Abstract
The aim of Critical Bodies has been to demonstrate an understanding of body weight and body management as always political and intertwined with a multiplicity of discourses including health, medicine and identity. Consequently, the meanings attached to weight are dynamic, fluid and context dependent. The authors in this book wanted to challenge conventional understandings about weight and body management as individual problems. The chapters in Critical Bodies showcase work that represents a range of critical, post-structuralist and social constructionist research to examine meaning making around body weight as a social, rather than a private, process.