Compromise!

First, I would like to apologize for my mini outburst in class. I felt it was something we were all confused about. The “it” in that sentence refers to coming to terms with the criticism we’ve recently heard about the medical paradigm in treating disability. Mia Mingus’ presentation was interesting in that it was a first person account related to Susan Wendell’s ideas of fixing society instead of disabled individuals, but we all seemed perplexed as to why it can only be a social paradigm or medical paradigm as a solution. In this piece too, Kathleen Lebsco’s and Jana Evans Braziel’s introduction to their book, was equally as related, but did a better job synthesizing the material for me and helping me resolve my confusion. Like Wendell, they began with introducing fatness or corpulence as a social construct, commenting on its differences from race and gender because it is a choice in order to further explain the cultural taboo of “being fat.” They comment on the horrible truth that people really do view obesity as one’s choice, as a sign of recklessness, irresponsibility, and lack of self control. In making this observation, they also discuss how fat is an aberration from normality, and moreover, some sort of transgression of space and not only of “healthy” choices. All of these points made sense to me, but it was harder for me to see science as a bad guy in this case. In past discussions, it was easy to discern how standpoint and bias plays a role in science, but in this case, it seemed like science and medicine could eradicate the myths that fatness and obesity stems from “wrong” choices; it seemed like medicine, instead of validating these myths like we’ve seen in other cases in the course, was shifting the blame off the individual. While I have some problems with the NIH’s method of categorizing bodies as healthy or unhealthy, I agree with Ashley that obesity is inherently different than sciences of race or gender or disabilities because it is something that can actually be dangerous. Our country has in some way built this problem through socioeconomic influences and has categorized it as a problem, and now we must help those who suffer. It’s one thing to treat them unfairly, as aberrations, or as irresponsible individuals, but seeing as how obesity is a disease with health repercussions, research should also be done to see how to help. Maybe it’s too early to tell if this is just a social construct like race or gender, allowing people later to perhaps marginalize and even dehumanize those who suffer, or maybe I’m naïve, or maybe we need to find a balance between social reform and medical reform. I agree that fat phobia or fat-oppression are very bad results of social perception that need to be rectified, and that we should build this world to be more understanding of the overweight, but we should also strive for better healthcare, a reformed medical industry without greed, and better solutions for people who truly do need them to live a fuller, healthful life.