Standardizing Adiposity, Categorizing Bodies: Conceptualizations of Health in Obesity Research

• In Event: The Body in Biomedical Knowledge

Abstract

This project investigates the rise of obesity science and examines the actors and institutions that shaped its formation and the social values embedded in body mass index (BMI) as a health indicator, explaining how and why it became, as Clarke and Fujimura (1992) call, "the right tool for the job." This project puts forward three primary conclusions: 1) BMI has served as a crucial tool to standardize research and articulate obesity's risks and health complications to the public and thus continues to carry authority despite its widely acknowledged limitations; 2) obesity's heterogeneity enables scientists to defend abnormalities in research findings without disrupting the BMI paradigm and to justify continued research investment and field diversification; and 3) meta-level problematic framing of the obese condition permeates obesity researchers’ identities. The methodological approach follows situational analysis (Clarke, 2005) and includes participant observation during scientific sessions at international obesity conferences, analysis of health authority reports and peer-reviewed publications in obesity journals between 2011 and 2015, and thirty interviews with prominent obesity researchers and clinicians. This research contributes to STS scholarship by 1) taking the field of obesity science as the object of study (Clarke, 1998; Frickel, 2004; Frickel & Moore, 2006; Oudshoorn, 2003; Shostak 2013), 2) asking powerful ontological questions (Latour, 2004; Mol, 2002, 2013; Woolgar & Lezaun, 2013) and questions of measurement as a biopolitical activity (Braun, 2014; Rajan, 2012), and 3) by examining shifts in research consistent with biomedicalization (Bell & Figert, 2012; Clarke et al., 2010; Conrad, 2005; Dumit 2012).

Author

• Melanie Jeske, University of California, San Francisco