tedxuwlacrosse
TEDxUWLaCrosse Salon Series - Fatletes, Health, and Our BMI Obsession: A Cultural Discussion of Branding Fat as The Enemy
The TEDxUWLaCrosse Salon Series presented Fatletes, Health, and Our BMI Obsession: A Cultural Discussion of Branding Fat as The Enemy at the UW-La Crosse Institute for Campus Excellence, Murphy Library, on Thursday, April 21, from 4:00 - 6:00 p.m. The event consisted of a presentation and group discussion facilitated by Dr. Marie Moeller, Associate Professor - Department of English, UWL.
At a TEDx salon, attendees watch TED Talks, listen to speakers, and have discussions about the talks they witnessed. Salons re-engage the audience in the presentation model through the critical element of lively discussions, allowing attendees to actively participate in the event and shape the conversation.
Fat is a culturally-loaded word—we reference it in terms of amounts in food, leverage it as an insult, worry about it as a state of being, chastise it as a moral failure, medicalize it under the guise of health, and discuss it it in broad strokes as a crisis and a high priority for erasure. Primarily, then, fat is culturally-articulated and understood as synonymous with bad and unhealthy—this understanding, however, encourages humans to collapse understandings of health and wellness with appearance-based body assessment.
Dr. Marie Moeller describes the salon, “This session responds to and challenges the way we understand fat—instead of being a visual marker of health, this talk reframes understandings of the way fat is culturally-treated, medicalized, shamed, hidden, and oppressed by our varying governing institutions—political, educational, medical, legal, juridical, and many others. Let’s understand, in other words, the complexity that is fat.”
TEDxUWLaCrosse Salon Series - Fatletes, Health, and Our BMI Obsession: A Cultural Discussion of Branding Fat as The Enemy
The TEDxUWLaCrosse Salon Series presented Fatletes, Health, and Our BMI Obsession: A Cultural Discussion of Branding Fat as The Enemy at the UW-La Crosse Institute for Campus Excellence, Murphy Library, on Thursday, April 21, from 4:00 - 6:00 p.m. The event consisted of a presentation and group discussion facilitated by Dr. Marie Moeller, Associate Professor - Department of English, UWL.
At a TEDx salon, attendees watch TED Talks, listen to speakers, and have discussions about the talks they witnessed. Salons re-engage the audience in the presentation model through the critical element of lively discussions, allowing attendees to actively participate in the event and shape the conversation.
Fat is a culturally-loaded word—we reference it in terms of amounts in food, leverage it as an insult, worry about it as a state of being, chastise it as a moral failure, medicalize it under the guise of health, and discuss it it in broad strokes as a crisis and a high priority for erasure. Primarily, then, fat is culturally-articulated and understood as synonymous with bad and unhealthy—this understanding, however, encourages humans to collapse understandings of health and wellness with appearance-based body assessment.
Dr. Marie Moeller describes the salon, “This session responds to and challenges the way we understand fat—instead of being a visual marker of health, this talk reframes understandings of the way fat is culturally-treated, medicalized, shamed, hidden, and oppressed by our varying governing institutions—political, educational, medical, legal, juridical, and many others. Let’s understand, in other words, the complexity that is fat.”