The article below is the original first submission of my academic article which appeared in Elena Levy-Navarro’s collection, Historicizing Fat in Anglo-American Culture (2010). I’m pleased to see the article has ended up on some readings lists at universities, and has had some very positive responses from some reviewers – but it’s still a hard essay to come by. For this reason, I’m posting this early draft here- if you find this interesting, I recommend tracking down Elena Levy-Navarro’s book here: Historicising Fat in Anglo American Culture which also has the final version of the essay, itself including some more references and a slight update.
Meanwhile, this was the last ‘scholarly’ essay I wrote, in 2009. SOme of it’s still relevant, although of course, there is one massive difference. That is the move from a Labour, to a Tory/ Liberal Democrat, to a full-on Tory Government. I’ve scribbled some notes about this in the next post.
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Greedy Bastards: Fat Kids, Class War, and the Ideology of Classlessness
Alex Evans, 2010. Pre-publication first draft. Originally published in Elena Navarro Levy (ed.) Historicizing Fat in Anglo-American Culture. Columbus Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 2010.
‘We donnot want dainties, we want bellyfuls; we donnot want gimcrack coats and waistcoats, we want warm clothes; and so that we get ’em, we’d not quarrel wi’ what they’re made on.’
‘John Barton’ in Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Barton (2000: 247).
Introduction: learning a lifestyle
Judgments of ‘healthy’ food so often manifest a moral basis – as Miller notes, ‘a calorie of sugar from fruit is morally superior to a Twinkie calorie’ (109). And as Miller himself later intimates, the particular morality at work here often has its basis in the significations of class, itself increasingly morally scripted since the rise of the protestant middle classes in Western societies. Popular ciphers for the social problems of obesity have long been certain kinds of food, and in particular, those of the sort perceived to be consumed most of all by working class people: we need only consider the covers of endless books and magazines about the horrors of obesity to discover that the cultural culprits are hamburgers, pizzas, French fries, and so on. And the shock-power of these images is surely as much the perceived vulgarity of this diet as it is the actual nutritional content of the food. Consider a recent episode of US TV series Top Chef, a show in which chefs competitively prepare meals to certain specifications to win a grand prize and title. In one episode, teams of chefs were asked to produce a low calorie meal for children, conscripted by their parents into Camp Glucose, a summer camp designed to discipline and correct the aberrant eating behaviour of overweight children. The Black Team produce a Sausage and Cheese Pizza, Melon and Berry Skewers, a Meringue (‘Crispy’) Cookie with Peanut Butter and Bananas, and a Mixed Berry Lemonade (440 calories per serving). The Orange Team, meanwhile, produced Spiced Turkey Meatballs, Roasted Corn on the Cob, and a Summer Fruit Smoothie (453 calories per serving). The kids plump for the pizza and cookie – and the Orange Team chefs are irritated by the wholesale rejection of their food. Asked by the judges why they made, of all the godforsaken things, turkey meatballs for a bunch of food-loving, ravenous, exercise-ragged kids, Carlos huffs:
‘Maybe they have to learn that they can’t always have the pizza. This is about learning a lifestyle’.
Why is it, then, that a lower calorie meal which features the pizza is considered less acceptable? It is almost as if the food performs the function of magic: the ritual significations of ‘lifestyle’ foods, their symbolic utterances, are imagined to have greater consequences than their materially identifiable nutritional content. But the effects the foods are presumed to produce do indeed have something to do with the ‘material’ – albeit not in a directly corporeal mode. Rather, the signifying characteristics of food in practices of consumption are routinely used in the practices of social classification: as Pierre Bourdieu reminds us, ‘tastes’ – artistic, cultural, and of course, gastronomic – function as legitimations, justifications and naturalisations of socio-economic difference (1984: 7). Perhaps particularly because Camp Glucose is expensive,[1] and as such, even if the conscripted kids are likely to be predominantly ‘middle class’, the horror Carlos feels in their choice of food has little to do with the body and its ‘health’, and perhaps everything to do with how that body –social and corporeal – might be (re-?) classified by its lifestyle, that is, by its taste. And such classifications may at least be perceived to have very material consequences: there is always, famously, that ‘fear of falling’ (Ehrenreich, 1990). For all that I want to counsel here, as does Bourdieu, against the subjectivist fallacy of class – that class is solely about perception – the fact is that how we are classified through the perceptions of others may provoke a great deal of anxiety in societies which believe in the endless malleability, and hence, individualised moral responsibility, of socio-economic status.
The fat material
There may be a temptation to see the body as somehow separated from issues of class: indeed, this may be a problem in the formative source materials of leftist critique, since Marxist theory appears to all but ignore the physical body. The ‘material’ for Marx, after all, is the social and economic – and that might be seen by some to ‘transcend’ the individual flesh of the body. Of course, this is simply a question of overt focus: not least, Marx’s materialism is based on the necessity of bodily survival, albeit through an assertion that this is achieved, and hence should be analysed, socially. Importantly, however, the ‘materiality’ of the body has been a subject of some focus for gender theorists, and studies of fat have already converged, of course, around the body as site of inscription. But any close study of body shape and class will also reveal that the fat body is an intensive site at which the relation of socio-economic and bodily materiality become most apparent. As Bourdieu points out in his epochal work, Distinction,
Taste, a class culture turned into nature, that is, embodied, helps to shape the class body. It is an incorporated principle of classification which governs all forms of incorporation, choosing and modifying everything that the body ingests and digests and assimilates, physiologically. It follows that the body is the most indisputable materialization of class taste, which manifests in several ways. It does this first in the seemingly most natural features of the body, the dimensions (volume, height, weight) and shapes (round or square, stiff or supple, straight or curved) of its visible forms, which express in countless ways a whole relation to the body, i.e. a way of treating it, caring for it, feeding it, maintaining it, which reveals the deepest dispositions of the habitus. [..] It is in fact through preferences with regard to food which may be perpetuated beyond their social conditions of production (as, in other areas, an accent, a walk, etc.), and also, of course, through the uses of the body in work and leisure which are bound up with them, that the class distribution of bodily properties is determined (Bourdieu, 190).
