The Obese Body as Interface: Fat Studies, Medical Data,

and Infographics
Dr. Marie Moeller
University of Wisconsin-La Crosse
1725 State Street
La Crosse, WI 54601
001-608-785-6928
mmoeller@uwlax.edu

ABSTRACT Categories and Subject Descriptors

In a recent issue of CDQ, Aparicio and Costa (2014) present a H.1.2 [Information Systems]: User/Machine Systems – human
discussion of the long history of data visualization, articulating factors, human information processing.
that data visualization is, again, gaining in popularity and
attention. Included in this discussion of data visualization is a sub- H.5.2 [Information Interfaces and Presentation]: User
set of data visualization--infographics. Such inclusion is apt, Interfaces – user-centered design.
considering that Blythe, Lauer, and Curran (2014) found that I.4.10 [Image Processing and Computer Vision]: Image
infographics are one of the top 10 genres in which alumni of Representation – hierarchical, statistical.
technical communication programs reported that they generate on
the job site and within their own lives. General Terms
Algorithms, Design, Human Factors, Theory
With regard to the importance of and renewed interest in data
visualization (and by extension infographics), in this article I call Keywords
attention to a specific use of the infographic—as a form of data Infographics
visualization from health-related organizations of medical and Data Visualization
statistical data regarding obesity. Through analysis of obesity
infographics, I argue that infographics about medical data can Medical Rhetoric
(and do) feminize the “obese” body and claims the female body as Fat Studies
an efficient instrument of normalization and cultural management.
Expediency
To do so, I rhetorically analyze obesity infographics to illustrate Information Design
that the infographic genre’s goals—to simplify, clarify, and
deliver complex information in a visually compelling manner— INTRODUCTION
can exercise problematic commitments to expediency and In a recent issue of CDQ, Aparicio and Costa [2014] present a
illustrate problematic notions of exigence [Katz, 1992; Ward, discussion of the history of data visualization, articulating that
2010; Dragga & Voss 2001]. Such commitments, encourage data visualization is, yet again, gaining in popularity and attention.
misreadings of medical data and, by extension, the infographics Included in this discussion of data visualization are infographics
that convey data regarding body categorizations and notions of as a sub-set of data visualization. Such inclusion is apt,
health. considering that Blythe, Lauer, and Curran [2014] found that
infographics are one of the top 10 genres in which alumni of
By obfuscating how infographics potentially drive simplification technical communication programs reported that they generate on
of terms that reify the narrow frames with which we understand the job and in their own lives.
“obesity” and “obese” bodies, I argue that such visual More specifically for this article, I consider how medical data—in
representations of data can also serve a metonymic function for particular a specific sub-set of data about obesity—is both
ever-narrowing cultural conceptualizations of obesity-as- constructed and visualized by lay audiences. To discuss such
detriment and obesity-as-bodily-fault. Further, I argue that such construction and visualization, I turn to St. Amant’s [2015] article
problematic use infographics can reduce the complexities of the “Culture and the Contextualization of Care: A Prototype-Based
body and definitions of the body, especially of the “obese” body Approach to Developing Health and Medical Visuals for
and definitions of “obesity,” with the effect of potentially International Audiences.” St. Amant claims that with regard to
pathologizing, managing and normalizing information and bodies medical visualizations, the central issue is expectation:
under the guise of promoting “health” and “healthy living.”
