Fat-Talk Nation illuminates how the fight against fat seeks to create a new kind of thin, fit biocitizen, and how it conscripts other subjects – the good doctor, the good parent, the good teacher, the good coach – into the campaign. The epidemic of obesity, it shows, has produced a parallel explosion of “fat-talk” which people routinely use in attempts to shape the weight of others.

The book shows how the war on fat has produced a generation of young people – and especially young women — who are obsessed with their bodies and whose most fundamental sense of self comes from their size. Pervasive talk about weight is damaging their bodily and emotional health, and disrupting families and intimate relationships. The book’s core concepts (biocitizen, biomyth, biopedagogy, bioabuse, and biocop) offer powerful tools for understanding how obesity has come to remake who we are as a nation, and how we might reverse course for the next generation.

As in much of the world, in China the quest for the perfect, thin body has become a national preoccupation, whose effects on young women’s well-being seem strikingly similar to those seen in California. Two colleagues, shown here, did a masterful job of translating Fat-Talk Nation into Chinese. It’s now been published by the Intellectual Property Publishing House, with new prefaces by the lead translator, Bi Da, and the author.