"This is a courageous, poignant, honest, passionate, angry book - rare qualities in a work of scholarship." - Bioethical Inquiry "As Murray notes, her ambition has not been to offer a new model for "fat" embodiment, but to look for new ways to understand it. Murray has succeeded in her task admirably. By moving the examination of the "fat" female body into the realm of the philosophical, she has been able to take the theory of fatness in a new exciting direction." - Hannele Harjunen, Social Semiotics "...extremely interesting and thought-provoking..." - Melanie Latham, Social and Legal Studies Journal

Investigating the current interest in obesity and fatness, this book explores the problems and ambiguities that form the lived experience of 'fat' women in contemporary Western society. Engaging with dominant ideas about 'fatness', and analysing the assumptions that inform anti-fat attitudes in the West, The 'Fat' Female Body explores the moral panic over the 'obesity epidemic', and the intersection of medicine and morality in pathologising 'fat' bodies. It contributes to the emerging field of fat studies
by offering not only alternative understandings of subjectivity, the (re)production of public knowledge(s) of 'fatness', and politics of embodiment, but also the possibility of (re)reading 'fat' bodies to foster more productive social relations.