Any body, then, is always an embodiment of (amongst other things) socio-economically fashioned habitus. And as such, it is also a place in which class seems most intensely to become ‘naturalised’. Not, of course, there is anything unquestionably ‘natural’ about the production of the body: it is always a site of discursive production and inscription, even if a central problem for feminists has been that the body always has its social inscription effaced and overwritten by its apparent pre-existence of discourse. And yet, there is more here than simply the fact that, as Judith Butler points out, ‘bodies only appear, only endure, only live within the productive constraints of certain […] regulatory schemas’ (xi) – we must also recognise that socio-economically classed bodies are routinely physically produced – corporeally, at the root of the flesh itself – by systemic regimes of power.[2] It is all very well, then, to argue in post-structuralist fashion that eating and body shape should be analysed purely on the basis of discursive formulations – but to ignore the fact that the availability of a wide range of foods and the potential for any kind of choice is precisely limited by socio-economic position – and the habitus which precedes, and may even outlive, such factors – would surely be to turn a blind eye to a massive source of injustice which often has very physical effects, one of which is to produce the bodily condition(s) referred to as ‘obesity’.[3] Looking at the fat, classed, body, what we find is always, as Foucault reminds us, ‘a body totally imprinted by history’ (1984: 83) – but it is so as much in its fleshy material production as in its discursive constitution. And there is the exercise of social control and inequity at the level of both material and discursive production, as bodies produced by material conditions which are reinforced by ideology go on then to become ideological deployments in themselves. In the discourses I will analyse here, then, I feel it is important to note that the process of the physical writing of a body through material and socio-economic forces is just as important as the reading of that body; indeed, the interrelation of the two – and the proposed model of interrelation and causation – will be my focus. In particular, the Althusserian idea that ideology represents the imaginary resolution of real contradictions (see 1969: esp. 233-234) is vital to the arguments I will make: what I want to suggest is that the fat body has become a remarkably useful ideological deployment – and a site of ideological inscription in ongoing global and local class war. In particular, what I will seek to emphasise is the disparity between the realities of the body’s production by class, and the imaginary ideological deployment of the body as it is produced by class discourse.
2. Don’t mention the (class) war
Class has not been a central object of analysis in ‘fat studies’ as a developing discipline. The issue has, where it has been discussed at all, long been a predominantly feminist one, at least in the humanities – despite the fact that it has, some would argue, been generally underexplored in wider feminist analysis (Hartley, 61). Race too has been of occasional focus in the field: Sander Gilman’s work, while largely focusing on masculinity and the perceived feminisation of fat men and boys (2004), has also considered race, and, in particular, Jewishness (Gilman, 2004). The cluster of knowledges in gender and sexuality studies known as ‘queer theory’ has also had considerable influence (eg. LeBesco, 2001). But while there are many articles and books on fat that mention class, there remain none, to my knowledge at least, that centralise the analysis of class, rather than seeing it solely as a secondary mode of analysis worthy of supplementary note. Moon and Sedgwick’s paper (2001), for example, provides a couple of important observations about the history of class and fat representation, and others have used this as a basis for class dimensions of their own analyses (eg. Huff, 2001). And yet, there is a strong sense that Sedgwick and Moon’s somewhat tangential observations have come to serve as one of very few tent-poles of class in a field where sustained analysis has not really been forthcoming. This said, there are notable exceptions: Peter Stearns’ Fat History has much to tell us, while as we will see later, Gard and Wright gratifyingly skewer Greg Critser’s journalistic study, Fat Land at length. Furthermore, the role of capitalism as an economic system in the production of fat perhaps maintains an ongoing presence (see, for example, Braziel and LeBesco: esp. 6; Gard and Wright: esp. 182, 141; Stearns throughout; then there is the anti-fast food movement, eg. Supersize Me (2004); Schlosser 2002) – but then, perhaps talk of ‘capitalism’ on even the left in the academy, in these post-Seattle, anti-globalisation days, seems somehow more persuasive as a series of systemic relations, than the related notions of ‘class’.[4]
This is problematic because a central strategy in ideology (in its deformative sense) is of course the displacement of discourses of class entirely, often by the substitution of apparently natural and ‘common sense’, and preferably viscerally culturally anxious, semi-mystical ciphers. In our ‘scientific’ age, biological science, perhaps ironically given its constant and formative attempts to interfere with whatever ‘the natural’ appears to be, so often fulfils this function in the popular press.
Obesity ‘contagious’, experts say
Having a friend, sibling or spouse who is overweight raises a person’s risk of being obese too, US researchers say. (2007)
Obesity is – as we all know, don’t we – a disease. And ‘it’ is not produced by social and economic factors, or indeed, constructed discursively as an ideological regime, but rather is spread by some kind of, perhaps morally aware, semi-mythic, cultural pathogen; nor indeed is it clustered within similar class groupings and shared habituses in families, friendships, and so on – all produced within the striations of class. This is remarkably dumb stuff, and indeed, even the article later seems to intuit this – once the shock headline, taken from ‘experts’, no less, has been deployed. But here we meet our old ideological friend, mystification. And then there are the ideological substitutions:
High IQ link to being vegetarian:
Intelligent children are more likely to become vegetarians later in life, a study says. (2006)
We might ask, first, what traditional and ongoing use the ‘I.Q.’ test has in social regimes of enforced inequality, regimes themselves produced by, and designed to reproduce, systematically iniquitous social divisions and classifications of various sorts. Second, ‘vegetarian’, in Western societies at least, may as well be a byword for ‘middle class’. What this arguably tells us, then, is that ruling class children do better in ruling class tests. Surely not?
The silences too can be, almost literally, breathtaking. In New Zealand, class is considered with some insistence not to exist, despite the fact that, under more than a decade of neo-liberal reforms and privatisations, socio-economic inequality was amongst the highest in the developed world by the 1980s (see Hobsbawm, 407; Roper, 2005). But the recent death of a Samoan immigrant woman in NZ after the private corporation that provided her home with electricity cut off her supply due to her failure to pay the bill – in apparently full knowledge of the fact that she was attached to a life-support machine therein – was met with all manner of arguments about the source of the problem.[5] First, in line with populist media xenophobia, it was suggested that the problem was with allowing Samoan immigrants into the country. This did not provide sufficient ideological deformation of material reality, however, and so the latest threat to civilization was wheeled out: it was all because she was fat:
Screen immigrants for obesity and smoking – doctors
Two Auckland doctors are calling for potential immigrants to be tested for obesity and smoking because of the burden both placed on health services.’
