Big Food and the Body Politics of Personal Responsibility

摘要

Under the threat of obesity-related legal claims, food industry advocates have responded with rhetorical efforts to articulate obesity to a body politics of “personal responsibility.” This article extends Laclau and Mouffe's (1985) theory of articulation to Foucault's (1977) spectacle of the scaffold to critique verbal and visual articulatory efforts that position “personal responsibility” alongside social values such as “common sense” and “consumer choice” and against a shamed fat body. The article offers an extended critique of publicity campaigns by the Center for Consumer Freedom in which the fat body is used as an object of disdain and ridicule—a shaming signifier deployed to silence suggestions that the food industry bear some responsibility for American obesity.