This article analyses anti-obesity discourse in post-war Czechoslovakia, particularly in the country’s late socialist period. The article conceives of the discourse on obesity as a tool of biopolitical, rather than totalitarian, power, examining the ways expert knowledge, power, and morality worked together to produce a socialist subject. On the first level, it analyses the expert anti-obesity discourse as an example of the expertisation of public discourse in socialist Czechoslovakia. Second, it shows the construction of obesity in contrast to bodily ability, and the stigmatisation of the ‘fat’ body. On the last level, the article focuses on the gendered aspects of the discourse and demonstrates the ways in which the anti-obesity campaign supported the heteronormative framework of late socialism. By examining expert and media discourses, the article argues that the campaign against obesity served as a means to construct a proper socialist body and induce a moral panic about the state of socialism.
Interrogating the austerity measures introduced by the Czech government under the Prime Ministry of Petr Nečas (2010–2013), this essay wishes to highlight the importance of the translations of the political into the registry of morality, which Chantal Mouffe identifies as features of post-politics, for (re)establishment of social hierarchies and inequalities based in difference. In particular, I demonstrate the strategic importance of “disability” and the racialised concept of “maladaptation” for such post-political reformulations of the political and normative outlines of abled citizenship. After mapping out the ideological deployment of the idea of crisis for the ethics of austerity, the essay concludes by posing questions about possible limits and drawbacks of relying upon crisis as a trope of intersectional feminist critique., Kateřína Kolářová., and Obsahuje seznam literatury
Critique is one of the social sciences’ most respectable tasks, especially when its aim is to emancipate people oppressed for their otherness. However, there is also a critique of critique as a disabling tool, replacing the obvious actors revealed as ‘fictitious’ with synthetic objects that the critic herself deems more ‘factual’. This article understands the critical gesture as a pragmatic resource for re-organising the field of dis/abilities. In the first part of the article, we make three critical gestures together with José, a person identified as mentally ill. A paranoid vision of a secret conspiracy, a naturalising concept of disease, and the critique of stigma all seek to radically redraw the dis/ability coordinates, but their emancipatory potential is thwarted by the complex interconnectedness of their objects. José’s recovery thus ultimately hinges on a delicate balancing act combining critique and composing. In this sense, his effort resembles the careful treading of lay and professional critics in the last part of our text, in which we try to solve problems of living with dementia together with the Hanuš family. While the critical gesture has an essential role to play here as well, close ethnographic encounters are rather about jointly articulating the critical matters of care, wherein the problematic agencies of both obvious and not-so-obvious actors are acknowledged.