Interfacing with medical data in this way, in other words, can be Does something look like we expect it to? If so, we tend
both understandable and yet highly problematic; this article to consider it more credible; if not, less credible (Rosch,
illustrates how and why. 1978; Aitchison, 1994; St. Amant, 2006). These
expectations, however, are not universal. Rather, they
are based on exposure over time. The more you see
something and are told it represents a credible depiction
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 of a given person, object, or place, the more likely you
are to assume that particular visual represents the most
appropriate, or most credible, visual representation of
that person, object, or place. (39-40)
I take up St. Amant’s argument, insofar as I am focused on the
ubiquity of particular visualizations of obesity and the
intersections of such visualizations with data about the obese
body. I am also interested in how such ubiquity of visualization
becomes a self-referential form of credibility, solidifying
particular understandings of the obese body and diminishing
others. My goal with this article, then, is to provide a counterpoint
to current approaches to visualization and data visualization about
obesity. To do so, I illustrate one potential articulation point
between technical communication practices, data visualization,
feminism, and the field of Fat Studies. To that the end, I claim that
Fat Studies is integral to the field of technical communication in
this current medicalized moment, as a way to speak back to the
normative, moral imperatives generated by cultural, visual
constructions of fatness and data about fat and obesity.1
GENESIS
I began this work for several reasons. In the fall of 2011, I was
told by a medical practitioner at a major medical institution in
Wisconsin that I was “too fat to be examined;” In 2012, in the
span of two days, one faction of my field (The Association for
Teachers of Technical Writing) had a 58 message listserv
dialogue regarding the intersections of Fat Studies and technical
communication, coupled with discussion of the use of and naming
of Fat Studies as a field of inquiry. Around this time in 2012, I
was also beginning to mine infographics regarding obesity, and
started to stitch together patterns through reading those
infographics, larger field commentaries about Fat and Fat Studies,
and my own experiences with medical institutions, to see trends of
dehumanization in technical communication design with regards
to individuals medically categorized as obese.
Initially, I had planned to collect, analyze, and hypothesize about
infographics from culturally-sanctioned locations of medical
information. However, as Madeleine Sorapure illustrates in her
2010 piece in Computers and Composition, the development of
free online design and information organization software has
allowed lay users to interact with and create infographics as a way
to break into research discourse. We can see such effects in the
way that, for instance, data visualization challenges abound,
including a 2010 partnership between the “Let’s Move”
movement from the US government and Good, a magazine for,
according to their tag line, the global citizen, asking for
infographic submissions on the issue of childhood obesity.
Infographics have also been called on to drive public action, as in
2014, when the American Public Health Association put out an
obesity infographic by calling it their “next public health tool.”
As mass access may allow lay users to interact in varying and
seemingly informed ways with particularly complex research
from large medical and scientific institutions, we are beginning to
see lay users increasingly take part in generating and
disseminating medical and scientific content. And, in many ways,
1
I use the terms fat and obese in this article in different ways—
calling on Fat Studies terminology, fat is a state of being while
obese is a medicalized term ascribed to a fat body to
characterize it as aberrant.
such lay user-generated content is often presented in technical and
information-savvy ways. Of the infographics culled for this
article, for example, most creators employ appropriate sources and
credible data, often from major medical and organizational
sources; their design and text shows attention to very statistical
data and design principles; the creators cite the sources they
engage. Thus, for this article, I am concerned less with the
credibility of the creative source of such infographics, though
further study about organizations who provide sanctioned forms
of these infographics is part of the next portion of this project. For
this small sub-set, I am more concerned with the ubiquity of the
presented obesity infographics that circulate on the web,
infographics readily available for users to interact with and pin
and re-pin, for example, on pinterest, or to be pulled and re-posted
on varying social media by users.
METHODOLOGY AND APPROACH
To cull widely-circulating obesity infographics and analyze them
from the standpoints of both their travel-ability and rhetorical
impact, I first began with Google searches based on inurl and
intitle for two terms: “obesity infographics” and “visual obesity
data.”
From those very large data sets, I narrowed the focus to
circulation of obesity visualizations. I triangulated this data in the
following ways—first, by considering which of the infographics
represented the largest number of postings/re-pinnings on
Pinterest and Flickr; and second, I considered the
credibility/viability of the data such visualizations held—to do so,
I asked two questions of the data: 1) from what institutions was
the included data from? and 2) how was data was used in
conjunction with visualization techniques?
From that triangulation exercise, I was left with a small sub-set—
six most posted/re-posted obesity infographics that included data
from institutionally credible sources (and were visibly cited)—to
rhetorically analyze. I narrowed my focus in this way both
because of the truncated nature of this piece, as well as the small
scope under which I was considering the work of such
infographics.
I analyzed these infographics through the following lenses:
feminist theory, fat studies, disability studies, and technical
communication/design practices. I became specifically focused on
the dissection of the fat body, which is where these infographics
intersected with one another.