The doctors’ comments in the New Zealand Herald today come after the death Samoan woman Folole Muliaga, who was obese, died after her power was cut off and she could not use her breathing machine. Dr Garrett said south Auckland had more obese patients than most other areas.’ [6]
What appears to happen here is that the one thing that cannot be countenanced – that socio-economic injustice, in a supposedly ‘classless’ society, had killed this woman – is displaced onto her health and race. She is, after all, a big fat immigrant. Ethnicity and body-shape (the latter itself a useful sort of racialization of class) are thatched into a veritable bird’s nest of intolerance and inequity, but the debate also relies on a remarkable substitution: the one discourse that must not be invoked is the one which points out the role of economics – a multi-million dollar corporation slaughtering a poverty-stricken woman over a few hundred dollars. When continued socio-economic inequality relies so heavily on the exclusion of class discourse, then, on a suffocating silence in the face of the visible sources and strategies of injustice – it seems particularly important in the academy that we pay attention to the role that class plays. I should make it quite clear here that I am not suggesting in paranoid vulgar Marxist fashion that all other modes of analysis are a bourgeois plot to conceal class – the primacy of class, or race, or gender, or sexuality issues is a tediously phoney war that, if it has a material reality, is based in the professional need to have something controversial to say at a conference once in while.[7] Rather, I am simply suggesting that talk about class needs to continue to happen in cultural studies when silence is the general rule in culture. (Interestingly, in lesbian and gay studies, we have long said much the same about sexuality [see for example, Sedgwick 1990: esp 51-59]). And given the tendency, after all, of fat to serve, as we have already seen, as a meeting place of so many signifiers of stigma and exclusion, the potential for fruitful overlap and inter-theoretical work is surely of massive potential in this field: consider, for example, the interrelation of class and gender as it is imagined in discourses on fat. As Sally Munt points out, one of the central tactics in the representation of working class men has been their construction in terms of a ‘feminine excess which needs restraint, of fat, cigarette-smoking, beer-drinking men who have become a drain on the social body (they leak, they weep, they rage: excrescent and grotesque)’ (2000: 8).[8] Fat sits at the anxious, viciously traumatic, meeting point of the multiple social stigmata of sexuality, gender, race, and class. As so many of us know, this is not a fun place to be.
Honey, Let’s Discipline and Punish the Kids
Father[, a bank manager,] hated to see them drawing the dole, believing that the principle of giving money away was wrong. He had been heard to call the destitute of the town, ironically, our “non-banking friends”. “Non-washing, you mean,” Mother said. It was not their financial so much as their hygienic habits she loathed.
From B. Aldiss, The Hand-Reared Boy, (1970; qtd. in McKibbin 1989: 274).
Although now exported to international markets, Honey, We’re Killing the Kids is a British invention. The episode I concentrate on here appeared on New Zealand television late last year. After an ‘overweight’, obviously working class nine year old boy’s lifestyle and eating habits (habitus?) were splayed on the table for the consumption of a hungry audience, his parents – instantly recognisable to some of us as Northern English working class people of a certain generation, the sort of people around whom I grew up – were berated for their imperfections by a cut-glass-accented, trouser-suited, immaculately-coiffed woman wielding a clipboard. And in the central presence of the clipboard-clutching voyeur, the show presents a televisual analogue – and a publicly displayed enaction – of the everyday experiences of many working class British families: the social worker marching unannounced and uninvited into the living rooms of kids and their parents on housing estates to observe, to judge, to correct the behaviour of those society considers potentially unfit (Skirrow in Medhurst, 1999:28).[9] That this spectacle is now provided televisually, for the salacious observation of the middle classes, and the moral education of the underclasses always under scrutiny, always at risk of interference from their social betters is, of course, an excellent use of resources.
The child’s parents are made to watch, sobbing, a digitally (‘scientifically’) predicted image of their child’s future body before and after changes in diet and behaviour: two possible futures, to be controlled only by adoption of the lifestyle choices presented by the ‘expert’. The future fat man can be prevented by the adoption of middle class eating regimes. What must be removed is of course the staple diet of the modern working class northern English habitus: potatoes, sugars, animal fats, red meat, deep-fried things (some even – swoon – previously frozen), convenience foods, fast-food – all the things that would have the readers of Body and Soul magazine clawing at their gullets.[10] But these are to be substituted for such acceptable staples as steamed fish with spinach – perhaps the kind of ‘light, healthful’ foods that Bourdieu identifies as those central to certain strands of middle class nutritional habitus (1984: 190). Unsurprisingly, the boy, fed on McDonalds and pies, is disgusted by the food – more evidence of how badly brought up he has been – and indeed, his parents too find themselves unable to eat such unpalatable stuff – evidence of course, that they are holding back their child.
After the child has been seen to – and his parents have been forced to change their own lifestyle practices – we are shown a second future self. But there are subtle differences in the stylings of the future subject which exceed the shape of the flesh itself: in the ‘before’ image, the ‘unhealthy’ child has shorn hair, facial bruises, and wears stained ill-fitting sports wear. In the ‘after’ image of the ‘healthy’ child, the subject miraculously sports a pristine, open-necked, white shirt, and a coif of medium-length chestnut brown hair. This was the point at which I began screaming at the television, and my partner, making a telephone call, escaped to the hallway. The future image looked, to this spectator at least, for all the world like the architect of modern, classless Britain: Tony Blair. Whether or not this is a likeness that would be perceived by others, the fact remains that, in the surface stylings of the body – not only the flesh of the body itself – the subject has changed from the council-scum (‘white trash’ in US parlance) couch potato to the elegant middle class Islingtonite. And what is remarkable is how naturalised these visual texts manage to render a causal productive association of the slenderness of the body and upward class mobility – through contiguous but apparently continuous and fundamental contact between skin and clothing, between style and substance, between flesh and fabric. This is surely a spectacular ideological deployment of the most overt kind: a terroristic carnival of public shame and disgrace for the sake of social control. And it is, in many senses, nothing new. As Leichter points out, the ‘health and wellness’ movement that began to emerge at the end of the twentieth century ‘helped set and protect social boundaries by defining acceptable and unacceptable lifestyles’ – Leichter compares these injunctions to Leviticus – and ‘“just as pre-modern societies patrolled the boundaries of their societies with dramatic rituals of inclusion and exclusion”, so too do modern societies’ (621, citing B. S. Turner). It scarcely needs pointing out that the precise boundaries, and targets, of such exclusions will be decided politically – not just in ‘politics’ per se, but in wider cultural political discourse – and in the name of historically emergent social and material expediency.
Fat and the Ideology of the Classless Society
What we might also suggest to be at work here is what Ross McKibbin calls ideological stereotyping:
Those outside the working classes have always seen them in stereotypes and their behaviour towards them has been instinctively shaped by varieties of folklore. In the inter-war years, more perhaps than in most, these stereotypes were constantly hostile; and even when so hostile as to be parodied – as with the most famous of the inter-war invention, ‘the coals in the bath’ – parody merely suggests how strong and not how foolish they were (271).
