No pain, no gain: bordering the hungry new world order

The late-modern discourses of female slenderness and free-market reform share striking rhetorical similarities. Furthermore, their corporeal effects are quite similar. The historical coincidence of their deployment is no accident; rather, they represent two gestures of a (re) figured late-modern hegemonic practice that feeds, ultimately, on hunger. By juxtaposing and critically interrogating these two discursive practices, it is apparent that a familiar binary opposition -- thin/fat -- was substituted for an unfamiliar pair -- adjusted/unadjusted. This discursive swap drew upon a long history of filtering between bodies and economies, and acted to naturalize a new disciplinary phase in late modernity. This phase is unsurprisingly profoundly gendered. It is also spatialized via connection with another binary chain: First World/Third World, North/South, West/East, developed/underdeveloped, here/there. However, the relationship of these two binary chains is contradictory, and this has given rise to a contestation of power that coalesces, literally and figuratively, around borders.