Hey I keep seeing that most of the gays in the gay community are well-toned. Are you not accepted as a fat person in the community or do they just not find that attractive? In spring 2020, an anonymous user turned to the collective intelligence of the German Q&A platform gutefrage.net expressing his personal concerns: “I’m overweight myself and afraid of not being accepted.” Responses from the online community depicted mixed sentiments: While some users affirmed the societal rejection of fat bodies, others countered by asserting that within the gay community, specifically for so-called “bears,” there is a designated place for fat male bodies. The “gay community” comprises social networks and places where homosexual men interact with each other and manifest shared…

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Darya, a 35-year-old PhD student in Florida who was born in Iran, shares a painful memory with me. At a New Year’s party, after she hadn’t seen her cousin in Tehran for three years and after an accident that had her gaining weight,  “instead of saying hi and how are you doing,” Darya explains, “she tells me, ‘Darya you’re exploding!,’ or let me say it in Farsi, ‘Darya, Natereki!’” Darya responded by justifying her body: “I said, ‘yeah, I’m gaining weight but I will be okay soon.’” After the party, Darya was very upset that she didn’t defend herself; she didn’t want to upset her mother. As she told her mother, “I didn’t answer her [cousin] and next time, I’m…

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Free will is the basic concept underpinning liberal capitalism. But it was only put fully into practice in the 1980s, when the state divested itself of responsibility in many ways and individuals were prompted to voluntarily take responsibility for themselves. The ethical principle of self-responsible voluntariness penetrated every sphere of life. Interestingly, this was exemplified by a group whose autonomy appeared to be suspendible by statute—prisoners. The German constitution or Basic Law repeatedly states that nothing should occur that is “against the will” of an individual. Free will is thus established ex negativo. The right to say no seems more important than the question of what exactly this will is. The Basic Law also states, just as vaguely, that everyone…

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Towards the end of the twentieth century the World Health Organization declared “obesity” a global epidemic. From 2001 onwards the term “globesity” came into use. “Globesity” is understood as a globally observable consequence of the spread of new “lifestyles” common in industrialized countries characterized by increased consumption of high-energy, industrially processed foodstuffs and low physical activity. According to this thesis, more and more people in the global North and increasingly also in the global South are “overweight” and suffer from “obesity,” measured by using the BMI. As “obesity” is classified as a risk factor for chronic, non-communicable diseases, “globesity” has been declared a public health crisis that threatens global society due to high healthcare costs and decreasing productivity. More recently,…

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In both contemporary medical and cultural discourse, a relationship between fatness and excess is often perceived to be self-evident. Being “overweight” is consistently connected to “overeating” and “overindulgence,” with the implication that if one simply ate less and practiced greater self-control they would lose weight and would stop being fat. Fat bodies may thus be perceived as transgressive since they are thought to transgress the norms of consumption. In the early modern period, however, the connection between excess and fat was not as straight-forward. While ideas about excess and excessive behavior permeated German-speaking society in the sixteenth century, excess was not always understood to result in fatness. Contemporary criticism of gluttony and drunkenness commented on the effects of such vices…

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