Body Capitalism
DESCRIPTION:
Weight-loss injections vs body positivity: Lizzo returns to dieting, Novo Nordisk becomes Europe’s most valuable company. What links body positivity, GLP-1 and the new beauty ideal, and how body capitalism and weight-loss injections have become the new norm.
Body Capitalism: Body Positivity or Weight-Loss Injections, Ozempic and the Scenic Arrangement of the New Ideal of Beauty
Body Capitalism refers to the economic logic in which the human body functions as a central field of exploitation. Body positivity and weight-loss injections are not two poles of a moral dispute, but two successive market phases of the same logic. What unconscious needs does the Wegovy injection address, and why is the structure-critical stance of the body positivity movement coming under pressure right now?
What does body capitalism mean?
Body capitalism is an analytical description of the economic position occupied by the human body in late capitalism. Three markets are intertwined. The food industry profits from hyper-palatable, highly processed products that override satiety signals. The pharmaceutical industry subsequently profits from the consequences: through GLP-1 injections, diabetes medication, and follow-up treatments. The cosmetic and surgical industries complement this with aesthetic corrections. Three levels of profit, one body, a closed cycle of exploitation.
In “La Distinction” (1979), Pierre Bourdieu described the body as a vehicle of social distinction, as sedimented class history, as habitus. Bodily capital, elaborated by Loïc Wacquant in “Body & Soul” (2004) as a distinct form of capital, belongs to the forms of symbolic capital. Body capitalism is the economic embodiment of this theoretical insight: the body is an object of investment, a sign of consumption, a field of conversion in a market of mutual recognition.
How does the GLP-1 economy work with Ozempic and Wegovy?
Ozempic is the brand name for semaglutide, a GLP-1 agonist originally developed as a diabetes medication. Wegovy is the variant specifically approved for the treatment of obesity and has been on the market in numerous countries since 2022. The mechanism of action has three components: GLP-1 acts in the brain as an appetite suppressant, in the digestive tract by slowing gastric emptying, and by stabilising blood sugar levels. Studies show weight loss of up to 15% within a year.
The pharmaceutical giant Novo Nordisk became Europe’s most valuable company thanks to these weight-loss injections. A single corporation measurably buoyed the Danish economy. Eli Lilly, with Mounjaro (tirzepatide), simultaneously created a comparable capital story in the US. When the medication is stopped, around two-thirds of the weight lost returns. This makes the injection a long-term treatment and thus a subscription-based business model. An injection administered for a lifetime is, economically speaking, something quite different from a medicine that cures a problem.
What did “Pro und Contra” feature on World Health Day – just a side note?
To mark World Health Day on 7 April 2026, the programme “Pro und Contra” on PULS 4 and JOYN dedicated its episode to the question of weight-loss injections vs body positivity, the current debate on body norms in today’s society, and the future of the Austrian healthcare system. In the studio: cabaret artist Reinhard Nowak (personal experiment), physician Siegfried Meryn (self-test and scientific assessment), body positivity activist Ina Holub, Naghme Kamaleyan-Schmied as Vice-President of the Vienna Medical Association, and Rudolf Silvan as health spokesperson for the SPÖ.
But such discussion formats are of secondary importance for a structural-analytical reading of body capitalism. They are an occasion, not an argument. What they document is the spread of the debate within the mainstream public sphere. What they fail to do is provide a deeper reading of the logic of exploitation. This is precisely where theoretical tools are needed that go beyond the discussion format.
What position does the body positivity movement take today?
The body positivity movement of the 2010s promised body acceptance for all body shapes, visibility for fat people, and an end to weight discrimination. Plus-size models such as Ashley Graham became symbols, while prominent voices like Lizzo and Rebel Wilson carried the message in mainstream magazines and on the catwalks. H&M and other fashion brands expanded their size ranges. Hashtag activism on TikTok and social media made overweight bodies visible on a scale that had never been seen before.
In 2026, the movement has taken a U-turn; the comeback of the slimness imperative is measurable. A study by the University of Nevada (2021) showed that the most successful body-positivity posts feature healthy, young, white women; the diversity of body types has been reduced to make it market-compatible. Lizzo has publicly switched to weight loss, while Rebel Wilson has embarked on a diet-driven career. The visibility of plus-size bodies on catwalks has measurably declined. What began as a political movement against the obsession with thinness has been absorbed by the fashion industry as a marketing segment and is now particularly vulnerable to the next market segment: GLP-1 consumers who no longer wish to be regarded as overweight or obese. The media narrative, which portrays Wegovy as a ‘miracle injection’, has further shifted the climate.
What is Alfred Lorenzer’s deep hermeneutic cultural analysis?
Cultural symbols, such as images, sounds, literature and advertising, are “sensory-symbolic forms of interaction” in which socially unacceptable ways of experiencing the world are unconsciously expressed. An advertisement is never just an advertisement. A pharmaceutical campaign is never just a pharmaceutical campaign. It is also always a staged arrangement that activates resonances in the viewer’s early socialisation history – needs that are otherwise difficult to articulate.
What is the scenic arrangement of the weight-loss injection?
Anyone who reads the images of the GLP-1 injection in the advertisement through a deep hermeneutic lens will see a recurring pattern in the scenes. A small, manageable injection. A slim, smiling figure in sportswear. Daylight, clean lines, a bright flat. Calm, self-efficacy, a hint of privacy. What the advert does not show scenically: the years of use; the waning zest for life as the reward effect flattens out; the economic conditions under which slimness became the norm; the rebound effect after stopping treatment.
