Fatness and the Maternal Body: Women's Experiences of Corporeality and the Shaping of Social Policy

Obesity is a rising global health problem. On the one hand a clearly defined medical condition, it is at the same time a corporeal state embedded in the social and cultural perception of fatness, body shape and size. Focusing specifically on the maternal body, contributors to the volume examine how the language and notions of obesity connect with, or stand apart from, wider societal values and moralities to do with the body, fatness, reproduction and what is considered 'natural'. A focus on fatness in the context of human reproduction and motherhood offers instructive insights into the global circulation and authority of biomedical facts on fatness (as 'risky' anti-fit, for example). As with other social and cultural studies critical of health policy discourse, this volume challenges the spontaneous connection being made in scientific and popular understanding between fatness and ill health.

Author: Maya Unnithan-Kumar
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Published: 07/01/2011
Pages: 246
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.10lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.63d
ISBN: 9780857451224

Review Citation(s):
Reference and Research Bk News 10/01/2011 pg. 241

About the Author
Unnithan-Kumar, Maya: -

Maya Unnithan-Kumar is Reader in Social Anthropology at the University of Sussex. She is currently leading an Economic and Social Research Council (UK)-funded research project on state-NGO relations as defined by their engagement with human rights discourse in the fields of sexual, maternal and reproductive health in India.

Tremayne, Soraya: -

Soraya Tremayne is a social anthropologist and the Founding Director of the Fertility and Reproduction Studies Group and a Research Associate at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Oxford. For the past twelve years, she has carried out research on reproduction and sexuality in Iran. Her current research focuses on assisted reproductive technologies and Islam in Iran.