20^th Global Obesity Meeting

Biography

Biography: Gulin Ogut Eker

Abstract

‘Eating’ and ‘losing weight’ are the most produced and consumed areas of the 21st century world. The forces of domination in the modern era, encourage people to eat constantly on one hand, and thus encourage obesity, and on the other hand, tempt people to buy countless products and services in order to lose weight. This paradox between eating and losing weight is the method the modern world’s consumption authorities use to dominate especially through the female body. In this research, obesity which is known as a physiological health problem will be discussed with a perspective of how human kind, who is in need of living among the others, perceive it culturally. For this purpose, the sense of power established on the female body of the 21st century will be revealed by the ideal woman perception in the Orhon Booklets and the Book of Dede Korkut, the written sources of Turkish culture. Primarily in the study, the codes about the female body in the Orhon Booklets, written in 732 and 735, Turkish text in which the name of the Turkish nation was first mentioned, and in the stories of the Book of Dede Korkut, which belongs to 8th- 9th centuries and was written in the 14th century, have been identified. The intended purpose of putting cultural beauty codes forward is to find out how and why the understanding of women’s beauty changed in the Turkish cultural history by means of gender approach and to figure out how the concept of ‘obesity’ is formed in the perspective of social domination through this perception. Beauty perception which will be defined as a social and cultural value in the study, from Pierre Bourdieu’s definition of ‘socialized body’, obesity in nutrition culture, and its use as body domination through the feminine body is another aim desired to be explored in the research.