Love, which presents a collection of photographs of smiling couples. Similarly, Newsweek ran a series of photographs on their website titled “Happy, Heavy and Healthy” in which readers submitted pictures of themselves performing athletic feats. Both websites called for volunteers to submit evidence that individuals classified as overweight or obese can live healthy, happy lives. The use of visuals in both instances is striking—both websites are predicated on the understanding that overweight individuals have been misunderstood (perhaps even vilified) in the course of public debates on obesity and public health.

Image Credit: MSNBC

The BMI Project

mkhaupt — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 05:02:27 +0000

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.