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.
Data collection has been done by the means of Sketch Engine program.
Data were extrapolated from the annotated English web corpus enTenTen20.
Data collection and analysis has been done during the period of two months: April and May 2023.
Recently, the enTenTen20 corpus has been updated to a newer version - enTenTen21. Nevertheless, the older version is still available, can be worked on and can be compared with the newer one. It has been noticed that the differences between the two versions of the English web corpus did not affect the results of this study. The only apparent difference was seen in slightly different numbers in frequency values for specific collocations. This was expected since the older version of web corpus consists of 36 billion words, while the new version counts 52 billion words. On the other hand, as noted above, these frequency deviations were not significant enough to refute the hypotheses. They have rather confirmed them once again.
This study is one of the results of work on a larger scientific-research project called "Metaphorical collocations - syntagmatic relations between semantics and pragmatics". More information about the project is available on the following link: https://metakol.uniri.hr/en/opis-projekta/
The study has been financed by the Croatian science foundation.
Working with the data/replicating the study:
Data collected for the purposes of this study is available in CSV format.
Data for each gustatory adjective (collocate) is presented in a separate CSV file.
Upon opening each file, stretch the borders of every column for better visibility of data.
Tables show different collocational bases (nouns) which are found in the corpus, in combination with a specific gustatory adjective, their collocate.
These nouns are listed by their score number (The Mutual Information score expresses the extent to which words co-occur compared to the number of times they appear separately).
Tables show what type of mapping is present in a certain collocation (e.g., intra-modal or cross-modal).
Tables show what type of meaning or cognitive process is working in the background of the meaning formation (e.g., metonymic or metaphoric).
For every analyzed collocation, we provided a contextualized example of its use from the corpus, along with the hyperlink where it can be found.
The experience of pregnancy during which one human body lives inside another human body can provide an unconventional way of making some aspects of human subjectivity and embodiment stand out. This article arises from a phenomenological analysis of the living body and through a comparative analysis of two philosophical descriptions of pregnancy (N. Depraz a I. Young) it arrives at an alternative understanding of the duality which characterises this experience. Instead of the duality of self and the other in myself – of identity and inner alterity – it offers a topological duality of excessive closeness and distance from one’s own interpretation of reality. The article draws, in this, on the account of friendship in G. Agamben, well-being in G. Bachelard and the world outside the world of J. Derrida. In this way there is not constituted some kind of more powerful female subjectivity, but conduct on the basis of tact with respect to the hiddenness of reality. With reference to a question of J. Butler, the final part of the article deals with the possibilities of ethics in a subject that is not transparent to itself, something which flows from the experience just analysed.
This text traces the development and implications of strategies of remembering the body in feminist theory, after what could be termed the somaphobia of early second-wave scholarship that saw attention to bodily matters as a potential point of ambush by hostile commentators. In reinstating the corporeal, however, all the conventional tropes of modernism that have both insisted on a conceptual split between mind and body, and recognised only one form of ‘proper’ embodiment, have been critiqued in the light of postmodernist modes of thought. The turn away from the rigid binaries and categories characteristic of the dominant ways of thinking – whether in the humanities or sciences – has mobilised not simply the emergence of a feminist phenomenology of embodiment, but a growing appreciation of the place of the sciences in understanding the materiality of the body. At the same time, the extension of multiple challenging bioscientific technologies directed to the body and its practices indicates that the recovery of fleshiness is not a final step.