A VIRTUAL SEMINAR SERIES OF THE ROYAL ANTHROPOLOGICAL INSTITUTE

Thursday 17 November 2022 at 4.00-6.00pm (GMT)

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Feminist Theology and Contemporary Dieting Culture: 
Sin, Salvation and Women’s Weight Loss Narratives

The Royal Anthropological Institute is pleased to present ‘Reviewer meets Reviewed’, a discussion between author Prof Hannah Bacon (University of Chester) and reviewer Dr Giulia Sciolli (University of Cambridge). The event will be chaired by Dr Hazel Andrews (Liverpool John Moores University).

Hannah Bacon draws on qualitative research conducted inside one UK secular commercial weight loss group to show how Christian religious forms and theological discourses inform contemporary weight-loss narratives. Bacon argues that notions of sin and salvation resurface in secular guise in ways that repeat well-established theological meanings. The slimming organization recycles the Christian terminology of sin - spelt 'Syn' and encourages members to frame weight loss in salvific terms. These theological tropes lurk in the background helping to align food once more with guilt and moral weakness, but they also mirror to an extent the way body policing techniques in Christianity have historically helped to cultivate self-care. The self-breaking and self-making aspects of women's Syn-watching practices in the group continue certain features of historical Christianity, serving in similar ways to conform women's bodies to patriarchal norms while providing opportunities for women's self-development.

Taking into account these tensions, Bacon asks what a specifically feminist theological response to weight loss might look like. If ideas about sin and salvation service hegemonic discourses about fat while also empowering women to shape their own lives, how might they be rethought to challenge fat phobia and the frenetic pursuit of thinness? As well as naming as 'sin' principles and practices which diminish women's appetites and bodies, this book forwards a number of proposals about how salvation might be performed in our everyday foodways and through the cultivation of fat pride. It takes seriously the conviction of many women in the group that food and the body can be important sites of power, wisdom and transformation, but channels this insight into the construction of theologies that resist rather than reproduce thin privilege and sizeist norms.

The book is published by Bloomsbury.
More info here: https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/feminist-theology-and-contemporary-dieting-culture-9780567659958/   

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The review

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, vol. 28, issue 1 March 2022, pp.372-373

Giulia Sciolli

Hannah Bacon is a feminist theologian who conducted fieldwork in a secular commercial weight loss programme in England by attending its weekly meetings for fifteen months as a researcher and fully participating member. By beginning her book ‘from the micro-practices of women trying to lose weight rather than providing a purely theoretical discussion’ (p. 20), Bacon aims to enrich the scarce feminist theological literature on weight and fat, and, at the same time, to offer a religious perspective on what she calls ‘Fat Studies’ (p. 26). By deliberately choosing a programme that employs the Christian terminology of ‘sin’ – spelled ‘syn’ – Bacon combines the participants’ weight loss narratives (all women, with one exception) with an analysis of the ambivalent ways in which theological ideas surface in what she characterizes as patriarchal weight loss ideologies. The book's distinctive contribution to the existing theological literature consists of not only grounding its arguments in ethnographic research, but also of suggesting how Christian theological ideas that discipline women's bodies and desires as sites of danger can be used to reconfigure contemporary discussions and practices around women's relationships with food, eating, and their bodies in ways that are less harmful.

The first three chapters focus on the weight loss group. Chapter 1 examines how the programme classifies ‘bad foods’ into ‘syns’, and how participants experience both eating and their own body image and sense of self in terms of guilt, defilement, and shame. Chapter 2 complicates this seemingly straightforward landscape by drawing on Foucault's work, and by highlighting the ways in which ‘syns’ are also associated with permission to, at times, indulge in pleasure – suggesting a rigidly self-surveilled but somehow empowering tension between self-care and self-harm. Chapter 3 shows how weight loss is framed as ‘salvation’, and to what extent it is experienced in redemptive terms by the women concerned.

The last three chapters build on these ethnographic insights to call for a reconfiguration of Christian notions of sin and salvation as related to food. Chapter 4 suggests how framing food as sin implies a ‘distortion’ of humanity's relationship with food (including with an exploitative food industry, animals, and the planet), and a self-punishing self. By drawing on hitherto overlooked theologies that challenge traditional framings of food, sex, and pleasure as evil, and that instead frame food as ‘a gift of God’ to be shared with others, Bacon calls for groups and practices that encourage ‘sensible eating’: that is, an approach to food and eating that would frame pleasure as a lively and nurturing aspect of life (chap. 5). Based on a ‘Sabbath sensibility’ (p. 261), this would allow women to escape pressures to be always perfect, hyper-efficient, and to hate their own bodies, and instead enable them to engage in a kind of self-care that would celebrate their eating bodies as a vehicle through which to get close to God (chap. 6).

The book engages with a vast range of Christian theologians, feminist theologians, feminist theorists, historians, philosophers, sociologists, anthropologists, and fat theorists and activists, and mindfully considers how not only gender but also class and race affect the ways in which women experience and respond to social pressures for slenderness.

An anthropologist might note that the arguments for a reconceptualization of the relationship between food and salvation developed in the second half of the book seem mostly informed by the alternative Christian theologies that Bacon draws on, rather than by her ethnography – and sometimes by seemingly taken-for-granted and generalized notions of what is ‘healthy’ for and what is ‘harmful’ to women. Moreover, whereas the reader is repeatedly exposed to how religion, politics, and economics are intertwined in the fat-shaming discourses employed by the weight loss programme, one does not hear much about kinship – aside from learning that some participants were encouraged to join the group by family members or family care needs, whereas others started the programme to carve a space for themselves out of daily duties of family care. The ethnography would have benefited from a deeper account of the participants’ lives beyond the weight loss group, and especially of how kinship care affected the way they experienced their bodies, eating, and the work done with the programme.

Finally, an engagement with Else Vogel's ethnographic work on treatment for what is biomedically classified as ‘obesity’ in the Netherlands might have produced interesting parallels with how healthcare professionals in that context try to reframe people's relationships with eating in ways that resonate with Bacon's proposal – generating questions about how alternative Christian theologies may already be informing secular care practices that attempt to remedy the harm caused by social pressures to be thin.

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