The usefulness of stereotypes of certain kinds of working class identities allows the ruling classes to cement their privilege by producing an image of a certain homogenous kind of people to be ridiculed and stigmatised as inferior in the name of the material interests of those in power. (We should note that these stereotypes can exist in all directions – the ideological stereotype of the middle class is one I will deploy myself later.) But the point that we should not fail to make is that these constructions of identity – these mythic and folkloric representations are bound up with particular material and social interests, mobilised in the name of gaining, or retaining, power.
The idea that the fat body manifests working class identities is a surprising reversal of history to say the least. Miller notes that ‘when the poor were thin, fat was beautiful. And when poverty came to be characterized less by insufficient calories and more by too many calories of the wrong kind, fat became ugly. In a perverse way, the poor determine fashion by providing an antimodel of the ideal body type that the rich then imitate negatively’ (Miller, 93). At one point, of course, it was imagined that fatness was the product of too much leisure – ‘fat cats’ were aristocratic, or later, the wealthier bourgeoisie. Sedgwick and Moon’s observe of Dickens’ excoriations of injustice, after all, that the rich woman’s body is almost imagined as being fashioned from the bodies of Victorian starvelings (308). But this slowly began to change, and the slender body came to signify the opposite. Peter Stearns provides a convincing picture of this reversal in his Fat History: targeted since the turn of the century as a moral issue, in the post-war period, says Stearn, the message began to emerge that ‘fat people and work did not mix well’ (115).
A teenager [in 1955] who lost thirty pounds was told that such strength of character in a fifteen-year-old-boy means “you can look forward to success in any future undertaking.” Diet morality, easily measured, counted strongly in the job market’ [..Before long,] like the daily or weekly bout with the bathroom scales, dealing with one’s doctor about weight became one of the real constraints in middle-class life, a public reminder of the need to attend to health and virtue (Stearns, 116).
Worrying about weight and being held accountable for one’s girth, then, became part of a wider moralistic and ideological process, firmly stitching together medicine and ‘hygiene’, with socio-economic self-production, particularly as a fully-functioning bourgeois economic subject: that is, characterised by forward movement, economic dynamism and auto-actualisation, and the diet industry has played a central role in this development. And it has also, of course, gone on to become a way of separating out others, and of justifying, naturalising for the increasingly ruling class the privilege brought only tremulously, contingently, vulnerably, by a worryingly turbulent economic system. By the same token, it has naturalised and justified the social exclusion and iniquitous compensation of those in its competing classes. We should note of course that both the elephantine aristocrat and the cumbrous council-scum couch potato are ideological stereotypes which have been of great use to the middle classes in their history – we might even suggest what has changed perhaps is the class of greatest perceived threat, and hence, the necessary re-direction (socially ‘up’ or ‘down’) of the stigma. When the aristocracy were still a threat to middle class supremacy, they were ‘fat.’ Now that the aristocracy is dead and faintly ridiculous, the working class are made to take on the stigma, created and maintained by the ruling ideas of the still-ruling class.
Such hegemonising projects shift throughout history, then, according to the emergent needs of the ruling class – themselves, as Gramsci reminds us, always a yoking-together of various groups and classes, always shifting strategically in ideology, as McKibbin’s study shows persuasively over some 80 years. But there is also an identifiable cultural political project of a long pedigree at work here. Not least, the moralism of fat stigma can be read as much as anything as part of an ongoing bourgeois deployment which stretches across the centuries: the association of class, morality, and the body has been a consistent site of fervid development of social power over the course of the rise of the bourgeoisie. As Terry Eagleton points out, in England, the development of ‘good taste’ was part of the bourgeoisie’s attempts to naturalise its own privilege (1983: 17, 24), won only by luck and the vicissitudes of markets in history. The previous ruling class, the aristocrats, after all, could rely on the symbolic guarantee of blood lines and heredity for that stabilisation. Eagleton even evocatively uses the word ‘transfusing’ to show the attempts by the new middle classes at an almost biological naturalisation of privilege that takes place in the establishment of cultured tastes which appear to naturally inhere in bourgeois subjects (24) – those structured-and-structuring-structures that Bourdieu calls habitus.[11] And the very involvement of a symbolic kind of corporeality in this process has some relevance to the present discussion – after all, is it not the case here that when working class bodies are stigmatised for their fatness, their social disenfranchisement is naturalised, almost racialised in the body, just as the attempts to ‘transfuse’ the cultural tastes of the aristocracy were designed to replace, and yet seem to produce, that same almost-embodied, subjective naturalisation of privilege in the rising bourgeoisie?
We are now told, of course, that this classed-and-classifying-body is changeable by practice, by lifestyle, by consumption – we all have a choice in our class, so the developing ideology has been produced. And in such a schema, not only is this body produced by class, but its own autogenic production is also morally and individually culpable. After all, the central ideology of middle class cultural taste has always been the notion of deserving, of moral superiority evinced by correct consumptive choices from an increasing variety of possibilities (after, for example, the end of sumptuary laws). And this is now a deployment central to the developing ideology of classlessness. This ideology has been well-articulated, and perhaps reached its apotheosis, in the British political sphere by the ideology of New Labour, a social democrat, British Labour Party, formed over a number of years from various, often disparate, elements in the party, and rising to power with the election to the leadership of Tony Blair after the death of former party leader John Smith.[12] Early New Labour propounded the ‘Third Way’, initially influenced, or perhaps simply given an alibi, by the formerly leftist sociologist Antony Giddens (see Driver and Martell, 47-50). This system, outlined by Tony Blair and Gerhard Schroeder as a new political vision for Europe, crystallized ideas that had been coming to formation in the British Labour Party (and indeed, the German and British SDP) for some years:
Social democracy [..] stands not only for social justice but also for economic dynamism and the unleashing of creativity and innovation. [..] Fairness and social justice, liberty and equality of opportunity, solidarity and responsibility to others – these values are timeless. [our aim is] to promote employment, to promote prosperity, to offer each individual the opportunity to fulfill their own potential. [..] The importance of individual and business enterprise to the creation of wealth has been undervalued. The weaknesses of markets have been overstated and their strengths underestimated. [..] The most important task is to invest in human capital (Blair and Schroeder 1998: 27-29).
Its German title, ‘The New Middle/ Centre,’ is arguably something of a misnomer: as Julie Hyland observes,
‘Despite [the authors’] pretensions, [the Third Way] is devoid of any philosophical or ideological merit. Nor does it set out a “new” idea as such. [It] is in the main a repackaging of the same right-wing, pro-market policies that have been pursued by governments internationally over the last two decades’ (Hyland 2003) [1998].
