Medical discourse, daily life and power: medicalization of fatness through media

The arguments of secularity, freedom, rationality and being scientific introduced by modern era are the significant occurrences that lead to the new discourses and politics on the everyday life and the body of individuals. The body has turned being an existence which complies with and takes its shape through religious knowledge into a project that obeys the prescription of modernity. This is a project that brings the claim of perfection of the body and requires an intervention in terms of economic, politic and social concerns. To constitute perfect processes of human life, to take mortality, health, and illness under control gain become crucial, and this occurs by means of the health discourse created through medical knowledge. The aim of this study is to argue the potency of medical knowledge and the power relations accompanied by that potency in the context of medicalization of everyday life and further to analyze how our bodies are being incorporated into the relations of both commercial and discipline with regard to medicalization of fatness. For that purpose, health column of Prof. Dr. Osman Müftüoğlu, who has an authority and popularity on his field, on Hurriyet newspaper, and all news concerning fatness and obesity through 2012, were analyzed. Keywords: Medicalization, daily life, discourse, body, health, medical discourse, power, medicalization of fatness