Fatness and the Maternal Body

Obesity is a rising global health problem. On the one hand, a clearly defined medical condition, it is at the same time a corporeal state embedded in the social and cultural perception of fatness and body shape and size. Focusing specifically on the maternal body, contributors to the volume examine how the language and notions of obesity connect with, or stand apart from, wider societal values and moralities to do with the body, fatness, reproduction, and what is considered "natural." A focus on fatness in the context of human reproduction and motherhood offers instructive insights into the global circulation and authority of biomedical facts on fatness (as "risky" anti-fit, for example). As with other social and cultural studies critical of health policy discourse, this volume challenges the spontaneous connection being made in scientific and popular understanding between fatness and ill health.

Maya Unnithan-Kumar is Reader in Social Anthropology at the University of Sussex. Her current research specialism is in the anthropology of childbirth, infertility, reproductive technologies, health, gender, and body politics. For the past ten years she has worked on reproductive health and rights issues in NW India. Prior to this, from 1986, she worked on caste, gender and development issues in southern Rajasthan. She is currently leading an Economic and Social Research Council (U.K.)-funded research project on State-NGO relations as defined by their engagement with human-rights discourse in the fields of sexual, maternal, and reproductive health in India.

Soraya Tremayne is a social anthropologist and the Director of the Fertility and Reproduction Studies Group and a Research Associate at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Oxford. Previous to this, she was the Director of the Centre for Cross-Cultural Research, Queen Elizabeth House, University of Oxford. For the past twelve years, she has carried out research on reproduction and sexuality in Iran. Her current research focuses on assisted reproductive technologies and Islam in Iran.0943698278\

Heather Latimer is a British-born bonne vivante. She has merrily roved in small villages and huge cities in countries all over the world where she's mingled with people of all nationalities, orientations and ages - rich and poor - rogues and royals.

Ms Latimer was formerly US national television and radio spokesperson for Funk & Wagnall's Encyclopedia where she was viewed as a specialist in making difficult subjects easy to understand.

She hailed from Fleet Street, London and Madison Avenue, New York where she was a busy freelancer and also contributed to innumerable US national magazines. Later she wrote 15 published books that are in circulation.

Ms. Latimer remains a specialist in making difficult subjects easy and noted for her heavy research from real persons in reputable locales NOT rehashed from the internet or other published sources. She is also recognized as the leading US authority on Louis Wain.

More information appears in Who's Who in America.