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California State University, Dominguez Hills
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Created: May 15, 2003
Latest Update: May 17, 2003
jeannecurran@habermas.org
takata@uwp.edu

Revision of First Draft Outline on
The Social construction of Obesity

By Millie Coulter
Jeanne Curran, Faculty Advisor

Millie, you've got a very long outline here. And it's kind of scattered. Let's try to tighten it up. First, you jump right into "Discrimination against obese people." But remember that we did this outline by quizzing you on what most concerned you about obesity and what you wanted to accomplish, after all your prior study. The way your thesis is going to begin is with an Introduction and Theoretical Background. And right in the beginning we will need to state the problem. Aha! The problem is "Discrimination against obese people."

Now I started by Calling the first section Theoretical Background, because that's what status characteristic theory and essentialism are. Then I added "other theories, for there are many we've talked about that just didn't come up in that discussion a week ago.

Outline:

1. Theoretical Background

   Discrimination against obese people. This means that obesity is a status characteristic by which people are judged.

   • Status characteristic theory -- essentialism Foucault against essentialism
   • Foucault and Chomsky Michael Daniel's article. Particularly obesity as "essentialism."
   • Other theories.
   * * * * *

   Then when I got here to "What is obesity?" I realized that we should probably fit that in front of the Theoretical Background, because you can't just jump in and start talking about theory. You've got to tell people what the problem is first. Aha! That's the Introduction. So I changed the title to "Introduction and Theoretical Background".

2. Introduction and Theoretical Background

   Now we can start with:

   • What is obesity?

     1. History of Obesity within the US.

     Link that to the cultural elements that go with obesity in US.

   • The Causes of Obesity

     1. Herditary
     2. Emotional - comfort food
     3. Food as a Commodity - the "cool" "in food

   • Obesity and Discrimination

     1. Size - Health and emotional consequences
     2. Cause as visible stigma - for example, frequent consumption of comfort foods - that's visible- theory reference Goffman, Stigma.

   • Obesity as a Disability

     Do you really want to go very deeply into this? It seems to take us away from the social construction of obesity.

III. The Image that Is Projected from the Media

IV. Positive Ways to Respond to Obesity

I changed this from Obesity Treatment, which sounded like it fell into the old way of looking at obesity.

1. Recognize the built-in judgmental nature of this category as we classify obesity as a disease.

2. Only recently have we come to understand that obesity is harmful to health. One approach is to respond with caring to a recently recognized illness. Not to blame someone for having an illness we didn't even know existed.

3. Share with others who have learned to see past the pounds.

V. Recommendation for Avoiding Obesity

Do you really need to go there? Remember you can't cover the whole topic of obesity. That's enormous. Stick to what you most want to say.

VI. Recommendations for Re-Interpreting Food and Its Role in our Lived Experience

Now this sounds more like what you really want to hit on because this IS social construction par excellence.

VII. Conclusions

jeanne's comments on the next step.