Date of Award
5-8-2018
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Heritage Studies, Ph.D.
First Advisor
Deborah Chappel Traylor
Committee Members
Cherisse Jones-Branch; Deborah Chappel Traylor; Lauri Umansky
Call Number
LD251.A566d 2018 U46
Abstract
Discussions of obesity in the Delta often highlight the region’s unhealthy food culture and lifestyle as explanations for what is considered an epidemic especially severe in the region. I call this discourse “Delta obesity talk” and examine it in the media and clinical literature of obesity prevention and health campaigns targeting the Lower Mississippi River Delta. I argue that by focusing on individual behavior thought to contribute to obesity and poor health, the narratives of these media outlets and public health programs direct our attention away from broader social issues contributing to ill health and onto individual fat bodies. Focusing on the Delta region, I contend that these narratives operate in regionally specific ways influenced by historical changes and ideas about southern and Delta culture. As I show, “Delta obesity talk” involves a process of regionalization of national obesity narratives that highlight the need for people to eat less and exercise more, the purportedly great health care costs of obesity, aspects of modernity such as the growth of fast food restaurants and influence of technology on bigger bodies, and health “access” in terms of the ways some people lack access to healthy food and spaces to exercise depending on where they live. In the Delta, these themes intersect with ideas about the region’s “slower pace of life” and unhealthy food culture to further obscure long standing structural inequalities in the region. To demonstrate this, I examine discussions of southern and Delta obesity in the media, as well as three public health interventions—Delta Body and Soul, which targeted black churches in the Mississippi Delta, former governor Mike Huckabee’s childhood and adult obesity prevention campaigns in Arkansas, and Delta Healthy Sprouts, which targeted poor pregnant women in the Mississippi Delta. My work fits not only into the discipline of Heritage Studies, but also fat studies, contributing a regional perspective largely absent from fat studies scholarship.
Rights Management
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Recommended Citation
Ulmer, Amy, "Fat Shaming the Delta: How Social Issues are Individualized via 'Delta Obesity Talk'" (2018). Student Theses and Dissertations. 508.
https://arch.astate.edu/all-etd/508
