A Feminist Analysis of Anti-Obesity Campaigns: Manipulation, Oppression, and Autonomy

MacKay, Kathryn

doi:10.3138/ijfab.10.2.61

Cited by 3 publications

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References 22 publications

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“…9,27 We now have evidence that obese people experience marginalization in the workforce, features of cultural imperialism such as stereotyping, and the distortion of responsibility that simultaneously blames them individually for having obesity and removes their power to explain or present reasons. [35][36][37] Individual-level public health interventions contribute to this distortion of responsibility when they address the public qua separate individuals, rather than as an interconnected group. This happens when public health agencies focus on attempting to motivate individuals to change their choices.…”

Section: The Need For Collective Actionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Utility and justice in public health

MacKay

2017

Journal of Public Health

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Section: The Need For Collective Actionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Utility and justice in public health

MacKay

2017

Journal of Public Health

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Public health, pluralism, and the telos of political virtue

MacKay

2024

Monash Bioeth. Rev.

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In the ethics of public health, questions of virtue, that is, of what it means for public health to act excellently, have received little attention. This omission needs remedy first because achieving improvements in population-wide health can be in tension with goals like respect for the liberty, self-determination, or non-oppression of various individuals or groups. A virtue-ethics approach is flexible and well-suited for the kind of deliberation required to resolve or mitigate such tension. Public health requires practically wise and careful thinking, which virtue ethics brings with it. Furthermore, too tight a focus on delivering outcomes in determining how public health should act has, in some cases, actually undermined its ability to achieve those consequences. However, the main concern about incorporating virtue into public health in a pluralistic society is likely to be that virtue is generally teleological, and we would surely need some widely agreed upon idea of something like flourishing or the common good for this to work. In this paper, I propose that for public health to express virtue in its work, it must express a commitment to justice as it goes about its business promoting and protecting the health of the population. Justice is both a contributor toward better health for groups in society, and a worthwhile goal in its own right. I will sketch an argument that justice as non-oppression – not merely health equity – is the right telos toward which excellent public health should aim in a pluralist society.

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Mothers: The Invisible Instruments of Health Promotion

MacKay

2020

Hypatia

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In this article, I focus on two problematic aspects of British health-promotion campaigns regarding feeding children, particularly regarding breastfeeding and obesity. The first of these is that health-promotion campaigns around “lifestyle” issues dehumanize mothers with their imagery or text, stemming from the ongoing undervaluing and objectification of mothers and women. Public health-promotion instrumentalizes mothers as necessary components in achieving its aims, while at the same time undermining their agency as persons and interlocutors by tying “mother” to particular images. This has a double effect: first, it excludes mothers who do not fit the campaign picture of a mother; second, it encloses those who do (even vaguely) fit the picture into an objectified image of motherhood that is defined by and subject to the dominant white, heteropatriarchal gaze. The second problem is that campaigns place unjustified demands on mothers, which stem from a misinterpretation of the maternal duty to benefit. I argue that nutrition-related health concerns regarding children are improperly framed as individual failures of maternal duty, rather than as failures of a system to function correctly. These arguments ultimately support shifting the focus of responsibility for issues around childhood nutrition away from mothers and back toward policymakers.

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A Feminist Analysis of Anti-Obesity Campaigns: Manipulation, Oppression, and Autonomy

Cited by 3 publications

References 22 publications

Utility and justice in public health

Utility and justice in public health

Public health, pluralism, and the telos of political virtue

Mothers: The Invisible Instruments of Health Promotion

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