Questions to Consider While Reading

Are you on a diet? Why?
Is dieting a form of empowerment or of social control? Try to connect your answer to your own experiences as well as to the readings.

Readings

Please read at last two of the following:

Bartky, Sandra Lee, ‘Foucault, Femininity, and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power’, Feminism and Foucault: Paths of Resistance, eds. Lee Quinby and Irene Diamond (1988).

Biltekoff, Charlotte, Eating Right in America (Durham, 2013), Chapter 5: 'Thinness as Health'*.

Brumberg, Joan Jacob, ‘The Appetite as Voice’, Food and Culture: A Reader, ed. Carole Counihan and Penny Van Esterik (New York, 1997).
Orbach, Susie, Fat is a Feminist Issue (New York, 1978), prologue.
Vester, Katharina, ‘Regime Change: Gender, Class, and the invention of Dieting in Post-Bellum America’, Journal of Social History 44:1 (2010).*

* Sign into the Warwick Libray cataogue to access the electronic version.

To Learn More

Dacome, Lucia, ‘“Useless and Pernicious Matter”: Corpulence in Eighteenth-Century Britain’, in A. Carden-Coyne and C. Forth (eds.), Cultures of the Abdomen: Diet, Digestion and Fat in the Modern World (New York, 2005).

Earle, Rebecca, 'Queen Victoria's Appetite', BBC History Extra, 2017 (and apologies for the sensationalist headline that BBC Histroy Extra imposed.)

Evans, Bethan, ‘Challenging Assumptions: Re-Thinking ‘the Obesity Problem’’ Geography 95:2 (2010)

Farrell, Amy Erdman, Fat Shame: Stigma and the Fat Body in American Culture (New York, 2011).

Forth, C., and A. Carden-Coyne, eds., Cultures of the Abdomen: Diet, Digestion and Fat in the Modern World (Houndmills, 2005).

Jacobs, Andrew, and Matt Richtel, 'How Big Business got Brazil Hooked on Junk Food', New York Times, 16 Sept. 2017.

Julier, Alice, ‘The Political Economy of Obesity: The Fat Pays All' Food and Culture: a reader, eds. Carole Counihan and Penny van Esterik (New York, 2008).

Nestle, Marion, Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health (Berkeley, 2007), Introduction.*

Ogden, Jane, 'Eating Disorders and Obesity: Symptoms of a Modern World', The Handbook of Food Research, eds. Anne Murcott, Warren Belasco and Peter Jackson (London, 2013).

Orbach, Susie, Hunger Strike: Starving Amidst Plenty (New York, 2001).

Schwartz, Hillel, Never Satisfied: A Cultural History of Diets, Fantasies and Fat (1986).

Solovay, Sondra, and Esther Rothblum, eds., The Fat Studies Reader (New York, 2009).

Stearns, Peter, Fat History: Bodies and Beauty in the Modern West (New York, 1997).

Turner, B.S., ‘The Government of the Body: Medical Regimens and the Rationalization of Diet’, British Journal of Sociology 33:2 (1982), 254-69.*

Walker, Sarai, Dietland (2015).

* Sign into the Warwick Libray cataogue to access the electronic version.