But what is salient in the Third Way, and remains so more broadly in the New Labour project (the term ‘Third Way’ has long been dropped as yesterday’s spin) is a rejection of the ‘Old Left’: it removes automatic links with the Union movement; attempts to further the privatisation of capital and private ownership (often in supposed ‘partnership’ with the public sector).[13] In terms of New Labour’s approach to individual socio-economic subjects, the aim has been to minimise social rights and welfare, and to maximise personal responsibility and individual entrepreneurship, creating individualised personal ‘human capital’. We might even suggest that it is we might even suggest that it is a sprightly, ‘slimmed-down’ reformulation of the welfare politics of Old, fat, Labour.
Blair began very early on to differentiate his politics from those of the Old Left, in his view too attached to what he calls – but some might not recognise as – Marxism: ‘..human nature is complex. There is free will, individual responsibility. We can choose and decide. The problem with Marxist ideology was that, in the end, it suppressed the individual by starting with society’ (Blair, 59). Central to New Labour’s ideology has been the myth of classlessness – although this in itself is only a newly intensified spin on one of the central political formulations of post-war Britain. As David Cannadine points out, it has been promised since the end of the Second World War that class would soon cease to exist: Ted Heath claimed this in the 1970’s; John Major promised as much on taking over the Conservative Party in 1990; Blair has continued this wholeheartedly (Cannadine: 150; 1; 182; see also Adonis and Pollard, esp. Introduction). Blair also foregrounded meritocracy, declaring in 1998 that:
‘People are born with talent, and everywhere it is in chains. [..F]ail to develop the talents of any one person, and we fail Britain. Talent is 21st Century wealth […] The class war is over, but the struggle for true equality has just begun’ (Tony Blair in White, 1998).
Talented of the world, you have nothing to lose but your chains: but ironically, Blair declared the class war at an end just as the (residually aristocratic) Countryside Alliance squared up with hunt saboteurs and striking workers outside the Labour party conference.
The myth of a classless society in New Labour’s Britain has been about stressing the potential and indeed, likelihood, of autogenic social mobility. The problem with certain formulations of meritocracy, of course, is a tendency to suggest that each individual is personally responsible, or even morally culpable, for their own social position. And this is further emphasised by the tendency, inherited perhaps from Thatcher (Cannadine: 179), for New Labour to use the rhetoric of consumer and customer practices in place of class, talking no longer of workers, producers, or classes, but instead, of ‘consumers’ and ‘citizens’ (Cannadine, 182). This serves to individualise class, providing an idea of class as an ultimately malleable set of practices and habits of consumption which are produced by personal choice, rather than subjectively and materially inscribed systemic socio-economic factors. Also influenced by the ideas of American ‘Communitarian’ sociologist Amitai Etzioni, Blair’s ideological base has tended to focus on the moral imperative of the responsibility of the individual to the community. For Communitarians (of Etzioni and Blair’s sort, at least), the problem in our societies has been “‘demoralisation” – a decline in morality and the absence of a commitment to fulfilling obligations’ (Lavalette and Mooney).
And it is this moral responsibility that the social subject who successfully and faithfully transforms him- or her-self into human capital, is seen to be fulfilling. Of particular interest to New Labour has been the role of welfare: ‘policies to offer unemployed people jobs and training are a social democratic priority – but we also expect everyone to take up the opportunity offered’ (Blair and Schroeder 1998: 36). Similarly, ‘the state should not row, but steer’ (Blair and Schroeder, not Stalin, 1998: 30). ‘Part-time and low paid work’ is ‘better than no work because [it] ease[s] the transition from unemployment into jobs’ (ibid: 36) – so the unemployed and the underemployed are equally at risk.[14] But the moral aspect of this is paramount in the ruling class ideology of modern Britain, and consistently evinced by what Lavalette and Mooney call New Labour’s ‘highly moralistic stew of censure, condemnation and punishment’:
‘..lurking within New Labour’s policies is a vicious ideology which both demonises and victimises some of the very poorest sections of the working class, that blames the poor and their ‘individual inadequacies’ for their situation rather than the structural constraints of more than 20 years of mass unemployment and welfare cuts’ (ibid.).
Those who are poor, in the New Labour formulation, are simply lazy, and worst of all, the welfare recipient is a person who takes up greater resources than they have the right to expect: they are, as we saw Munt astutely note, perceived as a ‘drain on the social body’ (2000: 8). Is it not then the case that the fat poor somehow manifest greed as well as gluttony? Indeed, as Gard and Wright note, Greg Critser’s US study, Fat Land which sets out to put the blame squarely on individual fat folks despite an interest in class, manifests a remarkable moralism which would certainly chime with the ideological concerns of New Labour and the British classless society:
If, as Critser claims, obesity is primarily a moral issue, [his] statistics push him close to the point of claiming either that wealthier people are also more virtuous or that the poor are simply more lazy and gluttonous [..] Above all, Critser is unrelenting in his scorn for any suggestion that we should be happy with who we are. While some of us would empathise with people who might already have enough to worry about, such as the poor and ethnic minorities, Critser’s argument is that these people should be more concerned about exercise and diet than more affluent groups. [..] What matters for Critser is only that the rich should instruct the poor about the “moral absolutes” of life. (Gard and Wright, 143-145).
