In the second decade of the 21st century, sugar supplanted dietary fat as the dietary enemy du jour. In the midst of this anti-sugar panic, sugar figures as a hidden threat, lurking unseen in everyday foods and acting on the body in ways that are simultaneously hyper-visible and hidden from view.
This in turn has led to a proliferation of self-help resources that encourage individuals not only to seek out and eliminate the hidden sugar in their diets, but also to rigorously scrutinise their own bodies and dietary impulses for signs of excess consumption, ‘addiction’, and the hidden harms of sugar.
Under the instruction of self-designated experts, individuals are exhorted to seek self-knowledge, both in relation to their consumption and their bodily and emotional ‘symptoms’; and then to enact interventions with the goal of liberating themselves permanently from sugar’s grip and restoring the body to an imagined ‘before’ of bodily purity.
Drawing on self-help literature and newspaper "hidden sugar shock” stories, the paper argues that within the self-help domain, the act of giving up sugar is never simply a benign health intervention but is also a normative act of self-making without end that renders social inequalities not only invisible, but also actively exacerbates them.
About the Speaker
Karen Throsby is a Professor of Gender Studies and Head of the School of Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Leeds. Her research focuses on the intersections of gender, technology, the body and health, and she has explored these issues in relation to reproductive technology, surgical weight management, endurance swimming, and most recently, the social life of sugar. She is the author of When IVF Fails: Feminism, Infertility and the Negotiation of Normality (Palgrave, 2004); Immersion: Marathon Swimming, Embodiment and Identity (MUP, 2016) and Sugar Rush: Science, Politics and the Demonisation of Fatness (MUP 2023).
*Image by thecreativesupplies (Adobe Stock)
