The body economic: The case of ‘childhood obesity’

Recently, ‘obesity epidemic’ discourses have begun to focus on the ‘problem’ of ‘childhood obesity.’ Notwithstanding the fact that it is not clear that childhood obesity is a serious health problem, individual fat children are increasingly being targeted by anti-obesity interventions, despite the significant emotional and physical risks inherent in such measures. In order to understand why this is occurring, I operationalise Dorothy E Smith’s (1999) theory of ruling relations in order to draw out the ideological basis and implications of mediated textual representations. Drawing from Law and Mol’s (2002) work on case study methodologies and Titchkosky’s (2007: 23) assertion that the texts we encounter in everyday life ‘are our world,’ I analyse three appearances of the ‘childhood obesity epidemic’ discourse within articles from online news sources. I find that the world constructed within these articles is one in which fat children’s bodies are understood as economic problems, and the children themselves ...