I also focused on the visually dissected obese body first because,
while the ubiquity of such infographics is compelling, more
importantly, as Ward [2010] reminds us, we must also pay
attention to the creation and study of information design in a way
that contemplates why arrangements of text and graphics have
symbolic potency for given cultures. Additionally, we must attend
to how, as Dragga and Voss [2001] articulate, we must broaden
our understanding of the ethics of visual communication by
“studying and developing a variety of techniques that will bring
humanity to technical illustrations” [266]. I answer both such
calls by responding to the following questions: 1. What symbolic
potency can be seen by the arrangement of graphics and text in
culturally circulating obesity infographics? And 2. How can
technical writing teachers and practitioners further develop
techniques for students to bring humanity and critical awareness
to technical illustrations when engaging data about issues
surrounding technical medical information, the body and human
life?
To answer my first question, I will discuss obesity as a social
construct and follow that discussion by analyzing a selection of
the culled obesity infographics through the lens of Carol Adams’
[1990] text The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian
Critical Theory. Through textual and visual analysis of obesity
infographics, I demonstrate how the obese body is visually
dissected in such infographics, similar to the ways in which
women have been historically dissected and framed by varying
food industries—as cuts of meat. In each case—women dissected
as meat and the obese body dissected as meat—the act of
dissection creates objects of subjects. I’ll explain this more fully
later on in the article.
To answer my second question, then, I briefly touch on how what
might appear at first blush to be humanizing in some visualization
tactics (i.e. including images of the fat body, illustrating the
“damage” and “danger” of the fat body) actually potentially works
against recognizing the wide variety of human experience and
varying definitions of health. Instead of dealing solely with
visuals as a location by where we can bring humanity to our work,
I call us to treat and teach our data with humanity, by, for
example, noting its potential fallibility and social construction,
and thus present data with a view towards obesity research as a
conversation to be had rather than bodies as problems to be
solved.
BODIES TO BE SOLVED: THE OBESITY
EPIDEMIC
Part of the way, as Julie Guthman argues in Weighing In: Obesity,
Food Justice, and the Limits of Capitalism [2011] that we have
culturally framed obese bodies as problems to be solved is the
way in which we don’t quite recognize that our cultural
construction of “the ‘obesity epidemic’” relies on “artifacts of
particular measures, statistical conventions, epidemiological
associations, and rhetorical moves” [25] including data formulas
that categorize obesity and connect it to health—such as BMI,
which several major health institutions have and continue to
challenge as a categorizer/labeler of health and well-being
[Rothman, 2008; Heymsfield and Cefalu, 2013]. The point, as she
articulates, is that pictures of obesity are thus painted “in ways
that tend to overdramatize some elements and underspecify
others, especially those that might lead to different
conceptualizations of the problem” [25] and that “the visibility of
fatness and the fact that many find it aesthetically displeasing
seem to influence scientific and public understandings of it” [25].
The notion of fat as aesthetically displeasing is compelling in this
location, and in relation to the field of technical communication,
in particular, in considering our field relationships to fat and our
understandings of the term fat and its place in our cultural mileu.
Consider, for example, the Association of Teachers of Technical
Writing listserv discussion from 2012, where one user articulated
that the use of the term “fat” was problematic in his/her view, as
“the use of the word FAT strikes me not as
"pleasantly overweight," but as UNHEALTHY (i.e. diabetes,
heart disease) and not something we should be celebrating or
accepting.” What I wish to call attention to in this statement is not
necessarily the discussion of understandings of the place of fat
studies, but how aesthetic notions shape the way this particular
user understands constructions of health in relation to bodies—
that there is a way for a fat body to be pleasing to others, i.e.
“pleasantly overweight” and a way for a fat body to be beyond
pleasant to unhealthy and thus a health burden on the state, i.e.
“diabetes, heart disease.” Such logics thus tie aesthetics to health
in complicated, nexused ways that are both difficult to tease out
and yet simple to moralize and collapse into one another.
