Theorising Diet Culture: Confronting the Structure Versus Agency Debate

In this chapter, I trace the various branches of the loosely defined ‘anti-diet movement’, showing how different communities of women have theorised the harms of diet culture. Specifically, I focus on the significance of fat liberation and activist communities, the divided feminist movements of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries; and the growing trend of health professionals adopting a weight-neutral stance. I describe how these existing positions have often artificially been placed into binary categories; advancing either a structural understanding of diet culture or an agentic understanding focusing on the choices and free will of individuals. I argue, instead, that binary understandings of diet culture diminish the reality that both structure and agency can be used to explain its existence, using Bourdieu’s theory of practice as a way of showing that neither self nor society alone explain the strong grip that diet culture has on many women’s lives.