Culture & Identity

UCLA Center for the Study of Women presents Paul Campos, author of "The Obesity Myth: Why America's Obsession with Weight is Hazardous to Your Health." In this talk, he discusses efforts to make fat people thin, through weight-loss diets, drugs, and surgery. Campos sees weight as a political and social issue and notes that body size is often used as a tool of discrimination, especially against women. Organized by Prof Abigail Saguy, Department of Sociology at UCLA, this talk is part of the Gender and Body Size lecture series, which addresses the new interdisciplinary field of "fat studies." Recent discussions of body weight have been dominated by health policy concerns over the so-called obesity epidemic. Despite a long tradition of feminist critique of fat hatred as a problem of patriarchy, there has been very little critique of the growing emphasis on the importance of slenderness for health reasons.

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In partnership with several Italian scholars, UCSBs department of religious studies gathered experts to discuss the way religious thought intersects with political legislation and action, particularly in the realm of sexuality. On this installment of Church, Sex, and the Public Sphere: Italy and the United States, Ann Pellegrini, Professor of Religious Studies at New York University, argues that the government should stay out of the regulation of morality Series (Voices, 11/2008).

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