“Paradoxical Bodies: Responsibility, Morality and Culture in Weight Loss Surgeries in Israel”
The 2023 Israel Heritage Room Lecture will be given by Dr. Hilla Nehushtan, the current Israel Institute teaching fellow at the Jewish Studies Program of the University of Pittsburgh. She specializes in critical medical anthropology, exploring the intersection between health, gender, and culture through the prism of weight loss practices. Her dissertation ethnographically studies a weight loss surgery clinic in Israel; it won the prize for best Ph.D. dissertation by The Israeli Anthropological Association (IAA). Dr. Nehushtan is currently teaching courses on Modern Israel, Health in Israel, and Body Size Around the Globe.
The social and cultural constructions of body size affect many aspects of daily life: how larger-bodied people are treated by their family and peers; discrimination against larger-bodied people in the workplace and the fashion industry; how people are judged while eating in public; the ways children and adolescents are socialized to dislike their bodies; the ever-growing diet industry, and biomedical perspectives that influence all the rest. Dr. Nehushtan advocates a more nuanced listening to both patients and medical professionals. Her research, conducted in Israel, is resonant with American practice as well.
Dr. Nehushtan’s Israel Heritage Room talk will be given at 4 pm on Sunday, November 5, 2023, in the English Nationality Room, 144 Cathedral of Learning.