The public stigmatisation of the fat body in current British culture is the result of just such a socio-historical exigency – it is an ideological deployment designed to, at least, appear to terroristically engineer functioning socio-economic subjects through, not systemic change, but an individual realignment of consumptive practices. Class, in Honey, We’re Killing the Kids and other such texts, is rendered as a matter of individual consumption: that is, what you choose to eat, and the significations that this will then produce, both in terms of visible consumptive lifestyle, and in the signs of the body itself. Turning class into a matter of stylistic choices, rather than inevitable conflicts in society over the distribution of material resources and wealth and power, has been a neat trick. Here, and elsewhere, changing habits of consumption – ‘lifestyle modifications’ – are presented as a way out of the systemic injustices and inequities of class, rather than, say, any kind of conflict produced by social association as leftists have more traditionally imagined, or indeed, by changes to social and economic systems. Hence, class is manifested by food, but can also be produced by it – as if by magic. Fat chance.[15]
Expressive Bodies
Bodies are so often imagined to express some perceived internal disposition or essence. This takes us back of course to Foucault’s criminal, made to express its deviance, but we might look to a more recent epidemiologically-oriented moral panic to see another pressing analogue. As Simon Watney notes in his groundbreaking essay, ‘The Spectacle of AIDS’ (1988) AIDS came to manifest, and indeed, was seen to produce the mythic homosexual body: a physical manifestation of the moral depravity, and indeed, previously only internally apparent, disease of the homosexual (1988: 78-80; see also Gilman, 2004, who formulates this in terms of Jewishness and diabetes). And in the same way, the fat body is so often produced and read as expressive of the moral characteristics of the working class, long since changed in their dominant ideological construction from an association with work to an association with sloth: they are not ‘dynamic’ or ‘active’ but passive; they are an ‘underclass’, perhaps so economically shapeless and directionless as to almost not be a class at all; they are those left behind by the – at one point – massive class mobility of the post-war period. As Thomas King notes in his brilliant recent book What’s the Matter with America (2004), they are even constructed in some accounts, such as that of capitalist guru Tom Peters, as the new leisure class: parasitic layabouts ‘freeloading on the Olympian labours of management’ (24). Consider then Huff’s observation:
‘In the era of industrial capitalism, an economic model has framed the narratives inscribed upon the corpulent body. Alimentary and material consumption, as Gail Turley Houston has observed in her study of Charles Dickens, were frequently conflated in Victorian representations of the body. Within scientific discourses, a one-to-one correspondence was reinscribed and intensified by the economic metaphor. Body fat was interpreted as the residue of aberrant acts of consumption. The corpulent body was thus made to stand in for rampant, unchecked consumerism and the abuses of laissez-faire capitalism. It served as a trope for excessive consumption, representing both waste and luxury […] the corpulent subject was selfish, was consuming more than his or her share of the limited resources available within the British economic system. The corpulent body, and particularly the corpulent female body, thus bore the guilt of exploitative economic relations as a legible, stigmatic mark upon the body, freeing the average man and woman, from not merely the vagaries of embodiment but also consumer guilt’ (Huff, 51).
The usefulness of the fat body and the ‘obesity epidemic’ to ideology at this point cannot be underestimated: it serves to re-inscribe the connection between alimentary and material consumption, but to effect a remarkable ideological turn-around.
Again, for Althusser, ideology can best be understood as the imaginary resolution of lived contradictions: it exists to explain, and justify, bizarre states of affairs in which, for example, outrageous material inequities continue to increase in our advanced capitalist societies, or in which surplus labour continues to be extracted, with menaces, from the many, for the benefit of the few. And in this justification it also persuades itself of the rectitude of its own practices (1969: 235) – there is no thinking outside of ideology for Althusser, and the process of the self-constitution and self-validation of the ruling class is as important as its imaginative constitution of its exploited others. Hence, the ideological deployment of the ‘Obesity Epidemic’, concentrated in the poor and lower class, is almost impressive in its elegance, telling us as it does that the poor working classes are lazy and greedy, and bolstering by opposition the idea that the bourgeoisie are dynamic and unselfish. With the most fiendishly clever ideological sleight of hand – and yet, no doubt in full unironic certainty of its truth – the bourgeoisie has managed to construct the poor and working class as the greedy bastards. And the wider economic patterns of conspicuous middle class fetishistic consumption, of massively mis-apportioned material wealth, have become projected, doubly and perversely fetishised, into the now ‘excessive’ bodies of the working classes. Were they not too indolent and corpulent to raise their arms, they would surely be moved to applaud.
Just as the body of Foucault’s criminal is literally stigmatised in order to manifest, to produce, to, in Butler’s later formulation, (1990: 135), performatively constitute the interior existence, or ‘soul’ of the criminal, so the fat body is used here to create, in historically exigent form, the stubbornly, resistently residual, classed subject: that is, the lazy, refusenik, lower-class moron that Munt conjures. Prodded to weeping, publicly shattered, and symbolically (but never truly) reformed, physically and mentally, in Honey, We’re Killing the Kids, he is made to ‘become’ the prime ideological and socio-economic subject of modern Britain in the name of pedagogy – just as his once-future body is designed to construct that subject typologically in opposition. As Foucault reminds us, the body ‘is bound up, in accordance with complex reciprocal relations, with its economic use; it is largely as a force of production that the body is invested with relations and domination’ (1984: 171). And in this context, we might also remind ourselves of Althusser’s counsel that societies must reproduce themselves ideologically as well as materially: as such, the production of domination (which is, of course, in the name of production) should in itself be seen as a material practice, and as such as precisely a force of production (2005: 45).
Meanwhile, in Foucauldian terms, as ‘a subjected body’, the fat body also becomes ‘a productive body’, not only in ‘its constitution as labor power’, but through its subjection to ‘the instruments of violence or ideology’ (Foucault, 1984: 171), transformed into the instrument itself. While working class people still – whatever Tom Peters would like to think – do the donkey work of the material through their body’s subjection to toil, they are also transformed into material practices of ideology: their body’s systemic subjection to poor diet, is reconceived through the proceeding discourses of the ‘war on obesity’ and publicly deployed. At this point, then, the fat body itself – systemically produced, and spectacularly re-inscribed – becomes an auto-locomotive Ideological State Apparatus all of its own. The role of diet-show mortification of the poor, then, is not only to stage a single public pedagogical intervention, but to render all similar bodies as ongoing, outgoing, foregoing material practices of ideology: the body continually inscribed by class then goes on to signify, ideologically helping to stabilise the systemic inequities that contributed to the initial formulation of its fleshy significations. In a sense, we might suggest that fat bodies have become, as Althusser would have it, ‘the realisation of an ideology’ (2005: 45). Or perhaps, bringing together Foucault and Althusser, it is more specifically an ideology’s corporealisation.
4: Resistance? What resistance?
There are here some highly unfashionable theories: Althusser’s concept of the ISA, for example, is no longer widely invoked outside of its teaching as a lamentable wrong-turn in the study of cultural politics. The problem for our appreciation of Althusser at least is that he is now most often read as a theorist of entrapment: the theory of the ISA, some suggest, works so well in explaining the subjective determination of continued subordination that it is difficult to find a way out of it. Althusser was writing, after all, in the aftermath of Mai ‘68. The Gramscian turn in Cultural Studies was adopted by theorists such as Hall, Sinfield, and others, precisely as a way of theorising the potential for resistance in the face of Althusser’s tendency to see the whole thing as already sewn up (see Sinfield, 1994: 24). Meanwhile, Foucault’s idea of our ‘docile bodies’ has long been considered too disempowering in terms of social subjects and their capacity for resistance. We tend to focus now on his later work which tells us that ‘there is no single locus of great refusal’ (1998: 95-6), which highlights the ‘tactical polyvalence’ (1998: 100) of resistant strategies, and which tells us that ‘where there is power, there is resistance’ (1998: 95). In many cases, this has been a good idea: refocusing on resistance and other political possibilities produced socially within working class culture – subcultures, youth movements, and so on – was once a way of thinking past the apparent dead-end of unionism and other traditional sources of resistance or, as we once dreamt, revolution.[16] And yet, while the critically liberating Gramscian/ Foucauldian resistance turn was an important development in cultural studies, I suspect we may often be in danger of exaggerating present resistance – presented perhaps purely as a textual effect – and producing hopefulness and triumph where there is currently only degradation, control, and injustice. As Sally Munt points out in the introduction to one of remarkably few books in recent memory to focus on class in Cultural Studies, there is some danger in the ‘mandatory celebratory progressivism of resistance theorists, asking us to look more tangentially for evidence of survival, of “getting by”, to temper the appetite for heroic potency’ (2000: 12). We should beware, she suggests, of ‘imposing a condescending glamour on working class struggles where none exists’ (ibid.). And my sense is that Althusser and Foucault’s work which centralises social control works horribly well in explaining the forces we see mobilised against the fat body in the name of the social relations it has come to justify.
