Dieting Temporalities

Abstract

In the context of a concern with achieving a healthy and desirable weight, this article explores the temporalities that underpin dieting and that are produced through interaction with a dieting web site. In contrast to a linear progressive temporality that successful dieting is often understood through, I suggest that the dieting website at stake here attends to and creates new kinds of dieting temporalities, where time is understood as potontial rather than as something which can necessarily be planned. Acknowledging the multiple temporalities of dieting involves an understanding of agency that is not (only) repressed but enabled through interaction with the website’s interface. As such, it becomes important to trace the relationship between temporalities and the kinds of measure involved in online dieting.

The Work of Seduction: Intimacy and Subjectivity in the London ‘Seduction Community’

“…The prospective and anticipatory relation these formulations express is unambiguous, as even before they have had these encounters Derek and Doug imagine themselves looking back on them in ways which bolster their own sense of masculinity. These narratives exemplify the operations of the ‘extended present’ in which ‘the future is always-already within the present; measured, planned for, determined, chosen in the present’ (Coleman 2010: 273). In this sense, Derek and Doug's desire for casual sex reflects a logic characteristic to capitalist labour organisation insofar as they are concerned not so much with the embodied experience or relational dynamic of these encounters as with ‘the creation of potential’ (Adkins 2008: 194 cited in Coleman 2010: 280).…”

Introducing i‐Docs to geography: exploring interactive documentary's nonlinear imaginaries

“…However, when systems have multiple attractors they have a ‘choice’ between different destinies’ (DeLanda , 35). Applying the concept of attractors to digital interfaces elucidates how their virtual architectures are continuously actualised and re‐actualised through user interaction (Wood ) and how user ‘attention is distributed across a range of possibilities’ (Coleman , 276). This is a valuable framework for Gaza Sderot , where the i‐Doc's plurality of attractors is foundational to its construction of nonlinear spatiotemporal imaginaries.…”

“…Here, I address two key implications of i‐Docs for geography. First, geographers and allied thinkers have a longstanding interest in how space‐time is articulated and reformulated through technologies of exhibition (Crary ; Della Dora ; Clarke and Doel ) and, more recently, through interactive and nonlinear media (Ash ; Coleman ; Dittmer ). Positioned within geography's wider concern with geographical imaginaries, these can be understood as investigations specifically into imaginaries of spatiotemporality.…”

“We Can’t Go Back a Hundred Million Years”

“…However, social scientific research on dieting has rarely investigated specific diet plans, and the practices or discourse associated with them (cf. Coleman, 2010;Mol, 2013). Thus despite the sustained popularity of low-carbohydrate dieting, the peer-reviewed literature on this topic is limited.…”