Such field-based discussions of the aesthetic limits of the obese
body and the relation of aesthetics to health serve here to show
how aesthetic displeasure becomes conflated with health. This
conflation, by allowing an articulation of “I’m concerned about an
individuals health” to stand in place for the articulation of “I
dislike how this person appears to me/makes me feel/disgusts me”
allows a further moralization of aesthetics-as-health that then
becomes tied to the nation-state. As Abigail Saguy [2013]
articulates in her text What’s Wrong With Fat, “Reports on the
economic costs of obesity paint the nonfat as victims, in that they
are unfairly burdened with the cost of fat people’s unhealthy
lifestyles” [22]. Such arguments, Saguy points out, are at the
“heart of neoliberalism,” insofar as such an ideology shifts
“responsibility for public welfare from governments to individual
people and markets” [22]. Indeed, individualization is fueled by
“the desire [of upper middle class Americans] to put symbolic
distance between themselves and the people from lower
socioeconomic classes” [Saguy, 2013, 19]. Similar arguments
regarding distance and identification are made by disability
studies scholars, for example, regarding bodies who stretch the
bounds of what is culturally deemed “normal.”
From a technical writing standpoint, relying on normalizing data
from, for example, BMI statistics that simply categorize as a way
to create normal and not-normal might make an easier, expedient
and normatively persuasive case about the “health epidemic of
obesity” and thus serve as a call to action for change. The use of
the infographic, in distillation of information, further serves
expediency as a way to highlight the “epidemic of obesity.” The
thought might be, then, that such an approach potentially moves
people quickly to take action. However, there are multiple effects
of these infographic representations of obesity that function in a
multiplicity of ways, including a support for the neoliberal
understandings and treatments of the obese body.
BODIES AS MEAT: VISUAL
CORRELATIONS BETWEEN WOMEN
AND PERSONS CULTURALLY DEFINED
AS OBESE
At first blush, it might not seem like this correlation would be a
salient point. However, I illustrate how, by dissecting the fat body
in ways very similar to the ways in which food industries have
done with women’s bodies, both identities are feminized through
the processes of individualization, disempowerment and
objectification. The effects of such processes, as I articulate
above, disrecognizing any responsibility of the social system
surrounding constructing and understanding said bodies and
normalizes one categorization of scientific data (i.e. BMI) to the
point of accepted commonplace.
In this case, I provide the following images and discussion from
Carol Adams’ [1990] text The Sexual Politics of Meat: A
Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory to illustrate how women are
animalized and objectified as meat, fetishized through their
relationship and correlation to animals (see Figures 1 and 2).

Figure 1
Beef Cattle Dissection
This particular objectification and dehumanization-through-
dissection differs from other forms of objectification as the end
point of dissection, Adams articulates, is that we recognize the
dissected body as that which not just objectified, but as a former
living creature that is rendered a dead referent. Once recognized
as a dead object, Adams refers to such bodies as absent referents,
meaning that the dissected body no longer represents the live
presence it once did, no longer subject, but instead stands in place
as some other object entirely (see Figure 2).
Figure 2
Israeli Fast Food Image
Dissected, the woman is now understood as dead flesh/meat,
which Adams argues creates space by which to understand how
violence, unheeded, comes to be enacted on such bodies. The
rhetorical trajectory that follows may explain one potential way
such violence becomes authorized/justified: if dissected women
are dead, much like a dissected animal, they are no longer the
form in which they appear. If they are no longer in the form in
which they appear, there is no harm in treating/using/consuming
such bodies (literally, in the case of the animal; metaphorically
consuming, in the case of the woman) in whatever way we wish to
treat and frame them. In other words, Adams explains how
through dissection, more so than other forms of objectification,
one being becomes socially distanced from another being, so
much so that we no longer recognize that being as a live being and
thus not as a being worthy of ethical treatment. Invoking research
on the early modern period, Adams articulates that such social
distancing operates in the following way—“Once perceived as
beasts, people were liable to be treated accordingly…it
legitimized the ill-treatment of those humans who were in a
supposedly animal condition” [69].
The creation of an absent referent requires a kind of death that
allows a body to become consumable while allowing the
consumer to disavow the living-ness of that being, to be not
responsible for the actual action of death. An animal is
consumable because it is not animal. A woman is consumable
because she is not woman. The representation the butcher,
keeping the hands of the consumer clean.