Lorenzer would ask: What constellation of needs is being addressed here, one that is embedded in the buyer’s socialisation experiences? The answer is not: ‘The buyer wants to be slim.’ The answer is: the injection promises a form of control over one’s own body that has been lacking since childhood, a reconciliation with the norm that has been experienced as hostile throughout one’s life. The injection is a symbol of the solvability of what appeared insoluble.
What forms of sensory-symbolic interaction are being addressed?
The body positivity movement addressed a different form of interaction, one in which recognition is a prerequisite. “You are good just as you are” was its symbolic gesture. A gesture that was indeed missing from the socialisation experiences of many women, and whose articulation was politically effective. However, this gesture could only work as long as it was not perceived as a market product. As soon as body positivity became a plus-size marketing category, it lost its symbolic depth; it became an advertising promise like any other.
The weight-loss injection addresses an opposite form of interaction: that of self-efficacy through pharmacological interventions. “You can change yourself” is its performative gesture. This gesture has a long history within neoliberal socialisation: self-optimisation as a duty, individual responsibility as the yardstick, market offerings as the solution. The injection fulfils, in a performative sense, what the self-help industry has promised: a concrete, interventionist measure whose success is measurable. It is precisely this measurability that constitutes the latent layer of meaning.
How does this relate to the new beauty ideal of ‘heroin chic’?
In parallel with the weight-loss injection, the beauty ideal of the late 1990s is making a comeback: thinness as the aesthetic norm. Extreme slimness, pale skin, dark circles under the eyes – the ‘heroin chic era’, named after the model photographs of Kate Moss and the advertising aesthetics of that time. Cautious assessments are emerging from the departments of Sociology and Gender Studies at the University of Munich: the ‘fat acceptance’ wave of the 2010s was a fragile achievement that had nothing to counter the revival of the thinness imperative as soon as the pharmaceutical industry offered a simple remedy. In the fashion industry, from Vogue to H&M to glossy magazines and their catwalks, the aesthetic pendulum has visibly swung back toward the beauty ideal of an emaciated figure. Plus-size models are disappearing from campaigns.
“It’s just fashion” fails to grasp the essence of this development. In Western visual history, pale skin and dark circles under the eyes convey a specific set of associations: suffering as dignity, self-sacrifice as depth, thinness as control. The return of heroin chic is the aesthetic soundtrack to a generation whose experiences of exhaustion find symbolic expression in a fashion aesthetic. The slimming injection produces pharmacologically what fashion photography celebrates aesthetically. Both draw on the same visual repertoire.
How is body capitalism reflected in male ‘Looksmaxxing’?
The male variant of body capitalism reached a visibly fatal peak in 2026. The twenty-year-old looksmaxxing influencer Clavicular (Braden Peters) collapsed live in April following a suspected Pentastack overdose; years of anabolic steroid use had rendered him incapacitated by the age of twenty. The bodybuilder Bostin Loyd died on 25 February 2022 of kidney failure, triggered by the peptide adabotid. Whilst women subscribe to Wegovy, men buy steroids, peptides and Pentastacks. Both paths follow the same, partly deadly logic of exploitation.
Both paths are complementary performances. Looksmaxxing scenically illustrates the male constellation of needs: recognition through measurable physical superiority, control over one’s own genetics, victory over what puberty failed to deliver. The weight-loss injection scenically illustrates the female complementary figure: recognition through slimness, control over one’s metabolic experience, reconciliation with the norm that has applied since girlhood. Both performances are highly productive economically. Both are vulnerable in their underlying socialisation. (Of course, it is not only women who use GLP-1 agonists, nor is it only men who use steroids and the like.)
What do these trends mean?
Patients taking GLP-1 often report not only physical but also psychological changes. Some experience the injection as a liberation from constant thoughts of food. Others report a flattening of life, the richness of which is not derived solely from food, but is partly so.
The question is not whether the injection is ‘good’ or ‘bad’. The question is what role it plays in an individual’s life plan, and which needs may remain unaddressed.
Summary
· Body capitalism refers to the economic logic in which the human body serves as a central field of exploitation. The food industry, pharmaceuticals and cosmetics form a closed cycle of exploitation.
· Bourdieu’s *La Distinction* (1979) and Wacquant’s *Body & Soul* (2004) provide the theoretical foundation: the body as symbolic capital.
· Ozempic (semaglutide) and Wegovy, from pharmaceutical giant Novo Nordisk, are GLP-1 agonists, originally diabetes drugs; they can lead to up to 15% weight loss in the first year.
· Upon discontinuation, around two-thirds of the weight returns; a subscription business model rather than a cure.
· The body positivity movement of the 2010s promised visibility for fat people, plus-size models and body acceptance; by 2026, a U-turn.
· “Pros and Cons” at World Health Day 2026 (Reinhard Nowak, Siegfried Meryn, Ina Holub, Naghme Kamaleyan-Schmied, Rudolf Silvan) as a temporal occasion, a marginal note in structural analysis, not the argument.
· Sensual-symbolic forms of interaction: the syringe promises the control that has been lacking since childhood; body positivity addresses recognition as a prerequisite.
· The heroin chic era returns (pale skin, dark circles under the eyes, emaciated figure); fashion photography aesthetically celebrates what the syringe produces pharmacologically.
· Male variant (Looksmaxxing, Clavicular, Bostin Loyd) as a complementary scene-based staging with its own peak of mortality.
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