In May 2015 Australiaâs independent broadcaster, Special Broadcasting Service (SBS), released a promotional video of a three-part documentary called Struggle Street. The show depicted families living in Sydneyâs outer-western suburbs, an area well recognized as experiencing significant socioeconomic hardship. The promotional video began with upbeat music and a deep-toned, male voice-over, contrasting the glistening waters and tanned, lithe, bikini bodies of Sydney Harbor and beaches with the graffitied, litter-strewn, and drug-taking lives of people living on the fringes. The video caused a great stir among Australiaâs media and the local mayor complained that the show misrepresented his residents. There was an immediate flurry, involving lawyers, accusations of defamation, and an online petition demanding the television program be stopped from airing. A protest by garbage truck drivers from Sydneyâs west was staged outside the SBS studios, with the mayor proclaiming, âThe program is garbage so weâve brought garbage trucks out here as a symbolic protest. This is a false representation [of Blacktown] and this program must stop.â
Despite the protests, the three shows went to air, although staged quickly over one week, rather than the planned three weeks. Given this frenzied and high-profile prelude, the viewing audience was huge, and many commentators applauded the ways in which the documentary sensitively portrayed the families, their strong sense of pride, and resilience in the face of adversity. Others, however, said it copied TV shows in the UK (such as the BBCâs Benefits Street, set in Northern England), where Middlesbrough football fans protested against the show by unfurling a banner at the clubâs Riverside Stadium, which read âBeing Poor Is Not EntertainmentâFuck Benefits Streetâ (Tyler 2015). Such protests argue that these types of reality shows are nothing more than âpoverty porn,â exploiting vulnerable people to increase ratings and denigrate those living on welfare benefits.
The very same week, we gave a presentation to university colleagues on our research into how a community with high levels of disadvantage responded to Australiaâs largest childhood obesity intervention. Specifically, this ethnographic project explored how people living in what the stateâs Department of Health refers to as an âobesogenic environmentâ (Government of South Australia, Annual Report 2008â2009) understood risk and why they displayed resistance to public health imperatives. Tanya described the significant economic downturn of the area since the 1970s, and the health issues that all too frequently accompany chronic unemployment, high rates of mental illness, and precarious lives. She didnât show pictures of our research participantsâ houses (as that would be unethical), but she did show houses that were typical of the area in which our fieldwork was located. She shared stories of how research participants resisted moralized stereotypes of obesity through humor, pushing back against neoliberal âresponsibilizationâ by appropriating the word âfatâ and its many euphemisms as a form of joking or endearment. Questions from the audience were mixed, with suggestions that the representations were inaccurate, misrepresentative, or biased in their selection. Someone asked if weâd seen Struggle Street, again making an implicit accusation and clear analogy to the reproduction of âpoverty porn.â
While Struggle Street and our ethnographic project are entirely different, there are some startling similarities to the politics of representation and positioning that each brings to light. Our research encountered a similar range of applause and accusation, of âtelling it like it isâ and misrepresenting the community. As Emma Kowalâs work on white antiracism in Australia showed, any discussion of sensitive issues, like class or race, the portrayal of Aboriginal Australians, or whiteness involves an âendless potential for misinterpretationâ (2015, p. 24). When we talked about obesity in relation to social class, we also encountered an endless and inescapable potential for misinterpretation. So much so that after the first year of our three-year research project, Tanya lamented that she could not return to her field site of India (where her ethnographic focus was on death and reincarnation), as it was nowhere near as political as researching obesity in Australia!
This book is about the politics of fat. It tells the story of what happens when a French childhood obesity intervention is purchased by the Australian Government and implemented in one of Australiaâs most disadvantaged suburban communities. On the face of it, obesity prevention appears to be straightforward, simply encouraging and educating people on how to make healthy lifestyle choices, to eat healthier foods, and increase physical activity. But of course itâs not so simple. For families who have very limited incomes, scraping a few cents together to buy bare essentials or to ask for out-of-date bread from the local food bank is a regular reality. Being told to choose more healthy options is unrealistic when their choices are already severely constrained and parents are looking for something filling and cheap to fill empty stomachs. Messages to eat less when your body aches from hunger seem incongruent with everyday realities. For women who use the flesh of their bodies to âget things,â being told to lose weight threatens their local economy of trading sexuality for drinks at the local club. And for people in the community who are well aware of the shame of obesity and the common stereotypes of living in a disadvantaged community, being targeted for being fat or incapable of looking after themselves is seen by many as just another assault on their self-esteem.
The story that unfolds in this book has a dual purpose. It firstly exposes the complex politics involved in Australiaâs largest obesity prevention campaign, from the government health bureaucrats, the public health nutritionists and dieticians, the local government workers, the social marketing team, and the anthropologists researching the program (us) to the people who are the target of such a programâpeople who live precarious lives where âgetting byâ frequently takes precedence over healthy eating. As anthropologists working in the community, we learned about how locals resisted healthy eating initiatives, rejected middle-class imperatives of healthy living, and crafted their own stories around health and fatness.
We also learned of the various hierarchies and conflicts within the community, and the various moral views about how people should work and demonstrate citizenship in the community. Many of the participants in our project were on welfare benefits, volunteering through a federal Australian Government âmutual obligationâ scheme to comply with welfare payment policies and surviving on very limited incomes. At the height of punishing South Australian summer heat waves, some people said that their fans and air conditioners were too expensive to switch on, leading to sometimes dire consequences for the very young or the elderly residents in public housing. Some could not afford to shower every day due to expensive water bills, and some houses did not have fridges, with one participant using a camp stove in her kitchen as it was cheaper to run than her oven and cooktop. Pride and shame circulated in equal measure in this community, and unsurprisingly (as others have similarly noted (Shildrick et al. 2010; Shildrich and MacDonald 2013)), in a depressed economy a process of âOtheringâ and distancing occurs, where people can be outright disparaging of those who are still more disenfranchised than they are.
Secondly, the book provides a timely analysis of the relationships between differing kinds of knowledge about obesity. We explore the many tensions and misunderstandings that arise within partnerships of anthropology, public health, and local government: of the devaluing of ethnographic research methods as unrepresentative, of the unpalatability of bringing critiques or frames of social class into our analysis, and of the attempts to silence or alter research findings. We were quickly reminded that all knowledge projects are political, and one can never be free from the values and interests of particular social locations (Kirksey 2011, p. 157). Our research inevitably entered the political game of representation, encountering the stakes involved in positive and positivist research outcomes. We would become aware of who can say what, of which words and voices are silenced, and of multiple contested knowledges, representations, and portrayals of people, health, and poverty.
As many commentators have noted, obesity is an intensely political issue, and this book deals with the machinations of local government power structures, assumptions of âwillful ignorance,â and class-based politics. This work contributes to a growing number of ethnographic studies of obesity, including Yates-Doerrâs long-term fieldwork in Guatemala (Yates-Doerr 2015a), Solomonâs work on metabolism and obesity in India (Solomon 2016), McLennan and Hardinâs research on the Melanesian Islands of Nauru and Samoa (Hardin 2015; McLennan 2013), and Popenoeâs work on gender and fatness in Niger (Popenoe 2004). Our work differs from these ethnographies as it is situated in our home city and focused directly on a community that was the target of the stateâs largest childhood obesity intervention. This provided us wi...