Mimi Nichter, Fat talk: What girls and their parents say about dieting. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000. Pp. xi, 263. Hb $22.95.

Abstract

The relationship between language and the body has become an increasingly prominent area of research within linguistics and related disciplines. Some investigators of this question have examined how facts about the human body are encoded in linguistic structure, while others have explored the use of the body as a communicative resource in interaction. Surprisingly little, however, has been written about the role of language in constructing the body as a social object. In Fat talk, Mimi Nichter, a medical anthropologist, addresses this issue by examining the discourse of dieting among American teenage girls. Although language itself is not the center of the analysis, Nichter draws on a wide range of sociolinguistic research to investigate how the body is constructed through talk – a question that will be of equal interest to scholars of language, culture, and society.