Abstract
Lyon (2002: 1) suggests that whilst work in the field of surveillance studies is broad and diverse, ‘what they have in common is that, for whatever reason, people and populations are under scrutiny’. Increasing amounts of intervention into people’s lives in a quest to monitor and regulate their diets, health, body size and shape is one way in which people have fallen prey to increasing levels of surveillance in society. As evidenced in previous chapters, the construction of obesity as a ‘health crisis’ has further propagated what Armstrong (1995) refers to as ‘Surveillance Medicine’:
Surveillance Medicine requires the dissolution of the distinct clinical categories of healthy and ill as it attempts to bring everyone within its network of visibility. Therefore one of the earliest expressions of Surveillance Medicine — and a vital precondition for its continuing proliferation — was the problematisation of the normal.
(Armstrong, 1995: 395)
Fat children ‘should be taken from parents’ to curb obesity epidemic.
(The Times, 18 August 2008)
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© 2011 Emma Rich, John Evans and Laura De Pian
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Rich, E., Evans, J., De Pian, L. (2011). Children’s Bodies, Surveillance and the Obesity Crisis. In: Rich, E., Monaghan, L.F., Aphramor, L. (eds) Debating Obesity. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230304239_6
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