Indeed, when these theories work so well, it is a sign that we need to start producing some kind of resistance – not simply looking for it where I fear it does not currently exist in remotely sufficient or organised form. This is not to say that there are no possible strategies: the transgressive potential of fatness as it has been hailed in fat studies often recalls carnivalesque, that most historically class-based of disobediences. And this may be a starting point for further representational fat/ class resistance – although again, carnivalesque often appears here largely stripped of its connection with class – instead, it is rendered in the feminist terms that it has most often been critically associated with since the 1970s (even, for example, in the context of a study of that poet of white trash, John Waters [Stukator, 2001]). And ideological stereotyping cuts both ways: perhaps we should do more to ridicule the skinny socio-economic subjects who drive their 4x4s to the extortionately priced, glass-fronted, air-conditioned gym, double-shot non-fat latte in hand and pay ever-increasing bills for ever more calorifically-deficient fetishised food products. Might not the rough-and-ready fat kids scowling on street corners, hoovering coral-pink thick-shakes and throwing rocks at the cars they will never afford, repeat – with a different emphasis – that age-old football chant, so often hurled at the overweight:
Who ate all the pies?
Who ate all the pies?
You fat bastard!
You fat bastard!
You ate all the pies![17]
Because who here, in the material scheme of things, has had more than their fair share of the pies? My sense is that it is about time we did some ideological stereotyping of our own to undermine the symbolically unassailable, smugly slender ass of the middle class.
Class war.
As I write [Edit 2016: originally writing in 2009], a think-tank report by Sir Derek Wanless, commissioned by the British Government, is being reported in the press to suggest that obesity – and the choices of fat people – are the fundamental reason for the likely collapse of the National Health Service. The Daily Mail leads with the headline, ‘Obesity crisis threatens to overwhelm NHS as £43bn is squandered’, mentioning only later in the article that ‘In a move that will once again re-ignite the row over GP and consultants pay, Sir Derek questions the value of the huge rises handed out by the Government in the last contracts negotiated between 2003-4’. Likewise, BBC News online leads with the headline ‘Obesity crisis threatens the NHS’ (2007), despite again mentioning massive salary increases for GPs and consultants as a secondary concern. But at least this sum was not ‘wasted’ on the obese – that is, on actual service provision for a large part of the population. The BBC article is of course linked to a contextualising feature on the NHS ‘crisis’ featuring an image of a child guzzling what my intrepid research tells me is probably a McChicken Sandwich (‘Why the NHS Struggles With Obesity’, 2007). None of these articles considers the class aspects of obesity, just as none considers the wider systemic problems in the funding of the NHS – such as the spending of massive sums on corporate management consultancy firms, widely suggested to have soaked up the greatest proportion of health spending increases in recent years. According to a National Audit Office report in 2006, public service spending on consultants reached £3bn in the 2005-2006 financial year, with a morbidly obese £500,000,000 – 1500% rise in two years – spent in the NHS. This was almost equal to the size of the NHS’s ‘deficit’ (Hencke, 2006).
I find that students so often imagine, in these days of globalisation of protest, that capitalism is solely a problem for them – for sweatshops in Asia, for starving Africans, for struggling Latin Americans – rather than something we might find just down the street. And Zapatistas and gap-toothed Asian children do look so gratifyingly exotic, so cosmopolitan, on the cover of New Internationalist. But fat studies is one very useful place that socio-economic inequalities and the attendant ideologies local to ‘developed’ Western societies can be critically pursued. My hope is that in analysing class in the UK, I will not simply persuade non-British readers to see class as a peculiarly British concern, but rather, as the beginning of wider work on class in fat studies as a whole. And indeed, such studies might add to a recent burgeoning of interest in ‘white trash’ working class studies in the US – especially as such issues interrelate with race (see, for example, Newitz, Wray, Kirby and the irrepressible Jim Goad).
It is all too easy for Marxists to fall into Puritanism: man cannot live on rice crackers alone, and if I have seemed to berate the middle classes here for a sort of tendency toward culinary ‘inauthenticity’ (they don’t eat the ‘real food’ of the working class) as well as a tendency to over-consume, I hope it is also clear that this is no more than a rhetorical device along the lines of the reactive ideological stereotyping I suggested. But I also want to note that the possibility for working class people to eat a wide variety of foods in a wealthy industrial early 21st century society is something that we cannot fail to argue for – and indeed, how we might allow people to change eating habits such that they are not at increased risk of diabetes, heart disease, all the usual suspects, is indeed, to my mind, a reasonable question, although emphatically not one that can be answered by the kind of strategies of bullying and ideological intimidation, or fostering of self-loathing, studied here. For the bourgeoisie to berate working class people for the habitus shaped by the very systemic conditions shaped to produce their exploitation is surely the most grotesque injustice, as well as a sickeningly impressive strategic manoeuvre.[18] I might end by observing that it has long been profoundly unfashionable to suggest that there is a thing as overt, engaged, and ideologically concerted as a ‘class war’ in action – at least, in British and American society. That, as we have seen, is part of the ideology. But my sense is that the ferocity of recent attacks on the working class fat body should persuade us that this fashion needs to change.
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[1] $651-$1000/ week, according to MySummerCamps.com. http://www.mysummercamps.com/camps/Detailed/25031.html
[2] Note here that I elide Butler’s centralisation of gender in this sentence for reasons of clarity. Habitus and hence body shape would also be produced by cultural constructions of gender, of course: e.g. less pronounced musculature in ‘feminine’ women.
