Tracing Diet Culture: Unpacking Power and Domination

In this chapter, I explore women’s perspectives on the power of diet culture: both what it is and how it operates. Specifically, I show that when women—as activists, health professionals, and everyday people from diverse backgrounds—are asked to reflect directly on what operates behind diet culture, they describe multiple fields of power. Fields where diet culture is said to reside include the field of hetero-relations, the field of consumption, and the field of health and medicine. In keeping with Pixie Turner’s notion that diet culture is a “hydra-headed beast” (Turner in The no need to diet book: Become a diet rebel and make friends with food. Head of Zeus, p. 7, 2019), I show that diet culture is reified in a number of social fields that carry significant weight in women’s lives and contemporary Western understandings of food, eating, femininity, and bodies.