Skip to main content
Skip to "About government"
Language selection
Français
Government of Canada /
Gouvernement du Canada
Search
Search the website
Search
Menu
Main
Menu
Jobs and the workplace
Immigration and citizenship
Travel and tourism
Business and industry
Benefits
Health
Taxes
Environment and natural resources
National security and defence
Culture, history and sport
Policing, justice and emergencies
Transport and infrastructure
Canada and the world
Money and finances
Science and innovation
You are here:
Canada.ca
Library and Archives Canada
Services
Services for galleries, libraries, archives and museums (GLAMs)
Theses Canada
Item – Theses Canada
Page Content
Item – Theses Canada
OCLC number
782100319
Link(s) to full text
LAC copy
LAC copy
Author
McPhail, Deborah,1977-
Title
Canada weighs in : gender, race, and the making of "obesity," 1945-1970
Degree
Ph. D. -- York University, 2010
Publisher
Ottawa : Library and Archives Canada = Bibliothèque et Archives Canada, [2011]
Description
5 microfiches
Notes
Includes bibliographical references.
Abstract
<?Pub Inc> This dissertation brings together feminist history, feminist geography, feminist political economy, and feminist embodiment theory to explore discourses of Canadian obesity from the immediate post-war era to 1970. Employing the concepts of Cartesian Dualism, performativity, abjection, and fetishism gleaned from feminist embodiment theory, I focus in particular on conversations about obesity in the medical and popular presses, federal government documents, and insurance company publications. I analyze how obesity was defined and categorized in complicated and often contradictory ways that reestablished the dominance of white, middle-class male subjects and reified Canada as a white, patriarchal nation. The dissertation further shows that conversations about obesity helped establish post-war colonial-capitalism through the mobilization of normative raced and classed gender roles. Relatedly, I suggest that the psychic and discursive processes of performativity, abjection, and fetishism helped to organize a "national obesity problem," and worked in part to ease the social tensions created by shifts in the gendered division of labour, the feminization of the public sphere, the supposed breakdown of the nuclear family form, and changing immigration patterns that characterized post-war Canadian society to 1970. Through historical example, this dissertation calls into question current health policy, medical research, and popular opinion that assume obesity to be a biological category bereft of any socio-cultural foundations.
ISBN
9780494649541
0494649542
Date modified:
2022-09-01