Unsettling Wellness: Towards a Praxis of Body Sovereignty
With Athia N. Choudhury, PhD.
What does it mean to reach towards good health? This talk unsettles the easy assumption that health is a neutral metric for personal and public good. We’ll examine how the idea of modern health and wellness historically emerged through various U.S. imperial reform projects of the 20th century that pathologized eating and bodily management for women and minorized subjects. The case studies–ranging from historical, contemporary, to scientific-–demonstrate how the metaphor of the “body as a machine” in need of fuel is a recent phenomenon that transforms how we think about the act of eating and our relationships to food. By examining the histories of diets and dieting, the foods created and circulated via U.S. militarism, and the impact of eugenics/progressive era reform on our modern global food system, we will reimagine how to approach body neutrality and sovereignty in healing praxis. In thinking about health as a set of intimacies between the interpersonal, the social, and the political, we can work towards imagining different ways to hold our bodies–in tenderness, in grief, in care.
Learning Objectives:
Examine the histories of diets and dieting, including the foods created and circulated via U.S. militarism, and the impact of eugenics/progressive era reform on our modern global food system.
Understand how to reimagine an approach to body neutrality and sovereignty in healing praxis.
Form an understanding about health as a set of intimacies between the interpersonal, the social, and the political.
About the Speaker:
Athia N. Choudhury PhD. is a writer and cultural theorist interested in questions of race, food, militarism, eugenics, and body surveillance in the 20th-21st century. She holds a Ph.D. in American Studies and Ethnicity from the University of Southern California with a graduate certificate in Gender and Sexuality Studies. Her current book project examines how wellness and diet culture become major ideological exports of U.S. empire that produce global consumers whose nutritional and medical decisions become racially coded and gendered during the American century. She is currently the Postdoctoral Associate in Asian American and Diaspora Studies at Duke University.