Description
This paper explores how the political economy of poverty might be understood in terms of body politics, and discourses of the fat body in particular. Focusing on the case of the UK as one of the most economically unequal of the world's wealthy countries, the paper examines how the poor have been singled out as particularly susceptible to obesity at the exact same historical moment that hunger is on the rise due to the combined effects of austerity and Covid-19. Although a number of scholars have highlighted the centrality of distinctions between ‘responsible’ and ‘irresponsible’ citizens to neoliberal discourse and policy, scant attention has been devoted to the question of the body – and especially the fat body – in shaping these distinctions. Our aim is to show how the ongoing privatisation of public wealth has itself been made thinkable through appeals to the poor as excessive, profligate, and overweight – appeals that have also been deployed as metaphors for the state itself as overly cumbersome and ‘flabby’. Indeed, discourses surrounding fatness (from the fat individual to the fat nation) form an integral part of the logics through which the material condition of poverty – including endemic hunger – is being produced. By drawing out the connections between obesity and hunger, the paper offers a distinctive contribution to contemporary debates about poverty, neoliberalism, and the body politics of contemporary capitalism.
