Impenetrable Bodies/Disappearing Bodies: Fat American Celebrities, Lean Indigenous People, and Multinational Pharmaceuticals in the Battle to ClaimHoodia gordonii

Products claiming to contain Hoodia gordonii have, over the 2000s, flooded the American marketplace; advertisements for dozens of brands promise to convert millions of ordinary American bodies into leaner, more desirable bodies. These products promise to erase cravings leading to overconsumption and aid the consumer in shedding the baggage of modernity. The marketplace success, evidenced by the proliferation of products claiming to contain Hoodia, is not because these products claim to accomplish what all diet programs and products do; if Hoodia assisted simple weight loss, it would not have as powerful a place in the American imaginary: all other diet aids claim the same thing. Hoodia's mythic status is achieved because the narrative surrounding the Southern African succulent touches something deeper in the American psyche: marketing strategies connect themselves with the powerful desire to return, at least symbolically and temporarily, to prelapsarian, Edenic locations, where magical consumables promising to erase the malaises of postindustrial societies still exist in museumized perpetuity. Furthermore, the claim that Hoodia can actually divest the consumer of the desire to consume is, in the American landscape of overabundancy and food-bombardment, almost as powerful as an antidote to death. It promises to safeguard the consumer and make the body and psyche “impenetrable” to the daily warfare within the consumer state.