My argument, then, is that a similar, expedient pattern is emerging
through obesity infographics—an articulation of the obese body
not as a human but as dead weight, or as a visually dissected
body, much as women have been, as dead meat.
I use the following images to illustrate the parallelism between the
dissection of women and the dissection of the obese body. As one
infographic, relying on BMI figures, puts it, weight is, quite
literally, referred to as “dead meat” (see Figure 3).
Figure 3
Infographic Framing BMI Categorized Obesity as “Dead Weight”
Though Figure 3 does not represent a body, per say, the absent
referent of the “dead weight” of the obese body is not far from the
infographic. More specifically, Figure 4 illustrates a dissected,
headless obese body—one that metonymically stands in for not an
actual obese body, but the health crisis of a nation. It appears,
quite literally, as if the obese body, as a stand-in for the obesity
crisis, has swallowed most of the Southern portions of the US.
Thus, the way in which the obese body is dissected and headless
creates an absent referent—not a human body, but a stand-in for
sickness, disease, harm, and threat especially in a particular area
of the nation—that allows us to vilify obese bodies and blame
individuals rather than social systems and structures in need of
fixing.
Other visual components add to such a reading of obesity
infographics—a problematic reliance on colors that are dark to
emphasize the gravity of the nature of the crisis of obesity, as well
as to illustrate threat; the use of the white line to disconnect,
reminiscent of a chalk line from a crime scene. All such choices
direct viewers to engage with obesity infographics with a focus on
blame, and shame, directed at the obese body.
 Figure 5
Infographic Framing Obesity as a Harm to Self and Others
Figures 4 and 5 explain how the obese body is a harm to the
nation-state, to individuals in the nation-state, and to themselves,
encouraging an argument that such infographic-based
dehumanization and shaming is justified because the obese body
clearly cares not to be responsible for themselves or others. In
Figure 6, we see a similar dissection, the creation of an absent
referent, and a dehumanization of a different form. A human, fat
body, medically termed obese in this infographic, is physically
turned away from us—without a face, and turned in shame, his
body is mapped with obesity statistics, painted over with data and
made to represent the increase in obesity rates from 1980 to 2008.
We are encouraged to stare2 at this body in disgust and shame, as
Figure 4
we read statistics surrounding the body—in this case, the
Infographic Dissecting Obese Bodies as National Threat
dissection creates an absent referent that calls attention not just to
Figure 5 represents another connection to the threat of obesity, the affect of obesity on a particular nation or population, but the
and the individualization of obesity, this time focused on the cost harm and irresponsibility of obesity worldwide.
that obesity represents to populations who are not obese (victims)
at the hands of the obese (perpetrators). This infographic shows,
first, how the obese person is a harm to themselves—dissected
into varying diseases that are attributed to obesity—and then
proceeds to pit obese persons against persons experiencing
hunger/food insecurity—implying that individuals with Type II
Diabetes (which is clearly different from obesity, but audience
members are encouraged to collapse obesity into Type II Diabetes
and other health threats from the first portion of the infographic)
are spending money on health care that could go to feed hundreds
of thousands of human beings each year. Dissected as a threat, to
themselves and others, such an infographic forwards a narrative
about obesity that blames and feminizes the obese body while
attaching responsibility for health care concerns regarding food
insecurity.

Figure 6
Infographic of Harm and Shame of Obesity World Wide

2
Rosemarie Garland-Thomson (and other disability studies
scholars) speak extensively on the work of staring and the
multiple functions of staring at bodies. For more information,
see her text Staring: How We Look [2009].

Figure 7
Infographic Depicting Obesity as Diseased Meat
Figure 7, focused on childhood obesity, returns to a literal
dissection of the obese child body—represented is the meat of the
child, the organs and tissue, that are harmed by obesity. The child
himself, the exterior, his facial expressions, are faded out to call
attention not to the human as a whole, but to the human’s parts
that his state of being harms. Thus, the obese person is again a
harm to themselves, and not truly human but instead a
conglomeration of their diseased parts.
