Dieting, Sex, Jesus: The Body as Moral Battleground
January 3, 2012
Seeking the Straight and Narrow: Weight Loss and Sexual Reorientation in Evangelical America
by Lynne Gerber
University of Chicago Press , 2011
What inspired you to write Seeking the Straight and Narrow?
This book is the result of a few different interests coming together in one project. The first is an ongoing interest I’ve had in body size and fat politics. I had been engaged in fat activist community, conversation, and action for a number of years and I wanted to take the opportunity that academic work provides to really hone in on questions that always engaged me: how has fatness come to have such a potent moral charge in American culture? Why do weight loss practices such as dieting generate such strong moral and religious feelings—and why do people use languages of virtue and vice, sin and salvation—to talk about them? And how do fat people navigate the highly moralized webs within which they live their lives?
I wanted to contribute to a critical analysis of fatness in American culture. But I didn’t want to focus just on fatness. I was very aware of how difficult it is for most people to develop and maintain a critical perspective on this issue, especially when words like “health,” “morbidity,” and “death” are raised; words that are often halt critical thinking about fat in its tracks. So I was in search of a case or an issue that would be a productive conversation partner with fatness.
Another inspiration for the project was some reading I wasdoing in social theory and specifically the work of Pierre Bourdieu. In writing about social movements in general, and feminism in particular, Bourdieu says that movements for change need to focus not only on consciousness (and consciousness-raising) but to intervene in the bodily practices that are part and parcel of how social power works. In reading that I remembered a documentary film I had seen on the ex-gay movement, One Nation Under God. The film documents the movement and tells the story of two early leaders of that movement who renounced it after they fell in love. Knowing very little about the ex-gay movement at the time and remembering the scenes of butch women getting makeovers as part of changing their sexual orientation, I thought that ex-gay ministries would be an interesting case for testing Bourdieu’s idea, raising the challenge of what happens when bodies prove less malleable to social intervention than his theory suggests.
http://www.religiondispatches.org/books/rd10q/5511/dieting,_sex,_jesus:_the_body_as_moral_battleground/
Lynne Gerber is a scholar in residence with the Beatrice Bain Research Group at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of Seeking the Straight and Narrow: Weight Loss and Sexual Reorientation in Evangelical America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).
= new reply since forum marked as read