[3] And certainly, most of us would baulk at arguing that hunger in the ‘Third World’ is a matter of significations alone.
[4] Indeed, it strikes me that class is so often imagined as the problem of somewhere else – in New Zealand, perhaps as in America, it is always something that ‘The English’ have – or perhaps just another time – as we will see, in the UK, it belongs to ‘the bad old days’ (see Cannadine 1999: esp. 179-184).
[5] See Binning, Keong and Cleave (2007).
[6] Reported in the New Zealand Herald. See ‘Screen immigrants for obesity and smoking – doctors’ (2007).
[7] Eminent leftist writer Jeremy Seabrook’s contribution to a recent New Internationalist series of introductory guides, The No-Nonsense Guide to Class, Caste, and Hierarchies recently claimed ‘The rich Western societies declare themselves dedicated to equality of opportunity for women, ethnic minorities, those of diverse sexual orientation, and people with disability. These aspirations to equality are both a substitute for and an avoidance of addressing more profound inequalities’ (2002: 9). If I agree that these issues are sometimes used in this way (see Evans, 2004 and forthcoming) this is not the same thing as arguing that they are actually in any real sense less important. Just how profound do inequalities have to be before they are not simply a distraction from the real business of class? To my mind, this is the kind of chauvinistic monoculism that gives class analysis a bad name and has led to participants in post-60’s New Social Movements abandoning class struggle in droves. This mirrors concerns raised in other, late-90’s, post-structuralist academic discourses such as queer theory and cultural materialist feminism, in which Marxist analysts – with greater and lesser degrees of shrillness and hyperbole – have claimed that the New Social Movements of the late 60’s have reached their dangerous nadir in theories which deny reality itself – and in particular, socio-economic reality. These critiques have some validity, I think, and yet also tend to suffer from the same totalising fervour of certain of the critiques they seek to usurp. See Kirsch (2000), Morton (1997), Hennessy (2000). On the continuing relevance of class analysis, see for example Wright (1996), a response to suggestions that class is outmoded as a term of analysis. Note in particular that Wright makes it clear here that class analysis’ primacy is not of central importance to an argument that class is a vital form of analysis (693) – he is quite correct, and I would caution strongly against outmoded arguments that suggest that ‘class trumps everything’ in the light of the vital analytical modes produced by what began as New Social Movements, in contemporary academic and critical discourse.
[8] Note likewise the endless jokes about male breasts in shows such as The Simpsons. Eg. Homer’s brassière discovered by his children in the recent Simpsons Movie (2007), or Marge telling Bart that she has been saving for breast reduction surgery for her husband, in The Simpsons, Season 18, Episode 14: ‘Yokel Chords’: What could be more risibly perfect than a working class male, formerly productive, now reduced to pushing buttons in a power plant – with breasts…
[9] The recent British TV series, Shameless (2004 -) also captures beautifully this experience – its regularity, and centrality – in much poor working class life.
[10] Or might at some point be featured as the latest exoticised authentica, plundered from some heretofore-ridiculed, now-fetishised culture in Bon Appetit, Olive, or Good Food; perhaps a temporary indulgence to be worked off at the gym later.
[11] C.f. Foucault and the concept of ‘sanguinity’ (1998: 147-149).
[12] There are numerous histories and analyses of New Labour and their time in power. Fairly even-handed – perhaps rather too even-handed for this reader – and concentrating on the party’s policy record is Driver and Martell (2006), also Coates(2005). On the formation of New Labour as a project within the party, see Russell (2005; also Driver and Martell Ch. 1). For a focus on understanding the role of electorate responses to the party and its response to the aftermath of Thatcherism, see Heath, Jowell and Curtis (2001). Those who want to hear about New Labour ideology from one of its leading ideologues might want to hold their noses and peruse Gould (1999) or Mandelson (2004). Overall, however, I have yet to find a more compelling account of Labour’s rise and ideological formation – if arguably paranoid, but no more than the rise of the New Labour deserves, I suspect – from a reasonably leftist perspective, than Ramsay (1999) – which satisfyingly, but as it turned out, too hopefully, describes New Labour as the ‘last dribble of Thatcherism down the trouser leg of British politics’.
[13] Labour dropped its commitment to public ownership (previously evinced in ‘Clause IV’ of its constitution) from its charter shortly after Blair’s rise to power. See Driver and Martell, 2006: 13-15; Shaw 2004: 52-53.
[14] Of course, some might suggest here that it is wrong to elide the differences between the (respectable) ‘working classes’ and the lazy, good for nothing ‘unworking classes’ – but the point we should not fail to make is that the separation of these two groups might be seen as an ideological deployment in itself, producing fractions between groups with very similar interests.
[15] Of course, it would be wrong to deny outright that change in habitus, where possible, may indeed produce social mobility – much as teaching kids to eat with the right knife and fork or taking them to art galleries may help them scrabble up the greasy pole later in life (most formerly-working class academics will attest to this process; I know I do). But the source of agency for such changes remains problematic: it is not achievable individually, and the unavailability of such a strategy to most is precisely, as Bourdieu shows, the system’s raison d’ être. Furthermore, persuasive evidence suggests that intergenerational social mobility in Britain remains in decline: see Paxton and Dixon, 2004: 60.
[16] Indeed, my own work elsewhere has focused on the potential for resistance, and the strategic possibilities, produced within mainstream texts, in, for example, the lesbian and gay movement. But in those cases, my sense is that there is currently greater reason to be cheerful and optimistic.
[17] For those of you spared this, it is generally sung to the tune of ‘Knees Up, Mother Brown’. Fat stigmatisation, it should be made clear here, has by no means been the sole preserve and practice of the bourgeoisie.
[18] See the recent TV documentary, Jamie’s School Dinners (2005). Indeed, there are certain problems with the cultural politics of the British campaigns of Jamie Oliver, designed to get reasonably nutritious food into school canteens. Occasionally, Oliver seems as much motivated by a desire for cultural ‘improvement’ as much as truly material and social concerns, and there is a remaining tendency in publicity to cruelly stigmatise the overweight (for example, Oliver’s publicity stunt which involved dressing in a fat suit, ‘comedically’ crushing his motorcycle under his girth – sensitive stuff). But while these campaigns are conducted, of course, within the constraints of capitalism (how could they not be?), Oliver makes much of the role of corporate interests in enforcing poor diet for children at schools, and the necessary role of government in breaking their stranglehold, and Oliver’s work deserves, I think, some leftist plaudits for its greater interest in systemic factors such as education and capital, and a collective, communitarian (not in the Blairite sense) focus. I intend to pay greater attention to Oliver’s work elsewhere.