Book review: the politics of weight: feminist dichotomies of power in dieting by Amelia Morris

In The Politics of Weight: Feminist Dichotomies of Power in Dieting, Amelia Morris challenges the degree to which feminist debates about dieting often take the form of a binary whereby (women’s) bodies are either sites of oppression or liberation. Instead, drawing on interviews with dieters, analyses of dieting programme materials, fat activism and black feminist scholarship, the book posits a more ambivalent ‘middle ground’, arguing for a promising path to nuanced understanding of how our bodies are shaped in relation to power and diet culture, writes Megan Dean.