Figure 8
Obesity as a Personal Choice, as a Killer, and Preventable
Figure 8 concludes the rhetorical analysis for this article—a
caricature of a fat person, comically drawn and rotund who is
killing the world—dark, a threat, facing again away from the
viewer. This infographic is calling a fat viewer to action—
claiming that obesity is preventable but placing the blame and
responsibility solely on the individual instead of sharing that
responsibility with social systems. Here, too, I would argue that
while the viewer is, at first blush, the fat individual who is being
hailed to alter their behavior, another viewer for this infographic
is likely the non-fat individual, one who is the “green/normal” and
can use such an infographic to shore up the idea that the
medicalized obese individual hasn’t done enough to prevent their
corporeal state and thus isn’t as moral of an individual as the
“green/normal” individual.
CONCLUSION
In the end, all these forms of the dissection of the obese body via
infographics reduces an obese person to consumable and
malleable, up for interpretation and open to oppressive narratives,
because the obese person is visually rendered not human. As
Adams claims, “The interactions between physical oppression and
the dependence on metaphors that rely on the absent referent
indicates that we distance ourselves from whatever is different by
equating it with something we have already objectified” (69). In
this case, the creation of an absent referent through dissection is
multi-layered, relying on our understanding of the dissection of
animals and the cultural and historical purposes and visual
dissections of woman. Thus, the dissection of the obese body is
both a creation of an absent referent and a feminizing act—
attachment both to a death and to a location of diminished power
and agency.
Obese bodies dismembered. Feminized. Blamed. Mapped with
seemingly unquestionable scientific data. No room left for
interpretation of obesity as a concept. Fat bodies are positioned as
feminized subjects, in particular by infographics, another vehicle
of the weight loss industrial complex in the service of the
perpetuation of narratives of normalcy—about what constitutes a
normal body, about what deserves praise, about what is
aesthetically pleasant, and what deserves disgust. The dissection
of our bodies in this setting, though, comes not through an
animalistic sexualization objectification, but a seemingly
objectified medicalized altruism. The effects, though, are the
same—the creation of an absent referent that makes the
domination and management of feminized obese bodies less
difficult, more “normal”. Such representation, though, is a less
overt form of management, one that takes on the narrative of
altruism to perpetuate stereotypical understandings and harmful
treatments of the fat body.
In other words, fat and fat bodies are yet another location from
which to forward hegemonic ideals about the weakness and harm
of what is considered feminine. In this instantiation, though, such
normative narratives perpetuate patriarchy under the continued
guise of health and well-being. Thus, obesity infographics are yet
another vehicle by which the obese body is commodified and
dismembered to suit the ruling class.
The logic, then, is two fold:
1. The fat body becomes a spectacle, an other, something to be
awed and disgusted by, a way for the viewer to process both the
fat body and their own body in relation to the fat body. In
dissection, the spectacle of the fat body is rendered harmful, other,
expensive, damaging, disgusting. Further work can be done, and
has been done, on the idea of staring and the fat body
(referencing, in particular, Susan Bordo and Rosemarie Garland
Thomson).
2. Under the guise of health and well-being, the fat body is framed
as non-normal, as a problem to be solved, as a threat to capitalism,
to themselves, to others, to our very systems of being. This is
what Lennard Davis and others term a narrative of normalcy—
accepted, commonplace arguments about the fat body as non-
normal. Accepted that fat bodies are bad. Accepted that fat bodies
are THE problem. Accepted that fat bodies are the fault and
problem of the individual. Accepted that body fat will always
cause harm, disease, death. That fat is always miserable, always
longing, always sad, always outside of human. That we must
strive to dominate it, always.
To alter such trajectories, I’d argue that we must, as Miller,
Dragga and Voss, and others called for, humanize our work, our
data, our approaches. In looking at these infographics, though, it
would appear at first that such work has already been done. And,
indeed, in some ways it has—the authors likely believed they
were humanizing the problem of obesity by clearly illustrating
just what a huge (pun intended) problem obesity is. In response,
though, I’d say that perhaps instead of humanizing through image
and accepting the data as solely data to be delivered, we might
consider humanizing the data, instead—what I mean here is to
recognize that research, and data, is culturally shaped by perhaps
placing competing data in conversation, by representing multiple
views within an infographic, and not relying on disgust, shame,
and dehumanization to frame bodies that inhabit a complex
cultural location.
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