The BMI Project by Shapely Prose

ladysquires — Thu, 21 Apr 2011 13:38:52 +0000

(Image Credit: Kate Harding, Shapely Prose)

The special guest contribution I had planned for this week is not quite ready (but should be soon!), so here's a quick preview of some of the themes we'll be exploring on bodies and visibility.

As I said in my post on childhood obesity campaigns, increasing access to healthy food and exercise is a public health and social justice goal that is worth aggressively pursuing. However, too often efforts at doing so tend to target bodies that do not conform to ideals of healthy appearance rather than encouraging healthy behaviors or promoting access to the means of engaging in those behaviors. The affect is the stigmatization of non-conforming bodies, which is, of course, counter to the goals of promoting diversity and treating all human beings as persons entitled to respect and bodily autonomy. It also tends to encourage hypocrisy, as it is possible to have a body that "looks" healthy but really isn't. As my post on Schultz and Ornstein's The Athlete showed, we often have a very narrow conception of what a high-functioning body looks like.

The slide show above has been hosted on the Shapely Prose blog for a few years now, but it is still one of my favorite visuals representations of body diversity and the skewed notions we have of what normality and abnormality look like. Enjoy.

viz. - Shapely Prose

The BMI Project by Shapely Prose